001good afternoon welcome to our school board meeting today is tuesday march 30th 2021 at this time will everyone please stand with me for the pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance to the fire 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 welcome i'd like to start by introducing the people here at the dais with me to my far left i have mr carl purses representing district four next to mr purses is mr rubin colon representing district five next to mr rubin colon is mr ted doran our school board attorney to my far right we have miss aaron lieben our agency clerk next to ms lieben we have mrs anita burnett representing district 2. on the phone with us today
002is mrs linda cuthbert our chairman representing district number three hello hello this is cuthbert immediately to my right is dr scott fritz our superintendent and i am miss jamie haynes your vice chairman representing district one we are happy to see all of you here with us and for those of you listening at home thank you items for approval today on this agenda are items 3.01 6.02 16.01 through 16.05 public participation times for items on the consent agenda 6 30 p.m for items of general interest pertaining to public education in volusia county a total of up to 15 minutes will be provided for public comment at this time time will be provided for public comment on any action item before a board vote is called on that item time will be provided at the end of
003the meeting for public comment for items of general interest pertaining to public education in volusia county before items from the board superintendent or attorney for discussion announcement or approval at this time under item 1.02 we have our district vision statement and board member comments do i have any board members that would like to speak this evening mr colon sure and so i would like to this week i'll inform you all if you haven't seen it some of our deltona high hosa students went to the national competition and some would won their national competition and we'll be going on to the international competition so we're really proud of our students at deltona high who participated in that who will be representing us proudly uh on the world stage we could call it so thank you um
004mrs brown go ahead i just want to welcome everybody back from spring break and i hope that everybody enjoyed their time and um just want to kind of remind everybody that um as we're coming back if you see anybody that needs help if you notice anybody that's struggling just reach out to them and be kind and ask them if they need something and if you can help guide them to the right person to to find what they need so that that we're taking care of each other emotionally thank you mrs cuthbert do you have anything you'd like to add yes i would um when we come back from spring break usually this is when seniors begin to go a little haywire and so i caution and address all the seniors throughout our district and these
005are the 12th graders you still have a quarter left you still have to get those credits in we want to see you at graduation and that's the goal so as we approach graduation and we we are approaching a testing season two we can't let up on the end goal and that is to be successful in the classroom as well as out in the ball field right now a lot of competitions going on especially in baseball and i have to say good luck to spruce creek baseball varsity game they were highlighted in news journal last week and then right after them university high school was highlighted so we have some excellent athletes still in our district i wish them well please stay healthy think think think so we we still haven't gotten to summer yet so
006thank you so much everyone welcome back from spring break thank you mrs cuthbert and i'd also like to reiterate um welcome back from spring break we're excited that everyone has returned and we are into the final nine weeks and along with you know seniors needing to keep in mind that they need to finish up their credits and everything we're also entering the time when assessments are going to start and having been a classroom teacher previously along with a mother and a grandmother what i'd like to say is parents this is my message for you right now take a deep breath just be an encouragement to your children as they head out in the mornings especially on the days that they're going to take the assessments just remind them how proud you are of them and
007that all you're asking for is for them to just go and do their very best this is not a time in which to add additional stress onto our students or our teachers during this time and that's the same message i not only gave to my own children but also to the children that i taught over the years because i used to tell them this is your time to show off what you've learned and at the same time show me as an educator maybe where you're still missing something which would say to me i could do a better job with that so at this time as we head into this season let's all remember to be encouraging of each other and just do our very best but thank you and we are happy that you're all
008here so we're moving on for item 2.01 do we have any agenda changes no chair we do not okay then at this time i'd like to put forth a recommendation for an approval of the agenda motion to approve agenda is presented second all those in favor say aye aye any opposed then the agenda is approved for this evening moving on to item 3.01 dr fritz you have some administrative appointments man i'm sure i do i'd like to ask dr mark shanoff to come forward and as dr shannon's making his way up here it's my intent to recommend him for the cheap operating officer position and i'd like to share a little bit about his background dr shanoff is currently the principal at edgewater high school in orlando he has earned a bachelor's degree in elementary
009education from rollins college a master's in ed leadership from nova southeastern he also has an mba with a concentration in operational management from the university of florida and he holds a doctorate degree from the university of central florida currently dr shanoff is the president of the florida association of secondary school principals and serves on the orange county public schools operational advisory committee he's also been the past president for the florida association of school administrators dr shanoff has been an elementary a middle and currently is a high school principal and this is what he said about joining our team he's honored to join the volusia county schools team and is looking forward to working collaboratively within the operational services and across the school district to deliver a world-class learning and working experience for our students employees
010and community i know he will be great thank you thank you um madam chair board members and dr fritz i am honored to join the vcs family and i'm eager to lead our operations services teams as an integrated function to help us meet our vision and our mission operations will align our work with other departments and yes we will ensure a safe and world-class learning and working environment for our vcs students our team members and our families i want to thank two very important influences in my life that are here dr leanne bradshaw i'd like to thank leanne for her unconditional love and ongoing support she's been there for me for just about everything the past seven years and is the most amazing supporter i could ever ask for without her i am not here
011i'd like to thank my supervisor and mentor of the past five years dr harold border chief of high schools in orange county for investing time energy and most importantly belief in my potential as a school leader much of what i bring to this position is the result of dr border's influence especially his commitment to students and his leadership of our high school division i'm looking forward to getting to work and establishing vcs as a market leader in resourceful responsive highly skilled and timely operations to advance student achievement thank you okay great dr shannon they still got a vote on you buddy have a seat gotcha all right you got a recommendation here you've heard the recommendation from dr fritz that dr mark shanoff joined our team as the chief operating officer do i have a
012motion so moved madam chair i'd like to make the first motion all right you've made the motion do i have a second second all right we have a motion and a second all those in favor say i i i any opposed it passes unanimously does anyone have something they'd like to say go ahead mr clone pretty good doctor you can't i'm back i'm back so i had the opportunity to share some words with him and and i want to welcome you to our community i tell you what we have is some really really great people and i look forward to seeing policies procedures standard operating procedures and things that can help us to be successful um as a system and work as a system rather than a lot of moving parts not working conjunction so
013i look forward to seeing uh the work that you bring i've read some of your blog posts and you're definitely you know real big on uh you know students and and and bridging the gap and all of that so it'll be interesting to see how that translates into operations and and the things that we do so thank you and again welcome thank you yes welcome and now we'll allow you to but thank you you got it am i good now you're good [Applause] yes if i may i wanted to uh make a comment on the recognitions if that's okay which was 4.01 we're not finished with this administrative one more one more oh four left away oh okay all right dr pritz uh when you hired me and you interviewed me i told you one
014of the most important things i would ever do is place a principal in a school with a really high quality principal i will have a high quality school you can guarantee it and so i'm very pleased to bring forward dr earl johnson as dr earl johnson comes up here uh some people call them retreads when they come back but i'd like to share a little bit about earl with with you in the audience earl actually graduated from sea breeze high school which is the school that i'm recommending him serve as the principal he also after he graduated uh became a math teacher at that school and an assistant principal and those you that know him know that he was a very successful principal he was a principal at osceola elementary he was a principal at
015terry t then he went up to flagler and was a high school principal and improved the graduation rates specifically with great success with his minority students while he was in flagler county he was moved to an executive director position that would be equivalent in our county to a deputy superintendent so you ask why would earl want to come back so i asked that question and i i got to tell you i love the answer he wants to finish his career where he started making a difference with kids and so i got to tell you i think that's the best i everybody that serves in a leadership position in the district office um we understand that don't we right so it's with great recommendation that i i put forward dr earl johnson to be the principal
016at sea breeze they got a vote on you earl don't make the standoff mistake we're going to call it read chair that sounds like my career football career retail madam chair school board members superintendent dr fritz um in the words of jackie gleason with the honeymooners how sweet it is to be back home with all started back in when i was a student at seabreeze high school the reason that when i first attended sea breeze i was one of those student athletes who were most likely not to succeed and because of mentorships and the relationships of the dick edsons the edgar scotts the dunstallers those are the reasons that i'm sitting before you today and i will assure you one thing the first thing that i will do is develop relationships with the stakeholders and
017see at sea bridge high school and in the community i would be knocking on doors like i did at every other school that i was the principal at one of the things that i can say is and the ideal team player by patrick leaciani he said that a great leader has to be humbled hungry and smart and smart not in the sense of intellectually smart smart in the sense of being able to develop relationships with people i am that guy that is very humbled and hungry to serve as principal of seabreeze high school and when i say serve i am serving all of the stakeholders at sea breeze high school to ensure we create lifelong learners prepare them for a ever-changing global society and we're going to do that one student at a time and
018i like to end with this once a sandcraft always a sandcraft [Applause] board members you've heard the superintendent's recommendation for dr earl johnson to become the principal at sea breeze high school do i have a motion i move approval do i have it okay and i have a second so mr purses made the motion miss cuthbert made the second all those in favor say i i i anyone opposed 100 unanimous congratulations thank you is there any hold on a moment is there any board member that would like to say something yes ma'am yes mr purses you know that's where i graduated yes sir all right you know it's near and dear to my heart absolutely and as is for the state yes as you know that is too and i just got to say that
019uh earl before you were a teacher at sea breeze didn't you have another job at sea breeze before i was a teacher at sea breeze i played in the nfl yeah yeah earl is really just an amazing athlete too and i know he he didn't bring that up but i mean you know how many people can say that uh also earl um there's someone sitting behind you uh that's been rather instrumental in your life and personally i know pretty well myself as does my wife since both of us hired that lady right there um you want to uh say a few words i would like to introduce my beautiful fiance and dr fritz i can't you say it retread because i'm coming back well she's my beautiful fiance however she was my wife for 25
020years prior to us being coming re-engaged and and she has always been the backbone of my career and we're looking forward to uh reuniting and finishing our lives together yeah well yeah she's an amazing person as you know dr ferg she's a guidance counselor at new smyrna bay each high school jewel right and uh i had the pleasure of working with julia when i was principal at tomoka and my wife susan had the pleasure of working with jewell and where did susan hire you juliet holly hill at holly hill uh middle school then i guess it was yeah so we go back pretty far with with the with the johnson family and uh i was as surprised as you when he applied for this job because i figured he's going to finish his career in
021in flagler and uh uh you know it's it's so rare that you can end your career where you started your your career that doesn't and what are the odds of that happening and you starting there as a as a teacher coming back as a principal i know there's not there's not anybody on the planet that's going to have more passion to do the right thing at sea at sea than you earl and i'm just so proud of you i'm so happy for you thank you thank you yeah first of all you owe mr purses a big one because he just saved your marriage for starters and i'm just saying and uh secondly you know i've heard great things about you as you know we have a mutual friend in mr rogers and uh i i'm
022looking forward to you know based on what i've heard um you're you're in the right place at the right time and you know that that matters and then which team did you play for were you a miami dolphin no sir i'd like to recall the vote because i know there's at least two of us here who are dolphin fans so no welcome congratulations what team did you play for with the new orleans saints and the denver broncos all right that that saves you in my eyes [Laughter] but i'd like to also say welcome back to volusia county and i hope you know just as you used to welcome me when you were the principal at turity to come on your campus i hope that you know i you don't mind if i stop in to
023see you at sea breeze so welcome back not at all i would love to have you there all right this is brunette i'd like to say welcome i'm glad to see somebody coming this way from flagler versus going to flagler so thank you that really means a lot to us it means a lot to everybody in the district thank you well congratulations thank you thank you miss miss burnett mr johnson i have tears in my eyes i'm so happy you're back and it's official welcome welcome welcome um my new podiatrist is just north of sebring i think i'll be dropping in a couple of times to see you so uh and he's the reason why i'm not here today i have my foot elevated above my heart so thank you so much for coming back
024and if and i had no idea that joel johnson and you have any association whatsoever and that is how professional you both are that's how wonderful so charismatic with students um and knowing that you're miss johnson is at new smyrna i feel like part of you was there as well so i hope to see a lot of both of you so congratulations and welcome to volusia county schools again it's always better the second time around well thank you and thank you for having me back thank you bye-bye don't hang up okay dr johnson's start date as well as dr shanoff will be june 1st he will be doing some transitioning i will share with both of these gentlemen you know i'd rather i'd rather hold a horse back than have to kick him in the
025behind and both these guys are willing to get going right away dr shanoff will be setting meetings with each of the board members between now and june 1st so that he can sit down and talk with you share his philosophy uh share where he wants to go and to learn from you and earl you are you are earl has texted me five times let me come back i want to get started with the kids right now and so i love that enthusiasm so he will be back here officially june 1 but he will i've given him permission i think teachers have a right to know who their boss is so he's going to go to the hiring fairs and start hiring teachers next year [Applause] moving on dr fritz item 4.01 recognitions yes and we
026have four today and i'm going to take them one by one um and then after the first one i'm going to ask miss roland if you want to make your way up here as i as i go through this but volusia county schools we are recognizing april 5th through the 9th as lgbtq health and awareness week volusia county schools is committing to building an inclusive environment for all of our students our district is devoted to continued in opening and having an opening dialogue in advocacy for all of our students of diverse populations we publicly support all these groups we want to acknowledge that vulnerability well i'm sorry we want to acknowledge their vulnerability while at the same time highlight their intrinsic value and contributions to our schools and community most importantly we strive to empower
027all stakeholders and establish a sense of belonging that transcends our differences and helps us achieve our common goal of creating lifelong learners who are prepared for an ever-changing society and i've asked ms rowland to come forward because i'd like us to talk a little bit about this this week and some of the work that we've done with our schools and our counselors and some of the work we're yet to do ms roland good evening vice chairman haines school board members and dr fritz i'm here today to talk briefly about the respect we have for all of our students they're all inclusive and we love them all in reference to lgbtq we have developed a lgbtq support guide to make sure we are not leaving out any of our students because they're all important to us
028the mission in our guide states we promote cultural competency by addressing the unique needs of all of our students our vision is for a safer and more productive learning environment for all of our students in accordance with state federal local policies and laws our district will continue to provide students teachers administrators and our community members the resources needed to make sure our schools are safe and as inclusive as possible as educators we value the worth of dig and dignity of every person have a devotion to excellence to provide an opportunity equally for all our goal is that every action and speech of our students teachers and administration should and would inc be inclusive and model non-discriminatory efforts we have support from every level there was a virtual conference that was sponsored by equity of florida
029and the leadership teams from around the state of florida there were seven of our members that attended that conference starting with our school board member our equity officer our school counseling specialist assistant superintendent coordinator of elected programs and our college and career counseling coordinator so we have support from the top level all around our schools to make sure all of our students are included in every single way we want to make sure we have a good representation to show how important inclusiveness is to our county we train our principals each year the principals are trained by miss anne-marie ren who is our equity specialist she trains the principals they in turn train their staff at each of their schools our counselors are trained each year by our counseling specialists to provide them with tools that
030they can support our students all of them inclusively we have diversity clubs at each of our schools that meet on a regular basis to make sure all of our children are taken care of our district policy specifically prohibits harassment and discrimination based on sexual orientation gender expression policy 509 prohibits harassment policy 525 policy against bullying and harassment and policy 507 the non-discrimination and equity educational equity we train our personnel specifically our counselors as this is often who our students will come in contact with and how they respond is often and very important we train them to when a student decides to come and confide in them we train them to offer support be a role model of acceptance appreciate the students courage listen listen listen assure and respect confidentiality demonstrate understanding acceptance and compassion be
