Volusia County School Board Meeting 4⧸26⧸2022

001one minute we'll get started in just one minute good afternoon and welcome to the volusia county school board meeting today is tuesday april 26th we will call this meeting to order please stand for the pledge of allegiance and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty thank you and once again welcome to the volusia county school board meeting i'd like to start off by introducing all of the amazing folks that are around the diocese with me we'll start off on the left hand side with mr carl purses representative for district four next to mr persis we have mrs linda cuthbert representative for district three next to miss cuthbert we have our school board attorney mr ted doran the honorable ted doran over here on the right hand side we

002have our amazing agency clerk aaron miss aaron lieben next to mrs miss lieben we have mrs anita burnett representative for district two next to mrs burnett we have miss jamie haynes vice chairwoman of from district one and next to mrs haynes we have our superintendent rachel hazel who is here today and i am reuben colon representative for district five and i have the pleasure of serving as the chair for this year items for approval on this agenda are 3.01 6.02 19.01 there will be several opportunities for the public to weigh in and provide a public comment uh there is a time certain at six o'clock where we will start no sooner than that to go ahead and listen to public comment at that time we will allot 15 minutes for comment after that before we

003vote on any board action item we will call for public comment as well and at the end of the meeting if there are any additional cards for public comment we will listen to those at that time next up we have item 1.02 district vision statement and board member comments where will we start today ms haynes thank you so there's been a lot of things going on that are wonderful for our students and for all of our staff and last week there was a lot going on but i have to honestly say that we have to give a shout out to the group that worked together to put on the teen job fairs i was at the one on the west side of the county along with mr colon and we had 507 people walk through

004the door at the center at deltona looking for you know with their children or whatever looking for jobs and all of the companies and businesses that came they were they did a great job with the kids and were looking to hire them but in addition to not only looking to hire our students some of them walked out of there that night with applications for even some of our parents so some of our parents even got a chance to fill out an application who are looking for jobs so i am so happy that we started this last year and i hope that we continue it because i think it's just a win-win and i've already got a list of people that didn't participate but heard about it and are interested in participating the next one that

005we have so thank you thank you miss hayne next up ms cuthbert um good afternoon everyone this time of year everyone is always so excited when athletes commit to colleges um spring football probably this is spring right yeah spring football is coming around baseball's starting but i think one of the most celebratory celebrations for me is our academics so it's still i'm delighted to see deltona middle who science yeah got in for lego and stem congratulations to all of you in your competition we also have a science olympiad winners in the audience tonight congratulations to you in your competitions and also i was at the battle for the books at uh deland at deltona deltona i'm on the other side of the county daytona library regional library and we had all the middle schools except

006for a couple represented so congratulations to all it's so nice to see our middle schools rise they are the cream at the top and they always rise so thank you guys thank very much for and congratulations on your competitions and your success because we all are lifelong learners are we not thank you thank you miss burnett thank you good afternoon everybody and it's so nice to see all the science olympiad um participants here and i i am my both of my sons participated in that in junior or middle school i'm sorry middle school and high school so it's always been fun for me to go watch some of the things that are invented by kids it's amazing because i can't think that i would ever have that much thought to put in in creativity so

007great job and i attended the uh atlantic academic signing today and it was so fun because you know like you said we we always um have the sports signing which is great because i'm a sports fan but um but it's nice to see us celebrate the academics too and that's very important and they had a really good group and a really good turnout and it was very exciting this was their first one and uh sounds like they're going to make this an annual event it was very good so thank you mr purses yeah thank you mr chair great comments everybody and you all are so right there's always so much going on at our schools unfortunately um i've been battling a uh upper respiratory infection for the last three weeks so if you want to

008know anything about a z-pack or um steroids uh throat lossengers i can i can attest to those things but haven't been in schools much the last two weeks but it's certainly nice seeing students and their teachers here and receiving awards and accolades for the great job that you all are doing just keep it up thank you mr chair thank you miss hazel well it has been a busy week and you all have highlighted some of the my favorite things that i've been to the teen job fair especially and some of the things but i also wanted to point out we had our job fair for teachers the last week as well and although we don't have a human resources update to share i am proud that i i talked with miss field earlier today and

009she told me that we had hired a hundred more teachers than we hired at the job fair last year so we're up to almost 200 200 new teachers joining our family is pretty exciting to me great thank you and so this weekend i had the pleasure of joining ms haynes at the vol fun walk at gemini springs dozens of families came out we had a great time walking so congratulations to our vol team uh for the work they did there miss lafisse at osteen elementary they threw the little mermaid it was amazing amazing and you know i think the kids don't realize this but parents about my age were singing along to every single little mermaid song and i think we enjoyed it slightly more than the kids did because that's from our time but

010we won't tell anybody and also we had the kindergarten first grade performances at pride elementary those of course was a great time and kudos to the admin team and the music department at pride elementary uh for that and today is a really exciting day for me because i see a lot of my deltona schools out there so i'm not going to talk about any of that because we'll have time to to talk about that later all right anybody else anything else all right next up 2.01 uh superintendent are there any changes to the agenda uh yes mr chair there are item 8.04 is going to be removed from the agenda that is the printed and digital textbooks for math adoptions we'll be putting that on our next agenda in light of recent events and then

011we have a few items added to the agenda item 14.02 district insurance and administrative contract renewals item 4.03 property insurance renewal item 15.09 approval of settlement fleet liability claim and 19.01 approval of the interim superintendents employment agreement great thank board you've heard the changes to the agenda ms haynes so since we're removing 8.04 i had a question about item 12.07 and if that needed to be removed also because it's for the printed and digital math textbooks so that item um actually i'm looking out to see if ms craft that item is actually for the company through which we purchase it through but it's not for the actual materials adoption we pulled off the ones that have the specified materials adoption but that one is just a contract with the company that we you any other

012questions burnett yes thank you um and so the books for 8.05 and 8.06 were they affected by anything they are not um 8.05 is the textbooks for chorus and 8.06 of the textbooks for social studies and those are actually what we call gap year purchases so that's during the year that we're actually selecting materials that is a year where we still have to make a purchase of materials but it's not under the official adoption and those are not part of the math adoption okay thank you any other questions ward you've heard the amended changes to the agenda do we have a motion to approve the agenda as amended mr chairman i um make a motion that we approve the agenda for tonight's thank you do we have a second i second it quotient has been

013properly made by ms kupper seconded by mrs haynes any further discussion hearing none we will pass the agenda for this evening next up we have administrative appointments mrs superintendent yes i am going to ask mr john kraft to come forward please hi mr craft so it is my pleasure to recommend mr kraft for assistant director of maintenance and operations mr kraft has been with volusia county schools since 2013 when he started with us as an office specialist he since that time he served as coordinator in facilities and maintenance and coordinator of environmental he has a bachelor's degree from embery riddle and a master's degree from embry riddle and it is my recommendation that he be appointed assistant director of maintenance and operations effective tomorrow if tomorrow wow all right board you've heard the recommendation to

014appoint mr john kraft as the assistant director for maintenance and operations department do we have a motion move approval a second emotions are properly made by mr purses seconded by ms cuthbert any further discussion i have one comment gothbert mr kraft over quite all these years you have been asked to do a lot of things and and i say things because it's been on all spectrums whether it's maintenance whether it's buying equipment whether it's administrating or taking care of employees looking things over i mean double checking you've always been there and you've always been a reliable source so i just want to thank you for your service so far and now you're going to be really held accountable so i wish you all the best and we have absolutely no reservations whatsoever we all know

015that you're going to do a great job so thank you thank you anybody else you're not mr purses well just just to reiterate a little bit yeah you are really awesome you have held a lot of jobs and titles and hats and sometimes without a whole lot of warning we just said john can do it you know so we we give it to you and you always come through with flying colors and uh by the way so does your wife so i just want to throw that out maria ends is she here yes where ah you are amazing too over there in a purchasing department but anyway we are fortunate to have such a great couple working in our school district we always know that behind every great man is a better woman [Laughter] thank

016you well i will say that i never put one and one together until right now and so now i understand they are dynamic because behind every great man there's a great woman so now i that explains it it makes it clear ford you've heard the recommendation we had a motion in a second all those in favor say aye aye aye all those opposed nay motion passes mr kraft i'm sure you've got your speech laid out as you're going to thank your wife yes sir but i do have a tight time constraint but uh i do good afternoon everyone board members chair miss hazel thank you for the opportunity you know it's a it's a professional goal that i've had for a while to be able to get an increased amount of responsibility we have such

017a great team of support people here both in maintenance and in all the departments in the district and we all have the same goals here i mean it's all about the students so with this responsibility i'm going to be holding myself accountable and definitely looking to see how we can help the students in the classrooms and reaching out with open communication to the maintenance and operations department hearing what they have to offer and uh helping empower them to make some good decisions we have a great team here so really i just want to help lead where i can and this is a great opportunity thank you to maria for all her support and my maintenance family but thank you again for the opportunity awesome and [Applause] and for those of you that don't know we

018are transitioning back our custodial staff and maintenance folks back to uh the district instead of being outsourced to the company so we are extremely glad that we are starting to build that infrastructure up to so our schools will be clean voted already didn't we yeah yeah we voted did we we can vote again all those in favor say aye aye all those opposed say nay yeah because we made a motion and then you had discussion and then we do have to vote good catch okay we voted i there we go all right miss all right now i'd like jana spouse to come up please and while she's coming up um so mr kraft is leaving the coordinator position for environmental and so talk about succession planning here is miss faust she began her career with

019volusia county schools in 2006 as an office specialist she has worked as a specialist in maintenance and operations trade specialist in maintenance and supervisor in trade maintenance and operations and i am very pleased to recommend ms faust as our next coordinator for environmental services thank you board you've heard the recommendation of the superintendent to appoint mr janice files as the environmental coordinator for the maintenance and operations department do we have a motion to approve so moved we have a second i second motion has been made by ms anita burnett seconded by ms haynes any further discussion okay could you tell us a little bit especially for the audience about what your job and will entail what will you do for environmental services we'll mainly be focusing on the custodial program and the new schools that

020we're bringing in this year so getting them up and ready getting everyone trained and just getting the the environments up to what we're all hoping to see and working working with the principals hand in hand so that'll be that'll be fun that's wonderful that's that's an awful lot thank you very much and i wish you well on your the expansion of the pilot program so thank you thank you board we've had a motion in a second we'll go ahead and call the boat all those in favor say aye aye all those opposed say nay congratulations [Applause] good afternoon school board and mrs hazel i just wanted to hold the mic just a little closer to you so we can hear you there we go i just wanted to take this time to thank you for

021the opportunity for me to be able to serve the district in this new capacity throughout my time with the school board i was with the training department i've been with maintenance and i've served it in many different capacities and this one here i'm really looking forward to i think that getting out there and meeting with all the principals and getting out into each and every school and just making it the best learning environment that we can for our students so thank you very much for this opportunity thank you so much and please hang out for a picture as soon as we're done here thank you her next appointment is i'm going to ask stephanie workman to come forward please and as she's coming forward part of my former role was labor relations and all things

022human resources which payroll is a part of so don't worry i see some lori looks out there already miss workman is not giving up payroll however her job role is expanding and it is my pleasure to recommend her for interim director of human resources let me tell you a little bit about stephanie and this is going to take longer because her journey started in 2004 with volusia county schools as a hospital homebound teacher since that time she served as teacher on assignment middle school assistant principal instructional specialist coordinator for esd programs coordinator for reporting requirements and tech services coordinator at legacy scholars coordinator of master schedule back in technology services and currently the coordinator in payroll ms workman earned her bachelor's degree from west virginia state university and her master's and her specialist degree from

023marshall university and i am thrilled to be able to recommend her for interim director of human resources thank you board you've heard the recommendation of the superintendent to appoint mr stephanie workman as the interim director of human resources do we have a motion i'd like to make the motion that's miss workman be the as and i really want the interim word to go away i'll be honest with you but the director for human resources um second promotion has been properly made by ms hayne seconded by miss cuthbert any discussion miss haynes so i've known stephanie for years and it doesn't matter what's thrown at her whatever job they ask her to do she steps up to the plate and she does it and she does it beautifully and when she took on payroll and we

