Volusia County School Board Meeting 7-27-2021

001good evening everyone and welcome online and those who are present in the boardroom to volusia county school board meeting this is tuesday july 27th would everyone please rise for the pledge i'd like to introduce to you everyone at the dance to my far left is mr carl persis school board member representing district four to his right is mr ruben colon representing district five to his right is mr ted doran he's our school board attorney to my far right is our school board agency clerk extraordinaire miss erin lieben to her left is mrs anita burnett representing district two to her left is miss jamie haynes our vice chair representing district one to her left is our superintendent dr scott fritz and i'm linda cuthbert i'm your chair and i represent district 3. we are meeting to

002get today at 5 30. we have not met for almost a month it's been a long very nice break away from the business of the school district so tonight we have an awful lot to do this is the meeting of the school board we meet in the sunshine we invite the public in we meet but there are a lot of controversial issues we respect one another's professional opinion and we agree to disagree because it could be a very late night during public participation which is at 6 30 times certain we're going to limit our public participation to 15 minutes which is what normally we um that is on the books that's our policy so we have that's time for five speakers three minutes each if you belong to a group you might want to select

003a spokesperson for your group or we will choose the first five people first come first serve the mass policy is not on our agenda tonight we already voted on that last month so that is not part of really what can be addressed to the board because it's it's not on our agenda we are tasked this we tasked the superintendent in our policy 503 in our optional mask policy that we adopted last month to come before us if a change in the positivity rate or the situation of covet 19 changed and it has so that is the purpose of dr fritz's presentation tonight and he has invited dr uh mrs patricia boswell to speak on behalf of what is happening concerning our schools and the county before we start school in a mere three weeks so

004that is his um a duty towards the policy that we asked of him and we passed last month so we will go ahead and continue our board meeting we will all work together most of us at the dais have been educators for a long time we will conduct the board just like it would be in a classroom we expect respectful behavior from our audience there will be no outbursts there will be no clapping you will be able to participate quite a few different times with participation public participation so items for approval on this agenda tonight 1.03 5.02 20.01 through 20.05 public participation times on the consent agenda one is at six o'clock public hearing on the tentative volusia county schools operating budget if it's all right with the board i would like to move that

005until after the presentation on the budget that way the public can hear what's being presented to the public first before there is public comment so the public comment is much more knowledgeable if that's okay is that all right with the board okay we also have it for 6 30 of general interest pertaining to public education in volusia county time will be provided for public comment on any action board item that we have before we call the vote the public will be invited to speak to that item time will also be provided at the end of the meeting for public comment for items of general interest pertaining to public education volusia county schools as well 1.02 district vision statement and board member comments would any board member like to begin mr colon so board i want

006to share with you we have a reason to celebrate miss farah johnson who is the ffa or let me take that back she is the ffa teacher at deltona high but she teaches in the academy of food and agriculture was awarded the teacher of the year for florida's career and technical education for the whole entire state so of all the cte teachers she was selected as the teacher of the year so mr farah johnson thank you thank you for all you do for our students and uh tonight we recognize you thank you thank you mr clunk mr purses thank you uh madam chair and uh great great that's so awesome to have a teacher from our school district win an award like that and i know miss haines is going to talk about one probably

007in a minute but i wanted to just say that yesterday uh monday we the district welcomed back all the assistant principals principals uh to the school district really nice uh training a session i think that went on there at the plaza hotel so i wanted to thank uh dr furtz for that and for all of your staff that helped put that on as a former principal i know that's a that's a real adrenaline rush when you come back after the summer you meet your assistant principals again and you sit around a table and you start just brainstorming about all the great things that you're going to do for your students and staff and it's just a super time so welcome back assistant principals and principals yay it's good thank you mr persis uh miss jamie

008haynes i want to piggyback off of what mr purses said and also thank like all of the um sponsors of that event yesterday you know all of the community members and organizations that sponsored it that was so wonderful that they stepped up to do that because it is a nice thing to be able to have all of our leaders come back and be able to spend some time together especially after the year we've had but last thursday night mr colon mr purses dr fritz and i had the opportunity to go down to orlando to the rosen shingle creek resort and just help celebrate mr g i mean so he made the top five finalists for a teacher of the year for the state and it was the excitement in that room um last thursday night

009was just unbelievable all of the people that came you know because they had all the teachers of the year there and they introduced every one of them from each of the counties and you know some of them they shared some stories about they also handed out some additional awards and honors but it was really it just it just made you walk away and say you know this is why we're here because there are such dedicated people that make a difference every day in the lives of children and i know that you know in our heart we'd love to have seen mr g be the winner but at the same time i know that he was struggling with the thought of taking a year off and not being with his students because he loves teaching and

010so i think you know i think it worked out the way it was supposed to be he got honored and a nice big check to go you know with everything and he's now part of a group where he's going to continue to grow and develop and he's back and he'll be back for the first day of school for his students and it was there's nothing better and it was a great evening and so first class it was it was first class and and i thank them for doing it thank you thank you miss haynes miss burnett well hello everybody um unfortunately i was not able to attend that but i did watch some of the videos and it was very nice um miss cuthbert and i we all kind of divided and conquered and we

011were able to attend something with the with the volusia league of cities where i think it was nice that we were all coming together as a community to try to help each other and work through problems and problem solving and try to just mend fences or build a relationship but it what a great opportunity to even have a teacher from the volusia county area in the top five for the state that's just fantastic thank you and congratulations to him yes it was a toss-up for for what so we were all busy last thursday night and it was wonderful to be a part of the league of cities and tomorrow um i think most of us will be at pine ridge high school first thing in the morning for a ribbon cutting for the hvac academy

012so we're i'm looking forward to that and then next week begins our new teachers returning for training so a lot of us will be going to breakfast some lunch and welcoming our new teachers and then our returning teachers veterans will be coming and also the new ones will be joining them on august the 10th and that's when our schools um completely reopen at least to faculties on tuesday the 10th two weeks from today so they have two weeks left of vacation and then school will begin that following monday on august the 16th and those buses will be running one more time and also um i'd like to welcome special guests tonight i'm sorry i'm all choked up i was surprised i have three of my four grandchildren here tonight and then um you you can

013stand that's right we have three from the class of 2020 and one from the class of 21. and then the real talmud in the middle is caitlyn's very bestest friend and they're all going before different universities in florida and this will probably the days are waning that we're all together again so thank you caitlyn for coming and nikolai thank you for ushering them all get getting here damien it was wonderful he's off to florida state aidan thank you for coming they're all off work today so aiden is going off to florida gulf coast nikolai will go to uf and caitlin's going to ucf so we have quite an array of colors in the front so thank you for it's nice to have kudas in the audience it's a great day to be a cuda all

014right and thank you so much i appreciate you guys coming 1.03 approval of the minutes um this is the minutes of june 22nd 21st it's our workshop and work session as well as our regular session from june 22nd is there a motion so move it's been moved by carl purses and i'll second it seconded by jamie haynes any comments or questions about the minutes all those in favor please say aye aye all those against please say nay the minutes have carried thank you um we've i've already announced one agenda change so is there a movement uh is there a motion to it there's one more agenda item is there one more yes sir there's a removal of 1302 that's the erp software implementation contract that we'll be bringing back later in the month of august

0151302 1402 and that's for maybe august august 10th meeting or we'll bring that towards the second board meeting in august okay okay okay all right the the agenda has been changed in which we will have six o'clock public hearing right after the presentation on the budget and the um agenda has also been amended to remove 13.02 is there a motion to adopt the amended agenda motion to approve as amended okay it's been motion has been made by mr colon to approve the amended agenda is there a second a second seconded by miss burnett any other questions or comments all those in favor please say aye all those opposed please say no the motion is carried thank you 3.01 recognition of community information department dr fritz uh chair cuthbert i'd like to ask kelly schultz and

016any of her communication team that's available to come forward folks i i'd like to share with you um that just good things are happening in volusia county schools you know earlier last month we were honored as the number one cambridge district for the nation um for our performance with our students and today i am very very happy to share with you three awards that our communication team won and you know part of this work that we do with our communication is under goal five and so i'll share with you that we are we are part of the nspra publication and digital media excellence conference and part of that there are 2 400 school districts that participate in that and there were entries for three different awards and i will share with you there were over

017800 entries and today we are going to honor this communication team with some first place did you hear me first place awards out of 800 so very very excited um the first award is an award of excellence for african american history video and the second award is an award for excellence for the vcs website redesign and i know that you all and i have had many conversations about what that should look like and then the third one is an award of merit for special purpose publication with our own strategic plan and i got to tell you how proud i am of this team we all know the work that has been done over this last year and the challenges that we've had and the social media footprint that we've had so i turned it over

018to kelly to make some comments for a team kelly all right it's great being up here madam chair board members and dr fritz thank you so much this is such an honor to be recognized by the board and my team worked so hard they work together only about half of them are here right now it was a whole team effort and i've said this before we might be a small team but we're mighty and i'm so happy to to be able to accept the awards from uh the nat this national organization there's there's as dr fritz said thousands of school districts from across the country and it's very competitive so it was really an honor to be able to get the letters in the mail and we were hooting and hollering and jumping up and

019down and we were so excited so um they played a role in all three awards in addition to our community information team we also had help from other departments including a student named xavier from mainland high school he's going to be a senior this year he was in the video and school board chairman miss cuthbert who is a former english teacher many of you don't know that we had her proofread the the booklet the vcs strategic plan booklet and thank goodness she did because i think that brought us home a win as well and uh yeah and also we have i think he's in the audience mr nick prince who was in our video which hopefully we'll see here soon the publications on the video can be found on our district website which i plug

020every time i get a chance vcsedu.org and madam chair if it's okay with you we'd like to share the african-american history video that won the award um oh yeah right now if we can please show it yeah okay all right hit it cue that cue that video [Music] at volusia county schools we're observing african-american history month at every grade level we're celebrating the many important contributions african americans have made to the fabric of our great nation we have about 10 000 african-american students in volusia county schools which is 16 of our enrollment in a resolution proclaiming february is african-american history month the school board noted how our quality of life is enhanced by the richness and beauty of african american history this special month also gives us an opportunity to showcase volusia county's year-round commitment

021to multicultural education diversity is infused into our curriculum and we provide resources and multicultural trainings to all new teachers in schools and at special events such as a recent principles institute we're working diligently to address factors that create gaps impacting minority students for the first time ever seniors are able to take the s.a.t college exam free of charge during school our high schools are enrolling students in the most rigorous academic programs that's right for each student we're using a program called restorative practices and restorative circles to build community in our classrooms our past program which stands for positive alternatives to school suspensions uses curriculum to help students restore relationships and move past problems in a positive way these efforts are embedded in our new strategic plan to make sure that all our students reach their

022full potential already we're seeing success enrollment of minority students in our advanced high school program is growing and our graduation rate for african american students has increased by nearly 10 percentage points in the past three years and we collaborate with community partners for all sorts of projects some of these projects include v-cans prosperity initiative and the united negro college fund drive avid students attend a financial aid scholarship forum each spring through uncf and nascar this spring we're partnering with local leaders to develop a history and civics lesson related to bethune-cookman university founder mira mccloud bethune and the statue of mrs bethune will be added to the national statuary hall in the u.s capitol building in washington d.c all of these efforts make our celebration of african-american history month even more special the importance of the

023commemoration is reflected in the special activities and academic lessons in our schools for this month [Music] everything from performances and trivia contests to art projects we've created displays and invited speakers to share with students virtually the month has been packed with meaningful educational activities we're posting pictures on the social media pages and we invite you to take a journey through the african-american history month with us there's so much to [Music] celebrate and he's very modest but chad goodman in the corner over there is the one who actually shot and edited this video congratulations he's running the audio tonight so thank you very much it's it's an honor to be here and to be recognized thank you but we definitely want to give some awards out get rid of the backdrop come on chad i don't

024want kelly to um [Applause] 4.01 public participation concerning items on the consent agenda board members will not be responding at this time are there any cards ms schultz for the consent agenda okay thank you 5.01 are there any board members do you have any items to be removed from the consent agenda hearing none 5.02 is there a motion to approve the consent agenda i move approval of the consent agenda motion has been made by mr persis to approve the consent agendas there is second i'll second miss burnett has seconded the motion any more concerns questions discussion all those in favor please say aye aye aye the board has approved the consent agenda okay 6.01 uh we don't need that one because we have already received it 16.01 superintendent's announcements and comments board members you'll remember

025last year that we started a summer graduation one on the east and one on the west uh for our students that were going uh the west side schools will graduate on thursday july 29th of this week at 12 30 in the east side schools and that will be at university high school and then the east side schools will also graduate that day at four o'clock at atlantic high school the first day of school for teachers is tuesday august 10th the next school board meeting in workshops will be on august 10th as well the workshop will be at 10 o'clock in the morning here in this complex and the board meeting will be at 3 30 also in this complex at this time i'd like to ask mr west to come forward our chief of human

026resources to share a brief update on vacancies mr west thank you dr fritz good evening board members thank you for giving me the opportunity to give you just a brief quick talking under about goal two i wanted to give you a little more specific and targeted information um and it's going to be very similar to the information that um that we actually collected last thursday based on the last day for our transfers for our teachers so uh just a couple of things this this information is based on classroom vacancies because that's what we're targeting right now we want to make sure that there's a certified teacher in front of every student on that very first day of school so it's not necessarily going to include our non-classroom allocations such as class counselors coaches or intervention

027teachers we still are actively hiring for those positions as well though but what we're really looking at in this particular set of data is the classroom vacancies and just want to remind you um this data is good as of last thursday 3 p.m july 22nd so that's changing every day every minute and so we're closely monitoring our vacancies we've actually identified some schools that are have a few more vacancies than others and we've actually met with those principals and the administrators there to see what the needs are to see what we can do to assist those as we're getting very close to that time but i think as miss mahini even mentioned earlier today those numbers have changed just from since last week uh we went from over 188 to over 200 that we've hired

028from the uh job fair as of today so i'm going to give you the uh the update um and this slide is just a sample for district one specifically but i'm going to go through all the districts just briefly to share with you the total number of vacancies shown here as of the 22nd it was 103. actually i just got the data before i came in here and uh now we're down to 94. so we've we've been working and processing that and getting those um vacancies filled and you're going to notice that if we look at it district district-wide and of course this is not going to change across each slide that we look at that averages out to 1.4 vacancy per school so that just kind of gives you the context of really when

029we're looking at the number of vacancies that we have school uh district-wide which it sounds like 94 is a lot and it is obviously we're working on that but when you really break it down that average number of per school is 1.4 vacancy per school and then we have a number of schools over on the left-hand side that actually have no vacancies at all and we actually have about 20 district-wide that have no vacancies at all so that's kudos to those principals and administrators who have been working there and we know teachers when they come back from vacation or when they have things that happen over the summer um that are unforeseen they have to take leaves they have to resign or possibly even consider retirement for for circumstances that occur so we recognize those

030things are changing constantly so that's where we are right now in district 1 you see we have 29 total vacancies um and i'm just going to flip through these kind of quickly district 2 as a comparison we have approximately 20 well we have 20 big classroom vacancies there for an average number of 1.5 per school and by the way over on the right you see the total percentage or percentage of total vacancies across the district um and then compared to uh district 3 there with 12 vacancies they only have uh of the total vacancies in the district and um district 4 has 21 vacancies with uh representing 20 and then uh we also have in district 5 there and i think it might have been left out of your your on the paper there but

031district 5 has uh 19 vacancies um that average number is only 1.2 uh vacancies per school so we're really excited about that information and just kind of wanted to give you a brief update remember the next two weeks is when we do our big push that's when we really are looking we we've stopped the internal movement which means we're just moving vacancies around and now we're really focusing on getting folks from outside to fill those vacancies so we're working on that i will tell you obviously i mean i think most of us know our highest area of vacancies are is ese and so we will continue to um to you know monitor that and and do everything we can to uh to get those vacancies filled so just wanted to give you a brief update

032and um thank you very much for the time i don't know if you have any questions but yeah i know we asked a lot on the board for mr west no i told you earlier today i love it thank you i loved my chart because it broke it down by school there you go yes yes this is new reporting it by district which is lovely and also when you put down the percentage per school per school it's or per district like mine is 1.0 it's it makes it less drastic so um but next time when you come back you'll be letting us know the the categories how many science teachers math teachers and and we'll be because it'll be the first day back for teachers it's our next board meeting so i'll have actual data

033of how many showed up the first day of pre-planning so yes ma'am we will do that thank you mr west thank you very much dr fritz i'd like to ask miss boswell administrator for the park florida department of health to come forward to provide the board with an update good evening miss boswell thank you for being here today yes ma'am where would you like thank you good evening miss boswell thank you for coming tonight and just speaking to the microphone so people at home can hear you as well good evening thank you madam chair members of the board dr fritz patricia boswell the administrator for the volusia county health department can you hear her online okay i'm doing just fine thank you okay so as we all know students benefit from in-person learning and safely

034returning and remaining in school is our priority as this new school year begins there needs to be a continued focus on keeping students safe since not all students will be eligible to be vaccinated before school starts variants have emerged that are increasing the risk of transmission and result in worsening illness to our younger people at this point in the pandemic given what we know about the low rates of in-school transmission when proper prevention measures are used together with the availability of effective vaccines for those 12 years of age and up it is vitally important for us all to take all the necessary measures to limit the community spread to ensure schools can be safe for all of our students faculty and teachers our interventions can greatly reduce the risk all eligible individuals should receive the

035covit 19 vaccine vaccination is currently the leading public health prevention strategy we have to end covet 19 pandemic the other prevention strategies for safe in-person learning recommended by cdc include universal indoor masking for all teachers students staff and visitors to the school regardless of vaccination status cdc also recommends maintaining at least a three foot distance between students in the classroom hand washing we know that hand washing staying at home getting tested and contact tracing are also important layers of prevention to keep our school safe again we're emphasizing the implementation of layered prevention strategies using multiple prevention strategies together consistently to protect those students and teachers that are not and our staff not vaccinated and as well as some members of their household so where are we in volusia county we've had 51 812 reported cases

036of kovit since the beginning of this pandemic 907 individuals have died including four young people in their early twenties there have been 3095 cases in children between the ages of 5 and 14. how many again between 5 and 14 3095. thank you we are seeing increased infection among our youngest 820 school age cases have been reported to us so far in the month of july so let's go back we've had 3095 total since the beginning just in the month of july we're not done with the month we've had 820 total cases from the beginning which was march of 2020 to august 9th of 2020 so last year when we were talking we had 544 reported cases in children under the age of 18. the state of florida recently experienced a 61 increase in cases jumping

037from forty five thousand five hundred eighty five cases two weeks ago to seventy three thousand one hundred and ninety nine cases in the last seven days in volusia county cases have increased during the same period from 1705 cases to 2976kg so last week almost 3 000 cases were reported to us our current seven-day average is 425 and the 14-day average of cases is 334. our current seven day positivity rate is 22.75 and our 14-day average positivity rate is 20.54 96.5 of cases reported this month are within our unvaccinated population the remaining 3.5 cases meet the criteria of a breakthrough case this month vaccinated resident residents are nearly 20 times less likely to become infected with covid than the unvaccinated residents so to put that in a tax rate unvaccinated attack rate is 81 per 100

038000 population vaccinated attack rate is 1662 per 100 000 population okay go back and state your percentage again on that you said this month vaccinated residents are what was your percentage 96.5 percent of the cases with the unvaccinated the vaccinated was 3.5 3.5 we are seeing an increase in infections among younger residents the average age of an unvaccinated case reported this month is 39 years of age the vaccinated case average is 63 years old presently 54 of volusia's county's eligible population is vaccinated that means they've re received at least one dose of our residents that are 65 and older are vaccinated only 15 percent of children age 12 to 4 are vaccinated and 24 of our 15 to 19 year olds are vaccinated our most recent report and this boswell could you say that one

039more time you said fifteen percent of what you have 12 to 14 year olds 12 to 14. and what did you say about the younger group 15 to 19 year olds or 24 of them are vaccinated do you do you have is this typed out or is this handwritten what you're reading typed typed is there any way we can have a copy of it because each time that you come as far as well you read this data and you read it very quickly and we're caught having to try to capture it and write it down so that we can have a discussion about it you'll receive us i'll send dr fritz's summary tomorrow sure if that's acceptable okay our most recent report indicated that 3 323 individuals residing in volusia were vaccinated during the week

040of july 16 to 27 to the 22nd so in the last week that we had a report of the number of people vaccin you know getting a vaccine 3200 300. that's volusia county in volusia county we are currently investigating 58 active outbreaks 30 of which are in our long-term care facilities six are in our summer camps there's other outbreaks of course happening in businesses church groups and other settings i'm particularly concerned about our long-term care residents at this point with the number of outbreaks that we're seeing and the fact that immunity wanes as you age so they are can continue to be our most vulnerable so i want to end by just saying the presence of these variants and the large number of unvaccinated residents the substantial community transmission those are the factors that's contributing

041to it so when you think about substantial community transmission the definition is 100 per 100 000 we're at 545 per 100 000. okay thank you are there any questions from the board i do mr colon so is it the position of the florida department of health as a body that we follow the cdc recommendations or is that something that locally uh your department feels is because as we know there's there's a lot of pressure from the government right now as it relates to this topic and so is is this the conversation that's being had across the state that's going to be applied basically or the same recommendation to most of the districts who are in a similar situation or is this a volusia county summary that you feel is is appropriate this is a volusia

042county summary okay so the florida but i will say that our surgeon general has said that we should be following cdc recommendations in the american academy of pediatrics and their recommendation is universal universal masking in schools so since this surge has there been any uh direction from the because this surge came you know when we spoke about mass the last time that we were at three point nothing percent which is when we made that decision however has there been a position or any statement and i realized we're only 10 days into this last surge has there been any position from the florida department of health formally to make these recommendations other than the surgeon general saying on a call this week to follow the cdc guidance in the american academy of pediatrics is that in

043writing anywhere that we're aware of it was on a call great thank you that's all i have thank you thank you mr clone miss burnett yes thank you um when you when you talk about the cases when they were testing is it the the point of care testing or is it the three-day testing antigen and pcr tests are both reported to the um department of health was there a recent study that stated that the pcr testing was giving false positives i didn't bring any of the um rates in terms of the you know okay false positive rates for that i'm sorry i didn't that's okay and how do they test for the variant it's um geo geo-sequencing testing that's being done at uh labs throughout the nation and cdc is leading so most of the

044positives right now are the variant or are they mixed uh so up to probably a week ago it was the uk variant that was predominant variant that that was really um what we were seeing in the cases and that's now changing where the delta variant is not quite the predominant but there it's it appears that that's a real risk for us because it's more transmission higher transmission how many hospitalizations for pediatrics okay and their age group please okay i think this month and i want to make sure i get it right all right so hospitalizations for the year of 2021 um we've had let's see 25. and what age group was that that's 19 and under 19. and did you want it for the year for the month of july um july that would be

045great okay so the breakdown for the month of july where we had six hospitalizations we had two under the age of one we had one in the ages of five to nine we've had two in the ages of 12 to 14 we have one in the ages of 15 to 19 which gets you to the six now there's something about hospitalizations you need to understand that is just what we're aware of okay so um we may not have a complete picture of hospitalizations and we certainly don't have a complete picture when it comes to recent hospitalizations so as of you know today what's been reported to us are those six hospitalizations i will uh caution that that's probably a a low number thank you okay and one thing to know about the numbers like um