031prepared to give a referral for resources and or provide emotional support remember when these students come they have not changed they are still students our goal is to treat every student with dignity and provide every student with an equally and equally positive school experience all the students that attend pollution county school belong to each of us thank you miss rowland oh and so miss roland thank you for that no thank thank you for that and and i had some feelings that i wanted to share about what happened last week and it was and i had no idea what you were gonna bring forth today so some of this may seem a little bit out of place because that was a beautiful and much needed explanation in context to what this resolution really was it was
032unfortunate that at the last board meeting the resolution came forth which what i believe to have been little context for all 63 000 students and their families as a school board member i serve every family with our actions and most importantly with my vote that present that what you just said is what was missing at the last meeting in my in rubin's opinion i'm only speaking for myself i think we missed an opportunity to bring awareness to the special needs that our lgbtq students face it was an opportunity to bring forth awareness to the fact that 39 of our lgbt students have considered attempting suicide in the past 12 months it was an opportunity to bring forth awareness that 71 percent of our lgbtq plus students reported feeling sad and hopeless now this is before
033kovitz i can't even imagine because i think all of us have experienced some of this at some point with all this craziness less than half of our lgbt uh students uh were out to somebody at school okay that's that's the reality and so you know a lot of what you spoke about today is what was not spoken about that day to bring awareness so folks can understand what that was we didn't talk about the fact that 71 of our students reported discrimination okay all we had was a resolution that was brought forth with no context and so i am i blame myself in part because it was my understanding that we would bring the context but i i wasn't clear enough in what i expected as to be the context and so um you know
034that that really hurt and you know for a lot of the folks that say um well you know this this school may not necessarily be the place 43 of students come out with their sexual orientation with their teachers and guidance counselors okay or they share it with them or the vast majority share with their classmates whether they're gay or straight these are the things that we needed to do to bring awareness to what we were voting on it was an opportunity to talk about the vision which you all heard today which is to a vision is a safer more productive learning environment for all students while recognizing the unique needs of our lgbtq community we didn't talk about that we didn't talk about principles and support staff and the training and and all of the
035things that we do regarding the language that we use in language that could be hurtful last week i met with a group of folks and they shared the things that i said that were hurtful that served as a dagger potentially to our students i didn't know i didn't recognize that okay and and i'm sorry for those that i offended because that was not my intent we missed the opportunity to share the training and the measures that we have in place to support our transgender children we miss the opportunity to share how we have increasing the numbers of counselors in our schools we're increasing the number of touch points where we're intentionally reaching out to students not waiting for them to come and tell us what's wrong versus to be there for them and say what
036can we do for you we miss the opportunity to uh i'll just leave that there and so it was mentioned that the resolution last year passed five to zero and i will share with you for those who didn't realize it that resolution came to the board on april 14th recognizing the week of march 23rd on a consent agenda item there was no discussion it was three weeks after it happened our students were out of school it was april 14th we were waiting for april 15th to find out whether our kids the governor would be bringing our kids back to school okay now that resolution unfortunately i don't think many people even knew it was there and so with that being said and i appreciate that you brought it forth volusia county has been known as
037a county that is inclusive we're on the cutting edge okay of ensuring that our children are treated fairly we have these training mechanisms during a public comment there were some folks who came up and said things that were hateful and not true okay and i could assure you that none of those comments swayed my vote on the resolution my opposition was solely due to the vagueness of the resolution and the fact that and how it would impact every student in our community every parent deserved to know what this resolution was going to mean and i think you did a very eloquent job today at bringing that forth and i thank you for that so to be clear gonna be you were very clear but i've got it written down and i wrote it and i
038rewrote it three times this week is recognizing lgbtq plus health awareness week and according to the superintendent and correct me if i'm wrong dr fritz there will be no activities planned as that is not the intent the purpose is awareness only is that correct that is correct thank you okay on that day and i have it kind of repeated here but on that day i fundamentally opposed with it moving forward without a clear understanding of how it would impact our students whether you supported this resolution or were against the resolution you did every parent deserve the right to know what that resolution was going to mean now now that i've been able to add what i felt was much needed context which is redundant because you did a great job at that i support the
039recognition the same way i did that night moments after the vote was taken and dr fritzkin attested this i sent him a message and i said i hope this will come back with context and dr fritz i want to thank you for that because you did an amazing job and and i think that now this recognition and though we won't get to vote on it but this recognition actually means something because folks actually know what we're doing to support our students not just a resolution with very little context thank you thank you mr clone um miss roland thank you very much for for bringing forth that information i think it was very important for all of us to hear as well as all of our students and that we do care and that we are
040supportive of everyone and especially in the lgbtq community that we unfortunately made feel uncomfortable last week and so that's that's shame on us and um thank you for bringing it forward and thank you dr fritz for bringing it back and i hope that everybody knows that we do support everyone in our schools thank you mrs cuthbert i know that there was something you wanted to share yes i would thank you uh i do want to thank dr faith for bringing it back for i did ask him to do that and it was very very well done of course mrs rowland always has just the exact words to put into our hearts thank you thank you very much this i found very poignant and it addresses not only our lgbtq plus students but all of our
041students who have and we are all unique and we're all different and as we celebrate diversity this is part of the poem speech by amanda gorham who spoke at president biden's inauguration she is our nation's first youth poet laureate and to quote a few lines she writes we lift our gazes not to what stands between us but what stands before us we close the divide because we know to put our future first we must put our differences aside we lay down our arms so we can reach out our arms to one another we seek harm to none and harmony for all thank you madame care thank you mrs cuthbert mrs rowland thank you so much this evening for coming forward and sharing what is happening in our schools and how we are working to ensure
042the safety and well-being of every child as i spoke last time as a former classroom teacher that is my that was my responsibility it still is my responsibility it would be my responsibility tomorrow if i walked back into a classroom to provide every single student with a safe environment in which to learn it doesn't matter who the child is it doesn't matter what type of home life they come from the color of their hair doesn't matter the shoes that they wear there's not a single thing that we should look at other than saying this is a child that has entered and it is our job to give them a safe learning environment as i stated that was what i worked towards all the time i worked towards teaching children how to use their voice and
043not and be okay with saying we can disagree on something but will still be kind and respectful to each other what i really hope as we move forward and i've shared this with dr fritz is that we work on how we reduce the bullying piece because yes our lgbtq students face this at times and they should never face it but our ese students face this at times any child unfortunately sometimes that walks in faces it just simply because there's something different about them but what i do know as a teacher a parent and a grandmother is that a lot of this does start at home because children typically come to school and they like and love everybody when you see them walk into a vpk a pre-k or a kindergarten classroom one of the cutest
044things to see believe it or not is all of a sudden when two little girls have the same shirt on and they look at you and they say we're twins and in their mind they're twins and it doesn't matter if they favor each other in any way at all but it's because they've got the same shirt on children don't see color children don't see differences i was fortunate many years ago to have a little girl with down syndrome join my kindergarten class we started out for a half hour a day and she worked her way up to two hours a day and not a kid in my room treated her any differently they all treated her with love and kindness and respect and they saw the potential of what she could do and i remember
045her mother coming in and shedding some tears because she said i never thought she'd ever be in a classroom with other students that were just her same age and so what i encourage everyone to do tonight and everyone that's listening parents here's a responsibility on you at home think about the words that you use think about the things that you say because even when they're two and three and four they pick up on something that you say or how you act or comments that you make and then that changes maybe how they act in the classroom but to teachers i want to encourage each and every one of you that every student that walks through your classroom door even those that may push your buttons because trust me there's some of them out there and
046actually they're happy to see if they can get a rise out of you or get you upset take every one of them from where they walk in that door give them a safe learning environment let them know that while they're in your room you will not allow or tolerate anyone to show them disrespect or to bully and i've talked with dr fritz about possibly having some tougher consequences for those students that are doing the bullying because bullying is learnt a learned behavior and my heart breaks at times when i feel when the victims that are bullied end up with the consequences versus the person bullying so i appreciate all that you and your team do you're doing a great job out there and i appreciate every every safe classroom we have on campuses i appreciate
047you and so if everyone will just love every kid that walks through the door and show them respect we can be a great nation and i believe our students could show the adults this is how we need to behave and act towards others so thank you dr fritz thank you thank you miss roland well done madam chair it's now time i'd like to recognize the month of april as child abuse prevention month april is child abuse prevention month it recognizes the importance of communities working together to help families thrive april 1st is where blue day and many in our community in our schools and vs vcs bus drivers and attendants will be wearing blue jeans blue socks and blue shirts recognizing the importance of this day on april 1st the next recognition i have is
048the month of april is autism awareness month the autism spectrum disorder the fastest growing us developmental disability affects one in every 54 children early diagnosis and intervention as well as an ongoing support for families from families doctors and therapists and educators can have a positive impact on our people with autism to achieve a high quality of life volusia county schools is committed to developing programs and providing services that meet the diverse academic and social needs of those with autism and as you came in today i think you saw some displays for both of these forums and both of these are extremely important i do have one more but i want to touch on this one really quickly because it really impacts our students these two um we we know that our students are our most
049precious commodity and so it's very important for us and we're all trained as educators to spot child abuse and to take the necessary steps when we see that again that's a learned behavior so i'm going to go back to the bullying piece and that's something that we have to to continue to work on as a school district so you have our commitment to doing that that's why we are starting with this restorative justice in middle schools next year not as an option but as a initiative so that we can stop some of the bullying because we know when students bullied those are the folks that grow up at times and become the abusers of our children recognizing autism awareness month is extremely important i will tell you that we know that we are seeing an
050increased number of students on the spectrum there is no doubt to that we are seeing more i remember when i was doing my master's in special education back in 1991 the statistic that was shared with us at that time was one in 500 we are now one in 54 on the spectrum now yes we know more than we did at the time but we know just by adding our asd units and what we've added over the last year that we have an increase increased student population that are on the spectrum and that very very different levels and so we are extremely committed extremely committed to making sure that we're serving our students in the schools getting them ready for life in our county as adults so i'm very excited about this it's it's a month
051but like many of these recognitions that we do it's something that we need we use that month as a reminder but it's something we never stop working on and then i have one other recognition that april was also school library and media month school library programs are an important asset in the educational system contributing to students achievement and development while fostering both excellence and equality and education our media specialists provide leadership and expertise necessary to ensure the library program is an integral part of schools instructional programs i will tell you i shared with you earlier with our custodial workshop that i look at curb appeal when i walk onto a campus i look at floors there are certain things i look at i always go to the library and what i hope to see when
052i walk into any library in our county is i hope to see kids in there and it doesn't matter what time of day i want to see that building being used and that's really important because when you have a school where the librarian or the media specialist is engaged in the instruction that's going on you can do all kinds of amazing things and every principal out there knows how important it is and how important these people are these are not your nine to fivers i'm just telling you media specialists a good media specialist they work in the summer time they work all year long they work after hours they're putting books in kids hands and you can almost tell whether or not you have a solid media specialist in a solid program before you even
053get to that media center because you see the signs along the way so again it's something that we cherish all year long but this is our month to support it i'm sure back to you thank you dr fritz at this time ms schultz do we have any public participation concerning items on the consent agenda [Music] board members and dr fritz do we have anyone that would like to remove any items from the consent agenda mrs cuthbert is there anything you would like to remove hearing that they're him okay thank you hearing that there are no items to remove do i have someone that would like to make a motion approving the consent agenda items so moved mrs burnett has made a motion and mrs cuthbert has seconded it so board members everyone in favor of
054the consent agenda items say i i i anyone opposed then all consent items pass unanimously we're moving on we have 10 minutes dr fritz before we need to do public comment so we're moving on to item 15.01 yep i do have a few announcements thursday april 1st at 7 00 at deland high school we'll have our all count have our all-county jazz showcase at deland high school at seven o'clock on tuesday april 6th we will have our futures first year teacher awards at 5 p.m at jackie robinson ballpark the next school board workshop will be tuesday april 13th at 10 a.m in this board room the next board meeting is also tuesday april 13th at 3 30 in this boardroom and i have a few other announcements just real quick uh we we are approaching
055the um assessment season and this is the state assessments that are coming to us and i wanted to point out a few things on that the first round of spring fsa testing begins next week with grade three and grades four through ten in writing the school's been preparing all year long i'm very proud of the work that they've done i'm ready for some good results to come back in in our high schools we have the cambridge ace ib and ap programs uh the ace exams will start april 26th and they go through the month of may and those are at five of our high schools deltona new smyrna pine pine ridge sea breeze and university the ib bat the ib exams start may 3rd at deland in spruce creek and the advanced placement exams also
056start on may 3rd at all 10 high schools so um we're getting into it there's no doubt about it um excited for our students they've been working hard you know we will be getting our results back in the end of july for most of these assessments but we will get our third grade scores back early but i'd like to wish everybody good luck i'd like to thank them for this hard work that they've put forward getting our students ready we recognize this is certainly a very different school year but i'm going to mirror something that miss haynes said earlier today i want our families and i want our teachers to relax we're there we're there at this point and so um keep going forward doing your very best and that's all we're going to ask
057of you we're just going to ask our students we're going to ask our teachers to do our very best and when the numbers come in we'll deal thank you thank you dr fritz um i don't know if you know or if anyone is here that could tell us on the two um items that are taking place at delante the all-county orchestra and the all-county jazz are those open for um any like parents or people to attend this year i think i think they are um dr b do you know do you know that i think they are open though because we have not received any instruction that they wouldn't be okay thank you thank you dr barry thank you because those are two wonderful events i've attended in the past and it's so nice when
058you get to see the kids that they've worked so hard all year be able to show off with the orchestra and the jazz performances and i'm happy to see deland high hosting it once again we are seven minutes away from public input point i'm not um are you okay if we start the internal audit piece and then move or would you like to go ahead and certainly do that then we're going to start with item 16.01 which is the internal audit presentation and the audit committee recommendation at this time i'd like miss miss muller to come forward miss mohler we'll stop you at 6 30 and then come back to your presentation okay okay hey there go ahead and introduce your guests for the audience i wasn't sure they were out in the lobby so
059i wasn't sure they were hearing what was going on so good evening we are bringing back the internal audit scoping from rsm as we discussed at the last board meeting that we would consider a finance audit and so they have spoken to several of district staff about this and formulating an sow but they also have the presentation based on our audit committee meeting that we held and so we have laura manlev here from rsm and so i'll go ahead and turn it over to her good evening board and dr fritz thank you for having me back again if you recall at the last board meeting at the board's consensus we went back to the audit committee we held a meeting with the audit committee and discussed the three audit topics that came out of our
060last board discussion an audit of maintenance an audit of white fleet and an audit in the finance area through our due diligence process and in talking with deb and her her levels of team below her we have crafted a scope of the audit that we think would be very valuable if we were to go into the finance area we presented that scope to the audit committee and took into account all their questions thoughts and considerations and after that approval from the audit committee we bring it before you today as we had previously discussed the original budget for internal audit services did cover two audits maintenance and white fleet and so for your consideration this evening is the adoption of a third potential audit which is in the area of finance so you can see before
