001c [Music] magic but i just want you to know i'm going to change good afternoon everyone and welcome to the volusia county school board meeting today is tuesday august 30th 2022 it is 4 33 p.m and we will call this meeting to order we will stand for the pledge which will be led this evening by edith i stark elementary fifth graders with their teacher katie zunzi and principal eileen r followed by the national anthem uh which will be sung by 135 of our performing arts teachers accompanied by angie monahan on the piano and then a moment of silence and reflection good evening i'm eileen r the proud principal of edith i stark elementary and i'm here with miss katie zinzi's class 5th grade class and we are going to recite the pledge for you tonight
002i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all [Music] we [Music] is [Applause] is [Music] oh [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] now we'll stand for a moment of silence thank you you may be seated wasn't that an exciting way to start our school board meeting with our why and you know the video of the teachers that sang the star spangled banner i must confess i've watched that about 60 times because it was just amazing to me how what's i mean they may have been practicing this for a long time but to me it seemed like such an unscripted moment and just the talent in that room was just amazing and so uh
003i look forward to seeing other classes lead us in the pledge again we start with our why and that is our why right there on that screen and we wish they could be here but sometimes it's difficult but i thank everyone who made that technology bring them here and so i'm looking forward to that so we'll begin our school board meeting by welcoming everyone here in the diocese we will start on the left hand side we have mr carl purses representative for district four next to mr purses we have mrs linda cuthbert representative for district three next to mrs cuthbert we have mr ted doran's school board attorney coming over to the right hand side we have our new amazing agency clerk miss celeste gilmore next to ms gilmore we have mrs anita burnett representative
004for district two next to ms burnett we do have miss jamie haynes vice chairwoman representing district one next to doc next to miss haines we have dr kameron balgebin who is our proud and distinguished superintendent and i'm reuben colon i have the honor and pleasure of serving as the chair this year items for approval on this agenda items 1.03 2.02 4.01 7.02 20.01 20.02 there will be several opportunities for public participation including uh prior to the approval of the consent agenda at 6 pm we will have 15 minutes allotted for public comment public comment will also be permitted uh just prior to any board vote and at the end of the meeting if there are any remaining cards we will go ahead and go through those cards as well item 1.02 district vision statement at
005this time we normally speak about all the great things that are happening across the district since the last time we were together which was prior to the start of school so i'm sure there are a lot of great things to speak about we will start with mr persis ah thank you mr mr chair indeed there are a lot of great things to speak about i'll just pick one there's five of us if we each pick one that's five things right so i'm going to pick the dual language program at holly hill school that was amazing uh miss miss haynes was actually there too and uh just so super to see those parents were so excited with their vpk children and of course they were excited but then again vpk children are always excited but uh
006yeah it was it was super so kudos principal bogus back there and all of the staff at holly hill school i thought it was a great day and all the content people were there the cabinet was there i mean everybody was there it was just a huge event ribbon cutting excitement kids got t-shirts they were ready to they were speaking spanish before they left that's how powerful that program was but anyway super day thank you mr chair gracias senor persis miss senora cuthbert good evening everyone i was able to travel to quite a few schools on the day that students weren't in session but teachers were and that was on the 23rd on the primary we closed our schools to students in order to have a lot of our schools become precincts and i was
007just making sure that everything was going well i visited indian river coronado elementaries and then i traveled to spruce creek high school it was all orderly a lot of people looking for the correct entrances and exits uh everybody was was very very nice very very nice and so and i did report some of my findings to um dr balgovin in order to make sure that when the election occurs on november 8th we've got everything ironed out when the large hopefully a larger population will come and vote because it's more more state and final resolutions will be made so it's just and everybody will be off school just want to let you know tuesday november 8th there is no school so hello together thank you mr chair thank you senora burnett thank you um well i've
008heard so many positive things coming from the schools and the parents and i think that that's very welcoming and i want to thank dr b and all of her team for that and going in with that i was able to attend your listen and learn is that what we're calling it listening okay at mainland high school and it was very nice to see the staff come and they were very engaging and positive bringing solutions and it was very nice because that's how we build a positive environment and a positive culture and so i think that we're off to a great start with that so thank you senorita haynes thank you so one of the things that we did the week of pre-planning is we also went out and honored the elementary and secondary principals of
009the year in the superintendent staff awards and so that was a lot of fun but as i was visiting schools their taylor middle high school has a poster that is kind of all around their school and i really thought that it's important and i almost think we probably need it in our schools and you know in all schools and maybe even district offices but it says before you speak or make a post think t stands for is it true h is it helpful i is it inspiring n is it necessary and k is it kind and so this i think needs to be said tonight because there's been a lot of chatter already out on social media last week and this week and i think people have forgotten that you know social media may not
010be the place to post some things because we're not on social media we're out at schools we're out you know doing things with kids and all of that and the best way to get an answer is to send an email instead of and so i liked this and i liked that the fact that taylor has it posted all around their school and i wanted to share that tonight thank you that's a good idea superintendent thank you chair i will make it very um i have a full debrief for all of you but i you know this is our third week of school and we couldn't have done it with every single staff member that we have on our roster and to be precise 7 850 staff member thank you to each and every one of
011you for a smooth opening this year and to all of our stakeholders we couldn't have done it without you so thank you very much that was short it was short yes and so as you know many of us have had a very very busy week we last two weeks i have had the honor and pleasure of visiting with the superintendent both galaxy middle school and orange city elementary as well as deltona middle school and i want to echo the my gratitude to everyone who helped us bring our schools back to life and you know our students were the missing piece you know i and i said this last last meeting it was amazing as i went through the schools to hear the teachers and i'm not a teacher so please don't judge me but to
012hear the teachers say we just can't wait for our kids to get back where i'm thinking they want like an extra day or two they're like no we just want our kids back because the kids bring the school to life and so really really excited about that also had a chance to stop in the taylor this week and so lots of great things going on across the district and again thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you to everyone district staff maintenance folks you know we always every year as the air conditioners get cranked up and you know the load starts being put on them things break and you know it just happens but you know our teams have been super responsive in trying to close as many gaps as possible so again
013thank you all right next item on the agenda approval of the minutes we have received the minutes for august 8th workshop and regular session um is there a motion to approve any changes amendments etc there's actually an error okay um on august 8th for the regular session it needs to say dr balgovin as a superintendent because she was here for that meeting and it says miss rachel hazel so that's just one error that needs to be corrected okay we can always count on jamie well i thought i had emailed it then i realized i had no you're good anybody else all right do we have a motion to approve the minutes as amended move approval of the minutes with the correction as noted by uh vice chair haines thank you do we have a second
014second motion has been properly made by mr person seconded by mrs cuthbert any other further discussion hearing none all those in favor say aye aye aye all those opposed say nay next item 2.01 superintendent are there any changes to the agendas uh prior to presenting to the board no chair board you have seen the agenda and reviewed it or does anybody have any changes otherwise i will entertain a motion uh mr chairman i move i make a motion that yeah i better make the motion before i move make the motion that we accept the agenda as stated this evening thank you we have a motion do we have a second a second motion's been properly made by ms cuthbert seconded by mrs burnett any further discussion hearing none all those in favor say aye aye
015all those opposed motion passes next item 3.01 superintendent's announcements and comments thank you chair i'm sure before we begin this evening i would like to say congratulations on your reelection on behalf of the entire board and our vcs staff thank you a couple things i there's a lot that i like to share but i'm going to condense it and give you the key bullet points first and foremost as i said before thank you to our board thank you to all of our staff members for a smooth reopening this year because of you we have been achieving the success that we have so far so thank you to each and every one of you every role that you serve in this county is important to our students thank you for your dedication to vcs a couple
016things i wanted to share that we opened up our schools and our enrollment has remained steady we just completed our dne process which is that did not enter student who registered but did not enter and we are 63 123 students which is pretty much where we were last year at this time we were 63 000 last year so we went up just by a little um we currently have a 60 168 bus routes that we're covering we've hired so far this year 864 members to our vcs team and 498 of those members are teachers that serves in our classrooms or work with students so congratulations we have a phenomenal group of teachers that have chosen vcs as their home currently in terms of vacancies we have total vacancies but i believe 180 something are instructional
017classroom and you'll get that update soon from the hr team support staff we still are in need of 206 but we had a very very successful job fair last week where we were high we were able to hire about 80 plus for the operational division so thank you to all of those who have helped share the word uh we you know our staff members share the word our stakeholders thank you for sharing the word we had a very successful job here last week a total number of staff members as of last friday as i indicated 7850 again what a great team we have here the number one employer in volusia county vcs uh a couple other things in terms of divisions as mr forces mentioned we did have the grand opening of our dual language
018program very fast in our county but definitely not the last at spirit elementary in holly hill at full capacity at full capacity now with a waiting list this year we are planning for two more dual language programs for the for the upcoming year that we will doing doing ribbon cutting and also if two foreign language academies that we'll be adding as well um in addition to that i wanted you to know that each student that enrolled into the dual language academy they received a t-shirt that says i will tell you what it says i am a i am bilingual what is your superpower [Laughter] i want to thank you ms haynes you were there with us for one of the ribbon cutting and so is mr percis and we had a great time with the
019parents and students there was strong competition i will tell you board between the parents and the students i think from the indication that we've seen the parents are right up there they're practicing also so we're very excited about this each student came forward as i said and i want to thank stetson university health family health source top flight strategies walmart neighborhood center for the saxon area fiesta grand mexico mexican grill they all contributed so that we could provide backpacks and t-shirts to our students for dual language program in terms of middle school we started our teaming our interdisciplinary teaming this year and overall it has been going well miss patti corp did go out to a few middle schools and and listened and learned and made some tweaks and that is our our uh commitment
020to all of our staff members that are participating in that program and our students that will continue to listen and make adjustments it's it's year one so when it comes to year one of any implementation it's important to to be cognizant and to listen make those tweaks as necessary so we will be doing so continuously this year in addition to that i want to share with you that we've been having those listen and learn sessions very very good very positive and i will tell you that we have a problem solving team in vcs because when they indicate that there's an area in which we can improve they're also providing solutions for doing so and that's that's that's the way of that we will continue to progress and and be the very best for our students
021so thank you to all staff members and everyone who's been attending a couple other things i wanted to share with you high school division very excited that our career technical education teacher of the year and our cte rookie teacher of the year for the florida association for career and technical education they will be here to be celebrated next week i mean for the next board meeting but i will tell you that it's amanda ellis she is the cte teacher of the year that we will be celebrating at the next board meeting and she is from new smyrna beach high school middle school and andrew peck he's the cte rookie teacher of the year and he's from deland high school we will be again recognizing them formally at our next board meeting we're also enhancing our
022teaching program we've received that grant for 1.8 million dollars so we will be enhancing that program currently we have an enrolled number of students in that program for the teaching academy it's 124 students and for a criminal justice program we're also enhancing and expanding that program our current enrollment in that program is 1189 students we also as you know the automotive program at taylor middle school and high school is enacted with an enrollment of 132 students so far new for this year in addition to all of our programs and academies that we have in high school new for this year are you ready ready we have in every single high school nft nft is the international nonprofit organization that provides entrepreneurship training and educational programs to middle and high school students every single high school
023this year has entrepreneurship and we have a great enrollment in in those programs for high school now i'm almost at the end are you still recording they're winking at you mr gomez can you hear me i want to make sure we don't lose recording you're good okay may i continue yes okay so we also know the importance of not waiting for high school right for identifying pathways to our students we know really it should begin in elementary um so for this year we will be planning with middle schools so the entrepreneurship program nft will also be implemented for the following year at some of our middle schools in addition to verizon innovative lab experiences so we will begin those identifying pathways in middle school starting next year in addition to that a few other items
024that i'm almost done labor day as you know it's monday september the 5th there it's a school holiday for everyone so make sure that you have a relaxing and safe weekend to all of our students families and staff futures superintendent outstanding achievement awards and principal of the year breakfast will be thursday september the 8th at 9 00 am in the morning and our vcc pta back to school breakfast slash general meeting will be tuesday september the 9th 2022 7 30 in the morning and last but not least i would like to end with just a two minute video so it can recap um our first week of school now i don't know if we can yes all right when the power flickered it resets something so it's coming just two seconds [Music] [Applause] have a
025great day [Music] they're going to take good care of you i promise you okay is that your favorite cereal you know what's my favorite cereal sharks this is your principal mr watson with the morning announcements and i do have a special guest with me our superintendent dr balgeman good morning sharks listen to your teacher and give yourself the best gift that you can give yourself which is knowledge is sound education it's okay not to be ready for that world yet out there but give yourself the gift of knowledge every single day and take your safety and security in your own hands your own measures if you see something say something high school history high school science this is a high school right here how about you guys good morning [Music] so [Music] we wish you
026guys a great year okay do your part to keep your school safe and do your part when it comes to engaging and learning right so that you can apply those skill sets and be the very best version of yourself [Music] thank you thank you i do remember you though all right thanks have a great you missed her today all right have a good one okay [Music] [Applause] and again thank you to everyone who made the start of school a success next item up item 4.01 administrative appointments dr baughen yes sir i am excited to share with you today that we have two administrative appointments for your approval board uh first would be the principal for palm terrace elementary uh karen troutman come on up please [Applause] [Music] [Applause] all fins are in the house all
027right so board i'm pleased to inform you um that because of the hard work of the administrative team there the teachers and staff including our stakeholders we had so many business partners that joined in the venture of palm terrace they have achieved a great of a sea [Applause] [Music] [Applause] at this point we can move forward with our succession plan if palm terrace had not received a grade of a c or higher then the state would have required us to adhere to some specific specifications when it comes to criterias for the principal for palm terrace so at this point i would like to present to you miss miss troutman she's been with us since 2003 here in volusia county she's earned her bachelor's degree from the university of central florida in a master's degree in
028educational leadership from nova southeastern university she holds certificates in exceptional student education k-12 educational leadership reading endorsement as well as esol endorsement she has been an assistant principal at palm terrace since 2018 a few of the things that she has been recognized for are the florida american educational alliance finalist teacher of the year in 2005 a futures foundation grant teacher in 2006 and the holly hill middle school teacher of the year in 2009 today i'm recommending miss karen troutman as the principal of palm terrace elementary and if approved by each of you here this evening her expected start date will be very very early tomorrow morning august 31st great and so if you're here to support miss trauma and i want you to stand up [Music] [Applause] and i want you to come stand behind
029her everybody who's here for her come stand behind her come on there's a whole group out it sounds like oh there's more out there let him in let him in come on [Applause] board you've heard the recommendation of the superintendent to appoint miss karen troutman as the principal of palm terrace elementary do we have a motion yes we do move approval mr chair and i second that motion's been properly made by mr purses seconded by mrs haynes any further discussion i third it hearing none will call for the vote all those in favor say aye aye elizabeth congratulations [Applause] school board members superintendent dr bulgaben and distinguished guests i'm grateful and humbled by this appointment today first i'd like to take a moment to thank god for those who've paid the way dedicating their time
030and energy for me to continue this work i want to thank my family my school family for being patient with me while i take this journey just know i pay attention to the little things the meal prepping the washing the folding the dusting pulling weeds watering flowers and going from store to store and i know that's your favorite i'd also like to thank our teachers who are number one that's right because i know if we have great teachers in our classrooms who acknowledge and understand students uniquenesses they're in the right place many students come to us with roadblocks and that's when the magic happens in the classrooms the winks a smile a whisper a handshake and even a snack we call parents we ask parents to come visit with us we talk to students we
031set high expectations and help those students meet those expectations while holding them accountable we are calm we speak with reason when high emotions are involved we do lots for our students therefore great teachers and staff like you and you like the ones at palm terrace elementary school are the most important ingredients to the secret of our success if it wasn't for great teachers and leaders like doris christian miss emily emmy frink and dr brennan from my elementary school highlands and myra chester vicki presley earl mcquarrie and mr mcmillan also known as mr mack from campbell junior high and miss leonard sailor miss carlock miss carlock miss colwell joyce elliott miss dennis mrs rowland and sheriff gaines from mainland high school and mr harris tucker from palm terrace who set mount everest high expectations for the
032community and students in their buildings i would not be here in this seat today thank you all i promise to work hard every day and allow my actions to tell the story of who i am and my commitment to the community and to palm terrace thank you all [Music] and so if you'll join us for a picture please [Music] because i wasn't here the last time [Laughter] she's making me look short i don't know you weren't excited enough [Laughter] um is it's fine that way you're in the picture all right this is thank you guys madam superintendent i heard some bulldogs barking yes i do i think i think if you look right over there chair green and gold thank you thank you chair my um my next appointment for this evening is for the
033assistant principal position at the land high school home of the bulldogs [Music] oh boy i thought it was going to be better than that okay so i would like to call up miss kelly mclarty to join us ms mclarty has earned her bachelor's degree from the university of central florida one in history in the other in anthropology wow she attended stetson university and earned her master's degree in educational leadership before coming to volusia she worked in orange county public schools and also in seminole county public schools our students have been fortunate to have her in volusia county since 2013 where she started at galaxy middle school as a teacher and then a math coach and then as a science coach from then she became a teacher on assignment for also a curriculum coach with the
034middle school division so she's work under the middle school division with miss core who's crying over there this is where she built and and created basically district assessments for us and curriculum maps and pretty much oversaw district-wide science olympiad at our schools she renovated organized and managed district canvas courses for us six through eight through the pandemic icp so thank you for that this is why today we are recommending miss kelly mcclarty as the assistant principal at deland high school and again her expected start date will be very bright and early tomorrow uh august 31st 2022 and we've got some bulldogs here come on bulldogs [Music] [Applause] well she's not welcome yet we're getting there a football friday well then you know what that means board you've heard the recommendation of the superintendent to appoint
035miss uh kelly mcclarty as the assistant principal with deland high school do we have a motion i make the motion we have motion's been properly made by mrs haynes seconded by ms cuthbert any further discussion i'm just thrilled that she's joining to land bulldogs all right bring none all those in favor say hi hi all those opposed cna welcome to deland high good evening chairman colon superintendent balgaben and fellow board members i am so grateful that you're entrusting me to serve the deland high school i fell in love with the deland community when i was attending stetson university for my master's that degree program was a powerful experience and has prepared me well for this moment one of my professors there taught me something i will never forget um it was a few weeks into
