001you all right one minute all right good evening everyone and welcome to the volusia county school board meeting today is tuesday january 25th 2022 will you please stand up and let's recite the pledge 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 i'd like to welcome everyone who is here for our meeting today i'm going to go ahead and introduce my counterparts who are here we'll start with miss lebanon today we'll start on that side and so to my right on the far end we have miss aaron lieben who is our agency clerk next to miss lieben we have anita burnett who is our amazing district 2 school board member next to mrs bernier we have
002vice chair jamie hayne next to jamie hayne we've got superintendent scott fritz on the other side with to the left we have mr carl purses representative for district four next to mr persons we have ms this is linda cuthbert district three and standing in today for mr dorn is mr wolf from our board attorney representing today items for approval on this agenda will be 1.03 3.01 and 18.01 through 18.03 there will be public participation times specific to items on the consent agenda at 6 30 we will have time for 15 minutes for public input at that time and then prior to any item that the vote boards on that the board votes on there will be an opportunity for public comment and then after that we will go ahead and finish the rest of public
003comment our district vision statement is creating lifelong learners prepared for an ever-changing global society and during this time we will go around and share what has happened what we've interacted with our schools and how we've let out this mission and vision uh for our district since our last meeting so who wants to get started first and so i believe the queue is working well and so ms cuthbert i'm dressed in new smyrna beach high cuda black and red to celebrate our teacher of the year madison miller a graduate of new smyrna beach high school and teaches at chisholm elementary congratulations and thanks to futures for hosting teacher of the year celebration at the ocean center on sunday and also new smyrna beach high school is where i met my husband today is my 30th wedding
004anniversary yes so thank you our schools are just not havens and good places for kids but also for adults especially teachers administrators anyone who comes in to visit us the school is the center of the heart and it means a great deal because my children went to new smyrna high my grandchildren have one more yet to get through um so keep your fingers crossed and it's it's um all of our campuses are are wonderful places for all kinds of experiences whether it's eating the best of food in our schoolway cafe meeting the best friends of your life whether they're your colleagues in the classroom within your best friends in our cte programs whether or not it's somebody you compete against in you know spruce creek versus deltona baseball but no the real rivalry is university
005spruce creek so we get so much out of our community school so it's wonderful to be part of it and also in a personal way too so thank you mr clone all right next up miss jamie haynes thank you so i've been out doing lots of spelling bees which i love doing spelling bees but it is kind of heartbreaking when they miss a word i'll be honest with you i know i know but some of them have put a lot of time and effort into that and so i helped out um with citrus groves spelling bee and george mark's spelling bee then i moved into like the literacy week and you know it has just started but every school wanted to do something different this year so i had to read charlie and the chocolate
006factory if you a chapter but be videotaped because they're doing it through a videotape of having people and same thing with edward tulane and the only thing with edward tulane was i actually went to freedom because it was for freedom elementary but i got to visit the stem classes while i was there and those students were working on the robots and everything and putting circuits together so that light bulbs came on it was so neat to see that but um so they let me actually read to them so that i wasn't just reading to a wall for the videotape but yesterday morning i was over at debary elementary and they i really liked what the media specialist did she selected two books one the wishing tree and the other is the the wish tree and
007so what was interesting is the one is written for primary and i was able to read the entire story and leave it for the class for i read to a kindergarten in first grade but then i went to fourth grade and i only could read up to a certain point and then leave them hanging for that one but i told them you know their teacher will continue on but there's nothing greater than visiting schools and seeing kids and seeing all the things that they're learning and they're doing and i just want to give a shout out to every school right now with all the literacy activities they're doing and the time and effort that they've put in to make this week special and for everyone out in the community you know parents community members school
008board members district staff everyone that's out there reading whether you're reading virtually or reading on a video link or you actually get to read in front of kids there's nothing better than doing that and i thank everyone that's participating this week because it's a wonderful event for our students but thank you wonderful mr purses hey thank you mr chair uh yes spelling bees are everywhere uh this time i've been judging a lot of times but the last time was at tomoka where i was the announcer so like whoa like additional pressure you know because you know if i don't pronounce the word correct frankly you know it's like but anyway that was a lot of fun and uh i loved how when it got to the final two i went for a long time and
009i'm thinking man this is never going to end but it finally did but when the it was so nice to see the student i think they were both fifth graders and so nice to see the champion student shake the hand of the runner-up and the runner-up gave the other students shaking high high fives you know that's that's just the way you'd want it to be good good sportsmanship and camaraderie also happy to report that the ormond beach chamber of commerce uh has started the teacher of the quarter again they started january the 14th so that was great and i got to go around with them we visited i think we visited seven schools uh to surprise a teacher of the quarter which is with which is great and uh again all that excitement and we
010walk in with the principal and members from the chamber and surprise the teacher ideally in front of their children so that they can all see it and the kids clap and we take a photo so good times we as ms hayne said miss cuthbert we just have so many great teachers out there just working it every single day along with the other school school staff and the principals and assistants so i uh my hats off to all of them they're working hard thank you mr chair thank you miss burnett thank you i was able to attend the vcc pta reflections award and that was very impressive the kids from kindergarten all the way up into the high school years um were were very good with their art reflections is about art so there's dance choreography
011film production literature music and photography and just the amount of work that you could see and the talent that some of these kids have it's it's just amazing they're going to go far and just another good reason for us to keep our uh our arts going in our schools but they did a great job and so did the team putting on the event so it was very impressive very good job thank you and so you know one of the problems with being chairs you always speak last so pretty much they take all your thunder and then it comes to you and you've got a whole lot to say but i want to congratulate mr joseph brennan from deltona high school who got guiding principle number two recognized at the teacher of the year event from
012deltona high pretty much it says he makes it happen and so congratulations to him also i want to congratulate from pine ridge and so our pine ridge ffa students are everywhere if you ever follow you know their facebook page you'll see while we are celebrating christmas they're in a trailer with horses and animals going across the country to compete and so i want to congratulate madison braun who got second place in showmanship and abigail davis who also received a showmanship callback i had the pleasure this week of visiting the hvac academy at pine ridge and if you don't if you have the opportunity i posted some pictures on my facebook page it is amazing what these kids were doing they were wiring a thermostat and they knew what every wire was for so that's important
013to to see them working on these central ac units was really exciting and last night at pine ridge again we had the welcome junior panthers so they had the ninth graders and it was a full house and so they also had the opportunity to go around the school and see all the different opportunities that they have whether they're choosing an academic route a military route or a vocational route to see what was available for them and so those families were really thrilled to be there and it was exciting so that's all i have all right we'll move on to approval of the approval of the minutes and so we've got minutes for november 9th workshop and work session and the regular school board meeting november 16th the school board organizational meeting and the leasing corp
014session december 14th workshop work session and regular school board meeting have you had the opportunity to review if anyone has a motion to approve the minutes or has any amendments please let us know move approval of the minutes yeah all six six uh i second the motion all right motion's been made by mr persons to approve all the minutes as presented seconded by ms cuthbert any other discussion hearing none we'll call for the vote all those in favor say aye aye all those opposed say nay motion passes superintendent are there any changes to the agenda before it is presented to the board for approval no sir thank you so much uh seeing no changes to the proposed agenda do we have a motion to approve the agenda madam uh i'm sorry mr chairman i i
015move that we approve the agenda thank you sorry hope you're good do we have a second i second that we approve this motion has been made by ms kupper to approve tonight's agenda seconded by ms jamie haynes any other discussion hearing none all those in favor say aye aye all those opposed say nay motion passes next up we have administrative appointments by dr fritz thank you chairman board members public as you know we had two vacancies um and one of those vacancies is for the principal position at riverview learning center i'm i'm happy to bring to you a recommendation i'm going to ask tom sully to come forward as tom makes his way forward i'll share a little bit about him tom has a bachelor's of science in social studies education from the university of
016central florida he has a master's in ed leadership from nova southeastern he began his teaching career in 1996 at evans high school in orange county throughout his administrative experiences he's worked in alternative ed schools title 1 schools and exceptional ed centers speaking with his supervisors he's been a great asset in those roles he's also served as an adult education coordinator administrative dean at the silver star's exceptional student education center and has been a middle school principal or assistant principal mr sully is my recommendation to be the principal at the riverview learning center beginning february 8th board you've heard the recommendation of the superintendent to appoint mr thomas solely as the principal at riverview learning center do we have a motion move approval of mr tom sully to be the principal at riverview learning center is
017there a second a second motion has been made by mr person seconded by ms anita burnett any further discussion i have a question mr sully nice to have you here this evening riverview is a beautiful beautiful older school have you toured it yet have you been there on the outside okay on the outside wait till you see the inside it's absolutely gorgeous so i know you will bring new ideas through your experience to that school and we're very happy to have you in daytona so thank you so much sir for coming thank you thank you ben mr chair anyone else yeah mr chair if i may yeah i just wanted to just pay you back a little bit because i didn't realize the background that you had in so many schools and so many levels
018and you're going to need all of it because riverview is not camelot and you know but those kids need love too and so they need someone who who can relate to students and someone that will that they can look up to and someone that they believe understands them because so often uh they feel like they've been cut out left out nobody cares and so they take a wrong path or make a wrong decision but i think with all the experiences that you've had the different levels the different places too you know not just one place for a long time i'm sure you can be you'll be able to glean on that uh all of those experiences as you go there and help those children and i wish you the best thank you very much wonderful
019all right so motion was probably made by mr purses seconded by miss burnett um any further discussion here in none we'll call for the vote all those in favor say aye aye all those opposed say nay motion passes i'm sure you've got some amazing words [Applause] congratulations thank you very much good evening dr fritz board member cologne board members miss rowland miss dervan mr west it's with gratitude and excitement that i come here tonight to be named the next principal of learning center to be able to help and serve our most needy kids as you mentioned is the reason why i entered into education field 25 years ago i want to thank god and my family because without their love and support i would not be here tonight to make this journey i want to
020thank my dad for being such a great role model on how to treat people the right way and also never to give up i would like to thank all the educators that have influenced me throughout the years and to all the faculties and staffs i've worked with who have constantly encouraged me to become a principal i look forward to working with a great team at riverview and continue the success they have had over the last few years thank you again and i'm truly humbled for this opportunity thank you thank you um one two three [Applause] believe there is another mr superintendent there is there is board as you know we had an assistant principal position open at river springs so i'm going to ask tim kerrigan you come forward tim as tim makes his way
021up here let me show you a little bit about tim with you he has been in education since 2006. he received a bachelor's in physical education and a master's from stetson and ed leadership he has been a teacher on assignment with us and currently serves at holly hill he's been in volusia county since 2014 and i'm going to tell you i have had lots of opportunities to get to know you have an item and i have seen tremendous growth tremendous growth in this young man i'm very proud of him i know he's ready to take the reigns as assistant principal uh at river springs so tim is my recommendation board ford you've heard the recommendation to appoint mr timothy carnegie as the assistant principal at river springs do we have a motion i make the
022motion that we appoint him as the assistant principal at river springs middle wonderful do we have a second second well it should be made by mrs j miss jamie haynes second by miss linda cuthbert any further discussion so what i'd like to say is you're headed into river springs and it's a large middle school and all i can say is it has a phenomenal principle and has other assistant principles that are phenomenal and i've had the opportunity during my career to work with all of them and so i'm looking forward to coming and visiting and getting to know you but i will tell you the kids they are just also like riverview elementary they need somebody that cares and shows them that they care you got to be firm but they just need to know
023they're going to be okay and that's kind of what our families need to know there too so i'm looking forward to getting to know you and i am sure you've got a great team you're going to get to work with and so i think this will be a great thing for our students so thank you thank you sorry mr person i was just going to ask a dr fritz um will we be replacing yes there will there will be a t.o.a you know i got to look out for my school it's a never-ending excitement you understand i completely understand that trust me i love that you're getting a promotion but i've got to care about it i understand i care too holly hill is a special place all right thanks mrs cuthbert okay i think
024what makes this pick really good for river springs is the fact that you are with k-8 so you're bringing that elementary behavior curriculum um to the to river to riverview to river springs so you know when kids come in in the sixth grade you know where they've been what they've what they're like and so it's it behooves i think the the benefit of river springs your experience and that so thank you for bringing all of that with you um it's it's a win-win situation all around so thank you except for maybe holly hill thank you thank you all right anyone else all right motion's probably properly made by mrs haynes and seconded by was it mister it was miss purchase mrs scott any further discussion hearing none we'll call for the vote all those in
025favor say aye aye aye all those opposed say nay welcome sir to river springs thank you i'd like to just thank a couple people i think my family for their support um specifically my wife sue she's back there you know i wouldn't i wouldn't be here this evening without her love and encouragement it's been a long a long road um and it's a good one you know i'd like to thank uh you know all of you for for this opportunity i really look forward to this next chapter in my my career and i'm looking forward to hit the ground running tomorrow so let's go wonderful thank you so much and we'll have you stand for a picture [Applause] yes [Music] [Applause] all right next up agenda item 4.01 recognition of february 2022 as african american
026history month presenter mr nick prince who is our minority achievement and restorative practices specialist come on up nick uh before before nick goes i actually had some opening comments if that's okay please we've had um a tremendous history here in volusia county schools and acknowledging that those contributions from our african-american residents is extremely important and so some of the folks that that just stand out in history that just make us known well outside of volusia county edith stark parsons street elementary was named after her and became the edith stark elementary school jackie robinson in 1949 became the nvp for the national league which is a true historical significance particularly for a guy who loves baseball as much as i do and today dr mary mcleod bethune is the first black person to have a state
027commission statue in the u.s capitol and so very very proud and we should be proud of our residents now mr prince board mr chairman dr fritz dr bagelman i want to thank you so much for again giving me this opportunity to talk about the importance of african american history month and and god is in the details and the fact that you made sure that we kick off the month properly says a lot so thank you for allowing us to start the month properly so i'm going to hit play on this fantastic video i'm i'm making my directorial debut on this me and mr jerry were like spike lee and steven spielberg so enjoy enjoy the video we recognize and celebrate african american history makers like [Music] yeah you should hear it again we recognize and
028celebrate african-american history makers like [Music] like [Music] in volusia county schools we celebrate african american history year-round celebrate with me celebrate with me celebrate with me celebrate [Applause] [Music] we have a ton of things going on this month and i'm just going to highlight three just quick things that we can talk about first at woodward elementary they're going to be doing a fantastic black history month uh celebration filled with uh trivia and luncheons and a week-long celebration where their parents can come in and and participate uh in one of the events uh at mainland high they are doing an open forum where uh local african american history makers are going to be talking about the past and the present and their future how they can contribute to that and and lastly pine ridge's chorus is
029phenomenal if you get an opportunity to see that chorus perform and and they're going to be performing on the 24th and the 26th if you get an opportunity to see a great chorus it's there it reminds it's diverse it reminds me of glee and i'm comfortable with saying i like glee it is phenomenal and i'll end with this as the video says we celebrate african-american history month but we celebrate all year long so i invite you to celebrate with me celebrate with us thank you thank you mr prince next up 4.02 recognition of february 22nd as career and technical education month dr fritz and you know this is this is another great area for us to celebrate and all the expansions that we've been doing in our programs i'm going to ask ms costello to