024all know how that important that was and she stepped in and cleaned it up and made sure people were getting paid and all that i felt then she should have already been made a director so i think this has been a long time coming and i'm so happy tonight to be able to support her in this role and i know she'll continue to do a wonderful job thank you anybody else you've always been a wizard with numbers you have such a a keen mind you see things that sometimes i i can't even imagine so it's it's remarkable that you and that's why she's had so much you've plugged in so many ways much like mr craft you've always been plugging in and it's amazing that you have such unique talents that you're you're successful everything

025you do so thank you for this new role because it's um it's it is too very uh tasking is that a good word tasking so but thank you thank you for filling in thank you so much good luck to you thank you anybody else all right hearing none we had a motion in a second all those in favor say aye aye all those opposing a motion passes [Applause] superintendent hazel chairman colon board members thank you for your confidence in me to serve as the interim director of human resources when i started my career in education 25 years ago i could have never imagined the path it would take from teaching high school mathematics to working in ese technology services payroll and now hr the path has not been one of logical progression which is ironic

026considering my logical background i learned early in my career the importance of servant leadership and always took advantage of opportunities to gain experience and grow you don't do not know how many times the phrases we need you to or will you take on have been said to me each time i learned from the individuals i worked with and always felt i left the experience better than when i started from being a school-based administrator to a district administrator in many facets each group of co-workers not only helped me grow as an employee but to also grow as a leader at the end of the day it is your team that truly deserves the credit for what is accomplished not just you as the leader i would like to publicly thank each of the teams i have

027worked with through the years for i would not be here today if it weren't for you i also want to take a moment and thank my mother who unfortunately couldn't be here this evening a former educator herself for always instilling in me the importance of hard work and dedication to your career i love and appreciate your continuous support lastly i want to thank my wife andrea for always supporting my latest career endeavor without your constant love and support i would not be the person i am today thank you and i know i have some big shoes to fill thank you and please hang out for a picture as soon as we're done all right mr jonathan pierce and while he's coming forward um so here is another story of successful succession planning after 38 years

028with volusia county schools um miss kathy gibbons is retiring so i think yes [Applause] what a wonderful tribute to your impact and your legacy ms gibbons we appreciate all you've done for our students throughout the years however mr pierce assistant principal at taylor will be our recommendation for the principal of taylor middle high school mr pierce began his career with volusia county schools in 2000 where he served as a teacher at deland high school teacher on assignment university high school assistant principal deltona middle and you're also a teacher at deland middle school correct middle yes i remember a student you had there that lived with me and then and also assistant principal at taylor middle high school and he earned his bachelor's degree and master's degree from stetson university and it is a privilege to

029recommend him as the next principal for taylor middle high school wonderful board you've heard the recommendation to avoid mr jonathan pierce as the principal of taylor middle high do we have a motion i happily make the motion for mr pierce to be the principal at taylor middle high i second it wonderful board we have a motion by ms haynes seconded by mr purses any discussion ms haynes so yes kathy's leaving after 38 years but you've been there the last few years working side by side with her and that community is a special community and some of those community members set on that panel to even interview and you know you were their top pick and i think that's what miss gibbons was hoping for and i know that you're going to continue to do wonderful

030things there and she's still a phone call away and i'm a phone call away if i can help you in any way but i want to thank you i want to thank you for going up there as an assistant principal and embracing that community and caring about all of our students up there and as i kind of told your wife earlier maybe we can twist her arm and get her up in that community at some point too but i'm looking forward to next year thank you very good anyone else yeah good um i've listened to all your accolades you've always been on the west side i'm a kind of an east side kind of girl so i i apologize for not uh meeting you sooner but i want to congratulate you because if if miss

031gibbons can give you give her your give you her blessing there you go i think you're going to be very very successful and if you want to know any stories i know lots of stories about that young lady back there okay uh she began her internship in her administration with my husband at atlantic high school so i got to know her at the very beginning which i think that's wonderful but i regret not having that opportunity with you so i bet i wish you the best of luck sir thank you thank you mr persis thank you mr chair uh congratulations i know you're excited it's a big deal becoming a principal you know it's a big deal and i you know i look at your back background you can you're an assistant principal at a

032middle school and you survived so that says something for you uh your assistant principal over there at taylor every time i've been to taylor and maybe half a dozen times in the last couple of years um i've always run into you when you're always around and you're always polite you're always professional uh you just seem to have the the right background mentored by superstar kathy back there she's she's like awesome and it's as ms hayne said just knowing that your faculty your community wants you i mean what what could be a you know a a better compliment than to get that so i certainly wish you the best i am i am not a phone call away um you can call dr barrio or mrs carmel they are phone calls away and you should get

033their cell phone numbers and call them constantly and uh that's what we hire them for all right thank you best wishes to you i know you'll be super thank you and one thing i could say about mr pierce is he knows his students you know he knows hey that student's missing half a credit of this and that and so um i'm grateful to you for that in your service board we had a motion and a second all those in favor say aye aye aye all those opposed a congratulations [Applause] [Music] [Applause] good afternoon school board chair cologne members burnett cuthbert and persis and our own district one miss jamie haynes and superintendent hazel thank you for the honor to serve as the next principal of t dewitt taylor middle high school i began my career

034as an educator deland middle school and john posinelli took a chance on a wide-eyed young man who wanted to change the world in 2013 i transitioned to deltona middle school as an assistant principal before moving on to taylor in 2018 throughout my career i've had the pleasure of learning from several people what an exemplary teacher and administrator is terry calkins and melissa cassell my first assistant principals thank you for always being there at the beginning and always encouraging our creativity and value of putting our students first neither of them ever flinched when christy mahaney suzy peterson liz pierce and i would approach them with our next greatest social studies lesson and adventure from turning the auditorium into the caves of lascaux with garbage bags and overturned desks to building mount everest in the media center

035to reenacting the oregon trail with shopping carts as administrators they both provided constant encouragement and friendship that stays with me today bill dunnigan and dr rick ginge without the two of you i would not be here today if not for mr dunnigan slipping into almost every conversation you'll make a great administrator one day i don't think i would have pursued my degree when i did become an assistant principal dr orange was my first principal he always encouraged me to develop my leadership skills and he provided the opportunities to learn every aspect of school leadership and miss kathy gibbons taylor's current principle thank you for your leadership and facilitating my learning and growing as an administrator to all three as we always say once a wildcat always a wildcat miss brandi hogue thank you for your

036guidance advice and always answering our crazy what if questions with my whole heart i must thank my wife liz pierce starting out as friends when i'd almost given up my dream of becoming a teacher she encouraged me to apply for a job at deland middle school started me on the path that has led me here today she has provided guidance and advice throughout my whole career you make me a better person every day by your life that shines so brightly how long will i love you as long as the stars are above you and longer if i can growing up in a small florida town like pearson i had several people who modeled what a master teacher should be one of these teachers was my high school band director mr dean castles mr castle's not

037only taught us how to play instruments but interspersed everyday skills lessons with life lessons many of his castle-isms as we call them stick with me today once during my senior year i spoke with mr castles regarding my desire to become a teacher and his advice is my why to this day make sure your students leave your classroom a better person than when they entered it when mr castle's past his impact could be seen in the over 200 former students from three school districts that attended his funeral as i take this next step in my career this is my goal for the students of taylor middle high school that when they walk across the stage to receive their diploma they are a better person than when they arrived as a sixth grader to the wildcat students

038faculty and community i look forward to serving as your principal striving to push taylor middle high school to its fullest potential thank you thank you and last but not least mr j strother please come forward i'm proud to recommend mr strother for principal of high banks learning center mr strother started as a teacher at deltona middle in 1997 with our district he also taught at heritage middle school pine ridge high school deland high school new smyrna beach middle school he was a student advocate at new smyrna beach middle school served as assistant principal at holly hill creekside and spruce creek high school and is now at a principal intern at creekside middle school and he earned his bachelor's degree from the university of central florida and his master's degree in educational leadership from grand canyon

039university i'm proud to recommend mr strother for principal at high banks learning center or deferred the recommendation of the superintendent to wreck to appoint mr j strothers as the principal of high banks learning center do we have a motion i make the motion that we appoint him as the principal at high banks learning center which i'm excited about or do we have a second and you forgot something in your in your um resume he's also a graduate of new smyrna beach high school he's a barracuda and one of mine you told me 33 years ago is that my ninth grade class okay i just want to let you know i think that's fabulous congrats i just want to congratulate you i know we haven't voted yet but i just so glad to see you there

040miss cuthbert was that a second uh oh gosh yes great board we have a motion and a second any further discussion hanes so i know that miss cuthbert was your teacher and you graduated from new smyrna beach high but i am so thankful that you're coming over to highbanks learning center because it's an alternative site for those that don't know but it's a site where we need some really strong leadership so that we can hopefully turn some of these students around that end up going there to spend some time and put them on the right track so that they can graduate too and be productive citizens and i believe you're the right person to do that and i look forward to coming to see you there so thank you all right anyone else all right

041hearing none we have a motion and a second all those in favor say aye aye all those opposed nay motion passes congratulations [Applause] oh good afternoon chad mccollone vice chairman haynes school board members mrs cuthbert miss burnett mr persis interim superintendent miss rachel hazel and the volusia county school community i'm humbled to be named the principal of high banks learning center as a resident of volusia county for over 40 years i am honored to be named as principal in the school district that i have lived in attended school and worked and served as an educator for the last 25 years i am beyond blessed to continue working with students families and staff in volusia county schools before beginning my leadership journey i served as a classroom teacher on the west side of lucia county working

042at deltona middle school heritage middle school pine ridge high school deland high school as a teacher in and out of the classroom it was deland high school where i had a very personal conversation with the one mr tom russell at the time assistant principal and future superintendent of volusia county schools he stated that he had spoken to my father who was also an assistant principal of lucia county schools and had a very lengthy conversation in which they discussed my potential in the field of education it was then and there i was given a career ultimatum that ultimatum was follow your passion and continue to work in the students that need me the most all the time or leave education and follow my other career path and choice outside of education thankfully i chose education and

043i chose education in volusia county thinking about my future in education i made the move back to new smyrna beach middle school where i attended with my lifelong mentor and of mine by the name of jim tager who was the principal of new sort of each high school middle school at the time i started there as a classroom teacher and quickly became school-based teacher on assignment working discipline and all other duties assigned by the principal after a few years i was promoted to based teacher at a district-based teacher on assignment at university high school yet again being able to work with a mentor that i had previously had by dennis neal i was there only a couple of months when i received a phone call from my very first assistant principal job at holly hill

044k-8 i would like to say thank you to ms julie roseboom for showing me the ropes my first year and miss tammy fisher who yet again taught me how to be a better how to better service the students in volusia county schools in my capacity as an exceptional student education assistant principal at holley lka dr sparger thank you for taking me in as a hawk and following and allowing me to spread my wings at spruce creek high school and every step of the way it was a great time to be a hawk your encouragement and advice are some of the reasons i became a successful administrator mr john e cash you are not only my boss now but a dear friend i will always have a special place in my heart for you sir and

045to you sir i thank you for showing me the true passion for students faculty and staff you have inspired me to be a better teacher coach leader along every step of the way on my journey towards principalship and helped me to understand the nuances that occur along that path i would be very missed if i did not thank my father michael john strother and my mother charlene marie strother who have always supported me and encouraged me along my career not only could i never have done this without them but i could not ask for two better people and parents to be in my corner and support me 100 of the time it is because of each of you mom and dad that i am here today finally i'd like to thank my girlfriend and life

046partner kate frazelle and my three children brody samantha and eva for their unconditional support during my career advancements and all the time and effort i put into work both on and off the clock as i continue to hope to be a role model for my children so they too may become successful and see the value in education and following their aspirations for a successful life now to my creekside family i am saddened to the part ways but i am happy to have had the pleasure to work with each of you along the journey the growth and development that we have made in this last several years is amazing and i am confident that you will continue to sign and be the number one middle school in volusia county the high banks learning center i am