036class and he came in and announced that he would be sharing with us who the smartest person in the room was and we all were silent it was so awkward and he let us sit in that for a moment and then he smiled and he said the smartest person in the room is the room um his lesson about the importance of collaboration to make each other better and every person we encounter has something to teach us and it was really powerful i'm i'm good at what i do because of my collective room of people my entire galaxy family that makes walking on campus feel like home the science teachers there that taught me how to be a great teacher sally brickler jeff crowe brian ennis my principal patti core who pushed me out of my
037comfort zone and challenged me to try new things my science family jennifer taylor jeremy blinn becky lucas louise chapman amy monahan they taught me to lead the way that i want to be led and to take care of each other my fellow coaches paddy calls us the middle school rock stars um it's an amazing team and we it's something it's amazing to be a part of them um my current supervisor dr drew olson has taught me to always approach every new experience with a learning mindset and it's totally changed the game um meg rowa who shared her secret to a happy work life and that's finding your marigolds and then spending some time with them and also my actual family my husband who is the most patient and smartest man i've ever met my mother
038who's my biggest cheerleader my child who inspires me to be the teacher that i want for him and then i'm thrilled to add to my collective room of people dr carr and my administrative team who's here to support me tonight and dr barrios and all 3 000 of the deland bulldogs [Music] [Applause] bulldogs yeah how come can you join us for a picture cue the family they're coming up there yes come on bulldogs all right bulldogs boy okay bulldogs [Applause] [Music] bad shirts very good thank you so much and uh enjoy that football game on friday night which you will be anxiously awaited next up we have item 5.01 recognition of mr and mrs lohmann community partner presented by dr balgaben thank you chair board members uh i am going to ask mr and mrs
039loman please just come on up and sit up here for just a second along with miss jen taylor so [Music] i want to share with you a little bit you probably see a basket there and and it's all letters written from students and i'll tell you a little bit about that i am so thrilled to recognize this evening mr and mrs loman because as you know it really takes a village and it takes all the right people in the village to say let's come together and make it happen for students so mr and mrs loman not only are they stakeholders partners in education they're also servant leaders and trailblazers in our community and i pretty much had the opportunity i believe it was last year that we met at the museum of arts and science
040and they wanted to do something special for our students so we were looking at data sets and we were trying to determine what is it that we can do that would really create a fun engaging experience for our students but also help them achieve that next level educationally and we were looking at some science standards and we were able to identify one or two science standards that our students district-wide were not doing their very best in because of that experiential learning piece they have to be able to experience some of those standards so mr and mrs loman said let's go ahead and do this let's do it right and we can't do it just for one year so they've signed a commitment with us for a very very very generous donation for three years wow
041last year we implemented and we had last year all of our fifth graders went to the museum of arts and science and all of our eighth graders they visited the museum of arts and science and they were able to experience those standards there and they had a fun day of reflection and learning and we had we have so many letters that we've received from parents thanking the loehmans and our students and our staff so all of our 45 elementary participated all of 14 middle school participated including our volusia online all of our students from volusia online um i want to share with you also that when we were looking at our data at the end of this year we saw i believe jen a 20 overall in uh improvement in that in that cluster of
042standards in the cluster of standards a 20 improvement so with that said not only did they provide that day for our students and will continue to do that for the next two years but also transportation we know that sometimes transportation is a hindrance but they also cover that so i just wanted to say on behalf of our entire faculty and staff here and all of our students thank you for making this a reality for our students for really making a difference in their learning as well why it's fun and engagement so jen i believe you have two or three stats you like to add well i just wanted to to thank you both so much i have enjoyed meeting you both and just really getting to know their heart i was so impressed when carl
043purses introduced me to you all and just the idea of wanting to really kick off and start back the museum of arts and science program for our kids i gave them three options i gave them the option of well we could invite some of our fifth graders or here's another option i've never done a business plan before by the way so i was presenting a business plan here is just if we invite the eighth graders and then i you know pie in the sky why not i gave them a plan for all of our fifth and eighth graders and they they went back and forth and they talked and the next thing you know i was crying because they picked plan three where all of our kids could go and not only one year they
044decided to do it for three years so i just think that's absolutely incredible and i think that's the most important stat i have to share and i'll add to that the lomans were very instrumental in the mary bethune statue in which the majority of our if not all of our middle school students were able to attend i was able to attend with several and so your your impact in our community is is is is immeasurable because the reality is it's an experience that those students will never forget every bit of it so again thank you thank you um thanks the the jennifer's uh clothes on the deal were her tears i'm for sure i mean it was just so beautiful to see how emotional jen got when she thought about the students going to the
045planetarium i will tell you you taught me a little something i didn't know and lowell didn't know but we didn't really know the difference between a field trip and a field study like we didn't realize that there could possibly be a time where some children could be left behind so for us that was a the difference maker was knowing that no child would be refused this opportunity to because of financial need or lack of it and so it's been just very rewarding for us to be a part of the whole experience and um i do have one uh these letters were incredible lowell and i read every single one of them uh we i scanned some of them and sent them to um stakeholders in the in the process of making sure that these programs
046continue but i do have one letter if i may i just wanted to share with you and it says um thank you lowman's elementary science museum team dear loman's elementary science team thank you for letting us go to the museum i learned a lot of stuff from that adventure i do have one question how do you think up these ideas do they just come to you or do you have to take time to answer that call purses i asked nancy the other day i said nancy every time we're together with carl and susan there's uh there's carl does it cost us money every time we're with carl are we missing something uh i have to tell you uh this book this whole box of letters here came from students that wrote letters that came from
047the heart and uh it just nancy and i were fighting tears a couple weeks ago when we got this with all the personal letters from all the students and everything so i just want to make an observation that uh uh the teachers that had those students you know going the planetarium was great and we have we have some improvements at the big improvements that are coming shortly nancy told me as we're coming here i can't let the cat out of the bag yet so we have uh you know with all this stuff that's happening with the space shots and going you know back to the moon and hopefully to mars you know four or five years after that uh and everything that's happening in astronomy you know it's it could not be a better time
048to go to the planetarium and see the expression on these kids and everything but uh nancy and i as we were reading these letters we both are fighting back tears it is amazing that you have your students that you teachers some of you i'm sure are out in the audience out there just took the students and had them write letters to nancy and i just blew nancy and i away so it just tells you how what a great incredible job all you're doing with your students that you have here so i leave one last thought we are not done and we will be here for a long long time helping all these students because of that man [Music] [Applause] don't don't leave we have we have something for you please come up okay and we'll
049take a picture paul persons didn't sign it did he i made sure leadership [Applause] okay thank you so much thank you [Applause] next item on the agenda 5.02 staff recognition holly hill school assistant principal mr michael zablo and educator mr david james dr balgabet thank you chair thank you chair board members um i would like to share with you a great story of heroism with with all of you this evening these two gentlemen um it was our first week of school and there was a scary and life-threatening moment in a student's life at holly hill and miss cutberg you were aware of this you sent me an email as well and thank you miss gottberg miss cutberg said we've got to do something that and i totally agreed with with you um i would like
050to call both of them to come up because truly the way they handled that emergency situation showed great leadership it showed grace it showed respect for that student and we feel that they are true heroes in in in our school system so i want to thank them both for their concerted efforts and for saving a student's life that particular day i present to you michael zablo and educator james david james who are here with us tonight and we have a certificate for them chair and board can you share the story a little bit with us yeah we can show you to share a little bit please so we're in the cafe um mr james is one of our our past teachers um he felt the need to come down the cafe and help with supervision
051on that particular day because he didn't have any students assigned to him that's just mr james tendency you know he goes wherever he is needed and so we were blessed that he was in there on that particular day we had a female student sixth grader first day of school who happened to be choking and mr james recognized that she was in distress immediately came over and started the heimlich maneuver on her shouted across the cafeteria uh to miss to me um i knew it's funny because in the cafe you know the students are loud the cafeteria is a loud place but the students all knew that something was wrong right away because of mr james's tone he's not one to tend to yell or holler or scream and so i was able to come over
052and assist mr james and take over the heineck maneuver and luckily unfortunately that student was okay we were able to get the the food item up and and so i'm glad and blessed and we are blessed at holly hills school to have mr james there every single day but definitely on this special you know this particular occasion for that student very good mr james thank you the only thing i like to add is that first time every time daily at the hill um our eyes and our hearts are open for safety and student success and as a grandfather pap um i for sure saw a need and as a team mr zablo and other folks there um it was it was a good day a good first day thank you all [Applause] if you'll honor
053us with a picture this is is there you go [Applause] thank you sir thank you so much come join us board next item on the agenda 6.0 nope we're going to keep going we will go to 7.01 superintendent are there any items on the consent agenda that need removal no chair board are there any items on the consent agenda that you would like further discussion and remove from consent agenda all right hearing none do we have any cards for any items on the consent agenda are any of these for consent agenda items though like miss alberts is for oh you're good so i have one card is there anybody else who's here to speak to any item on the consent agenda my cards are a little mixed up right now all right miss albert welcome
054miss albert you'll have three minutes welcome back thank you good evening chairman colon uh school board members dr balgaben members of the audience just very quickly i'd like to ask if you could please elaborate on consent agenda item 12.01 that's all i have thank you sorry close the screen out let me reopen it here the invoice for hurricane what is it it's the invoice from volusia county on the hurricane okay yeah yeah yeah mr pendley good evening board members since uh mr cease is fairly new to the role uh i'm going to go ahead and discuss it's basically um this was a consent agenda item that was brought to us from the county [Applause] they actually gave us reimbursement for hurricane dollars and ended up actually over giving us over 99 000 more than what
055should have been brought to us so we are just simply reimbursing them by giving those funds back to the county for that so it's um it's a reimbursement but it's really just giving them back uh what they overpaid us very good board anybody else have any questions thank you thank you mr west thank you all right hearing none no other changes or items to remove uh do we have approval for the consent agenda move approval of the consent agenda do we have a second i'll second ocean has been properly made by mr purses to approve the consent agenda seconded by ms burnett any further discussion all right all those in favor say aye aye all those opposed say nay all right we will move on to human resources update thank you chair i would like
056to call miss stephanie workman our director for human resources payroll and employee benefits along with miss christie mahani our coordinator for recruitment and retention and they will be providing us this evening with a human resource update welcome good evening chairman colon dr balcon board members we are here to provide our weekly update for our hr numbers and tonight's presentation will be in two parts the first part will just be updating the numbers giving you an idea of where we are and then the second part um miss mahini will talk about our recruitment efforts over the last couple of weeks he's trying to pull it up there it is okay so as of last friday our total number of instructional based vacancies district wide were 199. um the the big thing to notice on these is
057all of the areas have come down since our last board meeting so we feel like we're moving in the right direction our pair of vacancies for pair of threes we were sitting at 47 and 43 for our pair of fours again those have come down since our last meeting and i know with what we have processed so far this week they have continued to decrease we are getting those processed as quickly as we can transportation unfortunately went the other way our drivers we are now looking at 19 vacancies and 24 attendants what we found in speaking with transportation is that once people got back to work in the routes and those kind of things they just decided that you know this wasn't what they wanted to do so so they are actively recruiting and working
058with ms mahany to try to fill some of those additional vacancies um edep i know at the last meeting we talked about increasing the seats at many of our elementary sites and because of that we have also increased our number of vacancies to 22 but we have also been able to process 33 more request the hires so we're sitting with 22 vacancies but we've also increased so so we've that that's kind of twofold in benefiting the parents and also creating more positions schoolway cafe they had a phenomenal day at our hiring fair last week that they are down to two assistants three managers and three assistants on assignment so they really as as people were coming in they were scooping them up left and right before other departments could get a hold of them so
059kudos to them our custodians we're also moving in the right direction as well we have 45 applicants in progress of being hired as well as 55 vacancies so that has come down tremendously and i know they are recruiting as well to break it down by district to kind of give you an idea of where our hot spots still are unfortunately miss haynes district one is is still where we are seeing um the most vacancies 16 of those being at manatee cove and 13 being at university the others are are scattered but those are really two two spots and i know miss mahini is going to address those in a couple of moments district 2 is down to 22 classroom vacancies and then one non-instructional for a guidance counselor at mainland district three is doing very
060well in that they only have five vacancies left no baby hey you're going to go out with a bank district 4 has 26 again they're they're scattered amongst the schools with holly hill being at the highest with seven and then lastly district five we have 53 instructional vacancies and three non-instructional and deltona high and pine ridge are both sitting with eight and galaxy is sitting with nine so i'm going to turn it over to ms mahany to talk about our recruitment updates and some exciting things that are happening in her part of hr yes absolutely so good afternoon superintendent balgaben chairman colon respected school board members it is my pleasure to be here today to share the important work that we are doing in the recruitment office but before i share our update of the
061work that we're doing it is my pleasure to introduce you to our new diversity recruitment and retention specialist [Applause] she is joining our team as you saw earlier we had a new appointment in bulldog country um so it's bittersweet because i know she was loved there but we are so excited to have extra hands on deck and we're thrilled to have miss fuller on board and her beautiful family is here too to support her yeah introduce your husband when you get to that point so i am joined with my supportive and loving family um athletic director at new smyrna beach high school gerald anthony fuller and my two boys trenton and tristan they are pelicans at sweetwater elementary we'll get a we'll get a picture when we're done so we're really excited to have miss
062fuller on board to expand our scope expand our voice and i'm just thrilled to be able to work with such an amazing woman so i'm looking forward to that and i appreciate dr baughman for prioritizing recruitment in our district recruitment efforts because over the past couple years this work is amazing work but it's definitely grown in its scope part of it is my fault because i have put myself and put volusia county schools in situations where it has increased the workload so i appreciate you dr baughman for for recognizing that so my plan today is to share a little bit of where we've been and where we're going we have some really exciting things coming down the pipeline um first of all i want to share with you that throughout the spring and the summer
063volusia county schools has participated in 36 different recruitment events of those 36 we have hosted four of our own and one thing that we have prided ourselves in doing over the past year is volusia county schools has hosted one-stop shop recruitment events in that as candidates come in if they're hired they can complete their fingerprinting and their substance screening on the spot so we can expedite the hiring process so this summer we've worked with our district departments and our facilities maintenance operations team and we have hosted two job fairs for support professionals one at mainland high school and one at deland high school together we had 111 candidates attend both those events and we hired 64 candidates on the spot during those events so we saw such a great turnout that then facilities maintenance and
064operations wanted one of their own and so we hosted that here last week at dak right here in the lobby and in the board room and just in one day we had 115 candidates walk through the door and of those 115 105 either started or completed an application which is amazing because that means that if they weren't hired then they're still actively looking for a job so on that day we hired 46 but as i said 105 started or completed their application so we're still working on them and we're hoping to host another facilities maintenance and operation job fair next month on the east side of daytona transportation what you're seeing now on this slide we've started building our recruitment schedule for the fall but it's still in progress anytime we see an event that
065would benefit us we always try to get ourselves at the forefront and put ourselves on the list what i'd like to point out is that we do have four school-based pop-up job fairs coming up in the next month to address some of those school-based recruitment issues the first one is next week next wednesday at manatee cove elementary school our goal is to not only be able to hire on the spot but also to engage the community to share our need and be part of that collective voice and recruitment then we have on the 14th heritage middle school on september 15th we're going to do one at university high school and we have still yet to select a date for taylor middle high so that's where we're starting and we will keep going too so if
066we see success with those we will add more to the schedule so um when we talk about our recruitment efforts there's a lot that goes into it so i apologize ahead of time for the slides because i know the professional learning hat that you know you put on you think to yourself only 30 words to a slide but when i think about the amount of work that our small and mighty team does i just had to put it all pen to paper we are committed in the recruitment office to leaving no stone unturned and to tapping into any lead that comes our way so in addition to hosting and participating in events i want you to know that we have connected with various groups and stakeholders so while the current shortages that we're dealing with
067are real and they are out there and in our face our goal is to exponentially increase our voice by engaging the community we need that collective voice word of mouth is one of the most powerful recruitment tools that we have to use and that's what we're trying to leverage so i want to take a closer look at the groups that we have engaged with the first thing that we've done in hr is we pulled a report of all of the teachers who have retired since 2020 and 2021 so any of the teachers that now are frs eligible to come back to work we have gotten their contact information and we've reached out to them it's been a mixed bag of responses and lots of questions coming along with it but we're engaging and starting the
068conversation along with that we also took a look at our substitute pool because believe it or not we have 326 florida certified teachers in our substitute pool but they really enjoy that flexible schedule but we keep sharing any opportunities that are out there with them because if they're certified we want them full time we've also noticed in our work that there's a lot of misinformation out there about the pathways to certification and so that misinformation leads to ambiguity and confusion so we've put together communication in the form of a graphic organizer to make it a little more easy to understand for people who have degrees that there is a pathway for you to become a teacher so in doing that it's allowed us to tap into other candidates and other pools for example we have
0694755 active volunteers and mentors in volusia county schools that's a lot so those are people who already have that calling to be around kids right and some of them who already have who have degrees so we have been actively reaching out to them to gauge their interests to see if they would be interested in that pathway and if they have any sort of interest our team is there ready to help them step by step through the process the other thing that we've done is we have contacted all of the volusia chambers of commerce because we know there's a big voice out there in our business community and we also contacted the 222 active business partners that we have in volusia county schools shout out to the community information team for sharing all of that contact
070information with us because we know that was a lot to pull together but what we've done over the past few months is we've shared all of our marketing materials with them in the hopes that then they turn around and they share it with their business communities in their newsletters because we want to increase our network again we want to increase our voice and we've also opened ourselves up to the opportunities to connect with any of their chamber partners in person especially now that events are in person if you're hosting something volusia county schools wants to be there so all of the chambers were extremely receptive right but i have to give a shout out to ken phelps over at the daytona beach regional chamber of commerce because out of all of them he sat there
071with me on the phone for an hour and it was like a an impromptu think tank on the phone the next night we had a team it was mr gomez miss workman and i and we were representing volusia county schools at the daytona beach regional business member meetup we were there with business cards and flyers and we were trying to connect with anybody that we could to see how we could work together for our cause he also invited us to put a guest column article in their next newsletter it was a more in-depth article regarding um our shortages and our recruitment needs to try to further engage the community and then he also worked with me in updating their youth science assessment to include volusia county schools as an option as a result for students