030come forward and i believe we have some outstanding students here as well that are going to share some stories about their experiences well good evening and thank you for having us here we're here to share that next month is actually national cte month cte month is a public awareness campaign that takes place each february to celebrate the value of cte and the achievements and accomplishments of cte programs across the country i've shared a calendar with you all highlighting some of the activities that will take place our amazing communications team has already begun creating some spotlight videos of our academies and our cte programs across the district the first week in february we will go out and visit all of our cte teacher nominees and then we'll be back here again at the end of the
031month to visit you all again with our nominees to celebrate them and recap the month's events so joining me tonight we have representation from university high school mainland high school in pine ridge high school i'm going to let them introduce themselves and tell you a little bit about the cte programs that they're a part of well i want to thank the school board for having us we're really grateful to be here and just talk about some of the programs i am representing university high school this is my director mr brian kells we have access to a great digital video productions uh course at university high school really allows the kids to develop their passions and their just being able to um just discover what they're really most excited and passionate about so not only do
032we have our daily news that we do every day we upload it to youtube which allows the teachers and the staff to be able to be advised what's going on the student population is also aware of what we do i personally do a weather segment on the news because i want to be a meteorologist when i'm older so i really enjoy being able to have a class that and along with my classmates that are here with me today we're really grateful just to have a program that we can find what we're passionate about um but yeah our lower level students their uh their learning skills in a basic digital video production using cameras sound production and then our upper level kids are going out in the field working with sports broadcasting and things like that
033but it's just very reassuring to know that we have those resources at our fingertips and we can uh enjoy our time are you sure you don't want to be a teacher for us [Laughter] could his colleagues his peers stand up so he can see who's from university thank you welcome [Applause] hello my name is kirsten i'm a senior at mainland high and i will be representing our academy asim tonight for me we have two divisions we have a health science and we have biomed first off we're going to talk about biomed it's a four year course program just like health science starting off with principles of biomed that teaches the students about biology and medicine the second year is the human body systems which entitle i think we consume teaches you about the human body
034the third year is medical interventions which teaches students about cochlear implants prosthetics any medical intervention you can think of like a pacemaker for example as well and the fourth year is the biomedical innovations that teach you teaches you about organ therapy gene therapy and at the end during your senior year you'll be taking the base exam which is a seven hour test so all the seniors have taken that commends to you this which will allow you to work as a biotechnician in a lab and for me i'm in helsin's it's a four-year course program as i said before starting off will be medical skills and services which teaches you about the prefixes suffixes you know basic medical terms so once you progress you'll be like what does this mean and during your second year is
035anatomy physiology teaches you about the body and how the body system works and your third year will be junior year you'll be spending the entire year preparing for your cmaa exam which allows you to work as a medical office assistant so props to me i have to work as a medical office assistant after i graduate and during your fourth year you'll be taking your ekg exam which will allow me to administer ekg's on patients and i would like to say thank you to mrs mandel for being the director of the program she does great any other bucks out there just you all right well thanks you're just sitting back and looking pretty oh wait a second i saw a lot of bucks raise their hand how many people here got some connection to mainland they
036say something about buck pride never died see everybody knows that all right all right next up pine ridge how are you doing thank you all for having me my name is david cortez i am a current student in the hvac program i am a senior and hvac is just starting off it's a first year program we plan on making it a four-year program out of the program you will be getting three college uh certifications that are college certifications sounds good that's okay hey no you're doing great keep going you're fine yeah so you'll be getting three college certifications the program is a great program you learn ac electrician and plumbing so if you plan on making a career other than hvac you'll understand the basics have that basic physical physicology to go and take off
037the next career so yeah it's a great work photograph well a well-rounded well-rounded program i feel like i've learned a lot and a lot of stuff i'm able to do at my house simply than calling just hvac technician or electrician i can almost do most of it myself now yes yeah so if i yeah oh and if i had one regret it would be that's a first year program i wish i could be in it longer and learn more and get the full experience the freshman and sophomores thank you and anybody here from pine ridge want to take a stand stand up all right thank you so much and thank you guys for coming out thank you thanks the instructors too i love the celebrations all right next up we have recognition february 7th through
038the 11th as national school counseling week presented by mrs ingrid cruz and miss donette estelle home specialist for secondary counseling dr fritz you did it good job excellent i will say this and i'm very excited you know our counselors have picked up a huge lift over the last two and a half years it's a huge lift any time but dealing with some of the challenges that we've had but extremely proud and extremely pleased of all the work that's going on with the lessons that are being taught at the elementary schools to help our students cope but also that career advising that's occurring right when our students get to high school and meeting with students twice a year every student making sure that the pathway is is working for them and our partnership with the daytona
039chamber using youth science we've been able to have very meaningful conversations and that work is extremely important ladies sorry this is a nice chair makes me look a little taller than their passions and their talents as these traits relate directly of course to career awareness and development as we have just seen so we help parents also focus on ways to further the educational personal and social growth of their children and we work with teachers and other educators to help students explore their potential and set realistic goals for themselves school counselors seek to identify utilize community resources that can enhance and complement comprehensive school counseling programs and help students become productive members of society developmental school counseling programs are considered an integral part of the educational process that enables all students to achieve success in school
040though this is only one week of celebration of our school counselors we would like to recognize the year-round effort that our school counselors do for our students and stakeholders we have a video [Music] so [Music] thank you for your time thank you board any comments i'd like to make a comment thank you all for all that you do i mean we there's not much we can say i mean if it wasn't for our school counselors and so i'm gonna kick the word guidance somehow out of my head i got that was the takeaway from the video but our counselors help us in so many ways i will share with you even this week i spoke to my son's counselor i actually spoke to a couple of them just just to get everything sorted out and
041so they're just amazing in every way so again thank you thank you thank you all right next up we have recognition of february 4th as school crossing guard day presenter mr rodney smith dr fritz as rodney and mark make their way up here um it truly takes a village uh to keep our kids safe and to move them along and get them to school every day and um you know i can't thank our crossing guards enough for making sure that these young people get across the street safe and sound and on their way um and i will turn it over it's a true partnership that the bcs has with our sheriff's department to make this happen welcome gentlemen chairman colon members of the board dr fritz it's my pleasure as director of student transportation services
042to recognize our school crossing guards and express our sincere appreciation for the job these men and women do day in and day out these amazing safety professionals can be seen assisting with the transitioning of our students to and from school they provide the most valuable service to our young people and to the communities that we serve sometimes it's not that familiar it's a familiar face on the way to and from school that can change the trajectory of a student's day today's recognition would not be possible without our continued partnership with the volusia county sheriff's office which is responsible for the operating of this critical community service today we have with us captain richard forton and lieutenant r.j rohan from the volusia county sheriff's office at this time i would like to turn it over to
043them for any comments or introductions thank you board members on behalf of the sheriff and the 114 crossing guards that we have that work tirelessly every day to in the cold the rain on most days as we live in florida they are extremely proud of what they do and they come in day in day out to to cross the kids for volusia county um some of the most dedicated people i've ever had the privilege to to work with so they on on behalf of them we thank you guys thank you all right any comments mr persis yeah i would just like to say as a as a former principal uh elementary schools for a long long time before i got to middle school they were sort of the first adult if you would often that
044would see the children uh and you don't ever think about that but there were more than a couple of times when i had a crossing guard come to me after the bell and say hey you know so-and-so is a little upset uh so-and-so fell off his bike on the way you know kids were teasing him a little bit uh you know just a little little insight like that uh sometimes i'd even come and they would tell me hey it's it's jill's birthday you know you may want to know that i said oh that's awesome when i when i do the news the announcements i'll say happy birthday jill and she'll say how did he know you know but uh it's just it's just things like that and you can see uh the the crossing guards
045and many of them have been at the same post for a long time too but um you know those kids they just know them and they know them you know kindergarten first grade second grade third grade fourth five or six years they they know you see them give them high fives and you know it's just that little thing and and the parents that cross the that cross with their children you know how parents are on bikes and everybody gets off the bike and walks across the street and you see the parents you know they talk to the crossing guards too and yeah you know it's just just a wonderful thing when another one of our unsung heroes each and every day just helping us and making our schools uh safer and more importantly just as
046important getting uh the kids off to a good a good start i agree thank you all for coming appreciate it thank you again thank you all right so it is 6 16. kelly do we have at least five cards for public comment i'll go ahead and take those and so our next will be public comment which is uh we do 15 minutes of public participation we normally have a time certain however we do have enough cards for the 15 minutes 6 30 right six so board we've got enough cards right now to suffice the 15 minutes so we could either take a break till 6 30 or we could go ahead and start it now it's not gonna why don't we just move into the consent and then stop at 6 30. it's up to
047you guys i mean we've got the cards yeah it should be at 6 30 because somebody may be late well we've already got enough cards it's my point we're not going to add any more you know but that's cool we can keep going all right let's go ahead and move on to so we'll start at 6 30 with the uh public comment all right so we're going to move on to the consent agenda mr superintendent is there anything to be removed from the consent agenda no sir all right board members is there anything you'd like to remove from the consent agenda for further discussion yes ms haynes i have a question about 8.01 so would you please remove 8.01 okay and then i also had a question about i have a statement i want to
048make actually about 11.02 11.02 okay yes we'll pull that off all right uh miss cutler um i'd just like to make two comments about two uh consent agendas um 11.14 and 13.02 okay so we will uh handle uh 8.01 11.02 11.14 and 11.02 outside of the agenda mr clone yes also 8.02 and 8.02 okay and i said 1302 not 1102. or maybe i did okay so thank you uh do we have a motion to approve the agenda with the exception of eight point zero one eleven point zero two eleven point one four thirteen point zero two and eight point zero two well i'm misunderstanding this if they just want to make a statement we don't have to remove it you don't have to remove it that's covered under item uh board members comments after so
049that can be handled on item 6.03 mr chair so if an item is removed from the consent agenda for any discussion it becomes a board action item and so yeah i don't want anything they're not removing it the only one i heard say they want to remove it is miss haynes said she wanted to remove 8.01 so you just want to make a comment about it okay so which one ms haynes is it that you'd want to remove i want 8.01 removed because i have questions okay so 11.02 who's got that one that's mine um you wanted to make a statement you said yes because my questions have already been answered i just don't agree with them okay then mr chair i move that we approve the consent agenda minus three 8.01 all right motion's
050been made to prove approve the consent agenda minus 8.01 do we have a second okay i'll second motion has been made by mr person seconded by ms burnett any further discussion all right motion to uh we'll call a vote to approve the agenda all those in favor say yay okay all those opposed say nate all right motion passes all right so next up we have 8.01 who wanted to yes so on 8.01 my questions for that are it appears when i'm reading through all of this that this is a thank you miss wiles i was going to ask if you come up um yeah it appears that this is money that is beyond what our regular idea grant is right okay so in looking at it um one of the there were several pieces that
051i had a few questions about but one of them and i have to open it's under the agenda rationale piece that's a lot of money but one of the things that was the parent workshops so that is fourteen thousand dollars so i'd like a little bit more information about what um that parent work because i think it's very important that we get back to having parent workshops especially for our you know because this is covering our pre-k ese students and then also our k-12 ese students and that's been one of the topics that during this pandemic i've heard from a lot of ese parents that are struggling right now because they're struggling with they don't understand you know because we haven't had sometimes face-to-face iep meetings so they're struggling with the language when they're on
052a virtual meeting they don't understand the services their children are getting and there's been a lot of questions out there so could you explain what you're doing with the parent workshop yes this one particularly with the fourteen thousand dollars is for the pre-k students and we're wanting to have classes for our parents to explain to them the core language that is used in classes so that they can further that discussion at home with their students so this money will allow us to purchase materials pay consultant fees and pay for child care while the parent is with us we will have child care for the for them so is there already under your original ida grant or under your original pre-k is there already a parent component built into what the original grant has no ma'am
053not in this last one um the monies that we're able to spend this is this is our us or money um it's it's not called esser it's arp but um this is going to allow us to free up more money as when our new idea budget comes out and then we plan to build in more of these when that budget comes out in the summer okay and um i also know that when you go down to the ida part b the k-12 budget summary in the same document the first item there is part of what we have later a job description up for so could you do a little bit of explanation on that part for the behavior specialist where you put for those five job descriptions yes ma'am we're wanting to be more proactive
054in our approach to discipline especially for our students with disabilities right now as it has been a topic of conversation often we are very reactionary the student does something we come in we help we assist the teacher we assist the student and maybe that's because of lack of behavior specialists in in the schools we we have a finite number of behavior specialists and therefore many schools have to share a behavior specialist you know the behavior specialist is at school a for two days school b for only one day and then school c for two days this will not only give us the opportunity to have five more behavior specialists but these behavior specialists will be regionalized as well and so they can help us coach and teach the behavior specialists that we have on our
055current contract and so they will not only be proactive helping the teachers and the students but they're also going to help those behavior specialists that are currently under our contract and they will be at the highest level there will be a master's degree that's what we're looking for with the bcba again we want somebody with expertise that is on our payroll and not on the contract so that they can help us teach those behavior tutors that we have and those other behavior specialists that may not be a bcba okay and the final part um on this when i was reviewing which i have to say whoever put this together i want to thank them because they were so detailed i mean they were they broke it down but i know what happens lots of times
056is um people don't click on all the documents when it's just under the consent agenda so they don't realize the additional work that um you and your team are taking on so the next part was about the private school piece because i see that um there is a substantial amount of money that's also going to go to the private schools out of this um funding that we're receiving yes ma'am and there's a formula so we received 3.5 million dollars basically and the state gives us the percentage that we have to allot to the private schools and so that's where that that amount comes from then we hand it over to our staff that works um with the private schools and then they work with those private schools to to decide how that money needs to
057be divided up okay so and that's exactly what i wanted everybody to hear was that even though we're given the money we have to follow the formula yes and there is criteria so that the private schools also get and these extra funds are actually under the same guidelines the same restrictions as the original idea grant just because it's something in addition we still have to follow those same rules and guidelines as we would if it were the regular grant and so my final question is what's the time frame on this how long do we have this funding coming in september of 2023 okay this is due to the state my actual and what you're seeing here is an overview we have to be specific to the penny by the 31st of this month and so
058we are working i'm gonna say around the clock because a lot of my staff have been working uh very diligently because you also have to get the um if if i'm buying a workbook i have to know what company i'm using how much it costs per so yes well thank you very much absolutely you still want that considered outside of the consent agenda because we still have to vote on the items are you good with it right right okay 11.02 okay so 11.02 let me go to that wait wait wait no just chair just a point this is the only one we didn't this is the only one that we pulled so we could vote on this one now okay so we have to all right so let's go backwards so we have to vote