047so excited to join the team and become a member of the faculty and staff i cannot wait to embrace the traditions of the school its culture and spirit as i meet all the fabulous teachers staff and students and families it is my goal to support all stakeholders and continue the good work that has already begun and expand upon opportunities for those that may need high banks learning center in their future again thank you so much for this amazing opportunity and i look forward to showing my passion and pride as we assist all the students and serve them at the next level thank you [Applause] and so will all the folks who are appointed please come up and we'll take pictures first oh congratulations right here principles okay miss kathy good lord her completely we're hidden

048oh so okay thank you so much next up 4.01 recognition of deltona middle robotics team charging chaos yes for this mr caroline i'd like to call up miss amy monahan our specialist for stem and miss jennifer taylor our coordinator for k-12 science we're going to talk for just a minute to give you a little history and then the important people in the back are going to speak you hold the mic just a little bit closer so we can hear you you're awesome okay good evening chairman colon school board members interim superintendent hazel and audience members in 2011 the race to the top grant i had the opportunity to hire our first stem position in the science department i was lucky enough to hire the amazing amy monahan an environmental science teacher at deland high school

049this grant and position enabled the science department to dream bigger than we had before when i hired amy i only had one request what was it i wanted robots i wanted every kid to have at least one opportunity one opportunity to have robots and amy said challenge accepted let's do it so then the next question i asked her how much experience have you had with robots she goes i'll figure it out and that's exactly what she did so today i'm happy to share that her can-do attitude and the awesome coaches across our district have supported 100 throughout our district with a robotics program in addition for the past four years volusia has qualified as a first robotics district under amy's leadership this year they received an additional fifty thousand dollar grant through disney through the

050first to support growing volusia county schools robotics teams and as a result this year volusia facilitated 67 teams pre-k through 12 which is the largest number of robotics teams in volusia county history volusia hosted the regional championship which provided the opportunity for teams in our region to qualify for state and of the 36 teams that participated at regional championship eight volusia teams moved on of those eight teams deltona middle school the charging chaos qualified for state at this time i would like to personally thank amy and the coaches that have made this possible for volusia county school students and at this time amy would you please introduce the important folks we have behind us would love to but i do want to do a little shout out before we go there the regional championship we

051decided as a district it's a long story take it over and in two weeks we put it on but if it wasn't for john cash and j struther we would not have had a home to do that regional championship i said i need a place for in two weeks and they were like let's do it so the can-do attitude is all over volusia so it's not it we're a team it's not me it's not one person although it is one person sitting next to me at the moment [Laughter] so we cannot succeed in our work without the dedication of remarkable teachers who are coaches for a myriad of programs that are supported like first robotics and miss tanya nailing misses tanya nalin sitting next to me is the stem teacher at deltona middle school and

052is the coach of not one not two not three not four five robotics teams at deltona middle school she coaches not only that she coaches two cyber patriot teams if i three my my apologies i know i'm not going to do it all um one made states i've just been told uh science olympiad which we'll hear from her again tonight and facilitates an amazing program that all her students participate in called the amazing shake if you don't get a chance to go see that you really need to because this is a program where students compete in honing their soft skills and a wide array ray a wide array of real world situations so prepares them for real life and once you hear them talk a few times you'll be wow our future is bright so

053it is my honor to present mrs tanya nalin of the charging chaos state robotics team and the team members olivia b b boot bebo alexander williams braden pires elizabeth mcdonald jason jackson sorry neylon and reed break bill everyone i want to thank everybody for having the time and for thanking it sorry i want to thank everyone for having the time to recognize them i would like to thank miss monahan for everything that she has done for us um i would like to thank miss feltner for giving me the free reign to kind of do what i do and for miss steers who has supported us uh miss years at spruce creek for always being there to support our robotics and to lend a helping hand whenever she possibly could and i'm going to turn it

054over to our robotics team welcome guys you'll make it work we would like to thank you guys for having us today we are incredibly honored and we would like to have a few minutes to explain our experiences while working with first lego this year we were fortunate enough to make it past qualifiers for the first time in our short four-year history were very excited and set our sights on roads during our time at regionals we unfortunately did not make it to rhodes but we were fortunate enough to secure our first ever bid to the florida state championship in niceville florida this year no being a part of lego robotics has been a very enjoyable interesting and challenging experience we have learned a lot about programming engineering social skills teamwork and critical thinking we all enjoyed

055the time we spent together which brought us together as a team we made a lot of jokes spent a lot of time together which was the main reason we all work together as well as a team we're working on the robot to make working presentations we laughed enjoyed the overall and had fun together at the part of first we are giving a problem every year to solve this year's problem was to make a model method or basic technology to improve the transportation of goods and our solution to this problem was to make a system a cross-country logistical system with other teams our main part was automated trucks and together we really enjoyed making our innovation project because it allows us to be creative and allowed us to reach out to a lot of people and

056states also allowed us to work with other teams for example we had to work with another team to build a really cool piece to represent all our team during the second day of state during the first day of states we had to complete team challenges certain points we also had team up with other teams to build their lego structures that represented both our teams as a part of first we were given a problem we needed to solve this year we needed to make a model method or piece of technology to improve the transportation of goods we decided to create a motivated truck that worked with the animated maglevs and drones which was a combined which combines projects with two other logo teams during one of our table games during the second day of states was

057our table run and we had an error in scoring so we had to go back and talk with them but other than but we got our correct score and so yeah so much for your time thank you and congratulations [Applause] any comments are we ready for a picture let's do a picture miss feltner proud principal deltona middle so oh [Applause] [Music] all right next item up on the agenda is recognition of the science science olympiad regional and state award winners superintendent hayes yes for this we're going to have miss jennifer taylor a coordinator of k-12 science and miss kelly mclarty our district science olympiad liaison good evening again tonight i have the pleasure of kicking off the recognitions for the hard work and achievements of our volusia county science olympiad teams who qualified to participate

058at state this year after an intense regional competition at emory riddle university science olympiad as you know is an international competition where students prepare all year long for one of 23 events it's very similar to a competitive sport there are 23 different events they can choose from some of them they build things ahead of time some of them they just major in some type of knowledge topic that they then come to compete in many of our schools have multiple teams and the students you will see and hear from tonight are a representation of lots and lots of hard work parents students teachers principals coaches this year we had 11 volusia county schools in middle and high school participate in the science olympiad regional competition and of those schools we had nine schools that earned medals

059in various events those included deltona middle school galaxy middle school silver sands middle school new smyrna beach middle school deland high spruce creek high deltona high university and mainland our programs also expanded this year as we welcome to the science olympiad family river springs middle school and new smyrna beach middle school we are pleased to celebrate with five volusia county schools who qualified and participated in the state olympiad competition we're so very proud of each and every one of these teams for their hard work and commitment each school won different categories different events so the way that science telephony ad works is you can actually meddle in the individual events not just the overall at this time i would like to say a special thank you to kelly mcclarty for her leadership as the district

060liaison for science olympiad this is a passion that she has brought with her from galaxy middle school where she was a coach and that passion has continued to grow our program across the district so thank you for that thank you for your leadership at this time kelly gets the fun and the pleasure of introducing our wonderful students and our coaches which would like to share with you something that they love about science olympiad so before we jump in i do want to just um say thank you to mr colon for coming out the day of the regional competition he was out there cheering with the parents and the coaches taking all of the pictures right alongside them so we really really do appreciate your support and be in there that day i cannot wait for

061you to hear from our athletes and their coaches so we're going to jump right into that we're going to go alphabetically and we're going to start with middle school so we're going to start with deltona middle school so you're going to get to see tanya naylon again so tanya one of the things that's really cool about her is she is just such a go-getter and so she has built her olympiad program over the past two years and she is competing and meddling with her students against some of the best teams in the state um other teams are going where did she come from so it's it's pretty cool to see her program grow and her kids excel and you're gonna love hearing from them so tanya can you bring your kiddos down [Applause] uh good

062evening everyone thank you for letting us be here it's like an actual honor um my name is ethan and my name is peyton phillips and we're representing both the teams nerd heard which is me and accidentally on purpose from delta middle school so we are here to present to you our experience our personal experience with uh science olympiad and you guys already know what it really is but we're here to represent both these teams and what we did in science olympiad there are many different opportunities and tasks that range from build missions such as mission possible and bridges to tests like sounds of music as well as anatomy and physiology or labs like bioprocess labs some of the events are combinations of them which is a mix between both or more two or more formats

063so um we actually took like a lot away from this i've been personally doing this in sixth grade you know that's when we started and i'm surprised of how well we did compared to like all these teams i've been doing it for like 20 years um so i first joined it because i like science and science olympiad has the word science in it so i was like that's enough so um so i decided to join and i kind of went into it blindly but i'm really glad that i did join since i learned so much so many different science topics but only that i learned something even more important which is you know cooperation working at the team and so many other different things each event you get to work with a partner who also

064chose the event from the same team of course some events you can have up to three people none of them are only so low though you do have the option to do so but it is always better with a team as previously stated we have the amazing shake competition at our school it's a competition where you present yourself in the real world such as job interviews doctors appointments eating etiquette and these are all things that we had to do for the amazing chick plus more there are several rounds that narrow down the competition until the top five which is the debate and the interesting thing is um four out of the five people who um who made the top five i'm actually one of them um uh four out of the five we're in science

065olympiad um which is interesting because me personally i science olympia definitely helped with sign uh with amazing shake and i would not be in the top five if it weren't for the science olympiad um so yeah that's pretty interesting and also before we close this out i would also like to thank miss nylon she's she's been great yeah she's cool we'll keep her um but yeah i couldn't have made it where we were in states without her so yeah thank you to her uh can we actually give it up for her for miss neyland ladies and gentlemen um overall i hope our future generation gets the same opportunity we did and also took away the same things that we did and has as cool of a teacher as miss along like yeah uh but thank

066you thank you [Applause] i would like to add one thing if i could miss mcclary was absolutely amazing and i would like to thank her and also mr innis and the folks over at galaxy were a great help to me being a new coach the fact that i had no idea what i was doing and science olympiad is a beast to teach so having no clue the amazing people at galaxy were so beneficial and always willing to lend a helping hand so i am extremely grateful to them so thank you thank you [Applause] just to add on to what she said about those fantastic people over at galaxy one of their things is we want to compete against the best so we're going to help anybody who wants to get there to get to where

067they need to be and give them the resources they need and having said that our next school is galaxy middle school brian ennis and team galaxy are the largest olympiad program we have in volusia county their program actually encompasses over 60 kids every single year um and if you walk into the olympiad room over at galaxy it's such a special place because you can't tell who are the parents and who are the teachers because they work that closely together it's truly a teacher-parent partnership and like the kids were saying about the amazing shake and leadership olympia does so much of that for the kids so brian when you come up i would love it if you would share your team names and why those are the team names so if brian and his principal and

068his kiddos would come up hello thank you for letting us be here again welcome um one thing i've not done in the past is talk about the different adults that i work with but i'm very glad that kelly brought him up while the ladies are setting up their instrument i think they're going to play a tune for you here are some people that i really want to thank there's a lot of adults that make this happen first of all uh dr william mccunes works at embry riddle and he's one of the people who set this up he worked closely with a guy that you guys all might know named jim clements formerly of atlantic high school the two of them were the co-leaders of the embry rural event that mr colon showed up and raw

069rawed us through it was really awesome also there's a lady by the name of valeria ledford who many of you will never know she worked with a lot of people university of florida setting up our state competition here as mentioned uh we very much appreciate our our support of the people here in our county uh between amy monahan and jeremy blinn and of course kelly mcclarty and jennifer taylor uh the guy who got us started i don't know if he's still here but i haven't seen him a while but mike cimino is the one who got us in to science olympiad i say we jeff kroeb is like my my partner in crime that we we started this 13 years ago and uh we started something that is just it's it's blossomed um sitting in

070the audience behind me we've already mentioned tony and alan but there's the two there's the two tates there's wendy and dean back there and there's nick's doc these are other coaches that are going to be recognized today that you'll meet shortly it's like a big family now specifically from my school uh the janitors get involved they wear the shirts they wrote they root us on i have my bookkeeper the mrchiana i have deb combs i have the administrators uh our principal uh efren uh alejandro mr tony good and dr sherry pugh mremberger larussa and then we get down into nitty gritty these all people i'm about to mentor all coaches who donate at least an hour a week from august through march okay so in any other organization they'd get so much accolades but our