061you this slide this is the summary of the three audits that we are proposing that we perform at your request and if you want to move to the next slide deb thank you so much maintenance this is no change since our presentation to you before so i will save your minutes and move on to the next slide internal audit of finance there are two main work uh streams or objectives if you will that we see ourselves focusing on in finance finance is a very large complex piece of your organization it touches every and all facet of everything that you do everything ultimately does run through finance so it was very important that we carefully craft where we're going to be looking in finance to get you the best value and the best use of your
062audit dollars these two areas that we came up with are related to the payroll functions specifically at year-end and the second area is also in the payables process especially when you convert systems this is a great high risk area to take a second look at you certainly want to make sure that all the eyes are dotted and tees are crossed in your payables area so for that reason these are the two focus areas in finance that we'd like to start with certainly down the road through our normal internal audit function we may present to you propose other areas within finance but for now these are the two highest risk areas that we propose starting in and lastly deb thank you whitefleet there's no change to what we proposed to you last time as mr colon
063brought up he had excellent point last time there's been a few process changes and management changes we've had great discussion with your team and your staff and we still think that there is some value to be added here and some good recommendations that we can assist and provide to you all and the audit committee does seem to agree so these are the three areas that we're proposing to perform our next three internal audits and i'd like to share that okay and i'd like to share that um i i did exactly what you asked i went met went back and met with the audit committee which once again i want to thank all of you because the members that you put on that audit committee they're outstanding when we met they they asked some great questions
064and they looked at what was happening they even looked at the white fleet piece they looked at the finance piece and they unanimously voted that they would like if at all possible to do all three if not they did rank them but they felt that there was a need and they asked questions about you know the current systems we were using moving into the new software things like that and so it was a great discussion and this is what they've come forth with and we have one moment dr would you like to have discussion about this how does the superintendent have a recommendation do you have a recommendation yes i do believe that uh we should go forward with the top two for sure um if we if the board pleasure is to wait on
065white fleet i think we can do that um for another year but if it's something the board feels that we we need to do it immediately we can do all three and we can we can budget for that so you've heard the superintendent's recommendation that um he is willing to do two or he's willing to do three the committee said that if the money was there to do three which if you read in the board docs it said that there was they would prefer to see all three but they said if we had to wait they would push the white fleet so madam chair yes yes madam chair i make a motion that we accept all three but do the first two first uh finance and maintenance that way we keep within our 100 000
066budget that we have mentioned uh but i do agree with dr fritz thank you mrs cuthbert so she's made a motion do i have a second i second that all right so just for clarity so the recommended action um miss cuthbert was that we not only approve the one and two or three but also increase the budget to perform the three so are you only suggesting we do two and budget for two or are you suggesting we do three and budget for three well i believe our this year's budget was i think what that miss muller said last time was one hundred thousand dollars correct um so that leaves this year for the first two we can do the white fleet next year with another budget [Music] we do have the option mr clone for
067right now the budget is one hundred thousand dollars but we can increase that if the board wants to do all three is what we're saying so my concern with the motion is the fact that we're only talking about two and one of the advantages uh seen and brought forth by the audit company was to get our white fleet started off with the correct practices their best practices and so what i'm afraid of is if we wait until the following year which arguably i don't even know that we can approve something for the following budget we may lose the opportunity to start off correctly um that that's my concern so so linda correct me if i'm wrong you're saying just do the top two correct for this year to get it started this year to maintain
068i with with her presentation earlier uh with our finance update at the workshop this morning i would like to stay within our budget for this year's budget that way she can plan and it's not that few months away she can then plan for the white fleet audit gives it a chance to get working to get going and then we can see how it's operating after a few months of operation so we can tweak it so if we go ahead and accept all three but only doing the number the finance and the maintenance in this year's budget to be paid out of this year's budget and then the white fleet out of next year's budget if that's possible and our budget changes in july july 1st yes we would have to wait to start performing the
069work and sign um the contract until july do we know when we're expecting the cars to start arriving i believe they're arriving very soon some of them have to be ordered but some i believe are local see mr colon i think we need a chance for the plan that our district put forth to start operating knowing that they know that there will be an audit coming within a few months so it gets them the incentive to get it going straight which i think is what they're going to do anyway gives us a chance to analyze what enterprise is doing for us and then have some data already accumulated for us to analyze and to be audited mrs cuthbert this is miss haines when i met with the audit committee and they asked additional questions about
070the fact that we were going with the enterprise to rent vehicles one of their concerns and that's why they said if there was the funding to go ahead and move forward with all three they would like to see all three is they wanted to ensure that every vehicle was actually needed because um you know it wasn't until that board meeting when we talked about the white fleet that we actually learned who had vehicles assigned to them and there were some policies in reference to the number of miles vehicles were driven in order to earn a vehicle versus turning in mileage and so we did ask of the um we asked laura and her team if all three audits could be performed simultaneously and yes they can because they have experts in each of those areas
071so i think kind of what mr clone is saying and where i'm at based on what the committee was saying is i'm not sure if waiting for until we get the enterprise vehicles is possibly the best use because we may then pick up vehicles that we could have found out by looking at an internal audit that maybe we did not need all of those vehicles which would then be saving us money versus you know we may bring in 20 vehicles too many but now we have to pay for them because we didn't analyze the people that they were being assigned to and if they met the criteria i understand your point of view thank you dr fritz what is your input i think it's going to take us almost to the end of the year
072to get through goals by one and two anyway so i i think it's okay to approve all three uh because i think the third audit is going to be on the next budget regardless but i think where you're wanting to go today is to be able to give direction if you were to just approve two then we will have to come back to the board for the third one so it's if you want to get moving now then i would say approve all three yeah well maybe did i i thought that my motion was to approve all three to do the first two first and the third one to do out of next year's budget i think that's where it's going to end up going to me it's kind of it really doesn't matter because
073they probably it's probably not going to start to left july anyway so you could call it this year's budget or next year's budget chances are so many of these things are going to occur after it so it's matter of semantics i'm going to get it all done all right so mrs coverage thank you board i support her miss cuthbert you made a motion that we move forward with all three going ahead and starting with the first two and then the third one with the thought it will come out of the july one new budget mr persis is second to that all those in favor say aye aye aye all those opposed no okay passes four to one um thank you very much thank you for all the work and thank you for returning for a
074second time to discuss this with us at this time we're going to move into public input this is our public participation time concerning items of general interest pertaining to public education in volusia county a total of up to 15 minutes will be provided for public comment at this time board members will not be responding at this time i will call the first two names with the first person coming up to speak please state your name and speak clearly if you'll need to pull the mic up to your closer to you oh i have a lot more than we have 25 26 and these two are students that are siblings that would like to come up together oh okay okay all right so board members i have 25 um individuals that would like to speak independently
075and then i have a set of three siblings that would like to speak together so we're going to go ahead and start madam chair i think it's we have our rules and they are publicly announced ahead of time that we have 15 minutes for public input during this time of the meeting so that we can continue with the business of the meeting and then uh at the end of the meeting we always allow as much time as uh as as we need to to listen to the remainder of the speakers who wish to speak in terms of the order i think you should take them in the order that you receive them and if we can get five in six and during the 50 minutes i think that's what's fair to the audience okay so
076just to be clear so that everybody knows what is left on the agenda the items that we have not covered yet are 16.02 which is a board action item over the authorization to implement the custodial pilot program that we learned about in this morning's workshop 16.03 which is a board action item for the adoption of the school board policy 307 the student progression plan item 16.04 which is a board action item approval of the resolution for 20 20 21 19 declaring property is surplus board action item 1605 approval of some job descriptions and then and those are the only items that are remaining um mr persis has suggested that we only do 15 minutes of public input at this time i'd like to hear from the other board members or actually mr doran go ahead
077well i i don't think we can vote on any item without giving an opportunity for the public to speak to it in advance so if there are people who want to speak to issues of general educational interest which is 1701 then we can wait on those but we're at we're at 1701 because it has to happen at 6 30. p.m oh okay so we're well no no it's a um a specific time okay well any anybody who wants to speak to some item on the agenda that you're going to be voting on has to be heard before you vote no i'm aware that this is all general these are all general and we are at the general point because it's 6 30. and so the question is do we go ahead and only go with
07815 minutes which would be approximately five people at this time then move on and come back to this for the next public participation piece or do we hear all 28 at this time so at five uh maybe i missed it but it item 501 that's consent oh that's consent only so where is it on the agenda that we're going to have public participation on items that are going to be voted on i don't see it it happens at each item oh you're doing it in each item okay i'm sure i'm okay with hearing them all i think that at the end of the day we uh those three topics aren't going to take very long even after but i just think we should just go ahead and hear them all out all right mrs burnett
079i'm indifferent whatever we're going to hear from everybody i think it's important that we hear from everybody i'm good either way to be honest whether it's an hour later okay mrs cuthbert i'm in total favor of if someone took the time to come to our came to our board meeting to hear us to talk to us in a professional manner giving their three minutes we should be patient enough to hear them thank you all right then we're going to go ahead and we will start the first speaker will be miss anna hannon followed by crystal mcclure so if the first speaker will come forward and the second speaker will be ready do you have an overflow area mr myers do you have anna hannon or crystal mcclure in your overflow oh huh you're number two
080are you anna please he's a young student did he trade places with me yeah did you fill out a card for him yes please bring the student in yes all right welcome jude and we're happy to hear from you this evening you have three minutes okay you may begin my name is jude sorry and i would like to say my speech when i wear my mask i can barely breathe because i have asthma i have tried to wearing a face shield but but it gave me a headache when i did volusia live and had to be on the computer all day it would also give me a headache this is why i wanted to share some examples on what i've encountered since mass policy has been in place at school when i when i was
081in art my mask was down and i happened to sneeze into my arm the teacher got irritated because my mask was down and when i sneezed she was she she said that i was spreading germs all over the place even though i was using proper sneeze hygiene by sneezing into my elbow as recommended my only other option would be to sneeze into my mask if i were to do that it would result it would result in me breathing in germs the rest of the day i have also had a teacher that has yelled at me two times due to the mask the first time i was at my post as a safety patrol and my mask was down because i was outside then he approached me and said that i was not being a good
082example to the younger grades the second time he yelled at me for having my mask down in front of all the other kids and embarrassed me this time i was outside and six feet away from the other people sometimes other students would pick on me for wearing a different type of mask even though it correctly fit the policy one other teacher gave me attitude for my type of mask all these scenarios have happened because of the expectations of the mask to be worn and the moralizing of this that behavior i'm a student that has never had any disciplinary problems this year due to the mass policy i've been recommended shamed and embarrassed i hope i wouldn't be trespassed from my school for not wearing a mask like my mom was trespassed from this building for
083not wearing a mask who is here to advocate for my right to breathe freely at school thank you thank you jude thank you miss crystal mcclure followed by tara mcnaughton my name is kristen mcclure at the last meeting you guys did discuss the lgbtq week and even though i don't agree that a week should be labeled as such you did argue that not only do these students need support and to be free from discrimination but this is something that should be true for all of the students no matter what sets them apart or makes them different but we've observed something very decisive in our school culture and it is the mask due to the face mask policy the false hope the safety masks give and the belief of mass as the holy grail of health
084there has uh consequently been bullying harassment and discrimination amongst our students when you created this policy i feel you took a side you drew a line in the sand you didn't allow for choice and due to this both students and teachers alike have taken it upon themselves to shame and berate any student not wearing their mask appropriately and for not wearing it when they have the right to remove it such as p e recess gym or when six feet apart and now the cdc actually says three feet apart if we're going to preach a discrimination free school then we need to be free of medical discrimination as well we need to remove a policy that allows for judgment on another student due to their own health preferences if a student may have enough bodily autonomy
085to identify with the opposite gender and the school supports that then why can we not support a child who wants to wear a face mask and a child who doesn't want to wear a face mask for whether personal or health reasons through this policy and through our county the mask has been moralized and these seen not wearing it assumed to be selfish and considerate or immoral and those who shamed them for it feel righteous in doing so school board you missed an opportunity here to create a non-judgmental environment when you created this egregious policy if we want to teach students to respect one another it starts with this issue too we have taught people not to believe come as you are but instead to believe you are only worth coming if you have a face
086mask please understand the message that this sends and understand how we are teaching our children to view others i also want to add i've heard from some of you it's not our decision speak to your governor we follow department of health which follows cdc i spoke to the department of health and they said this is not true miss boswell told me clearly your school board has the right to make this change and i quote from her i can only give them numbers and recommendation changes from the cdc you seem to follow what you want from the cdc and the example i'll give is the face shield nowhere on the cdc does it state that is it effective alone and many kids are wearing this face shield all day long so what's the point of the
087mask anyway it's a shame that i can take my kids to their pediatrician's office in town and it requires no such face covering but in order to receive an education that my tax dollars pay for we have to follow rules that simply don't make sense you are not doctors neither is the department of the health and it's time to remove this policy let's teach students to love and express respect each other again and never allow such a decisive policy to ever be considered in our schools thank you thank you tara mcnaughton followed by carol sawyer hello my name is tara mcnalton i appreciate the chance to speak i will say this i have some notes i don't know where to begin at this point after listening today i'm i'm disappointed i hear that there's no
088vote being taken today i'm a little puzzled by that since there was before i'm not sure where the shift is i would love to get a hand on the material that was mentioned today to kind of look through that but anyway all that being said i know the last meeting we had on march 9th discussing this each of the board members gave their reasons for not supporting the motion made some reasons included this singled out a group of people in other words it would create more division um that many of you said it did not belong in the school system one said it went against uh his convictions um and yes many of you did say the board could not answer parents questions regarding the resolution um it was stated that this could be revisited
089to become more inclusive as all teens who struggle with thoughts of suicide are important the lgbtq plus group is not is not more important than other teens who who do not fall into this category and vice versa therefore if suicide is a motivating factor here be all inclusive all as this issue does not only exist among the lgbtq if bullying is the motivating factor then address all bullying of all people no matter race gender or how they they view themselves no bullying is ever okay just like an adult writing an article in the news journal sorry i have to go here anonymously which is cowardice by the way painting a picture by only giving part of the information and making leading statements is divisive and spiteful and unethical in my opinion bullying and i know
090there's somebody on this board that is enduring bullying herself if you ask me for standing and i appreciate you standing i believe this would fall into bullying as they didn't mind praying the names of those who stood up for their convictions not their agenda but their convictions yet they chose to remain anonymous or like the news media who only airs things that fits their narrative so i want to say this my daughter went to school she graduated in 2017. there were um there was one boy who committed suicide he did not fall into this group um last year two friends that also graduated close to her obviously they're not teens anymore but they did attend taylor high school they committed suicide during coveted season i see it's real i don't belittle it but i don't
091think the answer is naming out one group i really don't i believe whenever you all mention being all-inclusive revisiting this where is that is what i'm looking for where is the all-inclusiveness because i still only see naming one group i don't understand that um i don't really know where to go from here again i'm very disappointed i don't understand how how this rolled out today um i'm incred i am requesting that you be more inclusive i had to have a problem naming it lgbtq lgbtq week um so i know my time's up but three minutes is not enough and i have many more questions that just aren't being answered even prior to today that i've tried to get answered thank you mrs mcnaught carol sawyer followed by buffy smith good afternoon cuthbert chairwoman cuthbert board