072when they're completing that aptitude test to plant that seed early on so obviously that's not going to help us with vacancies now but it's building that pipeline so later on down the road they might come back to the results of that use science test and he graciously opened up all of their job postings to us so we can post on their site so super appreciative of all of these new connections and networks that we've made in addition to the chamber we always remain in constant communication with our college and university partners as we have done in the past and we are always sharing employment opportunities with their colleges of ed their career and services team members and we've also increased our voice to connect with other departments at those universities so the college uh the
073the biology majors the english majors the math and science because we all know there's a lot of biology majors who graduate and they decide not to go on to med school but we could use them in the classroom so we're trying to share that information about the pathways to certification um out there and then finally we've empowered our own people right our school and our district leaders and our departments to engage their personal and professional circles in our cause we've developed communication templates so we created a communication template that schools can send to their business partners that they can send to their families and even potential candidates of who to call what the steps are and how they can do it to make it as easy as possible for them and happy to share as
074well that the professional learning team jumped in the week of pre-planning and they went out to all of the schools and they delivered a teaching matters poster and a set of flyers to all of our schools so they would have them on campus for the meet the teacher and the orientation events that were held on campus that day that was a mouthful in addition to a lot of the networking and engaging that we've done just some new advertising that's that's on the horizon that you may not have seen yet um we now especially with the new statute that came down about our military veterans we have an advertisement in the veteran journal which goes out to all of our active military that are returning from duty and also the retired military we also have an
075advertisement in the national minority update that's something that goes out quarterly we've had that for a while we just recently added an advertisement in the volusia parent ezine which is um a magazine that's online and volusia county schools is going to have a dynamic ad that pops out on the side of all of the articles you are trying to read i'm sure a lot of you have seen our volusia county schools billboard on i-4 unfortunately that is ending but we can always take a look at that again in the future and then mr colon we have heard you um and we are dedicated now we have a string line dedicated to advertising so we are working on creating advertisements on facebook so people will see those on the side as well as boosting our posts
076so that we can specifically target demographics and locations for our employment opportunities and we also have printed mailers that we are printing out thank you schoolway cafe team for that idea and we're going to be mailing those out to teachers on leave of absences and our families as well now i know you've seen this slide probably ad nauseum of all of the external sites that we post on but i i really feel the need to share this with you again because i don't think the words on the page really emphasize the volume of communication that comes out from the recruitment office on a daily basis okay so just in the past month we sent out a teaching matters campaign and just in that one campaign it sent out 51 331 messages to eligible recipients so
077i want you to think on the back end when we send out messages and attacks 51 000 people how many emails our team is then fielding on the back side and our goal is always to be intentional targeted and personal because that's how you're going to get people in the door is if they know that you care and so we try to deliver that service and i'm telling you our team is small but we are mighty and we're able to do a lot of that some um opportunities for recruitment that we are researching that are coming down the pipeline so we are currently pricing out the cost of car wraps and car magnets so if you think about how many district employees we have in our schools that are constantly traveling to schools how easy
078would it be to put a car magnet on the side of your car advertising volusia county schools and then you can take it off of your car when the school day ends right so we're pricing all of that out we're again we're trying to engage the community in ways that we haven't before we're also taking a look at these two school board members yes we're also taking a look at a radio advertising campaign this would be a year-long campaign which would give us an opportunity to tap into approximately 220 000 weekly listeners of different age groups on various different radio stations so we're working together with the family and community engagement team sheila reese over there to try to get that going we've also spent quite a bit of time miss workman and mr west
079know that we are seriously researching um the possibility of hosting international teacher candidates here in volusia county schools so we're currently networking with other school districts to see what they're doing and also meeting with groups programs that offer those j-1 visa sponsorships we just met with education partners international last week we've also looked at some other opportunities proximity learning is a platform that provides florida certified teachers but they would zoom into a classroom to address teacher shortages so again we're just right now we're researching these opportunities to see would be a good fit for our our situation and then moving forward one thing that i didn't add on this slide is that november 8th is our election day and just like we did last time we would like to deploy our district members in the
080field and just share the need right and connect with the community because again it's not one person i tell this people all the time i may be the coordinator of recruitment but everybody is responsible for recruiting and then finally i share with you some exciting news and last week on friday we welcomed 48 senior interns from 12 colleges and universities here at dak in the board room who are going to be beginning their journey into their internship here in volusia county schools it was a very exciting day those events for me are bucket fillers because of the energy and enthusiasm that is in the room they were fresh and they were green and they were just so ready which brings me to this really exciting news um and we can go ahead and take off
081the pending dsc legal department approval as of this morning we are entering into a pilot program with daytona state college it is called the senior internship teacher apprentice pilot program this allows their senior interns to select one of two tracks the first track is that traditional senior internship where they're in a classroom alongside a cooperating teacher with that side-by-side coaching model the second track would be the teacher apprentice track where they would complete their internship as a volusia county schools substitute teacher in one of our vacancies getting paid 15 dollars an hour okay so we just got the green light we have of the 17 daytona state interns 14 of them have selected the teacher apprentice track so we that we started moving fast and furious on this i want to let you know a
082week ago this was a pipe dream and a phone call to daytona state to see if this was even possible and here we are a little over a week later and today those teacher apprentices were trained by our curriculum coordinators in the curriculum materials they have curriculum training today and tomorrow they're going to have focus training on thursday their placements have already been strategically made principals have been notified and they are so excited so the schools are committing to having these interns in that vacancy for 11 weeks and at the end of the 11 weeks if it's a great fit for the school and a great fit for the intern we're hoping that it ends in a higher so that is the exciting news that i have to share with all of you um i
083hope you're feeding off of my energy because i've been living off of this roller coaster for the past week so um that's great and i'd like to just publicly thank christy for all the work that she has done because not only is she out there as the face of volusia county but she has her own children that she is investing in so i'm recruiting them too we're gonna put our kids out there so but but i just want you to know that we truly appreciate everything you do [Applause] glad to have you join the team hey welcome and so please introduce yourself and tell us what you'll be doing you didn't see this coming i know you didn't um good evening i am tiffany fuller i am going to be the new diversity recruitment and
084retention specialist um so i'm very excited to join the hr team the the small but mighty team add my my size to that team i am coming from a loving and supportive and enthusiastic bulldog family and so i am incredibly grateful for the opportunity to have learned in bulldog country they have prepared me well for this next step and so i always said that that was the best team in volusia county schools and i stand by that statement but i'm i'm excited to join this next team great thank you and they're all still here because bulldogs they said you can't get out of that game on friday night though we've heard the presentation do we have any questions great job all right and the only thing i wrote down here was early voting and election
085day and you hit that so i think it's an opportunity as our folks are walking into our buildings i don't know if we can get a frame something that can you know get their attention qr code something we're hiring as they go down the walk to the precinct somehow so just a thought but i think you hit that on the head anybody else have any questions ms haynes i want to say what a great job you did but i also want to give a shout out because when you are looking at those vacancies i think we need to clarify a little bit about district one district one has the largest number of schools in it and it covers the largest geographical distance but even with that being said deland high is coming in at high
086school number one with the largest student population this year because they're over three thousand on the ninth day which that's the day we look at to make some moves and changes they came in with three thousand and twenty eight students so um and university was not far behind i have to say that because they were two thousand nine hundred 964 students and so you know the two largest high schools are sitting in district one the largest middle school is also sitting in district one which is river springs middle school that came in with 1265 students on the 9th day and the largest elementary is also sitting in district 1 which is debary elementary which came in with 904 students so at currently on the 9th day of school there are 18 534 students being taught
087in district one and normally i talk about the whole you know district mr clone is always about d5 but i thought it needed to be said that there's a lot going on in district one so when you look at the number of vacancies we have you have to consider the number of students that we're touching and i'm still waiting to hear what we're going to do with manatee cove and i'm sure i'll get an update on that but i want to give a shout out to every district staff person that went out the beginning of pre-planning week and they prepared classrooms and they have been out there teaching in those classrooms so that our students had teachers in front of them so i want to say thank you to them because when i was at
088manatee cove and i was walking the pre-k in kindergarten classrooms there were three district staff teaching kindergarten at manatee cove and they were happy and excited and they were doing a phenomenal job so thank you to everyone all right and this is kind of unplanned but i'd like you to come up with your family and let's get a picture with the board [Applause] [Music] i'm bulldogs oh yes [Music] i guess bulldogs i guess you guys get to do it no more really um [Laughter] there we go very good thank you and congratulations once again [Applause] all right next item on the agenda 17.01 public participation first up ms elizabeth albert welcome miss albert good evening chair cologne members of the board dr balgerman members of the audience i'd like to begin by just making a
089statement and i want to preface the statement by acknowledging ms mahany and all the work that she does there is no doubt that christie mahaney is one of the hardest working individuals in our district who has a 90 degree uphill climb and what she's doing so christy thank you very much for all your efforts you know i love you but buckle up so my my point is the point is when i sit out there and i hear about programs like the apprenticeship and i hear about the j-1 visa program and we really haven't received any communication on that as the president who represents teachers in the classroom it would be in it would be welcome if we could have some conversation about that on the front side because when you're bringing in an intern and
090paying them 15 an hour to take on the role of the sole uh instructional personnel in a classroom we need to know about that and have some conversations so if we could just do that at some point in the very near future that would be very good thank you because we've got a lot of questions about how that's going to work but i do want to talk with you also this evening about our middle schools and i know that um you know there's a lot of work that's gone on into the middle school situation we've met with dr olson just this morning dr olson has made himself very available to us to receive feedback and suggestions potential solutions to work on some of the concerns that we have i mean it was very interesting that
091that there was a statement made about having a learning mindset so that's what i'm going to suggest that we all have right now the experts on middle schools are telling us that there are there are some serious concerns class sizes are too large because students now with the sixth period day are only able to select one elective our core classes are overflowing i know the nine-day count meetings took place on friday and i know some of those adjustments are being made but i have a member who shared that their class was at 34 and the adjustment was made by two they're now at 32 in the core class that doesn't work we know that there are classes where we have a significant amount of students with disabilities and students that have additional learning needs it's
092very difficult to teach a class and do what you need to do when you have a support facilitator that may come in twice a week if they're not pulled to do something else because our goal is to provide our students with the highest quality education that we can and we can't really execute that in these kind of conditions and dr olson was very open to receiving that information today i'm bringing it to you so that you will also have the full picture and in the time that i have remaining i'd just like to suggest this to you it's too much it's too much all at once for example we have the shifting to teams we have a sixth period day six and eighth grade curriculum swap for history new math standards mtss pbis all in
093one year i would suggest that we pick one thing and we do that well instead of trying to do too many things and not be able to do anything well thank you thank you miss albert next up cindy baron welcome miss baron good evening dr balgamon sorry i always have said i'm chairman colon men and women of the board i'm very nervous i'm not a public speaker but i am a media specialist in an elementary school here at woodward elementary and i want to talk about some of the pressures we're feeling about book selections we spend a lot of time researching books reading reviews listening to what our students want what our teachers want what's appropriate for our children i came from a small community of two blinking lights and 5 000 people i had
094not seen the world until i went to college in boston and then i saw the world our children are often sheltered and they need diverse books they need books about their family other families blended families non-traditional families and recently this week received many of us received an email from a community member questioning our choices in books one of them was this lovely book called families families families and it represents every family can imagine men women grandmas grandpas aunts uncles so the pressure we're feeling is real we need to support our students and their diversity of their families their cultures their learning styles what they're up against in the world we need to be able to to have our children see every spectrum of the gamut within reason but we also respect that parents need to
095make choices with their students on what is appropriate for them so my concern today is that we do represent what it is our students are looking for and who they are that we don't censor them that within reason what's age appropriate is offered to them in a diversity of books we would like to make sure that they know about the world around them they know about their family they know about the situations that go on that are important to them in short we'd like to be able to do our jobs and we have a system for that and we also have a system for when people don't agree with the books we select we have a challenge process and we would like to make sure that we follow that process it's a good process it
096starts in the school and in the community where that child goes to school and then it grows if it needs to go bigger to the district it goes bigger to the district but let's follow the process and present our students with what they need and not let a few people attempt to censor what other students may wish to read thank you for listening thank you miss karen weinrich good evening i'm here tonight to take my three minutes i have two topics my first topic is covered pay and i understand we've not had an agreement yet about covet pay for employees i know covet is here it is real i know of four teachers at my school who currently are out with coven and i just had a student diagnosed today so it's here you know
097i had it over the summer despite being four times fast so it's happened if i am a new teacher coming on board i have four sick days given to me at the beginning of the year when you get coveted and you go through the process it's five days you're out so that means those new teachers or other teachers who are returning who have used their sick days in the past are working without pay or getting docked one day because of that lack of covet pay so i ask you to please make this a priority and come to an agreement about covet pay because it's it's here and it's not going away and it's not fair i know when i had it i was not very sick and if i if it had been the school
098year i would have had to be out the five days and i would have been feeling healthy but having to be out those five days and then i brought a i brought a prop because i like to bring my props this week i got my district progress monitoring calendar which basically lists the tests that we give and you know i know we've had a lot of talk about trying to reduce testing and we have absolutely no control over this new fast test which seems to me will probably be more testing than it was before but we'll see because we start it next week that also includes by the way practice tests that we have to do so there's it's actually even though we have two tests the ela and the math we also have to
099do practice for ela and math so i got a hold of this and we have 37 weeks in the school year and i just counted up how many tests these students have to take in the different grades so in kindergarten i counted 25. now i think most of us could agree that the amount of tests kindergarten should take is zero zero but of course we do have to give the fast in first grade and i i got this by counting the fast test twice because it's an ela and a math so that's where my where i got my numbers first grade takes 30. second grade takes 37 that's one per week third grade because we know about portfolios 63 it's 1.7 a week fourth grade which is what i'm teaching this year which by the
100way i love um more than one a week and fifth grade 45. now we're currently giving i ready test which i counted as two tests because it's ela and math and um i've been giving it since last week and i still have students not done that test can go anywhere from an hour to two and a half hours depending on the child because of the way it's given this is too much okay we can we can't control what the state makes us do but we can control we decide to do so i ask you to please look at this it's just too much and it's stressing the kids out it's just not right for kids thank you thank you miss weinrich can i can i have that please if you just give it to the
101agency clerk i'll read the scribbles and if i have any questions i'll be more than i know where to find you thank you next up stacy collins welcome ms collins hi thank you i'm a mother of two kids in volusia county and they are both in public schools one at deland middle and one at citrus grove and i am here to support libraries and media specialists in volusia county the world is diverse and complex and i want my kids to understand unique perspectives and the human experience is vast and complicated and when we show people stories from different perspectives we build empathy and connection when we limit stories we build fear parents do get to make decisions on how they raise their kids but when you censor the library you're censoring what my kid can
102and cannot read and that's my right and responsibility as their parent another parent doesn't get to restrict what my child can do also let's trust these civil servants who are in the schools giving their heart and energy to our children not for money not for fame but to help educate the next generation to be kind and wise and help solve complex world problems let's not make their job harder let's trust and support these people who help take care of our children day in and day out i for one am thankful for their time and energy and trust them otherwise i wouldn't leave my kids with them all day every day so that's what i wanted to say thank you thank you and dr jerry pikett welcome dr pikett board chairman members of the board community
103group superintendent volusia county schools while striving to provide the very best educational opportunities for our students face tremendous challenges related to inequalities in our educational system particularly with our faculty staff and students of color it is vital we address these continuous educational inequalities and work together to ensure fair professional practices my immediate concern today is what was the district's analysis as to why the new principal at palm terrace elementary school was not originally promoted as the principal how how was this decision so much different from the sea breeze high school principalship appointment next the two newly appointed alternative education principles what is the estimated maximum number of students each principal would be responsible for as compared to a school like campbell middle school additionally the hiring of minority leaders with all the challenges we currently
104have closing the achievement gaps of our underserved students in schools what was the rationale as to why we didn't take the opportunity to promote more african american and hispanic latino placement specialists to support those underserved students and schools finally academics what is volusia county schools immediate academic action plan to address the performance of our underserved schools we are not successful until all of our schools are successful in summation we have all the responsibility to ensure the success of all students and equality for everyone so here are a few highly recommended initiatives that i encourage our district to consider paid master's program initiatives for teachers with a three to five year commitment at an underserved school national and international teacher recruitment with signing bonuses relocation pay with a three to five commitment as well additional incentives
105stipends and increased salary for high performing teachers working at underserved schools with a three to five year commitment school to work programs for underserved students facilitated by school family liaisons paid college to students internships which i heard earlier with employment upon completion aggressive initiatives to increase dual enrollment adding magnet programs and international baccalaureate programs to our underserved middle schools and finally international baccalaureate elementary school programs to some of our underserved elementary schools let's take actions on the priorities that will aid and help our students and community now for much better tomorrow thank you thank you and mr pika can you email that list that you just said thank you appreciate that all right so we will move on actually let's take a break so we will take a 15 minute break and we will come