046we had yesterday 536 new cases reported to us the impact on the hospitals is two weeks out i'm sorry i did have one more question too i apologize you mentioned that you had six cases in summer camps when you did six outbreaks six oh okay six six outbreaks in six there were six summer camps that experienced outbreaks how many how many of the kids had uh became positive were positive in those successes i didn't bring that i just brought the outbreak information so do you know by the the tracing they were all related to the summer camp or did they come did they get it from home or how did we trace those so basically a case is reported and when the case investigation happens we find out that kind of information what what kinds

047of activities and places that particular case has been engaged in during their infectious period and it's linked back um to the fact that they were in a working a long-term care facility at the time they're working in a summer camp they're working in a daycare and then we begin to see reports coming from other cases that are also in that same facility during that period of time so when we have two cases or more and a facility a congregate facility of that nature it's considered an outbreak we see a lot of that in the jail usually the jails are listed on the outbreak list on a pretty regular basis thank you okay miss um james good evening mrs boswell good evening so i want to piggyback off a part of what mrs burnett just said

048and what you responded to her so you said we have currently six outbreaks across the entire volusia county that have taken place in summer camps correct today today today okay you said an outbreak is con it's considered an outbreak as long as it's two people in a congregate setting okay so it could be two people out of a total of five people it could be two people out of 300 students that are there correct so so it's it's an outbreak if there's two regardless of how many people two or more two or more all right so when you were here in march and you can correct me if i'm wrong but when asked about the number of individuals whether they were adults in the school setting you know staff or students if i remember correctly

049you said under contact tracing you could only trace back the possibility that 34 individuals may have come into contact with it in the school setting and of those 34 only four were possibly traced back to sports correct possibly but okay and when i asked you about what was the criteria at that time that we should have been following for sports you read me off a list that said students should have been masked while playing sports and all of that and we talked about the fact that none of our students were masked for sports they played football they played basketball they played baseball they did wrestling they did all of that nobody was masked and we could maybe for the entire district for the for the whole last school year all the way from august to

050march only possibly trace back four students pos four individuals so it could have been a coach could have come into contact with it at school playing sports here's where i'm at tonight i i heard you make a comment about the virus is waning in older ages so let's let's talk about this the effectiveness of the vaccine sorry effect effectiveness of the vaccine so let's talk about coven from when it started because covet actually came into the united states if you look at research in the fall of 2018. it was approximately february of 2019 when the united states government identified principal investigative research doctors to start researching it and companies such as pfizer and moderna and johnson johnson started on a vaccine my question to you tonight i have a lot of questions for you so

051i apologize miss cuthbert but please bear with me okay my first question to you tonight is here in deland we have our own clinical research facility we have two certified principal investigative research doctors that are involved with that they started researching this in february of 2019. i have been in direct contact with them from the time we sent students home that spring break from you know in march i have had long conversations with them i have seen the research that they've done my question to you is have you spoken to any of the doctors or researchers involved here in deland locally they were selected as the first group out of florida to do the research on this on and to administer the pfizer and moderna shots they are now doing the antibiotics have you had

052any communication with them no okay so can you describe for me the difference in symptoms and what happened to an individual that contracted the original covid versus the uk covid versus the delta variant do you know the difference in the symptoms or what it did to individuals bodies it depends on the individual okay do you know any of the signs though the original coven and what it did the symptoms said people yeah they were coughing sneezing sore throats headaches fatigue diarrhea okay when people were first hospitalized with that what was the immediate response that most hospitals what did they do first they had difficulty breathing so they were looking at the oxygen levels okay and what did they kind of jump to if they were struggling with breathing well incubating in the vent okay so

053research on venting individuals whenever you go to the point that you vent someone you basically have reached a point where a ventilator is going to harden their lungs and it's not necessarily going to make it better i happen to have spoken also with local respiratory therapists as well as some respiratory therapists actually ahead of respiratory therapy out of another state and this is what they said to me the first inclination of what we were told was to vent people what we quickly learned is that in the original virus the mucus was heavy and thick and by venting someone you basically were pushing them to the point that they may not recover because of what a ventilator does and also because that heavy thick mucus then blocked their lungs and made it difficult to breathe so

054what they quickly learned and why we took a turn around and then stopped seeing as much of ventilating going on was they learned you've got to thin the mucus out and keep it going and not vent and that's how we turn people around what do you know about the symptoms right now for the uk variant or the delta variant they tend to be more severe so people at the delta they're going into the hospital much more sicker that's interesting because in speaking with these research doctors that are local here what they've said to me is they tend to mirror a cold or a sinus infection the mucus is not as heavy in the delta variant at this time as what it was in the original variant because it's a mutated piece it's no different than

055the when the flu mutates like all of a sudden we'll get a very bad flu virus one year and then the next few years we've got mutated viruses off of that that are never as strong they're always weaker and you realize they build the flu vaccine each year off of the variant from that year and give it to people for the next year not knowing what the variant's going to be so here's where i'm at on this we already chose for mass to be optional i'm not changing my mind because number one children do not belong to us we may have children i have children i have grandchildren okay but my medical the medical decisions for my own children when they were of school age and for my grandchildren at this time belong to the

056right of their parents i'm not in the position to make medical decisions and to enforce medical decisions upon children so by making masks optional we've given every parent out there every staff member and every student the right to make the choice that is best for them so i'm standing by that american academy of pediatrics who's their number one funder do you know no let's try pfizer so here's what i've learned didn't want to get into all of this but i've learned and i'm researching and i'm continuing to ask questions of those people that are dealing with this and tracking this on a daily basis what i want to ask you about is not once does anybody ever talk about antibodies do you know where we stand with the individuals that have already had covenant and

057where their antibiotics are there is some cdc information out there that's what that's my source that is suggesting that over time your your immunity may wane if you've had a prior infection and there are cases where people have been infected for a second time okay so all right you opened that so yes i happen to have talked to the researchers that are local here that have been tracking people since february of 2019 who got the original case of covin we are now a year and a half out and those individuals still have antibiotics i have personally a 78 year old mother and a 79 year old father who last august got coveted and i had their permission to share this information tonight they have been tested four times since then checking their antibodies and their

058antibodies are still strong so what has their doctor told them there is no need for you to take the vaccine because the vaccine is not going to give you anything that you already don't have naturally in your body so how come we're never talking about the people that have already experienced it and the antibodies that like there's no discussion about antibodies and i'm sorry but naturally antibodies i'd much rather have antibodies because i took it i mean why do we draw people's blood at other times to make sure they still have antibiotics to if they'd had chickenpox or if they took the mmr we don't automatically demand everybody be vaccinated we we draw their blood to find out what they still have so when you said the vaccinate is waning in the older who was

059the first group that we vaccinated here our older folks okay so explain waning so there is some evidence that the immunity of some of our older adults may wane from the from the vaccine and they may not have the level of protection and that's the discussion that's happening around boosters right now okay so let's go back to this do you have any research that shows that if you have because you talked also at one point about one shot of the vaccination where we know if it's pfizer or moderna it takes two shots only j johnson johnson is a one shot do you have any research or data that tells you if everyone that was vaccinated whether they took the johnson johnson the first shot of pfizer or moderna are both shots did they all develop

060antibodies do i have that for the the people that we vaccinated no i don't have that but that's that that's you know what you're expecting you're expecting sure would you like to know what the real numbers are nationwide for the research that's being done in every state that is fed into one database shows actually that everyone that was fully vaccinated approximately 15 percent of them develop no antibodies but yet if they are carrying around a card and says they're vaccinated we're good to go right but if we've had covet and we have antibodies whether we're six months out or a year and a half we don't want to talk about it we want you to take the vaccine okay do you know what the research says right now for how long the antibodies are lasting

061in the individuals that have been vaccinated now three months for some six months for others and they're still following on all right my question here to you tonight because obviously you know you're going to quote the cdc guidelines i'm doing research i'm asking questions and i'm getting the research directly from people following all of this when we were still in school we yeah we had precautions and you know what i think of the mass because at the elementary level some of those masks were absolutely filthy that those children were wearing now let me go back and ask another question do you know what the numbers are on the in the zero to 19 or zero to 25 age category of children this past year that lost their life due to pneumonia not coven 19 pneumonia

062now i don't have that with me okay so i have it and i can share it with you and email it to you it's a whole lot more than what your coveted numbers are more children died this past year of pneumonia in previous years more children have died of flu than they have of covid how many children have died in volusia county of copen none none correct what's happening right now let's think about this we've been an open state and the entire world's been coming to florida to summer vacation our beaches are full our amusement parks are full families are here together because they can be here together and there's no restrictions kids are at summer camps kids are going to youth camps kids are hanging out and guess what kids are doing because this

063is what children do children hug they touch each other they hold each other's hands we got teenagers out there kissing teenagers were kissing even during the school year when we made them wear a mask but trust me they took it off and they were kissing but kids during the summer share food mom cuts up a watermelon sticks it in a bowl and they all reach in and touch it and they share food they share drinks i mean i got a two-year-old and four-year-old the two-year-old picks up the four-year-old's cup all the time thinking he has something better to drink than what she has and he takes a drink out of it right now we're not comparing apples to apples so my next question for you is this the numbers that you sent in the report

064over to dr fritz and said here's where positivity rate is the way you calculate the positivity rate and i'm going to make it just very simple is so if last year we had 1 000 people like this week in july that were tested and 50 of them were positive that's how you calculate your positivity rate well if this week in july this year only a hundred take the test and still 40 of them show up all of a sudden our positivity rates way up here because a lot less people got tested because that's how you calculate positivity rate so positivity rates don't mean anything what means something is last year if you say to me last year on this state ms haynes there were 72 positive cases positive people that tested positive and you tell

065me there's 172 this year then yeah i've got to wake up and look but your positivity rates are based on how many people test versus how many tests positive less people are testing and we've also talked about them having to test and retest and retest and look i appreciate what you do but the bottom line is if we've got right here in deland doctors that have been researching this and involved with updating the research and and they're tracking people for three years right now because remember this is still not approved this is still under an emergency order okay why is it still under an emergency order because we don't have enough data on it we don't know the long term side effects we don't know how long will will you get antibodies how long will

066your antibodies last now i can tell you if you got it you're if you've already had covid you're truly in better shape than anybody else because you've got antibodies except for the 907 individuals who've lost their lives okay i don't want anyone to lose their life but the reality is every day someone loses their life people lose their life due to cancer people lose their life due to so many contributing or co-morbidity factors we don't live a single day that someone doesn't lose their life answer by saying that were the flu deaths larger than what covets been not this past year okay no no no no the year before were they larger than what because we're labeling everything covered that we can label code because there's money attached to it so were they were were

067the flu deaths the year previous to cova coming out higher than the cova deaths i don't have that number with me they were they were higher and i'm telling you that this year alone the deaths to pneumonia were higher and you know what strikes me interesting about pneumonia i had pneumonia six years ago it was one of the worst things that i lived through but here's what's interesting nobody said i had to take the pneumonia shot nobody said you've had pneumonia or wait all of us could get pneumonia we've got you've got to take the pneumonia shot because you're not going to live through pneumonia so thank you very much thank you for coming thank you for being gracious and kind thank you for answering my questions but the you know when this all started

068we were told stay home stay home don't go out don't talk to anybody don't have contact don't hug anybody don't kiss anybody and we'll flatten the curve if we stayed home well we stayed home and we didn't flatten the curve then we were told now you all need to mask up stay six feet away you know quarantine all that we didn't do it last year one of my schools quarantined the entire seventh grade twice because you told them to and each time you told them they had to send every seventh grade child home from that school the first time was 14 days the next time was 10 days it was due to an adult that and if you remember at least i remember when we started this process you said if you put them in

069seating charts and they wear masks and no one that tests positive is in their space less than three feet for 15 minutes longer than 15 minutes those kids won't have to quarantine well my question was this typically a seventh grade class period lasts 45 minutes so i really struggled with how a single teacher in that room with the because i went to the rooms with the kids spread out sitting behind plexiglas shields wearing masks that the entire seventh grade had to go home because i couldn't figure out how that teacher what and and before it was if they had mask off i couldn't figure out how that teacher spent 15 minutes or more in close proximity to every one of those kids and i followed up and not a single one of those children ever

070got sick during both of those times so they missed 24 days of instruction prior to this past year when a kid misses five days parents are given a warning when a student hits ten they're given the second warning at 15 days they receive a letter stating they may have to appear before a judge because their child's not in school we no now i'm not accepting responsibilities you and your team sent some of our kids home last year and they missed 40 to 48 days of school we're not under an emergency order anymore in my opinion if they're out five they're going to get notified if they're out 10 they're going to get a warning at 15 they're getting a letter home so how can we be the one sending them home what i want to

071say to parents is this as we've always done if your child is sick please do not send them to school if you as an adult work in a school system please do not come to work sick okay i believe if we do that if we continue to say you want to wear a mask you want to wear a mask and a face shield please do so as long as we continue to stalk soap paper towels hand sanitizer and we continue on the path that we've done with these kids about washing their hands not touching their face not putting their fingers in their mouth if we continue on the path of them not sharing food not sharing drinks wiping off their desk area wiping off tables where they've been we're going to be fine and if

072they get sick they're going to go home because you just you just told me we we've not lost a child which is a blessing because i've never known a year that we've not lost a child to something because we've lost children in so many things so thank you for coming tonight but i'd like to suggest you may want to reach out to our local research facility that's here in deland and have some conversations with medical doctors that not only have medical degrees and practices doctors but they've gone on and taken the additional coursework and everything to be certified to be principal investigative research doctors and they've been doing research now for probably a minimum of 15 to 20 years they're located here in deland and they are a part of this nationwide project doing all

073of this research and they have access nationwide to tell you where we're at and the last time i spoke to one of them they said actually nationwide we've had less than 600 children and when i see children i have to preface the age they told me 0 to 24 okay and let me tell you what what 20 young 20 year olds are doing is a whole different thing than what little people are doing right that have died where it has been coded as coveted as part of one of the things but when you break it down you have to look at the comorbidities and what contributed to that because there's not very many if any that can be strictly a straight coveted death thank you thank you thank you miss haynes [Music] that will not

074i'm sorry i asked you in the very beginning of the meeting there is no clapping and there's no response this is the school board's meeting it is not yours we will not know miss newman no no you this is our board meeting this is the school board's meeting you are invited it's we meet in the sunshine you're invited in we are not going to discuss this miss haynes spoke her mind she's a board she is a board member she represents district one she has every right to say what she has as an elected official we will not have this hijacking of our meeting we will not have it if you would like to say anything please say it to the media outside but not in here there will be no clapping there will be no

075response you have public participation for that measure thank you mr persis excuse me it is your turn to speak first of all i want to say uh thank you to miss boswell uh madam chair i didn't really expect tonight for us to get into any kind of dialogue i thought we were just going to have a presentation of the information that's not a board action item correct there'll be a time if and when it will be and then we'll have a chance to debate if it is the board's pleasure to bring it before right on the agenda that is everyone's we have five board members in order to bring that up what policy 504 3 says and what we put into the policy when we um drafted it two months ago and we advertised it

076for 28 days and we approved it last june 22nd was in the minutes that we approved tonight we asked and this is what i asked to put into the policy right if and of course we had no idea that this would occur at this point in time just in case if we saw any change in what's happening with covet 19 we asked the superintendent to bring that information before us and that's what and that's exactly what miss boswell is doing here tonight okay it's not there is no vote there's no agenda it's a mere presentation of the of the information then i don't have any comment i don't have any comment okay thank you uh miss boswell thank you very much for coming we appreciate your facts and appreciate it forward to those um summary

077of these summaries and we i'm sure we'll get a copy you can send it to dr fritz i'm sure we'll get a copy thank you very much for your time thank you all thank you thank you we it is now um 6 45 we are 15 minutes past the 6 30 certain public participation and what this is we are not going to comment at this time this is based on concerning any general items that are benefiting the volusia county schools do we have cards we have five cards i'm going you have an opportunity to come to the desk please speak into the microphone so we can hear you here in the board room as well as at home you will have three minutes to speak when you come to the dais please state your name

078in the area in which you live in volusia county the board members will not be responding at this time i'm going to announce the first person and then the second person so that second person is ready to come so there's a better flow and we have more time uh jerry kenny is first and then elizabeth albert is second come on up sir good afternoon or i should say good evening sir any seat you would like right there is fine thank you for coming this evening thanks for the opportunity to address you it's only been about 20 years since i've been here that's my name we welcome you anytime sir my name is jerry kenney i live in port orange i'm the father of two sons who are grown adults graduated from the volusia county school

079system and i'm here today to talk about another deadly virus called critical race theory that many of you may have heard a little bit about um in my employment over the last seven years i've i've i guess you could call it an opportunity i've had the opportunity to be exposed to critical race theory teachings and spent a lot of time researching it and that's why i was kind of surprised when several weeks ago the florida board of education was having a hearing in jacksonville on on the governor's proposed rule change regarding critical race theory and as i was listening to the public comments uh with with each individual that was speaking in favor of critical race theory it generally took about 30 seconds to figure out that they didn't know what the heck they were

080talking about they they had no idea uh they thought that uh that people that were opposed to critical race theory didn't want accurate history being taught uh when in fact uh you know critical race theory for those of you who are not familiar with it it branches out from marxist critical theory and marx had a a philosophy of ruthlessly criticizing things that they wanted to destroy it was to change public opinion to make people uh very very much upset with what they've got and to to create chaos if you will it's a revolutionary tactic is literally what it was uh if you couldn't fight a war if you could fight a war then they would do it the other way but anyway it kind of prompted my attention so i got in touch with uh

081the school system and i wanted to see our textbooks to see if if any of that was was in there and other than finding a whole lot of love letters to karl marx in our history textbooks here in volusia county i really didn't see anything that jumped off of the pages and then i had requested what i found was that where the critical race theory is making its way into the system is through what they call supplemental materials uh things that necessarily are not approved by the state or not approved on the local level give you a good example there's a this is from volusia county this is what i got from your school system this is a for african american history it's an e-dynamics course i believe it's an online course but it's a

082supplemental course and it talks it says african-american history in the early 20th century it says by the turn of the 20th century african-americans found themselves once more under the thumb of a white population that was violent and angry though it began with a southern backlash against the policies of reconstruction the trend toward white supremacy and anger toward blacks began to spread across the entire united states now sir i'm so sorry you're you're starting so well but you're three minutes it's up it's up all right it goes fast doesn't okay let me just say this all right please critical theories is a book that i would really love to encourage all the board members to read so that you you really will be able to identify this because the buck stops with you you're the ones

083that approve this material okay would you put the take the title and the author's name and the isbn number and hand it to ms levin before you leave thank you very much thank you very much sir thank you for coming tonight miss albert and then jesse thompson afterwards good evening good evening madam chair members of the board dr fritz members of the audience well i hope that you all have had a good summer it was an interesting time away and yes mrs haynes or ms haynes the thursday night gala was wonderful to celebrate mr g last week that was super fantastic for volusia county schools a victory for us all absolutely today earlier in the board board workshop i very much enjoyed the presentation on the strategic plan and yes you are right there are

084many wonderful and good things that are happening within our volusia county schools due to the hard-working dedicated men and women who work for this county and so although things are a little bit different than a year ago there are some very unfortunate similarities and so i just have a couple requests for your consideration tonight i know that although masks are optional some are choosing to wear them so my request to you is that if there are masks in the warehouse we make those available at our school sites and our work sites for those who choose to wear them so that they do not incur any expense in buying them for themselves hand sanitizer always a good item to have handy particularly on our classrooms everyone benefits from a clean set of hands so if we

085could continue to supply that we would be very grateful and then as we know quarantines are eventually going to be a necessity it's undeniable no matter which side of the fence you're on it's going to happen we would ask that as much as we can we afford our employees the ability to work remotely we know that we have moved to a situation where we are one-to-one with devices we heard earlier today the wonderful things that are happening with the canvas platform and that our resource resources are now available digitally so i'm asking for the ability to work remotely so that the business of learning and running our educational institution can carry on we cannot endure another year of learning loss and so if we have the way to do it i'm urging you to consider

086allowing that to happen everyone wins that way um also i'm asking for the consideration of reinstatement of covid lieb i hope not to have to ask for that but here we are and so we are absolutely all in this together i'm hoping that we've learned some things from the last year learn how to work more efficiently more effectively so that everyone our teachers our staff our students our parents and our community can win so thank you thank you miss albert and miss albert is president of you and one more thing what a testimony to you mrs cuthbert that your grandchildren showed up on a tuesday night to hang out at a volusia county school thanks those are graduates for you okay thank you miss albert uh miss jessica thompson and then adrian andrino is afterwards

087good evening speaking to the mike you have three minutes thank you madam chair the area in which you live my name is jesse thompson i am from new smyrna beach florida one of the greatest beaches there is with all due respect i know this wasn't on the agenda tonight i know you're not voting on it but i would be remiss if i didn't bring up masks i know on meetings where people aren't voting on them it's still brought up that they should be here so i'm going to speak on the other side although miss haines took away literally any point i could think of so i'm gonna come with this i have two small children every morning i make them breakfast sometimes my husband helps i make their lunches i cut up their apples sometimes

088i give them pancakes for dinner not once has a doctor come to me and said maybe you don't give them pancakes for dinner not once has their teacher called and said maybe you send more fruits in their lunch although with all due respect to their teachers i do send way too much fruit and that's probably why they go to the bathroom as much as they do my point is as parents we have the option of what we put in our children's bodies we have the option of dressing them every day and taking care of them and it is an honor and a privilege to be able to do that so all i ask of you who take care of our children's needs as far as schooling goes is whenever you do vote if that time

089comes again that you'll make it optional for parents to choose whether they want their kids to wear mass to school they want their kids to not wear masks my daughter's a little person with very very small nasal passages and she cannot wear a mask and for kindergarten she couldn't see her friends faces and that was heartbreaking so please for all the kids please give them the option to see each other's faces and maybe to eat too much fruit in their lunchboxes thank you all thank you miss thompson um it's andrea andernino and i apologize if i mispronounced your name and then last tonight is jessica hathaway good evening state your name in the area adrian dino i live right here in deland okay um my son attends george mark's elementary school and he also has

090a diagnosis of autism we were out of school from march of 2020 all the way till april of 2021 because of covid we live with my parents who are elderly and myself i wasn't vaccinated either once we were all vaccinated we felt comfortable sending him back two weeks in was his very first and only exposure to covid we credit mask wearing for protecting my son from uh covet exposure or infection i'd also like to mention that i'm a nurse for 15 years and have worked directly with covid patients and a lot of the information that was just spewed out here was definitely inaccurate so i would like to see some sources from that information i know that we have discussed already that the cdc has um changed their guidelines on everybody wearing a mask indoors

091um vaccinated or unvaccinated my children don't have the option i have a two-year-old an almost two-year-old and my seven-year-old they don't have the option of um uh being able to become vaccinated um and i would i know that some people might not believe the positivity rates of covid um but june 24th by the florida department of health the positivity rate for children under 12 was 3.7 and then the last report date was on july 22nd that positivity rate was 15.4 percent and that is because of the delta variant which is extremely transmissible and we're seeing increased hospitalizations including pediatric hospitalizations although the florida department of health is not reporting that information anymore publicly i just want to be the voice for my son i want to ask for you to reconsider your mask mandate masks