092members and dr fritz my name is carol sawyer and i reside in new smyrna beach i hope you all had a relaxing spring break i would like to address the board about that very thing spring break i would like to ask you all to strongly reconsider the dates for spring break 2022 so they run concurrent with bike week 2022. for years afscme president kathy knowles and our sts representative both on the calendar committee have been strongly recommending that spring break and bike week occur in the same week we are all aware of the fact that there was a fatal collision between a school bus and a biker several weeks ago our bus operators are very professional and defensive drivers are always on the lookout for the bikers however the bikers are not always on the
093lookout for the school buses we all know that daily traffic is bad enough with all the bikers in town also because of all the extra traffic during bike week we had many buses running late to schools in the afternoon that led to students getting home late for the safety of all motors motorists please consider spring break and bike week to run concurrently in the same week maybe volusia county officials and the school board officials can work together and meet somewhere in the middle so that both spring break and bike week happen in the same week on another note i would also like to give a big shout out to mr aiken as the director of transportation for decades he created the best student transportation services right here in volusia county over the course of his
094time with sts mr aiken has been featured in several articles in the national student transportation magazine and has received several awards from the national association for pupil transportation for the quality and safety he has brought to student transportation volusia county we have the best equipment our buses and our shops the highest safety standards and the sharpest professional appearance our uniforms in all of florida and beyond i have been involved with several afscme training seminars i have talked with many employees from other counties and i can tell you i am proud to speak up about being a bus operator in volusia county thank you mr aiken for all you have done for volusia county student transportation services and last one thing i would like to update you on my new recruit he told me this morning
095that he is scheduled to take his written cdl test on april 6th we are both excited about the potential sign-on bonus hopefully coming our way please be sure to consider that the employee also gets the sign on bonus otherwise there isn't any reason for the employees to recruit new bus operators thank you for listening to me thanks thank you miss sawyer buffy smith and then following buffy um it's trevor tierra and is journey also with you journey's on our own okay so it'll be trevor and tiara together following miss smith good afternoon dr fritz inboard members i'm here today to talk about the four-ticket graduation limit which still does not suit all families i am especially disappointed as a mother of a taylor high student where we would never come close to filling the max
096occupancy at the ocean center with a four ticket limit one of my son's own siblings would have to be left out not to mention his grandparents and aunts and uncles who have played a huge role in his life i have pictured this scenario scenario in my head many times sitting there on graduation day in that huge facility knowing some very important people were missing and then looking around at all the empty seats and just feeling absolutely heartbroken i would like to point out that just yesterday our state governor made the bill sb-72 immediately effective that allows businesses and event facilities to function as normal without the fear of being sued with this bill governor desantis sent this message to the public and i'm directly quoting him we want folks to be able to live their
097lives to provide opportunities for people to do different things and then let individuals make decisions about what they want to do you want to go listen to the band go do it i am pretty confident that if he is encouraging people to live their lives and go watch a band if they so desire then he would most definitely want us to have the choice to watch our children grandchildren nieces or nephews brothers or sisters walk across a graduation stage this milestone is a great achievement that only happens once in a high school student's life so i ask you dr fritz and board members don't diminish this day for them thank you trevor and tiara followed by journey um hello school board my name is trevor and i have a few instances that i would like
098to talk about with face masks it is getting harder outsiding allergy season is here it's hard to breathe with the mask on attempts in the higher 80s sorry attempts in the higher 80s will be next week and it will only be getting harder before the end of the school year since coming back to school and wearing a face mask every day i developed to severe acne it's not just something convenient it hurting is embarrassing i've spent over a hundred dollars a couple of times trying to find the perfect acne solution for my face but since i'm only 13 a lot of skin products are way too strong for my skin and cause other issues the solution is no mask trapping the heat and causing sweat and oil to build up my main acne areas are
099the cheeks where my mask sits and my forehead under my hair my hair on top was a lot longer but how i liked it but now my hair got cut and i had to do that to clear up the skin and cool me off while wearing a mask though it's age 14 up can i get the vaccine started in april right now and starting april 5th adults 18 and up can get vaccinated too with more being able to get vaccinated and heard immunity grow when can we take off our face masks [Music] hello i'm tiara de pascal and i'm here to talk about what's been happening at my school with masks at the beginning of the year at gym we had assigned seats and we were in very strict rules on masks we were socially
100distant doing workout videos in our assigned area in our assigned seats kids would be told to put to pull their masks up at gym i would pull mine down too because i couldn't breathe now gym we can sit wherever we want and have our masks down on top of that we are now allowed to play volleyball foursquare and basketball at our gym with our masks off now that we are coming to the end of the school year we have fsa soon fsa is very stressful now is very stressful and now we have to do it with while wearing masks with algae season and wearing masks sometimes i feel like i can't breathe i take allergy medicine daily i still have a hard time breathing with a mask on teachers at my school have been getting
101vaccinated in studies show one-sixth of volusia county has at lea has had at least one child of the vaccine thank you for listening to me and have a nice day thank you so journey is next followed by anna hannon hello my name is journey i'm here as a volusia county senior asking for more tickets to graduation my stepmom has been a part of the push for two to four tickets as a child of a blended family only having four tickets prevents my granny from going to graduation when my parents were at work there was only one person who could go to every single weightlifting room that was my granny how many times many times our team left the school to travel to meets and my granny was the only one who could had a flexible
102schedule to go for me she knows every girl in their families on the team she has been my biggest supporter she's even vaccinated but there aren't enough tickets for her to come to my graduation with only four tickets my younger siblings will not be at my graduation either on the day i should be proud of all i have done i will not be missing the people who i want to be there the most for weeks we have been shuffled around on them who makes the graduation occupancy regulations from the school board to the ocean center to the council county council now back to the school board this is our moment we are pandemic seniors seniors have things been taken away please do not take away our families opportunities to celebrate all we have overcome if
103nascar can fill the speedway why can't 2021 seniors and their families do the same dr fritz has left the room but dr fritz if there is an ocean center cannot accommodate the guidelines you have said move our graduation to the speedway thank you for listening to me today anna hannon following anna hannon will be chris will be crystal bono good afternoon first i want to say that my mask choice colleagues and i did some research and one-third 22 out of 67 florida school districts have had a mass optional policy this year that means that 22 school boards chose to not follow the department of health or cdc recommendations but rather as elected representatives follow their constituents wishes and let the parents make health care decisions in 2019 if it were suggested that students and teachers
104in school should cover their mouth and nose it would have been utterly rejected why because we would have seen no reasonable rationale for any of this for any reason to make our children's breathing any less optimal for their entire school day to not see their smiling faces and be able to understand one another through words and expressions what changed in 2020 fear fear and paranoia that we are projecting on to our children we are creating an environment where a bare face and a smile is not welcomed and instead their breath the very thing they need to survive is weaponize and considered a danger to those around them the shame in this all is that many believe this is true that their fellow classmate student or teacher is a bio weapon instead of a human being
105worth of dignity if you may not freely breathe in your public school how can you feel welcomed there we have told them through face covering policy that they are no longer welcome to come as you are you have to you'd better come cover your face to be worthy of your in-person education if you don't you are our harm to others what are we doing to the psychological health of our children i do not want to argue science or try to change your own personal preference but i do want to speak to what is more powerful than any science which is a mother's intuition tell me those of you who are mothers which one of you when you checked on your babies sleeping at night and found the blanket over their face did not remove it
106so they could breathe unhindered would you have left it there because the fabric is breathable no why not because if there's any chance that it could cause harm to your child you would do away with it those babies of ours are now older and in school but the intuition to keep our children safe and protected is the same the mask that is over their face all day is like a blanket over their perfect face at night there's no science or cdc recommendation that will supersede a mother's intuition to be the best decision maker for her child and we reject the policy that undermines the parents authority and demands compliance with or else erroneously removes the child's right to their in-person education parental rights is not a partisan issue the child's right to their education is
107not yours to hold hostage with the ransom of a face mask the face covering policy must end thank you thank you crystal bono followed by jennifer strickland good afternoon i am a parent of a senior at taylor high school she is at work so she wrote something and asked me to read it hi my name is emma bono as a 2021 senior i feel robbed of a lot of normal things seniors would get to do my senior homecoming was canceled as well as prom grad bash and so many other things as much as i understand regulations for covid i don't want to let this virus take any more from me my classmates or our families i've never been afraid of the virus but knowing that it would steal most of my regular senior year experiences
108i chose to do online school i continued after second semester because kovid continued to hurt my expectations for my last year of high school coming from a large family the four tickets allowed would only allow two of my siblings to join my parents leaving me to choose which one of them could not attend being the oldest of four children my grandparents my aunts and uncles want to also be able to see the first of us to graduate not only that but there are others who have helped me to grow up and become the best version of myself and i want to be able to share this moment with them this special day this milestone of my life and end of an era with them at the beginning of this year going to football games we
109were able to buy pods of about 10 to 20 people and be separated with safe regulations why can't we explore these options for our graduation ceremony going to taylor a small school compared to the others i feel that we should be able to do something like that not only does the ocean center have the capacity but it also has the ability for us to keep those simple regulations the ocean center is a huge space for our small school with the ability for that amount of people if the ocean center cannot accommodate this for us as a smaller school than as a pandemic senior i feel like the county and the school district should explore other venues each high school in volusia county has a football field or what about stetson university and spec martin these
110are all options that we could explore so that we would have more options to be able to give my family more tickets thank you for your consideration in your time on this topic and as a parent this is a milestone that we want their families to experience with them we have seen them suffer this year and we understand and we have followed the rules but coveted cases are down and people are getting vaccinated and this milestone is something that we should allow them to be celebrated thank you for your time thank you jennifer strickland followed by james page good evening we are here today directly addressing dr fritz i'm going to skip for a minute the hypocrisy of the decision to limit graduation attendance versus the other decisions volusia county schools has made allowing our
111students to to play sports and things like that we have been told that the ocean center is dictating the attendance however after speaking with the ocean center and mr rechtenwald's comments at the last county council meeting it is obviously that dr fritz that you have not been interested in the alternate configurations prior to the cdc reducing the social distancing and it seems like we may still not be interested if they had alternate seating plans that would have allowed for more attendance before the reduction to three feet it would seem like to me that we would have reached a greater increase than simply two persons per graduate i would like to quote mr rechtenwald from the county council meeting on march 16th before the cdc reduced the guidelines to three feet i quote i know mr
112riddle has already developed some other configurations that will put more people in the ocean center mr rechnenwald goes on to say we will work with the school board because that is critical because what we have now is what the school board asked for so i want to make that clear in our discussions with the school board that's what we have today is that the two-ticket system because that is what they wanted he goes on to compliment mr riddle saying that he is a no better convention center manager at solving problems and like i say and i'm going to quote him again he already has other configurations that would expand the amount of guests i'm going to remind you that that statement was made march 16th prior to the cdc reducing those restrictions to three feet
113so if there were alternate configurations ahead of the reduction that should further expand not just double the attendance to four this is a fight worth fighting for our kids and i'm going to leave you with a common sense question we are socially distancing and isolating family groups and students that are already around each other for example my family tradition before every graduation including my sisters and myself would go out to dinner ahead of the graduation we will do that again for my nephew micah there'll be 20 something of us that will hug him take pictures with him um give him his gifts and and celebrate then we'll watch four of them walk into the ocean center an empty ocean center at that to watch to stay back while they take our germs in with them
114after we've just hugged all over him and kissed him it does not make sense to socially distance people that are not socially distant on a daily basis we ask you to reconsider this decision either find alternate venues do not make a one-size-fits-all decision for these graduates they do not deserve that i have seven seconds left so i'm just going to simply say the masks are silly let us parents have our choices back for our kids thank you thank you james page followed by sean kelly hello good evening good evening i don't have any kind of speech or anything like that i'm just saying directly that's how i am yes this is my first board meeting i have two kids in elementary school and chairman from being a kindergarten teacher you understand where i'm coming from
115on this i have a four-year-old that's in vpk i have a three-year-old that just started pre-k just this past monday after spring break these masks are ridiculous for these kids there's not many coveted cases with the kids there's more cases with adults coveted cases are going down teachers are getting vaccinated so what's the purpose of having the kids with the mask when i have to tell my four-year-old what is going on he doesn't understand what's going on he's being forced to wear a mask in p.e he's having to wear a mask in class no matter what when we're out about we don't have him wear our mask i just had to make my three-year-old put a mask on he doesn't understand because he's a preemie he's he was a 30 weeks he's has asthmatic problems
116possibly he's having to wear this in class now and he doesn't understand what's going on and i'm speaking on behalf of all the parents here on the school board please remove the masks it's not worth it especially for these kids because we have to touch doorknobs we have to touch everything i'm having to touch just like this desk just like everybody else is what's the purpose of it why and i'm looking out for my kids because we couldn't even have our first actual first day of school with my child this year he goes into kindergarten next year and we won't be able to do that because we have to just hand them off we can't even walk in like all other my other parents have in the past i'm here for my wife because she
117has asthma problems and she has to be home with the kids i don't like this please i would like to have a vote on this tonight if we could please to have this taken out please and i'm asking this on the behalf of all these parents here tonight i know i'm begging you for that please because it doesn't make sense just thank you mr page mr page can i have you if you don't mind before you leave i'd like dr balkerben to just get some information from you for what school your children are at because actually for the age especially your three-year-old we put some pieces into the policy where that those children at that age did not have to have masks on okay i can actually say that on my actual we just purchased
118a home in deltona back in july so he's actually we're zoned for forest lake elementary that's where my three-year-old's at in the pre-k program um he's actually um with the uh the es yes because of his issues with being a premature child my son is actually in the vpk program at discovery because they were already fully booked at forest lake but he's going to force lake for kindergarten so what i want you to know and normally we would not speak with you but i thought you needed to know this especially since you're a new parent in the policy we put in some guidelines for our children that were in ese programs and for our younger children and we did put in guidelines that they were not no child was to have masks on when outside
119for recess or pe okay so i appreciate you giving us that additional information and we're going to follow up on this and um i believe you put your phone number down on the card and we will be reaching out to you thank you very much because that was actually not addressed to me because our teachers actually sold that he needs to they're trying to help make him wear a mask throughout my three-year-old but my four-year-old he doesn't understand this either so that's what i'm trying to say but i'm speaking on behalf of this because he's going into kindergarten yes and i'm speaking on behalf of all these it's it's not fair it's not fair to our kids because they don't understand what's going on especially elementary kids thank you sir thank you sean kelly followed
120by kyle [Applause] durden good afternoon good afternoon my name is sean kelly i'm a resident of women by the sea i'm a retired army lieutenant colonel and i won't beg you for anything you all work for me i'm a family nurse practitioner with 25 years of health care experience most importantly i'm the father of a sixth grade obms student and an 11th grade seabreeze student and i just want to say how proud i am of those students that came up here in front of you all and and spoke to the to the injustice they are experiencing daily the bullying and the the physical discomfort they are experiencing so i want to read a quote that i think fits for them very well it goes like this power concedes nothing without a demand it never did
121and it never will if you find out what a people will submit to and you and you found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong that will be imposed upon them the limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress now it's frederick douglass i presume you all loud the teacher i'm still right um i'm here today specifically to speak about your mass mandate and on behalf of my children and now the children that i heard up here today demand as frederick douglass suggested that you rescind this injustice imposed upon our children i've never been compelled to speak in front of a school board prior to today coincidentally today is my daughter's 12th birthday but she urged me to come here instead and she said if i can do it