106back at 45 after c that includes materials instructional materials and other materials in our schools and we the legislation was put into place over the summer however uh school districts have until june of july june 30th 2023 july 1st 2023 to come into compliance so what we are presenting to you tonight is what we currently have in place what we are putting in place what structures we are formalizing and a timeline for bringing our district into compliance with the legislation by the deadline that has been set okay so this presentation if we as we always do relate everything back to our strategic plan we have highlighted goal four resources and operational processes because this is a huge resource that our schools use however it would also fall under goal one which is instructional materials all
107right i did give each one of you a teal folder and in that folder are the analysis of the two bills i find that the analysis a little bit easier to read than the actual bill itself our information that's on our website the information that's on the doe library materials website and then as we get to it some information about a an opt-out plan we're here to share with you the county procedures for library materials as well as how we are following the existing and updated state statutes our media collections follow our volusia county policy 320 as well as the recently updated florida statute 847.012 and section 1006.28 we will discuss in the presentation our use of the school-based media advisory committee as we go through the new and existing sections of house bill senate
1081467 it's important to note that both for 1467 and for 1557 the state has given florida public schools until june 2023 to bring the state into compliance although the state is giving us the school year we are putting into procedures to come into compliance as quickly as possible for purchases made after june 1st 2020 2023 each specialist i'm sorry that should have said january january 1st 2023 each media specialist must complete a online training that is being developed currently by the florida doe if any community member would like to review materials schools must provide access to that material to that individual an example of this would be a viewing space like at a boardroom a conference room at a school school site this applies to both library materials and instructional materials for books that are
109made available to students through media centers whether or not they're purchased or donated they must be selected by a person holding a valid educational media specialist certification volusia is very blessed that in all of our school media centers our media specialists have this certification we do have two schools that are currently seeking to fill that position and i will work with those schools to make sure that their school is in compliance all school districts are now required to provide a searchable format on their website for their list of materials in the media center last winter we made our destiny card catalog available to the community on the county web page under library media and instructional materials web page and there's a tab destiny card catalog and we added because we weren't sure that everybody knew
110what a card catalog was search for a book additionally to meet the state statute each school's website would also have their school's catalog search link found connected to their personal schools media web page as our web webmaster updates each site he'll be adding this link to that page all elementaries will have their new website up and running by mid-september complete with this link the state statute states that this is to be just on it simply says elementaries however we are putting out on all of our school sites the state now requires each county to have a challenge process we are very grateful to i'm very so grateful to my predecessors because our county created that process many many years ago and it was even updated in 2017 to incorporate both instructional materials and library media
111one new item that will take effect this summer is that each county will need to submit a list of materials objected to removed or discontinued as a result as as to an objection to the florida department of education schools will share that information with my office i will be gathering the data and my office will be responsible for sharing that information with the state doe other items in bill 1467 were carried over from previous state statute and they are book selection criteria the removal or discontinuance of books which is commonly referred to as weeding and stating that the school principals are responsible for overseeing compliance with the school district procedures for library media materials thank you and one thing i do want to highlight on this slide you see the word new a lot that's
112new in legislation but not necessarily new to volusia county schools a lot of these processes we had in place we've added some formality to the process and we've added some ways to be accountable through the processes but we've had these processes in place so this slide shows a timeline and this is really a high level overview of our implementation plan when we look at how we're going to come into compliance so in january it should be oh i'm sorry in january 2022 we had the volusia county schools library and media instructional materials website was updated to contain those selection processes as smith just pointed out on august 10th of pre-planning our media specialists participated in a pre-planning workshop where they discussed the weeding and challenge process reviewed this challenge process again is not new to
113our county however we did add a few additions to the guidelines which we'll go over they also reviewed the process for establishing a media advisory committee which those have been in process in volusia county for well i can tell you i was a member of one in the year 2000 so i i don't know exactly how long they've been in there media specialists were also briefed on the house bill 1557 the classroom instruction and review to it as it pertains to the media center august the 18th we held a principal's meeting where we reviewed both of the both the challenge and the selection process with the principles ms smith is going to go into the opt out link which will be available in september and flyers will be sent home social media will be released
114on how to opt out of selections and we'll go into what that process is in just a few slides also our classroom library expectations we are preparing professional development just in time for our teachers we've rolled out a lot of new initiatives at the beginning of this school year so this is a focus for us in the second semester of the school year to talk to teachers about classroom libraries and talk to them about how you go through the peer review process but we're going to demonstrate that to you tonight we'll show you that on a slide one thing i want you to know is that while there is a state debt database of approved instructional materials there's no state database for approved self-selection materials so when you think about trade books or books that
115students would select from the library or from a classroom library there's not a state approved what there are are guidelines for how to select those books they must be age appropriate they must be peer reviewed and we will show you how we are going to train teachers for that because you know many times and i was one of them teachers get their classroom library materials from a variety of sources they they want to provide their students with a lot of opportunities to read and we want them to be prepared to ensure that they are vetting those materials uh january um sorry we're that should be 2023. um the florida department of education is going to release a media specialist training on the selection process and that completion date for that will be march 2023 and
116in june of 2023 is when we are to send to the florida doe any list of challenges or titles that we have removed as a result of those challenges our media specialists develop purchase lists throughout the year they reach out to their faculty ask for student input look at curriculum as well as look at peer-reviewed lists of recommended books even when taking requests from students and teachers we look at the individual book to make sure that that book fits within our collection development policy for individual students looking at peer-reviewed lists is a part of state statute these peer-reviewed organizations are made up of professional librarians who look at the entirety of a book share the synopsis give recommendations and suggest age bans to assist our media specialists further in volusia county we have purchased three
117online platforms that contain peer reviews they are school library connection book list and the school library journal in addition volusia county media specialists have been trained in using the platform called tidal wave which helps them find a variety of information and we'll be i'll be showing you a sample of that it is important to note that there is no district or state approved list as as rachel hazel said the state recognizes that each community is unique and what and what might be a book of high interest in one school will not meet the needs in another school additionally what is it available one year in print is not available the next year because books are constantly changing once the purchase list has been developed the media specialist works with the media advisory committee to elicit
118feedback and then begins the ordering process what you're seeing here is an example of what we might see when we are using the tidal wave resource it includes information such as interest level reading level genre and other pertinent information for well-reviewed books tidal wave includes peer reviews as seen here there's a synopsis a recommended age group and that the reviewer does recommend the book for purchase each school establishes a school media advisory committee that gives feedback on future purchases assists in library incentives such as literacy week and promotions within the campus and if needed they serve as the challenge committee as far as the three of us sitting in this presentation can remember our county has had school media advisory committees we do anticipate that this year may be more active for our committees the
119slide shows that the makeup of that committee which is made up of a school of school staff at least one parent and one appropriate a student we do ask our principals and media specialists that the committee does represent the diversity of the school and that the parent is not a staff member it needs to be a minimum of five persons there approximately four meetings held a year some in person and some virtually depending on what the need is one update to the responsibility of the media advisory committee is that they now look through the potential purchase list and make sure that the book fits within state guidelines the school is individual needs and the school's collection development policy the challenge process information seen here is also found on our website and i believe i've included
120in your information one important note is just like any other concerns that individuals or groups might have our schools and media specialists first try to resolve with a conversation many of our parent community concerns are solved before the challenge process is ever needed if a parent has a concern about the library the media specialist and the school often will work up with a mutually agreeable solution if those solutions aren't unable to be agreed upon the process begins as follows the principal meets with the individual to hear the complaint upon closure of that meeting if there is no resolution paperwork is given to the individual to begin the challenge process paperwork is then filled out by the individual and returned to the school upon returning of the paperwork is actually when the challenge process begins the
121paperwork has to be returned the school media advisory committee convenes and the item in question is evaluated the principal will then provide the committee's decision to the individual in writing if the school level resolution does not meet the individual's satisfaction a request is made for the district-level committee to convene the school superintendent will decide if the school levels committee decision stands or if the challenge will proceed to the district level committee within 15 working days of this district school committee report the superintendent shall have the final decision and provide the individual with the copy of that decision i have a question i'm sorry to interrupt so a parent submits a concern the media committee meets four times a year what happens in between that time a called meeting will need to happen if there's a
122challenge they can be the purpose of the four meetings a year is to review the list of materials and recommendations for purchases however if there is a challenge that is formalized and goes to the committee then the committee is called for an additional meeting beyond the four so my my initial concern is that the ex you know we know the next year given the legislation and our need to be compliant is going to be definitely more than four times a year what happens to the book while it's being considered the the book stays available technically the book stays available in reality the book is needing to be read by the committee so the book was probably going to be used by the committee to research but it does not officially be so that's where i
123find a gap because i give an example i received a notice of a book just the other day that couldn't stay on a shelf and it was removed and it was removed however the process that you're highlighting would have kept that book on the shelf until the committee made a decision so i'm just trying to understand this because um that the more you know and i don't need an answer today i just think we need to look at the process because the next year is going to be very active and there's going to be a lot of books that are going to come up you know as as you know these more and more counties are sharing lists whether they're real not whatever the case may be you know and we've already had a situation
124where you know a decision was made and so i think we really need to be clear you know what exactly happens is there a process by which as in the example that i gave that it couldn't be stay on the show let me i um just real quickly so make sure i understand and that we put the right processes that you're asking for in place um let can i use that example that that you sent so um there was a book brought to your attention which was in one media center because the first thing we do when we're notified of that is look to see where the book is located and how many media centers have it the second thing we look for is how many times that book has been checked out because that's
125going to tell us something so in this case the book had not been checked out by anyone in over two and a half years and i think it had only been checked out once then and it was by staff member not by student so that actually did follow the process because we try to resolve the issue at the lowest level which means we make a phone call to the media specialist into the principal and say could you pull this book and look at it and see if this is something that you vetted that you feel is appropriate i can tell you in that case the media we made the phone call media specialists looked at the book called us back within 10 minutes and said no it's not i'm i'm pulling it and it was
126pulled issue solved now if she had not if she had said i've looked at the book and i don't see an issue which i don't think anybody would in that case of this book then um then we would have proceeded to the you must go to the formal meeting so i anticipate um while i do anticipate in fact we have a list now we have a list of books that have been brought to our attention that we're going through and looking and seeing and those there's going to be some of those that are going to be immediately removed and there's going to be some that probably go through this process um so in that case depending on where we are we have the committees formed there is certainly no four meeting limit that is and
127the purpose of those four formal meetings really is about purchases so the challenges are additional means great thank you and i just wanted to be clear that there is a process and you know where by which it will be vetted and if it then if it's immediately determined that it doesn't fit the criterion for our school district and our policies etc that you know there is you know that it will not go through that extended process and it you know will be pulled immediately our media specialists are very willing to look at the item and and judge the community that is today and resources right away which is what happened in that book i noticed i got the email we're gonna look at it through the process and within like 15 minutes i got an
128email saying we reviewed it and so i appreciated that okay i'm sorry that was my question thank you let's see where did oh okay we've always had a mechanism in place for parent input with our school library media centers but in addition in an effort to ensure additional parent voice and transparency as well as make the process easier for our parents we are offering an opt out option each parent will be given an access to a web link that they can choose one of the following options unlimited access to library materials limited access to library materials in which we'll seek more clarification from the parent and a third option is no access to library materials for our middle school students i do want to note this because young adult materials often start at grade eight
129we do have a special level in middle schools that parents already have to sign a ya permission slip form so that will still remain in place for those eighth graders i have a question how the heck do you enforce this um actually they um they tag the book they tag it and then it pop-up happens and there's uh most of the librarians have a spool a section on it so we've also worked with technology services that were able to um put a note on a student's record so when the student comes to check out a book if there is a limited permission or no access on there it will automatically alert the media clerk and and likewise with y a permission slip forms we've had this for many many years in our eighth grade so
130it says y permission and it pops right up that they're able to have those we do we default to yes if we don't get a no or do we default to no if we don't get a yes it we will for the ya 8th grade middle school you have to have the permission slip form to get that it defaults to no but for the opt out it defaults to students have access to full library unless the parent says they want limited so everybody let me get that right so the opt-out policy students in elementary schools unless a parent fills this out asking for limited or no access they will have access to library materials it is just like the media where the opt out for the media release where you are assumed to have access
131to have your picture taken unless a form is filled out do we have a lot of books in that young adult category elementary we have none elementary none eighth grade in eighth grade um it would be hard to say um it's going to depend on the lib the library to the size of the library because of course holly hills is going to be much smaller than silver sands which is a larger school so there's probably 200 books that are in its own little section for y a for eighth grade um that they have to have permission sub forms and some some schools have more some schools have less it depends on the collection development of what that school wanted to do for that library so i'm old and i this almost seems to me like
132the old video stores where there's the movies for everybody but then there's that red door i don't know what you're talking about i won't describe the red door to you but it just well the issue is in eighth grade um that's where um going back to where schools junior highs middle schools kind of ages happened and so a lot of books are written for eighth grade and older and so that's where a cut off range is often seen in a young adult i'm going to need some education because i i'm really struggling with what do we have in our libraries that is so inappropriate per se or not let me not say inappropriate age appropriate and if it's 200 some odd books or eighth grade for eighth grade which we know that middle school is
133sixth through eighth grade which means there's a red door that only eighth graders who have parents i mean i mean let's and as we start talking to see this isn't a big deal until we start talking about it and now all of a sudden this is gonna i mean this will be in the news journal tomorrow so well and to understand numbers at a school um the average middle school they probably have between eight and twelve thousand books so to put that in perspective in terms of amount of of books that that we're talking you still have rows and rows and rows and rows for the rest of okay i'll stop i just i'm struggling with how we would enforce this and you know and is there an alternative way to ensure that the books
134that are appropriate they have access to without not you know because you how do how does a media specialist i won't call him a librarian how does a media specialist stop a sixth grader from going and grabbing that book and sitting down and reading it when their parent has said that maybe they can't check it out but i i'm just having a hard time and then i ask myself well if it falls into that category i mean what are other districts doing to because ultimately you know all it's going to take is one parent who said i don't want my child to have access to this and now they're going to go pull the book and they're going to go home and say look what i read not that i could they couldn't check it
135out because it would flag so we have that safeguard but look what i read and nobody and so then we find ourselves in a you know he said she said and and my my fear is that while there may be me while it may be legitimate that the stu you know it was rightfully so in the library that student shouldn't have touched it the court of public opinion will drag that media center through the mud right now and so figuring out how we can ensure appropriate access is is no different than the door at the video store yes they could have had those same movies i mean you go to the supermarket what do they do they put a cover over the front of the magazine well i do hesitate to compare that to young
136adult books as well i think the first thing probably um we need we need to bring some samples so that you can see what what would be considered young adult and what what wouldn't be considered young adult the other thing that i just want to mention is that um the students this would probably you're right it would primarily they would be identified when they come to check out the book because that's how we would identify but as you get to know your students you're you're also knowing who turned in what permission form and we did model this after two other districts that we were collaborating with um in fact the form came directly from those other districts we the opt-out form so i i'm looking forward to the field trip because i do need to
137be educated thank you sorry i got a little lost where oh here sorry i got a little lost where i was volusia county is very blessed with an amazing team of media specialists who support our schools in many ways i do want to share that i'm very proud of the work that they do how they support their faculty and staff how they support literacy and how they support inquiry in the media centers they care deeply about our students and the work to make the media centers a strong and vibrant part of the school in addition to spending the last two weeks of class device checkout and student checkout they support their teachers with curriculum needs reaching out to them to how they can assess assist support with resources and make their lessons even stronger but
138if you ask most of them what's most important they will share that it's literacy sharing the love of books and helping find books that meet each student's need i've personally seen what it means when a book connects deeply with a student and that is really our goal is we want to make sure that students are able to connect connect with books i just want before we turn it over for questions i just want to close with thanking you for allowing us to present this information i know it's very timely i know there are a lot of questions out there and i want to emphasize to everyone everyone listening everyone at the dias that we're committed to answering those questions and working together to problem solve because this is really about making sure that we have
139the right policies and procedures in place it's not about what any one of us as an individual believes is is the right answer i i don't have all the answers but i'm willing to follow the process to find them so if we can answer any questions we're happy to thank you board anybody have any questions ms cuthbert okay as an english teacher and i know that english teachers are very scarce these days new ones coming up the pike and most of this you can't answer because we haven't gotten clarification from the state yet but most of my curriculum was based on supplemental reading it enhanced the themes the characters but the message the subject the purpose and the language the language is what's so enriching i mean i wouldn't supplement just with novels i would
140supplement with essays chapters from a larger book speeches abraham lincoln's second inaugural address is one that i used all the time i used a chapter from minecomp but the assignment was to find the fallacies in it so but that was done with an advanced placement class not a regular high school class so i know so much of this is being addressed to media specialists but we also need to really make clarification for our english teachers not just at the middle and high school level but every elementary teacher teaches reading encourages reading fiction nonfiction and a lot of our tests have been non-fiction and there's a lot of thought-provoking non-fiction out there i remember teaching zora neale hurston from the 1920s going to the 1950s with gloria naylor to the 1990s with um oh gosh i