059so we voted on the agenda yes now we've got to vote on the consent items we have to vote on the one that we pulled we haven't voted on the other ones yet no we have to vote on the other ones all right so we can vote on 8.01 all right so do we have a motion to approve 8.01 i make the motion that we approve one exactly okay motion's been made by miss jamie hayne seconded by mr persis any further discussion all right hearing none all those in favor say aye aye aye aye motion passes all right next we have uh the approval of the consent agenda with the exception of 8.01 because we've already approved it do we want to go on to further discussion or do you guys want to do that
060after that's just about time all right so we'll go ahead is there a motion to approve the consent agenda items yes okay all right motion has been properly made by ms burnett seconded by mr persis any discussion all right all those in favor say aye aye all those opposed say nay all right and so now we'll go and find out what folks wanted to talk about 11.02 so 11.02 is about the building replacement for edith i stark elementary school and i was very happy at first when i read the title and then um i did call dr shanoff and he answered every question that i threw at him because i went through that castaldi report i'm struggling with this one i'll be honest with you because um when you look at the so basically my
061understanding is is yes they did an analysis on stark elementary and i've spoken about stark elementary before and how we didn't keep it up at one point because they thought it was going to close and everything but when you go and you look at the age of most of the buildings there and i don't know how many of you have ever visited there i mean trust me i love the brick i love where the school sits i love that it serves its community but when you go into some of the older buildings there's just not a lot of space in there and there's not a lot of space for our kindergarteners to move around and the rooms are dark and you look i mean we're talking 1956 is when building six was built 1958 is
062when building seven was built um you know 1956 also for building one and two and they did an addition in 1959 i mean we're well over the 50-year mark for a lot of that school and so what i understand after going through all this and asking questions is we're not going to build a brand new school we're just going to go in building by building and redo that and and i have experienced that i was actually on the campus of blue lake elementary at one point when that was a decision they made there and i've heard the reasoning why i just i just want to state i want the very best for the children that go to stark elementary they deserve the best education just like every other child they deserve access to the best
063technology and everything and so i'm just letting everybody know how i feel i'm not sure that just going building by building and like gutting it and doing a rebuild is what's best for our children there thank you all right 11.14 um it is now 6 30. i can wait until after public participation if you'd like now we can go ahead and go through these really quick okay i just uh 11.14 is the tentative facilities five year work plan plus our 21-22 work plan i just want to complement mr grube who is our director of facilities and planning this is a major undertaking every year i also wanted to make sure the public understood the the extent to what we keep track of our our facilities all the revenue sources that are listed all the leases
064our charters are examined the revenue sources um you just a lot of you just paid your property taxes there's a 1.5 millage rate to help keep our schools operating our cops are half cent sales tax you pay that half cent on the six cents that goes to the schools that's what is renovating and rebuilding all of our schools uh the grants that we receive from the federal the state and the local government it's just phenomenal i do want to let you know we do not receive pico money anymore that's the public education capital outlay we receive zero dollars from the state in that allocation i think it all goes to charter schools now also the student stations the number of students at each school we have to keep track of to make sure that our
065facilities are adequately accommodating our students in their space so this is a huge undertaking and it's extremely well read very very interesting and something that i i still learned every time i look at it is there a um a hard copy for this or is it just going to be online i believe there is a hard copy uh right now is it possible that because it's something i refer to all the time is possible maybe board members could receive absolutely a hard copy that would be really just we have it online just for easy access but absolutely we'll get you a copy okay it's wonderful especially in our own schools in our districts to keep track what year the renovations are going to occur so thank you very much to mr grove's department and then
066the last one is 13.0 true two the approval of the resolution of class size reduction compliance now i just wanted to make sure the public understood what that meant we are the state says we are out of compliance with three middle schools and i think miss skipper is miss skipper here okay i asked miss skipper if she could explain what this is we tend to know but the public may not uh what so thank you miss skipper for staying and explaining this very very grateful thank you absolutely so there are class size compliance obviously that the schools are mandated to meet within our survey reporting that's collected to the state during survey two which happens in october very close to the beginning of the school year so there's always a lot of shifting in classrooms
067as we try to get students to the right schedule for them the three schools that are in question are creekside galaxy in river springs now the schools are on what's called school-wide average our entire district follows that policy the grades six through eight classes at all of our middle schools are in compliance but the classes that are offered for them to advance which are ninth grade classes fall into a different classification now as you can imagine if you can distribute the class size compliance across an entire school that makes it much easier because you have a bigger volume of teachers offering those courses but the advanced classes was a smaller pocket and we did not have enough teachers to be able to cover the class load so the schools were forced to make a decision
068of having to limit the number of students that were in advanced or allow them in and possibly go over the class size so those three schools unfortunately did exceed the class size we've already submitted an appeal to the state on the the findings and we are very hopeful that they will hear that appeal they actually supplied us with the template letter that we used which is explaining that due to covid and the restriction on teachers we just can't find enough teachers to fill positions so that that appeal has already gone to the state but we are obligated to also give them a class size plan and that's what you're approving tonight is a an affirmation that we promise that next year we will come within the class size we are utilizing the state statute that
069is already listed that gives us the parameters to use in order to meet class size and we are working with the middle schools to also clarify their understanding of that school-wide average between grade grouping of six through eight and how the ninth grade classes will be interrogated differently just to make sure they're aware as they're developing schedules if it's possible for them to balance better if their teachers don't allow them to have enough space given the sections any additional questions now you explained it so much better than i ever would have so thank you very thorough you are very welcome thank you so much thank you mr chairman thank you doctor and 8.02 so 8.02 um i basically wanted to draw the attention of our community and parents that we have put forth to get
070additional grant money to install the cameras that we need for safety and security and because as we know lots of times we have laws that are made and they're unfunded and that you know we needed more money in order to get the rest of the cameras in for security and so i appreciate that there was some grant money that opened up and i do want to say thank you to the team that went together to write this up figure out what we needed so it could be submitted thank you very good we'll move on to 5.01 which will be public participation and so i've got five cards here you'll have three minutes to address the board uh it is our expectation that any uh administrative or complaints that are made that are outside of policy
071will be handled by the superintendent and district staff uh and so there is a timer up front here where you are able to see your time limit at three minutes i will kindly ask you to stop and to ensure that everyone has an opportunity to address the board the same amount of time first up we have dr victor gooden come on up and please speak right into the mic it says reverend so my guess is the microphone is your forte welcome good evening to the school board dr fritz as the as our superintendent i am concerned and i want to just thank you for the black history celebration is temporary curriculum has more permanence and i would like to see in others as well black history is a part of the curriculum even if it's
072not so that we can ensure that black history is not just taught in the shortest month of the year the teaching of black history will and does expose injustices which black people have encountered and currently encountering and will encounter the future unless something is done to right those wrong in this case exposure is the key and so as we look at this especially and you're aware of conspiracy theories they're all around us the proposed blsb which echoes when our governor has talked about sponsored by florida senator manny diaz and i'm appalled found it to be an end run around the main issue at hand which was a way to ban or exclude the teaching of black history in the public schools it feels as though change have been put back on us and not receiving
073true privilege of citizenship in america this is supposed to be our land of the free and home of the brave but black history in 1926 the creation of black history week the second week in february by dr carter g woodson in 1912 he was the second african-american after w.e du bois to obtain a phd degree from harvard university then in 1969 educators and students at kent university started the black history month movement and then former vice president gerald ford had the good sense to praise black history month urging all citizens to seize an opportunity to honor the often neglected accomplishments of black americans in every endeavor throughout our history so we're looking for more than just a celebration celebrations coming yo it needs to be a part of the volusia county curriculum for our students
074black history is american history because we are citizens of america thank you for your time thank you dr gooden next up we have miss cynthia slater either one welcome miss slater good evening to dr fritz and the members of this board again i'm cynthia slater and i'm the president of the volusia county daytona beach branch of the naacp and i want to first thank you for bringing black history month to the forefront this this evening black history month celebrated each year during the month of february is a chance for all americans to learn details of their nation's history that unfortunately are far too often neglected and pushed to the wayside black history month wouldn't have been possible without negro history week's celebration in the united states almost 100 years ago in 1926. the famous historian
075carter g woodson and the association for the study of negro life and history proclaimed the second week of february to be observed as negro history week since the inception of this event the main focus was to encourage the teaching of the history of black americans in educational institutions particularly at the primary level i won't repeat a lot of things that dr gooding has said but as the saying goes black history is american history a wise nation shows reverence and learns from its past it does not let the most significant facts about our shared and collective memory disappear into the pit of forgotten history what happened in the past shapes and informs where we are headed in the future the reading studying and celebration of black history can never be confined to one month but february
076is still most significant because not only does it provide us with the opportunity to highlight black history but the father of black history identified february because of the birth dates of two great americans who played a prominent role in shaping black history namely president abraham lincoln and frederick douglass but as it relates to crt few americans have ever heard of crt and outside of law schools it's rarely taught and taught not at all in k-12 but if black history is compared as many are comparing with the banning of crt it raises legitimate questions is the banning of black history month next in america's schools will it be watered down will it be reduced to nothingness will teachers be intimidated from teaching it i say to you this evening please do not let the miseducation of
077crt disrupt the teaching of black history because black history as reverend gooden said is american history thank you for listening to me this evening thank you mr slater next up we have thaddeus collins welcome mr collins good evening to the school board dr fritz in 1926 carter woodson introduced to america black history week a week to celebrate and recognize the achievements and contributions of blacks to this great country we call america he wanted to recognize and wanted our children to be exposed to folks such as harriet tubman serena truth nat turner denmark vesey thurgood marsha mary mcleod bethune martin luther king fanny lou hamer and many others but we want our children to know the accomplishments of these giants but we also want them to know local heroes and sheroes it has come to our
078attention that thousands of children have attended bonne elementary turity small edith i stark david henson and they know nothing about these individuals we asked the school board to designate a space in all of these schools to talk about and allow children to learn the history of these great individuals they are children that participate in all kinds of activities at the dickerson center at the t.r faircloth gymnasium in the midtown cultural center and the yvonne scarlett golden center and the george cusack center we're going to be asking the the county and the city to designate areas that children will know about these individuals that the facilities they attend are named after finally they travel george england boulevard and rip college drive and they have no idea who the men were and what their contributions what contributions
079they made to make their lives better as my colleagues have said before me black history is indeed american history thank you mr collins next up mr charles peacock welcome mr peacock good evening superintendent thank you for having me here tonight uh charles peacock new smyrna beach high school um see me a couple times now i told you i'd be back i'm here to talk about workplace uh discrepancies issues that we have there's a term that is going around seems to be a nationwide issue called work uh a teacher shortage um i'm here to tell you right now that i don't feel as though it's a teacher shortage there's plenty of teachers out there there's plenty of support professionals out there the problem is that they're no longer in the classroom they're seeking alternate means and
080the reason being is because there's a work a shortage of work and life balance there's a shortage of empathy there's a shortage of being treated like a professional adult and there's a shortage of salary those things all fall under an umbrella of a shortage of respect we struggle on a daily basis we are at best treading water problem that we're going to have soon is the amount of expansion that is going on within our communities new smyrna beach is blowing up to say the least there's constant developments going in venetian bay expanding this all leads to more and more students being brought into the classrooms with nobody there to do anything to help them we're losing educational value because of it you've any given time you can walk into the lecture center see eight classes
081that are just sitting in there there's no other educational value to that for god knows how many periods of doing it on a daily basis we need to change the way the educational profession is looked at and quite frankly that starts with y'all we can come out here we can speak we can fight we can say all the words but nothing is going to happen until there's actual physical change being done and that lies on your shoulders i can appreciate the fact that there was uh you know a ratification to our salaries just recently and which will be voted on later tonight which i'm hoping that you do pass is it enough i don't believe so um well i still continue to speak about it because there needs to be more absolutely but i can
082also say that i feel as though it's a step in the right direction i can appreciate that i'm hoping that a salary committee can lead to further advances in it in the near future and that we can get to where we need to be sooner than later but as for now again i appreciate the fact that there was at least a jump forward um right now the teacher shortage situation is the fact that there is going to be a shortage oklahoma state university has just eliminated or not eliminated they suspended their educational program because they can't get students in the classroom to become teachers and yes that's oklahoma when is it going to happen here it's going to we need to do something about it we need to change the way that the field is
083respected thank you mr peacock thank you next up dr jerry pikett welcome dr pikett chairman members of the board community groups business partners superintendent schools i sincerely believe that we are living in one of the most critical times in the history of volusia county schools as related to educating our students and ensuring that they are prepared to maximize their fullest potential in all walks of life so as we prepare to celebrate recognize and honor african americans and the many contributions made to our nation those contributions made at that time and still today make our nation a better place not only for just african americans but for all americans and i repeat all americans this is inclusive of our nation's current wealth development of land and the prosperity that continues even today from those contributions i
084strongly encourage the superintendent and this governing board not to allow any form of legislation or critical race theory to diminish in any way the teaching of african-american history let me make myself clear african-american history is american history and the major contributions of our african americans caucasian americans native americans hispanic latino americans asian americans and all other americans not mentioned are what makes america the greatest land in the world and the most diverse population of successful people ever assembled as a governing board it is our obligation our duty and responsibility to teach our students this segment of our history simply because it represents the truth all of this is really about truth everyone here today and abroad for us to move forward together and unite let us all be reminded that some aspects of america's truth
085can be painful for most of us and that's why this is the best time in history for all of us to pull together and to make sure that our kids know the truth of all americans and celebrate their contributions our kids need the opportunity to learn their history and understand the details investigate critical moments and analyze their own thoughts and conclusions the truth will indeed set us free from any conceived untruths of the past in summation african-american history is american history the great divide in american society right now as we say it is our truth do we want our kids to know our truth and move forward together building on the truth this is our chance leadership for 21st century generational change leadership that will inspire all and ensure that lives are saved uplifted celebrated
086and none absolutely none left behind thank you thank you dr pikett and so for those who are remaining a public comment that we will begin again in 19 item 19.01 for now we'll go ahead and take a 15 minute break resuming at 7 10. thank you you it test test test test test so it you one minute it it is 7 10. we will continue our board meeting next up we have item 15.01 which is superintendent's announcements and comments thank you mr clown on saturday january 29th at 7 p.m at the land high school we'll have the all-county band showcase the all-county elementary music showcase will be friday february 4th at 7 p.m at deland high school the next school board workshop will be here in this board room on february 8 at 12 30.