122you can do it i believe the mass mandate for children is misguided politically motivated and has the potential to cause harm mental and physical harm to the well-being of children and is based not on science you are entrusted with my children's education and provide a safe environment as i'm entrusted with people's lives in a hospital but unlike you i've never mandated any treatments for a patient to do so would be a violation of their autonomy i can recommend i can highly recommend i can strongly recommend that you do this under the threat of risk of injury or death even they can still ignore my advice but i'm still there for them afterwards i don't punish i never mandate i don't ask for submission and their health is my job i can't understand a mask mandate
123to begin with the cdc recommends face masks they do not mandate them so if you follow cdc guidelines you in fact recommend wearing masks not mandate them i had more about the statistics but someone already spoke to it through my own research and i am fully qualified to do healthcare research i found that a third of the counties do not have mass mandates and in my research they have hired better testing than volusia county almost all of them they either have better testing with lower test rates with lower positive test rates so how can that be sir if my children are the bio weapon of mass destruction you say they are then these numbers would be off the chart if they didn't have to wear masks sir i do apologize but your three minutes are
124up but i want to thank you for coming and speaking thank you on behalf of your children thank you work for me kyle durden followed by karen weinrich good evening board members dr fritz i am here to address this one-size-fits-all venue matter for these seniors if the fits all then every school needs to be afforded all the others give us the engineering track the communications academy the medical track otherwise school demographics do not matter in this fight i am severely shaken up over this because i am passionate about these kids that have lost two years of things that they will never be able to get back they will never get back their prom or their graduation you guys have failed these seniors you've had over a year to find a place and make a a
125final suggestion of where all these kids could have their classes graduate without them having to limit them to four people four people do you remember your graduation do you remember how many people were there for you i remember but i also remember i won prom king and i remember that i have that to look back on and these seniors don't i'm urging you i'm pleading with you give them more than four tickets to graduation it's not possible look at the genetics and the demographics of this county they both a lot of parents are single parents but there's also duplicate parents co-parenting that are along with them the whole ride i'm simply pleading with you guys to come up with a better solution and i will actually quote dr hill who was a former board member
126saying regarding the mask it's refreshing to see that some of the assisted living facilities in deland have removed their restrictions and letting people get back to a living normal life it's unfortunate though the cities surrounding this area and the school board still have a mass mandate requiring children to wear masks no science supports us no nonsense paul politicians need to let science guide their policies and not politics thank you thank you karen weinrich followed by jonathan weinrich good evening um karen weinrich from port orange and teacher at spruce creek elementary i've got three things to try to cram into three minutes first of all i wanted to talk real quickly about volunteers due to contact tracing this year at the moment only retired teachers are allowed to volunteer now that vaccine is more available especially
127to our older population many of which are volunteers i would ask that you consider opening volunteering to any fully vaccinated volunteer we desperately need our volunteers back and many of them are eager to get back and if they're fully vaccinated that would eliminate the need to contact trace secondly i'm here to speak about mass as a parent and a teacher i fully support keeping the mask mandate for the rest of the year um you know i've heard all these public comments and i know that maybe some children struggle with it i have had no issues getting my students to comply with max mass mandate in fact i was pleasantly surprised how easy it was the maths are working both jonathan and i have been exposed and quarantined twice and neither of us have contacted cobit
128and i believe that the consistent use of mass or a major factor mass are more than a personal choice they are about protecting others i hear what are we teaching our children we are teaching them to care about others because when we wear a mask we are not just protecting ourselves we are protecting those around us and that is an important message to give to our children lastly i came here all fired up to talk about the lgbtq resolution that did not pass last time so i do thank you for bringing that back and um thank you for the explanation for miss roland you know i was i was very disappointed i went i was didn't make it here for the beginning of the meeting last time so i went back and listened to all
129of it and i heard we don't want to make it political but by not supporting it it became political who lgbtq students are is not political it is who they are we the reason for this week is because and i went and looked it up as the coalition who supports it they say lgbtq individuals can face issues that reinforce societal stressors and stigmas even from within the health care system the public comments we heard at the last meeting are prime examples of those type of things and the reason we knew this week you know the message that that was sent whether purposeful or not i know it was not purposeful was that lgbt student lgbtq students parents and employees don't matter i want to remind you we need to support our lgbtq students but also
130we have parents and employees who are lgbtq and we need to support them as well thank you mr clone for your clarifying comments i appreciate it i appreciate your apology and i really do appreciate i know that i'm sure that others do as well so thank you for that jonathan weinrich followed by chad hello i'm jonathan weiner i am a senior at sea breeze high school and i've been here before so hello again um to start off i would like to discuss the spring break challenge which if you guys don't know for high schoolers it incentivizes us to complete 85 percent of our online courses or have 20 hours of sat practice in khan academy this incentive program really disappoints me the program shows students are not putting forth effort without reward this program does
131not benefit any students futures many adults in this room can attest that not all work comes with rewards especially work you sign up for on a more personal note i feel i have missed out i don't have any online classes and as a senior in my last quarter who has been accepted to college since august i do not feel the obligation to take the sat again so why do i need to do 20 hours of sat practice so the option of doing khan academy obviously does not spark my interest i know plenty of my classmates are in the same position this makes it seems that seniors can just kick back and relax for this last quarter and as you guys emphasized before that is not true if the county truly relies on incentives those seniors
132who have senioritis and don't have online classes cannot access i encourage you to rethink the idea of this program my second subject to discuss is also about the lgbtq health awareness and i would also like to thank you guys for passing that this is a good step but now we must act recognition is not enough we must give direct mental health by providing more trained counselors in schools and the reason these people matter is because according to the cdc lgb youth are almost five times as likely to have attempted suicide compared to heterosexual youth moreover according to the trevor project 40 percent of transgender adults have attempted suicide students teachers and school board members need to be aware of the unique challenges they face and once again i would like to emphasize the fact that
133they are who they are the way someone is is just that it is not political me wearing glasses is not political my curly hair is not political me being straight is not political i was born this way there should be no politics involved when it comes to the rights of other peoples i urge you to offer more help providing counselors to volusia county schools i would also like to mention in my last 30 seconds that in this last three minutes i have not struggled to breathe also i would like to answer those people asking why we wear masks it's also to protect others especially teachers they are at risk they are the ones we are protecting my parents and my brother are teachers and i would like you to protect them thank you thank you
134chad followed by alexander vargas uh hello i'm chad mcnaughton i'd like to thank you for your time tonight i was at the last meeting when this lgbt subject came up um i observed some things the last meeting some people spoke from from their convictions what makes them up from their core they spoke about that and they um they met direct opposition we could tell that i could sense it at the back of the meeting um what's kind of interesting a form of bullying what we're trying to stand up against anyway i just want to say this vantage point what you see depends on where you stand evidently some of you here stand way far back um uh this is a question that i just sat back there it's like if we really care about the
135students right and we're saying that we're going to train teachers who still have to teach then answer this question when does a teacher engage in meaningful conversation that leads to help these students that are in this in this in this group right it's during class when they're supposed to be doing their job um and so this is okay for you like if your student or if your child was in this group and we just heard the statistics of the suicide rate you're okay with someone who's tasked with 99 of their job teaching all the other students to try to catch them it's like having a net with holes this big you're saying one thing and doing something else where have you put your time and effort into coming up with an agenda to um to
136fund guidance counselors we heard in the last meeting and it was just come up in topic that you have one per 700 students who's failing who you know you say you care about these students and i'm back there as a father of a student and it's lies you're just saying something to smooth it over to sound like this is the hot topic lgbtq oh don't touch that we can't do anything you're talking out both sides of your mouth that's what the students see i've been a a leader a group leader for uh children and youth for 14 years they see through that the only person that makes feel good are some of the parents here and you you're going to go back and pat yourself on the back and think you've done something really good
137for all these students but get this when you want a teacher to engage with a student in class how many other eyes are going to be in there in ears they got better ears than any of you than me i can't even hear something my daughter turns something's on her phone it sounds like a mosquito i can't hear it it bothers my stun but here's the thing all these other uh eyes and ears you are asking for trouble because when they confide in that teacher what's going to happen you've just opened it up everybody else if there is bullying i don't agree that no bullying should ever happen in school i got 19 seconds got a lot to say but you're sitting here saying let's let's ask a teacher to do something else right let's
138add something to your job description why don't you stop what you're doing mr purses add something to your job description to come in and listen to these students and be a safeguard for them you know what's going to happen some of your other job description isn't going to get done that someone else is counting on i'm counting on a teacher to do her job to teach my kid how to to excel in life and go forward you're asking a teacher to do all these other things plus be a guidance counselor and listen for someone who's about to commit suicide this is the biggest bunch of crap i've ever heard if you really care and you really care and you really care do something else add some money to it and get some somebody that's in
139there that's qualified don't put it on another teacher that gets up and takes her kid to another school and is fighting a mask and all the other crap that's going on in the classroom sir i don't understand i know i'm sorry no i apologize but you are saying one thing and doing another but i could tell you your money follows your convictions if you value your time give it your time if it's your money you give of your money sir thank you thank you alexander vargas followed by robert cosgrove good evening i'm alexander vargas i'm 17 years old i'm a student a child yeah i get called perverse by people who stood in this very room while others stood by and said nothing i'm a child yeah i get compared to a pedophile because my
140transness my gayness parts me that hurt no one i'm a child i didn't choose to be transgender and gay i didn't choose to go to school every day and hear people scream in the halls i don't choose to sit in class and have people debate if i should have rights i don't choose to fear simply going to the bathroom but i have grown used to it i should be proud of who i am but i get mistreated and feel like i have to hide but i won't i won't because lgbtq students exist in florida 18.2 percent of high school students identify as lesbian gay bisexual or questioning and 1.5 percent identify as transgender our community faces struggles every day for being who we are one in two transgender students and one in five lesbian gay
141and bisexual students attempt suicide we deal with hearing about hate crimes on our community another gay person shot another trans woman murdered this is why we need to not only spread awareness but also teach lgbtq people have a history the stonewall riots in 1969 that were started when marsha p johnson an african-american genderqueer woman threw that first brick when patrons of a gay bar were being arrested just for being gay that brick that our community builds on she fought back and it's my turn to place a brick in this foundation we deserve to be respected like any other student and we should not have to feel ashamed of being who we are if we teach students to be kind and respectful then lgbtq students would be less afraid less ashamed and we will feel safer
142it is time to stop turning a blind eye to the issues faced by lgbtq students it is time to take action and teach having a true lgbtq awareness week would be a good start it is simple just a week that teaches a bit of history and kindness it does not hurt anyone it is simply teaching people to be respectful i want to build a foundation for future lgbtq students this is just one brick the idea that if we teach students now to tolerate and to accept then maybe there will be fewer murders fewer shootings and fewer hate crimes and fewer children committing suicide thank you thank you robert cosgrove followed by dana dunmeyer um thank you my name is robert cosgrove i'm from port orange i'm a resident and taxpayer there i come here this
143evening to address this issue of the lbg cube uh problem that you paint as a problem this has been with us for for many years there's no question about that there was a fine presentation made by one of the employees saying what the school district has attempted to do and will continue to attempt to do which i take it to mean that they have not been attempting to do in the past this is something new that's what you can walk away from this i'm particularly concerned that last week you ladies and gentlemen took a position that you reversed today and i wonder if the reason that you took that change of heart was because of a newspaper report that would please let me finish of a newspaper report that was published by a failing near
144bankruptcy newspaper with an incompetent reporter giving in inaccurate information one of those pieces of inaccurate information was just espoused here 18.2 percent of students are in in this category i don't buy it you shouldn't believe it where did this information come from from the center for disease control in 2015 the bureau of labor and statistics says that's not true at all it was two percent soda you know ladies and gentlemen there are excuse my uh language there are lies there are damn lies there are statistics and there are politicians in the order of increasing uh inaccurate information so to believe these things when we have no other information to support that it's just simply irresponsible i'm particularly concerned that the superintendent of schools did an end run around you people on his school board when
145he brought this thing back to your attention again you make policy he carries the policy on he is not the policy maker you are the policy maker you're elected to do that you're failing when you do the things you do i wonder how many of you are sitting here as board members changed your mind because you didn't like the feedback that you were getting from these newspapers and from the public we this young lady put on a solution it's a solution in search of a problem if these students are being bullied and some of them are that needs to be addressed we have bullying policies our educational foundation in this country was founded on equality not on diversity everyone is to be treated equally there's no question about that that's what needs to happen in
146our educational system we don't need to have identity politics and when you do this that's exactly what you do thank you very much for your time thank you sir it's dana dunmeyer followed by lisa alexander good evening i'm dana dunmeyer i live in orange city i came here tonight to express my disappointment that the board failed to pass the lgbtq health resolution at the last meeting and i was pleasantly surprised by the change uh i was concerned what what prompted me to come is that i was concerned about how lgbt lgbtq students felt when the resolution didn't get a second i was also concerned that the board had created confusion among principals teachers counselors parents and others about whether the board supported actions to support and protect lgbt lgbt sorry the mask is in my
147way lgbtq students ms rowland's statement and and mr colon's comments as well went a long way and i congratulate you for that i'm a little confused about whether her statement is the board's policy i suggest that it be distributed to show that it is to all principals counselors and teachers along with the resolution it's a good inventory of what you're doing now my plea would be do more there have been statements here tonight that lgbtq students don't need special consideration i strongly disagree mr colon cited some of the statistics the the challenges lgbtq students face are great you have heard testimony of that tonight please keep this in mind as you are implementing your policies and programs and uh providing resources i the comment that there were one in 700 one counselor to 700 students
148gave me real pause uh really i mean and and i strongly recommend that something be done about that so that we can deal with this concerning situation thank you very much um and i also will mention that i support masks thank you thank you lisa alexander followed by amber scott good evening good evening i'm lisa alexander i come from south daytona and i teach at sea breeze high school covid is disrupting so much of our lives and although we are adapting to the new normal there is only so much time in the day to meet the numerous expectations placed on students and teachers even the state of florida recognizes that this year requires a bit of extra support for people who may be struggling the state mandated eight hours of mental health training for students
149helping students to recognize and understand some of their feelings and know that support is available to them is invaluable but what about my eight hours of instructional time i broke my contract and i spent outside of working hours viewing the video so that i would be prepared for the students that i would be sharing the information with especially since i'm not a trained counselor but those eight instructional hours i can't get them back so what's more important right now patients grace and mental health or testing while they are not mutually exclusive there is only so much time an inflexible timeline in which to accomplish the county's goals so we can test this year in u.s history we were given no testing reprieves in fact we got an additional test that's a required um uh uh
150sorry sorry i lost my place a required midterm exam we also have eight required district interim assessments and i have to give at least one assessment for every unit we do so we are now talking about 17 days of testing only with no learning going on adding insult to injury many of the students are banking up old tests and those folks tend to be the least likely to be able to miss instructional time we also have loose instructional time to fire live shooter and other drills and we need the instructional time not endless assessment i was visited by the learning walks several weeks ago they were looking for learning objectives student engagement and whether or not you are up to date for the breakneck speed of our curriculum calendar i watched dr fritz's video he