071teachers we have diana ronawitz sally brickler william cobb james e rath carla felder kim fowler sydney gregg and amanda white these are teachers now we have parents some sitting in the audience here christina avalo brian barber jamie dubach april jocks uh katherine peavey and mike spencer some of these are teachers by the way but luckily their kids are with us and then we have some people like there's a man named lee benjamin and a guy named alejandra amana they heard about our program have no kids in the game aren't teachers at our school but they donate hours a week coming in and visiting us so it's a great outreach in addition we've got some kids in the audience here that used to be with us these are high school students emma crobe mason ortiz daniel

072radu trinity belfower jordan dasher zack ledger and navia sharma these are high school kids that come help the kids do research and prepare and work and in addition to all this we have awesome parents who provide food and support and then we have the reason we do this and that's these guys so i'm gonna now hand it over to them i hope they're ready and uh i really don't know what they're gonna do but i'm sure it'll be awesome this is uh donya duperon and this is uh lily downs two of our awesome sixth graders they were like we want to go in there as the newbies and tell them what it's like i was like i'm not gonna stop you so anyway here you go hello my name is dianna duproan and i'm in

073sixth grade hi my name is lily downs and i'm in sixth grade we are honored to be here like to thank you for letting us have this opportunity to share how great our science olympiad is the categories i am in are paintball parachutes storm the castle crime busters food science enrolled scholar i won second place for ping pong in first place for storm at regionals also i won fifth place in pikma parachute at states overall all three of our teams won first second and third at states i'm regionals yes i'm in sounds of music oh sounds of music crime busters bridges storm the castle ride to do it and solar system i won first place and stormed the castle at regionals as states we beat the 8th graders and the 7th graders coming out of

074place of 9th and crimebusters in elementary school i had always dreamed of being a musician or an aeronautical engineer my brother was in science olympiad so once i saw him compete i knew i wanted to do the same thing i wanted to pass my brother and get more medals in him i learned better teamwork skills and best of all i had fun while learning cooperation and teamwork at the same time my brother was here last year and i love to take over the legacy i wanted to be inside columbia because first i wanted to be my brother and i think science olympia can engage your brain of science we are one big family that is kind to everyone we work together to solve problems and questions in science and thanks to my brother i was

075able to win medals also he taught me what teamwork really isn't to be the best person i can my brother jeremy ended up winning first place in all five of his categories at regionals and what sixth place for electric graduate stuff at states science olympiad helps us get better grades and make helps me to become a more social person overall an xylophone that me and my partner emily karins made so we built it out of we built it out of metal pipes felt super glue a head of a nail epoxy and a wooden stick this is on a c scale it had eight notes plus one more we had to grind down the pipes to make the right notes so we drilled a hole into one of the ends we did it all into one

076of the ends so that way we could string a spider wire through it and hit it so that way the tuner could pick up what note it was uh this is a rocket we use for ping pong parachute and this is one of the parachutes that we brought to regionals my partner gwyneth davies and i made this parachute by using trash bags uh strings ping pong ball and duct tape and for the rocket we used duct tape two drinking bottles one 16 ounce and the other is a 20 ounce also we used a clear plastic tube to launch the rocket we use an air compressor we hook the rocket to the air compressor then we put the parachute on top of the rocket and we just back away and say three two one launch uh

077you we usually use a psi of 50. the time starts when the parachute goes in the air and the time stops when the rocket touches when the pinpoint ball touches the ground i like to take a moment to play on my xylophone and excerpt from yankee doodle dandy okay [Applause] that was awesome and thank you and i don't know if you guys caught this but when we were at the olympiad competition when they did the overall it was a galaxy first place galaxy second place galaxy third place and so congratulations to our team at galaxy and also mr alejandro back there i see you will come up for pictures in just a minute oh by the way i wanted to answer kelly mccarty's question she's like what are our team names uh we've had many

078awesome students in the past and our teams are named after students who displayed characteristics we're trying to uh uh match uh there was a young man by the name of uh lake ose and he was almost dedicated the kid never ever wasted a moment of time and he is our our first team is named after him the lays our second team was a young man named dietrich guzman who started out as a sixth grader as the most off-the-wall adhd kid who couldn't focus on anything and he ended up growing into our strongest leader we've ever had and so uh we our second team is named the dietrich's because uh the the growth that you can make and our third team was a young man by the name of james white we call him team james

079who won more medals than anybody in the history of galaxies so we have a few kids right now working maybe these two who wish to rename that team after themselves so anyway thank you very much thank you and congratulations [Applause] our next school is silver sands middle school and that's wendy tate and wendy has been doing olympiad for a while and she's very they're always very consistent at silver sands they're always there they're always a big part of the competition and so wendy if you could come down and they brought some cool stuff welcome i'm just going to talk for a second and um galaxy was first second and third but silver sands was fourth all right which to me means second these are two of my um this is william and i forgot to

080bring his uh build but he can tell you about it and this is gisele and i have been doing it for a while this morning i saw two of my former olympiad kids in chick-fil-a my daughter won a chick-fil-a this morning and i was there on my middle school team and they're seniors now and one of them has a brother that's in college and so yeah i have been doing it a while and i love it i really do but i'm gonna let these guys talk to you so in regionals i uh didn't get to go to regionals because i was busy that day but i saw the photos and i could tell they had a lot of fun um i built this trebuchet for state i when i started at state i did not

081know what trebuchet meant that i learned it was a french catapult that was the energy that launched it came from away and i would have brought the projectile to shoot it but i don't think security would have left me um i also did a green generation and ornithology for state as well i have ornithology in this binder and there's a bunch of songs and photos in the and william he did solar system and came in 13th for solar system what about you yeah we didn't exactly do the greatest and solar system but we did we didn't also make an airplane like the for the electric white project which we got i believe we got third place in awesome [Applause] which is pretty surprising considering it crashed into a wall halfway through that we also built

082a mousetrap car where the engine was a it was just a mousetrap it pulled forward and we tried to get it as accurate as possible i believe we we got around like second or third in that too i was built by ben who not here at the moment and before we went to state i also had done the ornithology and yes the and yes we had like an entire field guide with us it was it's not an easy thing to do for work ornithology is the study of birds is it's a very large subject thank you for that explanation honestly by the end of ornithology i never wanted to hear another bird call in my life um and miss tate i want to thank her because without her i don't know what we do because

083she i don't know how she even organizes this for how long she's been doing it i just want to thank her for that [Applause] thank you for giving us this opportunity thank you and please uh hang out for pictures in just a few minutes oh absolutely we're going to see something i didn't bring your fly and i don't want to hit anyone because i have that uh basically here weights they would drop the projectile i have and we i used it i spent about three to four hours building this with just nails we had and then we would try to test it and we looked at the rules we had to do a few like changes but honestly i think it went pretty well these would sustain the arm that i right here [Music] this

084and this would launch the projectile so we use what would carry the projectile it would when we i pulled the trigger the projectile that was in this mask would go flying and basically it would just go flying about a few feet and when we did the test for state it hit the bucket once missed it by a foot and then we tried again and it did pretty well in my thoughts for the first time hey awesome thank you congratulations [Applause] what a clever use for a mask so that does it for our middle school so we have two high schools um so dean tate is the coach for deland high and um he has a reputation in volusia for just always being there for his students and olympia is just one gigantic example of that

085so i'm going to let him come down with his students and tell you a little bit about their journey give us three chairs we'll use all three hi welcome dean tate um thanks for having us um i've been doing this uh i think since my sixth year um and uh it's it's been a wonderful uh wonderful journey um my two uh co-presidents this year have uh been participating on the team for three years and they they participated at heritage middle freshman year i think you guys actually rode the bus with me to states so i gave them a ride to their first state cup they're not first state competition state competition when they were 9th grade and they've been with us for the three years and wendy zhang and austria merit wendy is going to

086mit next year wow and austria is going to princeton [Applause] good afternoon everyone i'm wendy zane i'm a co-president of science olympia and my name is austria merritt and i remember being in middle school with wendy and being on the team there and growing throughout the process into high school and getting to experience the different levels that science olympiad has and all the events and as a senior now i can see the value that science olympiad has had as a club and how much i've learned it's introduced me to all kinds of areas in stem and future career options and interests that we could follow and it's been a great opportunity to meet people um one specific event that i participated in this year was wi-fi lab and i really liked it because it allowed

087me to like further explore like the real life implication of a class i had like at school like physics and yeah like overall science olympia has been like a really fun journey because i just got to like collaborate with a lot of like um high schoolers and like work with them and like do fun events and stuff um for me an event that i've stuck with throughout every year in science olympiad was anatomy and physiology and it was a really interesting event to take on because i hadn't had any classes in it and just throughout the years i could see how much i'd grown and been able to learn and self-study and working with a really valuable opportunity to have and and one of the things that um i'm always very happy to see is

088is that when um the president is typically one of our seniors and and they step up in leadership um in in these two young ladies are no different the the amount of help and assistance they gave to the entire team coordinating everything was just uh amazing and i also want to say thank you to everybody at the county um and uh brian i mean you could tell brian she's just incredible you know thank you for coming out it was fun seeing you out at the regionals um you know if we ask anybody any of the coaches for assistance um we always want to help and um dr carr my principal she supports us and and it's just a wonderful experience and i think the kids get a lot out of it thank you so much

089and we'll get a picture shortly after our last team is spruce creek high and it's led by dr stoot so if you want to come up with your students i'm dr students uh it's been a fun year uh regionals was in person and we had a fun time uh the states was remote and while it was fun we're looking forward to next year being in person uh we were able to get second place in states in ornithology in six in green generations our current presidents weren't able to be here eric i believe is looking at colleges and salma is at a meeting for a scholarship dr sparger asked me where some is going this year and he said brown and i said i don't know i'm certain it's somewhere prestigious so which has been true

090with like almost all of our students uh the ib program as weird as that sounds we have that over at spruce creek high it's almost like a feeder program for the science olympiad there we get really fantastic students and it makes it a really enjoyable time but it also means that we have like a continuation there so one of our upcoming presidents jeannie liu is the sister of last year's president merrill liu and the other uh ahmed alib is the brother of the current sitting president of some of the other presidents eric chen and he's number three of four there's going to be one more in the future coming in over to spruce creek high but the current presidents want to talk a little bit about their feelings and plans for next year please do

091[Music] so hi i'm jenny liu and this is amit aldiv hi my name is ahmed and we're both currently ib sophomores attending spruce creek high school and we are the upcoming co-president for science olympiad next year okay so i've been in science lympia for about two years now and i've completed uh competed in dynamic planet experimental design and write it do it this year and last year you know the competition was virtual so i didn't get to get the full experience of science olympiad but after this year i feel like i can say that science livia is all about collaboration and i really enjoy the events i enjoy the time in between the events as weird as that sounds i enjoy the awards ceremony not just by myself but with my fellow partners and i've

092mostly participated in test events so i never experienced build events but even sitting down to take a test with your partner is just so as weird as it sounds it's fun but it's a collaborative experience and it's a partnership it's enriching and it's about stem so for me the teamwork aspect of science lapid is super super big yeah so um what i participated this year i participated in green generation which is like an environmental event i also participated in bridges where we constructed a bridge as well as right stuff where we can we constructed a plane and i also competed in remote sensing and basically my position this year was bill's event director we tried to encourage more people in the club to do do and complete builds and something a lot of high schoolers

093and i enjoy about science olympiad is that we get to collaborate on the test as well as we get to build structures that we would not do in like our regular classes so it's super fun we get to explore different areas of sciences including life sciences animal sciences anatomy it just the list keeps going on and um we competed in states this year um we we got top 20. it was not as it's not as good as we thought we would be but we're excited for next year and we've adapted and we're ready to see what our future holds i'd like to say a huge thank you to dr sparger as well as dr stu for allowing us for giving the support that we need for science olympiad as well as always being there when