092aren't something that's being put in your body it's a tool for prevention and protection for the children and i would like for you to follow the guidelines of the medical experts academy of pediatrics cdc which it also states on all of your emails that you will continue to follow the cdc guidelines on the last on voluntary masking in that email on the bottom it says you follow the cdc guidelines that's all i have thank you thank you very much for coming this evening and last is miss jessica hathaway good evening talk into the microphone state your name there in which you live and you have three minutes thank you for coming hi good evening um i am dr jessica hathaway and i am a proud volusia county parent of of three school-aged children uh the

093daughter of an educator and a veterinarian with 21 years of experience practicing in volusia county my degree is from cornell university which at the time when i attended was the number one veterinary university in the united states of america and i am here first of all to thank everyone for taking the time to express views on all sides of of these concerns um to thank the public health department for coming and clearly and concisely stating the data we have on a local level and for everyone being willing to listen to facts and also have a good educated conversation about everything ms haynes in particular i'd like to offer to you any time since you said that you'd like to speak with doctors veterinary medicine has lots and lots of experience with infectious disease because we

094don't have vaccines for a lot of the issues that we face and i would love to talk about antibodies and titers and vaccines and you're right sometimes you shouldn't vaccinate and sometimes antibodies from natural immunity last longer but other times they don't and we in our practice actually use hiders to help make sure we're vaccinating appropriately and i think that that all comes into play there is middle ground here um i also wanted to mention delta it was not in play last year this is a new strain and please keep paying attention because it will be different okay um briefly i just wanted to state that i am not rapidly pro or anti-vaccination i actually have three children that needed medical exemptions for a long time for vaccines in schools and that i was grateful

095that they could get those and that also i was grateful that i was told that they would be asked to stay home in the event of an outbreak so what we have now is an outbreak of a disease where there is not an approved vaccine for children under the age of 12. this is a new situation that we as the adults in the community are required to act on no they are not all of our children except they are all of our children we need to have face-to-face education my children suffered greatly because of their dyslexia and adhd not having face-to-face education there is not a vaccine again i reiterate for children under 12 how do we keep things safe for them in the instance of coven 19 studies are showing that viral load shed

096for the delta strain is high even in asymptomatic vexed individuals who may not be outwardly sick this is new data because it's a new virus we have to keep learning we have to keep asking this strain is unique because it's striking young children and young to middle aged adults and they are now making up a larger portion of hospitalized cases across the country but of course in florida than in other times during the pandemic the transmission or spread and severity of viral disease is like covid19 so not all virus viral diseases but like this one is decreased by reducing the viral load the individuals are exposed to universal mass are the most effective and reasonable way to keep the viral load and exposure lower in our schools and to protect our young children especially those

097under 12 where there's not even an unapproved vaccine option for them to get the teachers and their vulnerable families at home while still allowing the much needed face-to-face education i'm sorry ma'am wow that was unnecessary i apologize i got caught up in which what you were saying i did not it there's no bell or anything and i didn't keep track i just so you're really i'm just asking members of our community to please come together for the safety thank you of all until the cases drop and there are vaccines available for all the students okay it is now the conclusion of public participation i think we're going to take a 10 minute break i'll see you back again around 12 minutes after 7. thank you ready mr clone [Laughter] welcome back at 7 15. we're

098at 18.01 presentation of the district advisor committee annual report dr fritz i'd like to ask miss kelly schultz to come forward and miss jennifer manacio hey jen that's good evening it's nice to see you again tonight and thank you for coming thank you chairman cuthbert members of the board and dr fritz i'm happy to introduce with me tonight miss jen maranacio did i say that right that's correct the district advisory committee president as part of the dac bylaws every year the president presents to the board what it's about what dak is all about and what happened in the last school year so we have a very short presentation and i'll let her take it away i am jennifer maranacio madam chair school board members superintendent friends thank you for having me and uh yes on

099behalf of our vice chair angela kufnicki and the rest of our dac members i present our district advisory committee annual report for our 2020-2020 school year which is always very hard for me to say so um this presentation aligns with the strategic plan goal five communication and community engagement our dac members are comprised of school advisory council representatives from each school and appointment of additional representatives such as school board member appointees futures foundation ese department federal programs and union members our dac members can be asked and do serve on other school committees such as the teacher of the year and school calendar committee we hold eight monthly meetings the first week of every month september through may excluding january and we as a district advisory committee serve in an advisory capacity to the school district

100our monthly meeting topics this year included our back to school opening plan our schoolway cafe presentation we had an operations update our budget presentation we had a presentation on one-to-one technology our restorative practices a presentation on the strategic plan and our new advent health cardiac screenings in preparation for the 2021-22 school year new officers were elected at our may meeting which also was our first in-person meeting as we met virtually all through the past year were there any questions any comments or suggestions questions for mrs m i'm not mrs m yes miss haines i just want to say thank you because um i love how you bring you know the people together and the topics that you cover are relevant topics and you're just you're just gracious and i know that this past year was

101kind of fun doing some of it virtually but it was nice that that last meeting was in person and i'm looking forward to next year's meetings so thank you thank you thank you miss haynes um anyone else yeah i i just wanted to piggyback what miss hanes said uh you run a great meeting even virtually and uh uh uh you are such and dr fresh you should know this they have been uh strong supporters of uh volusia county public schools she and her husband lenny are just fantastic people i mean can't keep up with your children now where are they now oh well she wanted me to brag um they are wonderful [Music] i have three children i have two covid graduates one graduated in 2020 from sea breeze high school and she is a

102rising sophomore at florida state and i have a 2021 graduate um and he is an entering freshman at university of florida and then and we have a mixed marriage we each got one so the third one is up for grabs and he is a rising junior at sea breeze right yeah yeah yeah so thank you so so much for everything that that you you have always done for volusia county schools and now taking on this role and do you have are you the chair for next year as well or how does that work yes and angela kubnicki is graciously also going to be the vice chair for next year as well good for you okay well let's hope that we can do them in person yes yes um anyone else miss brunette i'm pretty new

103to all the meetings but i have been attending i'm the member for the for the east side so i appreciate you helping me along and i look forward to meeting in person over the next school year thank you um i was very grateful that most of your meetings were online because then i could attend between my fractured foot and being confined to treatments it was it was wonderful to be able to be comfortable and and look in i thought you did just fine on um you know and you had people muting and unmuting and you were right on it so you're welcome we got your meeting started it was a very very pleasant experience and dak is very important i think to our county because each parent from each school gets to participate get district

104information and send it directly back to their schools and that is so important in our communication and there's nothing like meeting other parents from across the county going you've got that problem too we do too and you just don't feel so much alone or and then you can problem solve all the challenges you might have and it's nice because there's always a time in which people get to brag about all the good things that are happening in schools and that's always nice and everybody can steal ideas of fundraising and activities for parents night or something so thank you thank you for all your volunteerism um we're very grateful thank you and here's to a new successful year 21-22 okay and maybe maybe there's going to be a nice grab bag that's going to come out

105to be the best package you've ever had but thank you so much thank you so much thank you and if i may say one last thing i do want to say thank you all so much um usually we have school board representative from the east side attend the east west side attend the west it was very nice virtually to have as many of you there as possibly could and you're right dak is an unusual um animal in that um it's not a school board meeting but you're there as a resource and it isn't a district but you're there as a resource so i want to um just give a thank you to all of you for continuing to make the virtual meetings happen and be there also but um just to comment on the membership

106i just want to say thank you because when mr colon was at our may meeting he did say a comment on something that happened at a school board meeting he said i don't know how many of you attend or listen to our school board meetings and every hand in that room went up and so these are those people and so i actually know they're listening now and i just want to say you know how wonderful it is to serve with such a dedicated group of advocates and volunteers who even with the crazy year continued to make virtual work came back to the in in um in-person meetings so thank you all for helping support that thank you and mr colon are you the west side rep or is that miss haynes actually we think we

107all we rotate it you rotate see i'm the east side rep which is why i wasn't there but i'll be there your when's your first meeting september uh yeah we usually start the first wednesday that's yeah the first week in september okay thank you very much yes sir go ahead i guess this is a question for kelly have we put any consideration of transmitting the meetings and so we had quite a bit of folks be able to attend from either side of the county because they didn't have to travel and so i don't know what the bylaws say or maybe they could be maybe they're non-voting because they're not in person but they at least can hear the information firsthand when they can't travel from one side of the county to the others i think

108that would be helpful for everyone i mean it's if we this is a new tool that we didn't know we could use and all of a sudden you know again it doesn't take the place of being in person and i don't know what your bylaws say but at least everybody can get the information oh yeah we can definitely look into that and i'll talk with dr fritz about it thank you thank you excellent suggestion thank you mr colon thank you and have a safe home thank you 18.02 presentation and demo of let's talk you know board we talked about this tool and approved this contract in the past uh past board meeting i'm going to have kelly and joe i said i've come up but i want to share a little more about what this

109platform is as we go through this this is a way for our community to build sending communication to the district and different and specific departments and to be able to get a response back and to even send it a general statement if they're unfamiliar which department it would go to to be able to help answer those questions so it is lined to goal number five in our communication mr schultz okay exciting to be up here again madam chair board members dr fritz miss cuthbert asked that we give a demonstration give a little bit more about let's talk from our last board meeting and so um it's a digital platform it's part of goal five strategic plan and joe sutta our web services web developer is here with me he is the point person in my

110department who's been working on this and it's perfect because there's uh some back end stuff that's definitely his language the rest of us go okay but um so we'll go we'll start through this this is part of goal five to strengthen communication and community engagement let's talk it's a digital customer service platform that will allow the district to track incoming communications and it's a really a neat system that allows us to analyze and get and get some analytics on how well we're responding and this will help with our strategic plan where we um we can gauge how what we're doing and communicating with all of our stakeholders so the communications come in through so many channels that you know it can be very hard to track them we email text phone calls voice mails in-person

111meetings letters social media and there's a communications hub it's it collects communications and allows employees to collaboratively formulate a response or redirect that communication to the appropriate team it reduces the amount of time customers spend being transferred from department to department or person to person getting them information faster it reduces instances of lost communications and it's a tool for gathering topical timely feedback trending topics can be added to our contact page where we can allow customers a way to easily register some thoughts and have them routed automatically to the right person or team and there's an faq section as well some of the key features include the website widget which provides a 24 7 way for customers to contact the school district the communications are automatically routed to the right appropriate the appropriate team based

112on the topic that the customer selects there's a chat bot this provides a way for customers to receive answers to common questions after hours when district offices are closed it allows customers to ask questions in natural conversational language such as what's being served for lunch this week or who do i contact for help with my teaching certification it's also available 24 7 365 and will be available on the district site and on the school sites the school websites it's designed to help automate answering common questions without having to involve a district employee that's a nice a nice feature of it and if it can't answer the question it offers to let the customer send a message to drake directly to the district department and we can monitor what gets asked and train it to answer

113new questions or refine answers and help with the flow all right let's go back one yep if you go back one slide we have a video very short video to show you let's talk has been really good working with us and implementing this and we thought wow they already have a video created they i think it really spells it out and it explains it's a quick video highlighting some of the key features so we'll play that real quickly let's talk is a cloud-based customer service and communication tool that connects your community with your schools community members start a conversation by clicking the contact us tab on your school or district homepage they can identify their topic who they are the purpose of their message and more our universal inbox lets administrators instantly assign messages to

114specific team members for more efficient and accurate responses [Music] let's talk allows you to easily manage critical messages and health and safety concerns messages are marked as critical when keywords that you choose appear receive instant alerts right to your phone a real-time data dashboard helps you track response times see what issues are trending and measure customer satisfaction let's talk is a simple way to streamline communication and build and nurture community trust try it today so that's what it will look like and it's directly tied into our school district website and it'll be on the school sites as well and i mentioned before and i'll mention it again here we did quite a bit of research before going with this and let's talk has launched in 300 school districts and eight districts in florida and we've

115reached out to the communication teams there and they love it and dr fritz comes from a district that had it as well in osceola county and i've been in direct contact with them and implementing and pushing this through has been great so you want to go to the next slide and joe's gonna take it from here with a little more technical talk and then it'll be back on my end not too technical i promise um so what you see here on this slide is a demo version of the what's going to replace the contact us page on our website this is how it's actually going to look i wanted to actually show you our page rather than a demo page at the top of the page is just some introductory text it's actually just below

116the let's talk with volusia county schools at the bottom of the slide that establishes the goal of our use of let's talk how to use it and what customers can expect from the district by using it below that are buttons that correspond to district divisions departments and teams we've worked hard to ensure that the topics are worded as clearly as possible to ensure that customers can easily find them without having to dig through jargon let's talk is mobile friendly so if someone uses it on on a tablet or a phone they should have exactly the same experience using it as someone using it on a desktop or a laptop our contact us page will also be available in spanish and as we move forward we plan to ensure that not just the contact us page

117itself but the form and as well as any elements that can be translated are translated and we can also translate into other languages as needed members of the community can send dialogues directly to us by clicking the button that corresponds most closely to their needs so for example we have a back to school button on the contact us page so if somebody needed help with back to school they would click that button fill out the form and it would go directly to a team that's specifically assembled in order to be able to most clearly and most correctly answer those questions okay this is an example of the contact us form itself as you can see the form only has a few fields on it its focus is the subject and description fields because those are

118the most important in addition to the subject and description it asks users to identify the type of feedback that they'd like to submit that's up at the very top of the form as well as tell us who they are whether they're a parent student community member or somebody or another group and what that does is it helps us with metrics we we want to understand who is trying to contact us and why and down at the bottom it allows them to provide information so that we can respond their name email address or phone number i should point out that none of those fields those contact fields are actually required but we do ask that people fill those out if they want a response down below the contact information customers have will find a check box

119to allow them to hide their contact information from the district in cases where safety and security are concerned we i should say administrators do have the capability to reveal that information but it's very closely guarded because we we want to protect people's privacy if that's what they choose to uh to do certain words and phrases this was something that that was shown very briefly in the video will trigger what are called critical alerts these are primarily related to safety and security as well as mental wellness but they can also be configured for other topics as well like back to school or the half cent sales tax or other topics that that might be hot in the in the district these messages will automatically be assigned to district employees most qualified to respond to them quickly

120and effectively and then lastly this is the chat bot and this is probably the um what i think is is the coolest feature of the uh the entire platform um it's it's basically an artificial intelligence driven faq so think of a typical frequently asked questions page it's a long wall of text the questions and answers are usually filled with jargon it's a lot of information that you have to dig through and if you don't know the trick control f and then type what you're what you're trying to find you might spend a while digging through it and trying to find exactly what what you're what you're looking for and um depending on the on the wording the clarity of the wording you might not actually find it um the chat bot will allow people to

121ask their questions in their own way so in a natural conversational way and receive the correct answer back in the same natural conversational language we've pre-loaded the chatbot with about 30 questions and answers we plan to make changes to this list over time to ensure that the answers stay accurate and to add new frequently asked questions as they come up this will ensure that the chatbot is as useful as possible so some just a couple of examples uh when is the first day of school where's my bus stop uh how can i access my child's grades those are three questions that we've actually pre-loaded the answers to so if a customer asks a question that the chatbot then can't answer it allows them to create a dialogue and send it to the district it doesn't

122just leave them hanging and then lastly the way that the chat bot learns is from feedback from customers it asks the question was i able to help at the end of every single interaction and what it does is it uses that feedback to tweak its its accuracy and uh what phrases and words that it listens for so kelly's going to share some information about our implementation timeline now i also wanted to mention tracy carpenter a public records custodian has been working with joe directly on this because i wanted to make sure to pull public records in and make sure that you know some of the things that you answer you need to make sure that you're not filing any privacy laws or anything like that so um here's the timeline pre-launch july 5th through the

12329th for planning training and customization beta testing the week of july 26th that's this week and we've already started working on the back end joe has and our first test will be hr mr west tomorrow maybe i shouldn't have told them um and district employees will see and respond to these these dialogues we're going to do some beta testing behind the scenes before this goes live make sure that we're all set up because there was a lot of back end work that joe and tracy worked on to get in touch with every department and say who is your point person that's going to be monitoring this and who's the backup so we're talking schools departments across the district so they've been working on that and they have that list community information staff will monitor and

124assist this beta testing as we've been doing um the soft launch will be the week of august 2nd the widget added to the district homepage and the contact us page and then the back to school launch the the real launch will be the week of august 16th where additional topics will be added and communications to customers to inform them that let's talk is available and i know miss cuthbert you asked about the rollout plan for communications we will be sending this out and notifying all of our stakeholders that this is available how it works we're going to have a click sheet available and we'll send as much information as we can to let them know that this is available and how to use it okay are there questions of these two very knowledgeable young people

125thank you for your presentation i remember you pointing this out at the last board meeting where you were discussing it and i was excited to hear about it because i think communication is something we can always have an opportunity for an improvement so um what i would ask is is would you be able to come back at a future board meeting after it's been live and school's back in and give us some updates on how it's working out and how you've modified the questions that you've you've added for the frequently asked question sheet and just how it's working out absolutely and it's also part of our strategic plan so we will have some updates in our stock takes as well and we can pull the analytics and it can narrow it down to departments and

126and schools so we'll we'll be on it and we'll work with them and and make sure that it's running smoothly so thank you thank you for that request was that was very good uh miss haynes so first of all i want to say thank you and and joe i know that all that behind the scenes piece you're doing is not easy and it's very detailed and you're great at it so i'm happy to hear that you're doing that piece but um so it's going to be posted like on our site so is it going to be posted all right i think you said this on every one of the school sites also eventually yes the plan is that as the new school websites start to roll out the 16 that we've already launched and then

127the remaining 20ish of the elementary school websites as they launch we'll add it to their new websites okay so then they can then share that with parents yes like because the whole idea is it seems you know everybody goes to a variety of locations and there's just no way to monitor every location to be able to get people an answer so i like the fact you know this looks simplistic on the front side not on the back side you know for people to be able to do it but we want people to have accurate information so thank you for the work that you're doing thank you and i think this will help alleviate a lot of the phone calls that the front desks are getting at the schools once this gets up and running and

128i've actually helped and assisted with some schools in the front offices on occasion you know to help answer phones and and bless their hearts it's a lot of work and there's a lot of calls coming in and parents walking in all at the same time and so hopefully this will help with them too once everybody gets up and rolling with it so yeah thank you um mr colon i'm ecstatic because this is exactly what we've been looking for and just to expand that communication and allow more avenues where we can go to parents rather than waiting for parents to always come to us and so is there the ability to tie in social media to let's talk is that is there something in there there is yes um it has the capability to tie into

129facebook and twitter great because again it's it's a you know a lot of times you know folks go to other folks because they have to come find the answer where if we're able to come to them that will definitely uh make it easy and i'm all about that so thank you absolutely yeah thank you that was it you guys have such good questions um mr purses yeah no i just want to say thank you uh for doing this i i'm i'm thinking with the start of the school year it's like transportation can have their own let's let's talk because that's what it is i mean it's just unrelentless just calls about where's my bus this is this is a game changer this this was something that we implemented in osceola county um and the exact

130example you gave is the number one area that we noticed the first improvement yeah the other the number two area that we saw where it was ese yeah and because when parents had questions about ieps we were able to get those answers very quickly back to them so we're excited uh we we've we went out on the limb on this one after um watching another district perform and do well with it and change the game and also they also have a communication goal um and so we feel very very um encouraged that this is going to be good for us but it does have a reporting mechanism so for example you can you can see which departments are getting the certain number of hits and so that'll be part of our stock take that that

131kelly brings forward and that when we report out to the board at mid year and at the end of the year yeah okay thank you thank you best of luck and uh as miss burnett said it'd be great to hear how it goes after about three or four months in you know yeah absolutely thank you wait a minute i always go last sorry i guess i'm from an old school where you know you have to write an answer how can how much time will this consume an individual in all these departments i mean you're you're dedicating one employee to all of this correct answering questions um it's actually not just one employee in each department it's it's a usually a team of two to three they're not being devoted to it full time though we

132anticipate that the volume of messages that come in at the beginning will be fairly small and then grow over time but the idea in involving more than one person is to spread the load um so it shouldn't ever take over anybody's job full time i i can't see that happening and also i know when you were talking about transportation there's where's my bus app is there a place on our district website a list of all the apps that are beneficial for parents or community members where to check i mean all the different things that we offer because we've been doing that a great deal in the last year or two developing apps and adopting and purchasing licenses for something like this like where's my bus how many parents know that we have that app you

133can track your child's bus to see where it is and if your child's been dropped on or dropped off yet so do we have a list of all the different we do not but i really like that idea um yeah okay i think by the end of the week we'll have that one good idea all you guys had all these great ideas i was going to ask you okay and and that will definitely be part of our communications in back to school um but i like that idea as well we can have one spot where parents can find all of that and also not only put it on our website but to deliver to all the ptas especially the volusia county council of ptas and to dak as well so they can we can spread

134it around as much as possible um and it would be nice on some of the school marquees because more and more of our schools are getting digital and i saw the new one that you smyrna purchased and i also noticed that there's digital in front of chisholm elementary now they can say you have a question contact let's talk you know we can advertise um some of those and as parents wait in the pickup lanes you can have that stuff scrolling or or signs on the marquee especially the first week of school instead of saying school opens you know monday august 16th everybody knows that but they don't know have you tried where's you know where's my bus you know you can put those signs where the bus picks up so um that's a good point

135okay all right that's wonderful thank you and thank you for all your work um welcome i truly am marvel because i cannot do what you do so and i'm glad you can so thank you very much sarah thank you so much thank you thank you 18.03 elementary and secondary school emergency relief esser funds update dr fritz the state is down for the next four items okay you're getting a supplement for this correct good evening let's talk yes sir all right i will i will be brief um but hopefully give you a high level overview of what we are doing with the esser funds as i had promised at the last meeting that we had um sr funding aligns with strategic planning goal number four resources and operational processes and to recap these are numbers you've

136seen before but just to put them back out there we received elementary and secondary school relief funding which is esser in two phases phase one was 15 million which we have almost completely exhausted phase two 64 million and phase three has not been awarded at all that's just a projection of 149 million of the 15 million um the funding period for that was march of 2019 which was the start of kovid through september of 2022 however we have primarily spent all of that money and will with a goal of fully exhausting those funds by the end of september of this year of the sr2 funds we have a total allocation of 64 million it was awarded on may 7th of 2021 the funding period was june 1st through of 2020 through september 2023 however you'll

137recall that we got a little memo saying that we had an advanced allocation that needed to be spent by september 1st and so that that's the money that i was discussing earlier today in the strategic planning process that we've worked diligently to try to to allocate um and especially to try to help the general fund with and that money must be spent by september 1st that they might back off a little bit on that we're hearing but we haven't heard official word on that so we're moving forward with that yes and we also just got a memo i believe it was last week and that was regarding the second phase phase two of sr2 and there are four grant applications that are due on august 12th so we're working diligently on putting those together as

138well i just want to remind everyone that as far as spending the esser dollars there's assurances that have to be met and they all pretty much tie back to education and the impacts of covid on education to address learning loss protection of children protection of special needs you know groups of people mental health services and also the last assurance the 15th one is to maintain operations and to continue to employ our existing staff so the assurances are very broad and we have a process basically when we are looking at spending these dollars that everybody has to go through they have to fill out a detailed kind of application explaining how this you know was an impact related to covid how we can tie it back to one of these assurances and all of that documentation