141know i forget his name but he was a professor at the university of chicago but to compare the language and the racism and the treatment of people and how things have changed from the 20s to the 50s to the 90s so students would understand that when they got to the 21st century how can they handle certain issues but according to the state legislature that assignment might have to go out the window so i can see as a person who taught mark twain and and um zora neale hurston and todd uh toni morrison as well as patrick henry and uh nathaniel hawthorne i see a future that's very bleak because i think what we do in education to achieve to have student success student problem solving students have to be able to choose how do they
142know what to choose if they don't know what they like or what they don't like we have emboldened enhanced and paid a lot of money for cte programs at the high school in the middle school even at the elementary level with stem steam all of our programs we have special charter schools that are just geared straight for stem but it's so they can try things out so they know what they like what they're there they can adapt to what they don't like so when they get to the college level and have to pay money for all of this it's it's not wasted so as we we move forward with all of this and of course i will be a private citizen fairly soon i i am very concerned about the teacher in the classroom who
143wants to give supplemental reading as an assignment to enrich and enhance the child's or the students or the teenagers understanding of what learning what the learning is because we're all encouraged in our lesson plans in our course syllabuses syllabi sorry that we we have supplemental reading assigned and that it's all done by theme i mean i remember having one theme just for gender you know comparing virginia woolf to hillary clinton to to um oh i thought i forgot her name she wrote she was one of the first writers of female literature back in the 1800s she wrote um my antonia and oh pioneers willa cather yes thank you well cather i mean it's in the contribution of women to literature and to our history i know a lot of history teachers want to assign a
144supplemental reading in the past what we've done mr colon is i have gone to my principal and said i would like to assign this book the principal would read it talk about it with assistant principals talk to a couple parents pta get it approved and then i could do it even when i wanted to do a seven-minute excerpt from saving private ryan because it had um abraham lincoln's address there's one of that's the reason why they went in to save private ryan um because they did not want it was lincoln's uh not his gettysburg address no it was a letter it was the letter that he wrote to mrs bixby he wrote a letter to mrs bixby saying that no mother should lose four sons uh in a war and so that was you know
145i used it but i got permission because it's an r-rated movie i got that permission from my principal she saw it she said there's nothing there that was controversial she came in and sat with me when i showed it the first time i started i cut it right off so it was we used so much to to enrich the experience of learning in the classroom i can see a huge collision of ideas of controversy of the lack of choice for our students and i understand state legislature i understand what they're trying to do i understand parents rights of course i mean i've had objections i've always had something else for the student to read i understand it but we also need our beloved pardon the pun for you know tony morrison's beloved but our beloved
146media specialists but also the other teachers in the classroom k through 12 who want to offer reading especially when elementary teachers take their kids down to the media center and there's a scholastic book fair going on because we had some complaints last year about a book or two at the at the fair what are we going to do about that as well so what i'm trying to say i suppose is i see that the can of worms being opened and i just want to wish you the very best in trying to solve all this and i and i perfectly understand your point mr colon it is very confusing i'm just hoping we get a lot of clarification from the department of education but it also the public needs to understand as you said it's all
147going to be discussed what's happening because they've tried to there's been a movement to rewrite huckleberry finn and i'm against that because i've had students who say i'm not going to read it because of that one word and i i asked the student i said are you unhappy with that word and he said absolutely i said i'm unhappy with it too i'd never use it never even thought about it and he said well then why are you asking to read it because i want you to understand how you feel when you see it and hear it that you never want to say it you won't tolerate it when it's spoken to you said it's important to know the pain in order to know the joy of it no longer being used because unless we understand
148the pitfalls we will never ever understand the hallelujahs though i'm sorry i'm just on my soapbox a little bit i apologize but i do see a world of of um a lot of a lot of pain coming forward and my heart goes out to you miss smith i'm sorry thank you anyone else so i think you brought up a good point and it's how are we going to handle it i guess that's a question just to throw out there how are we going to handle the classroom resources you know again what what i am afraid of is is not so much you know if history holds right we're not going to get a lot of direction from the florida department of education we never have and so what i'm afraid of is that a teacher
149may in good-hearted long-natured because they probably taught as long as you did miss cuthbert and said you know this was appropriate i've used it for 30 years and then all of a sudden they get drugged through the mud through facebook through social media instagram tick tock wherever for something that wasn't on it you know was not flagged was not so what does that process look like you know just recently i reached out to the chancellor of education said what are we going to do about ace and all those courses who said we don't necessarily care what florida does we're going to continue to do what we do and the answer was direction forthcoming well we're still waiting for it school started already school started and so the rhetoric said oh we're cutting down on this
150cutting down on that what we're going to do get rid of camera jace ap all those courses you know do the parents sign something that says i understand that this curriculum is not going to be confined to the limits or limitations of the legislature of the state of florida well at that point the parent makes that decision and so i was pretty sure we would get that direction before the start of the school year we're still waiting for it ms cuthbert to add what you said you know we tried as a board at least when i was on it before you all a uniform policy and it that was saying you have to do this you can't do that and it eventually went right back to the other way so children now have choices which
151what they can wear we also um had i think as michelle obama tried to instill a new national program for healthy eating in our in our school cafes and that too was was criticized heavily whenever we've tried to narrow down choices especially for children who are so prone to soaking up everything we we get into trouble one way or the other so it's and also who's going to determine what's age appropriate uh what because it's going to be different for different kinds of families in different economic groups and educational groups more open-minded versus not as open-minded parents so i understand all the choice but still it's our job as a public school system in order to have it available if someone wants to look into it you can always say no i go into the
152grocery store and i see those haagen-dazs ice cream i have to say no you know it's a choice even though it's there it's wonderful it's delicious it's great but you know i gotta lay off that i've got adopted out i'm gonna try anyway but and that's that's the whole point i think it's about choice and is it our job to choose or to make choices for everyone no it's somebody else's you know we have to make sure it's available if they so choose to look into it that's what a public school system does thank you mr purses thank you mr chair thank you miss cuthbert right right from the heart there well as i reflect back on just being a principal in the number of times i had you know a parent question a book
153it was never a time when it was with the instructional side of things and we got to separate that the the instructional side is state goes through the state the vetting process there is an approved list and we spend half of our funds you know buying buying that um so what the what the what the challenges always came in on was the either that the library that the teacher had in in his or her own class classroom or maybe a book that that was in the media center i think with with all of those except for one it was resolved which is with the principal and the parent and because as we just said if it's in the media center we're not forcing your child to read a book that you don't want your child
154to to read nobody ever does that so uh you know once the once the parent just tells their child i don't want you to read that book and the principal knows you don't want child to read that book and it's not an assigned book to your child anyway so there really is very little chance of that happening usually the parents parents always find fine with that they may they may have some religious reasons i've had some along along that line i only had one book that actually went through the whole district process and that was in 1989 and i remember it went through the whole thing all the way to the superintendent and the superintendent decided that the book should stay on the on the shelf but um and the name of that book was
155downwind i still remember that book now it was about a nuclear nuclear um blast that took took place and the fallout come coming and and these two kids running away in their father the father said some um said some um curse curse words as he was packing up the house and that's what the parents were objecting to so anyway uh uh i just have a lot of faith in our in our system i've always had a lot of faith in it we've had a very good good system um and it's it you know there there are there are got to be some parents for whatever reasons that may object to something that is on the shelf but clearly um now you're going to have you know over the 90 of the parents our parents going
156to say you know i don't have any problem with that book it's been there it's it's it's fine so parents get more upset about a parent um dick dictating to what their child can read then objecting to what's on the on the shelf so as long as we have this open open process which we obviously have and parents have a right to weigh in on the selections and they have a right to object to something they don't want their child to read and we seem to cater to all of them i mean we seem to make all of this work we always have this may be this bill may be formalizing it but i don't see that we're doing i'm going to be doing anything a whole lot different than what we've been doing for
157over 40 years i i mean it's unless i'm you're right your your idea specialists are very organized they keep track of everything well and i want to add to that mr purses because one of the things when i was speaking with some other counties um two of the other counties that i talked to were having to put and they actually asked for our challenge process they asked us if they could look at it because they don't have media specialists in their schools and so there are districts that that do not they have they either have a clerk or they have a part-time clerk but they don't have a media specialist to run the process so um we are fortunate that our board has always made that a priority and so we've been able to put
158that in place yeah that's great good for us thank you mr chair i just wanted to share that yeah thank you anybody else all right hearing none thank you so much thank you all right next item on the agenda is 20.01 volusia league of cities uh bored in days past we had a presentation from the volusia league of cities regarding our membership to that and i wanted to go ahead and formalize that just as a reminder it is a two thousand dollar fee for membership and we went on and on and had a presentation on this so this would be the formalization of that uh volusia county schools joining the league of cities yeah mr chair if i'm if i'm correct maybe you guys remember but i thought the lady said that we would be
159good for the remainder of this calendar year and that our dues would start in january it'd be good for a calendar year is that correct do you remember okay because i signed up to go to the next the next one so i didn't know whether you know that was good it's like a month away sounds good any further discussion otherwise i'll entertain a motion i move that we joined the volusia league of cities effective with uh i guess formalizing our membership in january of 2023. do you have a second i'll second motion has been properly made by mr person seconded by miss burnett any further discussion chance i've given a lot of thought to this and also listening to mrs mahany you know talk about all their work we're doing with chambers and everything and
160i think that the more um we are connected with the chambers and the and the cities and things like that in the county um we're working together because you know as i said i'm very thankful for the city of debary partnering with us to correct an issue that we had with um debary elementary and that they even partnered and paid for half of it and i think that's the way it should be because the people that live within volusia county also have children or grandchildren and we should all be working together so i you know i appreciated the presentation and i appreciate the ability to network with people because when you network and you get to know them then it's easier to say can i talk to you about this and can we partner on
161this and so i think that's you know we've started taking steps in that direction and i think we need to continue because it shouldn't be well the school system should always take care of this but the county is not responsible or the city is not responsible no we should all be working together for the best interest of our families i agree miss cuthbert um to piggyback on what you said i've been working along with the district help from the district trying to get a traffic light outside of new smyrna beach high school for seven years and it looks like it's it's finally going to happen hopefully as because the county's involved they're going to pay a third the city of new smyrna beach is going to pay a third at least until they vote it's
162still up in the air we all have to finalize our votes because this would be in the capital plan but we've also worked with the county when we uh when mrs hosseini asked us for hearst elementary the property and when she had an idea to turn that in and then the county gave her three million dollars and renovated it for families and unaccompanied youth to find a place when they were not there and plus we have we i think three years ago you were on the board we decided to take a half a million less in a piece of property that we had on williamson just north of lpga because the gentleman came forward because he had a grant he was trying to get a federal grant to build a veterans center and we had
163someone who wanted to build apartment buildings right across the street from the other apartment buildings and we were worried about the density and the traffic and we knew that area was going to explode and so we decided to take the half million less because we wanted to contribute to our county for veteran center and so it took about 18 months we waited that long and when the grant when the gentleman found the grant everybody came out of the woodwork and tried to get that grant from that gentleman to another piece of property but he stuck with us and and it's all it's it's up the structure's up i've been by it it looks really really nice and i always say that's 78 acres that knew that our school district owned that we sold to this
164gentleman so we could have a veteran center in volusia county so we do work tirelessly with our our other municipal partners and i'm very proud of that a fact i know i brought up some caution at our last meeting about joining but i'm in favor of this especially when the the director said that if it didn't work out we didn't have to go it wasn't a three-year contract it was a one-year uh deal so you all can see if it does work um and and see if it works and if anybody wants to invite me as a guest i'd be glad to go so thank you so i just want to let you know i'm in favor of this thank you mr purses yeah i was thinking what miss haines just said uh when we
165got that that graphic from um mr west and uh mahani i uh i sent that to the city of ormond beach and asked them if they'd put it on their website and they said sure we'll do more than that we'll put it on our website instagram twitter facebook and then i said oh so then i went to holly hill i said hey ormond beach is going to put this will you put it on your website and they said the foreman beach does it we're gonna do it so i said oh okay great so just food for thought i mean you know they're more than happy to help out so i thought that's great very good thank you anybody else hearing none motion's been properly made by mr person seconded by miss burnett any further discussion
166all those in favor say aye aye all those opposed a name motion passes next i'm on the agenda 2.02 approval of the school board attorneys 2022 evaluation presenter miss jamie haynes this was yours all right so board we uh last board meeting we approved um the evaluation instrument for our school board attorney evaluation uh instrument and so each of us have been able to complete the evaluation um i'm open to how we move forward with this uh i have not seen anybody else's evaluation nor have we seen each other's i don't think uh mr doran hasn't even seen the evaluations uh and so um do we want to go person by person how do you think we best condition i just ask maybe some questions to get us you know often mr burns the track
167track here i have i asked karen bishop to give me a copy of ted's contract because i you know hadn't seen it really i mean and uh and it's just a one page it's rather straight straightforward there is uh right at the end number five there as you know ted's contract we approved it last year in june 22nd of 21 and i believe he was asking for a five-year contract at that time and we amended it to a three-year contract so it expires june 22nd of 24 and then item number five it says this agreement may be terminated by the board for just cause based solely on the law firm's inability to provide or perform the board related legal services defined in paragraph one above so um you know i just wanted to bring bring
168that to the to the board's uh attention as far as the process uh miss chair i haven't i haven't i didn't fill out anything i wasn't i wasn't really sure what what we were doing this evening i mean it's something that i can fill out and then after i fill it out i just wasn't sure what the next step is after i filled it out does it become a i'm assuming it becomes a public record as soon as we turn it into the clerk and then i'm assuming that um that ted would get a copy of this of course um and then i guess that's it and i guess ted has a copy from each of us and and the clerk has a copy so if anybody wanted to see a cop um his uh
169eval similar to what we do with the the superintendent i was trying to think along those those those lines um get to filling in whatever you say mr jeremy you're you're the chair get to filling it out carl okay you've had them two weeks i'll fill it out three weeks anybody else mine's filled out miss burnett do you just want a synopsis do you want a total number do you want me to go page by page what's the total number for starters one for mine is four okay and so once again none of this has been given to mr doran do you want to give us a synopsis of your findings comments etc sure i just found that my experience has been that not all board members are treated equally i've experienced situations where i've
170been intimidated on the phone and um and in a couple situations in particular and during meetings there's been some demonstration that not always suggestive of criticism constructive criticism especially at the june board meeting then on the school board law policy 103 directly related to the school board attorney and request that we drove up a three to five year contract and specifically says in our policy that each year we are supposed to gauge this and so to me we're out of policy because it should be a yearly contract by policy and i would think that that would be something that that should be known by all including our attorney um communication again i just think that um for me what i've experienced is the communication has not been equal and at times even rough directed to
171some of us and i don't feel like i can trust our attorney to have a professional conversation because of things that were said that i trusted him to say to keep between us at a meeting that's pretty much the synopsis the rest it's it's about the same so i've got this all written down let's go get a copy okay anybody else i have mine filled out okay my total is two okay you discuss the synopsis i'm going to be very brief with it because i don't believe in airing dirty laundry is does our students and staff any good i have been put in situations where i was threatened and then received a text trying to skew what was said and turn it into a different type of statement i've had a family member that was
172texted and asked to set up a meeting thinking i guess that that would um you know which i'm sorry but reaching out to one of my family members and asking them i don't feel as appropriate i don't have trust i i believe that my own personal um that personally i've kind of been drugged through the mud with some statements that have been made that i've never hidden what i went through but it's not a topic for someone else to share i i tried to say it at the last meeting when all of the items were being cut out of here and i want to say this i actually thought that the first evaluation we started with i had it filled out when i came to that meeting and had i been talking about that first
173document prior to all the slashing of the categories that came out of that along with you know we had more choices on how to rate mr doran would have gotten a much better score from me on that document than what he's getting on this document because this document limited it down to um a smaller number of items and it also was it's either satisfactory or unsatisfactory and so that in turn hurt the score that he received from me i um it's like i said my phone rang one day while i was already on the phone with someone else and he had i truly believe he had to have had the email already prepared and when i didn't answer the phone by switching over from the person that i was speaking to an email arrived immediately
174stating that i did not take his call so i believe in people working together as a team but that's not some if i called him and he didn't answer immediately even though he's our employee i would not send an email to all of you saying i just called mr doran and he did not answer my call but that's what he did so he made a phone call to me i was on the phone and i did not answer the i did not hang up from the other person or switch over and an email immediately went out i wrote in and this stuff's there and i wrote an email requesting some information about a decision that was being made where each of us were not asked and i just in the email just stated the facts
175of what i thought and the response that i received back was not professional so i have some issues with trust professionalism and being threatened i i don't think you know if i were a principal and a teacher threatened me how would i take that i mean so that's that's kind of the situation we're in as we were reminded last year at the june 22nd meeting when it was kind of a surprise that mr doran's contract was up and the statement made to us was you only have two employees and you should know when and i also go back to the fact that we have a school board policy and he's never been evaluated thank you miss gothberg i've worked with um mr doran um see three months shy of eight years i've never once had
176a problem if i had an issue i called him if i couldn't get a hold of him i left a message he always called me back i don't i don't i can't begin to fathom your experience because it has not been mine i gave him i gave him a 19 all maximum possible points it seems as though i have always had the belief that there's an issue you have to talk about it i have done that with former superintendents i've done that with our school board attorney i do not believe in disparaging people in public i believe in talking it out in private i'd like to know when you were able to talk to to mr doran about your issues was he aware of those issues did you put it in writing i mean i've
177always had access again as i said before i accidentally called him at what 7 7 30 in the morning and he was groggy of course but also i apologized and he said no problem i'm here whenever you need me and i have called him when he was in montana i've accidentally called him when he was out socializing but he always took time for me i have not had that experience that you that you both seem to have and also we did have three categories that we did at the workshop and then mr mr persis suggested that we go to two it was a three to two vote to accept these two i voted no for it as well as mr colon the rest of you said it was okay so i know there are only