094we need that when we need them and we want to say thank you and it's an honor for um for allowing us to be here today [Applause] all right so we will march right up here and we will take pictures everybody in the audience good [Music] sure we're missing one okay [Laughter] okay thank you so much [Applause] first second yeah right one two okay uh congratulations [Laughter] right all [Applause] right uh-huh you guys have a couple more years hey congratulations [Applause] hey board we've got two cards for public comment do you guys want to go ahead and do those or would you like to take a break first and then take a break we can do those and take a break sounds good all right so as you all are aware there are three minutes

095uh to speak to the board and uh first up we have michelle mccoy welcome you'll have three minutes there's a timer there to remind you of your time thank you that good yeah all right greetings everyone i am so proud to be here to talk about the battle of the books for middle school first we appreciate all of you who are able to come by and see us and support our kids it was an awesome day regardless of what school you're at middle school is a tough time to be a reader everything is about appearances and being cool and the fact that we had 13 teams that competed is incredible we are all every single one of us that was a coach are so proud of each and every team and player it's also a

096tough time to be a librarian some days with many of us responsible for running the media center and handling all the one-to-one devices and all the problems that come with them and we are also extra grateful for our teacher friends who hopped in there to be coaches for some of our teams as well this was definitely a village that we needed to make this happen personally i started out with a team of five but i had one who fell off the team decided he didn't want to get out there in public and i had another one who was my team captain was absent the day of the event and yeah so uh i just us we just took my other eighth grader you're the team captain and off we go is a team of three

097sure did the kids were so worried about being a small team because most teams did have four or five people on them but they collaborated like pros and they worked so hard together people from all over the county congratulated them and complimented them and they were literally glowing with pride another library media specialist said and i'm going to quote her because i couldn't possibly have written this this was a magical and impactful life-changing day for my kids my team consisted of a kid who eats in the lunch in the library due to behavior in the cafeteria and one who reads because he's grounded for life his words and another who is shy with a difficult home life and one who tries to skip class by being in the library but that day the day of

098the event they were important smart special part of a team they work together and encourage each other and saw themselves in a different light each one had a personal victory regardless of the number of points they earned what a powerful outcome this event was a collaboration between media services and the ela department the district's financial support and their willingness to let so many secretaries and toas and specialists that everybody at the district level come out and volunteer for our event everybody was just absolutely integral to this being a success we also thank all of our principals who let us do this it was just a wonderful wonderful day each team got different colored t-shirts with matching 2022 battle of the books logos on them which were provided free for kids and coaches thanks to vain

099our local media association uh mcgraw-hill and our library vendors mackin and children plus edition financial also helped support our thank you miss mccoy okay and i'll just have a little thank you at the end but let me let me make sure i didn't miss anybody if i missed the vendor they might get mad so we are going to bring you all back and i'm curious to see who won so we're going to bring you back to battle of the books if the board would agree because i want to see who those kids were who won and i don't know who won so i'll be i don't want to know i don't want to know we'll pres we'll honor them here thank you so much for coming next up is carol sawyer a lot of numbers

100on there and i'm going to speak fast so i thought you'd have a nice visual like stephanie workman i love numbers too welcome miss sawyer you can go ahead and start we'll give you eight seconds back go ahead okay sure okay good evening miss hazel chairman cologne and board members tonight i would like to explain the structure of st student transportation and why we have vacancies when other departments say we do not have vacancies we have 233 bus operator position codes but only have 177 bus operators we have 56 open bus operator positions but you wouldn't know that by looking at our website under job vacancies i will use bus operators in this example but you can apply the same concept to the bus attorneys in order for sts to run efficiently the following example

101describes the structure we have used for decades you cannot equate the number of bus operators with the number of bus routes there are many variables that come into play within the structure of sts as you will see in the chart these numbers are from april 13. keep in mind things change all the time we have an east side and a west side we have one bus operator dispatch on each side one bus operator safety and security on each side there's four bus operators dispatch bus operator could never drive because the buses could not leave the yard without a bus operator manning the radio the safety security bus operators should never drive either because they're supposed to go out when an accident involves a bus or an incident occurs on a bus which is quite frequent

102however these bus operators are driving every day next on each side we have three areas three one two three on the east four five six on the west each one of them is run by one bus operator that we call a lead driver trainer they shouldn't be driving either except in an emergency because they have to make sure that each route is covered every morning and every afternoon along with inputting bus referrals and a host of other administrative jobs however these bus operators are driving every day also next we have three area unassigned drivers in each area that's 18 bus operators these bus hider operators are not assigned to a route but they are assigned to drive every day and what they cover are daily call outs we average about 15 bus operators calling out

103every day we also have bus operators on workman's comp family medical leave other kind of leave bus operators are stood down for some reason next the current number of bus operators that you will see in each area is what we have left and area one for example there's 29 routes and only 25 bus operators we need four more bus operators in there and you can go all the way across to area six 32 routes and we have 29 bus operators we need three more bus operators there to cover all the routes so if you add all that across you will see for sts to run efficiently we need 21 more bus operators in order to cover every bus route without many of us covering two or three bus routes on any given day these shortages

104causes us to eat up bus runs put more kids on the buses which causes more behavior it also that it changes the buses and there's a disruption with the parents the students and the schools so i wanted to explain why we they say we don't have any bus openings but we do have plenty of bus openings thank you miss sawyer thank you thank you all right that concludes public comment we will take a 10 minute break and return at one minute welcome back board members before we proceed i wanted to share some good news with you all we had item 8.04 and gentlemen if you guys don't mind one second we had an item 8.04 which was the textbook adoption for math and so we pulled that off of the agenda this evening and so

105that will come back to us the next meeting however while we were here we received great news and so miss chris smith if you want to just come up real quick and again we're going to vote on this at the next meeting but i just thought it'd be great that we uh so that she can go home hello yes um and immediately when the state list did come out those courses that did not make the state list our publishers immediately started doing the appeal process um the up the random upper courses we still they still have not gotten feedback from the state on because they knew that elementary was the priority because elementary we need to get those ordered for elementary so we have the wonderful news i just received it from our math director

106tammy deary that big ideas is the only second k-5 publisher on there now it joined the other company so we are on for k-5 we are on that state list now along with many other courses that we have that was the big concern of ours so we look forward to bringing that quote to you to approve at the next school board meeting great thank you for that great news thank you yeah yeah or if it's okay with you we'll skip down to the legislative update seeing as these gentlemen are ready to goes anybody have any objection to that very good so we're going to go down to 18.01 legislative update uh and for this update um we'll turn it over to mr kevin pendley our general counsel who is joined by representatives from gray robinson

107thank you ms hazel mr chair board members tonight we have for you the legislative update and i have the auspicious occasion to introduce my colleagues from gray robinson to my left rob stewart and to rob's left chris carmody who most of you know and have met these gentlemen have been working on our behalf since we entered the new contract for lobbying services with them and they have an update for you for this year's legislative session they would like to present this time welcome good evening uh thank you for having us again chris carmody robert stewart uh we'll we'll we have some slides a slide deck uh and we'll run through those quickly obviously if something comes up feel free to ask or we can save it to the end whatever's easiest for you and and

108i will i will say at the front end this is an attempt to capture a lot of what happened in the session and then go drill down into issues related to k-12 but by no means does it cover everything so you know if at the end you didn't we can cover some ask question by all means we can jump into it but um we'll go ahead right here that's us i can assure you i'm as tall as robert if you look at that photo um the uh so we'll you know when we look at when we look at any session you kind of have to look at the leaders uh to understand the personalities in the room and so we'll start with the governor's office and uh they're there we've been asking around to some

109of the more senior lobbyists to is that has there ever been a governor that's had as much influence and and power and sort of reach over the entire process as governor desantis and the answer keeps coming back no um he is that influential in this process he's got a great team working with him and that sort of sets the tone for the entire session and you're seeing some of that in the special sessions that are following but we'll start there you have the governor that's his chief of staff james othmeyer who is his former general counsel stephanie coppalusis who is formerly florida d.o.t secretary was a clay county or clay clay county uh board chair or not county chair excuse me for executive side and then chris spencer is our former teammate from gray robinson

110we lent him to governor desantis transition team we're still waiting for him to come back but the good news is he still answers our calls um that's who's leading the effort of course you know these cabinet members they're no stranger to anyone that's nicki freed on the left commissioner of agriculture who's currently running for governor ashley moody our attorney general who's running for election and jimmy patronis our cfo also running for reelection when you look into the house and senate um you see top left there chris sprouse who's the speaker he's terming out november um and this is his leadership team that bottom left there that's an important person to to to know as we go into these special sessions and i know you're familiar with mr renner um representative renner that is uh but

111he'll be the speaker in the next two years after the november elections assuming the republicans maintain control in the house so those are the the leaders there cr uh speaker sproul's background is an attorney he was a prosecutor so you can see a lot of law enforcement and criminal issues are are sort of important to him but as well in his various backgrounds he's taken to higher education in other areas and then in the senate you have wilton simpson the senate president who's also an ag commissioner candidate uh the governor just endorsed him yesterday uh and then here's the rest of his leadership team there in that bottom left and he's a farmer by trade he's had several businesses but an egg farmer is what he's most known for across the state and then bottom

112left kathleen pasado who's the rules chair and she's the incoming senate president she's an attorney out of naples florida was served in the house previously before she moved to the senate and she would in theory ascend to this presidency after november and with that i'm going to turn over to robert to talk a little bit about some of the session stats sure and and good evening everybody robert stewart again great to be with you uh really appreciate the opportunity to to not only share what happened in the last legislation last legislative session that just ended but really more than anything just for the privilege of being part of your team it really uh has been fun uh in these first few months and so um the next slide that you see in front of you

113really kind of tells a broad picture of how much goes on in a 60-day session so 3 600 more more than 3 600 total bills filed if you back out of that total the house appropriation bills which under the house rules to file for an appropriation you have to actually file a bill if you back those those out you're still at 2 000 plus or minus pieces of legislation that get filed every single year and of that this year only 285 of those passed at the most recent count i think this is as of yesterday the governor has approved 70 bills there's one still pending his action although he may have signed that yesterday and then the one bill that he vetoed was the congressional maps and we'll talk a little bit about redistricting but

114that's been the only bill that he has vetoed so far the next slide will show you on the on any given session there is one constitutionally required thing that the legislature has to do and that's pass a balanced budget uh the second thing every ten years they have to do is uh redraw the districts following the census and so and you're doing that if you haven't already uh with your uh districts here and the county and all of that so um the the house and the senate maps that the house and the senate each drew were already approved by the supreme court they were hardly challenged they were very quickly approved under the fair districts amendments that are in our constitution and so the the maps for the house and senate as you see them

115in the slides that are about to come really are the law of the land the congressional maps are the ones that the governor threatened to veto he followed through on that threat and that triggered the special session that we just had last week and those maps are again already under challenge but are likely to carry between now and at least the election here's your house maps not a lot of changes at least in terms of the number of members that you gather for your delegation the one that i'll point out to you is district 30. that's a new open seat and it is now a north brevard south volusia seat and that's just kind of a new seat but i think you kept the same number of members in your delegation on the senate side

116you've got senator wright representing the vast majority of the district with a little bit on the north end belonging to senator hudson who has a really a northern seat that grabs the top end of volusia county on the congressional side these are the maps that were just adopted by the governor that i mentioned were under challenge right now but we do expect at least as we sit here today and anything could change tomorrow but we expect today that these will be the the seats that you run on um you have uh congressional district seven on the southern end of your county uh that is now an open seat that's the seat that was previously held mostly uh by stephanie murphy and she's not running for re-election so that that seat's open and then district six

117you see there's michael waltz who is part of your delegation today i believe so as robert said uh they are required every year to pass a budget this is that that anomaly tenth year when they do redistricting so let's talk about the budget as you know you you've been following it hasn't been sent to the governor so that we'll we'll have more to discuss on this later but that the legislature approved a 112.1 billion dollar budget uh for for and with 8.9 billion in reserves and 43.7 out of general revenue i.e top line revenue our sales tax property tax interestingly enough before we get into the details the just five years ago the budget was 82 billion so you can do some quick math on that that's grown 30 and 10 years ago it was