139exists so basically with the advanced allocation we received 29.6 million a million went to charters one and a half million went to indirect cost leaving the district with 27.1 million of that 27.1 million we used 12.3 million to help the general fund and the other 14.8 was used to address all those other coveted related issues and so therefore that leaves us with part 2 of the 64 million which is part 2 s and that's the one that i'm discussing that we need to put four grant applications in by the 12th of august for the breakout of that is 34.4 approximately 3 million goes to charters and this is going to probably be a little bit less because we just received information since this was put together so a little bit less will go to charters

140than what we were estimating here the indirect cost of 1.9 million 2.6 has to be used for finding missing students 12.9 has to be used for academic acceleration 3.2 must be used for technology and that leaves us with a balance for the district to also utilize on other things that meet the assurances of s or of 10.8 um so what again just like with the advanced allocation what we were planning to do is we're planning to use that 10.8 million to help the general fund and when i show my budget presentation next i'll kind of show how that models into the full picture and then again as i stated the last component is sr3 which is at this point not awarded we don't have a whole lot of information on it but we are expecting

141that we will get word on that hopefully sometime in the next several months um one of the things you all had asked me to do at the last board meeting was let you know of the the money that we're using for us or how much of it is going to continue to be an expenditure to the district after esther goes away and so everybody that's applied for any kind of s or funding that we've utilized has modeled that out to determine over the next five years what it looks like and this is just a recap of that so essentially most of the esser the phase one or phase sorry sr2 phase one funds most of those funds so we spent about 27 million and most of those are reoccurring costs so there are things that

142once esther goes away we're going to have to figure out as a district how to fund because we truly are using esser to help us with funding our services in the general fund at this point that is all that i have for the esser presentation if anyone has any questions i'm happy to answer them and if not i can move right into the budget presentation and answer all of your questions at one time any questions from a sneed not yet i mean this is exquisite i mean this is so well detailed the yes and the no and every year reoccurring recurring costs of the the department contact estimated expenses i mean everything and i i mean it's very transparent okay great and that's right that's what we meet on weekly as the team with the

143grants and um lindy um from grants and dolly viederman in my office worked really hard to put that together and make it very clear along with all of the people throughout the district who are utilizing the esser funding so and we ranked it from high to low so it would kind of be a quick snapshot and especially it's very transparent of what we did over the summer so um i had a grandson who did the algebra one um class he took the eoc so fingers across but i mean i i remember teaching summer school very long time ago and uh we and then all of a sudden we cut it out because we couldn't afford it we only had enrichment programs so this robust summer program was was wonderful i did ask how many students

144were in that algebra one class at new smyrna high and there were close to i think 60 60 kids attended and that was at least i think i remember correctly but i mean wonderful turnout so i think in the future i would like to know um maybe the end of august into september is there a way dr balgovin we could find out what our uh enrollments were here this summer i can actually give that to you this week at your weekly okay that would be wonderful to see how robust uh what effect we had on students and and i do want to mention that the the document that you have that's the plan and again it's it's what we're tracking towards but it's not actual yet because we're not complete and again we're meeting weekly

145to look at summer programming like where are where are we versus our plan versus the actual and we're just constantly trying to make sure we utilize every single dollar so we don't leave any funds on the table um also excuse me ms haynes i just had a thought would you send this um and and the powerpoint copies that you gave to us to each of our state representatives okay and also to michael waltz who is at least he's my representative at the u.s congress because these are federal dollars and i think our representatives need to know what those tax dollars went for especially at the government um at the congress u.s congress level our u.s house representatives and maybe our senator but especially to all of our state representatives throughout volusia county it's transparent it

146what it does it shows them look at the money we received look what we spent it on look how wonderful what service we did for our students and all the way up to off year 2627 look how much more we could do for our students if we are funded so quick excuse me i'm going on my tirade here no more dcd baloney and quit cutting us money every year like the 10.8 million dollars they cut us for this year so just think what we could have done with that 10.8 million and then of course reoccurrence costs for 22.23 is 13 million work we'll probably use lose that in the dcd um so this maybe helps them fight for us a little bit more in volusia county is it okay with you okay good that's that's

147great okay i i i'm sorry i got a little excited there anyone else like to speak yes ms haynes the only question i have and i've had it from day one when we knew we were getting this money you know my biggest concern was that we would place items in here that would basically be reoccurring because it's just a one-time pot of money so i think dr fritz what i'll need to know and it can be in one of our one-on-ones or whatever is for everything in here that's reoccurring what are we going to do when this money is gone and how are we going i want to be very transparent i'm not sure yet i need to be very transparent with everybody here this is a budget workshop meeting um the ceremonies are keeping

148us afloat and so you know right now we've not been able to you know lay up we have not had to lay off any staff we've made sure that we've kept things consistent and you know we get down the road i hope we don't have to make hard decisions but there may very well be that time that would have to happen um the goal for us going forward that's why we do the things that we do with the allocation meetings that's why we do what we do with the position review committees and we're looking at utilizing entitlement dollars wherever we can but but you bring up a really really strong point that you know some of these concerns are there and some of the esser is certainly keeping us applaud if we didn't have it

149we would be in a in a pickle so good good point ms haynes all right thank you miss haynes i'd like to also echo dr fritz on that that i i received an email tonight from the council of greater schools i'm not sure if i'm saying that right and it was to come to a session in november where the first topic is how are we going to fund everything after esther goes away so it's not only a volusia county schools problem it is a a problem for all schools especially schools you know with that may not necessarily have growing numbers of students with all of the concerns with empowerment scholarships charters everything like that it's every it's it's a global problem really so very good question yes because from day one when you know it

150we found out we were getting it my first thing was it it can't be things that are going to reoccur because we can't rely on this it's a one-time pot of money and what i know about a one-time pot of money is you enhance something you actually put together something that is sustainable you just can't you know you can't move salary i mean i understand that right now we're doing some shifting but you can't hire additional people when you don't have the support out of your general fund to pay them when the money goes away and so i know that i've said that before and i'm going to keep asking because i just i don't want to be in a situation a year from now or two years from now and it's and then it's

151doom and gloom and what are we doing i mean it reminds me of when we hit the recession and we had to pink slip everybody that was less than three years experience i don't want to be there again so what i think we need to do and i think kelly's team is doing a great job we've got to get the positive message out of all of the wonderful opportunities in volusia county and the but i will say i talked to the vol group the other day and vol you know we set here last year and they had over 12 000 students and elementary was like 5 000 and i think elementary's down to around 300 12.50 total for k-12 12.50 yes so 1250 total so we went from over 12 000 to 1 250 and

152you know like i said elementary went from 5 000 to i think like 300 and so our kids are coming back you know um and they've been coming back ever since you know like january and december of last year but we just we can't we get we can't lose any more of the children to especially to other options like private which is why i suggested all that information go to those who make the decisions about funding yes i agree with you thank you miss cuthbert miss burnett i'm good thanks okay thank you uh gentlemen either one okay thank you so much thank you okay we will continue then to 18. oh i'm sorry are you finished you're done i'm done okay i just didn't want to cut you off thank you um 18.04 presentation general

153fun tentative capital budget uh fiscal year 2122 dr fritz and miss nade let's just jump right on in this is our our tentative capital budget for your review so yes this is our first public hearing and we i mean we'll actually adopt a millage rate tentative millage rate um and um budget this evening and then i'll come back to you on the 14th of september to do the final adoption so after tonight the millage rate that you adopt will go into the tax bills for the citizens and then it'll be finally adopted but just to give a real quick highlight from where we stand from the last time we spoke again we tie back to strategic plan goal number four resources and operational processes a quick recap of the past two years last year's budget

154dollars versus this year we're now you know moving from the million dollar budget range up to the billion dollar range and the growth there is primarily attributed to the the issuance that we did for our certificates of participation for capital projects and also the infusion of those dollars that came in from esser again i've mentioned before but i just want to put it out there again that for every dollar that we spend in the general fund the majority of it goes to salaries and benefits for every dollar 80 cents goes to salaries and benefits 13 cents goes to purchase services four cents goes to materials and supplies and three cents goes to energy so we are heavily a organization that is people driven this slide you will remember seeing previously which just shows the impact

155of covid on the number of full-time equivalents we have full-time equivalence is basically the number of it's enrollment but it's not exactly individuals it's how it's being enrolled full-time and we were at 62 pre-covered we dipped to 60 and we're projecting out to 61. earlier i had told you that that resulted in a loss of 11 million it's now going to be a 10 million loss and that's because we did have avalorum tax growth in the community and that helps offset some of that state revenue that we're losing because of the reduced students however we still do have you know declining enrollment and unfunded mandates so again the fte loss of 10 plus the frs rate increase which i had mentioned was 2 million before it's now come in at 2.5 million and then these

156empowerment scholarships are estimated right now at 12.5 million and those are basically children who are leaving and going elsewhere instead of to our school system and we are projecting that the numbers there could potentially double so that's a big hit on our budget and all these added up our 25 million dollar hit so modeling that out essentially without using any s or 2 support what that would mean is that we would have way more expenditures than we have revenues and that would really drive our financial condition ratio to a dangerously low level of 1.98 percent so what we did is we decided that we would go back and look at those esser dollars and we would take that 10 point million that exists 10.8 million that exist on the bottom there and we would basically

157go back and scrub the general fund remove expenditures from the general fund to try to help that situation and what that ends up looking like is that we then still have a deficit but it improves our financial condition ratio to almost five percent so the tentative budget that i'm proposing to you tonight which i'll bring back to you when i bring a final budget i'll bring you a budget that at least has a five percent financial condition ratio but tonight i've got a budget for you at a 4.28 and that's primarily because really really we didn't have any information on sr2 until after we put this together so we're already working on the second phase of it but this was a conservative best approach that we could present to you tonight for the tentative so

158lastly if i were to look at all of the money so the whole 34.4 million instead of just the 10.8 and i would use all of that to help the general fund i would our budget would look a little bit better it would be an 8.25 financial condition ratio ending and still though we're still in a position where we have more revenue or i'm sorry we have less revenue than we have expenditures and so what that means is that our financial condition ratio declines still so we're going to have to really kind of look at that and figure out what we're going to do about that so just to highlight the fy 19 and 20 numbers are actual so those are once you do an audit and you close out your books and you really

159know what you have what it truly is it's not a projection it's actual fy 21 that fiscal year is just ended however we're still in the process of cleaning everything up and we'll have those final numbers for you by the time we come back in september but we're estimating to come in basically ending fy21 between somewhere between 8.8 and 12 percent and that is because we took that money out of the general fund and put it over an s or to build up our fund balance in the general fund to try to help with these losses that are going to occur so we're trying to pre-plan um and position ourselves in a better position and then again the um the budget as i'm presenting it for the tentative was is reflecting a 4.28 so that's

160just but i but i put the three scenarios there i put the really worst case scenario the the uh moderate scenario which is what i included and then the best case scenario if i were able to use every single penny of esser to help the general fund what we would look like so and then lastly i just wanted to update you on the capital budget from the last time we presented it we've removed the career center from the budget and we've added some classroom additions to the budget other than that the capital plan remains basically the same so with that i would like to entertain any questions you have and then after that i will move on i think to the formality of the resolutions that we have to read and um where is the

161i i know i saw it before the the millage rate suggestion and the dcd it's the next one up yeah okay it's i read those as part of the resolution gotcha um but just for the dcd because that was something oh i can wait that's okay you can wait okay oh sure sure um i do have a one question for you after the board members speak okay hello so can we go back a couple of slides let's go back one two next uh that's a good one let's go to the next no one more over to the right oh that's slow next one we're going forward forward i'm sorry forward forward forward one 14 one more keep going i love that keep going next one over beautiful and so what i want to highlight on

162this is and and yes there were numbers on there and we know that covid has affected schools has affected learning has affected enrollment and that's the reason the federal government put together these esser dollars you know where we went through something and so while the budget uh is denoting and mind you we can't speak of money we don't have yet but we know there's a hundred and they're about 149 million dollars that are coming that are not a part of this equation because we cannot budget for what we don't have but we know that money is coming so despite the fact that you know we don't have that money in this calculation we are technically and correct me if i'm wrong you know this is based on what we have in our pocket right now

163knowing that a hundred and some odd million dollars is coming to help close some of this gap so if you notice and then i say this for the benefit of the public what we're what you can see here is that our fund balance is actually going to end up being uh after s or is actually going to go up am i wrong um if we use esser to help our general fund it will help it will improve our fund our financial condition so our bank our savings account is actually going to get you know potentially bigger so while we are we we don't have the money in our pocket right now because esser is a lot of after the fact but i i i say that because you know i could already see tomorrow morning

164oh school district is in and then they're i mean that's what this money is for it's designed to help us get through what covid was there's a reason why it's coming so um i am grateful for the fact that the federal government has stepped up and they have done what's right in order to keep school districts uh you know going because the reality is that it's not only the money that we're that we spent it's the money that we're going to spend to close the gap that was created through this pandemic so again i appreciate the presentation and you know like i said i just want to be clear that you know this is not doom and gloom we're going to be okay you know in fact we're probably gonna be better than we are

165today but it's definitely not this is not easy because as you all saw in the presentation there are uh buckets of money one bucket can't be used for the other can't be used for the other can't be used for the other and so while you have a lot of bucket like one of the buckets was you have two million dollars to go find your missing kids well i think we heard that our missing kids are and so if you have two million dollars in that bucket and something doesn't change and there's not any loose language guess what you probably won't use those two million dollars because it's in that bucket i mean am i wrong no you're right um so but we are trying to since we've already done some work on that what we're

166trying to do is say well the work we did on that already now applies to that right and then there is some discussion that that after you meet those requirements if you haven't utilized all the money that you may be able to use it which is why i'm i'm modeling like on my bottom line thing here best case scenario that's why i'm modeling that i could actually improve the general fund more with that and my i i'm not trying to be gloom and doom at all and i appreciate i appreciate what you're saying i just want to make sure that we are kind of reflecting the reality of the situation which is that esser is helping us right now but when esther goes away we're going to need some other kind of changes to to

167happen it's either going to be that we're going to have had massive student enrollment growth that brings in lots of revenue that we don't have or that you know the funding formulas change or something from a legislative standpoint because the fefp the the funding formula basically is set up to be based on number of students and not like number of schools that you have and your operating costs but some of the things that happen like for example with the empowerment scholarships we might have two kids in this school who leave us and two here and just like mr west pointed out to you individually per school it's a real small number but collectively it's a big number well you don't get those economies of scale where you can shut down a school now because you've

168lost 100 kids and that hurts us and the fefp formula is based on weighted fte so those are the kind of conversations that you you all as a legislative bought you know as a as a governing body can have with the legislative people to kind of have those conversations thank you that's all i have thank you mr colon uh mr purses now i i appreciate the fact that you do these uh individual teams um meetings with with us so she's answered all all of my questions thank you mr purses miss burnett same with me she we spoke last week and answered questions thank you thank you mr burnett um i also appreciate the time that you take to meet with us individually and go over and answer any questions that we have prior to us

169getting here and i also want to thank dr shanoff for answering one of my questions about like the added space going in at citrus grove because i didn't know about that but really um you know and i appreciate you that you're you're being honest with the numbers and showing us exactly where it's at and you know i agree with mr clone except that having been on the side where you're responsible for federal dollars i don't ever trust them until it actually arrives because i've seen too many times that they put out what a number it's going to be and then you don't get that amount so i hear what they've said but until it actually arrives here and it's in the bank for us to be able to spend i'm not banking anything so i

170appreciate your honesty and showing us where we were thank you thank you i just have one question um and it's in our budget book i already asked i already told you i was going to ask you um you know that way she could have a good answer um it is in the um all fun summary or even in the general fund i guess it's probably a good idea just go to the general fund it's on page 10 of our booklets that we received i just have a question most of all our expenditures are increased which i can perfectly understand but there's one decrease that i'm somewhat puzzled and that's student services transportation services because in the actual 1920 school year it was 16 million 275 586 and then the adopted budget in 2021 was 15

171203 the actuals we spent was even less 15045 and then this year our tentative budget is for 14 five five eight million so i just wondered why when gas is going up and mechanics and we're still purchasing buses what 20 per year 15 20 per year why students transportation services are going down in expenditures okay um i'm i'm going to get you that answer i don't want to speculate tonight because i'm not 100 sure but there are re-budgets and rollover encumbrances that impact the numbers sometimes so it could be that but i'll i'll get back with you within an actual answer and i'll share it with the rest of the board great question thank you and can i ask another question that i i don't know it's been resolved i've asked i've discussed a couple

172times but i don't know um are there bonuses for hires in here the bonuses are we going to give bonuses for bus drivers who oh is that that's bargaining okay thank you okay i apologize it's part of bargaining yeah that i understand okay thank you miss neat i appreciate it thank you appreciate that thank you now um what we did is we took care of 1701 remember we asked to put 1701 after 18.04 which is what ms need just took care of miss schultz do we have any cards on from the public about our general tentative budget okay thank you so 1701 is is okay 18.0 we have no 1805. all right 19.01 um oh that was our um time certain let's see or is that the second one erin is that the second one

173okay thank you very much see i told you she was extraordinary 18.01 we are now entering our board action items in which we will have public comment uh before we vote on each action item board action item resolution 20 21 22 leving the tentative district ad i never pronounce it correctly thank you thank you i'll let you do that for me uh property tax millage rates for the fiscal year 21 22. uh dr fritz yesterday take it away all right i'm required to read this resolution to you so bear with me as i read as quickly as i can all right a resolution of the school board of volusia florida levying the tentative avalor and property tax millage right for 2021-2022 required local effort required local effort prior period adjustment discretionary operating additional operating for

174the general fund and district discretionary local capital improvement for the capital funds and debt service for the district debt service funds on all taxable property property within volusia county florida for the fiscal year beginning july 1st 2021 and ending june 30th 2022 stating that the percentage by which the millage rate to be levied is higher than the rolled back rate repealing all resolutions in conflict therewith providing for a severability severa ability providing for an effective date whereas the school board of volusia county florida is authorized under the constitutional laws of florida to levy attacks upon non-exempt real property lying and situated in volusia county florida for public school purposes and whereas the required public notice has been given and the public has been given an opportunity to be heard and to ask questions concerning the

175tentative millage rate for fiscal 2021 fiscal year and whereas all matters required by law pursuant to the adoption of the tentative millage for 2021-22 have been accomplished now thor now they are for be it resolved by the school board of volusia county florida an official session session dually assembled in deland florida this 27th day of july 2021 as follows that the follow following millage rates be tentatively adopted for potential levy upon all taxable rail property line and situated in volusia county florida for the fiscal year 20 21 22. the require a the required local effort millage of 3.59 the required local effort prior period adjustment of .005 the discretionary operating effort of 0.748 the discretionary local capital improvement of 1.500 uh and total millage rate of 5.802 the total millage rate for fiscal 2021 of

1765.802 mills as calculated excluding debt service rate of zero point zero zero zero is two point five one percent higher than the rollback rate of five point six five nine eight computer pursuant to section 200.0651 of florida statutes and that is the first resolution and if anybody would like to know what any of that means i'm happy to try to answer mr clone thank you miss need so we go through this every year and so the required local effort is that something we said or is that set by the legislature that that's a combination of property tax that we're required to oppose in order to get the fefp revenue which is the florida education finance program revenue so and so the reason this is a tax increase is not because we're taxing higher it's because

177we're expecting that the property values went up however the [Music] uh rate of the local effort is actually set forth by the legislature correct correct so if you look at our tax rate last year versus our tax rate this year it's a decrease however as you stated because the property values go up there's a slight increase in taxes so am i hearing you say we decrease the taxes but it's go we decrease the tax rate however it's going to be considered an increase because the property values have increased correct very good thank you i think we actually figured it out it's about 27 didn't we the average it's on the average home it's 27 for the year okay thank you mr clone excellent point anyone else mr burnett was there a specific reason why we're

178not going to roll back uh specifically i would say it's the deficit situation that i've presented to you you don't have enough revenue right now to fund the upper the operating cost of the district so i rolled back would put us in a worse deficit situation have we exhausted all of our have we improved all of our efficiencies to in order to sub um have we improved all of our efficiencies so that we could exhaust the money that we have first we are constantly working on that i'm sure that there's efficiencies we can still recognize and we will continue to work on that so the answer is it's a continuous process of trying to improve but again going back to the 80 percent of our budget you know you can only squeeze so much operating

179money to try to deal with the the heavy lift that we have which is funding people and funding benefits for people thank you miss burnett ms haynes i have no questions at this time okay thank you so the 5.659 mills is from last year correct when it says uh the rollback rate of 5.65 mills that was the the millage rate this year that we're adopting is 5.802 um and that that is the the one that we're proposing as the tentative millage but if we were to go to roll back in other words if we were to cut ourselves back to the level of revenue that we had last year and not have the advantage of any of the revenue property value growth that millage would be 5.698 6598 yes okay um and the only way

180a school district can raise its millage rate of anything is to go before the voters we are unlike the 16 municipalities that can set their own military school districts school districts cannot do that right right if you compare our millage rates to the municipalities like if you look over the past five years our rate is just steadily declining yes you probably won't see that with municipalities and local it'll always be steady yeah tax rate will stay steady and plus they have uh different kinds of revenue that that we do not have they um the county council can collect beach you know tolls and that's revenue we we can't do that we can't even have a bake sale so i always thought it was a good idea let the air force have a bake sale and

181then we can collect the money when we sell the airplanes but anyway and also one thing i didn't know if you knew and i learned this a couple of years ago that when we collect the taxes it's collected by the county and then the county delivers it to us but it's only the money that's collected and sometimes and last year we were very concerned about this time last year about the amount of people who would be delinquent in their taxes or would have lost their homes or had to vacate because of of covet and and everything so do we happen to know how we what kind of percentage of the taxes that was it we the the collections were good it wasn't really an issue but the the second item on here that required local

182effort for prior period adjustment that is um that is kind of a millage that allows us to make up for uncollected taxes from the previous year so that's what that .005 um prior period adjustment millage is okay so when the county collects the taxes we get our share maybe they were able to collect 96 percent of the property owners we then distributed the tax revenue to the charter schools correct yes they get so we even get the we even lose more money because they get everything and we don't so again it's it's always the shaving and then when you take that and add in the dcd and then you add in a lot of the unfunded mandates like the i think the um the little things that the teachers are going to have to the

183alarm that teachers are going to have to wear i mean that's an unfounded fun unfunded mandate did we have to spend 1.8 million on that yeah okay yes okay yes so that is why the school district is in financial difficulty so um we just don't have the flexibility that municipalities have correct well i was just going to say uh you're going to need two separate emotions on yes yes but i just wanted um to contribute to help um miss burnett i'm sure she knows a lot about you know the port orange and municipality and taxes you know through your your husband mayor and of course you know a lot of that because you were on the county council and your wife's on a ormond beach commission but school districts are run so differently and and

184that's much to our chagrin so ask another question sure certainly please do so if we were to go to roll back if just hear me out if we were to go to roll back how how would that affect us next year when we brought this budget towards us how would it affect next year for the same proposal next year how would it affect our proposal next year for well you would basically you're setting a lower tax rate so your rollback would then probably be the same situation where if next you so if you set the lower tax rate the rollback rate and next year you have property tax growth in order to go to roll back next year your rollback rate's going to even be lower than rollback this year so you're you're kind of

185i mean you're you're cutting your revenue growth that you that you legally have but if if we're not allowed to set our rate how that's that's more of where we do have some we have do have some discretion to set our rate there's some discretionary millages that we have so that's where you can cut it back to roll back to to basically reduce your revenue down to the level of last year but i i don't know if i explained that right but so if you reduce it though it's it's not like next year you're going to come in and be able to keep rollback and bring the same revenue unless you don't have any property tax value growth which hopefully isn't going to happen and there's no indications of that right now based on you