151said that the feedback provided through the learning walks aligns with our goals and mission you mentioned that you have a plan but i don't know what that plan is i will tell you that it would be great if every school in volusia county is an a school but the only feedback i received was from the district person who said good job where is my academic specific academic feedback that would help me to be a better teacher although i directly asked about the feedback i still have none how is the unenlightened observation of teachers improving our lot what is the purpose i learned nothing through the learning walk ladies and gentlemen neither students nor teachers improve if there is only time and proclivity for testing and evaluation not learning i thank you all for your time
152thank you amber scott followed by dr macklin hello everyone my name is amber scott and i'm a chiropractor that serves children women and families in volusia county as a chiropractic physician i'm responsible to diagnose and treat disorders of the nervous and musculoskeletal systems since the mass mandate in school i've seen an increase in headaches neck pain ear pain acne dehydration and the most detrimental and crucial consequence of covid and mask wearing are an increase in bullying depression anxiety and learning complications in children we should ask ourselves are masks effective we've been wearing them for about a year now and there seems to be no scientific proven success there are schools that do not have mask policies and have remained healthy stable learning environments for their children throughout this coveted season research that's out there is
153questionable at best when reviewed from a peer-reviewed standpoint for example there's something called the inoculum theory it states that if everyone wears a mask it will reduce the number of viral particles that are naturally escaping with breathing leading to not a decrease in covet contraction but only a less severe case if you do contract the virus another is that breathing humidified air is good for you think about these young children breathing in a natural waste product for hours upon end in a classroom masks are distracting for kids especially young kids in a learning environment kids do not even wear masks appropriately especially not for the whole day school age children depend on facial especially young children depend on facial expressions for an emotional connection throughout learning i have seen firsthand kids who have been spun
154around without stability from home online learning to back to brick and mortar schools and back again they're suffering from an increased rate again of anxiety depression learning difficulties i just ask that you give children back a sense of normalcy and a less distracting learning environment by simply making mass optional for these children i also definitely support them having more tickets to graduation after seeing the tears shed from these poor children in this school district thank you thank you board members we need to take a break for a few moments only because i've received a message from our technical team and we are frozen at the moment and they need a few minutes in order to get us back on um like so i do apologize everyone we're going to take a ten minute break or
155nine minutes actually we will be back in here at 8 00 pm to continue with the public input so that the technical team can bring us back up thank you you if i could please have everyone return we're going to continue at this time with the public input dr macklin followed by jennifer i don't want to mispronounce it cicante so is dr macklin here i think she's sitting out there dr macklin michelle macklin i think i saw her sitting out there okay then jennifer cicante and i believe um she's outside i believe jude put two cards in the young the child that spoke first um it was just outside okay then um is it a jennifer cicante cecente she's uh cecente thank you mr clown she's just there okay then annika if i pronounced it
156correctly can you pronounce your last name for me okay welcome i'm sorry thank you you may be here good evening i'm annika dugo a gender fluid ib student at deland high school and a member of its gay street alliance club i was notified of what transpired at the last board meeting by an ally who sent an article that summed up a wasted opportunity the board took due to a small few who were misinformed the only cure for ignorance is education and as a volusia county school board you have the ability to educate yourself and influence the education of others by advancing this week of awareness for the health of lgbtq plus students the board reiterates that they do not care for these students by abandoning this week of awareness the board ignores the risks and
157lack of support these students face students like me have a higher chance of committing or contemplating suicide because they feel isolated and face oppression daily according to the netport academy a treatment and rehabilitation center for adolescents report that one in four suicidal teens are part of the lgbt community and are five percent more likely to attempt suicide than their hetero heterosexual and cisgender counterparts i am one of many students that fall under the statistics i fortunately have the support of my family and doctors however there is nothing the scoreboard does for students that lack support why are there lives and futures not worthy in this district they are but why is their health at risk and why is nothing being done about it by adopting a week in the near future when students are in
158session there can be that is dedicated to the health of lgbtq plus students a conversation can be started among all students and those who are not aware of the risk their peers face in a safe place with educators jimmy heinz states that politics is no place for a school but the health of students is not political so why should the health of lgbtq plus students be considered controversial as students with a higher risk endangered hate to others all should be aware and keep an open mind a trait that ib instills in their students and candidates like them open minds change lives i thank the board for this opportunity to share this evening and implore you to reconsider your responsibility to the students that students of this county thank you thank you kim short good evening
159i wanted to talk about some legislation that um miss mueller had brought up some legislation today during the workshop and i wanted to add to that a little bit there is a house bill 1007 and a senate bill 1358 that will change how time shares are assessed if it's passed and schools counties and cities could lose about 170 million a year in property taxes there was an article in the orlando senate all yesterday about it i'm also i would like to ask the board to support a couple things that florida pta is supporting senate bill 48 and house bill 7045 we are against i know that we did you know hear a little bit of discussion on that today it is being hyped as a simple streamlining of all the current programs and an enhancement
160of parental choice but here's what it really does it expands scholarship eligibility while combining the mckay and the gardner scholarships under one program and the florida tax credit hope and family empowerment scholarships into another program and that's specifically senate bill 48. what i don't think people understand is that it all it reduces the financial oversight of scholarship managing organizations currently we are we are auditing any organization that takes these scholarships annually what will happen underneath this legislation is that it will go to every three years that is something that regardless of how you feel about the scholarships i can't see how anybody would be in favor of us lessening any kind of accountability so that's something that i'd like to have the school board support in saying no to senate bill 86 is the bright
161futures bill that i'm sure everybody here has heard about the school district of palm beach county has called to action against senate bill 86 i'm trying to pull everything i can to get people to vote no for it i'd really like to see this board stand up and also say that they're they're against this um this legislation these kids deserve to have some consistency and tallahassee making changes to the way that we help our students is not something that is good for students there's also house bill 359 and senate bill 86 which is the covid 19 impact on school accountability bill that is something that florida pta does support and i know that this board does also support um there's something else that i i um i would like to talk about and that's senate
162bill 358 and i want a couple seconds 358 and house bill 1119 and this is going to require that schools ask students if they can swim and point parents to free or low-cost programs if the answer is no there are there are schools in other counties and i know even in this county that do work with the ymca to provide some kind of a swim program for their students through pe i have my good friends in pinellas county it's something that they do every single year i have tried and i have tried and i'm here to try again to get this county to do it for with all of our elementary schools i think that it's doable and i think it's the right thing for kids if we care about safety and we most certainly
163say that a lot this is something that affects more children die from this than anything else so um that's that's it that's kind of my little legislative update thank you thank you at this time that ends public participation we're going to move into board action item 16.02 authorization to implement custodial pilot program for the fiscal year 2021-2022 dr fritz i will turn it over to mr west okay great thank you dr fritz um as we uh actually presented to you this afternoon at our board workshop the district is proposing to pilot an in-house custodial operation at the 15 selected schools in the district to compare the difference between outsourcing and in-house custodial services we've gone through that program so and i appreciate the input that you have given us at the board and we look
164for the are excited about moving forward with this pilot program thank you superintendent recommends the approval of the proposed custodial pilot effective july 1 of 2021. sorry my glasses fall down and run through uh june 30th 2022. you've heard the recommendation of the superintendent regarding the custodial pilot program do we have a motion it is with great pleasure that i make the motion that we begin our path into uh having in-house custodial services once again it's an equilibrium with an equal amount of pleasure i second the motion and i'm sitting in a spot where i can't do either today but thank you mr cologne has made the motion mr persis has seconded the motion all those in favor say aye aye aye okay good do we or any nay all right is there any discussion
165can't wait for it thank you we are excited we are starting thank you tomorrow all right moving on to item 16.03 adoption of school board policy 3.0 or 307 student progression plan ms roland and mr pendley uh please come forward you going we're here tonight to get approval for our student progression plan we presented it back maybe two three months ago for advertisement has been advertised and we're here today just to get approval to move forward our student progression plan superintendent recommends the adoption the pros amendments to the school board policy 307 the student progression plan do i hear a motion move approval do we have a second a second okay so mr persis has made the motion that we approve the student um progression plan mrs burnett has seconded it all those in favor
166say aye aye aye opposed any discussion you're approved thank you very much moving right along item 16.04 board oh you know what i didn't ask for public input do we have any public in you would tell me right she will tell you she will tell you okay kelly would have been on it we're moving forward to 16.04 board action item approval of resolution 2021-19 declaring property as surplus do we have any schultz do we have any more public input all right all right we have ms doster and mr groove sitting uh sitting next to mr pendley ms doster i'm not on this one am i no you're not sir but i just thought you wanted to stay there at the table go ahead stay around can't vomit there may be a question or two i
167was willing to relinquish my time to mr pendley good evening madam chair school board members dr fritz we're here tonight to present resolution 2021 19 to you for approval it's titled declaration of property s surplus we have stephanie doster's going to give the presentation tonight we also have some fdot uh support in the back raising their hands if there are any questions of a technical or engineering nature they're here to support the resolution as well so i'll turn the presentation over to stephanie thank you steve as steve mentioned we have [Laughter] we have resolution 2021-19 which proposes to deem portions of property at myrtle avenue adjacent to new smyrna beach middle school as uh surplus or unnecessary for educational purposes this is being initiated due to a portion of the st john's river to sea
168trail loop or river to sea loop trail being installed along myrtle avenue in front of new smyrna beach middle school this is being constructed by fdot and it spans this whole project i should say spans between volusia county flagler county st johns county putnam county and brevard county as you can see here on this map the different colors show the different phases of this project and our project is in purple and it is a pre-construction funded uh portion of the project and you can see here the green comes up out of the south where it has been complete this trail has been completed from brevard county through edgewater it pops out at 10th street and where you see the purple there in front of new smyrna beach middle school that is their next phase um
169and you can see here it's a little covered up by the screen in the corner but this is what they are this is the amount of property that they are proposing to use it's about 16 000 square feet and it's along as i said the frontage of new smyrna beach middle school if the board chooses to donate this property they must deem it as unnecessary for educational purposes through this resolution prior to the donation and if the board just does choose to move forward with the resolution to surplus the frontage um and this approximate 16 000 square feet we will come back with a more formal presentation on the project um with a memorandum of agreement between the board and florida department of transportation and the city of new smyrna beach so with that if
170you have any questions i'd be happy to answer them and if i cannot answer them i do have representatives from the project here to also answer questions um may i speak yes madam chair yes um this is linda cuthbert uh you're talking about the i guess the water across the street from the smyrna beach middle school correct that is fenced by school fencing no this would be property along the frontage of new smyrna beach middle school is this the sidewalk in front yes so we have our fencing and then there's a little tiny strip of grass in the sidewalk in the street so what are we doing to the city so it through throughout the world because this wasn't a part of the agenda so i don't know if she can even see this was
171an attachment on the resolution this is exhibit a what's on there oh see i'm looking at the picture um and you have it in blue that's being beated yes and that is directly adjacent to our right-of-way at new smyrna beach middle school so they would need as you can see here um to the south 13 feet then it goes down to 5 feet this is all property that is currently within our fence this is property that they would need to acquire to improve this trail or the sidewalk that is currently there to improve it to the trail standard okay so we are dealing our own property that is just on the other side of the the front parking um how is this going to affect the renovations and maybe the reconfiguring of the stacking of
172the parking in the front so this will not interfere with the current renovations um taking place at on the property this um part of this project includes rainwater retention and underground infrastructure landscaping and the sidewalk right now part of the current construction that the school board is starting does not include reconfiguring that parking lot i know that is something that has been of discussion but that is not part of the current project um but okay i am considering that um i have considered that with this proposal from fdot um that we are just moving in slightly uh in that area and it would not i mean i haven't seen a design for the proposed new parent loop but it does not seem that it would impede any changes on our property will we have to
173move fences we will be moving fences and whose cost fdot at pardon florida department of transportation okay so they will be paying the cost yes and that includes the water retention area across the street i think they will be tapping into that water retention area across the street with a underground infrastructure drainage system and that will actually benefit our property which currently does hold a little more water than it should in that area along the sidewalk and in that parking lot but that will be part of their discovery process it will be part of their permitting with st john's water as well but yes that is the intention is to tap into that retention area to help flow into the larger attention across the street okay so mr group and mrs doster you see this
174as a plus for the school itself and for volusia county schools this will not hinder any activities or any renovations any renovating plans that are going on at new smyrna beach middle school correct that's correct it will not impede or interfere with anything we're doing there and and like stephanie said it will benefit the district in the long run uh especially from the water retention standpoint that will improve that situation on the lower part of myrtle avenue is where all that retention water will currently without where that will run to okay i just i just don't want to incur any additional costs for the district for us deeding this to the city of new smyrna if it helps the flow that benefits our county and counties surrounding us i think that's beneficial i just don't
175want our that middle school to take any bumps because of it but thank you for the reassurance when the project is completed the responsibility of maintenance of the trail and the landscaping outside of our fence and all infrastructure outside of the fence will be to the city of new smyrna beach so okay the improvements will benefit our students will benefit the walkers and the bike riders in this area that's wonderful thank you both very much and i appreciate your patience thank you thank you ms haynes you're welcome um mr purses yeah i was wondering could could would you mind madam chair if uh someone from ffdot came to the dice could we ask him to come to the front to join us good afternoon my name is sylvia joseph i'm with florida department of transportation
176and i'm the ftw project manager yeah i think you just pull the mic a little bit closer we can hear you a little bit better yeah i wonder if you could just tell us a little bit this this is a pretty massive project um it's i think it's in five five counties is that correct and i don't know 250 miles or or more yes um and so could you just explain a little bit about this is a massive project it's a well collection but what we're doing is like the whole project we're just doing a segment of the project from our 10th street on uh metal avenue from 10th street to 44 which is a gap we just saw that just the segment we're doing different there are different projects with this long rail we're
177doing different segments but we we are doing just one that specific segment now so is it about halfway finished or how would you describe it says halfway as far as our project right the whole project the whole project we like like we said we're doing segment by segment okay uh we have done different different segments i think we uh there was a a sketch that showed all the segments that are completed and um if we could show that sketching we can accomplish different different different segments here we are the first one so it starts in st augustine is that what i'm seeing that is that is all yeah yes i guess i i think i called the consultant should have more knowledge of the the whole project i i have the consultant well i think
178it's just good i just wanted the the board to be able to see why they call it a loop and uh i think as in terms of benefiting uh just the fact that it'd benefit the quality of life folks know you know we always encourage people to get outside exercise walk bicycle families adults everything and do it safely and uh i think that's what this loop is all about um yeah so i'm tyler mullenberg i'm the engineer of record for this project uh with newkirk engineering we're a consultant for f dot this is one of two state of florida major trail network programs that are funded that are in the central florida area one is of course our saint john's river to sea loop trail which is the five county loop trail it will connect
179all the way from titusville to um west volusia sanford it's part of the spring to spring trails network that um a lot of i think echo money has gone towards yeah over the past 15 years so what's in green are the existing trails that have been built the purple our project for example is a 1.25 mile segment along just myrtle avenue here it's fully funded for construction in 2023. the intent is to create a loop that both for ecotourism and for local folks we can promote more outdoor activity as much as possible a lot of these trail segments are being routed connecting existing features where people would want to bike or walk or otherwise and so in this case the middle school is right along the route but we also connect in daytona state college
180to the southwest and the planned route would connect in with the downtown area and there's a fair bit of housing along the way that we're trying to pick up yeah i remember we had almost on the council we uh volusia echo funds were used a lot for that west part uh over there to just continue to build this trail system this multi multi-track is that what you guys guys that's a multi-use trail and so it's kind of like eating an elephant you got to take it one bite at a time it's it's too big of a project for us to solve every problem in one sitting so this segment is one of the segments that had a more obvious solution to it and you know the existing sidewalk that's there is in pretty poor shape