087the next regularly scheduled board meeting will also be on february 8th at 4 30 in this board room and i'd like to just take a moment to thank futures for our teacher of the year event i just it was just an amazing event and our our sponsor evan health for making that happen as our primary sponsor and i'd like to congratulate madison miller our our teacher of the year um at chisholm and academic coach and look forward to working with her over the next year mr chairman back to you great thank you next up presentation multi-tiered system 16.01 mtss mr superintendent uh board members as you know um and there are lots of things that we're doing to support our students but when you think of multi-tiered system of support um in the past the
088way some things have worked is they've actually been catalyst if you will to supportive environments for our students and what we want to do is create a supportive environment to keep our students where they're at so they can work with their peers and so they can be a part of all those wonderful things that their cloud their classmates are being a part of and so as we start talking about multi multi support systems on mtss we're going to bring that to you and as we've talked a little bit about what some of the transformation that we're doing in middle schools next year and going back to teaming and creating those those safe environments for our kids so that they can be successful so there's really a gradual release between elementary and high school that plays
089into this work and i've asked miss roland and thomas vaughn to come share with you as we as we transition from a more reactionary to a more proactive approach to support our kids so ms rowland mr vaughn welcome good evening chairman colon school board members superintendent fritz we're here this this evening to give you a brief overview of multi-tiered systems of support and we've been working on this this issue this plan since the beginning of the school year in the past we've always started multi-tier system support of being on the discipline end but as we start to look at our strategic plan it crossed across goals one and goal three because goal one deals with the academics and so children need support in academics as well in the area of social emotional learning or in
090the area of discipline so mr vaughn has been working with tamika harrison to develop a plan for us to see where we are and develop where we want to go in the future so that our kids are taken care of academically and behaviorally and emotionally as well so miss dr clayton is sitting here with me and she's the goal lead for goal one and i'm the goal lead for goal three and miss savannah is the director of student services and he's working with tamika harrison and developing this plan for our district so i'm gonna turn up to mr vaughn so he can give you more information tell you where we're going and how we plan to get there mr vaughn thank you mrs roland and dr clayton good evening chairman colon board members and superintendent
091fritz mtss is not new it has been a part of the educational frontier since approximately we're here to talk about it today because as with all good things from time to time the intent of a system can become lost or partially disconnected and for that reason and others that you'll hear in a few moments we are adjusting our focus to ensure alignment with the florida department of education where they state that within a multi-tiered system of supports resources are allocated in direct proportion to student needs data collected at each tier are used to measure the efficacy of the supports so that meaningful decisions can be made about which instruction and intervention should be maintained and layered the multi-tiered system involves the systemic use of multi-source assessment data to most efficiently allocate resources in order to
092improve learning for all students through integrated academic and behavioral supports further to ensure efficient use of resources schools begin with the identification of trends and patterns using school-wide and grade-level data student students who need instructional intervention beyond what is provided universally for positive behavior or academic content areas are provided with targeted supplemental interventions delivered individually or in small groups at increasing levels of intensity the system is characterized by a continuum of integrated academic and behavioral supports reflecting the need of students to have fluid access to instruction and supports at bearing intensity levels to be clear this is not esc in fact mts s is not the pathway to esc but at the same time it can be the pathway to esc to that end the members of our teaching leading and learning plc is working
093in collaboration to ensure the fidelity of keeping the whole student academically and behaviorally in mind when navigating barriers and supporting acceleration the work of mtss is directly linked to volusia county school strategic plan as mrs rowland mentioned it's specifically linked to goal 1 high quality instruction goal 3 safe and supportive environment and goal 5 communication and community engagement currently there are two goal strategies that specifically refer to the work of mtss as i mentioned before mtss is a multi-tiered system it is made up of many subsystems that i would argue to be irreducibly complex meaning that if one subsystem falters then it will have a negative impact on the remaining subsystems and the whole system itself because of this i applaud the work of this board and district staff that have ensured ntss be included
094in the strategic plan which naturally raises the accountability of the work being done ultimately resulting in greater student achievement mtss is important the work within is directly related to end result of law the general education intervention procedure the every student succeeds act and the individuals with disabilities education act additionally for volusia county schools there is language in our recent doj settlement agreement that includes direct ties to aspects of the multi-tiered support system those specific guidance will be reviewed momentarily but at the end of the day the most important reason why mtss is important is that it is good for students for all students not to mention that how educators can respond to intervention will have an effect size impact well into the desired effects for bettering student performance as you can see here on hattie's
095barometer of influence response to intervention defect size is much greater than the minimum desired desired effect size of 0.4 the key to attaining this impact though is the implementation of a system with fidelity that ensures consistency across the district remember teaching leading and learning plc is hyper focused to ensure the whole child is being considered and understood academically and behaviorally where we are with the implementation to support this work we established a district mtss leadership team this past november to give you an idea how vast mtss is the membership of this team is nearly 30 people who represent multiple departments multiple levels in multiple schools collaboration with increased perspective is paramount speaking of in collaboration with our psrti partners out of the university of south florida who are funded by doe we have completed our
096district self-assessment of mtss implementation in its current state the assessment covered six critical domains multiple tiers of instruction and intervention problem solving process data evaluation communication and collaboration capacity building infrastructure and leadership the results of the self-assessment will be used to guide our team's focus for continued improvement eventually it is intended in the near future that all schools will use the same self-assessment to guide continuous improvement at the school level in further collaboration with our partners we have provided a comprehensive mtss manual which will be a big part of our guide in providing professional learning development and training as such we have initiated a surface level mtss overview training that will reach to the teacher level before the end of the school year to meet that goal to date we have trained intervention teachers academic
097coaches and elementary assistant principals in the coming weeks all principals and secondary assistant principals will receive the same training this training has been delivered as a train the trainer model the expectation is that the school administrators and academic coaches will collaborate to deliver this training to their faculty and staff lastly the work of this group has provided assistance to elementary schools informing and scheduling their walk to intervention groups mtss where we are going connecting the dots in this realignment while effectively communicating monitoring and supporting the work is projected to be a three-year timeline actually it should read year three and beyond because this will be a continuum of learning monitoring and supporting for the foreseeable future think mandalorian this is the way bringing your attention to the top we are currently in year one and
098are preparing for your two goals we are optimistic to have a comprehensive professional learning plan in place that will leverage summer learning opportunities followed by pre-planning and erpl events for school year 2023. the need for multiple access points for learning with continued support is directly tied to the visual on the right the three-tiered instructional intervention model is a critical element of mtss implementation in a typical system tier one includes the instruction delivered to all students tier two includes supplemental instruction or intervention provided to students not meeting benchmarks and tier 3 includes intensive small group or individual interventions for students facing significant barriers to learning the skills required for school success it is important to consider academic behavior and social emotional instruction and interventions when examining this element this diagram depicts the multi-tiered system of support
099with a layer of triangles this implies that even if a student is in tier three the red triangle they would still receive interventions and supports from tier two and tier one all this to be done while building teacher capacity strengthening shared leadership and growing our family school and community partnerships our doj settlements and accomplishments i previously mentioned that mtss is important for several reasons and one of those was linked to our recent doj settlement agreement specifically mtss is related with these four areas listed all of which are in progress of being accomplished we are to provide enhanced written guidance for teachers on data collection and benchmarks while determining concrete time frames for when new interventions supports or services shall be implemented if the problem is not resolved think scientific process where variables are limited to
100determine a desirable effect how long do we wait to remove that variable also known as an intervention and implement a different intervention to monitor its progress in meeting the desired effect also known as the increased student performance thirdly we are to provide written notification to parents and guardians regarding the commencement of the problem solving process and regular status updates concerning the progress of the process in fact an mtss brochure has been developed to be shared with all families so that they can know what to expect from schools using a multi-tiered system of support things like information on their child's progress in meeting grade level standards notice of academic or behavioral concerns with early identification instruction and intervention that is matched to their child's needs feedback on how their child is responding and making progress an
101involvement in individual database problem solving for their child finally we are to have requirements and procedures in place to ensure continuity for students within the problem-solving process from one school year to the next especially think about students transitioning from pre-k to kindergarten fifth grade to sixth grade and eighth grade to ninth during these critical transitions but also keep in mind the system will ensure consistency in a continuum of services as students transfer from school to school within a school year we intend to accomplish the systematic requirement by way of our current student information system focus where an mtss tab can be utilized to increase our ability to monitor progress while decreasing the number of students that would otherwise fail or fall through the cracks remember the work of teaching lenient learning is working closely and
102collaboratively to ensure the whole child academically and behaviorally is being supported for the greatest successes mtss is a multi-tiered system of support that addresses these academic and behavioral needs of our students it is good for the students and it is the way thank you mr bonds thank you board you've heard the presentation do we have any questions thoughts feelings or concerns miss cuthbert okay okay i'm just asking for clarification you know just clarity just to kind of find out all that what you have plans for this this um i know you gave us the 30 000 view look um i just have something just to if you haven't developed yet we're only in year one just just let me know um this is all going to be assigned to employees we already have correct so
103we're not hiring anyone new to do all of this no no okay just wanted to make sure that's clear okay i thought so okay is it additional work or is it work that we are reworking the work is being reworked connecting the dots adjusting and realizing training process is already in place so it enhances and give them a support in that area because pst is already in place and when you start to look at kids that are having issues in the classroom you can't look at just one particular issue you have to collect data to see where that child is experiencing issues or whether the child needs help that's why it's a tiered system of support tier one tier two and tier three so as a child gets more and more um becoming more of
104a concern the supports will increase as he jumped tears from tier one to tier two okay and that all that will be recorded and that date is available yes will parents be able to be able to look at that with a school counselor and an administrator to also be part of the so it's done at home as well as at school and the pst process does have a place where the parents must participate and get input as well okay thank you and also who is in charge who's going to be overseeing it whose responsibility will be in administrators uh eventually it all be yours or where is the how do you report that everybody's responsible everyone an educator's evaluation is this going to be part of an evaluation for the adults well a teacher's evaluation
105at the end of the year is this the data how's the data going to be used it's just to promote uh the improvement of students correct yeah it's really it's really not about the teacher evaluation what it really is is if you think about um a system of support for our kids to make sure that they don't fall through the cracks so when kids for example um where you don't have systems you'll you'll have a student that struggles academically and they may be referred for some esc testing without a whole lot of interventions being applied this this work is designed so that we can make sure that we can keep students as much as possible with their typical peers and with the goal of being able to stay in the absolute least restrictive environment with
106supports and so as supports are needed for a child as they struggle that those supports are given and eventually it could lead to something like a re-evaluation if it was necessary for a student to get those type of ese services but this really is a way of looking at how we are cradling our students in our schools to provide them the support so that they can be successful in those classrooms and and to reiterate it's not anything you have to hire new staff for it's it's really not it's it's simply providing the supports and changing some of the work so it's not so reactionary and it's more proactive in the front end i just want you know the public to know all of this we who are in education kind of know this is how
107we work i just want to make sure that everyone is is very very clear and thank you dr fritz explained it very well and you guys um it's very well planned out you know what your goals are it's tied to the strategic plan you know who's going to do the giving and who's going to be doing the taking and that's when when there's a great plan just like any lesson plan you've created your own lesson plans great things will happen so as we have data as the third year comes around how will we look have you thought about how we're going to look at the data are there goals that we want to see or are we just going to like my idea i wanted where my students were when they came into my classroom
108i wanted to get them as far as i could by the end of the year sometimes they went far exceeded my expectations most of them did and others just developed the year after you know and you know based on their age and their availability their culture their um uh group maturity at the point how we look at the data will we look at it as the growth because when we progress monitor or are we going to have a rigid line like in the fsa if you have like 300 points you don't make that 300 points if you get 299 you're no longer a three or a two something like that so are we looking at growth are we just going to set numbers the kids have to match numbers we won't do numbers we'll look
109at the growth of the child because every child is different so we can't put them in a cookie cutter process so we will look at each child individually so it's not a particular number we look to see where the child is on the tears tier one tier two or tier three and so we actually look at adding extra supports as the children go along so it's not a specific number that they have to meet that's wonderful thank you because everybody matures at different times thank you thank you mr chairman thank you miss haynes thank you guys very much thank you mr colon miss roland you and i have been around a long long time and you know how much i appreciate you i was just a little confused when i did read this because we've
110been using the multi-tiered system of support for a number of years you and i both know that so i understand that we have new employees that maybe we that haven't received the full training and and that's one thing that we've learned over the years we'll we'll implement great training and then what happens is we forget that as new people walk in the doors they haven't had that training so i looked at this as well maybe it was just a way to step back analyze where we were at and say you know maybe 30 percent of our teachers now have not received this training or they've changed positions and we've possibly changed some of the guidelines and things like that so what because because i don't want anybody to be confused that we haven't been doing
111this because we have been doing this and we've had our you know our process to even help us once they get to tier three if it's not working how to identify you know the additional supports we can give to kids so i just didn't i wanted to clear up that it's not just something brand new out the door you know that we're starting it's something i'm so glad you said that because it is not new um and thank you miss ange you are absolutely right it is not new but it is something that requires continuous training as you pointed out because we have new people coming in all the time and there are certainly tweaks as we go but it is definitely not new let me just realign the process so that everyone that's working
112can can be trained the system companies have already been trained so that'll be someone training each a school setting or each school site that could actually make sure that the processes are being followed and is being done um with um validity not just the process that we go through just to say we went through but make sure it's being done with validity and not just going through a process to say we did because all our kids are important and that's right this time of we're in now they need more support than ever before so we want to make sure it's being implemented properly and make sure it's actually being done with fidelity and i want to thank you and your team for realizing that that that was a need and because we do have some
113teachers out there that they don't they've not had the training or they've gotten just a piece of it and so i appreciate you realizing that and coming up with a structure in a way to ensure that everyone has it my question though really is about that year two piece um where we have the pbis school level implementation one thing and i don't expect you to have it with you tonight but one thing i think i'd like to know and i think the other board members may want the same information is which schools have we already implemented pbis in you know with validity and what's the plan you know like do we have a group that will start next year you know which is really your year one yes and i'm just going to share with
114you that we've we've talked with the team we've talked with our principal council we will actually do pbis in all schools next year there are some schools that pbis is a name but what we've realized sometimes when we when leaders move around things are important and they go with them or they don't exist so part of us rolling out and you'll you'll remember that we are training our principals to have their school improvement plans mirror the district strategic plan and to learn how to do the stock take process that we go through and which you'll see again for your mid-year report on february 8th pbis will be something that we work with all of our team our school teams to implement this next year because where it's working it's really really working mr colon and
115i got to see a great example of it on friday where it's it's part of the culture it absolutely without a doubt is embedded it is not one more thing teachers have to do it's just something that is but we recognize that this is really what's needed in all of our schools there's no question about it so sayings it's like i feel like we're supposed to launch out of a cake here but yes it'll be next year we've already had the conversation that will be in all schools with fidelity okay i still would like to know which schools even if it's only a name only just like who's already stepped into that piece so that you know as i'm out and i'm visiting i can just kind of take a look at so are they
116actually you know have they implemented it and where are they at with it or is it just a name only and dr fritz i'm happy to hear that it's going to be at all schools next year so looking at that year three then where it says the targeted supports and technical assistance and ongoing and i know this is not something we're going to stop because as i said we've had mtss around for a long time and we did a great push when we put it out there on training but you know as with everything we have to stay up with it so the only other question i had is when we did roll it out originally several years ago we rolled it out with some very specific um we took our time and we found
117some very specific resources and materials you know that these are great resources at the elementary level for fluency you know for students that you know are struggling with fluency or struggling with comprehension and things like that so have we taken what was developed before and looked at it and said you know because every publisher wants to sell you everything you know and and they always tell you it's the best thing but we've learned over the years you know certain products work better than others so have we developed a list of resources for teachers at the different levels and not only develop the list of resources are we ensuring that those resources are going to be in those schools so that the teachers have access to them so they don't have to go you know find