186know the the growth in the real estate market the values of real estate okay thank you okay any other questions for ms snead okay thank you dr friends i have a little paragraph i get to read too not as long as you're as miss need the superintendent recommends the approval resolution 2021-22 of the school board of volusia county florida levying the tentative ad valorem property tax millage rate for the fiscal year 2021-2022 requiring local effort requiring low effort prior period adjustment discretionary operating additional operating for the general fund discretionary or district discretionary local capital improvement for the capital funds and debt services for the district debt services fund on all taxable property within volusia county florida for the fiscal year beginning july 1st 2021 and ending june 30th 2022. you've heard the recommendation of the

187superintendent for resolution 2021-22 living the tentative district admiral say it again mr pendley and valerian thank you mr purses uh property tax millage rates for the fiscal year 21 22. is there a motion so move ma'am the motion has been made by mr persis is there a second second it's been seconded by mr colon any further discussion thank you uh miss schultz are there any cards thank you all those in favor please say aye aye all those opposed please say nay nay okay it has passed four to one of the naval is miss burnett thank you very much um 20.02 board action item resolution 21 uh 2021-23 adopting the tentative volusia county school's operating budget for the fiscal year 21-22 dr fritz and ms nade wouldn't you just keep going alrighty resolution 2021-23 a resolution

188of the school board of volusia florida adopting the tentative budget for the fiscal year 2021-22 for the general fund capital projects fund debt service fund special revenue fund food service funds special revenue fund other federal programs special revenue fund miscellaneous and internal service fund of the school board of the volusia county florida repeal repealing all resolutions in conflict there with providing for severability providing for an effective date um whereas the school board of volusia county florida is authorized under the constitutional laws of florida to levy attacks upon non-exempt real property line and situated in volusia florida for public school purposes and adoption of a tentative budget and whereas the required public notice has been given and the public has been given an opportunity to be heard and to ask questions regarding the tentative budget for

189fiscal 2122 and whereas all matters required by law pursuant to the adoption of the tentative budget for 2122 have been satisfied now therefore be it resolved that the school board of volusia county florida hereby adopts the tentative budget which contains the following funds and appropriations for the fiscal year 2021-22 general operating five million four hundred and thirty three thousand one hundred and thirty eight eight hundred and seventy nine dollars capital projects three hundred and forty five million eight hundred and fifty five four hundred and thirty seven dollars debt service fifty one million two hundred and three thousand three hundred sixty four dollars special revenue food service forty four million five thirteen three thirty seven special revenue other 45 million 318 308 special revenue miscellaneous 45 694 internal service fund 13515 991 for a total of

1901 billion 88 million 849 thousand and 10 dollars past well i don't say that last part okay thank you dr vince the superintendent recommends the approval resolution 2021-22 of the school board of volusia county florida adopting a tentative budget for the fiscal year 2021-2022 for the general fund capital projects fund debt service fund special revenue fund food service fund special revenue fund other fund and internal service fund you've heard the recommendation of the superintendent for resolution 2021-23 adopting attendant to volusia county schools operating budget for the fiscal year 2021 uh 22. is there a motion can before we make a motion can i just let you know that my staff is listening and corrected i verbally read 5.59 on the millage rate for the previous resolution and it's written and it i should have said

191five i'm sorry i'm saying five i really meant i said that it was 3.59 but it should be 3.549 so i need to make that correction and i don't know attorney doran if we need to have another motion but the millage has to be adopted before the budget and since i made an error on what i stated i just want to correct that for the record um but it's correct in the document it is correct in the document okay we don't need to we're good okay cool okay thank you you pointed it out we'll cover it all right thank you thank you ms snead for your transparency and your department who always backs you up okay um is there a motion so moved second so moved and seconded uh it was moved by mr persis

192and seconded by uh mr colon remember this is tentative it's a tentative budget uh ms schneed before we um vote when will we vote for a final budget on september 14th september 14th thank you so we have a period of time to analyze it for more public input okay mitchells are there any cards for this thank you and the cards i'm asking for is um for public participation if anyone wants to discuss it okay any further discussion from the board all those in favor please say aye aye all those uh opposed please say nay the motion is carried five to nothing miss need we greatly appreciate your participation tonight couldn't do it without you thank you very much thank you very much okay uh 20.03 board action item contract purchase of trinity methodist church dr

193fred i'm going to ask mr pendley to come up and kind of go through the action board members as you know when we've toured the facility with some of you the trinity church adjacent to our property was listed for sale and so we did tour that and for reasons that i'll share with you and publicly um i have mr grube up here as well um as we have it as we have grown our staff at the dak building has also grown but you got to realize that the original dak building uh was was staffed for a much smaller school system so when we look around we have an i.t department that's pretty crammed together we have district employees they're in portable buildings all over uh and when i say portables i mean portables all over

194the district and as we move in and we saw like with the doj right now we do believe there's going to be an importance with our esc to keep that very centralized and have our folks here and so the challenge is always space and so we did go forward and walk the building and felt like since it was so close and it was right here that it would be something fruitful but i'll let mr pendley go through and give some more specifics mr pendley thank you dr fritz madam chair board members to give you a little background on the proposed contract we were approached in april or may of this year by our contiguous neighbor here at the corner of wisconsin and clara a 1.3 acre parcel adjacent to our parking lot and to the

195brewster building comprised of the church building and offices of the trinity methodist church the church at that time was interested in pursuing purchasers and moving their location at some point in the future and offered the property to us unsolicited at that time for consideration if we might want to within a couple of days not even a week they had two other offers on the property and there was concern at that time about what other ventures might be located adjacent to our property here at the deland administrative center causing us to begin preliminary negotiations with the church body it took some period of time because the local congregation in the district administrative staff for the united methodist church florida conference had an opportunity to look at making a proposed offer so the contract that is before

196you for purchase and sale is in the amount of 995 000 including all of the buildings and pertinences and the 1.3 acres the buildings comprise approximately 26 000 square feet there is a 90-day contingency in the contract for due diligence of inspection and suitability we can with permission of the seller go in conduct necessary testing and suitability measures from the facilities department but based on that preliminary negotiation the and those provisions in the contract the seller has issued a draft contract uh executed on their part so it's up to the board to make a decision as to whether it wishes to accept uh accept that contract and move forward mr grube has done some analysis on space requirements and that sort of thing and could answer any questions in that regard okay any questions from

197the board miss burnett um sure and and i know mr dr fritz and i spoke about this a little bit um but how does the purchase of this really affect with our strategic plan and our um and our mission as a school well i'll tell you it's it's it's space um the really you know if i had to say it was tied to any part of our plan it would be gold4 for our efficiency of use portables for example are extremely expensive one of our goals right now is to get rid of all leased portables it's something that we we pay for and i got to tell you it's one of those things that you pay for that just hurts you i mean when you pay for a lease portable and at least space um

198you end up paying more than the portables ever worth over time and so we're trying to get out of that business dr sanoff is doing a really good job of condensing portables we'd much rather have more permanent space for us and our folks and and here's the reality we're not getting any smaller you know our county is going to continue to grow we see the construction it's going to be requiring more schools at times and for us to build a centralized staff i think of the area around atlantic high school where we have so many district staff and employees right now amanda wiles for example is uh she doesn't have it she's the executive director of resc and she sits at a table in a portable surrounded by other people and there's about 12 people

199in this one portable that are sharing a space it's very collaborative however look on the bright side right yeah however um you know there's a need for us to be able to bring people together to be more centralized and to take the portables like that and be done with them i mean there's no there's no value on the portable over time it's it's very much like a mobile home it depreciates over time so if you ask me where it would go it'd really be go go for and for us to look at savings of having a more permanent structure thank you i have a couple more um and so when you talk about getting rid of the portables and trying to centralize people together what is the dollar amount of savings that we're gonna experience

200from from the purchase versus getting rid of these other portable well we are still analyzing the portable situation uh i i would love to give you a hard answer but i don't have it um you know you'll cut the electricity and the utility expenses that you have in the portable plus you'll cut that facility completely out um dr shanoff is going through he's looking for that i've asked for a report from him to take all those extra portables and determine which ones we can actually start just cutting out we can come back to you for certain on that as far as what kind of savings it's going to be but i don't have it this evening okay and how does this affect our current projects with repairs needed at schools and other buildings that are

201drastically needed well the other projects are part of our five-year plan we're continuing uh tonight for example you saw the career that we had budgeted for a career center that was about 15 million dollars and we we we decided to go a different direction which is why we have the partnership now with atc and we're starting to use that facility and that partnership with daytona so that's 15 million dollars going back into that it is this is a 995 hit to the capital budget um no school projects will be delayed because of this i can assure you that school projects are the priority um and that's why we have that five-year plan in the oversight committee as far as helping us gauge what the priorities are um but you know this would be one that

202you know we would go through with the 90 day appraisal for or sorry the 90 day inspection we would look at that and we would if there were blatant concerns we would come back to this board and and let you know i mean we're not going to if we have to go in and throw millions into a building then we don't really want to proceed but what what we want to do though is bill to make sure we can get that inspection going you know the ideal location of this is you know what another thing you're going to do is save save fuel on individuals realize when our employees have to go from one facility to another we're we're having to compensate for that if we can have a 26 000 square foot facility right

203here next to brewster and dak and we can start to centralize and bring some of those people in those remote areas here there's going to be less travel time on the road too so you know i the board you know it really is your pleasure i mean we we were approached it wasn't anything that we went and did i it you know we walked it it seemed like a good idea um at the time as we walked it and realized our situation with our space but ultimately it is your decision and did the oversight committee were they involved in any of this or have they been asked no i don't think so because this was new this was already established property and that they usually work on the renovations and new properties but dr shanoff

204maybe you can answer that i don't think the oversight committee has been involved in any of this it's not have some sales tax what's that now it's not right the proposal would not include the use of perhaps okay okay thank you you're good we got it thanks just giving you some stretches give you some stretch exercise thank you miss burnett um mr columb so i have a question and i asked him earlier and i didn't follow through and ask again but do we have an appraisal for this property yes there was an appraisal completed in may of this year can you forward because again not having walked the property and i understand ms haynes did but you know i it's very hard to say okay let's vote on something that i have not seen an

205appraisal on to know what it's worth number one and number two i am very very very concerned on the condition of the building and the amount of money in addition to the million dollars that it's going to cost and so between seeing the appraisal and really really relying heavily on that inspection to determine what i mean as we know we just talked about what was the school we just talked about bonner which is the one we did for the uh it was bonner that we talked about it was such an old building oh we try you know and so that church is an old building and so what would it cost to make it you know churches uh enjoy exemptions for ada if it's a historic building what would it cost for us to because

206we don't enjoy those exemptions and that would change uh so you know there's a lot at hand here but you know again i really really like to see the appraisal and and then again i weigh heavily on that inspection and that if we're gonna spend a crazy amount of money then you know as much as it sounds like a good idea it may end up being a money pit which i'm not in favor of so um if someone can forward that to me that would be awesome yeah it was my understanding that that you had but i'll be glad to make sure please another copy please okay thank you mr cologne mr persis yeah uh ruben said many of the things that i was going to say the same concerns i have about it uh

207so uh i think on the plus side it's in it's in a good spot because it's close to everything here but i would be concerned about the money it would cost to repurpose it and you know how we are going to repurpose that church into something that we could use um and the cost the cost of doing that but if you're just looking for us tonight to vote to kind of get the process rolling so that you can take a hard look at it and then i guess you would be coming back to the board and then saying well this is how much it's going to cost for us to use it is that uh yes that's correct this will this will start the 90-day discovery period for us to do diligence okay we have

208toured the building we've taken a cursory look at everything obviously we didn't do an in-depth inspection that would be what we would do next and determine just what the extent of the uh issues are and what we would have to do to to bring it up to code and to bring it up to to repurpose it for for our use yeah my uh the city of ormond beach just went through something like this with the with the church and uh they uh they decided uh no because it was in such terrible shape so and it was gonna cost so so much so uh i want to just be assured that if you come back 60 days from now and you tell us it's going to cost you know whatever it's going to cost and we

209decide that's too much we just can walk away from this without any cost to the school district that's right this is a 90-day contingency inspection period in the contract okay then i'm fine with just finding out more yeah thank you mr president miss haynes so i've had the um prior to even this happening i had been over there because the church you know ran a pre-k center so i had been in and seen that in recent years i'm also very familiar with you know our brewster facility i've been in that on all levels and every little nook and cranny which is kind of crazy if you've never been over there there are a lot of nooks and crannies there's you know because because that as well as this building our old school buildings i mean

21035 years ago when i came here dak was actually run out of a portable down the street stone streets were the first yeah i mean i mean that's where you went and filled out an application and got fingerprinted and everything um so when this topic came up i did ask to go and tour the current facility to just see what had changed in the facility from when i had been in it prior and um mr pendley was gracious enough you know he met me over there and we walked the whole thing so to go back to what mr clone said about like what we just did for child's academy the bonner facility you know i've been in the bonner facility many times but i have to be honest with you i was never allowed upstairs

211from the first time i went there we were able to walk this entire like it it's night and day okay we were able to walk this entire facility there was no part that they said oh you can't go into that park because it's not safe or whatever unlike the bonner um i too though said from day one you know what does the appraisal look like you know what we're looking at is we're looking at a corner um lot piece of property right here in downtown deland and if you've kind of been around downtown deland there's not a lot i mean look at where they built the marriott you know there's not a lot of space left here in downtown deland and if we even look at what pricing is right now i'm just going to

212use an example of a neighbor that's down around the corner from my home in debary it was a 1959 home so it was built in 1959 which they did build you know homes really well at that time he and his wife bought it in 1972 they paid 27 dollars for it in 1972 they just put it on the market two months ago they listed it and keep in mind it's 1049 square feet they listed it for 225 and it sold for 245. that's kind of what's happening with property right now so my interest in it was it finishes off our area because it's sitting on i mean it's just right there we've used their parking you know at times for years and they've been gracious enough to allow us to park there they've even allowed

213us to use the facilities to do some trainings and things like that yes i want to know what the appraisal is i'm with all of you on that because property does keep going up but i also need to know like if they can do a thorough inspection come back and tell us you know is it stable is it sturdy what will we have to do so i'm open tonight to just seeing all of that especially since there's a clause that says we have 90 days to do this in and then if we see that it's not viable we can back out without any penalty i mean even if you go right now and you put forth money in the thought that you want to buy a house nine times out of ten you don't get

214that money back so you know i appreciate what mr pendley's done and set it up that we can do this and i think it's something that we need to take a long hard look at because some of us have been around long enough to know that the original plan was when they were shutting edc down which was behind campbell and turity we were going to build out here on 44 across from the daytona deland campus which we own that property but all that got axed and and we we're paying leasing on portables that you know aren't even in great condition i mean we've got some we've got some of our employees in spots that are not great so i just would like the chance to look at it that doesn't mean that i'm sold on

215the fact that that's what we need to do i think we just need to gather all of the facts i agree okay it's it's you know if you've lived in a a subdivision or a neighborhood and there's a lot next to your house and someone knocks on the door and says you want to buy it that that's where we're at we weren't looking at it they were good neighbors um but you know one of the things that i i've noticed is the need you know we have a need and we have people all over the place and if i need nancy wait i got to give her a good hour to get here uh because she's all the way over on the other end of the world and so i mean it's okay uh and

216listen you know they're a bigger fish to fry orange the other end of the world yeah i hear them there are there are bigger fish to fry for me as a superintendent goal number one is way more important but i but i will share with you that you know the first question i had asked kevin to was you know do we have a do we have a time period to be able to get out of this thing and that's when we got the 90 days so you know if i had to make a decision right now and it was a done deal i wouldn't be so easy to come to you all and say let's do it but my thought is let us get in there and really analyze it i did walk it um

217with kevin and i saw that there was possibility for space there were there were some meeting areas for folks where they could come together um there were some sweet areas that we could we could bring people together so like i was talking about earlier and so there was some functionality of the building but um you know again goal number one is way more important to me thank you thank you all um thank you mr pendley for researching all of this taking care of all the legalities of it because your hours are very precious to us that you devote to this and mr grube i trust your expertise implicitly and your staff and i think when you are in there and looking at it i think you'll give us a realistic uh view um he can

218say no it's not good correct yeah i mean in fact that's that's what i want him to do and we've all owned properties you want someone to walk in there and tell you exactly what's not right if the plumbing's not right if there's something especially in the walls if the ac unit's bad i want to know it yeah and then i also want to know how much it's going to cost to fix it yeah yeah because it could be three times four times as much as the property itself and who knows it's it's very important for us the structure the engineering and how much it costs to heat i mean it may not have a whole lot of insulation and i know through walking through a lot of your renovations you have great ideas going

219through um was it pathway no pathways pine pine hills pine hills elementary is it pine hills i don't know i mean the renovations at that school were marvelous and i toured new smyrna beach middle school last week with mr group and his staff in welbro construction management and it's it's just awesome so our staff is very very quick their expertise is there so i trust you very much to give us a very accurate um worthwhile why why don't we do this full transparency why don't you come back and bring the inspection report to this board table we'll do that yes sir okay that would be fully objective marvelous we'll lay it out the way we we see it yeah because i too think about our employees over at brewster and a lot of affordables because

220i've been here 35 years and when i moved here from cincinnati portables well we call those big things colonies okay and then when i called the the the the portable to find out and it was mr purses who was working that's when i met miss purses it was the very first time to turn in my um teaching information and i said this is called a portable because we call those toilets those are those little little square things those were called portables and so when i applied to ocean county schools i thought portable and that's where i have to turn in all my paperwork oh my gosh the vision but anyway um i just want to say thank you and that's how important vocabulary is so thank you for your expertise um so i guess i'm

221in favor of moving forward so that we can have an inspection um in order to give our employees a little better space they too just like our teachers just like our students yeah public are there as well i'm sorry sir yes sir okay all righty thank you um but we will do that okay and i'll okay thank you um all right so uh dr fritz you have a recommendation do you want is the comment for this uh this comes this comes after the motion has been made okay the superintendent recommends the approval of the purchase and sale agreement for the acquisition of the 1.3 acre parcel adjacent to the dac building for the purpose of administrative office expansion okay you've heard the recommendation of the purchase of trinity methodist church is there a motion recommendation

222so madam chair before i vote i i've got to see this appraisal i can't vote on something i have not don't have the information for 9.95 i understand that but again not having been there i'm very challenged with saying you know i i trust you but i i would like to see the appraisal and we've gone through this before thankfully you weren't here doc mr group back when but we said with any new property we would like to see the information and so i think that's the responsible thing to do um again i just this is a million dollars so i mean i don't know if anybody else wants to see it if i'm alone then i'm alone and if they could just forward it to us if we could see it look at it

223real quick and i'll get that that's my thought okay the um document that's before us that was loaded up on board docs it says that um we have to uh have an answer by july 31st to them that's the current contract yes okay so if we do not have the appraisal um and and if we don't have enough votes and or you know to to make a motion or to second it do we lose that opportunity to purchase i don't know the answer to that uh right now it was drafted for this meeting and went to as i said this has been through some effort with their church council and their conference council as well and this i got it back and put it on the first agenda after receiving it i just want to

224see the appraisal okay uh mr personally i was just going to suggest madam chair maybe we could hear the public comment and then by maybe by that time that's fine if you would i don't mind usually we have the the motion the second and before we vote that's okay if that's is that all right with you to hear the comment absolutely beforehand okay uh i'll call this is um miss kim short would like to come down and have her three minutes gentlemen we'll be right back with leave him in the chair good evening everybody so just a couple facts because i had a chance to talk to some people this is not the first time the church has approached the district in fact over the past 20 years the this church has actually approached the

225district several times and every single time under every administration they have turned down because they've been smart enough to recognize that getting in the business of buying a church is going to benefit the church and the drama that's going to be associated with this is only going to hurt you the historical people are going to go nuts if you try to rip it down it costs two and a half to three times what it would cost to just build new to renovate and make it what you need and i know that because my whole family is a family of people in demolition miss marnaccio and i'm sure we're on the same page here this is one of the worst ideas i've ever heard come before any board and i've been listening to board meetings and

226attending them since november 2012. so i need everybody to like let that sink in for a minute because i've never been so frustrated with an idea as i have with this one you all need to say no we are on we are in declining enrollment we have no idea what's going to happen i don't care what anybody says we have no idea if the kids are going to return or what's going to happen i understand adults are uncomfortable i've been over there to where where ms wiles's office is to talk to lita grillo this summer so i get it it's it's not this is not ideal for anybody it's also not ideal for any of our children and and i sat there in a workshop listening from home on six seven the whole tentative capital

227budget workshop everybody here has projects extra to the five year plan that they want to see happen in their schools because we've got we want a brand new enterprise we want this we want the everybody wants everything there's wants and there's needs we are we are way worse if you talk to people like pat drago than we were 20 years ago in enrollment and in the quality of where our buildings are in our facilities this is not something that we want to go down and i would also say to you guys you know i went through the strategic plan i think it's a stretch to say that it's somehow related because it's not um you know we we've got we're talking about wanting people in offices when i'm listening to when you guys are talking

228through the goals today we're we're rating right now where we only have one percent of our teachers that need improvement 57 are effective 42 percent are highly effective yet when our staff is out reviewing them they're saying that only what 67 is that where my number is 67 of them are are doing it where it's aligned to us instruction as far as i'm concerned nobody should be sitting in an office we should all be out in the schools of figuring out what's going on so yeah i'm i have to say i haven't been this mad in a long time terrible idea thank god thank you very much mr short all right gentlemen come on back how you feeling mr pendley you all right i'm sorry okay you have heard the comment from the short you've

229heard mr cologne's concern as well as mr persis you've heard from mr pendley as well as mr group and dr fritz what is the pleasure of the board uh i can back up the the superintendent has made a recommendation i asked for a motion that and mr colon spoke he said he would prefer not to have a motion at this point because we do not have an appraisal is there are any more comments are we able to get it did you get an appraisal i mean i'm sorry sir is it just a matter of an email being forwarded to somebody um that i i don't know is there paperwork for an appraisal mr penalty has the appraisal he can certainly email it to the board if you guys like to look at that first so

230be it up to you we have an electronic version we're happy to provide it please yeah i'm looking for it right now i just need to find it you know it's not popping up here but we do have the appraisal i apologize i can't put my fingers on it right at the moment yes sir and move on to the next one and come back to that one okay all right um is it okay i mean it's it's a little after nine can we take a ten minute break while you locate that perfect for us and we'll come back at 9 15. thank you gentlemen welcome back um we took a little extra five minutes to have more conversation so what we're going to do um we're going to pull this aboard action item for right

231now 20.03 for further review so we will not um have it brought forth tonight so our district's going to do a little more research do we need to vote on that i'm sorry are we voting the table is that basically yes we're tabling it we can table it yeah well it's on the agenda so we have to vote and there's no no motion has been made yet either way i'm good but it's on the agenda so we do have to yeah all right make a motion today can i make a motion that we table this item is there a second yeah we say until august 10th to august yeah okay yeah okay emotions been made uh by mr cologne and seconded by mr purses to table this mo this board action item 20.03 any further