181we have a lot of uh obstructions along the path and and so this is something that was trying to get fast-tracked forward and get in place because it has benefits for the whole world spring the spring trail over there i mean you know when they do it it's it's amazing it's wide and it's at least 12 feet wide and so to talk a little bit about what we would be taking from the middle school to repurpose here there's an existing shallow retention area that the water would be rerouted into the larger pond that retention area currently floods across the existing sidewalk in front of the school there and floods across myrtle and flows down the street and you get kind of a muddy flow on the side of the road into an inland so all
182that's going to be rerouted into a closed drainage system the sidewalk won't flood anymore we're going to have shrubs and a lot of ground cover and other plants the landscaping has been designed with a splitter island so the trail widens out and we have landscaping in a central island so that we won't see as much of the parent pickup traffic parked on the sidewalk which means the sidewalk can't be used um you know so as much as possible we're creating a shade canopy and that protective envelope but we needed space to do it so we're shifting the security fence back we we worked closely with stephanie and the other folks at school board and with the fdot legal folks to develop an agreement that we will put a temporary security fence in place during construction
183it'll we have a plans update phase that we'll go through so we'll get all the specifications approved by the school board we will get everything constructed get the final security fence constructed prior to removal of the temporary fence principal and another school board representative will be able to inspect so we have a lot of assurances and details that have gone in to try to make it a a good project for everybody and you know some of the land area was actually you know designed with additional property being transferred so that we could fit that landscaping and there's other features that were desirable you know to make it a better function for everybody into the project yeah i have full full confidence they'll do a great a great job as they have done in other parts
184i i i just wanted to hear more so i think it's pretty exciting and i think it's a good it's a good place for it actually yeah absolutely this has been one of the better projects i've gotten to work on in my career there's a lot more uh popular support for trails and these types of oh yeah way more so mr clown they're putting in roundabouts hey that was one of the other projects i had was grand avenue so oh yeah no no more roundabouts no yeah no this one's a lot less controversial i'm sure um will we try our very best to do this construction while school is not in session okay so that's the thing i forgot to cover is we've agreed that the work in front of the school will happen over
185the summer um our funding got pushed from when we first had talked about it and so we've moved a year back but we were looking at summer 2023 now would be summer of 2024. with the latest cove bill out of the federal government they gave us notice that projects could accelerate so we could be back in 2023 but that's absolutely the work in front of the school will happen during summer and will coordinate so that there aren't summer school uses in that area that we would be impacting the other thing that we have been doing is continuing to reach out to cph here's the design firm working on the middle school improvement plan so as they're able to release information to us we're making sure that there aren't conflicts between those projects so that is
186something that we're aware of and we don't want to create a problem now i do see an entrance to the school here what impact or what will we put in place in order to protect the bike riders as they're driving through the entrance of a middle school at a given time or are there no entrances am i seeing that wrong um there are there's there's a bus loop there's two vehicular entrances and there's the maintenance um exit loop that's kind of the southernmost end of the sheet that you see there i i don't know that we have any measures for you know that are special for the driveways of the school versus other driveways along a trail typically we set our stop bars and our stop signs for the intersecting driveway behind the trail crossing
187we sign the trail crossing um i i expect that you'll have crossing guards and other staff that are going to be present during your school hours in the area but obviously not at every driveway this is a middle school we don't have any crossing guards my apologies no you're good you're good you're good i mean you were doing good till you got there um i i guess might you know and again i i could hear pat northey on my shoulder saying reuben what are you thinking about but um she's the trail queen uh in west volusia but uh you know that that's probably my biggest concern is to make sure that you know as you said it's a bust loop is there any parent entrance there i've never been to new smyrna middle school there
188is a parent entrance on that same sidewalk uh yeah we have four driveways along this frontage of the school and so fdot has really really thought this out well because i mean having a bike trail and ecotourism in front of a middle school at certain hours of the day is well i think the intent would be the eco-tourism would be directed more towards weekends when you'd have saturdays and sundays and school wouldn't be in session and it would actually be a net benefit because now you have a trail that's in front of your middle school so you have a state agency paying to improve your safe route to school for your kids it'll be awesome i see a net benefit i think it's a great idea i'm just concerned with that entrance and you know
189god forbid somebody gets hit you know you know we're putting a bike trail in front of an entrance of a middle school which at any uh at those critical hours both in the morning and the afternoon it's you know parents are everywhere in fact they'll probably be parked on that trail waiting for their kids to come out and that's what they do today and that's why we're putting landscaping around the trails so that you can't drive onto the trail from the road anymore so okay so that's a good point so where then will those cars so right now they park in the front of the school to wait for their kids to come out so where then will they go if it looks like it's pretty landlocked there so where where will those cars go
190in dismissal and that's an excellent question that i don't have any an excellent answer for i mean i i think they're right now we've had a lot of coordination where i've been told that this is a problem or they've tried to use police enforcement and that hasn't been affected um the staff from the school have tried to engage the situation and that it is a problem that they are unhappy with where the parents are parking and waiting for their kids and they appreciated an effort of us dissuading it from this location you know i was engaged to design a trail i wasn't engaged to solve that problem um so i didn't but you know the the short answer is you know it's a problem where they're parking now i did not find a better place
191for them to park but i can take measures to discourage them from parking on a pedestrian facility it's hard for kids to safely use the sidewalk when there's cars on it i think that that's a bigger safety issue than putting a trail in front of a middle school and ironically that's not you know your problem to fix and probably not a part of this conversation however nonetheless it is going to become an issue when you know you probably have 20 30 cars who park right on that little area now like it or not there actually is a plan uh for that i think miss cuthbert was going to share that she was trying to jump in but there is a plan for to move the parent pick up miss cuthbert did you want to share
192that okay anyway there's an area off to you can't really see it you can kind of see where the trees are at right now okay miss copper did you want to address that what the plans were yeah go ahead yes i'm i'm sorry the the lag of the conversation i apologize we are in the middle of a renovation at new smyrna beach middle school and i have been advocating to change that front parking to parent pickup we can always reconfigure we have land in the back part the northern west part of the campus that we can add parking for faculty and parents and we can make that front area a little more accessible we can use it in other ways mr groove and his team are extremely creative um they promised me i've had a
193promise the maintenance hub is moving to that's on that southern corner that the gentleman is talking about is moving to new smyrna middle we will have that extra space in there so we have other opportunities before us so you'll be glad that's why i asked that the questions i did at the very beginning because i wanted to have aware with all what we were going to do so this is happening really at the best time because our project manager uh and our court and our uh our construction management company as well as our engineers on the school site will take this into consideration and so i would love to have the general the engineers ideas at least have that accessible to our project managers so they can work together and so we have that plan
194so when 2024 comes around it's it's a beautiful spot it's easy people can go in and out and we don't have the dangerous intersections that mr clone was referring to so i have every faith in mr group's team to make that happen thank you thank you very much miss haines and dr frick thank you miss cuthbert so you know again i just now hearing that it'll be a parent loop that's even more but i trust that you all know what you're doing i support the the trails i support the loop so that's the non-issue i just think we have a lot of work on our side that needs to be done because at the end of the day this is at the front of a middle school and so you know whether we build the
195loop which we did at timber crest to build the loop for parking pickups because our cars were in the street and i tell you it's very heartbreaking when you get parents writing you because they got a 177 dollar ticket because they were waiting to pick up their kids from school and we're blocking the road so thank you you anyone else have any questions was there ever an option of looking across the street for the loop for the loop or for this for the trails so there were a few reasons the the preferred alternative showed the trail on the west side of the street one of them being that a primary user group would be our middle school students and creating the need for all the students to cross myrtle avenue right in front of the
196school would create a larger safety issue than locating it at the front of the school where it's easy for them to access so that was probably the biggest reason as we get north of 7th street between 7th street and joel street which is a little unmarked dirt road it's really preferable for the trail to be on the west side of the road i believe we have four existing driveways total where we have nine or ten residences on the east side that are fairly narrow in lot line and don't have a lot of setbacks so from a location of trail perspective on that block it was better on the west side we do cross the street at that point but it was a you know the balance of safety of kids crossing from the middle school
197plus the rest of the alignment seemed preferable to keep it in the location of the existing sidewalk safety's first for sure any other discussion i want to thank all of you and i especially want to thank you for coming up and adding the additional details and explaining this to us i've had the privilege of going to new smyrna beach middle school for a variety of events and so i kind of understand the layout of where all the parking is and you know currently where the maintenance piece is that's going to be moved and all of that and there is property there and so you know and i support the whole trails piece i think it's a wonderful opportunity for us and um i look forward well if any of it it passes tonight i look
198forward to seeing the outcome of it dr fritz the superintendent recommends the approval of resolution 21 or 2021-19 declaring a portion of the property in front of new smyrna beach middle school is surplus which will form part of the right-of-way for the florida department of transportation river sea trail all right you've heard the recommendation of the superintendent did we have a motion i didn't know yes we want you to make the motion thank you miss cuthbert who would like to second it i'd like to second it mr purchase would like to second it so miss cuthbert has made the motion mr purchase has seconded all those in favor say aye aye aye any opposed it's approved thank you very much we're moving on to item 16.05 board action item for approval of job descriptions mr
199west ah good evening let me put on my hr hat here for a moment um so just like to uh bring before the board a number of job descriptions there are a number of new job descriptions that are coming before you that actually are part of a an agreement that we had with aspie and mou for electrical mechanical and refrigeration plumbing like mechanical engineer so we have those positions that are coming forward to you tonight also along with the custodial pilot the new custodian and head custodian job descriptions and an updating of the guardian commander superintendent superintendent recommends the approval of the resolutions of job descriptions that mr west talked about board members you've heard the superintendent's recommendation for the following job descriptions move approval all right second all right mr purchase has made the
200motion mr clone is seconded all those any discussion okay all those in favor say i any opposed then move forward mr west thank you at this time we are at 17.01 public participation do we have any thank you miss schultz then and well we already did 17.01 we're moving on to 18.01 with no public participation so we are at items from board members and the superintendent or board board attorney for discussion announcement or approval so we're starting with 19.01 who would like to go first uh madam chair i just wanted to call your attention i left this pamphlet i hope each of you got it and some of the uh it's it's it's pretty cool because it's easy to follow and if as you know any bill has to go through three committees and it
201just sort of shows you where these particular bills are these are bills that really relate to children children's issues and i just i just have it there for your information and you can see some of the ones that i've already passed two or three committees so that usually is a is a good indication that they will be there at the end uh but um i i really love the one well i love a few of them here but student illiteracy and the k-12 education the the home book delivery for elementary students which as some of you know is kind of is a a uh paralleling the dolly parton imagination library that you know sends books to children from from one month after they're born i think to every month thereafter until they turn five and
202uh so this would be cool just some good things and just wanted to share that with the board thank you ma'am chair thank you mrs cuthbert do you have anything you'd like to share mrs cuthbert oh there you are um well i did talk to the mute button when you okayed the pilot program for the custodial i ran for office in 2014 because when i retired in 2012 from polish county schools that was the last year of our custodians and i ran a good 25 percent of my energy was to get the custodians back and so i just wanted to say i'm so delighted to be part of this new pilot program um i think it's that mr craft has it well organized uh we will tweak it i'm sure we'll look back and forth
203you know we didn't bring it back for the longest time because of the money and the expense and uh it was it was difficult but it's so good to bring our own people back and it was kind of an interesting evening tonight when we when mr johnson came back to volusia county we also added someone from orange county to volusia county mr shandoff to our our team and so it's nice i'm so lucky to have three of those 15 schools in my district to begin that pilot program so i'm really looking forward to to all of this we when you look back since the beginning of the year we've been through so many changes a lot of our changes have been very difficult to make some of them are difficult to keep there's still a
204lot of we've made some mistakes we've corrected a lot of them a lot of them we would still love to correct but whatever we decide to do i know our listening to a lot of the public participation i know that in all of our hearts and everyone in this boardroom and me at home we all have one goal in mind and that is to protect our students and to provide them with the best safest healthiest education we we can give them that is still our number one goal we will always have the pros and cons those who agree and disagree with us we just have to stay true to our core and know that you know in the end it thinks our problems will be solved so as we move forward this last quarter of
205the school year i think it's very important for us to remember our whole purpose is to see our students graduate and i think i think it would be a good time to talk to mr reckenwald again um it didn't if those quotes were accurate these are not the quotes that we heard these are not some of the conversations we heard and i know that dr fritz has told us that his conversations were not the same as mr richterball has stated so we do need to get this straightened out uh i believe as soon as possible so i hope that within the next couple of days our very level-headed superintendent we'll give him a phone call and maybe we can get this thing straightened out once and for all you don't have a peek [Laughter] well
206i did have miss haynes on the call with me so she can attest to what i said well good um i you know i'll give you the fly squatter if you want but um i do think that you know we we just you know our kids deserve a second and second chance if we can at all provide that and i do know the ocean center is probably the best place to have it based on weather air conditioning safety control security everything that's involved in all of this plus it's it's tradition we've been going to the ocean center since the late 1980s when it was built when it was first built so um i i thank you very much for um indulging me today so i can stay home and keep my foot up to heal
207so i hope to be with you again on the 13th i'm sorry again gosh it's been a long meeting so i wish everyone a safe trip home but thank you for listening to me and like you know the lag between watching it on the computer hearing it on the phone or two different things so thank you very much thank you mrs cuthbert and um we were happy that you could be with us this evening over the phone and virtually um okay mr clone would you like to speak next i haven't given you a chance i i have nothing okay what mrs burnett write that down just listening to some of the some of the comments tonight i do think that we owe it to our students and our staff to to make sure that we
208do have appropriate use of counselors and that we have enough the week that the school system has seen we definitely need to make sure that we are dedicating time with our counselors so that they have the opportunity to appropriately meet with with our students and and the staff let's not forget the staff because i know atlantic for one had a rough week and there's some staff there that's that's hurting as well and and we just need to make sure that that we give them opportunities to um to talk to somebody invent and that those counselors have that job to focus on and not other jobs to focus on so i hope that we can um that we can reach out and support them and that we have a better week next week for everybody yeah
209i i agree with you and so um based on you know some of the comments that happened tonight about the meeting at the county council and the fact that some statements were made that kind of threw dr fritz under the bus i'm actually going to bat for him um first of all i'm going to start off with mr jeff brower he he's the county chair at this time and he worked very hard i will tell you on helping to move us towards the opportunity of getting more seating for graduation he actually spoke at the county council meeting he sent some emails and everything and he kind of sent a very direct email that said it was time to open up more seating and so dr fritz did arrange for a virtual meeting and he included
210me on that meeting and i went into that meeting having been told what mr rechtenwald had said at the county council meeting which was a little disheartening to me that you know he put it back over here and said it was kind of all of our fault for why there was only two tickets and everything and what i will tell you in that meeting is dr fritz was very firm about moving forward you know and at that point the only piece we were being allowed to move forward on was to move towards four tickets um but that was met with met with resistance okay but he stood firm in that conversation um had he not stood firm i and and we had jeff brower on our side i don't i think we'd still be at