118a way to get them themselves ask their principals for the money spend their own money and or they're not looking for some other resource because consistency is the key i had an elementary principal tell me years ago he submissing when i bring my fourth grade teachers in to meet with them each one of them is using something different for intervention so he said we can't even talk the same thing to say you know what is working and what's not working because we're not being consistent across the board so do we have a list and do they have the resources yes ma'am i'm glad that you brought that up as well that's the beauty of the reset on the mtss overview in addition to the ela best standards one of the initiatives that has always been
119in place by the state of florida is the requirement for us to submit a quick k-12 reading plan with decision trees and part of the new house bill 7011 has increased the requirements in that reading plan which requires us to put the resources in our decision tree and we have them broken down by every single grade level and identifying which areas of need they are specifically for reading so if it's phonics you would use these resources if it's phonemic awareness these if it and these are the scores that you should be looking for on your screeners if it's fluency vocabulary comprehension and so forth and so um we have it's a systematic process and that's why we're bringing it back to the forefront because of exactly what you said there were so many schools that
120got to the point where they were doing a little bit of this and a little bit of that and now we are systematizing the entire process so that it's in alignment with the requirements of the state the essa requirements and the items that we put in that k-12 reading plan we can't just decide on our own they have to have evidence base so when we submit that to the state they check the evidence base from the research companies which would be things like the what works clearinghouse the national center for intensive intervention and the essa clearinghouse that they take a look at all of those resources and clear them for us first and i will give you um the example of even the state responded back to us and said okay thanks for providing that
121evidence but now how are you going to exactly use that in your district and so we had to get even more detailed and so the greatest part of this whole reset is we're looking at the entire umbrella and the whole idea is that we're turning every stone for every student to figure out what works for them so they're not just pushed to the side or in a separate group that maybe they don't need to be in that we find something that works for them to be successful thank you for that and um mrs cuthbert on your question about the teacher evaluation piece actually under the components that teachers are evaluated on there are some components that participating in this and doing it correctly does show up because there's a data collection component there's a component
122about meeting the needs so it's not like new components are specific to this but that is a part of what's already built into their evaluations so thank you thank you mr glenn thank you i don't see any other names anybody else have any comments or questions all right just i just have so i do have a few questions and i appreciate what miss cuthbert asks and so um as we're looking at the infrastructure which is year one you know i appreciate that it's everybody's job but what i've learned in my life is when it's everybody's job nobody does it and so i'd be curious to see down the line as it gets developed what the actual governance structure looks like for this and who is going to be responsible for what for example we're implementing
123the pbis which is a program that's nationally recognized who is responsible for looking at that material for ensuring that it's appropriate for ensuring that it is accurate for insurance that it meets the needs of our students and so that's something i'd like to see so that we have clarity on that my next question is um what it looks like to me is that right now does every student fall under a tier of support right now as we speak today so every single student the a student the f student the ese student is on a tier of support how is that communicated across the grade the teacher so if i'm a student coming into sixth grade how do the six teachers that i have seven teachers that i have know what level of support i'm at
124how do we communicate that now or is that where our inconsistency is where we're looking for this to help us uh get on the same page that's a great question also which is part of the systems we are seeking to improve even better so part of the infrastructure that thomas referred to would be to improve our identification in the focus system our student information system they have an entire suite of mtss forms and documentation that we want to get embedded completely into the focus system which will have everything at everybody's fingertips and then um every teacher knows it's part of the educational lingo that we all love so much but that all students receive tier one instruction which is core instruction every student even if they are in a ese program they should all receive
125core instruction on grade level and be exposed then the tier 2 support is that targeted support for them to be successful with structures that would help them be successful on tier one core grade level and then the tier three would be that intensive support that would fill the their learning gaps and so tutoring programs what you've heard of the wind time was designed to be part of the tiered system of support as much support during the school day it before and after school is icing on the cake so it is what we deliver during the regular school day that is targeted to their individual needs great and what role do our school counselors play in this here i know this is addressing the academic but when i look at the outside we have growing family
126school community partnerships shared leadership and building teacher capacity so there are also some external parts so i'd be curious to see how other departments are as we look at the governance of this what they're providing the supports because as we build systems i mean the idea is that it happens the same at deltona lakes elementary the same way it happens at cypress creek whether it's monday tuesday thursday or twice on sunday that it's that we're following it in a uniform way that's what systems do and you know one of the challenges is sometimes you know everybody does it the best way they know how and so um ensuring that we have those systems in place that you know bring you know consistency school counselors are involved they meet once a month um as a as
127a as a entire team um secondary 6-12 meets and k-5 meets on a monthly basis and so the counselors come and discuss issues they're having um they look for support from each other so when teachers bring the child's concerns to them they actually discuss what the teacher what the child is going through the council will often call the child in and call the parent then they reach out for resources from miss esther hominis cruz and they have those meetings to collaborate to see what they can do to support each child but they do have actual system in place what they offer the tier one student to tier two student and tier three students so the supports are in place and they are across the board so that we know what we're gonna do for each
128child at each system each tier it's not different um they hold meetings and they have a plan in place that what's what support should be offered at what tier so those things are done through our school counselors and they meet once a month to update or add or change some things that are not working so they do communicate regularly great so in my head i see all kinds of algorithms and if you know if a kid needs clothes can they do all that clothing yeah and let's go back to where we're headed we're headed to the schools taking over the stock take process to review their school improvement plans every month like we do so the conversation that we have in goal three which is where rose and thomas are with with mtss we have
129that twice a semester and then we will share out with you but it's an opportunity for two hours for them to update me for me to ask questions for me to push back and so in part of that are those systems of support that you're talking about those universal systems and so as we start to roll this out what you're going to see is that that that's the piece that principals will take with their school improvement plans and they will meet once a month with our teams and every month they will get an update for example on where we're at with mtss what's working what's not working you know what barriers are you facing and how do we how the principle will take that role like i have how can we knock the barriers down
130so that they can be successful that that is our our main mechanism that we will we will build our unified support around is that school improvement planning piece which i think is important because that's what mirrors our district plan so thank you thank you miss cuthbert um can i ask a question we have a lot of supports outside the classroom as well we have take stock and children food brings hope we have boys and girls club we have scouts we have extended days we have private tutors um how will they and as our students leave our classrooms because we don't want to just be a silo how what kind of communication would you like to see like for maybe what food brings hope what students see at the end of the school day when they
131go elsewhere can there be like a communication between what they're witnessing what they're seeing to the school counselor or to whoever handles their their tiered support at the school levels we can all work together for the whole child and that is our intention is to make sure the students know who they can go to for support and it is it is across the board we don't have food bringing hope at every school but those schools that do have food bring hope as a support the families are aware that that service is available for them through food brings hope we have the after school programs and not every school has after school program so the schools actually share that information with their staff and their parents per school because it's not the services aren't consistent across
132the board with what's offered for each child what's available to each family so each school makes sure that the parents are aware in the community as well what they offer for the kids after school okay by law are we allowed to access that information how the student is in those programs to help them in the classroom are we allowed to do that so that depends so in our extended day program or edep we know those are school employees those are school students and we do extend the day into the edep program and make sure that we know the gaps are here this is what their plan says they need to be working on and we make sure that is extended into our extended day programs likewise we do the same there is a strong parent
133component to this whole process and that we're communicating to the parents exactly what the students deficiencies are and we work together with all those social services to match to families needs and that is just one layer of making sure you know whatever service food brings hope provides we want to make sure it's matched to the individual students needs and that we act as the liaison there but there is um some responsibility also on the family side to make sure that they carry those things out which we have additional resources that we give to them throughout the process so it's nice to have that communication so you can see the child in a lot of different ways because we all we can't do it alone we certainly can't so thank you for for this presentation very
134grateful for the presentation tonight thank you very good thank you so much there are no other names on the q list thank you all for coming and sharing this great news with us thank you all right next up we have board action item 18.01 which is adoption of proposed amendments to the school board policy 801 public participation in school meetings presented by mr pendley thank you mr chair board members bringing forward tonight item 1801 which is the revision to our policy as you know back at the reorganization meeting in november the board expressed desire to move away from the 3 30 5 30 board time starts however by policy 801 those times were set so what we did back in december at first reading was to remove the 330 530 time certain for those meetings
135this revision allows you flexibility going forward for this year to have board meetings at other times other than that the policy remains the same it has been advertised according to florida statute for the appropriate period of time and tonight is ripe for adoption thank you mr pendley what did you say miss haines so we originally started this at our organizational meeting and started talking about changing the time and we agreed to it and in the minutes tonight that we approved for our organizational meeting what we said is we would like all regular meetings to begin at 4 30 p.m with a time certain public participation at 6 00 pm and all workshop or work sessions to be held from 12 30 to 3 30. so we've approved unanimously those minutes tonight and so i just
136wanted to refer back to when that started and what we had agreed to thank you great thank you ms cuthbert if a board member mr pendley um sees something that might be objectional what is the best process for a board member to to stop something whether it might be public participation in public participation because i just wondered you know if we're going to follow the policy where there is no name calling and people are not going to be uh called out in as individuals or attacked is does the individual i know the chair is in charge is there any recourse for a board member uh yes ma'am the board by practice follows robert's rules of order and your parliamentarian is your board attorney um and at that time if a member any member uh were
137to call for a point of order that would be directed to the chair and the chair would make a ruling on the point of order at that time okay thank you i just wanted to make sure all board members knew that they had that process that procedure thank you thank you thank you mr chairman thank you mr persis thank you mr chair uh and we're finally here yay yay it's government it takes three months to get there but it's okay so now do we have the flexibility after we vote on this to let's say in may or something we decide as a board hey you know what we we don't want to meet in july 26th we want to meet on another day or at another time [Music] as long as we serve give proper
138notice are we able to have that flexibility now and make those changes yes you would so long as appropriate public notice and publication of that meeting change were made currently our practice is to after the organization meetings in the fall notice the meetings going forward for 12 months we do that at one time the only issue i would raise with that and it's it's minor but there is a economic impact there because you would be having to publish notices each time you changed your meeting dates if we don't do it all at one time but certainly according to the revisions that the board if it's the board's pleasure to pass this amendment you would then at that time be allowed the flexibility to set meetings one more question then my other question is so at
139our next organizational meeting next november november the board could decide hey you know that 430 thing didn't work out so well let's change it to another time we won't have to advertise we won't have to go back for another rule change on on this policy no sir i love it thank you thank you mr chairman all right i don't see any other names on the queue so one of the things and mind you it may be a little bit far out but there is legislation right now dealing with public comment and school board meetings don't know where it will go where it is changing it's requiring 30 minutes of public comment at the beginning of a school board meeting and so just want to put that on the radar because that's probably soon coming i
140will share with you that you know sitting in this chair is a lot different than being over there even though i still mosey my way over there because five 15 minutes is just not a lot of time and it and and i personally don't think it really allows you know a whole lot of time and so um in my very humble opinion i'm good with this here however i think we can talk about it in a future date have an appetite to maybe bring that to 30 prior to the legislation just because again it just is yes sir i'm just going to say a week are we still scheduled to have that leadership um master board yes sir yes in february or march spread yeah and so again it just feels really really short i
141mean it goes by really really fast and so uh as someone who does want to hear public comment um i think it's something we will definitely entertain very good so miss haines i was going to add to what you just said you know i do agree with you too because it goes very fast but one of the things in december when we were in tampa i spoke with a lot of different school board members from other areas and we were talking about public input and i have to tell you i was pleasantly surprised because we currently allow public input for all consent you know for the consent agenda items we allow public input for each individual item that we're going to vote on individually we allow the time certain public input and we allow the
142public input at the end of the meeting and when i spoke to a lot of them they they don't allow all of that public input from some of the other counties so i think we are ahead of the game but i do also want to say i agree with you on the 15 minutes it goes by pretty fast but thank you very good i don't see any other names on the queue so policy has been presented i don't think anybody has spoken of any amendments to that do we have a motion a move approval of uh item 18.01 adoption of the proposed amendments the school board policy 801. all right do we have a second i'll second motion's been properly made by mr purses seconded by mrs burnett do we have any public participation cards
143all right miss elizabeth albert welcome mrs albert thank you uh mr chair good evening members of the board dr fritz members of the audience so i wanted to just ask a couple questions because we have talked about this several times and so there are some clarifying questions that i need to ask of you that hopefully will also be questions that some others who are listening will have and i appreciate miss haynes that you reference the minutes because that's really important what this does not say is when your meetings will start and mr persis a moment ago you referenced what if we decide we don't want 4 30 anymore my concern is how we communicate that you know this is a really big ship and we've had our 3 30 and 5 30 alternating meetings for
144it at least two years perhaps even longer and so now we're shifting into a document that doesn't articulate anything specifically and so to me that's an area of concern i appreciate all of the conversation about wanting to engage with the public and listening to the constituents and the folks that actually have their trust in you that you're going to do the right thing and i appreciate that but this needs for my lens to be a bit more specific the time certain for public participation that's a big win for people particularly if you're considering starting your meetings before the end of the standard work day which is five o'clock if these meetings start at 4 30 and we don't have a time certain for public participation i think that's going to limit some of the engagement
145that we'll have from the public of course there is a second opportunity at the end of the meeting but listen i've logged a lot of hours in those seats over there and sometimes these meetings go really late and if you are a parent or you have to get up early to go to work the next morning and you're weighing your options of three minutes to engage with the school board or or being able to take care of your family i know what you're going to choose so having that time certain is really important another thing you know it it again i just worry about how we're going to communicate this because one of the best things that you can do as a board and all five of you are fairly seasoned at this point and
146you understand what needs to be done is listen listen and engage that's what we need more of so that's my time thank you very much i appreciate it thank you miss albert all right motion's been properly made in second in any further discussion all right seeing none we'll call for the vote all those in favor say aye aye all those again say nay motion passes five to zero next up we have item 18.02 board action item approval of job descriptions mr west good evening board members dr fritz thank you for having me come this evening uh to present uh four uh job descriptions that we're bringing before you tonight uh one is a revision of an existing job description which is the school guardian and it's just an update of a number of duties to
147align it with the actual what they are currently doing uh the other three are new job descriptions the wellness coordinator is going to be housed in the employee benefits division and is going to be grant funded our behavioral specialist position is going to be housed in ese and will actually be a cost savings of the district because we're actually looking to replace some of our contracted services with that position and then the maintenance technician planner is in dr shanoff's office in regards to facility usage and will be self funding once we get that program up and going all right thank you so much board members do we have any questions for mr west all right mr west i do have a question the behavioral specialist position is that something that we believe and i guess
148this is more question for mr pendley is that something we believe falls under bargaining uh no sir that is a non-bargain position since it's it's not a teaching position and it does not uh require a certification uh this is actually going to be a person that's an individual that's a liaison between the district and those contracted service employees so this is more of a supervisory role than it is actually um a bargained position all right there are no speakers on the queue and so do we have a recommendation mr superintendent superintendent recommends the approval of the job description description additions and revisions all right do we have a motion mr chairman i move that we accept four new job descriptions wellness coordinator school guardian behavioral specialist maintenance technician planner thank you is there a second
149i'll second motion has been properly made by ms cuthbert seconded by miss burnett any discussion miss burnett i just want to say we you called us and talked to all of us individually on our weekly calls and uh there was many as you know i always ask questions about financial impact and so i appreciate that you were able to tell us that that these positions were not new that they were going to be restructured or they were i shouldn't say not new but the two that are new were actually coming away from outsourced and being with a company where we had some outsourcing it's it's very important to your employees that you have this in source that you you have these all internally so i was grateful for that so thank you thank you all
150right next up ms haynes so i just want to clarify the school guardian is just a revised um you know revised or updated job description it's not new it applies to the school guardians that we currently have that maintenance technician planner i i was kind of hoping you were going to give a little bit of explanation like you had shared with us when we asked you on our 101 meetings a lot of questions but just the the community and parents and teachers and staff know we're moving to a system for the rental of our schools our rooms because we currently rent out rooms and we rent out our schools to the community um for events and so this is a system that we're moving to so that the same fee will be collected every time