232discussion all those in favor please say aye aye all those against please say nay um the the motion is carried so we will table at this time thank you mr pendley 20.04 uh board action item request to advertise policy 521 wellness policy mr fred dr fritz well we'll turn it right on over to mr pendley mr family thank you madam chair dr fritz members of the board this is uh we're bringing forward as advertised policy 521 the wellness policy the updates and revisions are required annually on this it simply addresses the nutrition and fda requirements updating our policy to be in conformance with fda standards for nutrition it also includes revisions for fundraisers school sponsored fundraisers physical activity requirements per updates in the statutes and regulations over the previous year including physical education high schools

233and a recommitment to a tobacco-free campus mr fisher is here with ms roland's staff if you have any specific questions about these requirements but there have been no changes made since this was first read as a revision to the policy 521 and has been advertised for the required statutory period welcome miss rose rowling hi how are you this is a policy that has to be resubmitted every year and what each district has to have is a wellness team and each school has their own wellness team and right now those teams have not been completely established they open up for new members each and every year and they monitor the sugary drinks that are they cannot be sold at school they host physical activities they host physical events and walks or runs to keep the staff

234and the children healthy so each school has their own wellness team that they have at their personal schools also there's a community-wide wellness team as well it's called the school health advisory committee and this includes community members our staff members it includes students and so it is a community-wide effort we have community members that apply um they don't apply they volunteer to be on this team we even had a student from new smyrna beach high school that was in 11th grade that wanted to be the president but she wasn't old enough so it does involve students community members and staff from halifax hospital we have department of health members that are um on those teams so it is a community-wide effort so we have a school health advisor committee and we have a school base

235and a county-wide school of health wellness policy on committee members and what we were thinking about board just like we've done many times when we've asked you to put together a committee for us as we were looking at you for recommendations and we would come to you and ask for three representatives um and then we would also have our several district representatives as well and so if this policy gets approved for this advisory council then that's where we would go with it on that advisory council we now we have hela demigola debbie fish is on there um there is grace calamari that's on there from my district um evelyn kirkamona's my message name up she works in a lucie county school cafe cafe schoolway cafe diane martin morgan she's a school social worker coordinator she

236works there mary alice myers who's retired she was on the committee nick prince is on the committee jose rivera who's no longer with us he was on the committee so we do have quite a few of our staff members that are on that committee and we have like three individuals in the department of health um we had a guy steve parish that was on there from halifax health so we do have a wide range of community members that are part of this committee and it's opened up every year and they're in a rebuilding phase right now because steve parish was the president and he resigned at this point but they have met since he left and they're going to re-establish this committee will find a president for this committee beginning the beginning of the new

237school year but anybody that wants to join feel free to let myself know or mr reuben cologne since you're in the medical field feel free any board member that wants to join us please do um it is open to the community at wise at large if anyone wants to join your free you feel free to do so okay thank you miss rowling okay uh any comments questions mr colon you mentioned three members from each of us is that what i heard is that i understand yes yeah so we will get you that okay you know i would just recommend when you think about the members either you know they don't have to but something you may want to consider is somebody at an elementary middle high type of level or you could even go with

238some folks in the community that have medical background that's fine too it's just if you're thinking of school personnel the reason we ended up on three is we just wanted to give you that option okay um how often do you meet say that again how often do you meet um the school kind of established their own their own timeline for meeting but this a community-wide um committee meets once a month okay cool okay any other questions yes ms purnima you when you were speaking you mentioned um about it was open to the community and they just needed to apply is that going not necessarily applied they can just make come they can come join the meetings um once they get it advertised online um on our website they can come and just join the meeting

239it's not uh where you apply it's all voluntary okay so it's not necessarily you apply it's voluntary i apologize yeah sorry i don't mean to say apply but you can join the committee yes i just want to make sure that people are aware it's out there and they have the opportunity to to come forward and be part of this um as we've learned over the last year there's a lot of people who who now are trying to become more involved in the community in our schools um and then in in the policy i noticed too that it said that um there was health screenings that are done what are the health screenings that are performed um we do vision hearing we do scoliosis exams we do um weight embodiment bmi screenings so there's several screens

240that we do and we do flu shots at the schools and so there are several things that go through this committee that we take care of and are all of those advertised and permissioned yes they're advertised yes and permission slips are sent for everything yes even the eye screenings yes each school gets we put flies at each school um each nurse at the schools when the kids come in and if there's a child that continually is ill that nurse will give that parent a referral to go to a doctor free of charge and make sure that child is seen if there's a medical issue but what we have screening is we do put flyers in every school um to make sure that it is known that you know the vision bus is coming or the

241dental bus is coming and the hearing vision screenings are coming so the schools are made very aware of what is happening and most principals send out a um a message to their entire staff their entire families to let them know that the screenings are happening and we give them like a month notice so it's not as they're caught by surprise as well in advance that they demand where they are made aware of it thank you it sounds like it's very good for some of the students that don't have are not able to take advantage of maybe seeing a routine doctor so thank you thank you oh thank you miss uh burnett ms haynes the only thing um i had a question about you need to speak a little closer there you go the only thing

242i had a question about was um under the part where it says the maximum number of school days to conduct exempted fundraisers i see that we've done it on a staggered approach but is there like a real reason why we only give elementary five days um you know then we go to middle and junior and give them 10 senior you know our high schools get 15 and then it says but if you're a combination school you get 10. is is there some reason why there's not some consistency with that because i know that the fundraiser piece you know brings in a dish you know brings in additional money for things that they can do on campus or they can take kids on field trips or it helps supply some of our athletic things so what's

243the reasoning behind you know having it as a staggered instead of everybody having the same amount i don't know if there's a reason that is staggered they usually give more to the secondary because you're dealing with more students in the schools and so they kind of add more dates to it because of the number of students that are in each school okay yeah thank you okay um i have a couple questions um some of our wellness policy uh activities show up at the fact fairs correct and that's a great source if you've never been to a fact fair uh we have four per year yes a different uh two on the west on the east side and i've always gone to the one at new smyrna beach middle school and it's fabulous all the programs

244and the giveaways i mean people walk out with big grocery bags full of things it's um there's an awful lot of really nutritious educational um i guess programs that the county the school district offers uh programs that i didn't even realize that we supported um and also some of our affiliate business partners like easter seals and what are some of the other companies there are usually 50 to 75 vendors easter seals is there we have uh police departments there yeah yeah the sheriff's departments the police department's there hospitals are there so library so there's a ton of visit vendors that are at those events and the families really do appreciate it because there are bags of grocery there are bags of school supplies there's different things they can get at these fact fairs they get

245information about schooling about college and so um these high schools come and put boards up and express what they have at their schools their academies you know the advanced programs whatever they have they display it at those fact fairs so the parents can go to that one place and get most of what they need on while they're at those factors and there's um employees that are there to answer their questions on the spot if they happen to have them while they're at the fact fair yeah usually they're in the south and northwest side of volusia county and the north and south east side of the county they're on both sides of the county before a year and also some schools like reed patello elementary has an excellent nutrition program they've won national awards they've made

246it a focus i think sugar mill elementary does the same thing with their home-grown garden right they have a home-grown garden yeah and i i got to be part of there they got a nice award state award for their participation so um a lot of schools haven't um embraced this wellness policy and made it a focus of their students and their the driving force of the community so it's it's it's really good really good so um any more concerns comments these two okay dr fritz the superintendent recommends the authority be granted to advertise the proposed amendments to the school board policy 521 wellness policy okay now this is just um a board action item for permission to advertise okay i'm sorry yes to advertise request to advertise policy 521 wellness policy we shouldn't be advertised

247but that's what it says request to advertise policy sorry i'm staying corrected okie doke so we we're okay all right thank you sir um you've heard the recommendation of the superintendent for board action item 20.04 request advertise policy 521 which is our wellness policy is there a motion second okay it is the motion's been made by mr person since seconded by ms uh mrs burnett um any cards thank you all those in favor any more discussion board okay all those in favor please say aye aye all those opposed please say nay the motion is carried five to nothing thank you so much 5.20.05 board action item adoption of proposed amendments to school board policy 217 student appearance dress and uniform code mr pendley take it away madam chair members of the board this uh request

248at the board's pleasure to amend the policy 217 to eliminate the uniform requirement from the dress code you will see there that in the title uniform has been stricken any reference in general statement to uniform provisions have been stricken in general dress code provisions under section two we did include the language concerning no flip-flops in the schools or permitted to be worn and there was a change in paragraph b4 section two concerning hats caps and coverings and of course elimination of section three to repeal the uniform requirements this policy has been advertised for the appropriate amount of time no change has been made since the board's june 22nd hearing first reading and it is ripe for adoption okay thank you mr pendley uh mr purses uh thank you madam chair i just wanted to uh

249get back to dr fritz's comment i think at the very end when we were we were going through this uh and i was wondering if in our policy we need to have or if dr fritz thinks it'd be worthwhile to have a definition of a flip-flop so that because there is the slide and i know it's popular and uh but when i think of a flip-flop i think of that shoe that has that little thing in between your big toe and the next step and the little rubber thing that little rub everything that irritates you after a while uh so i mean that's what i think of as a flip flip flip-flop and i didn't want yeah i didn't want principals to have to go through the well you know you said no flip-flops but

250you didn't say you couldn't wear this and then somebody's going to say well what's the difference between a slide and a flip flip-flop and you know i just want to make it harder i had the opportunity to talk with seven principals the other day we were talking about athletics uh but this came up and i really would like to share some insight with you um the slides are are a big deal uh because when they're the athletes wherever they go there weren't and so most of them wearing socks and you know this was a sticking point for them uh i'll share with you they they they don't want to have to place that at least the seven principles i was with because they feel like those slides are something that has become pretty much standard

251um and so they they really were concerned on that now the only thing i thought about is most athletic events you know there's a transition there's a period i mean when you're dressing out or going to that's where they can wear the slide you know if that's something the board was okay with it rather than maybe walking around the hallways um but it was something and it really it was just recent i would have shared with you beforehand but i had an opportunity to talk to principals last thursday and that was something that we talked about and it was only seven of them but it was it was a sticking point right so it so given the way the policy is worded right now is there wiggle room to allow the principles to say yes

252it's okay to wear the to where uh those i mean you could leave it as it is and we could exercise comments coming we could common sense when it was an athletic event transition if that if that makes sense yes yeah i mean that that works but is that something that you would have to we we could communicate that very clearly that there's an athletic transition or that that that that apparel would be okay and would it be i i just don't want to make it seem like we're favoring athletic things i mean is it would it be is it act extra curricular things i mean could the conversation we had because we were talking athletics it was really gen it was around athletic events so are we only talking to piggyback high school or

253you know well i had four i had four high school and three middle school principals so we had both yeah i i remember even seeing it when i was still there as a middle school print principles the basketball players would like to wear them i mean the way the policy used to be at elementary was because like of pe and everything that they needed the closed toed shoes on to go out to pe so it's a it's a secondary thing it's a status symbol yeah yeah it's a secondary name so other than that i mean i'm fine with it with everything you know i just want i just don't want to cause another gray area where you know some kids are getting in trouble and some kids aren't okay mr colon you have a question

254i think it's something that we can that the district can further define because i had never heard of the term slides until i googled it two minutes ago and those are sandals um but are they flip-flops no they're not flip-flops you know i mean i thought this was i thought this was the kind of shoe that carl only wore that i've never worn because i've never owned a pair of slides they don't come in my size but i guess they do now um after those glitter shoes the other night those were pretty dazzling i think with this policy there is room for the district the same way it was past the last time and then they defined it i think there's room for that and we could use best judgment for that and i don't

255think that because it doesn't necessarily speak to slides however um you know our principals know best and and i think we can handle it you're right i mean we want we want button seats and that's really the aim of what we're trying to accomplish and uh and i guess i'm going to have to get myself some slides i think you'd look great in them i really do they're really cool they wear them with socks yeah we're sitting there socks oh yeah follow me onto my truck i got a pair isn't it nice to come to an educational function and learn something that's wonderful thank you mr cologne uh thank you mr purses excellent question uh ladies miss burnett or miss haint i'm ready to move forward okay i do have a comment i have to

256say this i said it last time when this you know when we started talking about this and we didn't start this discussion until june 22nd and i said even then we've not necessarily been considerate of all of our families i i don't know where you guys stand on emails you know but i have to say at least 50 to maybe 60 of the emails i've received have been from parents stating why you know why did you push this to the last minute like why have you put us in this situation they've also stated that they had already bought which i said was going to be a problem they had already bought polos you know there's families that have shared stories about the lack of income this year you know because they lost jobs during covid

257and you know what are we doing so i said all that on june 22nd i said you know are we being considerate but where i'm at um is what i've said to every one of them i hear what you're saying i brought that up but by moving forward on this basically what we're doing is we're giving an option so we're not saying that because i'll be honest with you those little elementary kids look so cute in their little like school polos or little school t-shirts in their shorts i mean they do they look they look adorable like they they come on campus that first day and it you don't like you know they're yours you know what i'm saying in a classroom or whatever um this is an option i mean by moving if we

258move forward on this tonight you may choose to still wear the same bottoms that you've been wearing you can change your shirts you can wear the same shirts you can i mean realistically there are things i think that especially high school kids because i've received some emails from high school kids going oh no you know go with this because i should be able to express myself i'm not saying you can't express yourself but i want to say to them did you read the policy because it's not anything goes right and i and i think that's where i still come back to you dr fritz part of why we're in this situation is a policy was developed prior to i mean miss cuthbert was the only one on the board when this policy was developed none

259of the rest of us were here and nobody nobody supported the policy i i mean i think elementary it started out they did but it it's high school's been a joke okay so my thing is if we vote tonight and we're going to these general dress code requirements which is where we were before the uniform piece got added are we going to enforce this or is it still going to be in anything goes yes i want kids they're learning but at the same time there's just some there's some attire out there let me tell you what we'll enforce okay because i want to be very clear um we would we will make a student be a compliant dress code we will have things like other clothes but what i won't do is this i won't

260suspend kids no for dress code and but you know you say that and i know we're all being logical but i'm telling you it's happened in in the past i won't do that i won't support that if they ever gets to miss rolling ms rowland's going to say no because we need them in school yes and you know that's that's really important i i think what you're doing dude let me let me applaud you on this because this this is a common sense approach the county i came from has a uniform policy and i remember when i got there in 2008 i got there days before they were going to implement and i thought this is going to be something because i was coming from a county where there was no policies how's this going

261to work the reason it worked is because it was a very poor county and 95 percent of the families were behind it because they were going to build dress their kids for 80 dollars there was no resistance and it worked because 95 people were behind it if you don't have a large majority a uniform policy just does not work it just doesn't work it was an epic fail when i was a principal in hillsborough county i i remember they tried it at a pilot and immediately they started doing waivers and when you do one waiver you might as well do because within a week i had 600 waivers coming in and so i think what you're looking as a common sense approach what i've heard from each one of you when things are covered up

262that should be covered up you want pants pulled up at the waist and you want kids to look like they're supposed to be going to school and so my administrators can enforce that they absolutely can the guidance they're going to get from me is don't put kids home because they're not in dress code and let's make sure that there's some type of closet that's you know and it's really important you don't want to embarrass a kid either i've seen that approach to it i don't like that yeah so we'll make sure we do it right that's good yes mr sorry i changed my mind um you spoke of making sure that we're doing things right and and you spoke of some financial impact and and i've had many emails just like you and there's been

263on both sides of the coin but i've also there's you know it when we talk about the bullying aspect of this that people still know when you buy a polo from a discount store versus a polo from the mall so there's no there's still that i mean there's not going to change anything with the bullying of of what clothing you're wearing because that still happens whether you're buying your polo at the discount store versus an expensive store i just wanted to say that because i know that that's been communicated as well but that still happens so teach your children to to be kind to others whether they get their clothes wherever whether it's a polo or a regular shirt yes mr color so i wanted to share my thoughts because i know i'd spoken to

264the slides that was there and so i i actually went back and listened to the board meetings from when the board made this decision and it was hours and hours of meetings thankfully on youtube you can make it go one and a half to two times to catch the things that you wanted to hear and the way i the way i looked at this was what did they aim to accomplish number one was they thought it would decrease bullying and i think that it has not because and that's probably because of our society right now i'm not saying it all has to do with uniforms but that didn't happen we thought it would improve academic outcomes well for whatever reason in our high schools it was never implemented yet our academic outcomes are amazing and

265so that didn't accomplish that goal either and so you know i i look you know what would it improve behavior well it actually caused more referrals so the goal was we said if all the kids look the same we're going to have less referrals and well that didn't happen either and so i'm not a fan of doing things just because we do it this is the way we've always done it when you look at what the board and their mind thought process was at the time along with the incentives from the state to adopt this and money that some of which never came okay i i i wanted to see what their mentality was and when you look at the goals you're talking about me there yes ma'am you were the only nay um yes

266right okay and so um i watched that video too and so with that being said i thought to myself what did they aim to accomplish and after five years did was it accomplished and the answer was no and so why would we continue to do the same thing over and over expecting a different outcome we know what that is yeah and so that's where my thought process is that's what i've shared with families and you know this is not just about getting rid of uniforms and this is not it is there was a we did something that i tried to get into the mind of the board members at the time not questioning you know what were they thinking and you know i'm glad that after so many years we are looking at it and

267deciding did this work did this not work and we realize that you know i think that by setting a a standard that is attainable now we can better because what happened was it wasn't an attainable standard so the truth is a principal could sit at the door and basically send dress code every kid to the auditorium for suspension for each for the day the other part of this that you know is when we talk about those referrals now we have administrators who are going to spend half their day and i've heard this dealing with referrals you know we're we're all about teaching and learning we need those administrators because that's the only way they're going to become great administrators is to be in the classrooms and so instead of them being in the classrooms they're

268taking care of referrals for dress codes you know not to mention you know teacher you know kid's been in school all day we're in the same thing he gets the sixth period now the teacher says bye jimmy you're not dr you know you're dress coded go to the office you have a referral and so you know looking at all of that and seeing where our focus is which is teaching and learning in order to teach the kids got to be in class and in order to learn the kids got to be in class and so that's my thought process and that's why i'm very supportive of this okay all righty what was going on back then um you know remember this was before a lot of our fencing initiatives it was before a lot of

269security cameras and now we're going security cameras it was before we had a lot of the protective sheeting this the stuff in on our front offices plus it was somewhat political too there were some outside political pushes for uniforms it was a huge discussion i mean i've never seen so much explosion explosion i was against it because i knew it was an enforcement issue it wasn't a dress issue it was an enforcement issue and having a husband who was an ap in discipline in facilities that's always you know it was very obvious so and that's why i insisted on streamlining this and making it real easy because then it's so much easier to enforce if it's easier to enforce it's easier for our kids to follow it's easier on the referral list it's just we

270just want everything covered so the attention is on the on the textbook and the teacher and the learning and not in what you got on and it's an option correct it is an absolute option if somebody still wants to wear the the polo please do wear your school colors i think it's a great idea it's just an option so options okay any other discussions yes all right sir in just a second okay um dr fritz the superintendent recommends the adoption of the proposed amendment to school board policy 217 student i'm sorry my glasses fogged up appearance dress and uniform code okay you've heard the recommendation of the superintendent of um 20.05 board action item adoption of proposed amendments to school board policy 217 student appearance dress and uniform code is there a motion i'll be

271with you in just a second i came here to talk to this issue uh sir in just a second i'll be with you in just a second is there a motion motion to approve uh policy 217. okay uh it is uh the motion has been made by mr colon is there a second a second it's been seconded by mr uh miss burnett any more discussion of the board okay now sir we have time for public participation it has to be a motion on the floor for you to address it first so okay sir that's no problem is that my name yes yes sir it certainly is pull yourself up to a microphone is it climber or climber it's climber like mountain climbing okay i was just missing the beat all right sir you have three

272minutes please announce who you are what area of town you're from you have three minutes to speak i am ron climber i live in ormond beach and the very first sentence of this 217 says the responsibility for the address and appearance of the students enrolled in the district first primarily rest prime their dress and rest primarily with the parents and the students and i think that's the most important sentence in the whole thing and you can stop right there and have a good program but in the second sentence you say however there's that dreaded word however i think of my eighth grade english teacher would just x that word right out of my composition and say run don't use that word it's halfway between pejorative and useless but however means forget what we said so

273far here's what you need to know and in the second sentence we say we realize that some of you parents and students are incapable of making proper decisions so we've got some fashion and grooming suggestions for you here that we're going to call roll rules and you've got all this stuff like appropriate size of the clothes if you've got belts you got to have belt loops and no hats and that's the reason i showed up tonight no hats that seems un-american to me is there anybody in this room that doesn't own a hat and wear a hat pretty frequently but you can't wear one at volusia county schools and no sunglasses this is the sunshine state i can see a morgan and morgan lawsuit from that i mean no sunglasses i can also see an

274abuse of that with the it's good for thee but not for me i don't think the coach is going to stand out there in the phys ed field all day long with no hat no sunglasses i may be wrong but i'll bet he doesn't and so the students can't wear hats or sunglasses but the coaches can something wrong with that picture and flip-flops you can wear flip-flops to the white house you can wear them to church and by the way madam chairman your daughter had the best pair here tonight there was about ten pairs in and hers were a plus she's very much the shitty stuff you could wear those anywhere except volusia county schools so and also you've got a thing for no clothing with tears have you turned on your tv alan jackson

275ellen degeneres they all wear clothes with tears in them no tattoos that's got to be the enforcement problem of the century there and haircuts correct me if i'm wrong it is none of your business how anybody wears their hair am i am i right or wrong and um why do we need all these rules my thoughts are we don't need these rules just leave that first sentence in there it's responsible to the parents and the students vote no thank you very much sir not only that you did the perfect timing as well all right any more further discussion from the board all those in favor please say aye aye all those opposed please say nay i'm sorry sir we disappointed you [Laughter] [Music] i i do believe our district will be contacting you yeah i've

276asked them to do that so all right um thank you so that that concludes our board action items um 20.01 public participation this is cuthbert before you start public input i have a question um i understand why it's 6 30 to right i think i understand why at 6 30 tonight for the specific time for public input you followed and only did the 15 minutes but i know in the past if we've had parents here to speak we've allowed them to speak so my understanding is now for this you know like if they stay for the end of the evening but my understanding is even if they've stayed we're still limiting to five now for the end of the evening no i'm just letting if somebody's willing to stay with us this long they they

277deserve to speak okay all right i just that's where i stand i feel like if they've been here and done the long haul they should have an offer i agree opportunity okay okay it's already in place okay dr pam schrager uh okay and then that's first and then lisa duba is second please state your name and tell us what part of the county you're from i'm dr pamela schrager i'm from deland resident of deland i have two kids um in in the police county schools and um i'm a a doctor of 26 years experience um you know one thing i'm sorry can you hear me correct wasn't there one so one thing i just thought i didn't realize and something it's my own fault i neglected it you can see your own time yes yeah

278i didn't know if you knew that yeah and also on the side as well yes okay i just i apologize thank you for pointing that out i appreciate it all right i'm sorry thank you that's just to help you out a little bit thank you um so i've come to you guys tonight i'll be brief because i know it's late to ask you to reconsider the mask policy in schools i know it is a debate that you guys obviously i've heard from discussions tonight have put a great deal of time and effort and research and thought into and i wouldn't waste your time unless i thought that there was reason to look at it with new eyes and that reason is with the rise of the delta variant which statistics are changing all the time