178two but still you all voted for the two i have written out my comments it is i have no qualms letting it be public i am perfectly happy with his firm remember we hired his firm and so it's it's important and i don't know any firm that would take on a school district as large as ours for a period of 12 months especially when you have to have the entire firm involved the last time we were here we had mr sims took care of us uh we've had mr sims in executive session i'm sorry dewolfe mr wolfe oh shoot i'm sorry it was mr wolfe i apologize um that's my attorney and it's it's um thank you for the correction i appreciate it it's um and miss yoon has helped us uh with charter school
179legis litigate litigation his his secretaries have always been very wonderful very clear in everything that we've done you know i i heard the term and i felt just quite disparaged and i felt very embarrassed by it i heard the term somebody call us the firing squad and if you're going after another person this is the fourth person that's being sought after the firing of margaret smith tom russell dr fritz and now going after mr doran this has to stop we have to be a model for our students we have to work things out we have to problem solve much like we ask our students to do if we have an issue we need to work it out it has to be done in the office i had an issue as when i was chair when
180mr dr fritz was returning back uh and dr baldwin was still interim superintendent we met mr doran's office we had a nice long conversation issues were discussed but it was also done very professionally and very openly i was getting ready to have another one with him when the board voted to fire him of course i did not it was a four to one vote because i was you don't buy her superintendent in the spring we did that to mr russell i saw what happened as a result and then again this time so it's maybe i just think differently i don't know i just i'm a firm believer in relationships i'm a firm believer in being honest and open and discussing issues we have to be i guess somewhat disobedient at times but his job is
181to give us his legal opinion it may not agree with our opinion and his job is to protect us from straying so that we don't get into trouble with the public we don't violate sunshine laws so that we don't violate each other sanctity of individual thought so that we don't cross the line and and us take the role of superintendent when we're not we've hired our county leader right here we do not cross that line and try to enter into her lane we don't enter a lane of anyone else we have to be mindful of what our jobs are and our jobs are we are all politicians i was forced to be one in order to be on the board because i consider myself an educator through and through even as a parent we're educators
182so i want to make sure i'm a model for my students for my teachers and for the almost eight thousand teachers and staff that we have employed and for the parents who are and the family members and our community members which is why i voted to be part of the league of cities even though at first i didn't think it was necessary and i'm very mindful of the the dollars that are going out the door but i knew it was time to start anew i heard what miss burnett had to say last time and and also miss haynes what she had to say and how beneficial it could be and i totally agree it can be beneficial so let's try it let's try it and see but i have had my evaluation finished for a
183while it's um it was to me it was a no-brainer and so i don't know who to whom we turn this into mr persis do you have a number uh yeah i have a number you want my phone number my social security number what do you want i i look uh each of you you know i respect uh what he said you have to say i mean it's just like when when you evaluate the superintendent you know you may feel one one way somebody may feel the other way i mean that doesn't mean that you're wrong and i'm right or i'm right and you're wrong i mean you know you you're on this board you were elected and i respect whatever you feel is right and and obviously what this is saying is is really
184your feeling about these things my my total score of chairman colon was 11. any comments you'd like to make on that well i i would just like to say that a year ago when when this was coming up you all know how i felt that i felt like you know because it was kind of like late in the game and it was june and we had no place to go because we weren't going to meet again uh uh you know i was i had the the notion of extending ted's contract till the end of that calendar year to give us time to do what it says in school board policy where it says that uh should the school board have a need to retain a new school board attorney due to resignation termination or non-reappointment
185of his contract of the previous school board attorney then the following guidelines should be followed that we advertise and that we uh review the the proposals that are received and you know try to get at least three and rank the top three and then we would pick and you know that's what i thought that we would do but um as it turned out it was the will of the board to amend what mr doran had asked which was the five years and to put it into into um into three years so you know that's that's where i am thank you chair so for me my number was nine and i'll share the reasons why one of the key roles of the school board is to review and revise policies and just recently we were sent
186the document where there is a pot there are several policies that have not been reviewed in 48 years and when i think of the constant over those many years you know and mind you that just means we have work to do and i'm honored to be a part of that work but it was very concerning that number one we had policies as a board that you know in in however many years nobody's ever said hey why aren't we reviewing policies mr pendley did correct but that's again there's part we have policies in the book that were last revised in 1974 and so i i think that's an essential role of the board and and prior to being here and mind you you know i'm equally as guilty i spent four years here and so thankfully
187we'll be able to write that wrong and so that's a concern the fact that we had a policy in the books that said it was a year-to-year contract yet we approve the three-year i mean whether it's appropriate or not our policy did not you know if the policy is no good change it but that wasn't even and and i'll echo you know last june when we faced this it was um it was very last minute um communication you know again we go back to policies and so um i i find that that that part because we we have very limited roles and policies probably our largest role and you know as it relates to communication skills you know ensuring an effective working relationship with all board members is essential to the operation of the district
188everyone's entitled to the same information regard despite the mechanism for delivery defining which method serves each board member will be key to the success of the board when it came to professionalism my comments were it is expectation that the school board attorney always supports and stands by the decisions made by the board regardless of the audience at hands any attempts to undermine the board's decision advocate or express any other position other than determined by a majority vote diminishes the authority of the governing body and so i've got some concerns there in our roles we are often confronted with opinions and personalities and ensuring an even tone during public meetings is is my expectation even for myself even when somebody is is is sitting there saying things that are not necessarily true and the last comment
189i made was this is a baseline assessment this is something that we created just last month and i truly personally see it as a baseline assessment again mr doran has not reviewed these has not seen these i haven't seen each other's i would say the tally the vote was 95 45 out of 95 potential points and mind you each of us gave our own but there really is no we we did not set what point system would even mean because again this is just an evaluation tool we created just last month in my personal opinion i would say that i think in fairness because we just created this is i'm just one of five we just created this tool we just provided the feedback i think the fair thing to do would be to submit
190it for approval because we're each there's really nothing to approve we're giving our our tally and um and allow mr doran the opportunity to respond because that's the right thing to do i mean it's it's truly we can say you know he's just hearing this for the first time and you know if he decides that you know he wants to come up with an improvement plan something like that we can certainly have that discussion if if it is the pleasure of the board to do something different then that could be placed on a future agenda we have we now have an evaluation but but honestly in all fairness because we just created this tool there are some serious concerns and i don't think mr doran is is not realizing that and uh i think that
191you know he should have the opportunity to address our evaluations and that doesn't preclude us from anything in the future just gives them the time to be able to to address them and come up with hey you know miss miss burnett why why did you feel this way or mr cologne why did why did you feel that way i mean i i to me that's the fair thing to do but i'm only one so i'll open the floor otherwise i think you know we do have a three-year contract right now so you know that wasn't so much the question that was on the table as much as it was getting an evaluation on the books so um that's my thought i'll open the floor miss burnett thank you um miss cuthbert you know you mentioned
192private conversation i would love to have done this in private but law doesn't allow that so we are where we are right um i think we have to do this in the open am i correct or incorrect i think it's always better to do things in the open yeah so so i mean we don't have a choice for that as far as making any personal phone calls when you don't trust somebody you can't make a personal phone call to to do that and as you mentioned there were conversations had and definitely i was there was an attempt to intimidate me at least twice on conversations and i shut them down and i think that we have to have a board attorney that we can trust and while there's other things that you said he supports
193us on things absolutely agreed but but i do feel like we have to have a board attorney that we can try that we can trust and and i hear you on he needs to have the opportunity to to review these and we come back i i hear you on that i i'm very disappointed that we still have not addressed the policy that says this is a year to year and yes you're right it's on us but honestly too and and i was new to the board last when this occurred but and i think that we're working better towards becoming um are making our opportunities better every day um when when we review something the policy needs to be there with with whatever we we are reviewing and i think that could have been um addressed
194more appropriately had we all been a little more on top of that so thank you and i agree with you i mean we're learning the same way we've learned that we have policies again that haven't been reviewed in longer than i've been alive and and i didn't even read them to see if they were even still even pertinent i mean that's embarrassing puts it into perspective it's embarrassing yeah that's all right and so um anybody else miss uh haynes i actually agree with um what miss burnett said because last year when this was brought up on that june 20 second meeting one of the things that i asked mr doran specifically in the meeting was is there any legislation is there any policies or anything that would keep us from having a five-year contract because
195when i did all of my work in federal programs we weren't allowed to have um multi-year contracts and and that's why i asked that i mean there are rules and laws or state laws and federal laws about what type of contracts you can have when you have to put out a request for proposal you know and and the process you have to follow and so you know one question that's never been answered yet and i've asked it several times and i've been asking it since even i think last year you know when did when did mr doran actually start how many years has he been in this position like i've never gotten an actual answer on that but when i did ask last year like was there anything and and i agree the policy since
196we had a policy and and i apologize that i didn't know that you know what all it said and i told you when i learned a lot of things talking to board members in other districts that do this every year you know they evaluate their attorney and a lot of them don't even have attorneys that have a separate business and work the way that ours does a lot of them have in-house attorneys and things like that but you know i specifically asked that question last year and i believe had the policy been attached right there at the same time that there was a five-year contract attached in board docs i wouldn't have had to ask that question and i would have known what the answer was and i said as i said to you previously
197mr persis i apologized for not agreeing with you a year ago you know and making this a one-year contract okay but when i even brought up that question there was anger okay that that's what was expressed and then when i talked about never having done anything over three years in the position that i previously had been in because of the rules and then you talked about a year you know when we took a break that's when it was kind of said okay you know like the anger could go away and he would take a three-year you know and i i'm seriously i'm sorry to the community i'm sorry to everyone that i didn't know that ins and outs of that policy and that i did not make that decision with you a year ago but
198here we are faced now and there's been more things happen and you know some of it's been said well because the chair directed him to do things and i think to some degree i need to understand how the chair can have sole authority to do some things when we're all on equal basis like we're all five of us are elected officials we all you know nothing is different it's just each year we select someone to sit in the chair spot and my thought is whatever information is shared with the chair that same information should be shared with the other four people that are not sitting in that chair in a timely manner and in the same way and so you know when i got the phone call and i was threatened i ended that phone
199call by saying i'm not going to continue this conversation so miss cuthbert i ended it in a very professional way but it's really hard for me to want to have a phone call conversation with mr thank you ms cuthbert i challenge all of you then and should be part of the policy that before there's an evaluation that before it's made public you all have a meeting with him whether it's superintendent before an evaluation is done with the superintendent you should each of you individually sit down and discuss it and that way it's a one-to-one you get answers right away problems can be solved and issues and maybe some misinterpretations can be taken care of because only through communication can that be resolved that way who's ever sitting at this dance is not blindsided by what's
200going on it's important for us to trust one another but when dr fritz sent us that email that he was considering not asking for a um to ask for his contract to be renewed within five minutes he just sent it to us five board members within five minutes i get a phone call from the news journal asking my opinion about the issue and i said how did you know a board member called me and told me now that makes me feel my four board members had to call the news journal immediately i don't know who it was i didn't ask it's none of my business i just know it was done so i had to move on from that i want to work with you you're my colleagues but we all have to trust i
201understand that but we need to sit down and talk to the individual if we've got a beef we have to sit down and talk privately and if you need we do that when when you're a teacher you get your rep if you're a union member you get your rep and you talk there's the parent there the principal's there you have a talk there's always an appeal when it comes to signing your evaluation you can always appeal it there's always a process but you don't say your opinion with no no idea what is going to be done in front for the first time in public you need to have some kind of preparation it's only the humane thing to do so in the future since you're setting this policy up before these evaluations come to us
202and it becomes public the person we're evaluating who's our employee deserves the same treatment as all of our other employees have a conversation before principal recommends i mean we went through this couple of years ago when teachers were not uh the first year or third year when they were not uh re-upped uh reapplied or re-employed and they were let go they wanted to know the reason why i know legally there's some ramifications to that but it should have shown up in some evaluations along the years so at least the teacher would have some kind of idea what's coming up not completely blindsided so i challenge all of you and i hope who's ever the chair you knows next time or if you you do this you set this rolling everyone should be required to sit
203down and have a private conversation with the one who's being evaluated in order to get some of these issues healed because as long as it stayed private it's going to turn around in our minds and it's going to eat at us and that's not good for any of us i want us all to heal that's my mama talking you know it's my mother so that's what i think needs to be done we need to be able to trust each other and not be blindsided when we come here thank you mr chair all right so mr dorn you have anything you want to add at this time i mean i think i again and and procedurally and again this is something we've never done before hasn't been done in a million years so or at least
20448 so do we want to submit these and bring them back for approval once they're all tallied up and it just seems that not giving the opportunity to address them if it's going to happen as a result of this then nothing the answer is nothing because the reality is that what's a question today is the evaluation of the of the board attorney it's not anything else so we're doing the evaluation now again i think i think in all fairness because mr doran hasn't seen these before you should be given the opportunity to address them with each of us and see if we can make it better i mean there's a lot of work to be done 45 out of 95 is not good and i don't think anybody in this room can say that that's
205good and there's five of us right and so only one person gave anything about 50 again that's as we bring these together i i think you know giving that's personally and nobody's throwing out any other ideas so i feel like i'm the only one throwing out ideas here well i did at the meeting yes so i i think you know being given the opportunity to and then you know doesn't preclude us from anything else in the future it just basically says we have this here and it gives him the opportunity to address it with each of us individually and go from there that's my fault i'm struggling with an individual meeting i'm being honest because whatever happens in that individual meeting it's he said she said or or whatever and i i mean i come
206and i'm always respectful and professional but that line is not what has happened when it's been one-on-one so i'm struggling with that do we have any provisions in the contract for remediation i'm just trying to think what how we could address this without putting district staff in a position because this is really and so i almost want to make a call to andrea messina to see what you know if it's even if that's fair if it's even you know what next steps would be i think that's a great idea we'll take a 15-minute break what what what is it oh you mean now i'm just gonna call it right now it's um so you guys are okay then with accepting the results and then and moving on from there well look maybe i need to
207say something you know i've worked with i went back and looked i wish i could remember the exact number it's about it was approximately 20 board members i've served under and superintendents and many of those board members are aware of what's going on here and they've reached out to me there isn't a single board member that i've worked under that would not have given me i believe a hundred percent on all of these categories so we obviously have a problem because for 20 20 board members and superintendents felt like uh some of them use terms like you're the biggest blessing that ever happened to me and so uh i look forward to to talking and meeting with each of you individually if you want to bring somebody with you that's fine um i don't care
208who it is there's a number of things here that are based on misinformation um it needs to be said that not one of you has ever privately or publicly criticized me before tonight and not one of you called me and asked me any questions about any of the decisions that you were making um you know mr clone i'm mostly anxious to meet with you about one of your number one concerns because you're going to find out that that is not my job so you know uh you know part part of what's come out of this in my mind is that you all don't have a good handle on what my job is and my job is what you want it to be and it will be what you want it to be and i will
209do whatever needs to be done to fulfill those expectations um but historically uh you know my job has been as it has been for the last 20 years and much of what you're focused on is is not something i've ever been required in fact i've asked to be involved in some of these things and have been rejected for financial reasons because the district doesn't want me to you know participate in for instance policies because they didn't want to pay for it so that's fine but um you know i i look forward to looking at the score sheet looking at the the individual item that's rated and finding out the specifics factually that um that you know you you believe and i'm your subordinate so it's i'm not going to debate you over it it's whatever
210you say it is but i'm anxious to learn about that um there is information in the record so to speak uh that undermines some of the criticisms here and i'm i it's my job to protect you i every board member i've ever worked under would tell you that i did everything in my power to protect them both legally and politically and um and that's true today so you know for we can you know i don't want to publicly air or respond in a public way to some of these things i would rather explain them to you privately and if you still feel there's an issue then we can come back and talk about it but um you know i was i asked for the opportunity to bring information uh that would assist you like we
211do with the superintendent you know superintendent historically prepares a package of information to show what you've done and etc and i was told that was not allowed to provide any information to the board so you know i mean it's it's i guess my point is and then i'll stop talking everything that you all are saying all the decisions you've made any score sheet you filled out you've done it without talking to me and making sure that you knew what what you know what what what my job was um one board member you know was hand threw around one of my billing statements and said you know don't provide us free information we we already know what you do well that tells me you don't know what i do for the board because their one billing
212statement is it doesn't cover what i do so i want to educate everybody on what i do i also want to hear from all of you on what you want me to do um so that i i know what the job description is uh and you know i think it'll resolve 90 of you know what people have said here mr purses um yeah you know i was trying to find uh somewhere in the policy where it it said that we had to do the do an evaluation is it it's not in there it's not in a policy that we know it just says that annually you're gonna decide but it says annually it sort of implies that the contract would always be a one-year contract in that every june we would decide whether to renew
213or not and in effect that would be the evaluation right if your contracts are renewed then i guess you get the support of the board and if it's not then i guess you don't so we're sort of like not doing either one of those we're in the middle of a first year of a three-year contract rather than hiding level one and we we created an evaluation instrument that we didn't really have to do but we did it now and that's fine i do think that it takes two to have a meeting so if ted calls me and says hey carl i want to talk talk to you about this and i say you know ted i don't really want to talk about it it is i feel the way i feel and that's it that's
214it so then we don't have a meeting i mean you know i mean these things are there's maybe one or two things out of all of this that really needs any kind of clarification it's really the way i feel it's my my opinion it's it's miss burnett's opinion it's ms hayne's opinion it's your opinion it's it's it's the way we feel about your performance on each of these areas so um you know i i think again that he needs to have this this written copy and a written copy needs to be presented to the clerk and it's a public record miss bernat thank you and and i agree they should go to the clerk and we can um actually i'd like a copy back because i hand wrote mine um but but when when you