11870. so in 10 years this budget has nearly doubled now there is a lot of federal funds that are being used in this budget about 5 billion from from the relief packages from covid that congress passed a couple years ago we had five billion left over but most of this is top line revenue and and some of that you could blame on inflation some of that you can blame on other things but or i say blame it's a good problem to have we have revenue here but there is a lot of money that the legislature had to spend interestingly enough very little and recurring dollars that they put into use some and we can get into some of those but mostly uh it was non-recurring because they recognize that whether it's inflation or something else

119a bill will come due and we we will have a dip in the economy at some point that that will drop this budget but if you can see quickly health and human services 48.9 billion education that includes k-12 and higher ed 25.7 that includes the the base teacher raises which we'll talk about later 6.9 billion for criminal justice 6.5 for transportation economic development about 11 billion that is the road fund that d.o.t has and then 9.3 billion for ag and natural resources this is an important one in that four years ago the governor said he wanted more water funding water quality funding mostly focused in in south florida the lake o lake okeechobee area but he said he wanted 2 billion and with this budget and the 600 plus million that was towards that they're

120gonna well eclipse that two billion over four years and then finally uh billion dollar uh inflation fund it was originally acronym to be iden i assume everyone can read or can translate that which the house had a little fun with that but but really it was about um that we are facing inflation in our state across the country as well and what they're trying to do is uh deal with the fact that dms the the main procurement arm of the state is going to be having a lot of contracts that by no by no fault of anyone the cost of goods are going to go up and so this is now a billion dollar fund that will allow these agencies and departments and divisions to to tap into that fund through approval uh to to

121get an increase on some of those procurements or those goods that they're trying to procure um here's a pie chart if you like pie charts you can get a better idea of what that looks like the big bright red is health and human services and the next in line is education um you know and i i kind of hinted at it but we'll talk about that a lot of this is because of the increased revenue and if you look at just january alone they were 200 that's that final bullet there there 200 million over the projections and i think just this last go-round for for february it was something like 300 million over projections so the state is doing well when it comes to that and and that's that's a sign of why they're having

122an increased budget now this is all of course before the governor vetoes anything line item vetoes uh so all that is subject to change but affordable housing we know volusia county is no stranger to this issue as is the other 66 quite frankly counties in the state uh they did full they kept good on their promise from previous session that they would fully fund sadowsky after they reallocated how that would and if you recall they decided to take let's just say the pie they were going to do half of the pie towards affordable housing and the other half split you know fourth and fourth uh towards resiliency funding and water quality they honored that this year and what was in the interesting is they put hometown heroes in there which is basically 100 million dedicated

123for um down payment assistance for first-time home buyers police firefighters 911 operators teachers paramedics health care workers and home health aides robert and i tried really hard to get lobbyists in the hometown heroes program but no one was buying um so we'll talk through uh they always pass a tax package uh so we thought we'd give you a quick back-to-school sales tax holiday uh they have to re-up that every year but they're of course going to continue to re-up that begins july 25th disaster preparedness holiday begins may 28th freedom week which they did last year is essentially a tax exemption on on outdoor goods if you will camping supplies hunting supplies water supplies and then um also outdoor events so think of a concert um or also in person not outdoor specifically you can go

124to a show but live events and all as long as they're done before december 31st so in theory you could go to all the nfl games in jacksonville or tampa up until december 31st tax-free if you bought your tickets during the week of july 1. uh seven-day tool time sales tax as you know during the pandemic we had a talent loss on many trades but including construction even though they did stay open somewhat this is a sales tax holiday in september for those skilled trades so you can get a tax-free hammer if you will and other things sales tax exemption on diapers and related items and then the fuel sales tax that the governor asked for he ended up getting it for october for one month and that's mainly because you probably are well aware

125our high tide season for tourism is during the summer months and it would have been too exorbitant of a cost to the state to do it in those months they did in october and a fun one robert and i worked on we got some sales tax exemptions for world cup tickets if and when we get it in orlando and or miami because that's something fifa asked for so hopefully that'll come in 2026. 500 tickets are now tax free too yeah see that very important note um so any session sort of starts the 60-day sprint starts with what the leadership priorities are the speaker of the president and the governor and we'll talk through a couple of some of what those priorities were that set the stage for the session um chris sprouse a former prosecutor

126himself law enforcement was a critical topic for him and first responders and and hometown heroes which chris talked about a minute ago the first uh house bill won and and number one not not by chance it was the most important bill to him it's an additional homestead property uh tax exemption for um for first responders uh kind of frontline workers teachers law enforcement correctional officers firefighters you name it and that'll be on the on the first 150 000 dollars in value so an additional exemption for those folks that of course has to go to the ballot will require 60 vote to pass the second was house bill 3 and that was about law enforcement recruitment so sort of a florida response to the national defund the police movement was to fund the police so things

127like a 5 000 bonus if you leave another state to come be a law enforcement officer in florida thousand dollar bonuses reimbursements for a thousand bonuses for training uh reimbursements for the cost of training if you go to the academies uh those types of things were really important to the speaker and those fat those passed without really any significant fanfare other than a rallying cry of support um president uh simpson had two real main priorities i'll start with the second one uh which was the local business protection act uh what that does and it was started out as a bill that local governments and any quasi-governmental entity was very very concerned about because it would have allowed for a new cause of action against the local government if an ordinance or a change in your

128code cost that a business money and they could prove it what ultimately happened was a three-year 15 rolling average that you had to prove and it also had some watering down of when those suits can be filed but but it was sort of in response to the legislatures ingrained at this point feeling that local governments in some places are not treating businesses fairly and this was a way to perhaps create a cause where businesses could respond the second one was an environmental resources issue really focused on the everglades and it dealt with the lake oh and the surrounding areas and how that water is drained and where it goes and and how we're discharging that was a bill that the governor's office actually got involved in very early on concerns with the original drafting they

129came back with a compromise bill that everybody could support but it was one that got a whole lot of play and of course the governor chris mentioned he really is driving just about all of the decisions that are up there some of the things i've mentioned already the law enforcement increased pay and the bonus structures he recreated what's called the florida state guard to support the national guard in times of emergencies chris mentioned the tax cut of course teacher pay that was fully funded again this year even with a little bit of extra money for uh for the for the longer tenured teachers and support staff and then of course elections enforcement he ran on well not ran on but opening the session his state of the state talked about the need for an election

130enforcement arm he just signed that this week and what that does is create an office within the secretary of state to to look at and and and go after election fraud cases as they as they may arise in florida so it was no surprise to anybody that followed this session that social issues really dominated a lot of the discussion and i'm going to as fast as i can go through these four because these are the ones that you read a lot about so things like the abortion ban florida enacted a 15-week abortion ban really following the model of mississippi that's a law that's under supreme court review right now in washington and so we'll sort of know the fate of florida's law vis-a-vis roe v wade based upon what happens with the mississippi bill the

131individual freedom act this was what was really the crt bill that was signed just recently and it and it and it creates really i think for the private sector and the public sector for that matter but an interesting uh dilemma about diversity equity inclusion initiatives employee training handbooks the things that that that are being required of employees as a condition of employment how does that really all shake itself out this bill will be challenged and ultimately the courts will will settle it uh the parental choice and education bill you've certainly seen a lot about this that's a bill that has already been challenged immediately after its signing and that is the one that prohibits um uh instruction and grade k through three of gender identity and sexual orientation issues and then thereafter it has to

132be age appropriate and that's you know the one that was not so not so lovingly called the don't say gay bill uh by the opponents and then immigration this was really something that took up more time than i think anybody expected and it really was from the from the supporters of the bill what they viewed as a shot across the bow of the federal government to say hey enforce your laws in florida if you don't we will the opponents of the bill would have said it was a manufactured crisis and a red meat issue just for an election year the truth is probably somewhere in between those two extremes but that was a bill that did take up a lot of time and i mentioned those four one because two of them really impact the

133school district in some way and again the courts will ultimately settle those issues and and if and when if one of them is thrown out i would expect that some portion of it could be back some variation of it could be back in the following session or even in a special but i mention those to you just to kind of set the stage like with the priorities of all the other things that are happening as we on your behalf are working on the volusia specific issues uh that we worked on this year so there's some other issues that we think will have some touch on the school board certainly uh you're some of your partners here so we want to touch on them with digital infrastructure one bill that was passed you know this this

134legislative session is gonna be known for a couple things we'll talk about one that didn't pass but we expect we'll be back data privacy um this was a priority of the house a loose priority the senate certainly a priority the governor as as they tick um they try to rein in big tech as it's referred to but essentially it would have created a framework by which businesses in the state uh and all parties would have to regulate or or manage our personal information uh this polls very well across the board uh republicans democrats and dependents where the rub is is the house wanted a private cause of action and their bill that would potentially set up class action lawsuits depending on the approach and the senate wasn't wanting to go along with that that did

135not make it to the finish line in the regular session uh we are hearing uh in our in speaking with our friends in the legislature that the special session that the governor just made official today that would begin may 23rd that special session will likely have an expanded call and this would likely be a part of that expanded call so we'll be paying attention to that and keep you apprised another one again this session can be known for a lot of things some of the things that robert just covered on social issues but the state really got serious about cyber security this year both in policy and funding and you'll see some of those bullets there um they took the cyber security task force recommendations and now require state agencies and local governments they prohibit

136them from paying ransoms now i'll say that that includes school boards obviously and and we all know i assume your cio knows this better than anyone of you know public entities just as much as private are targeted frequently for these black hat groups to to hijack our system and then ransom it back what's interesting and i'm not encouraging this but i'll just make sure because i tell you the law um you're restricted from paying a ransom but interestingly there's no penalty of if the local government is to pay the ransom so i'll just say do what you want with that make good decisions hopefully you don't have to pay ransom it also requires to report the incident so that you should definitely do requires training within 30 days of hire for for new employees obviously

137to help them deal with those phishing attacks through emails and what have you and then requires um all the local governments to adopt standards to safeguard this data and i.t they put their money where their mouth is you see over 100 million in funding there um that that is available some of them through local grants some of them at the state level and including a 7 million appropriation to usf's cyber security center to do an assessment of the state and local government and where we're at i see kevin wants to add something on that i just wanted to point out for the board members that does include a revision to chapter 119 for cyber security making it an exemption and confidential so we do not have cyber security plans excellent point and so moving on

138just a few local government issues we'll put on your radar that will be affecting your partners in the city and county uh there were two preemption major preemption bills the green check mark obviously that one passed and robert covered it there was another one that dealt with business impact statements and allowed for businesses to to i guess in theory more efficiently sue to shut down an ordinance if they thought it impacted them uh sovereign immunity this is a big one we covered some of this when when i fir when we first met with you when we were brought on board this bill did not make it to the finish line it was discussed about raising the caps that are currently at 200 300 000 respectively uh and and but it kind of got bogged down

139in its own way of is a million too high or too too low i think we would all at least this room agree it's too high uh but that that was part of the debate and if you reduced it is it per person per incident is it both what have you um kathleen passadomo the incoming senate president she was probably the tip of the spear in the senate and probably leading the negotiations and trying to make sure that if the caps are raised it's done in a fair manner that's not going to put whether it's a school board or another local government um in a difficult position where their rates just go sky high from however they choose to ensure at their level and then also to make sure that the claims don't skyrocket either

140right because if you go from 200 300 000 to a million some of our friends in the trial bar may look at these claims in a different light now that they know that there's more available before they have to go to the legislature for a claim bill as well uh local government financial disclosure this bill was going to require uh the same disclosure at the local level that they have at the house level which is i think is called the form vi it's just a little more transparency it didn't make to the finish line but i can assure you that we'll be back in future sessions tree trimming this was a bill that kind of changed the wording on what whether or not a homeowner could trim or take down their tree without the local

141government and acting or engaging public notices this is a win for both schools and local governments as far as it last session they they pulled back the requirements of what you have to put in your daily paper this one all completely takes it back and now um it's you correct me on this robert but i i believe the way this is and it will be signed is you won't have to do any advertising in your local paper on your notices as long as you follow the procedure set forth in the bill for online um smoking in public places local governments can now regulate in beaches and parks uh unless it's a cigar kudos to the cigar lobby for getting their exception but every all other kinds of smoking can now be regulated and prohibited and