279but suggesting that it's as much as 86 of the current case load the thing that is different that i don't think that we've talked about tonight is the incidence of high viral loads in vaccinated individuals what that means is vaccinated individuals can become asymptomatic carriers which is different and it's a game changer in the past the vaccine not only protected you from disease but also protected you from spreading it to other people so that people that can't get vaccinated had some degree of safety if they were with people that were vaccinated um all of us have heard the people say it's okay i'm vaccinated um suggesting that i'm safe i'm not gonna expose you and that goes away with a delta variant the the evidence is early and it needs to be followed i don't

280think it's definitive yet but um that means that everyone at school kids that can't be vaccinated or even the vaccinated kids they all can be asymptomatic carriers which changes up our policy entirely all of the people that those kids come home to the kids are going to expose them period if masks aren't in school so every teacher every staff member every student that has anyone at home who's at risk it doesn't matter if the kids are vaccinated or not they can bring it home so the only way that we can protect them is to have them in masks and it's different last week i personally can't get vaccinated because of health issues and am high risk my kids thankfully are both vaccinated so i can send them to school and they need to get back

281to school please they need to get back to school but i could send them to school and not risk my life but that changes with the delta variant the simple thing that we can do to keep my kids from bringing home a disease that could kill me is to ask the kids to wear masks i know your job is to protect the kids and not protect me i get that but i do think we have a responsibility as a community if not only to protect the kids from further mutations but also to protect the staff the family the community at large and if the kids are going to be spreading if everyone that's there can can spread um then i think that's a concern and it warrants revisiting it's basically like going back to school

282without the vaccine because your kids your kids weren't really the ones getting sick to begin with the vaccine didn't change that what the vaccine changed for you is that the kids no longer were contagious and that is different now so i ask you to look at it again thank you thank you thank you we appreciate you staying with us tonight thank you thank you lisa duba and then kim short is no longer here okay then kim and then phyllis stoffenberg good evening so on a happier note i got a chance to go to the florida pta leadership convention and i just wanted to do a shout out because they did an absolutely amazing job it was four days and for anybody who hasn't been anybody who's listening if your pta has never been i highly

283recommend that you spend the money and the time to attend they have they had five sessions jam-packed with tons of great information on how to look for grants on how to build a website um how to build your membership on how to build relationships you know there's the normal ones of treasurer and other leadership type ones but there was one that that caught my eye it was actually the last session the fifth section fifth s session um and it was done by an avon green who's the college and career specialist with broward county public schools on leveraging peer influencers to build a college-going culture and they do something in broward county called they have a program called brace cadets and what they do is um they basically decided that i'm going to read it because

284it's so perfectly said students need guidance and support throughout the college going process but with student-to-counsel ratios in florida hovering around 450 to 1 many students aren't getting that support to address the need broward public schools created the brace cadets a peer-to-peer cohort of students who are trained to help their peers with college applications fafsa completion and scholarships among other steps attend to learn how peer influencers are preparing students for life after high school and how you can bring the program to your school so they had 500 students apply they picked sixty it's about four to six the school a high school they put them through real training on how to sit with students and how to help them they uh had they used title four funds to give each of the students a 500

285stipend so if you do the math it's 30 to for 60 students and the impact was massive they they basically they said that where they would get 20 maybe parents show up or chill whatever to come to a session to learn about these things in a school they'd have 70 or 80. that's the impact of student voice and having students involved and i know everybody in this room knows that because you've been around long enough and you've seen it so i just i i was so impressed i mean the other woman i don't know if i said her name kathy mcdonald from the florida college access she was the other person who taught this um who was the presenter who taught this workshop and i i mean they talk about you know the programs they

286use naviance and zello and i know they're expensive but i i just i the brace cadet piece of it was just so awesome okay so thank you thank you very much um would you terribly mind giving us some of that information or just sending my email i'll send an email greatly appreciate it thank you miss short uh phyllis stoffenberg i apologize if i mispronounced your name oh good thank you uh welcome thank you for staying speaking to the microphone state your name where area and you have three minutes thank you very much for affording me the opportunity to speak at this board meeting my name is phyllis stoffenberg and i live in deland i don't know how many of you can appreciate how many parents watch and are attuned to what goes on at these

287board meetings it's astonishing i am very involved as a couple of you know in local county state and national affairs programs clubs parents are very very involved in what goes on in these meetings they call me i'm re representing a large number of parents i believe god gave us our children he gave it to us to protect them to guide them to raise them to the best of our ability he didn't give them to the school board he didn't give them to the department of health he gave them to the parents they're only loaned to us and then we do the best we can and we clip the wings and let them fly the statistics that you're getting from the department of health we all know as adults statistics can be juggled any way you

288want i know that i did that in my career for 34 years there's also false positives that the department of health gives instances they had deaths one i know of a family that had a mother die from cancer on the death certificate they tried to put covid on another one was congestive heart failure on a dead again they put covid the families literally had to fight in order to keep that off the death certificate reason being and we all know it the government pays you or pays to get so many statistics and they also pay for the funerals they are now reimbursing up to i believe nine thousand dollars per person that passed away from covid i have been advised by these parents if in fact and this is not an ultimatum by any means

289it's simply a fact that there is a large group of parents if these parents have these children have to be masked and it's mandated by the department that they get vaccinations these parents are prepared to pull their children out of the school system they are well versed in how to get tutors they have even gone to the point where they have grouped together to have homes that these children can go to in order to get an education if in fact this comes to fruition thank you for your message tonight we do appreciate it very much thank you thank you for sticking around thank you so much i appreciate it we wish you well uh and elizabeth albert you're bringing up the rear no pun intended i get a little when i get tired i get

290a little slap i know and i'll try to be brief so um elizabeth albert um holly hill i haven't said that in a long time so interesting anyway good evening again madam chair members of the board dr fritz members of the audience a little bit off topic for a moment only a moment it was mentioned earlier that tomorrow there is a ribbon cutting at pine ridge for the hvac academy i want to thank you so much for that and i want to encourage you to continue to see the value in the trades my husband is a lifelong 30 plus year ibw journeyman electrician my son is a third year apprentice in the ibw apprenticeship program and my daughter is almost halfway through the welding program at daytona state they will always be able to figure

291out how to make a living they will have skilled trades that they can work in dr fritz i believe you know the value of the trades and so what i am and the reason i'm sharing that is because we have a great opportunity i know that we're spending some money to make sure that all of our high school students take certain tests but for children like mine those tests they didn't really mean a whole lot although they were both enrolled in the science medicine academy at mainland and they got through but that's not where their heart was it took my daughter almost four years to figure out this is what she wanted to do but she's now there so i'm really asking that we focus on children like mine who are not going to go

292to a four-year college or even two plus two i paid all that prepaid money uh but the point is we have to be diverse okay now i'm gonna shift so i think that went over really well so hang on it wouldn't be a school board meeting if i didn't talk to you about you know concern the payment right um i i was happy to see that our financial forecast is you know with the numbers that we're working through for the fiscal year for we're not a negative number uh we know that the governor has requested the information for the classroom teachers and the principals that was sent already so we have an idea of how many folks qualified for that payment plan at this point in time we should be able to get an idea

293of what we're looking at in order to recognize the loyalty and the commitment that our folks gave during the pandemic i'm asking for recognition a monetary recognition i'm not going to use the b word but the thousand dollars that uh that we believe and i know you have a desire to do something for our folks i'm asking that we we start to make some decisions here and i'm going to leave with 25 seconds on the clock so thank you and have a good evening thank you very much miss albert that concludes public participation um i don't have any other cards miss schultz do we have more cars okay um we'll continue rebecca suarey will be next and then christy mcclure they're not here and crystal mcclure all right thank you uh there's no name volusia

294county resident is that permissible she doesn't have to say her name it's permissible okay okay good evening good evening for this time my name is volusia county resident uh ma'am would you speak into the microphone so we have so we're able to hear you yes you have three minutes thank you sure so there was a lot of talk this evening about um risk and death death and i would just like to point out in 2020 according to the american foundation for suicide prevention suicide is the eighth leading cause of death in florida that is one person dies by suicide every two hour hour every two hours in the state of florida so on to mass mandates which implicate constitutional issues i lead to read the florida constitution section two basic rights all natural person persons

295female and male alike are equal before the law and have inalienable rights no person shall be deprived of any right because of race religion national origin or physical disability i also read section 3 religious freedom there shall be no law respecting the establishment of religion or prohibiting or penalizing the free exercise thereof i also choose to read section 23 of the constitution of state of florida which is right to privacy every natural person has the right to let alone and free government and free from government intrusion excuse me governmental intrusion into the person's private life except as otherwise provided here in this section shall not be construed to limit the public's right of access to public records and meetings as provided by law so underneath the school board we have school community relations policies which

296is number 811 family and school partnership the introduction reads a the school board believes that the opportunity for a student to be successful is strict is greatly enhanced when there is a strong link between the students home and the student school part two exceptions of the school bird board and district part a the school district will involve and work collaboratively with all stakeholders including parents students employees professional associations etc b the school board will continue to maintain involved family and community which leads me to read the house of representatives staff final bill analysis which is hb 241 chapter 1014 parents bill of rights the bill prohibits the state its political subdivisions and any other governmental entities and other institutions from infringing upon the fundamental right of a parent to direct the upbringing education healthcare and

297mental health of his or her minor children without demonstrating a compelling state interest for such actions effective changes constitutional principles it is well settled that the interests of parents in the care custody and control of their children is perhaps the oldest of the recognized fundamental liberty interests protected by the due process clause of the 14th amendment of the united states constitution the right of privacy is a fundamental right which we believe demands the compelling state interest standards the test shifts the burden of proof to state to justify an intrusion of proper privacy so we please ask that you take into consideration that parents have the right to choose when it comes to any sort of medical procedures that are thank you i appreciate you concluding thank you thank you kirk hall is next and then

298dr jerry pikett no mr hall i'm sorry okay thank you and uh dr pikett left as well yeah okay thank you uh willie williams has left alrighty and tammy ming min i apologize if i mispronounced your name anna hannon good evening nice to see you again please talk into the microphone they're a little more sensitive right now and you have three minutes all righty um i what just wanted to address a few things that uh patricia boswell from the department of health talked about um there is a from the department of health there's a school health administrative resource manual and that was updated in june and it hasn't been updated this week so on page 32 under mass use in school settings it says that mass policies should be voluntary so i'm not really sure

299why she contradicted herself there i understand there's a spike in variance but that's what the policy says as of today you know we all knew about the possibility of virus mutations and spikes and we need to learn to live with this um you know living with a mask is just there's no real proof that it works there's a lot of debate about it i just don't think that we can just go on forever year after year as the virus mutates kind of like the flu and wear masks and have all these excessive restrictions i think we need to learn how to live with this um you know these are our kids and we need to make those health care decisions just because they go to school doesn't mean that we relinquish our rights whenever we

300drop them off as far as the quarantines i just don't know what authority the health department or even the school board has to quarantine kids excessively if they're asymptomatic so i would really like to understand where that authority comes from i think last year we all kind of went we rolled with the flow but now we need to get serious about catching up and the kids need an education and i think you know there's probably going to be some more pushback we want our kids in school if they're healthy and they're not sick as far as the parents bill of rights i just don't think that we can even after july first when it became effective i don't think that we can really re-implement a mass mandate i don't think that it's going to be

301within the law to do so i don't think that the current policy as it is if we don't have a requirement about written parental consent i don't see how we can reimplement that and stay within hb 241 within the parents bill of rights so i think i don't think that policy 503 is in alignment with that and then of course there is the possibility that if any school board implements a mass mandate the governor said the other day and turned to speaker sprouls that he will call for a special session so i just don't see why we need to address re-implementing a mass mandate so i hope you all take that under consideration and let's get back to a good school year thank you thank you very much and a good school year for you

302too as well jennifer dixon and then elizabeth hall okay so miss hall and good afternoon good evening definitely evening now i've been here for quite some time my name is jennifer dickinson and i'm from deland i really did not want to come here tonight to speak a little bit carefully into the microphone so we can hear you okay i definitely did not want to be here i was definitely not happy to see the article in the newspaper that we were going to be talking about masks on our children again i work in education in the preschool we did not wear a mask not one day all last year we had zero children get covered last year not one and these are little kids these are kids in your face these are kids touching me sneezing

303in my mouth you know i work with two-year-olds they're gross uh i know a lot of teachers that are dealing with the kids in the elementary you know how gross uh i just i just feel like i want you to know that it is our right as parents to make those decisions whether we have masks or not masks and that's all i'm really here to say tonight is that it it is scary we are all afraid but we have been living this for a whole year i hope after a whole year we have learned how to keep ourselves safe and healthy as for me when i found out about covid i got healthy i ate better i worked out more that's what we should be educating our children on not scaring them that we're going

304to kill grandma we're going to kill our neighbors we're going to kill our friends my nephew won't take the mask off he's terrified teach him to take responsibility for his health that's why we should be educating our children not scaring them so thank you good evening thank you very much uh that concludes public participation now for board comments who would like to begin mr colon so uh once again tomorrow we will be having the ribbon cutting for uh the hvac academy at pine ridge and you all know how excited i am about that um i am elated because you know our students will have the opportunity to take advantage of it i had the pleasure of walking through there and let me tell you you all are in for a treat so i'm super stoked

305and look forward to seeing everybody tomorrow for in a few hours although we're pretty early today thank you thank you mr cologne miss burnett um yeah it is early i was expecting a midnighter here um i won't be able to make the pine ridge event tomorrow but i know we're all excited about that as well as we received an email about an electric electrician's program that i know you responded that you were going to meet with them and i think that's exciting and we've talked about many a different opportunities for our students in that in that realm and um i know we've talked about getting a plumbing course around too so i kind of excited about that i think we all would be but um tomorrow i am going to get the opportunity to go

306to meet one of the the principal meet the principal day for the um sugar mill and so i'm excited about that and next week i believe we have a ribbon cutting for our new school or ground breaking from groundbreaking on the second um that's kind of exciting as well new for me so i'm excited about it and i am going to make that so i hope we all have a great week thank you very much miss burnett mr purses yeah i uh you know i'm not going to be at that ribbon cutting but i i am going to be at that food brings homes no food brings home hope but it's homes i think it's something on words because it's at ici homes yeah this is what farooq's doing to help people get into their

307houses right right and that's in the morning as as well and uh that's over here on bevel road so that's what i i don't know that one we didn't know anything well i don't know i have that on mine so i don't know i'm did you know anything about that yeah i can give it a little bit um it's it's through food brings hope it's mississippi's program where she's working with um to try to revitalize the community um around campbell and turity and so trying to work with helping a few teachers like that maybe are first-year teachers or teachers that are working in our system to try to find residents and to look at some programs to build to live in the community and she's not just looking at teachers but that's what obviously one

308of our components is and it's starting very small um and tomorrow's just kind of the kickoff mr west will be there uh as my representative because i'll be at the hvac um but he is going to be there to kind of christy mahaney is the one that's really been working with that maybe that's where it was yeah maybe that's where it was so anyway that's it thank you mr purchase uh miss haynes so miss albert i want to thank you for coming up and talking about the trades tonight because that's been you know something that i've talked about for many years even when i was back in the classroom because i'm not saying that every child shouldn't have the opportunity if they want to go to a college or a university but we've got kids

309out there that that's not the path they want to take right now and my own son would have loved you know a trades program when he was in high school um a former secretary of mine her son you know couldn't get involved into the electric program until he got out of high school and then we connected him with someone but he would have loved to start my son had the chance to work on a construction site the summer he was 16 and he was like this is what i want to do but we've not been offering anything for kids and so here he is 28 now and it was last year in november when he just said i'm moving forward finally to do what it is that i want to do and he's now working

310for a company and he's been trained and everything and he runs all the wiring he's down doing a school in orange county right now and he's just as happy as he can be on what he is doing and but it took to this point because we didn't have that opportunity so i am so excited about tomorrow's you know ribbon cutting for the hvac system i2 you know with the electrician and the plumbing there are so there's a need for that here in volusia county and you know i think whatever we can bring in that these kids get excited about and that helps them stay focused on learning and they find that passion of what they want to do and i'm so excited your daughter finally figured it out like my son but um i'm i'm

311looking forward to the future for our students that are coming up and the fact that we're going to be able to offer them additional paths so thank you thank you for saying that let me just jump in real quick just so that you know uh we we are working mr clone actually visited with me with atc at daytona state we will start second semester transporting students to daytona state facilities for their specialized programs so for example even in new smyrna they have a manufacturing program at the daytona state we're working to coordinate those schedules and it will start small second semester because it's second semester um but it'll ramp up for starting next fall and so you know we're working on things like this is the logistics you have to work on the kids still

312have to get their core classes so you go first and second period you go away for the hours in between and you come back sixth seventh and so we're in the process of working on that with michelle at daytona state but that is our big project and then august 3rd i believe it is gave we have all the guidance directors going to atc to learn about this so that we can start scheduling for kids i understand this the importance of the trades and and i i got to tell you if you don't think that those folks use higher order thinking skills yeah to fix a toyota or to figure out how to build a latest and greatest kitchen um i just got to tell you there's tremendous respect there and so that will be an

313area that we keep pushing and that's part of one e for us that's acceleration that's why we are doing what we're doing in the guidance well we we're we're doing eight touches with every kid minimal with the guidance counselors we're making sure that the first thing they do is that career survey when they get to the start of this school year because i i just and i know it really isn't my time to talk but this is the stuff i get excited about this is the stuff that's going to put the kids in volusia on the right path so thank you madam thank you ma'am i used it i'm done thank you um yes sir may i just uh click clarify because karen the bishop just sent me a text and everything so yes it's

314it's homes brings hope home springs hope and it pulls together assistance from private donors the city of daytona beach the federal government daytona beach housing authority to transform renters into home owners the program's goal is to help 12 renters close on homes purchases by the end of this year and then double that next year and it is you know obviously funded and founded by uh farooq hussini yeah so i don't think there's anything she can't do yes that's true mrs cuthbert yes ma'am i just had one other thing um i had the opportunity to meet with dr fritz yesterday and okay i had the opportunity to meet with dr fritz yesterday but um you went you and i were there for um mr purchase was there for me so too the presentation yesterday and one

315of the things that i know that everybody's still waiting to hear because you put that slide up that said like by tomorrow administrators would get information to kind of know where we're moving forward but you and i had a conversation about that and um you know and i talked about this earlier today so the intent is you know we're still going to provide hand sanitizer out at the schools on our buses along with the wipes because we had already made the promise an additional mass mr i know elizabeth mentioned that earlier i believe but uh dr shanoff has already got the mask okay so we're going to have those at schools so that whoever wants to wear one at any time um you know or the face shields or you know or whatever because i

316know that a lot of teachers especially our speech teachers and our um primary teachers did a lot with the face shields last year so that they could work on the sounds and all that because if you can't see and the kid can't see what to do with their mouth they can't learn to read so i just wanted to you know reiterate that after we talked this afternoon we're planning on still continuing on with having available or making available at the schools all of those cleaning supplies the hand sanitizer there'll be masks in the event you know a child or a teacher wants to put on a mask and they have forgotten it and and that's what you're going to be sharing with them tomorrow because that's been the question people are just asking you know

317are the items still going to be available because i think truly when you talk to a lot of teachers what they learned is just by setting up those constant routines of having kids wash their hands use hand sanitizer wipe the desk down the tables down you know that kind of stuff so yes all those things will be available and the same as you know as you were walking out i was jumping on a superintendent's call yesterday with all the superintendents and the number one concern from every superintendent on there and it was voiced over and over and over and over is we want guidance when it comes to quarantining and contact tracing and the reason we want guidance because you got to remember the governor the governor has the department of education and they have

318the department of health we're getting conflicting messages we're getting messages from the department of education to open things up and then you have department health coming along saying close things down and we're very candid that that really puts school boards and superintendents in a very difficult situation and we pushed really really hard not just to give guidance but to put it in writing i didn't feel overly confident that was going to happen but there were 67 superintendents pushing pretty hard and i'll share with you i think there's going to have to be some some work on our end as i researched and talked to other superintendents in our areas we know that this is a year that our kids have got to get back to work we've got to get back to work i do

319not envision having kids out 48 days like we did last year at times there's still some things that we're going to have to do you're going to have to do some type of contact racing with kids you know we're gonna have to figure out we're gonna have to utilize um good strategies like you and i talked yesterday about seating charts you're gonna have to have seating charts on buses you're gonna have to see any charts in classes so that when it a kid if a kid does get covet then we can really look to see where they were sitting around and is it an issue and some of the things tonight that i didn't hear that i was hoping to hear a little bit of is there were scenarios that were described to me when

320i was talking earlier at the department of health one of the things that was said to me was if one child has a mask on and the others do not and the child with the mask has covered the mask would keep them from having have anybody else go home and so the other thing that i heard is if a child has a mask on or if one kid has a mask on the other kid doesn't the one the one that would have to go home would be the child without the mask those were all scenarios and so i don't think those are hard and i don't think those are defined it was not discussed this evening at all i think those are some of the questions that we're going to have to wrestle through before

321school starts i'm hoping to get some guidance obviously as a superintendent i don't want to be out there on our own our district doing our own thing i think it's really important for us to make sure that we get that type of guidance um as of where we're at right now i will reassure principals tomorrow that those safety supplies will be at their schools for when all teachers come back there will be some type of contact tracing and as we get closer to it more details will come that's what i'm going to say at this point because that's what i've got you know i'm hoping that we again we get some guidance and if you can help us with the florida school board association i think we all need it we're all on the same

322page on this one we're on the same team um you know right now what other school districts are is they're maintaining what they did last year with that contact tracing and quarantine but i don't think any of us want kids out 48 days there is a fsba leadership meeting on friday which i'll be attending so i'll ask that question um are you okay sorry if i ask a question um what about buses right now on buses um dr shanoff i'm going to ask him to come up because i asked him to get some details from surrounding districts what the plan is dr shanoff reached out to orange county seminole county and a few others go ahead thank you good evening uh chair cuthbert board members dr fritz um so at this point um all of

323the other there's there's only one district that didn't respond to our request that was flagler but brevard seminole orange osceola hillsborough all responded at this point with the exception of osceola osceola is still going with masks on buses every other school district that responded is moving forward with just enforcing their policy which would be either no masks or mask optional on their buses cleaning protocols would be the same so these are things that we've discussed with our team i'm really pleased that that mr moyer is queued in to the florida association of pupil transportation they coordinate very well so we were able to actually look even outside the central florida coalition to see what other districts of comparable size were doing and the only district out of about 25 that responded that is moving forward

324with masks on buses is osceola every other district is optional or no so i wish i wish i had more sunshine news to share with you but but i don't so if you're asking me today to commit we will have to continue with some type of contact tracing and there may be situations where kids would have to be quarantined but we're going to try to minimize that so it's not anything like it was last year and i'm seeing heads not so i need to know because that was my whole thing we wanted you guys wanted me to bring this back to you so i'm i'm trusting that you're either good with that or you're going to tell me pretty quick just i'm good with minimize it that's all i wanted to do just what do

325the bus drivers say because they're the ones i think we heard from bus drivers that they want masks i think we can have available like certainly the bus driver themselves can wear a mask but i i think that's why it's important for us to have some type of seating chart i thought that was a really good idea i think you know in our schools that that's just another safety protocol so we will have the hand sanitizer on the buses just like we will in every classroom we have plenty of supply at this point in our warehouse our supply chains are good they're healthy so when we need to go out and get more the availability is there masks hand sanitizer wipes and deploying the the ppe kits were very very popular last year and we