151and the money will go back into the school so that we basically move away from if mr clone and i are at two different schools you know i pick and choose who i want to rent a room for he follows the protocol and rents to everybody he follows and makes sure they have their insurance and he collects the fees and and you know i just say well that's my friend so i'll give a reduced rate we're cutting out all of that with this because we're going to have a standardized system where it won't matter you know whoever approaches and wants to rent from either one of our schools they will have the right to rent it as long as they meet the requirements and everybody will pay the same fee which is actually a win-win
152for our schools because then a portion of that money is going back into the schools for them to use for the students and the money that will come from that will pay for this position for the person that's going to oversee all this correct yes ma'am okay yes and i thought everybody needed to know that because you know we're being very careful not to add any positions where we're taking money away from students and so this is not taking any money away from students the behavioral specialist piece was the part that i talked about earlier tonight that is written in right now into that grant and we are using a third party company for behavior specialists as we've all learned when we use a third party company something we suffer in some way we either
153get less services or we have to pay even a whole lot more money because there's no company that's going to give us the same product that we can do in-house because they're out to make a profit and that's written in there and then the wellness coordinator was the one that i had a lot of questions about mr west if you remember i kind of grilled you on that one but my understanding is is that florida healthcare is going to reimburse us because we've been using their um you know wellness coordinate well their product basically for this and so we're going to actually get better services they're going to reimburse us and this is going to be a cheaper cost to us to bring it in-house correct yes ma'am and and this will also help all
154of our employees we'll have one person that's going to be you know focusing and be able to get um we'll hopefully see some insurance you know savings as well as providing a wellness complete wellness program for all of our employees yes ma'am thank you and and thank you mr clone thank you for letting me do that because sometimes when people see this they just think we're just adding more people and taking away from our students and so i thought it needed to be clarified that we're saving money in areas and we're going to bring in more money so thank you thank you all right thank you so much all right we do have a public comment card thank you all for coming up this is elizabeth albert welcome back mrs albert thank you mr chair
155members of the board dr fritz members of the audience so let's talk about the behavior specialist shall we so when you lay out the new job description that's proposed in front of you and you lay out what we already have in place in our schools which is a teacher on assignment social emotional learning facilitator although i would agree that they don't exactly line up item by item they are so very similar in a variety in a lot of ways with the understanding that the folks that we currently have employed in our schools the teachers on assignment the sel toas they are actually highly qualified compared to this new job description that we're rolling out also of note is that we do already employ 13 certified mental health specialists throughout our school district who were i
156remembered uh brought in in order to help meet the sel needs that our students have and boy do we need them now i i sure am very happy that we have them so what i've heard tonight is that there are five positions that are going to be created if this passes they will be regionalized and these folks will then become liaisons to the contracted employees that were currently paying a third party to work in our schools how does that make good fiscal sense and how is that reasonable when right now on our vacancy website we have over a hundred instructional vacancies posted and we have more than 200 support vacancy posted now in a perfect world when we had teachers in our classroom sure let's talk about this but why now why are we doing
157this now when we should be laser focused on putting folks in our classrooms if we do this what happens to our scltoas have we thought about the next step because you know when you throw that pebble there's always a ripple so these are some of the questions that that i have when i take a look at this of note also is there was a talking point about how this is going to save us money as we looked at the grant application tonight over 622 000 has been written in the grant for behavior specialists i'm not able to understand how all these dots are connected maybe it's just me but i need a lot of clarification around some of these points and i don't think that i'm the only one again i notice here that this
158new position is going to be providing support to building principles my understanding previously was that anyone who supports or works to develop principles must have also already been a principal at one point in time so i just have some questions about those things that have been discussed previously i wonder how this actually is going to align with some of the practices that we've already talked about and have been established previously and quite frankly i don't know if this is the right time to do this if we want to revisit it once we get our classrooms filled and our support professionals filled well let's do it but maybe not right now thank you all right so we have a motion that was made by mrs cuthbert and seconded made by ms cuthbert and seconded by miss
159uh anita burnett any additional comments thoughts feelings or concerns all right hearing none again and just for the sake of the public we are only approving job descriptions tonight uh and so with that being said we'll call the vote all those in favor say aye all those opposed say nay motion passes unanimously all right next item up is 18.03 board action item ratification of proposed collective bargaining agreement with volusia united educators for instructionals and support staff for fiscal year 2021-2022 mr superintendent board members i i got to tell you how appreciative and happy i am that we've been able to get to this point and i think this is is important work you know the governor put out a challenge to school districts and this board eagerly looked for all ways to meet that challenge
160to be able to provide for our employees and so with that i'm going to ask mr west and miss hazel to kind of walk through a little bit for that piece of the ratification and kind of talk about what's happened and what we're here today to do thank you dr fritz thank you board members um miss albert come please come on up um we definitely are very excited to be able to bring forward to the tentative agreement that has been reached between the district and the union and has been pointed out and brought to them the members and i'll let miss albert talk a little bit about the ratification and um just to bring before you months and months and hours and hours of work on both teams parts so we're very excited about the
161collaborative effort that we put together to hopefully benefit all of our instructional and support employees from the view well thank you mr west i appreciate that it was absolutely a team effort and if i could take a moment first to recognize the members of the bargaining teams because this doesn't happen by one or two people this is a movement also wanting to thank all of our members across the district who sent in their suggestions who participated in the committee but specifically on the bargaining teams for support we had valerie jessup we have laurie miller on instructional we have paulette mckibben shed we have yvette loscano and the mighty mighty matthew lawrence he is a walking calculator and boy oh boy do we appreciate him and we have dr macklin josh leclair and dr lakita howard
162and so recognizing their efforts and the long hours i wanted to make sure that we did that but i i'll say this i'm glad we're done i'm really glad i slept uh thursday night although you know i slept a whole night imagine that but you know we do have a work that still needs to be done you know that we've got to do better for our mid-career and veteran teachers as far as salary goes i have heard your commitment to doing that now that we're at the 47.5 very excited to convene the salary committees and to implement what we were able to negotiate and so again also moving to 15 i know i'm going to get the hook in a minute but the pathway to 15 for our support that's very critically important that we
163lay that out um and it would be wonderful if we could get there before 2026. so thank you thank you miss albert i i want to acknowledge um our team also thanks for bringing that up um and rachel is an amazing chief negotiator obviously i don't have to tell you that the the efforts that um and the work that she and elizabeth sat together and brought together a plan and then with our teams it was phenomenal introduce our team real quick rachel another year all right on our support team we had two principals shannon hay and jacquise copeland and then from our district side which really um a lot of most of our district folks did double duty they did both instructional and support so that of course was mr west mr penley myself um
164miss sneed amanda wiles michelle golden stephanie workman did i miss anybody okay and then on our instructional side we had um three principals serving uh angie polite john cash and paul naric and so we're very grateful for all that they did great thank you mr superintendent the superintendent recommends the ratification by the school board of the negotiated and proposed collective bargaining agreements with the volusia united educators for both instructional and support staff effective july 1 2021 through june 30th 2022 board you've heard the recommendation of the superintendent do we have a motion move approval second motion has been properly made by mr person seconded by mrs cuthbert uh we do have public comment thank you all mr shane's story welcome mr story good to see you all again it's almost to be sunday good to
165see you again uh i'm one of the two percent that voted against the ratification of this agreement primarily because i think it does little to not to support the teachers that put me in the place that i've been the reason i'm successful is because i leaned on the teachers that were in the classroom long before me probably teachers that looked like miss haines over here or ms cuthbert over here or mr persis when he was in the classroom those teachers that spent a significant amount of time in that classroom telling me how to deal with my students and how to become a better teacher and an educator overall the the little that we have done to respect the veteran teachers at this point has pushed them out of the field i mean if we look
166at some of the statistics where 27th in years of experience out of the 67 districts i know there's like 70 but there's like fau and some things like that but we rank 27th in years of retention essentially is what that is for years of experience because we were 38th in average pay we know that average is highly uh correlated to your veteran teachers that receive a higher salary which they are entitled to when you guys got rid of that step system it's killing the veteran teachers it's not fair i mean think about how you would feel if you spent that much time in a position and you look down and see somebody that just got here yesterday and they're making almost what you make that's depressing why would you stay in the same field or
167why would you stay in the same county in our neighboring eight counties we rank six in average pay and the counties that are similar to us within a thousand instructional staff we rank fourth out of those six so i know this is like being ratified this is a new thing right like we're headed in the right direction uh we've done some great things to address the compression we're doing some great things to to address the esu workload those are great things but a lot has been mentioned about history tonight and those that do not understand history are doomed to repeat it right you're talking about not not providing a benefit to those veteran teachers and we're also talking about things like i know here in css and pst like i've got a graduate i got
168a master's degree i understand what that stuff is some might not but i can tell you that there's an increase in pst right now due to the doj agreement there are more students entering the pst process as a result of the doj agreement because we can't just ship kids out and kick them out of class which rightfully so but that increase increases the workload for teachers so if you look back at that pay why do you stay if your workload's going up and your pay is staying flat right you know we're getting teachers in we still had 471 openings between instructional support and administrators but if you look at a county that's relative to our size seminole has 66 total openings so i mean that's that's kind of a problem that we need to address
169here in bullish county and we do that by addressing the pay for those veteran teachers asap another thing imagine waking up in the morning as a student you're hungry because you didn't get dinner last night your family doesn't have much money you hop on your bus and it's running late because they're driving two routes you get to school you scarf down one of the two free meals that you're getting that day you head out the door and run across campus to get to your class and try to be on time there's no teacher there you go right back to that cafeteria it's not education that's babysitting and we need to fix it thank you mr stark all right so board we had a motion by mr purses correct and seconded by miss cuthbert any further
170discussion ms haynes i also want to say thank you to everyone that was on the bargaining teams and put months of work into this but what i really want to say is to everyone that's sitting here in the audience right now and those listening at home so by getting this to 47.5 which is what the legislation said that we had to do we have held up our end of the agreement based on the funding that they put aside and said this is what you have to do um i am happy that we are not the last district in florida getting to this point i didn't um there are still i've been following what other districts are at and there's still a lot of them that are not going haven't gotten to this point this year
171and we'll still be looking at it again next year what i'm asking each and every one of you to do is this several of us sitting here we have gone to tallahassee and we have spoken to all of our representatives there we have talked about this piece of legislation we talked about it prior to them approving it because the original legislation was only was going to put 100 of the funding only at the lower level and we talked and did we get what we wanted no but we got 20 of that funding to go on to the more experienced teachers but the way it reads right now and this is what we need support and help with because i've not only talked to all of our representatives in tallahassee i've talked to them when they're
172here at home in volusia county those that represent us we need them to honor the fact that we followed the guidance and the legislation that they put forth and we have gotten our base salary up to 47.5 in volusia county for teachers and the reason why we need them to honor that is because we've reached that point now we need them to continue to give us that funding but now give us the flexibility so that next year when bargaining is going to happen we can take the money and not be tied any longer to any constraints and we can raise the salary of our experienced teachers here in volusia county those that have already spent 20 25 30 35 and even upwards of 40 years because it is true what mr story said tonight i
173was a new teacher 35 36 years ago and without the experienced teachers that took me under their wing and taught me and walked me through all of the different things that they don't teach you at a university or college because they don't they teach you your content that you need to teach but they don't teach you what every day is going to be like and all the things that you have to do and the way you have to do them and in 2011 when the legislation changed and the bottom kind of fell out for our experienced teachers i was a classroom teacher at that time and i thought how can this be fair you know i signed a contract and i have followed every requirement that they asked me to follow and they just pulled
174the rug out from under me well it's time that we put that rug back and we do what's right for our experienced teachers and so along with all of our experienced staff but i would ask please just take a moment i mean probably everybody in this room has a smartphone just look up who your local representatives are and reach out to them call their office send them an email and say please allow volusia county the flexibility next year don't go changing the legislation so that they can work on raising the salaries of the experienced teachers because the compression is not good and when they took our steps away that was not good for all the teachers that have been here so many years so i'm just i'm really pleading with every one of you just
175take five minutes if you don't want to contact all of them pick one that you can and right now is the time so that they don't change anything with those rules and we can turn the table around and maybe eighty percent or ninety percent will go to the experienced teachers next year and the smaller percentage can go to all of those that we have already brought up because three years ago i think we were at thirty nine two so in three years time we've gone from thirty nine two to forty seven five so that's that's a good start in the right direction but we need to get the experienced people so please do that thank you mr clinton thank you ms cuthbert miss copper i agree with mrs haynes it is absolutely true in 2010
176was the last year that a step was given and that was the year i got i obtained 25 years of experience so i was able to get that last nice bump of salary no one has had that sense and so it is true someone with 26 years experience that i had when i retired is not making the same amount and that reflects not just in salary but in your retirement so it's extremely important the state legislature is passing a lot of legislation against school board members right now school board members are under attack i even heard our one of our senators u.s senators say that in local news this this this weekend because we're the ones who are advocating for public education we recognize the fact and when we were told by our finance department
177and our human resources department that the money that we received from the state legislature for raising the starting salary 80 percent of that money was to go to new teachers 20 was to go to our veteran teachers and when you have a got 80 the other 50 only got 20. that's happened twice now so i know dr when i was chair last year dr fritz and i wrote a letter um to the state legislature asking for increased funding and also the flexibility to be able to put money take if if we've reached that 47.5 that's what mrs haynes was saying well then let us use the rest of that money for veterans we can only do what with the taxpayer money that we are given the state controls almost every single penny that we spend
178they tell us they may say that they're going to increase the student the base student allocation which we call the bsa but i think it was about three years ago that one hundred dollars that i heard my local representatives you know bragging that he was able to get public schools volusia county could only use 45 cents of that for discretionary funding our salaries that we pay comes from our general funding our general fund 80 percent of that general fund goes to salaries right now so the school operates on 20 we are very transparent we are public education everyone knows our salaries everyone is welcome to our board meetings we meet in the sunshine everything we discuss we announce our meetings you have every right to criticize and and give us applause at the same time
179but state legislators are tired of hearing from our school districts and they're tired of hearing from school board members they're not listening to us anymore we need the general public to advocate with us not for us but with us next week all school board members across the state are meeting in tallahassee i'm unable to go because i have have surgery they're meeting to advocate for public education so it's not just volusia county it's all counties in the state we're all in this together and we really need we need your help we truly truly need it we only can spend taxpayer money you said we rent some of our facilities out for churches and for events but that goes to the school we don't we can't collect any beach beach tolls we can't um charge somebody
180a bus going across a bridge i wish we could um we our children ride free on our buses they're so well cared for at the very beginning and the end of every day we have substitutes that are very caring and very loving we have crossing guards we cannot do this alone we are part of everyone's community we're all interconnected but we have to be interconnected financially as well our district cost differential you mr story spoke of seminole county they get almost a dollar for every dollar that they send to tallahassee they get it back in funding when we send a dollar to tallahassee we get about 96.35 cents back so we lose three and a half cents per dollar in funding because of the economic base in volusia county because they consider us poorer than
181flagler or brevard seminole or lake because they consider us a poor county they say well you don't need that extra money miami-dade gets a dollar six broward county gets a dollar six orange county gets over a dollar one they all get additional two-thirds of the counties in this state get less than a dollar in funding and one-third get more than their share and as miss johnson who had mr colombia seat before many times would say we don't mind them getting more money to help with their standard of living but don't take it away from us so we totally agree with you in funding 100 110 percent but we need the extra help please help us so thank you dr fritz for you and your teams and all the chambers the daytona chamber a lot of
182the chambers across the county go and advocate for us as well we're very grateful for every voice that is lifted for public education so thank you thank you mr chairman thank you miss cuthbert there are no other uh names on the cue list we'll go ahead and call for the vote all those in favor say aye aye all is opposed say nay motion passes five to zero well i think that's worth our yoo-hoo [Applause] all right so we will take a quick 10 minute bathroom break and then we will dive right back into public participation you foreign two minutes two minutes all right we will call this meeting back to order and so we will ask everyone to please be seated so that we can go ahead and get started first up we have the
183honorable judge hubert grimes judge grimes it's an honor to have you here tonight and likewise mr chairman it is indeed an honor i see a lot of familiar faces around the diocese so thank you so much um i'd actually like to uh offer my comments tonight regarding the black history month program that's been put forth and as i stated i appreciate the opportunity to address the learned members of this school board tonight and it's that wisdom to which i appeal on the issues that are coming at all of us at this time let us not confuse the difference between critical race theory and black history as a law student back in the mid 70s studying constitutional law we began to analyze the cases coming out of the supreme court on issues such as affirmative action