215say mr persis that we're kind of in the middle i mean we've been asking for this since april and it kept getting pushed off so we could have addressed this in july had had everybody been on top of their game and i've been asking and asking and i've said multiple times how disappointed i was that this wasn't addressed and it wasn't on the july meeting so in my opinion we still have something to address and if we want to do it after he has the opportunity to meet with us and look at this that's fine but we still have this policy to address which is that the retention of the school board attorney shall be placed on the agenda of the first meeting in july of each year and that has still not been done
216and and i think that that that's where i am thanks sayings and not to contradict um mrs burnett but we actually learned about this by attending training at fsba you know the end of november beginning of december and i actually believe i mentioned it the first time at the meeting in january so you know we're how many months from january and every time i kind of brought up um this you know it just nothing ever happened and and so you know we figured out early on we were out of compliance with the policy and so it's taken a long time and and yes it may not say an evaluation but it does say that we would yearly decide you know what's going to happen and why i pushed for an evaluation actually was because that's
217what other districts shared they were doing and that's what we learned i mean you were sitting in the same training that i was sitting in and you were sitting in that same training and the first thing i said when i came back from that training is both of you had previously been chairs and had it not been shared in the trainings that you went to you know so you said through chair training and they never talked about attorneys well that was that was the i don't know i don't remember how much time they spent on it but it was it was a pretty lengthy piece in the trainings that we set in and i was very surprised that because miss cuthbert you've been here almost eight years and mr purchase you've completed six so you
218have more time than any of the rest of us and both of you had previously been chairs until mr clone became the chair i mean mrs burnett and i have never you know been in that spot and that's why i brought it up in january when we had a meeting and i said we set in training and learned this so i'm with mrs burnett on the fact we still have i mean we have a policy and we're not following it and you know and this like i said this could have been different but we whittled it down to this and um i and and you're right it's my opinion okay just like yours is your opinion so i don't know what there is i don't know that my opinion can be changed i guess my
219question is do we want to put giving him the opportunity to meet with us do we want to put that on the next agenda as a decision yay nay or what what decision well the every year the board every july the board is supposed to make a decision whether or not to retain the attorney every year that's the policy so [Music] giving the opportunity to review these with each board member because again that's a policy god knows from 119 2003 was when it was last 2003 so that's a long time it's 20 years it's going to be on the agenda next time i'm asking a question i'm fine with that i'm asking a question i'm based on the commentary that we're hearing will you you say it again i didn't hear exactly so we have
220to according to our policy we have to make a decision every year on whether or not we are going to retain the attorney for a year am i am i do we have consensus on that except you have a three-year contract and the contract before that was five years well i'm going with a policy because we shouldn't have had a three-year contract the policy hasn't been followed in 20 years ago presently written was there when i came in and it and it's it doesn't comport with our structure well and that and that's our problem that's that's the challenge here and that's where i struggle when i say if it didn't com you know that i mean that's something that directly relates to you and so if it didn't conform to what we're actually doing then
221that policy should have come back up for revision but it never has but mr colon i am specifically prohibited from addressing changes in policy by the district that's not my role and i have been specifically prohibited from being involved in changing policy since the day i arrived 20 years ago even when i asked to participate yeah i was rejected and the reason was because the district didn't want to pay me to handle policy so if you want me to be involved in policy i will be involved going forward absolutely i mean i work with mr pendley on it and we can come up with policies again again excuse me thank you and so the policy is actually in place whether we like it or we don't that's our policy if we didn't change it in
22220 years that's our problem that's the board's problem but the policy is there and i can't say to miss burnett oh we're going to ignore that policy i mean the phone use policy was last revised in 1978 could you imagine how much has changed since then and so that that's why i'm that's why i'm saying based on our policy it is saying the board has to make this decision every year and miss burnett is not out of place in saying that based on our policy we need to do this that's not out of place whether we like it or we don't it's not out of place now i again say we i'm one of five i'm throwing out an idea given in all fairness that we just created this tool that opportunity to have these
223discussions and come back and formally put that on the agenda if that's the case that we want if there's a consensus for that if there you know if there isn't a consensus and everybody says well you know what you're right we haven't done this this way for the last 20 years and let's just let it be which clearly doesn't seem like that's a consensus okay then we deal with it but just because it wasn't done doesn't mean that it makes the policy not be in place i can't say that to miss burnett with a straight face so for me in all fairness and and i'll even go back to something jamie said when when we looked at this evaluation tool it was all or nothing and i was a nay for that reason because i
224thought it was not it wasn't a good thing because it didn't leave room for you know what maybe it happened sometimes but not all the time but i think that clearly there are at least four of us that have some concerns and i think that given mr doran the opportunity maybe i don't know the history on it uh you know i could you know i my questions would be more okay i get it district policy but school board policy i mean especially one that says you're going to be evaluated every year i'd be concerned about that one or your contract's going to be yearly i'd be concerned about that one we all miss the mark i'm guilty we're all guilty we have not been doing our job over the last 40 years almost 50 years
225there's policies that haven't been touched and i'm proud to say that i'll be here to help bring these up to date and allow our public input to come and and our district to revise to make sure that our policies are up to date that they actually apply anymore you know other than the ones that we regulatorily change because something changes in the law and we have to change those i mean we've got a lot of work to do but we haven't been doing our job but i can't say to miss burnett miss burnett no we're not going to do that because no it is our policy so i'm gonna throw out that proposal that we come back if we want it on the agenda we'll put it on the agenda i have no problem doing
226that if that's the consensus okay um as far as doing it in july you know what we haven't been in compliance for 300 years i'm okay with 301 sorry i mean it's embarrassing i mean it is embarra i am i am so embarrassed that it's taken four years for me to realize that hey you know what because you know what there is no school board member handbook and we we we trust that what we're being told to do and guided to do and is the right thing only to find out we hadn't been doing it and that goes to school board members before us i mean again there are policies on here that have not been touched in allocation of funds for textbooks library materials other instructional materials was last updated january 24th 1978. i
227was born in 77. that's a lot of school board members have been through here we can right the wrong so that's my proposal again if you guys want it in the form of a motion i'll pass the gavel if we just want consensus that's fine however you all want to do it i really don't um i'll be quiet ms haynes you're next on the so i've asked this question before too and i don't know that i've gotten an answer on this mr doran the very first year you started did you have a one-year contract a two-year contract a three-year contract a four-year contract or a five-year contract so when you were hired and you originally started you were under a one-year contract and of course because the board wasn't familiar with me okay but i've
228talked about this publicly before there were trade-offs i had a five-year contract and agreed not to increase my fees i worked for 12 years without any pay raise 12 years i did that and i publicly talked about it you can go back and pull the tapes i did it for the stability of knowing that i had the work in order to to ensure that my employees who have been with me for over 20 years would be taken care of um i did ask for and i did receive an increase recently no one had any of these issues when that occurred but you know it's as i said the the contract before this one was five years long and those were the the decisions that were being made i mean essentially i'm locked in at my
229present present rates again for three years which is fine i accept that it does say you can give me a raise but it doesn't require it so there have been trade-offs over the years were you on the board when this policy was revised on november 11th 2000 and i mean were you were you the board attorney when this policy was revised in november 11 i i might have been i don't i don't remember now i'd have to go back and look it was right around that time that i came on but i don't know what the revision was specifically and i don't recall it being revised i do know that the policy that exists today is the policy that existed when i started and it does not in any way shape or form match up
230to the structure of the district which has been approved by opaga probably two three times so um you know i mean those these are just the facts my thought is that the minute the contract was changed then the policy should have been changed to reflect the change that the board at that time made and and so we are and i'm not excusing where we're at right now but we've also been through a pandemic that no other board ever went through which spent took a lot of our time i go back to last june though when the five-year contract all of a sudden just popped up that like we had no warning you know that we walked into a meeting with no warning that that's what it was and there were some negative statements made that
231night and so i said well i'm going to write it down but i asked specific questions even that night but you know the paul i wish the policy had been there i i go back to say and apologize and i think just because something wasn't followed and hasn't been followed for 20 years or 15 years or 10 or 40 that doesn't give us the right to continue not to follow it so i'm for following the policy mr doran you mentioned that you had asked in the past about being part of the policy change do you have documentation proof of that no mr kism is dead otherwise i would have a witness well i mean i didn't know if you had an email or i i of course not have emails we were talking about how
232many years ago or if you had a scanned document from the arc from the uh dinosaur days it would have kind of been it would not have been based on an email it was based on uh conversations with richard kisman all right thank you mr purses yeah thank you uh yeah well i was looking back in the art archives here and it says that uh that ted according to the news journal you've been the school board attorney since 2002. all right that makes sense mr chair uh i would prefer yeah because what what what we're in the middle of here is we have a contract that isn't in alignment with our policy and we can't go back and say well ted throw your contract away because we're going to do it just a an annual
233one and i mean that's that's just not what you do we were both parties and we agreed to his contract this contract to me is what his contract is unless that what you're saying is that uh you want to terminate uh him for for just for just cause here and um the law enforcement the law firm and and that can be done at any time at any time what i would prefer to see rather than put it on the the school board agenda because i think we're going to get right back into this just you know just going around and around if you want to schedule it as a workshop item to talk about how we want to change uh policy 103 get input from all of us and and maybe from from mr pendley
234too how we would want to change policy 103 maybe we don't want to say in an annual contract maybe we want to change that to a two-year contract and maybe we want to change that change that date upon which we want to look at it it doesn't have to be june maybe it should be december i mean we could make it whatever month you know works works for us but i would rather us talk about it in a workshop setting with some with some counsel here to kind of guide us uh because most of the language in this to me is is still very clear very good it makes a lot of sense um we're just in a little bit of a pickle now because we have a contract that's not an agreement with our
235with our policy uh but i i think i think unless there's three board members that feel differently that uh you know that we would we would stay with mr doran through through the duration of his of his contract so so while i agree at looking at the policy i also believe that 45 out of 95 means there's some concerns and i think given that opportunity to address those concerns is the fair thing to do again he's just seeing this today for the first time that's and so if we want to workshop it next time i'll be more than happy to put it on a workshop if you all feel that there's benefit to that and we can go through and and go through the through you know what our meetings were like and go from
236there if you all want a workshop that's i'm not opposed to that i agree with i think we do address the policy i was fine with putting it on the agenda next time okay if you want a workshop and put it on the agenda we could do both do both because you know we are required once a year to say yay or nay well i think we need we need to address the policy the contract is out of sorts with evaluation and we're doing a few things for the first time without him knowing how he's going to be evaluated which doesn't seem to be all that fair and the contract is i mean he has a contract until 2024. so and there's going to be a change in board members at least one you've been
237reelected uh we still have to wait to see what's going to happen with one or two of the races and i mean we've got more people coming in uh miss burnett still has two years of her term as well as mr purses so it's um i think we need she's right we need to address the the policy we want to workshop the policy basically also again it doesn't take away the fact that by policy we have to make a decision because you know if we decide to change it you have like any policy we have to advertise the change you know you have to have a policy in place in order to make a new contract i'm okay with workshopping and if we i'm putting it on the agenda we can do both yeah and
238that gives everybody an opportunity to discuss it and and i would encourage mr doran to set up meetings with each of us however you feel his best and and i don't know how we would find a mediator for this folks who don't feel comfortable i guess we couldn't we can speak to andrea messina see if we can get some guidance on that because i don't want to put any district staff in a position that is is is not theirs to be in um mr clone may i say something yes so you mentioned that there's elections i i don't i don't agree with that this is our job now not no representatives who might have a future opinion i'm just trying to give credit to those who might have a future opinion who has to work
239within with this attorney or another attorney there's no disparagement intended right so is there a consensus yeah yeah okay so workshop workshop and we'll put it on the agenda based on the decision and our current policy that's fine all right mr doran you got work to do 45 out of 95 is concerning and i don't think that you're that's absent to you all right next item on the agenda and so do we have a motion to accept i don't know how we would do that because you really can't we just hand these in we're gonna hand them in and that's it so there's no emotion he said so we're good so i will man celeste would you mind coming around i'll get you a new one i guess it's public record now there it goes
240all right next item public uh comment do we need a ten minute let's take a ten minute break just the teacher you guys want to play your names are you put my name on that you guys want to keep going in the right hand corner all right let's do it first next up willie williams come on up welcome mr williams share that greetings chairman cologne superintendent dr vaughn school board members and members of the audience my name is willie frank williams jr and i live in daytona beach florida i love my community and i'm concerned about the state of our schools in the daytona beach area i believe it's a state of emergency does anyone care about the marginalized class in our world our nation our state and volusia county we have much to celebrate
241because we are almost at pre-pandemic levels of achievement and we are closing the achievement gap is this true or is this the narrative how are our high needs schools doing in our marginalized students black hispanic and students with disabilities our focus tonight is on our daytona beach schools fsa spring 22 proficiency rates palm terrace elementary ela 34 math 40 science 33 west side elementary school ela 32 math 32 science 32 trt small ela 27 math 26 science 34 campbell middle school ela 29 math 30 science 29 percent mainland high school ela 36 percent math 24 science 55 64 of mainland's 10th graders did not meet graduation requirements in ela other than title one support did you know that you only get additional funds when you become a d or f school then the money goes
242away when you become a c when did seeds become acceptable two of the goals our superintendent has set for volusia county schools are number one to be in a district number two no d or f schools we have a rule in our home with our kids an a is a standard b is acceptable c means we have a problem even if we became an a district do you know that our marginalized students can still suffer many articles have been written about the inequities of standardized tests standardized tests measure the wealth of families you can tell the school grade by the zip code poverty is a key factor one key factor is generational wealth is home ownership here are the latest numbers for home ownership white ownership 70 hispanic ownership 50 black ownership 43 percent that's
243a 10-year low for african-americans standardized tests in school grades perpetuate the lie that one group is smarter than the other we have to begin to have difficult conversations on how we together can become better to that end madam superintendent along with my guy dr jerry l pike senior we'd like to request a meeting in the daytona beach community to talk about the new computer-based assessment that is here and how we begin to build supports for our schools that will last a lifetime i will send a formal request to you school board member barnett and school board member purses i recall seeing the sign in one daytona celebrating that palm terrace had made it because of a c grade i thought what if we had a sign in the pavilion in port orange congratulations sweetwater elementary
244we did it we already see what would be the reaction to me it was heartbreaking what do i want the last line of our pledge of allegiance recite it perfectly justice for all for me c stands for crushing to god be the glory thank you mr saudi robert saudi dwardi robert yes robert swaddy i have two cards i have a robert card and then i have a robert and annie robert and annie are you guys together yes we are okay three minutes each or you'll speak again after sorry so you want to go first i don't care how you did i mean yes yes okay go for it three minutes each i think we're all exhausted okay sorry very welcome okay um i'm annie swatty this is my husband robert swati and we're here advocating
245for my son lance okay lance is a very happy look at his face high functioning down syndrome kid okay and this is a letter i attached inside for all of you guys to read and i wish you would read it okay it's from my son i helped him write it but this is his story the story goes all the way back the story goes all the way back i fight for his inclusion okay so this is called inc my mission is inclusion not exclusion okay my son has currently been excluded okay he has a full inclusion program he was at obms mr perseus know and mr krajewski may rest in peace created a great inclusion program for him he was on the basketball team he went to seabreeze high school all of it got diminished
246seabees high school will never follow an iep i have been fighting fighting fighting finally last year after so many mediations due process i'm not going to any more of those okay i'm calling ocr department of justice you name it everyone and that's why i'm here at the board i need your help my son got placed i had the help of aria hair she was wonderful she came to my last annual iep because i reached out to her she was a believer in inclusion okay there's not a lot of people that believe in it and certainly sea breeze high school is one of them okay so my son deserves a fair chance so does all the other kids okay to read their iep and follow it my son had an effective iep it got diminished as
247soon as he got to sea breeze i've been fighting fighting fighting so now i'm in a position where my son got placed in a building 15. i am now fighting about building 15. building 15 is a separate building on campus segregated from the rest of the campus and it's like 1950 when you hit the kids my son is not ever going to be justified to be in that building neither says anyone else because they take no inclusion to any of those kids zero inclusions no electives no exposure to the gen ed okay that was like 1950. this is 2022. ada laws section 504 avoid students being discriminated against okay they're operating on an outdated ineffective system hiding the kids and that is not right okay so it's cruel immoral illegal a systematic change needs done
248as soon as possible not just for my son but for the rest of them okay we are taxpayers we paid or have our kids educated not confined okay educated included and they deserve the whole campus okay please help unchange the change they made on my son and save the kids in building 15. if the boy's mission is to improve education overall with all gen ed kids why not the special needs kids too why are you ignoring them and hiding them away in the building that's it sir you've got three minutes thank you okay so let me talk about i'm robert i'm just talking about building 15. it's a secluded building it's it's terrible i went to pick up my son there the kids were outside chaotic people are screaming and my son's back up against
249the wall head down every time i pick him up he won't talk to me for hours for hours we have to coax him down he's so traumatized from being in that building they didn't want to put him on a bus with the same kids and it's just too traumatizing i don't know if you guys ever been in that building or been around those kids but there's a maybe there's a reason to have a classroom for those severely disabled kids who cannot cannot talk and scream and act out but down syndrome kids autistic kids don't need to be in that same classroom they're high functioning kids they've taken away their electives they've taken their ieps which is called an individualized educational plan and they made it a group plan and put them all in this building
250and i don't know what they do in there but i know my son shuts down and i know these other kids are deprived they're taking away their my son and his friend isaac both had choir and keyboard last year this first time for isaac to ever have an elective his mom has been fighting for him to have inclusion all his life and he's he's been doing great now they took this way these kids love their choir class they love their keyboard class now they're sad they're upset that they can't go out they can't even go out of that classroom they don't go to lunch with the gen ed kids they don't get to walk in the hallways of genetic kids they don't get they they we drop them off in a building in the back
251of the school nobody knows it's there you pick them up from the same place nobody knows there they wouldn't let us drop our son off in front of the school with all the other kids to let him walk the classroom and they said oh no absolutely not why is that he knows where to go this is unfair discriminatory wrong these kids are misplaced they're warehoused they're forgotten about and it needs to be a change kids have there's laws out there to protect kids supposed to be individualized educational plan not a group plan you're not supposed to take away their rights their electives a chance to to thrive these kids can grow these downs and boys are they're great they learn they comprehend they do exactly what you ask them to do they love to smile