326are deploying those ppe kits to every one of our classrooms um for the upcoming year okay thank you um you have a question for dr shanoff well um dr shannon i think you were here on june 22nd and maybe not at that time when we did vote you know for the mass to go optional because carol who represents the bus drivers came up and spoke that night and i felt like she gave a pretty accurate you know accounting of what happens on the buses you know she talked about they wear them off their ear you know not even on their face they wear them as a chin guard you know she talk and and what she said that night was please she said you know it take the bus drivers have spent how much time

327trying to enforce kids to wear masks correctly and she said they're not which you know their their focus should be on getting them to and from school safely not did the kid take their mask off and the one thing she asked that night which you know she represents that group was the hand sanitizer and the wipes to stay on the bus and um so you know i appreciate the fact that you reached out and found out what over 20 you know districts were doing and that they're basically doing the same thing we're doing or they're just saying no mask at all so it's really hard you're either optional you're not i mean it's really hard to to try to do you're mandatory here but not there and i you know i would encourage an optional

328approach and we'll just make sure that we have the ppes for everybody we'll we'll make sure that the ppe is available and we will be implementing the seating charts um we're going to do this um out of an abundance of of caution but we are going to comply with with the mask policy which at this point we're going to move forward with the with the mask optional um on the buses okay and the drivers can protect themselves if they so choose pardon me the drivers can protect themselves if they so choose oh yes ma'am so any anybody at any time can can wear a mask um they can wear a face shield they can wear a face shield and a mask if that's if that's their choice okay thank you yeah yes mr cohen there

329was question about a federal mandate and whether or not that applied to school buses have we learned whether that's accurate or not yes or mr pendley actually had to leave um but he did he did analyze that today and he replied back i think to miss burnett stating that he did not think that that was amended we would have to comply with very good thank you thank you for the thorough investigation we do appreciate it thank you thank you um there's one more thing i forgot i was kind of close so board members just so you know what i'm going to do my team and i on the on the drive over to hv the hvac my team and i are meeting tomorrow morning on teams and what we're going to do is talk through

330an faq and once we prepare that faq we will share it with the board and then once we're feeling good i'm going to send it out to schools so that they have it but again you know there's going to be a general theme on this massacre optional we are we're going to make sure that that's known for transportation as well and we are going to have contact tracing and quarantining with the intent not to have as many kids be out as they were last year and we're going to have ppe available for all staff okay okay thank you uh one thing i wanted to piggyback on what you were saying about the trades um you know i was uh involved in the birth of career connections 26 years ago or even closer to maybe 30

331years ago and it was um i've it's been wonderful to see the development of cte in our district one thing that hindered us was the liability because in high school children are usually under 18 and it's that exposure to high powered equipment to electricity that could injure them and we've always had difficulty with insurance and liability so things are beginning to get their programs being developed to work around it and we've even talked about dual enrollment on the trades so we can do it with academic programs we can certainly do the trades as well so it's it's a little slower but there's more movement happening now it's funny how it's beginning to accelerate and it's really good to see so uh with that i'm going to turn everything over to mr doran okay sir thank

332you madam chair uh well if we didn't have enough to do we we are so lucky to be uh in the year 2021 which is the year following the census data collection which means that we collectively all governments around the country are required to reapportion our districts to ensure that the representatives are representing roughly equal numbers of people so um to compound the problem historically um the data would have been released this past march uh in fact and i don't know the source of this information but the county understands anyway that it will be released no later than september 30th but possibly as early as mid-august which would be in a few weeks any way you slice it we've got about 90 days to accomplish this because it is legally mandated that we reapportion in

333odd numbered years there's been a lot of analysis on the law to try and figure out whether you could go into january or february as i understand it there are some counties and districts that are thinking they're going to do that basically on the thought process that oh well you know who's going to sue us and but if they do get sued i think they're going to lose so we don't want that so what we've got is a december 31 deadline to accomplish this um 10 years ago when we did this we worked with the county the county is offering that same thing again very gracious very generous they have people we have people they have software that can create these maps um it's my understanding once the data comes out there may be a

334rough version of the data that they can kind of gin up some you know representative example of what it might be and then there'll be the final data potentially that comes out which was what we'd actually have to work with but when the data is received it's my understanding that it takes about four days for them to produce a map or multiple maps so i i don't know what that has to do with maybe it has to do with getting it in the computer or something i'm not sure but anyway um so uh we have roughly 90 days to accomplish this now i i mr pendley and i have been in conversations with both the county attorney's office and in a meeting with people that went beyond that group i mean county representatives um sabrina

335slack who i know well is the assistant county attorney that's been designated to be in charge of this and again she's just been she's a wonderful person she's very easy to work with we clearly want to take them up on their offer to work together with them but in the course of the conversation with the county a couple of things struck me as issues uh that you know i wanted to present to you all right recognizing that you know i wanted to protect you in the sense that um uh and it may not be in you know your feedback maybe we're fine you know we don't care but uh i have sent you a number of dates that they've proposed i don't know how you feel about those dates they're meaningless to me other than

336i do think it's going to be like herding cats to get seven county council people and five school board members together so everybody's gonna have to be flexible um in accomplishing this i know some of you want to meet after 5 p.m and i think that's you know something that we need to impress upon the county the location of the meeting that they're suggesting right now but it's not carved in granite they're not saying you know this is it they're proposing that we meet in the county council chambers uh that would they say that they can get everybody up at the dance all what would it be twelve um that's kind of struck me you know i just know 10 years ago i was laughing with mr purses because he was in the county council

33710 years ago so i remembered seeing him sitting at this meeting i just kept visioning him there and i'm thinking he wasn't on the school board how am i seeing him as well he was on the county council so the ten years ago what we did was we got a big room at the old port house and we created a square of tables with chairs so that everybody was looking at one another that's not what's being proposed maybe you care maybe you don't but i did want to to um bring that to your attention so you could give me some feedback and i think you know what's following this presentation and our discussion is going to be i'm going to obviously be contacting the county and giving them some feedback on what you you guys

338say tonight so that's that's one issue another issue that struck me is that the way i understand they're approaching this is they have staff person or persons who are going to use some criteria that they've come up with to pump out some maps without any real involvement from any of the elected officials in advance of those maps coming out and becoming public now they certainly can be modified you don't have to accept any of the maps and i get all that it also can be politically sensitive if you know one of these maps takes in a part or all of a city or something that you know you're not happy with and then it becomes politically kind of difficult so i don't know that you want to accept their best shot at five districts or

339if you want to talk about some criteria and have our people or someone representing you make sure that those criteria are more implemented because you could have very different maps one goal that is has been stated and it would be a good thing but certainly not required if the five districts were mirrored one another it would be you know make it simpler on the supervisor elections that did not happen last time the school district did not go along with the county's approach so uh you know it's not required some of the criteria they're using first and foremost that the elected official be in the district reside in the district that's you know pretty important uh the second you know i'm not there's no particular order to this but they're talking about uh drawing lines consistent

340with community interests i think that probably talks a little bit about municipal boundaries it talks about rivers it talks about roads and you know that's of course i think a good criteria one of the criteria to apply um so you know these these are some of the things that i need some feedback on um let me see what else i've missed here i oh i just mentioned this ten years ago because we had so much time to work with we made a very concerted effort to bring community in on the process we invited chambers of commerce we invited cities to comment uh it was as i recall important to some cities to try and you know have their entire city entirely in one district versus another and not split up obviously that's not possible to

341accomplish uh completely because there's just no way to divide them up and not have some cities get divided but you may have some other criteria that you want employed so first question in my mind is aside from these dates that i've sent you is how do we feel about the location of the meeting joint meeting um the idea here is i'll just add this if the census data comes out in september or august uh sometime early october there would be the maps created and then in mid to late october there would be at least one if not two joint meetings with accounting where you guys would be looking at maps giving feedback they'd go back and create more maps uh and may have may have to have a second meeting and then of course from

342there if we can you know we gel on a particular map and then we start the ordinance process and bring it back to you in like mid-december for about so i throw that in as well but in my mind the first question is how do you feel about the proposed location of the meeting the arrangements for the meeting um so that i can respond just bring it we'd like to start with you i think that um we all should be on the same playing field we should be equal um so sitting at their dice is not a big positive in my opinion i think we should all be eye to eye equal and you mentioned at a square table before i think that's where it should happen um i know for me i work during

343the day as well as mr clone so some challenges there with timing and so i would definitely appreciate five o'clock in the evening to start and and i definitely think we need representation we shouldn't just um give them carte blanche for for making decisions for the school board okay okay miss um hayden i i totally agree i think that i'm not in favor of meeting in their chambers you know and all of us just sitting around where you can't even look at people i i think we need to be level i think it needs to you know be set up as a square rectangle i'm perfectly fine with it being at that time of the day i also i really don't want to have them generate maps before we have any input because the minute

344they generate them they're going to be released somehow and then that's just going to open up you know yeah it's going to be like a can of worms and you know if they're if they generate them and they're happy with them why will they even want us to come to the table you know to have a discussion so i'd like to see a discussion and us to have the ability to have input on the maps um prior to you know maps being released to the public thank you mrs haynes mr mr let's do mr clone i that came out of my mouth first so i agree with all of that and i'm also concerned with the fact that we're going to be like sardines in that room it really the chambers is not really big

345and when you're bringing two bodies together i don't think there is the space there i think we should be willing to open up one of our schools i think we may have schools that have a large enough learning commons particular to anyone where folks can come and and uh be a witness to it should they opt to um you know i think there's actually more involvement with school board and county council in the last few years than in years past seemingly and so i think we may generate a crowd that and so to have 12 people sitting on top of each other with you know coven and no end in sight i don't know how smart that would be and so that's why that's why i you know and so i also agree in having

346uh the representation but you know and also justice and maybe i'm the only one but you know i think we should workshop this just to understand the process from top to bottom i've gotten bits and pieces i spoke to lisa lewis and it just happened that that same day was the meeting with mr pendley lisa's saying i mean you know you haven't heard anything i'm like well not since they asked for our address and it's like so i think understanding the process but again i agree with you on the maps part i think um you know and and again it's going to the politically sensitive part of it is you know what if there's a community my understanding was that 10 years ago you know lake helen wanted to be a part of deland now

347i'm 10 years i mean i wasn't even paying attention then and so that's how i you know the map ended up going around where the person who represents deltona also represents daytona park estates way on 92 and delaney and there is and so there was a story behind that and so understanding the process understanding the timeline understanding i think will be important i would ask for that because you know it's not a matter of just what do i want versus you know what's the process and what's the right way to do it so that's my thought thank you mr purcell well since this is my third time doing this because i was i was the mayor of uh uh orman in 2000 and even all the cities have to go i thought you were still

348in elementary and the uh yeah and i can let me just put you all your minds to rest it's it's it's a wonderful process actually it's a it's a learning process and they the county has the the county will be able to tell you how many people live on each block they will get that map and they and you might say you know what i've represented that street for that i need that street well they'll tell you well if we had that street they're going to add 12 people you know and they'll come up with a map first that will um well first thing the first thing they'll do is show you how the population has changed since 2010 and while maybe volusia had 500 000 people and maybe volusia has 550 000 now so

349your district has changed and they will try to make each district down to within five people different from each of us now we are allowed to go a little bit beyond that but really they want to keep it as close as possible to each five of you and uh it's it's just fascinating how they can they'll come up with the first map or two and you'll look at it and you'll go wow that's that's pretty darn good i mean you know i can i can live with that there will be give and take there has to be there's 12 of us so it's not like everyone's going to get exactly what they want but they will do everything they can to keep each city intact and they will try to keep your district pretty much

350as close to what it is now but given the fact that your district probably has more people in it now uh so they'll have to massage that a little bit personally i've talked with my county council person in the same district that i you know for who was heather post and uh i said heather i already know with the growth in lpga area that our district is going to change our district is almost the same now except i pick up the leon springs which nobody can understand why and jamie picks up pearson and it's just like why doesn't jamie represent both and you know so i drive past the ones so i mean you know that's a correction that can easily be be made and i've talked to heather and i just said you know

351we i can either way you know i mean a couple of blocks here a couple of blocks there it it isn't going to matter i think there is a there was a number of volusia county council training rooms uh ted that if you're suggesting and i agree with everyone the the official diocese isn't the best place so but there are uh training rooms there ted but we could all circle around they have the the visual screens and uh we'd all be looking at that and it isn't it isn't it won't be the county telling you anything the county will just say here's one way that it would be pretty even and get your reaction to that so they would just and everyone just keeps talking talking through it uh there isn't any you know strong

352arm thing but at some point it's kind of like well if the district four people school board and county council may agree this could work for them then they'll go to district three you know at some point at some point all 12 of us have to say okay i can live with this but if it gets to the point where the school board folks and the county council folks aren't you know that they someone's not going to give then they'll say okay fine all right then they'll just go to school board and say okay school board members what are the five districts how do you want it to look and they'll they'll do that that's why we're that's why we look the way we look now because i've got debary split and half for county

353council but not split for a school board yeah and then like you said you come over and grab mcginnis you know and reuben goes up and grabs daytona park estates yep i mean it's kind it's kind of crazy yeah it is and and and they will i know know that and they'll probably the first thing you'll probably see is a more concise district that's what they try to do um but it it'll be it'll be it'll be interesting and i can't remember ted how many meetings it took uh for us to to reach it wasn't it yeah it it wasn't long i mean because there's only so much you know i mean it has to be equal and you want to kind of keep where you are now but correct anything that just seems like

354ah you know i don't need to go there i anticipate reuben's city of deltona is going to be way over a hundred thousand and i think that's probably going to drop that's probably going to drive the rest of us and see when and when he has the density like that then his district in in the geographic area can be small because so many people live there i mean that could work out great i'm spread out you're spread out oh i i go from oh i go from the aster seville line all the way to the very seminole county line yeah yeah i i do agree with all of you i don't think the dance is the proper place it should be on neutral territory i wouldn't mind the old courthouse it's kind of official and

355it has the ambiance of that training room was fine uh and a school would be great uh is it going to be a public meeting yes i'm sure a lot of people might want to come here it just struck me but what do you think of a basketball stadium basketball you know one at this one of the high schools or something you guys could all be in the center and then the public could be sitting up in the bleachers no probably better on a stage like at deland high school high school and high school high school auditorium is it big enough it won't generate that much public interest trust me on that there may be a few people who are thinking of running for office against one of the 12 of us now now they

356may be interested you know to see where the lines are drawn it isn't anything particularly in this year that i think is gonna yeah i just think it's more important for us to be cozy and look at each other and be able to see the screens really well and be with the with the um the uh facilitators of it so i agree with what miss burnett said at the very outset yeah okay you have your consensus okay well i mean help me because what i hear carl saying is inconsistent with the other four potentially certainly i hear we're not meeting at county council fine i get that um to what degree are we going to be a part of the initial process in other words we have an employee understanding josh that is really really

357new i think you've assigned him to this john no that's the guy from the county he's the new one because whoever whoever was retired there was a person who'd done it forever i don't know the district has somebody uh involved mr pendley said he didn't even know who he was he was so new to the district that's no idea no i don't this is the only josh i know is a brand new principle josh is from josh is from the county he came from he's from the county so he came from lake county but this is the guy the guy who traditionally did the census that was harrington i think he he uh uh retired in june and so this new guy is working this process now and so he's learning so i heard four

358of you say you weren't comfortable with the county just running the show correct and mr person full of confidence okay but we haven't done it before you've it is a lisa lewis elections office that kind of you know oversees this and she uses the the county um volusia county m employees who are involved in all the maps and data and all of that so uh mr person since this will be your third time you you were there the last time yeah so but you were on the county council yeah so is i mean the outcome was the school board and the county couldn't agree yeah we had almost we almost had it and then i don't want to call out names but there are some people that just dug in you know said i just

359want to keep my school i've always represented this school and i was just like oh please you know i mean it was you know some of it got really see all of us are elected officials from our districts but we represent the county yes they too represent the county and i think we should all participate yes we're all equally elected officials representing yeah the citizens of volusia county so we should all be equal and and find a nice place that's neutral for all of us to talk to one another and look at each other and be part of the process yeah okay so as you're saying the district is not going to have anybody involved i think during the writing of the lines i think we should i think we should i'd like to be

360involved i'm saying this is what he's saying no but you guys are saying yes yes i'd like to be involved i don't know who it is that could represent all five all five of us well can't we all go no i mean ted's not gonna know what you want for your geographic character we should workshop the idea you can't it's not gonna be that hard i i know you guys have you started working we would like to learn too you already know but we would like to learn that as well we would like to have your experience so allow us to have that experience by participating yeah it it's it's pretty it's pretty simple i mean the right okay i don't mind simple but let us participate well i mean i understand there's not a

361lot of options but they're they didn't agree last time there's a lot of options in the sense that you could you know i mean the districts can be look from what i understand and this is all speculation yeah everybody agrees that district five is going to be substantially geographically shrunk you know in size i don't know that hillary clinton but he's he's reuben's gonna have the most people i mean they were close to a hundred thousand times a lot of his outlying areas are gonna get given up yes and his and geographically his district's gonna go down in size but because there's more people in the city but i don't i don't think he's gonna be upset i mean listen no i didn't say you get upset no but like he's got he's got this

362little daytona park estate park but those kids actually go to george mark's deland middle and deland high but yet they're like certain it's like i love daytona park estates they will make it as concise as they possibly can to where you live and and without dividing cities that's you know that's what but the county divided cities i know but what they would prefer to do is not divides because it makes it easier for the for the electorate that are voting and that's why they try to match up i mean mrs burnett in particular is gonna you gotta have to fight in cities you're not gonna be in your own district yeah so i mean there's gonna be divided cities and some you know i saw some squirrely stuff in there like you represent people on

363the south side of mason avenue in daytona beach no you actually yeah yeah it's in the map you actually go across mason avenue now you know it probably was just the necessity to bring enough people over to you yeah but there's a better commercial well it's even there's gonna be a lot of options it's like you take the city of debary and half of the like i'm talking elementary half of the city of debary goes to debary elementary the other half of the city of debary goes to enterprise right well enterprise is represented by reuben but debary elementary is represented by me all of debary votes for district one the school board but debary but where it's split this way for the elementary schools it's debary is split this way for county council yeah i

364mean it's weird and that isn't good i mean well and how many different runs do you want i mean they could do several like i think there were two or three options oh yeah they said this or they said this and it was very different yeah and they do it best they can to keep like major thoroughfares you know like 95 or or 17 1792 this side and that side and block it but they will show you because i even think for mcginnis you have this side and i have this side i know what is it you need from us tonight yeah well because what you're saying is i'm i'm getting close to midnight i need two things from you i think one already is very clear we don't want to set up the eyes

365of the county council and we need to come up with another location and everybody's on equal footing and looking at each other the second thing is to what degree do you want to just turn this over to staff basically on the county staff and just let it fly it sounds like the majority says no they don't want to do that so let's go do you have any thoughts on how we would accomplish that uh we'd be there we'd participate yeah we want to be there well you can't you can't sit there while they're drawing the lines i don't think um when you say participate i mean they're they're gonna be it takes four days to come up with one map so you basically what we're saying is somebody from the district gonna be there understanding

366what each of you wants so so mr persis was saying that that lisa lewis's team draws the maps and then we look at them why if it's lisa lewis's team drawing the maps not the county council but you'll never do that oh yeah it's not the county council so that's that's my county council member i didn't see anything until the school board did i mean we all walked in the room and said okay here's one yeah now i feel better with that like lisa i feel great with lisa if her team were drawing maps and and both sides saw them together lisa is definitely is the one because tries things lisa does a wonderful job with everything she does i trust her i trust her also yeah okay and then we'll get together and we'll

367basically what i need for me then is uh the only other thing is if there's a date on this list that is just an absolute no-go the september 23rd is a fsba meeting 23rd and 24th yep okay so that's a new go date that's a no-go um okay well i think that's what i need then i think i've got everything i need they had um november 11th i can't imagine they would meet on it's veterans day yeah that's a good point but these are these are their dates i know someone would just probably forgot yeah they probably did okay i i only i do apologize but i have um there is a date in october i couldn't meet october 14th was that a day 10. october 14th like they were picking thursdays they're all thursdays

368and fridays okay i'm not available because of the florida school board association um october 6 through 8th and those days aren't on there are they on there yeah they're not on october 6th through 8th okay but do you want to make a note so that they don't like choose this um because october is throughout the year enough to be at the state board of directors meeting and the 14th is the teacher of the year nominee call out the ceremony just real quick yes yes here here are all the dates if this is if the census data is released mid-august they're proposing september 16th september 23rd september 30th if the census data is released on september 30th they're proposing october 14th october 22nd october 28th november 5th and november 11th and they're what they're talking about

369doing is having two meetings in this flurry of dates october 22nd i hope it comes out in august the sooner it comes out the better off they are i can't make those october ones ted did you watch october 22nd i will be out of town okay october 22nd all right the only one i can i can go to any of them except the 14th of october i don't think any of us would be able to go to the 14th because that's our teacher of the year nominee reception okay yes all right is there a day of the week that if they shifted these from thursdays and fridays to tuesdays and wednesdays does that mean tuesday's not a good idea because we meet i think on tuesdays yeah they meet on tuesdays okay well i'll do

370the best i can with that and just get it you know by email and start getting some of data because they knew it would be so hard to line it up with 12 people ted if i recall last year it was just two meetings yeah no i don't i don't think it would i mean once you get in there it's like well it's either this or that i mean you don't yeah i think the first meeting if you you just give feedback and then the second meeting they come back with the new maps based on the feedback yeah okay unless anybody has any questions i think i've got what i need that's great to at least send her an email tomorrow and tell her what our thinking is okay madam chair i'd still say i'd

371like to have a workshop to learn more about this whole process i don't know how anybody else feels but you know we're kind of i know you know i know but i don't know what is there what is there to learn it's just a map [Music] officials office be able to come into the workshop yeah maybe that would be absolutely lisa loses his office you don't have to come carl you're excused experience good yeah i mean carlo's already experienced i i he can be excused but i'd like to learn it's fascinating [Laughter] i just know how many people live in every house so so how are we leaving that are we doing a workshop do you think see if they would just come out and just see if they would come out for a half

372an hour and go over with this during the workshops our next workshops explain the next schedule we're going to get to the the 10th scheduled workshop at the next scheduled workshop yeah that's fine and maybe maybe maybe she could be first that way carl can come in after well i do want to i don't want to say i was trying thank you i do want to say remind everybody we're going to be the next workshop's going to be about setting the goals for the superintendent that's fine so everybody needs to be thinking about that and of course primarily based if not exclusively based on the strategic plan but that's that could be you know a lengthy conversation okay so uh just throwing it okay plus i think there's isn't there a third issue dr fritz

373you guys threw out today at agenda conference that you're gonna squeeze into that workshop well what was it no we have this you guys are going to give me my goals um no there was a separate whole separate issue that you said at the agenda conference of might i can't remember you remember that mrs cuthbert no i don't aaron might legislate oh the legislative proposal they they want to throw into that workshop as well and get you guys to tell them what you want to start early kevin kevin was going to maybe we could do that at a workshop or a board meeting how about the end of august it's it's up to you this morning you guys said workshop yeah but we could i mean really it's about getting getting view your concerns for

374the legislation so i mean if you want to do it at a board meeting we could do it a board meeting if you don't do it a workshop you do a workshop so just so i can be clear so you were thinking asking lisa to come like at 10 a.m and give and just inform the board how this all works that'd be great that's a good idea okay all right okay thanks give you peace of mind you're so generous okay is there anything to come before the board so we can all go home nope let's go all right thank you we're adjourned goodnight