184voting rights employment education and other civil rights matters as part of our in-class and study group discussions even then the phrase critical race theory was relatively new and more of an academic discussion fast forward the phrase has continued primarily as an academic discussion for law school students never for undergraduates high schools or any other lower level students critical race theory was never designed nor has it ever taught the idea of making our children hate america as our governor and other politicians have alleged throughout the country there are people who don't have a clue nor understand but are using this phrase as a red herring to launch an attack not just on critical race theory but really on teaching black history this is wrong and it has to stop how or why should secondary schools be
185barred from teaching something they've never taught anyway my continued plea to you is that you not get it twisted critical race theory which is barred by political leaders in tallahassee is not and should never be a leap frog to not teach black history moments in our schools which we've been doing for years whether you talk about enslavement that started in 1619 with the arrival of the first 20 africans in jamestown virginia dress god plessy v ferguson board of brown v board emancipation the civil war reconstruction jim crow or the era separate but equal martin luther king and the civil rights movement black inventors such as george washington carver lewis latimer dr charles drew garrett morgan educators such as dr du bois dr woodson dr bethune dr howard thurman jackie robinson and the countless others that
186have saved our lives open doors of opportunity and made america what it is today while mitch mcconnell may not accept it the sacrifices of our ancestors and our daily struggles and love for this country make black americans real americans can you imagine what it's like to make continual sacrifices to prove your love for our country yet to see the constant barriers seem to be erected try enjoying the full benefits and rights of citizenship i implore you let's not get it twisted black history and critical race theory are two different things black history is american history thank you for the opportunity to address this learning process thank you judge grimes next up we have owl buoy mr bowie thank you and good evening to uh superintendent clown up board member board chairman colon superintendent fritz uh
187i got that right at the risk of repeating some of what you already heard um i'm going to go ahead and do that partly because i think it emphasizes uh the importance this matter is to us and um as you already know my name is al bowie i'm here as a member board of the volusia county african-american leadership council to applaud your support for the teaching of african-americans back hit black history in our schools and to encourage you to maintain that sound educational position it's common knowledge that an educated citizenry is the foundation of a sound and thriving democracy that has informed and engaged citizens making critical decisions that ensure liberty justice and opportunity for all if we want our democracy to function in a way that lives up to the words of our constitution
188and pledge one nation under god with liberty and justice for all all educators and parents we must ensure our children are provided with the comprehensive instruction that fills their need for knowledge to secure our democracy make informed decisions about their welfare health and safety and inspire their imagination for a better future when american history is taught to our children and students it must be inclusive and with the purest intent to make them aware of people and the events that forge this uh the greatness of this young nation those good and those not so good but also to ensure the mistakes made in the past do not repeat themselves however it is imperative that it be taught to include content that is truthful although sometimes uncomfortable for some in order to appreciate the progress that has
189been made due to the contributions of various ethnic groups to do that it must include the true story of african-american black american history from the time of the first slaves our ancestors arrived at jamestown virginia in 1619. african-american history is an integral part of american history in order for our children especially our african-american children to fully appreciate the struggles of the past the black and white heroes who fought and died side by side for freedom can take pride in those who in spite of severe oppression and denial of adequate education made outstanding contributions to the quality of life for all americans they must learn of their past and prepare for a better future while it is important to teach our children about the wonderful human sacrifices and contributions made by great americans like dr king
190mayor mcleod bethune w.e.b dubois and great abolitionist frederick douglass john lewis and the pioneering chemist dr charles drew whose work led to the formation of blood thank you mr bowie thank you thank you thank you what's up jennifer kelly welcome ms kelly thank you good evening everyone can you hear me board members superintendent fritz my name is jennifer kelly i live in ormond beach and i have two children currently attending volusia county schools i'm here tonight to bring to your attention some issues i have come across concerning language found in one of volusia county schools support guides i have emailed some of you with my concerns and questions mr colon did respond stating that the district the district is researching and will soon provide responses that was seven days ago and i'm still waiting let
191me start by saying my concerns do not have anything to do with which support guidebook i found this information my concerns have to do with the language and the tone guidance given that teaches children to hide things from their parents and guidance given to teachers and staff that is currently illegal for the parental bill of rights which was signed into law july of last year early last week i was sent a screenshot from the front page of the volusia county school gender support plan marked as confidential on this page is a question regarding parent guardian involvement it asks are the parent guardians of the students aware and supportive of their child's transition if not what considerations must be accounted for in implementing this plan i have never seen this form before and immediately had several
192questions a quick google search led me to volusia county school 38 page lgbtq support guide the screenshot sent to me was the first page of a five-page gender support questionnaire within this questionnaire there are several examples of how to conceal information from parents but not only but not one statement encouraging parental involvement personally i don't think it's appropriate for schools to be doing something like this with minor children without parental knowledge and consent within the rest of the support guide you will find several examples of guides on guidance on hiding things from parents on for one example page 11 and 12 talking to parents and guardians even when asked it's never appropriate to divulge the sexual orientation of a student to a parent then guidance is given on how to take care regarding recording such
193status giving guidance on how to not answer parents and guardians if they ask and gives examples of leaving out details and reporting on record as to not disclose gender identity this is all illegal there are several other examples within the 38-page support guide that encourage hiding information from parents that i cannot cover within my three minutes bottom line this sends a message to children that their parents input and authority are no longer important it sends a message that children need to be protected from their parents not by their parents creates a huge wedge between the parent and the child schools are unqualified to be taking steps like this without parental involvement it's a violation of the parental bill of rights parents know and love their children more than anything in the world our number one
194job is to protect and keep our children safe things like take that fundamental right away thank you thank you next up dr reverend dr kennedy jacobs senior welcome reverend jacobs thank you for the opportunity to speak to a superintendent also the chairman of the board board members allow me tonight to speak about cultural competence as it relates to black history i would like to first say that any culture of people who has denied access to its history is problematic i am a product of volusia county school system from the 60s to the early 80s my first exposure to an african-american history class was from dr sheila fleming that a professor at bethune-cookman college in my freshman year of college ladies and gentlemen human development identity development is a part of human existence our fear of
195hearing or teaching history will cause us to repeat history my work has been around the outcomes of children and families within a social location within the african-american community since 2013 i pursued solutions to help my community as it relates to cultural competence and family sustainability history talks about our history in poverty oppression discrimination it is my belief the reason some families still struggle today of fitting in this global society there's a lack of understanding most importantly we have not learned to value our differences the difference between division and diversity division means separate diversity means to accept and to appreciate one's values and one belief system we speak that there is a gap in education i believe that gap is history valuing people valuing culture valuing beliefs let me tell you why history is important in
1962011 i left daytona beach to pursue a master's degree i was registering at howard university i left the university from registering for a master's program and went down georgia avenue in washington dc and i was put over by a s a swat team with guns drawn and with masks on and as a potential student i sat on the curb in broad daylight crying asking myself why am i sitting on this curb a pastor getting ready to go to college and they are accusing me that i'm a drug dealer because i look like a person of color ladies and gentlemen in volusia county if we consider removing black history or out of our schools we are repeating our history we are repeating what other people have repeated many years ago so today we come today not
197to plead for a cause but i think the biggest word we all need today is love we're all the same people going in the same direction and hopefully we can learn to love one another thank you for the time thank you robin jacobs next up is carol sawyer carol sawyer mr mr chairman as you are calling people i i don't know who you're calling i don't hear um because you're saying it while the clapping is going on so i don't know who was the gentleman who just spoke that was mr jacobs jacobs and carol sawyer okay thank you i just can't hear it thank you welcome miss sawyer thank you good evening dr fritz chairman coleman cologne and school board members i just want to tell you what is really happening in transportation i will
198use my route as an example for the last two weeks i have been driving three different routes 314 10 and 3 23 some at the same time yesterday my high school students arrived 30 minutes late to school because i had to drive two routes for my previous school which made me 30 minutes late to that school several times my middle school students didn't arrive to school until after 10 am again because i am driving two routes at a time i feel that i should be paid for three bus operators there are many other bus operators doing this very same thing throughout our school district this could not be good for student learning we are professionals that are required to maintain special credentials to be able to drive a school bus i dare say that not
199one of you around this table not our chief operating officer who oversees our department and not even our transportation director qualify to get behind the wheel of a school bus and drive without our bus operation call order please without our bus operators the students would not get the school we are an integral part of the student learning process covet may be part of the problem but the bigger problem is not enough bus operators and bus attendants we cannot force people to come drive at our schools but maybe if we offered a competitive wage we could get people to come and maybe keep the ones that we have again like i have said before we are one of the lowest paid in the state of florida seminole county just made a tentative agreement with their bus
200operators and tenants to give them all a two at two dollar an hour raise a supplement of 300 to 2500 depending on the years they served there and a perfect attendance bonus of 1150 with the potential to re to receive 2150 along with what they currently receive in their contract deltona is just over the bridge what's to stop some of our deltona employees to go work at seminole county last week it was brought to my attention that our new employees training to be bus attendants are being paid what would be equivalent to a contracted step three bus attendant how do you think this makes your current bus attendance feel what happens when you tell these new employees in training that they will have to take a pay cut in order to be contracted in closing
201right now at this time in tallahassee they are talking about making it mandatory for all bus operators in the state of florida to start at fifteen dollars an hour starting this july thank you for listening thank you sawyer next up miss elizabeth albert i just wanted to tell you miss cusbert thank you for your star recognition after miss albert's going to be don sequeezy welcome miss albert thank you chair cologne members of the board dr fritz members of the audience so uh just wanting to bring a few things to your attention it's always a nice way to spend my three minutes giving you an update from the folks who are actually in the classrooms and the work sites doing the work so i want to start by referencing what happened earlier tonight before the board
202meeting and i did speak with several of you and you took care of it and i thank you very much for that however uh the fact that folks were wanting to attend the meeting and were made to stand outside in the rain in the cold and were not let into the building is not good and i again appreciate those of you that i connected with and i appreciate that it was corrected but we have to do better than that there were several people who were here who left probably not feeling so welcomed by their school board and the house that they pay for i need to speak with you about working conditions in our schools it's really we've done a good thing with the contracts we have work to do but the working conditions are
203the number one reasons why our teachers and staff are leaving us so now that we have a pathway with salaries we have to work on fixing what's going on inside the buildings deep cleaning is an issue that is specifically related to covid the website has changed for the coveted responses and protocols and we know that it's a moving target and we we understand that we want to work with you to communicate the message but the message now currently says on the website but in order for a classroom to be deep cleaned it has to be requested deep cleaning should be the expectation i worked with a teacher today to try to figure out how to request deep cleaning we went on the abm app and there was no place for that there was an other
204so we checked other and wrote something in and then one suggestion was well maybe we'll go tell the principal secretary i said go do it so the more methods we use to request the deep cleaning since it's not the expectation that's great but we we really should be doing better in that regard if we want the to minimize the surge we have to do better another thing is the virtual meetings the superintendent made a statement about holding meetings virtually when we can that should be the expectation we already know how to do this remember we've done it and we did it almost all of last year this should be an easy spin so we are having to put out fires with these virtual shifting to a virtual meeting it sends a mixed message when the
205superintendent says one thing and then we have to call around and our schools are doing something different that's not good uh and you know another i spoke with you the last time about culture so i'll end with the culture issue again it should be the prior priority of the work that we do um when do we ever stop and make time to look and reflect upon the culture of our schools and and our work sites and i know there are a couple board members that ran on that so we really do need to make it a a priority we need to be intentional about it um i'm just asking you to look at our strengths and where we need to improve thank you miss albert next up we have joanna oh no i said don
206squeeze welcome it's uh don zaghetti by the way guess he got you sorry about that good evening dr fritz chairman coleman members of the board here to talk about we're just not bus drivers when i started with this job i thought i'd just drive a bus i look at chapter 16 in here with first aid there's 22 chapters bloodborne pathogens i'm dealing with cleaning up throw up from kids just this week in one week i have two children recovered out from my bus that i'm contained in i took this job for one reason was the time you get to have off so i could spend more time with my family it's the only reason the money was the second part i look at it now and i see how thick this book is and everything
207we're responsible for i feel uh on the bus now we're like uh i'm a father i'm a counselor on that bus i'm a teacher on that bus i'm a guardian for these kids on that bus everybody else does the same thing that drives a bus it's a lot more than what i thought i was getting into dealing with children with disabilities it's you know 13 26 an hour it really wasn't what i expected that kind of money i made 30 years ago i mean my first job is pouring concrete i made about 20 a day i was 17 years old in the summer it was hard work but it paid good here i am 30 years later making 1326. now i don't i really don't have a chip in the game like i said i
208got my own reasons where they look at the people that are single moms kids single fathers with kids some people working two jobs to survive rent back then i paid 750 maybe ranked today is about 1700 in a decent place try to buy a car now a truck 79 thousand dollars we're not keeping up we're not even close when i hear from the union and other people talking and this is cooler talk well we're gonna make two percent more that's what we're bargaining for i said it's ridiculous i mean i wouldn't if if i really look back again it's hard i could go either way i mean you see the signs i drive with my wife but we love bucky's and there's a sign there they'll start you at 17 bucks an hour to high-end
209can't hang candy on a rack that's pretty good i'll go for a system manager and go at 21 an hour and they don't hold any responsibility that we do as bus drivers in this county we need to get competitive to get you know a dollar two bucks up there we need to get up there real quick because you're going to lose more than you're going to gain thank you mr please next up we have joanna lane cruz joanna lane cruz welcome greetings board members and dr fritz i am joining cruz i live in new smyrna beach i am a single mom with two children who struggles every day to survive financially i currently perform as an area bus driver bus driver for volusia county which job i have successfully done for fifteen years i currently
210make fifteen dollars and three cents that's a dollar seventy seven more than the current starting rate for drivers today as a seasonal bus driver in volusia county while transporting the future of america and our most precious cargo i'm performing in the middle of a pandemic i'm exposed to covet 19 daily as a front-line worker i'm exposed to parents who are angry due to the covet 19 issues and concerns i'm exposed to administrators who are angry because we're late and due to covet 19 related issues and concerns i'm exposed to road rage which is due to the same concerns i'm transporting up to two or three times the number of students on my bus routes and trips due to the crude crucial shortage of bus drivers i'm overworked and underpaid as a bus driver in volusia
211county target amazon costco wawa and many other employers have a starting wage of 15 an hour for the front line workers buckies 17 an hour the projected annual inflation rate for 2022 in the united states is that of 2.4 percent i respectfully ask you mr chairman board members dr fritz to endorse a pay raise for bus drivers that is both meaningful and equal with current job expectations and working conditions which respective pay raise would be in the best interest of the bus drivers employees and volusia county schools via paying a living wage offsetting the increase of inflation enhancing the encroachment of new bus drivers and enhancing the retention of career bus drivers that volusia county schools has already invested significant money into via training and developing for us thank you thank you next up mr
212jim miller jim miller good evening mr chairman board members and dr fritz i'm here before you tonight to speak to you about your transportation department you see some others here tonight as well but there are more that would like to have been here but they couldn't make it because either they had to go to another job or they couldn't afford the gas to come because they only have enough to get back and forth to work our our bus operators and bus attendants are overworked and underpaid if it wasn't for us the transportation team our students wouldn't be in school we have daily close to 20 routes that are open that we must cover we also have employees on medical leave and that and those that have tested positive for covid and must stay home before
213anyone else takes off or calls in sick one day last week we had 24 members of transportation that called in on top of our daily outage and those that had planned days off so that was over 60 runs that had to be covered in order for us to get the students of volusia county schools to school and home we doubled up on runs and did double runs into and out of the schools this creates late buses very crowded buses and adds to discipline problems and most of our buses do not have attendance volusia county is the second lowest paid county in florida it is pretty bad that the high school students are making more money at a fast food place or a grocery store than what we are we have to support our family and
214pay bills unlike the high school kids that live at home if you don't do something about pay about the pay you'll be losing more employees to go somewhere else to make a living you have employees that live pay check to paycheck and can't make it and are going homeless just because they just can't afford to live with the wages we have there they were they worked two or three jobs just to try to survive the cost of living and everything are arising expect to pay accept the pay we make how can you look at yourself and the employees and feel good about what you're doing i know that we had employees first hand that was homeless if it wasn't for another bus driver that helped them out with a place they wouldn't have anywhere to
215go we have more requirements that we must follow and continue training that we must keep up with all the time i hope you'll do the right thing and make it that volusia county isn't the second lowest paid county we love what we do and we do it for the kids that is why we stay but we just are getting burned out and starting to look at other options i hope you will do something or if not that you can honestly look at yourselves and be okay with what and how you're treating your employees and just remember if it wasn't for transportation many students would not be back in brick and mortar schools we are what makes the school's district we are the first person and the last person that many children see every day we