211two tickets so when i hear that they said oh well it's you know our fault that we haven't gone beyond two tickets that was but i'd heard it prior to it so i want everyone to hear that dr fritz was very firm in that virtual meeting and requested at least four and he said he also requested that we continue to have discussions as we move closer to this time because the thing about this is we are you know if we're running the facility we already have it it's just like okay so can we update it now and could we go to six tickets or whatever and um i am very appreciative because we have moved taylor now away from the 8 a.m spot on sunday morning and they're going to be 7 p.m and i'm
212very thankful for that because that is a more reasonable time for those families and for the time that they have to travel and everything to get there so you know i appreciate everybody that came and spoke tonight um so that we could you know hear what the thoughts are and everything but i i just want everyone to know that dr fritz stood firm to try to get us to four but it's going to take some more pressure i believe on um our county council and mr reckenwald to get us beyond that yes i agree i think i think um also that we might want to have representatives everybody get in a meeting at once and and stop this finger pointing and when everybody is not at the same table at the same time too many
213different opinions or perceptions are are thought of so i do think as time goes on there's plenty of opportunity for us to increase those tickets but i think that we need to have a meeting with somebody from every entity at the at the table and that way there's no misconception of what is being said and who's saying what i agree with you and and i and i do think that you know the smaller schools need to have a little bit of an opportunity to to have more if there's availability you know but that's that's not my job um but um i don't mind having this conversation i don't i certainly don't mind having that conversation the deal is though this board has to stand firm if you allow one school to have more tickets and
214nine not to so what what's going to happen is you have university who has 2600 kids and then you have spruce crate that's got 1700 kids and they said well we can have five and make it and and then you have university can have four and then you have taylor they could have six and so the reason we went that way is because we really didn't want to you know the same argument taylor's using other small schools could use as well saying we're not as large as university or deland and so that's why we kept it consistent we realized you could put more taylor students into the ocean center but then you open that up and what we can't do is if we make an agreement to do that for taylor we can't bend on
215it the other night you know you can't you can't go across and have a different number for every school um this board room will be packed i i can promise you that so um i i can i can certainly address taylor if you want me to it's just the board has to stand strong when the emails start coming from the other schools so dr fitz my question on that is based on what i saw of the older contracts is we had x number of seats okay so like say six thousand um and so they were able to do six thousand tickets from the school and my and granted taylor's a little unique um because up until last year they never held their graduation at the ocean center theirs was always held at stetson and the
216the area was packed okay but in the past it's my understanding is you know the limit was 6 000 tickets and um each high school regardless of their size basically took the number of students that were graduating and divided it into that so there wasn't equi it wasn't equitable in the past you know like because because deland university and spruce creek were larger they and i don't know the exact numbers you know that they got but say they each at that time got six well you know sea breeze and atlantic because they're smaller could have had 10 or 12 i mean because it was like it was just you have 6 000 tickets to sell i think where we're at right now and and trust me i was on that call with you and you
217know i appreciate you continuing to say no we need to go to four we need to go to four because they didn't want to go to well one person did not want to go to four but um my thing now is if like even if we're stuck at four at this point okay because they're not they're not budging i think if we take whoever's the largest which is a toss-up on any given day between deland and university it depends on you know what the numbers are but let's just say you know and and not everybody attended but let's just go with a number of 600 i think we're safe with 600 you know students and they're allowing four that's 2400 um you know parents or family members coming so you know i'm open to and
218and i have the two largest high schools in the smallest i'm open to the fact that if we say okay it's 2400 tickets or if we even say it ends up being say 3 000 tickets that we divide it by the number of students because that's how we did do it in the past and i i can i can fight that like because trust me i'm going to get hit with the most because the other problem though is sure this is the configuration between the configuration it's not the capacity they can't set up like if you set up for a group of four you can't go to a group of five in between graduations and you can't uncover and cover seats yeah time frame and you've got to keep that three foot at least spacing
219around that hub of four all the way around in front to the side to the back to that side the only option would be to do taylor because it's at the end of the graduation there is the end and that's the only one that that's what i'm saying but you couldn't do it for the others because you can't bring seats in between graduations to set things up you could at taylor uh well you you could take off the seat coverings because you wouldn't have to recover you wouldn't have to redo it what i've actually asked for taylor um after being there last year and what happened um because i even talked to the tech guys and i said i don't think they filled even for like so carl you went first last year if you
220remember the seats are spread out on the floor and um you know the students come in and sit in the seats if need be they go into the lower bowl because trust me for deland and university they filled the floor and the lower bowl the students did in order to space them out and then the parents went to the upper bowl well by the time we got to taylor last year and i think they were last last year they didn't they filled three rows on the floor like just three rows and maybe a few in the fourth row like not even a full fourth row but the parents were clear up here and so what i've kind of already asked for them is like since they're the last group of the evening why can't they
221move to the lower ball do you i mean because they were so f i mean that place just echoed i think we did make that adjustment yeah actually there's nobody in there i mean it was sad yeah so again it you would have to excuse me it's not that the ocean center i mean ocean center could do it for taylor since they're at the end okay but it would still take more manpower just do all that and then like dr fritz said you'd have to stand firm on the other schools if they knew taylor was getting more because they're small because then you start getting the sea breezes smaller than the land and this school is smaller than that everybody's smaller than yeah the top three you know i mean i need to be clear
222it would not be my recommendation to give one school more than another right but if the board says it's really that important particularly you know sayings because that's your area then you know the rest of the board has to stand behind it and say that we're going to support the four because you know what we said with with the county was we want to keep revisiting this if things change if things start to improve we want to come back and we want to be able to ask for more that's still the intent you know that's absolutely intent if things were to get better if they don't get better then we would have to make a decision and what i'm just saying is we would have to stand tough on this one this is not an
223easy decision because you're going to make some people you know you may make the folks that taylor are happy but you're going to make nine other schools unhappy yeah well what what i'd like to see right now is i'd like for us to keep going back to the county and you know we went from two to four i'd like to see if we could go to six you know as the next spot because then they can group it off and sit because right now they're gonna have to group them off in four they're not grouping it at all because they're holding other events you know they've got a monster truck thing coming up and things like that but you know i'm thinking if we could set some timeline with them of like we come back
224and meet you know by april 10th and say okay or even april 15th can we go to six at that point you know leaving still enough time that the final decision will ultimately be made before they have to set us set it up for the way it's going to be i mean so i i think that you know it really is all coming down to semantics and i believe what i in hearing it what the county is saying is we've agreed to go up to 2400 right so four per graduate at 600 a pop so that's 2400 and then the school district is deciding in order to keep it fair based on what you just said uh the superintendent then is deciding in order to keep it fair that we leave the same amount of
225numbers so what i want but it's not just the superintendent because the board the county did say once we set it up we can't add and break it down no i hear you i hear you so when i think of most like deltona high i think was what 400 graduates and so that would take it to six so if we asked them to bundle them in twos so that that point and again i don't know what it would look like i don't know what our actual graduation numbers are right now so i'm not but you know if we ask them to bundle it in twos then you could arguably so you know because and you know i didn't watch any of the county council things so i could totally see how they're saying we're giving
226you but you're limiting the amount of folks for whatever the reason right wrong etc so maybe we could look at because you know again i think at the end of the day we all want most as many people as possible to enjoy that day and you know brevard county specifically in theirs denoted that it would be based on the class size and the size of the venue so in other words if you had a smaller class you obviously can have more gas etc and so i i would you know again i don't know the numbers but i'd encourage you and then if if we're able to move up some you know and like i said to one parent who called me from spruce creek you know i don't know that i didn't know at the
227time that a little more would even make a difference for spruce creek if they gave 500 more that might make a difference for a smaller school but not for a larger school so in order to take spruce creek from four to five it would require them to expand you know or from four to six um but you know just something to explore i mean again i i think at the end of the day we for me i'd rather have as many parents there as possible siblings etc um as long as we can do it within the configuration that we're set for and that is a limitation last year i we had the same conversation on africa because i was walking around the lake and um you know the bottom line was we couldn't go from
228two to three because of the configuration you know they just wouldn't be able to do it so um and i just if we could explore what that would even look like for our schools because right now we're saying anecdotally you know three schools will likely be you know at four and everybody else will be at moore we don't know this so i'd be curious to see those numbers again it's not our decision but you know again i think we all want families to be there and if jamie hayne who's got the two largest schools no but again we you know it's she's got the two largest and she's got the smallest and she's got the smallest so but you know again i think i mean you could literally put the whole town of pearson with
229all due respect love our friends at pierce and in the ocean center and still there'd be and what's interesting in looking at the contract is you have you know police you know it's the same amount of support that we're paying for yet we're not taking advantage of that capacity so i don't know about you when wawa has the drinks at 99 cents i get the biggest one and so because they're all 99 so why would i get the small okay and that's kind of how i look at it you know but i'd be curious to see you know well i mean the plan that i have and the plan going forward was to meet with the county again as the cdc starts to change and relax to see if we can get them up increased
230um i i strongly do caution us to be careful about doing different numbers for different for different schools um you know we would have to be very strategic here talk about rearranging time so in other words you would have to start with your biggest configuration first and then work backwards so you get to tailor because you'd have to remove chairs in between well no that's what i'm saying if we do it by twos if it's possible to do it by twos and again i don't know this i don't i'm not a stadium yeah but if it were possible to do it by two then we could if we had the capacity we could go up by two more for let's say a deltona high to reach that 2400 uh whereas for taylor you can invite
231the but whole town empty seats so the way i understood it and i'll ask uh dr barrio if he understood it this way the way they were going to sell this so like if you got four tickets and you were a family but you were a family of three you would sit there with your family and your pot they're not going to put another person right next to you because they're not part of your pot right and it's actually better to go with the pot is that correct so that you would be pod setting so um you know i i mean i i can certainly go back to the county and look at uh increasing everybody um you know going different numbers for different schools will require changing of graduation that are set as far
232as times because we will literally have to start with the largest and work backwards and i hear what you're saying with the two but you can't count on every two and it takes more space for twos because you're having to leave a wider berth around it that's why the four is better because like when you put the four together then you just have that piece around it but if you do twos they have to spread out more like this so that's why i mean my next goal really was at the end of the last meeting was can we go back next time and maybe inch it up to six and then make a pot of six um you know because when you make the pot of six it's still just the same circumference piece around
233it but when you go those twos you have to spread them out like i said i mean again i'm not pretending to know the answer today however you know again i i think that a lot of the back and forth with the community is the semantics of the fact that the ocean center is saying well we're giving you 2 400 seats or whatever the number is there's there's no question that yeah there's a lot of finger point going on and i don't have a i don't have a problem going back to the county before the next board meeting and seeing where we're at to see if any there's been any relaxation uh you know we'll see what's happening with the governor and see if there's any reduction and we can certainly do that dr barrio
234can set that up um and you know i'd like to so that you are a part of this conversation have a member saying since you started it maybe you or mr persis or somebody that already opened the door at least once can be a part um so that when we get there you can hear the conversation and you can help understand where it is we're trying to go and our next board meeting is on the 13th if we can get a meeting dr barrios with with the ocean center prior to that i think the goals of this board should be that we try to go to six but we're trying to go to six for everybody yeah and if you know there's a point that we get down the road and this board says you
235know scott we're okay stand on our ground and you know pierson can go to eight but everybody else is gonna stay at four you know you just gotta prepare for that i would not make that decision today no i wouldn't i would wait because they're going to have everybody i'm going to just tell you everybody in the world they're all going to come out do you want them to come out now or do you want to come out later be no limits by the time we graduate there could be no lunch well and i think that one of the things that we're dealing with community-wise is the fact that you know bike week just happened and the community saw the county's response to that although arguably they'll say it was private businesses then you'll we
236have the monster truck thing i haven't seen any pictures of the cheerleading thing but i'd be curious to see as some of these events are starting to engage you know i can probably assure you the monster truck people didn't rent the place to fill the place up a quarter of the ways you know and pay the same fee they would normally so i'd be curious i think after some of these things have taken place the vaccination the change in the county and the state's position i mean this is just ever-changing and it's what i said earlier to fox this is ever-changing covett is ever changing and we're committed to our students and ensuring we can get as many people as we can to celebrate with them you know there's still a lot of time yeah
237time is probably the only thing we really have on ourselves we can be consistent i mean i think between board meetings we should gave one of our goals should be every between every board meeting we have a meeting with oc so we can come back and give a report where we're at i would like a board member to be there with us you can rotate it out but i would like to be important um to be there so that you know i say our goal is to try to get it to six at the next board meeting if we can and based on some of the relaxations um rose i'm going to ask that mr pendley between the two of you you stay in touch with the cdc guidelines and what's being relaxed at the
238state level so for example when the governor says events are open that we have that information prior to going to the meeting with the county so that we can walk in there with some some evidence as we go forward okay um in fact rose and kevin it would be good if you could join that meeting with us and i i mean if we could possibly do this since you know they threw out well there's different configurations or whatever but i actually think maybe if it's possible for the next board meeting if they can release to us like just even what the configuration's going to look like and if we had the current expected high school senior numbers for each high school so that you know we knew how many each high school was planning on
239graduating and i know it may not be set in stone yet but like close enough and we could actually project what the seating looked like you know and so like okay so we're here at four but you know when you take the land high this is what it's going to look like versus you know because i think the visual because the problem is people have gone to the website for the ocean center and they've just seen like what the total capacity is not even understanding that well the way it's set up there's not maybe that much capacity you know in it and so i think it would be to our advantage if we're proactive and we can say here's the numbers that are graduating because that's the other thing everybody only knows about their school
240like they don't understand the other numbers and then a map of what it looks like and it's like okay so we've gone to four now and when we group by fours you know this is where we're at you know with those classes and i find visuals sometimes you know help when they can actually see it and i i do i do commend you though because you've been very very professional in your approach this you really have we've listened to cdc we've listened to the department of health we've met with the county we've negotiated we have not asked for anything more than what cdc has permitted when they went from 30 to 60 we said okay it's time to go from two to four you've been very good in your approach and you know as a
241board that at the end of the day we're gonna get to june and you are not going to make a hundred percent of the people out there it is just not going to happen but you're doing the right work for our kids and getting it more and safe and and you know we have agreed that look we'll go back and we'll keep checking and we'll keep pushing and as things start to change we're going to keep asking those questions i i think as a school board that's all you can really do you know i mean we can't oh we can't open it up to everybody and we heard you know i counted the number of speakers that came in and what their topics were today and kelly and i are going to start to do
242that because it's good trend data for us to see what topics they were talking about we had 25 speakers five came and spoke on graduation five right all from the same school so it wasn't a mass number i think the general population appreciates this board working to get it from two to four i think they really do and i think they will appreciate the fact that if we can keep working with the ocean center in the county and they know even if it never goes above four the board is going back and trying to make this work safely for our kids and i think that's all we can do as a board as a team that's what we can do we're going to put a best fort forward we're going to try to make sure
243that we can do this safely and we're going to have regular meetings with them and we'll pull out the evidence and at the end of the day if we get it up to six or we get it to eight or we get it unlimited then great if not you you've done the best job you can i really do believe that we're gonna agree two better hey we gotta celebrate that we're two better than we were last year all right all right all right twice as man 50 increase that's right [Laughter] any further discussion than hearing then we're adjourned