252they're just kids you know they may be 25 30 years old they're still going to be kids take away electives like keyboard art fire class something that will express them that brings them out and just brings their emotions out and makes them flourish my son and isaac in choir class when the kids clap and everyone claps in the audience at their keyboard brings them to life it makes them feel so proud and out sea breeze high school took it all away there's nothing left thank you for your time is carol sawyer ma'am dr barrio our assistant superintendent for high schools thank you miss dr burrill carol long time no see hey mr cologne i'm good good evening uh superintendent valgaben chairman coulombe and board members it's nice to be back in person again instead of
253watching from afar now when mr west calls my name i can wave back at him instead of waving at the tv i must say that the parent loop at new smyrna beach middle school is a much needed improvement as a bus operator for this school i want to thank whoever was is responsible for fixing the huge problem we had there with the buses getting tangled up with the parents trying to get into the school in the afternoon thank you it was it's a big uh difference i would also like to give a shout out to our transportation hr representatives len and jeannette for all the recruiting and the hard work that they've done over the summer do we have all the operators in attendance that we need not at all it is a work in
254progress and unfortunately our current trend is downward like miss workman has mentioned driving a school bus takes a unique kind of person for many reasons i would also like to say that i have set up our student behavior committee filled with bus operators and bus attendants and our first meeting will be held a couple weeks with our transportation management team we will be working on developing a student code of conduct for transportation that will work for all stakeholders we will be inviting miss harrington and mr prince to attend one of our future meetings to give us some direction in the do's and cants of creating this code of conduct we will also be looking at the current referral system and how we can improve what is not working for transportation the student behavior committee will
255be a key in keeping our transportation employees and one last thing i would like to say kudos to our director of transportation rodney smith for obtaining his cdl permit he is a i saw it with my own eyes he is a very busy person right now learning all the parts underneath the hood of the bus and underneath the bus so he can pass his cdl to us look out volusia county mr smith could be driving that bus really soon that's great thank you that's awesome thank you ashley grunerwald i know i messed that up no i just said thank you ashley grew grew and walled close captioning not dr available i'd like to thank mrs cuthbert for your understanding of the importance of the various styles of reading in our children's in their lives mr
256purses thank you for agreeing with that unfortunately though we have seen in the past few years that the few do get to decide for the many i am here for that reason as a concerned media specialist parent and adult who cares about all children i'm concerned that the intellectual and emotional freedom of students is being taken away under the guise of protecting children i'm talking about the house bill 1557 the parental rights and action and education act and the statement in it that says that was sent to us by a parent that it prohibits the instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity decay to three students i want to emphasize the word instruction in the bill as this term denotes that one would teach these ideals i'd like to point out that having a book
257on a shelf does not meet the meaning of the word instruction as used on bill it's hard to believe that during a time when finding teachers to put in empty classrooms where that should be the main concern of everyone we're talking about books and libraries i believe that i can speak for all of our media specialists in the county when i say there was not one of us who got our teaching certification and the additional media specialist certification to run a library because we wanted to put books that were not in the best interest of our children on the shelves and as a professional i'm offended in case there's anyone that doesn't understand the purpose of books my best explanation is this books are tools that allow the reader to travel great distances explore and
258learn new ideas and live vicariously through the characters whether they be good or evil happy or sad or wherever in between books allow the reader to develop empathy and understanding of others empathy which is something that we all need more of at this time taking away the voice of any character that deserves one is shameful our children need books that represent them and books that allow children to develop empathy for others what's next books about bullies being taken off the shelves i hope not because they teach children how to deal with situations like this professionals being bullied before we pull our books off the shelves i would like everyone to note that most children have free access to anything that they can imagine they just have to formulate the question correctly they carry with them
259the one thing that can show them and even instruct them as the word in bill 1557 says anything that they can think of so before we are the parents ask what books are on my library shelves i'd like to know what's on their children's cell phones thank you miss next jennifer dickinson uh good evening everyone i am here this evening to read a letter from crystal mcclure she could not be here this evening those these are her words i have come to you in the past to speak on this issue and what seo videos the sle videos i have come to you in the past to speak on the issue of sel and want to bring a few points to your attention i was asked to be on the sel committee last year we had
260two meetings the first was introductory and lasted about 30 minutes the second meeting was after the committee was able to view all the now old materials to pick out any potential unforeseen issues or concerns moving forward with the required videos for the remainder of last school year prior to the meeting i had watched all the videos replied to ms mcintyre and miss rolland none of the findings were discussed in the meeting but the committee was thanked for our input during the seven-minute meeting miss mcintyre mentioned lauren's kids was brought to her attention by another parent and she states this is something we are continuing to look at to my surprise at the vcsb meeting in june miss rolland spoke and told you they decided to go with lauren's kids in the july board meeting she
261stated regarding the sel videos we vet them first we have a five-member committee that looks at them as well and gives us feedback and then they will be available to any parent that would like to view them you just have to have to email miss mcintyre when i emailed miss roland that the committee did not see these videos nor agreed to put this program in place i received no response all of you apart from dr b were copied on these emails i simply want to know the committee was no way involved in the implementation of a new program lawrence kids and we have had no meeting since april 27th as a committee member i have asked several times what is my role i have never received a response i am not certain how i am
262supposed to move forward what is the part of the committee when we are not involved or notified any changes or issues i do have the seven minute meeting recorded as well recorded statements at board meetings for comparison if needed a response from the board would be appreciated thank you thank you so much amandel shammy welcome welcome i'll try to stay awake and go super fast because i know it's late okay good evening school board members superintendent and community members my name is amanda l shimi and i'm the director of choir theater and dance at the incredible ormond beach middle school i also hold many state and national positions with nea fea florida vocal association and i'm a music ambassador and volunteer for the dr phillips center in orlando i am a volusia graduate from kindergarten
263to spruce creek high school hold dual degrees in music education political science with a minor in psychology from the florida state university and have my masters in educational leadership from nova southeastern i'm a teach for america an americorps corps member and i was the 2017 volusia county volunteer of the year i share this information with you just to point out with all my experience in degrees i teach because i love it more than anything else in the world i am here tonight to speak with you about the sixth period day and how it has devastated the performing and visual arts stem electives technology classes and athletic programs throughout our district when the idea of teaming which is one which i 100 support and the sixth period day which has nothing to do with teaming started
264to get pushed together last year i noticed how this would affect our students and sat on the committee with interim superintendent hazel dr olsen and miss core although her schedule was too busy to make the meeting we had a very productive meeting and i left excited about teaming knowing that we were considering keeping the seventh period day for the betterment of our students when miss hazel and dr olson spoke to miss core however she was not willing to consider keeping the seven period day even though the majority of her district staff had expressed concern about the negative consequence this would take to our students and refuse to meet again until summer it is now the beginning of the school year and the exact problems we presented to the committee have become our new reality with
265no true solutions coming from the district except to continue to allocate more core units when we already have 199 vacancies these are just a few of the problems hurting our students with the new schedule performing arts programs are down over 50 percent district-wide visual arts programs are down district-wide pe classes are lower than they've been in decades core classes are huge with a large percent of ese students some over 80 percent students receiving services when iep or 504 no longer are able to be a part of the electives they would like due to a lack of schedule flexibility lower socioeconomically no lower social economic students no longer get the experiences of participating in performing arts programs that they might not be able to afford after school many students now have no electives because of pe
266and over 40 of many schools not passing reading fsa and now they are in intensive reading let me make it clear i 100 support teaming and i'm proud to be a leader in that structure we have created this year but the sixth period day never should have been put together that with that idea that was a dr fritz solution to a teacher shortage he created due to a negative working environment and the implementation of a flawed plan that was brought by someone who was terminated will continue to hurt our students until we return to the seventh period day i leave you with one question what makes volusia county schools stand out in middle school when compared to florida virtual homeschooling and other online platforms which we are losing students to daily it's our performing arts
267it's our visual arts it's our stem electives it's our agricultural programs tech classes and other wonderful electives that we offer throughout our district thank you thank you michele dan pronovost oh i'm gonna get it right someday good evening and thank you welcome uh just want to point out i am the big bad mean parent that sent the k-3 email in case anybody was wondering um i did want to clarify for you guys uh on the presentation for library media they went over the challenge process it seemed like they put the end-all responsibility at the superintendent level but looking at the policy if there was another if the person who was making the challenge disagreed with the superintendent's decision then the school board ultimately would make that decision that's at the very end of policy 320.
268so just wanted to help you guys be clear on the policy so i would also like to mention the peer reviewers that they use for book selections these peer reviewers are things mentioned like book list student library journal et cetera they went over those in the powerpoint they're organizations that come up with opinions about books and that's all they really are is opinions by professionals like they said libraries media specialists and all that but the example i turned into you guys there gives an example of a peer-reviewed book the book name is identical if anybody out there wants to look at it written by ellen hopkins uh it's got very good peer reviews they recommend it for ages 14 and up or 9th grade and up according to our policy we could have that in
2698th grade as a young adult book with a parent permission form signed currently it's only in high schools um i honestly don't know how often it's checked out or read that information is a lot harder to get at with the schools but it's got some very dark material in it again it's peer-reviewed so if a media specialist is looking at those peer reviews they would get a recommendation for 14 and up some of those books that mr colon brought up he brought up one example there's also four other books that have already been pulled from the schools those were peer-reviewed some of those were recommended for teenagers as well so what i'm trying to get at is just because it's peer-reviewed by other media specialists or librarians and put out their own popular book lists
270or other things like that doesn't always mean that it's a book that doesn't contain materials that are too sexually explicit for our students for those ages so i would recommend we take a better look at the peer reviewers and not just go by their recommendations alone thank you thank you ashlyn pronovost welcome hello everyone i am up to five children and at the age of five to eight i have yet to have one who needed to know about sexual orientation different types of marriages what they are attracted to wondering what gender they are i guess that's because i shelter my children i believe it's more just the fact that an average five to eight year old doesn't have any of these topics on the forefront of their mind most children are too busy learning how
271to read count and who's going to be the first one to finish their work so they can go to be the first one on the playground book banning is a form of censorship occurs when a private individuals government officials or organizations remove books from libraries school reading lists or bookstore shelves because they object to their content ideas or themes my desire is for volusia county libraries to at least censor all sexual books by putting them in their own sections so parents who want to keep their children innocent and or sheltered can i would gladly volunteer to help in this process as with lots of other parents if they were aware of the sexually explicit content in our libraries i do not want my children having free access without my awareness on sexual topics they are
272too young to understand and for the record none of my children have a cell phone it is up to me the parent to expose my children when they are ready to have these conversations not the school librarians they do not know my children better than me as their parent there are hundreds of examples that i could read to y'all and you would cut me off due to the language so i'll mildly describe one a child can currently borrow on incest with graphical details of a father brutally sexually abusing his twin daughters with no parental permission for children in high school so all children in high school can rent this book the girls describe their fathers privates and the way that their bodies reacted without to con to consent such behavior from their father the violent
273physical abuse and jealousy the father puts between them this book is so graphic that there is no way a child would not know what it means to be raped one twin gives graphic details of her idolization of suicide and even attempting suicide because she wasn't daddy's favorite child to rape while i know this is happening to many children tonight as i speak this is such a harsh reality that i should be the one to grant my child permission if i believe my child is mature enough to handle such a topic a topic school librarians are not my child's biggest advocate i am children should be sheltered from innocently picking up books about rapes minors doing illegal drugs that make it seem really fun and minors giving vivid details on how to do sexual acts on
274one another these are just three examples of the hundreds of young adult books currently in the county libraries i will continue to show up and tell every parent i know about the current uncensored adult topics that media centers contain censoring to age appropriate is not banning it's using common sense i hope to work hand in hand with lots of librarians in the district in the near future sincerely a very proud shelter mom thank you thank you miss elizabeth albert welcome back miss albert you mr cologne chairman clone board members superintendent falcon members of the audience so um my topic is a little bit different i wanted to talk to you about monday labor day the holiday that's brought to you by the union right so uh did you know that before the formation of labor
275unions workers were treated unjustly and unfairly workers didn't have any sense of security or safety on the job necessarily unless the employer chose to do so but thank goodness for unions because working people began to organize and bargain collectively for better working conditions better wages better hours and the first labor day was celebrated in new york city on tuesday september 5th hold on 1882. and unfortunately though it was a result of 13 uh workers who passed away in the pullman strike in june of 1894. wait a minute that doesn't add up nonetheless president grover cleveland made reconciliation with the labor movement a top priority of his administration making it a federal holiday so nonetheless when you're eating your hot dogs and your hamburgers and celebrating the good life that you have with your friends just
276please remember that this is the day where we pay tribute to those american workers who have worked hard to set a very high standard for for everyone the reason we have weekends is because of unions so make sure that uh you toast with your kool-aid the labor unions that have brought this holiday to you thank you could you say your address was for the hot dogs and the hamburgers yes 1381 educators road thank you that is our last public comment brought to you live all right last item on the agenda is comments from the board superintendent attorney discussion we'll start who wants to start off we'll clear the slate miss cuthbert you were first all right miss copper i just want to bring one item up we do have a meeting on tuesday november 8th
277that's election day schools are closed and i don't want to impede any school board candidates who might be still campaigning i thought we we didn't we didn't change change i don't think so we may not change that last meeting well i brought it up the la at the last meeting and it was kind of dismissed but i'm bringing it up again as far as i know we have a meeting at 4 30. yeah on november 8th i don't think it would be fair to miss haynes we fixed we fixed the one for august we didn't touch that one so he's staying on top of us what we have done in the past is move it to wednesday yeah that's what i put on my calendar wednesday night officially the ninth i want to move it
278to wednesday i'm i don't know 4 30 on wednesday it's a workshop and a board meeting i'm fine uh wednesday's fine for me wednesday anybody opposed to wednesday i just need to confirm it but i don't think it'll be a problem can we just do a workshop i mean a meeting do we have to do a workshop we can i mean i'll leave that up to the district because people are going to be very tired exhausted tired jamie's going to come back looking dark like me because i got a 10 you can switch the workshop to the end i think it'd be a great time for new board members remember all right so we will make that a uh change the board meeting for november 8th to november 9th 4 30. 4 30 and we
279will get rid of the workshop that's before that uh pending approval by miss burnett okay so 4 30. good all right so any objection to axing the workshop what i thought would be good is to switch the workshop to the end of the month that first meeting i think it would be good for the new board to come together in a workshop situation we can look at that later on we usually only do an organizational meeting and yeah that's on the 15th i know but we don't usually have an item we have a second that's right you're absolutely right very good thanksgiving thank you for that thank you ms haynes thanks you for that very good uh mr purses anything i do have something i just want to uh reiterate i think what we've all
280said earlier and just thank uh dr balagaban for her leadership uh for her exhaustive day you put that first day you with anita well you would you were there at 5 30 in the morning i thought someone like photoshopped you in in there cause i was like i was there i said there's no way you were there at 5 30. i took the day off well kudos to you yeah that's awesome i i didn't catch up to like nine o'clock i think i caught you at the at shark territory you were awesome you were awesome that whole day from vpk kids to high school kids and everything in the middle so great and all the cabinet for everything that they've been doing super the principals teachers everyone everyone's just working really hard and i can
281understand uh as we all know in the system the first few weeks of school there's you know things don't go just perfectly and there's scheduled mix-ups and there's things happening and it takes a lot of energy a lot of energy to get school school started it's just i can't begin to tell you it's just exhausting exhausting and uh and yet they got to do it every day every day it's not like you do it that one day yeah we did it no tomorrow comes too and the next day the next day and it's equally hard every day so just wanted to thank everyone that's it mr thank you miss burnett thank you um just kind of repeat off of what you said thank you to everybody it's it is a tiring event and um and
282i know everybody's working really hard to make the best for the students out there and since it's fall we get you know high school football or whatever sport these these uh schools are doing so i know that they're having fun with that so everybody have a good week it's hands so i'd like to um thank dr earl johnson for taking my call immediately about the air conditioning out at places yeah okay but i'd like to i'd still like to say this okay each of us if we leave our home to go on vacation we follow what the rules are and the rules are don't shut your systems down just you know bump them up a little for while you're gone okay and so even though we've adjusted the schedule right now so that it'll come
283on at 6am and it won't go off till 6 pm and i so appreciate that because i had you know people sending me screenshots of their thermostats and showing me how they were turning off at 3 00 or 3 15 before school was even over and then their room was getting hot i mean we've had some 100 degree weather lately so i would still like to make a suggestion that we treat this the systems within volusia county the same way we treat our home system and not totally shut things down but just bump it up so that there is still a level of air moving because that's needed with this heat and humidity to keep mold from growing and things like that so i do want to give him though and all of his team
284over there because they've gotten mobile units out to places and i understand supplies are on back order and parts and things like that but i think our systems would last longer and work better if we treated them the same way we treat our systems at home because if i every time left you know my house and i shut my system off and then brought it back on i'm not doing what's best for my home so that's my plug on air conditioning you're probably hot right now you've got your fan running gotcha it's off it's awful it's off wow i had every fan in my house running earlier um dr b just a couple things chair cologne first and foremost miss albert thank you for labor day hot dogs and hamburgers we know where to go
285there's a bear over there as well but um we want to wish our staff and all of you a very restful three-day weekend and uh be safe thank you mr person [Laughter] you heard the directive i do have some good news i like to share we are going to be saying hello to our commissioner on thursday who will do a quick visit to our school district along with senator wright so we look forward to his visit here and also board members you will probably see an email a little bit later tonight when you get home or tomorrow morning we had there's a there's lots that goes into how the state calculates school grades but one of the precursor for for that calculation is that you have to have a minimum of 95 percent of the
286students tested so this past year there was a an amendment where if you have 94 percent they will take that on a case-by-case basis and could and do consideration so we just received an announcement from the state and confirmed by rea department fine ridge high school its official a b status [Applause] the land high school bulldogs its official a b status volusia online k12 a b status and there was one a middle school because of the percentage but a new smyrna beach middle came out with the c status so congratulations to the leadership team to their entire staff parents they do their home they help kids with their homework as well all of our students who work diligently in the entire uh team here at dak and brewster thank you all for everything that you
287do including operations and our bus drivers to get them to schools good stuff very good and with that being said this meeting is adjourned everyone have a good night zoom in is it 10 yet you're doing good mr colon