216went from 220 bus routes last year to 170 bus routes this year you have 1.5 million on hold for open positions thank you for your time and listening to me and i hope you do the right thank you mr miller next up nicole ham robinson nicole pam robinson thanks welcome oh thank you for good evening board members um dr fritz chair my name is nicole ham i've been a bus operator for 18 years come february i would like to talk about retention i understand we have 50 available positions open within transportation 28 of them and 28 additional attendant positions um we would like to know what is happening with the monies and why they cannot be distributed or reallocated to the current employees for retention and hazard pay we've been kicked on spat hit slap
217punched constantly attacked by parents and students as well as working during this covet pandemic we have to undergo annual physicals and training such as dexterity 70 hours of book knowledge and attendance 35 hours computer knowledge hands-on knowledge not to mention everyone cannot pass a background check nor physical or drug test this is a thankless job which is not for everyone we are underpaid under appreciated disrespected the list goes on we have been stretched far too thin we are having to double and triple up routes as bus attendants and hopping from as bus attendants are hopping from bus to bus this is due to lack of drivers and attendance we are losing more employees than we can keep and replace because of the pay is not worth the workload and the stress this is an unsustainable
218amount of pressure that has been put upon us we are being overworked many of us drive 8 to 10 hours a day sometimes even more if we have to obtain a field trip this is like driving to virginia or dc every day ask yourself can you or would you be able to drive an 18-ton vehicle with three classrooms of screaming kids behind you six wheels seven mirrors and upward speeds of 55 miles an hour every day we have to work hard to maintain our schedules all by fighting regular accidents event traffic and detours this job which has been undermined by many including our own is an integral piece to the machine that allows the school system to work properly without us volusia county schools would simply not be despite the importance of our job we
219catch ridicule rhetoric from every angle including administrators children parents and the public yet we get up every morning some of us for the last 30 20 10 years to be insulted chastised and stressed etc all while in pain from our various injuries caused by driving the bus one in four of us have had a rotator cuff surgery knee surgery carpal tunnel surgery some of us have slipped discs sprained or swollen ankles but we don't let that stop us the reason we call for our called support staff is because we are here to support we have over 24 000 students that we transport every day we are over 400 strong in student transportation thank you miss ham your time's up next up ken short next up kim short welcome hello welcome i wanted to take a
220minute i didn't write this on there but i did want to take a minute to say that florida pta has their ledge con next week actually it starts on sunday and i will be attending uh to represent volusia county there'll be 40 of us in attendance this year because there's limited people in attendance due to covid it lines up with children's week which runs through the fourth and that's you know i know many of you are going to be up there too i i wanted to bring it up because this you know this annual event it celebrates and honors our commitment to children youth and advocate and advocate and advocates there are two there's senate bill 1 1048 and house bill 1193 that are the student assessment bills that i'm asking for any parents who
221may be listening right now or any advocates who may be listening right now to please take a look at because there are some concerns that this is not going to reduce testing and one of the issues that the florida pta has noted is that it it takes the our florida's youngest students and request that used to be able to do a paper pencil and makes them go to compute computer based even kids in pre-kindergarten will be forced to take computer-based progress monitoring tests this is this is a concern for advocates like myself and for florida pta so again anybody who's listening right now i really hope you guys take the time to contact your law your law makers the thing that i wanted just to bring up quickly is i i understand you know the
222district's reasoning for going from 41 academies to 21 i don't necessarily agree actually i don't agree that's an old thing to discuss what what i want to make clear is that parents are confused about the process to apply for the academies all the applications are due by january 31st and i really need everybody to take a look at this through a parental lens you walked into the career academy and you were handed this piece of paper and you walked around and you saw terrific academies and programs and then you go into your child's portal to go and apply and you don't see everything listed and then that's confusing and so what you're told is the ones that are blue on here are the ones you can apply for the academies the rest you have to
223go through a variance what if my child wants to apply to three but one is an academy and two are programs when am i going to find out if i got into them through a variance and how does that line up with me making my decision or my child making their decision as to where they're going to go to school on top of that the mainland collegiate institute is not listed where the ib and the ace programs are listed thank you miss short next up mr anthony berlinda or leda anthony welcome uh so uh i want to thank the board the chairman dr fritz for your for the opportunity to speak to you and for your hard work and dedication in this challenging work as well as to all the people back there who've been
224speaking to you all night teachers bus drivers uh maintenance crew everybody so thank you my name is anthony ehrlich i live in barberville my grandson got a great education at pearson elementary and then taylor junior high and high school and i'm a member of the west volusia naacp my purpose in coming here tonight is to affirm my belief that black history is american history i come to the microphone to speak to you because i think that volusia county has a special opportunity to emphasize to its students the body that about our unique contribution and role to american history black history american history and that is the role uh that should be recognized i think would energize the students to learn about an influential civil rights activist a very important activist and theologian who comes from
225our area howard thurman i suggest i'm going to read to you if i can get it on my internet uh a very important summary of uh of mr of dr thurman but my suggestion is that the the curriculum in volusia county should definitely focus on this guy and educate our students about it also that field trips are available his his birthplace and his boyhood home is still available it's a spec it's been preserved and it's available for field trips it's at 614 whitehall street in daytona beach and uh so i i don't have enough time to really read this i mean this guy was a very influential guy he met mahatma gandhi he was the mentor to martin luther king and many other leaders in the civil rights movement and information about his boyhood home
226and about himself and his marvelous career outstanding career that's often overlooked is available on the internet thank you very much thank you next up kathleen sievert welcome to siebert hello thank you for letting me speak and first i would like to apologize to my fellow employees as i have not been to work this school year i work out of deland i'm been there for 12 years and i'm finishing my fourth year as a lead driver trainer i went from a nine month position to a 12 month position with more responsibilities but the same pay i love my position i love my job now i'm making 14.93 an hour and as i said i've been driving for 12 years we hired somebody that has 10 years of experience and started him off at more than 16
227dollars an hour with his experience i still have two more years of experience but yet he's making much more than i am we're extremely short and i know that this is a nationwide situation but with our operators doubling up on routes overloads tardiness frustrations not only for the operators in attendance but school personnel parents and mostly students they're driving a huge vehicle which requires special license and is about 40 feet long weighs 12 and a half to 14 tons and that's empty that vehicle is overloaded with children and we make sure that those children stay safe to and from school we have to watch out for cautions on the road other vehicles people animals while driving 60 to 80 students sometimes with an attendant to help most the time not as we drive we're not
228only a driver or an attendant we're a referee a nurse peacekeeper tear wiper teacher all in a moving classroom we understand budgets are tight but if you guys got onto a bus in one of our uniforms for a week just to see what really goes on you guys would truly know our value we know that you can't pay us what we are valued at but the two percent three percent that's not enough we've got single parents i mean this is all pete repeat it just we need to get something that we can all agree on and that we can afford to live off of and when minimum wage goes up the people that are not making 15 an hour are they just going to be making the same as a new hire and what about
229the long-term employees are they going to get steps you know a pay increase as well all that is stuff that you know we need to look at when i asked what was going to happen was i going to make the same as a new hire i was given the shrug shoulder and said possibly well i can tell you i won't but i love my job thank you so much and that is the end of public comment i do want to say for the sake of the public that as a board and the school as the school district and the union that represents our drivers are in current impasse we cannot discuss or talk about it because it will come before us as a board in the coming days so we are not able to discuss
230anything and so i don't want you to take our lack of commentary as we don't necessarily agree or we don't that it's not doesn't go either way we just are not able to speak about it at this time all right last but not least we have our board member comments and so who would like to start tonight miss bernie thank you i just want to say that i know that we have a lot going on the next week we're going up to the state where we were going to advocate for more funding where where we need it and i'm looking forward to that because it'll be my first opportunity to do it and um i think that we can make a difference and like you said earlier miss haynes and miss cuthbert we need others
231to help push that agenda with our state leaders so that we can we can provide better pay for our employees because i know that's important to all of us so thank you thank you miss burnett mr purses anything no sir i i wish you all well and tallahassee i i regret i can't join you but i know you'll do a super job and whatever i can do from the home side i can certainly email and call and badger them as much as you want me to but i will be there in spirit ms haynes um so i know that we can't talk about you know the best driver thing but i would like to ask dr fritz if his staff could actually verify for us a comment that was made tonight i think i mean
232it it doesn't impact that but i'd like to know um since the comment that was made that we are the second lowest district in the state of florida i would just like to have data that shows where we actually fall because we have found this through a lot of things you know people will say we're 16th on this or we're 35th on that or whatever and so i just like to ask for that information and then i'd like to also state that i did take a look at the document that is being used where it's where our students that are under the age of 18 which they are minors can a meeting can be held without parent permission with those children and a document can be filled out and that information is not shared with
233parents i have never in my entire career of teaching from the day i started teaching did i ever not involve parents i mean i can give examples where you know i was teaching fifth grade and a child was struggling for the day and i just said let's walk into the work room and call home so that you can talk to your parent because it was never my responsibility to step in and be their parent or to make decisions for them or to tell them not to share things with their parents i mean when that type of thing happens then we're not communicating well we're harming the culture and we're burning bridges with parents and from the day i started teaching one of the best older teachers that i taught with my very first year that
234took me under her wing said the best thing you can do is not only build the relationships with your students and be a great listener and talk to them but build the relationships with parents she said it's never wrong there's never a wrong time to call or to hold a parent conference and you know i had students in my parent conferences so that they could even talk to their parent and they would hear what the parent and i were talking about and they could provide input so i am very concerned about that form that is in that booklet because i don't think there's anything we should ever meet alone with a child to me the only group that has the ability to meet alone with a child is the department of children and families and
235possibly not share with but that's usually generated when there is you know an issue taking place and then i want to say even though they've all left i want to say thank you to um everyone that came this evening and spoke because i too believe you know black history is american history native american history is american history you know asian american history is american history and i have a very um diversified even immediate family you know my son-in-law spent the first part of his life in the philippines and his grandfather's chinese and his grandmother's filipino his gentleman that he considers his father is african-american and his and his two brothers are african-american and filipino and you know i don't think we should ever take away the history of what's happened because i too believe that
236we learn from history and the mistakes that we made and hopefully we won't make them again my heart's a little broken because i'm not sure what happened that made these individuals think that we were going to take history out of our classrooms because i believe because i've never said that and i have never heard any of you say that i mean i think everybody sitting here tonight along with our teachers out there in the classrooms we want a history of the united states and even the world history taught so that we can continue to learn from it but i do thank all of those individuals that came tonight to share with us and stayed for a long time to be able to do that and i'm looking forward to next week and i'm going to
237put one more plea out there all of you that sent us emails a year ago when we were trying talking about opening schools i mean we got thousands of them so if everybody out there seriously would just take five ten minutes to call house representatives senators or send an email like if you could send us an email you can send them an email and and tell them how you feel about things but especially i'm serious because you know whether you like it or not for the first time we've had a governor that did make teacher salaries a priority now what would be nice is if he'd start making the salaries of everybody else a priority but he started somewhere and in the 35 years 36 years i've been in louis county i've never had a
238governor that made teacher salaries a priority and everybody says well you know there's been this teacher salary piece but hey he put the money in a separate pot so that none of the rest of us could do something with it that it wasn't intended for all right did i agree with the way it was split no but hey we've got it we've got our group to 47.5 so he just needs to give us the flexibility give us the money again next year in that pot and just give us the flexibility so that we can then start with the people that are up there in the 40 30 20 year mark and we can bring them up and so we can go up there but it's true they're tired of hearing from us because they hear
239from us all the time and they just look at us like you're just the school board members parents and community members you can move mountains if you'll call or send an email i truly believe and so i'm really asking you to do that thank you scott i guess i've been very blessed to to be in to have been an english teacher because i could incorporate music art literature poetry language authors from all over um and teach curriculum [Music] you know through the standards but to add uh the i guess the beginning of our country's settlements the puritans the native americans the african-americans but one author that i didn't hear anybody mention tonight who's my favorite is zora lee or neil perston she's i taught my eyes were watching god and i've taught her essay how
240to be colored me that she wrote back in the 20s it was it's beautiful language i guess i fell in love with language long before i fell in love with teaching because as we speak whether the language is spoken whether language is visual whether we blink or sign tap our feet clap our hands it's still language it's how we communicate and so no matter what it is all of our cultures is american history because we are the melting pot and we we need to thank a british gentleman named named thomas payne who coined the phrase the melting pot see that's history but i got to incorporate his the crisis number one which is a brilliantly written argument defending the birth of america in my classroom so through through our through my i guess some through
241through my ability to be allowed to teach in in my county school that's one reason because i enjoyed it so much it was so rich that i had the freedom to do it but of course that was before the fsa and before common core that i fell in love with this school because it gave me my family it gave me a rich association of friends it gave me a wonderful community of parents and pta members who from all levels from elementary to middle to high school i served as a pta president i mean it's involvement in one's community is history i mean i'm very pleased to see that all of us through serving through the elective process we are making history in volusia county no matter where our families come from we're still making volusia
242county history and black history is volusia county history too and i was very glad that gentlemen brought up that one man whose address is on whitehall i saw mr purses write his dress down too but we're all very blessed to be here right now doing this because we have the ability to make change and only through change can we progress and only through progression can we become better and grow and have more children descend to our public schools so thank you very much and i hope nobody mentioned but we won't come back until the 15th of february correct that's after valentine's day so spread the love okay thank you thank you mister thank you chairman mr wolf nothing at this time wonderful dr fritz can we come back well shoot i put it off to
243the 15th didn't i reminded you yes that's a good thing yes i'm a bit preoccupied right now sorry all right dr fritz yes sir all right and so i do have one thing that i want to share with you all we in the last few weeks we've covered some of our mental health some of our legislative required topics some of which are in my very opinion things that should be spoken about at home however these are legislative requirements that the legislature has put that we need to talk about in school and so you know one of the challenges is that a lot of these topics are spoken about in english classes or in you know it's the only way to get everybody to meet this law and requirement and sometimes it puts folks in a
244position who they're not ready to talk about trauma they've gone through trauma themselves and so now it's they've been placed we've all been placed in a position where they have to cover these subjects which they may not be necessarily prepared to cover give you an instance we had a young lady who's a daughter of a dear friend of mine and she's had some trauma and when the information was presented as required by the state in the classroom there were students in the class that really weren't comfortable with it you know they'd been through trauma themselves and that teacher was not prepared to speak about it because she is an english teacher and so you know they raised the concern so there's a few things i think and you know we're all parents and and we
245all you know have a sense for common sense and you know we're required to show these videos and and we're using content that's approved by the state we're following the law but i wonder sometimes if we you know and of course the solution to this was the parent can opt out and that's great however i don't know how easy we make it for the parent to opt out you know i know when certain topics are covered in school for example sex education we're very clear about that and we give the parent the ability to decide whether or not they want their child to participate in that and so i wonder if there is a way and and i'm just sort of throwing this out there if there's a way that we could not only make
246the content available but also have where a parent can say i don't want my child you know whether it's at the beginning of the year emergency contact form i don't want my child to participate in this this this and that because what we're finding is we're chasing our tail trying to meet the legislative requirements you know it's not anything you know we're using content approved by the state yet a lot of times it's after the fact that we're we're hearing this that or the other and so i i just want to get the creative juices moving because you know as a parent you know i know what i want my kids to learn in school and there may be something that i want to teach them at home and so i think we really need
247to find a way to um you know allow because you know what that's what the state will tell us they'll say well the parent can opt out you know mind you we're left with the parent who's now having to deal with their child whose trauma has been relived because a subject was covered that they were not you know prepared to or their foe you know and yes the counselors are available the esther's counselor is in the school there's 3 000 students in the school and so there's no question despite our best efforts to meet those needs they can't be everywhere and we are required to cover it with everyone and so just something to consider see how we could make it easier uh so that um you know a parent can decide whether or not
248they want their child to participate in a certain discussion or not so again i just put that out there dr fritz not throwing that at you but just something that we can think about how we best can uh facilitate that and maybe you know give the option let's be real most people are going to be okay with it if the state says it's okay it's okay but for those who are not they should have the ability to um be able to provide information ms burnett i just wanted to add a little bit to that and and i think it's important too that not be the answer of well don't send them to school because that's not fair either because they they re they should benefit from the same education and we should have a different
249path for them to to go that day or that hour or whatever um because i know sometimes you know it's okay well i just won't send my kid to school and that's that's the parent's choice that's fine but i don't think it should be our choice to say that i agree that we we need to make it easy on them to allow them that input but also make it easy for them to attend school that day as well i agree all right hearing nothing else everyone thank you for a great meeting this meeting is adjourned