142then local tax referendum this goes into effect october but any referendum including school referendums on taxes and millages and such would have to go in a general election ballot and that goes into effect october so if something was already set for august that would not be impacted by this and so quickly election reform uh don't worry we already have secure and safe elections at least the last go around but they'll now be more secure this bill passed and actually was just signed by the governor yesterday that was that bill robert was referenced earlier that was outstanding it creates that office in the secretary of state for election crimes and security um and they funded the legislature funded ten positions on that for them to do the investigations um requires if you're in a single member

143district and it was re redistricted you don't get to wait the two years like if you're on a four-year cycle you gotta run right away for some of those uh county commission seats uh revises retention and information posting requirements for the ballot initiatives and they got serious about ballot harvesting uh those of you um i don't think anyone here has to worry about harvesting but the maximum fine for a year was a thousand dollars that's two fines of a 500 each for ballot harvesting they increased that to the maximum fine in a year of 50 000 so they really got serious about ballot harvesting saying that's not okay and you probably heard of drop boxes that became a big big no-no in certain circles in the states to say that word so they changed that

144from secure dropboxes to secure ballot intake systems uh that's what they are uh so there you have it um robert's going to jump in quickly with some higher education and then we'll get jumping into the k-12 issues which i'm sure you have some questions or at least want to discuss further yeah very quickly on some higher ed issues things that will be important to maybe you or some of your parents in the district bright futures changes there's always some every year this was kind of a neat one this year it allowed for paid work time to be substituted for the volunteer hours that were required under um under uh bright futures that was i wish that had been the case when i was when i was growing up i worked a lot and struggled sometimes

145to get the volunteer hours in but uh but that happened um and uh on the postsecondary education side really the second bill there is really all about the accreditation piece um there was uh there's a long story that i won't get into about a particular commissioner of education that thought that he might uh want to be the president of a state university and that didn't happen uh because one of the accrediting agencies really stepped in and uh and oppose that idea as a result all state universities now have to change their accreditation every i think it's five years um uh and so that is another one that passed this was a really important one the next one uh public records and public meetings this is uh dates back years of effort particularly in the senate

146to pass this bill and it's the one that allows for state university and state college president applicants to be held not in the sunshine for a certain period of time so what florida has struggled with or at least those who have searched for university presence say we've struggled with uh is that some of the best candidates in the country won't apply uh because they know that the moment that they hit the send button it's a public record and anybody can find it and if you've got a great job as the provost at an ivy league school but you want to be the president at uf you may not apply because you're worried about losing the job that you got and so this would everything still becomes public eventually and the top three uh when they

147shortlist would ultimately become public quicker but it hopefully will allow for more applicants better applicants looking at our state colleges and universities and then this was just kind of a fun one florida likes to be positioned itself as the most veteran friendly state here was one for for reduced tuition and cost uh for our veterans on the k-12 side and we'll get into that is this me still okay um you see here um the budget there is an increase in the bsa and in the overall fefp that's good news um and uh and uh i think from at the risk of jumping the shark here with what we really spent a lot of time on your behalf working on was the uh was the floated concept of the 200 million dollar penalty uh to schools

148that fell within um you know the the 12 districts that were at any point in time even if it was just for a matter of days not in compliance with the mass mandate rules at the state level originally that 200 million would have come out of the fefp meaning a reduction to those districts still an increase year over year but a reduction over what it could have otherwise been working in partnership with the florida school board association and other districts that were impacted we were able to move that 200 million out of the fefp and into what more of a bonus pool almost of the district can apply for but not impacting the underlying fefp which was a nice which was a nice win uh for the districts yeah and working with kevin and your

149team we were able to also make it clear that it was if you were found to be in violation actually as opposed to if you were in theory in violation but there was an actual finding which would should put us in good standing with that fund so that's a that was a win and and kudos to um the house and senate leadership as we made that case to them of giving them the timeline of what volusia went through and why we should not be considered part of that dozen that was a big win and you guys thank you so much for your access based on the way that the wording in the final language came out it's my opinion that we will be in line to apply for those funds just as any other district

150not sanction sanctioned by the department of education thank you thank you um financial literacy in public schools this is uh this is a hometowner for volusia county um for all of her legislative career the late senator dorothy huckle fought to require financial literacy in schools and they did it finally this year and named it after it was a really sweet moment in the florida legislature where they recognized and honored her legacy of service by passing this bill and now it is a requirement for a half credit in high school to get your diploma you must have some financial training uh financial literacy courses um another veteran friendly bill was the um was trying to get more veterans into the classroom waiving certain temporary certificate requirements to get them into the classroom still would have to

151you know pass all the things to be a fully certified teacher but doing something to try to get veterans into the classroom using their life and their service experience to serve our kids uh was something that everybody sort of rallied around this was a uh you you mentioned instructional materials just a moment ago and some of the challenges there this was really a two-part bill it started with the house of representatives wanting to strip the pay for all school board members statewide the senate was not willing to go that far uh the senate uh talked about 16-year term limits and keeping your pay they ultimately settled on 12-year term limits that are not retroactive they start this in november um and uh but the pay remains which is which was good news and of course

152the instructional material issue another part that will likely be challenged if it hasn't already and and that is going to create some level of process a newer process for how instructional materials are are examined uh and of course you have the crt issue now that's sort of overlaying that uh but this creates a new process by which uh parents or uh the fact or our community can can talk about things that are in our library um in our library category uh um what's the word catalogs that's the word i was looking for um student assessments here's one uh the governor talked a lot about this leading up to session and it's one where uh bipartisan almost universal agreement in the legislature and i think here at this room at the risk of taking a guess

153that we're testing too much and moving to a level of not high stakes tests but um but progress monitoring throughout the year that's what this legislation ultimately did the devil and that is always going to be in the details but there was broad agreement that we needed to get away from the high stakes testing moving to more regular progress monitoring with one test at the end and that's what this bill ultimately does as we look ahead to the year it's probably worth knowing you see by senator diaz you know a lot of these bills were by senator diaz who as as you probably saw is now the new uh appointed commissioner of education uh replacing commissioner corcoran so our firm has enjoyed a good relationship with him and look forward to working with him on

154your behalf but uh obviously wrote those we got a few more we got like uh yeah on charter schools not compared to previous legislative sessions not a lot happened in the charter school space uh the big thing that did happen it all pointed to is that second bill and that creates the charter school authorizing committee at the state level and the charter school review commission uh giving that that board power to review and approve applications at the state level um and then on the charter school the hawkins beltran bill what that bill really does is is make sure that there's at least a window if if a school gets shut down there's a window there so that kids aren't left in alerts your families aren't left in a lurch as as charter schools are closed

155that was at least the goal of that bill on concurrency issues as you all partner with the county and capacity there's two bills that made it through the process one by senator perry out of gainesville area and and the two major changes is basically uh there has to be proportionate shared mitigation must be directed by the school board toward a school capacity improvement identified in the five-year facilities plan or must be set aside and here's the change and not spent until such an improvement has been identified um and then as well school board shall notify the local government that capacity is available for development within 30 days i i'll admit i'm not fully aware of if the issues that arise or don't arise here in volusia that's some of that's a major problem in some

156of the more urban uh parts of our state as developers try to move through and get capacity certification or not and then education uh by pre-k-12 appropriations committee they put this was a this is a budget bill they put out but essentially requires a rolling wait list of sorts for enrollment on capacity and for school districts to to provide that and then a driving choice grant program to increase transportation access for folks that are there chris goes to the next slide on the concurrency bill i'll just point out that really was a that bill arose out of a one particular development issue in tampa um it really wasn't it it never started as a statewide issue most counties and school boards are getting along fine on those issues and the first draft of that bill

157was frankly egregious in its treatment of school boards and it was able to get moved in a good direction over time thanks to some good advocates in the school board space to make it more palatable another one there was a campaign finance bill that had nothing to do with us or or many folks there and then at the late stage in session there was an amendment offered that was going to rein in the local government advocacy if you will as you probably know under current law before this has changed essentially allowed for local governments including school boards to provide factual information but they couldn't take positions like sort of advocacy type or opinion of this this increase in the millage or this increase or this reapproval this sales tax will will you know anything that's

158opinion-based uh because of the perception in certain school districts and other counties that you know flyers would be putting kids backpacks basically with factual but all the information there that would uh that would shift the conversation they they made a reach the legislature to to rein some of that in our team and others working on behalf of their the elite cities and association counties and other uh partners of ours were able to get some of these exceptions put in there and knowing that look we get it you're tr you don't want someone to get cute with the rules and and not be advocates but but put it in such a glossy way that it feels like advocacy but on the other hand whether it's a school board or a county or city they should have

159the right to provide information so you'll see those exceptions in there um whether it's a forum a response to information or reporting on official activity um you can now provide this information but that the law just as an fyi is changing there a little bit and then bringing this in for a landing uh and then certainly would love to answer any questions uh we we put this together of important dates uh before we thought about the special sessions occurring and reoccurring um we now have one called for uh may 23rd so that should be thrown in there before the primary elections i don't think we'll have special sessions after that but i wouldn't rule it out especially until the budget's signed sometime before july 1. but if if there are no others we have primary

160elections august 23rd regular elections in november and then an organizational session likely the week after we again at the time when we put this together thought there'd be a property tax special session november but that is in maybe three weeks uh and then committee weeks december through february uh regular session in march ending may 5th cinco de mayo uh and and in the meantime obviously that's an opportunity for us working with y'all to come up with priorities whether they're appropriation priorities whether there's policy issues every year there's got to be cleanup on k-12 um you know things that they they did in good good intentions and then once they peel back the onion or pomegranate whatever analogy you want to use go well we didn't think this was going to occur let's let's fix that

161next session and so that's an opportunity for us to work with you and come up with ideas on things that we can advocate and start working with the elected officials that we are expecting to be there next year with that robert and i would love to take any questions or further flesh out some of the issues or or get out of your way as they say thank you it is well it it used to be the normal start of session um so going back um six years ago it was only every 10 years that the legislature met in january maybe eight years ago that they started alternating even numbered years in january odd numbered years in uh in march so that's what we're back to march for 2023 because it's an odd-numbered year so for

162the board that is a relevant date yeah i would even ramp it up farther than that because um what's going to end up happening and chris mentioned that the dates you'll have as soon as organizational session happens in mid-november they're going to have at least two committee meetings and two committing weeks in december at least two in january usually three in february leading up to that startup session so you know the sooner you can develop the priorities whether it's in the you know early fall uh to early or early fall late fall to winter that's when you really want to be sharing those with your delegation in december january at the latest so that you're ready for that march session it's really never too early so if we know something we need next year whether

163it's policy or appropriation i mean it's hard to fully predict the winners of elections and we've got at least one contested primary here in volusia that that of two members incumbent members but generally we know who your senator is going to be next year or at least the main one and then the person who shares the the north side of the county and we have a general idea of who's going to be your your representatives um and so the sooner we can go have those conversations with them of hey policy wise this is a priority and to the extent you can work with us and and from an appropriation side same same issue to the extent they can work with them um we're going to enjoy leadership in this part of the state and the

164house and the senate especially in the house on both budget and policy so we should uh take advantage of that those partnerships that we have here for the county to make sure we bring home some good policy and some good appropriations thank you so much miss cuthbert if i have a question about house bill 3 if you could the law enforcement officer benefits i also saw one of the details in which the governor wanted to give law enforcement officers the benefit if the officer had children who were um k through 12 h they could get a hope scholarship that passed is that i think that is in there i'll confirm that for you and and i'll get back with kevin to get you the answer i believe that piece was in there as well okay

165and and that what that does is that gives children the opportunity to go to a private school on the public dime i think i would like a follow-up i'll make sure that i get you the answer is haynes back to the cyber security piece um with what what we're facing right now with cyber security cost it just keeps going up and up and it's taking away large portions of our budget that means we're taking it away from kids because schools are like the number one target right now our school districts so is that cyber security piece going to make any difference for us because i think that that almost has to become a piece of the priority because what we're having to pay out in cyber security and the and the drastic jump that has

166happened you know at some point when do we say enough is enough so and i pulled the slide back up so we can reference it you'll see there 35 million was set aside for dms and the chief information officer jamie grant former house member to distribute to local government is grants we should immediately uh whoever the right person is on your team to connect with us to get a good better understanding of what those costs are and why and and and what we've been doing about it and robert and i both know the cio very well and have and know the folks at dms we can set meetings to at least discuss okay how soon are you going to roll out those grants what's going to be the criteria we'd like to be on that

167list so that we can supplement or offset if you will so that you can dedicate more of your funds towards instruction and staff and what have you well because i mean we've already taken steps ourselves you know once the legislation came down and we hired an internal auditing firm that reports to the board i mean the first internal audit we did was on you know our cyber security piece and the penetration all that but we're getting ready to have to pay for another full-blown audit on that piece because we can't let it go since you know school districts are the number one target so when you're wanting to do an internal audit on another area to see can we streamline you know can we save money we keep having to come back to this area

168pay out for another audit here and then pay higher cost to be insured because of what they're doing so i just i we need to know that because that's money coming away from our classrooms where our kids are and if i heard you correctly i want to make sure on the public notices we are no longer going to have to advertise in the newspaper there are ways that you're going to still have to advertise but generally speaking uh my understanding of the way that bill ultimately fell and we'll get the staff analysis and the final bill analysis to kevin and your team to review it because obviously we want to make sure that you're in total and full compliance with the with the public notice requirements um is that the whatever was left outstanding from

169the bill two years ago that still had to be put in the paper those were basically all removed so as long as you're on the website as long as you're using the state's general consensus website for all public notices there's a few places that you still have to do it but my understanding virtually everything can now go online we were looking to go to online website notice for publications for meetings like this and and public notices but that will be a big benefit i can tell you that my office typically for all policies have to be printed uh in the paper those are large expenses that we have cost savings to thank you and just one final thing on that bright future scholarship program if i understood you correctly we've it's always had the volunteer

170hour piece and we did run into a problem when you know the pandemic started and students couldn't get out there to volunteer and so they did at that point adjust that piece but if i understand correctly we're now going to allow paid work hours to also count and replacement of the volunteers account for that piece yes ma'am okay and that to me i mean i'm all about volunteering because i think it it teaches leadership and it teaches a love for your community and things like that but we've got kids that they're helping you know support their homes and so i think that is a win-win that we're going to allow them paid work hours to also count because you hate to take this kid who's a bright kid that could have that scholarship but he

171or she needs to work to help you know put food on the table in their home and you've really nailed that was the a lot of the discussion up there this year we did get the question a couple of weeks ago at a presentation like this where they were asked if that if that possibly counts for this year's senior class i don't think it does um but uh but we'll confirm that for you and get you that answer as well so i didn't mean to cut you off i apologize no no thank you and because once you do know i think we need to get that word out to our parents because i don't know if you guys were here earlier but you know we held teen teen job fairs last week on the east

172side of the county in the west side and the west side had 507 come through the door and there were even parents that they some of the companies allowed to fill out applications because there's parents looking for jobs too so thank you thank you mr purses uh thank you mr chair so there's is there any truth to the rumor that elon musk is going to buy the state of florida and create his own country and no oh there is i haven't heard that one you haven't heard of that one yet all right well i am i am i am happy to hear that or maybe i'm not i'm not not so sure uh i got to tell you this is like the best most comprehensive uh legislative summary i think we've ever had so just

173kudos to you to you guys and your firm and uh maybe to you kevin you want a little bit of credit for that too it's all the crowd no okay so forget craig kevin on the credit part but uh no i think i think you all done super job uh was was there any uh legislation that made it to the finish line that would help expand internet access in rural countries and places where they do not have it now yes i wanna if i get the number right and i can get you the exact number i think there was another there was a lot of money last year but there was another 400 million i believe added in this year's budget again they were looking for non-recurring costs uh so that they didn't you know

174bind future sessions and future legislatures and that was one of them and they used a lot of the federal dollars coming down those will be overseen by deo and dane eagles team over there but yes so to the extent the county uh wants to look into that we should because there is a lot of money in the hundreds of millions in that are participating with volusia whatever information you provide mr chair thank you ms haynes again i had one final statement we didn't have this pro this um powerpoint presentation provided to us before the meeting so will it be provided to us now so that we will have access to it and it can be posted for those that will go back and view it all right thank you you miss burnett that's exactly what

175i was going to ask but also and this actually it's more for dr shanoff i think than you guys but it kind of played into this and that's dr shanoff could we get an update with all the building that's going on and the growth and where we stand with what our projection is for the schools for the students with because i know we've talked about that before but it was before you came and i think since then there's a lot more growth we are working with the county on those concurrency issues and collaborating with them to bring that information for growth management purposes and for school purposes and i'm sorry i know you probably don't have all the information today i just thought maybe an update soon but if you have something great we try

176to keep our planning in business website updated so those numbers are typically updated by stephanie's office regularly so but we can make sure that those numbers continue to get published thank you ms cuthbert thank you mr chair i just have one question i saw in the very beginning when you divvied up all the different billions going into each priority i saw that transportation has been increased does that mean our transportation will increase that category i mean are we able to then hire more bus drivers if they're available in order to reduce our school bus routes that you probably mean within the fefp category so i i i think the short answer to that question is probably yes i think the longer answer is transportation at the district level is grossly underfunded even when they give

177you an increase so my guess is you know you're going to get a little bit more than you would have gotten and it still isn't enough to hardly do what you're doing much less higher more there was a bill and actually that's a good reminder there was a bill that was that was heard very early on in the session that would have allowed districts not required them but allowed districts to transport via bus at one mile instead of two the current statutory level is two that may be a good idea in principle for some families and students but there was no money attached to it and that would have been a monumental cost because again you wouldn't have had to have done it but how long would it have taken for the drum beat in

178this community to ask you to do it and then you don't have any funding to go along with it so we expect issues like safe pathways to schools and transportation funding to come back next year there was also a bill that would have allowed um i don't i don't i'm gonna at the risk of getting something thrown at me i don't know how popular red light cameras are in this community but uh there was a bill that would have allowed for dis uh to districts to have cameras to enforce the people who run the stop signs on school buses and that bill gets filed every year and never moves and it actually moved this year and that's money that didn't it didn't pass but that's money that theoretically could be put back into transportation funding

179for school districts if if and when it would ever pass so some of those conversations are happening the last thing i'll say at the risk of of belaboring the point there is an opaga study going on right now that was funded in the 2021 legislative session uh about safe pathways to school and you know there's a there's laws on the books that haven't looked at in 30 years um and uh it's so that the oppaga study was designed and i don't know what the end result will be we'll know in july but it was designed to come back to the legislature with some ideas best practices around the country you know who's doing what right and wrong and where um and that may drive some of that conversation again but there is universal understanding and

180appreciation at least at the school district level around the state that the money we give for transportation more is great but it's still underfunded and just to let you know we have received national um honors for our oppon pagas studies and the work that we've done here so just thought you'd like on the transportation issue okay yes good to know thank you thank you anybody else so i have a question on the bill that they're talking about putting on the ballot as far as the teachers 150 000 how are they defining teacher is that their traditional only classroom rostered teachers or are we covering all teachers that is a great question mr chairman i don't know off the top of my head we can get you that answer of how they defined it my guess

181is classroom teachers but it may have been broader than that so i can find out and we can get back to you yeah they've usually when they make that reference they're they're referring to instructional uh staff but that's not always the case and we'll get you that specific answer because we know some of your media specialists and others don't qualify necessarily as instructional yeah and actually i heard something really interesting i think it was uh mike springer actually was on wndb and he was talking about that and they were talking about you know it's a great thing we are all about that but what about a teacher who rents who the landlord has to pass on that tax increase to them and doesn't get the benefit even though a teacher is living in that property

182so is it really all teachers the answer is only teachers who are property owners so that so it's really complicated and and again there was the question of how do they define teacher uh it would make it very complicated for a tax commissioner to ferret that out as well back tax bill your trim notice if you have an exemption check there somebody's got to verify that wow so definitely well again thank you so much for this amazing presentation we really appreciate it and look forward to receiving the uh presentation so we can remember i imagine you've got it thank you and also board it sounded to me like we probably need to plan on a workshop for our legislative priorities so we can get ahead of it so we'll plan on that as well if

183that's if there's a consensus i see lots of heads going as such so mr chair if i may i was going to say it you know on that we we always encourage at the local level it feels like in tallahassee sometimes they're picking on not not not picking up our local governments or school districts uh but but i do feel and and the folks we partner with and work with up there that they they want to be helpful they think they're being helpful right um so i think if we have ideas that's not just defense but hey a little offensive let give us this right to do this or or did you realize because of this law that we have to do this and it's superfluous or actually let us go to them and say

184hey fix this for us and let us work with it and i know some of y'all are wondering uh i worked at blockbuster he worked at einstein bagels those were our high school jobs when we also had to volunteer but we we really appreciate the partnership we're looking forward to having more wins next session and we look forward to finding those cool issues that we can go play offense on as well as appropriations so thank you for having us today great thank you so much all right next item we're going to go to is 6.01 which is a consent agenda believe it or not we haven't even spoken about consent yet all right board members there was an item that was removed initially which was 8.04 does anybody have any other consent agenda items they'd

185like to discuss pains item 11.02 item 11.03 and then i'd like to i'll save it till later i have a comment about an item that was on the last board meeting do you want to have that discussion first or do you want us to take care of those uh individually we can have discussion if that's right all right so uh we will seek approval of the actually let's go ahead and talk about them so 11.02 ms haynes so on 11.02 this is that parent pickup loop at debary and um they're bringing forth a um an action that we're going to save some money on this right now here's my it's a decrease here's my biggest issue when we when the city of debary chose to do the study and then they came and partnered with

186us and said they were going to pay for half of the cost of this loop which you know to me was a great thing i think cities partnering with us is the best thing because we knew it was a safety issue well the city of debary not only partnered did the traffic study you know figured everything out put forth half of the money to do this loop they have even since then they have been using city staff to actually get the cars off of high banks and they opened up one of the ball fields and they're running three lanes or loops of traffic there every afternoon and they're manning it the city of deberrias they're manning it and they're communicating with the school and releasing only so many cars at a time so that they're

187not blocking high banks where an emergency vehicle or whatever can't get through that project though was really scheduled to be finished by now and i've driven past there it's not started yet so like i'm happy to see there's a decrease but i've got a community that they've taken the money from debary and the and the community supported it the debary city staff is running this so that we can you know we could keep it safe this year and that loops supposed to be finished and it's not really started and in addition to that we've got a new school year coming and i'll be honest with you i don't know what the community is going to do if we don't have a loop when the school year starts and i don't know how much longer we

188can say to the staff of the city of debary hey will you keep dealing with our afternoon you know and morning parent pickup and drop off and will you continue to use your staff to make sure that our kids are safe so we have two issues first of all we we've we've been meeting with the city the entire time city is a partner on this they've been a partner on this project city is well aware of the timeline we had to resubmit permits for this project when the city put in a turn lane on that back side of the gate when they put the turn in we had to halt all of our permits and resubmit our permits set our project date so the turn lane and the permitting that had to be resubmitted to

189st john's water district as a result is what's holding up this project this project was ready to go um we had engineered this project we had designed this cut in this project we had to wait until we had the appropriate permitting before we were able to come back and do it is it going to be ready in time for the fall when school opens i can't promise a date because i can't be sure where the supply chain issues are we have a project timeline that project timeline has been published so we would like to have it done by the first day of school but we have run into some issues with that new turn lane requiring us now to have to go back and get new permits thank you you're welcome my other one 11.00

190so dr shanoff you may want to stay right there is um once again i'm pleased to see this but it's a reduction in the dollar amount for the changes at woodward i recently went to one of the meetings at woodward avenue elementary and if you guys haven't looked at it yet and i understand if you haven't because i actually think we need some you know more time for us to see some of like what the plan is but they're they're going to add a building with 11 classrooms at woodward and new administrative offices they're going to add a new cafeteria at woodward