001c one minute we'll get started in just one minute c 30 seconds laughs good evening everyone and welcome to the volusia county school board meeting today is august 8th it is 4 30 on the dot and we will get started please stand for the pledge of allegiance and now we will have a moment of silence and reflection just to sort of just like our students do every day we are now doing that in our board meeting just to reflect on the why and why we're here so we'll take a moment of silence thank you i want to welcome everyone to the volusia county school board meeting we'll start by introducing the folks up here on the diocese we'll start off on the right side we have our agency clerk extraordinaire this is eric lieben who
002is here with us who's our outgoing agency clerk and then we have our incoming ms celeste gilmore who is our incoming agency clerk next to miss gilmore we have miss anita burnett represents district two next to ms burnett we have miss jamie hayne vice chairwoman representing district one next to ms haynes we have dr carmen balkerman's superintendent over here on the left-hand side we have mr carl purses representative of district four next to mr persons we have mrs linda cuthbert representative for district three next to mrs cuthbert we have mr aaron wolfe on behalf of ted doran our board attorney who is representing today and my name is ruben colon and i have the honor and pleasure of serving as the chair of this year representing district five items for approval on this agenda are
0031.03 4.01 6.02 and 19.01 through 19.02 all right there will be two opportunities there will be several opportunities for public participation including a time certain at 6 00 pm where we will listen up to 5 15 minutes of public comment time will also be provided for public comment before the board takes a vote on any item and before the consent agenda is approved next item on the agenda is 1.02 district vision statement where we usually talk about the great things that have happened from the last time we were here so we'll start with mr ah thank you mr chair well um hey i get the easy one i want to just say congratulations to all the uh principals that are in the room this evening uh you know you all are to be commended and
004that's why you are here and i know uh what you all would do you would all say well it's it takes a team and it's my faculty and it's it's everybody but we all know that uh without that person at the top without that principle modeling without that principle having the x the expectations without that principle given the paths on the back uh doing all the things that you all do each and every day that wouldn't happen so congratulations to each of you i know that there isn't any place you'd rather be tonight than right here because there's nothing on your mind it's not like the teachers come back tomorrow or anything uh so uh uh we'll try to make this recognition brief so you can get back and i know your phone's probably blowing
005up as you're sitting here uh but uh you know that's the life of a principal but thank you for everything that you do and continue leading with grace and respect thank you mister coming from a principal that's awesome miss cuthbert yes thank you for coming last day of freedom well at least mostly technically but thank you for coming and spending a few moments with us because it's definitely our pleasure to congratulate you and celebrate with you all that your team has done your students your parents the support getting them breakfast every little thing but all those little things all add up to one big thing and boy is it a real big thing so thank you thank you and it and it's so nice to see so many of you here and of course uh
006thank you for coming my little ninth grader back there that i had in class a long time ago she's she's definitely one of my cute little boogers that we talked about [Laughter] so it's wonderful to see all of you um who i've been able to work with seeing you as teachers and and and go through the um all the different steps into leadership but we all know teachers are natural leaders so thank you thank you mr chair thank you miss burnett thank you um well this last week i forget what even date is yes it's two monday last week we got to welcome the new comers to volusia county schools and it was nice to see everybody smiling faces and so with that we get everybody who's volunteered to come back again so thank you
007for choosing to come back to volusia county it's definitely a wonderful environment and we're grateful for you to be here and i also enjoyed our trip our little walk through through the beachside school last week even through all the dirt um it was fun and it looks like it's going to be a great school and i'm excited for it so thank you for everyone who was able to put that together for us and note when you're going on the construction site touring beachside don't wear sandals guilty miss haynes i want to agree with what my colleagues have already said and we are so appreciative that all of you are here tonight especially with teachers returning tomorrow and we know your new teachers were on campus and we too were at the new teacher thing last
008week and at the beach side thing and yes we have learned not to wear sandals but another thing that has happened since we were here last is we did the summer high school senior graduations for the students that finished during the summer and we held that at deland high so we thank dr carr and her team for allowing us to hold that there but there were so many parents and other family members out in the audience and they were so excited to watch their child walk across that stage and still get a chance to have their diploma and i think that's a great thing that we do here in volusia county is no matter when they finish we still give them that opportunity to have that graduation ceremony and then i'm going to give a
009shout out to kellyanne marx is the vice chair of orange city and saturday night i went to her event for she runs the backpack buddies program where she and all volunteers no one gets paid for this they pack meal kits and they go home and our students backpacks at a variety of our schools and it was a wonderful event and they raised a lot more money so that they can continue to take on some more schools to pack meals to go home with kids for the weekend because as we all know right now times are really hard for a lot of our families she also does the food drops and i got to participate in that and the thing that was the most disheartening and i will say that dr balkerman sent out chad who
010made a video of what she did so that she could share that but people were lined up starting at 5 30 in the morning for us to start handing out food at 8 30 in the morning and so that just kind of says where our community is at right now but she started this in 2019 and everybody volunteers and so for our schools that benefit from this a thank you note would probably be a nice thing you know but thank you doctor thank you chair this is my second board meeting and perhaps it will go down when history is perhaps one of the most exciting board meetings for me because if you look in the audience here today we'll tell you that leadership matters so i want to congratulate our 17 principals that are here
011today we will do a special recognition for you but thank you for all that you do for our students here in volusia county your work is exemplary and it's because of your work and the teamwork that you do with your teams obviously at your school level it's why we are as successful as we are so thank you and second teaching matters too right and we had an opportunity of gracefully welcoming 460 teachers at mainland um high this past uh last week tuesday wednesday tuesday and wednesday tuesday and wednesday 460 teachers and i can't tell you what great energy we experience in that room you know what the future is very hopeful when when you get an opportunity to see those faces and interact with the individuals that have joined volusia county public school i'm very
012hopeful for what's ahead of us so i want to thank all those 460 teachers for joining one of the best counties in the nation when it comes to teaching and learning and congratulations to each and every one of you in the audience today thank you and uh just like you all last week i had the pleasure of joining our first year teachers and i had a little bit of time in my hands so i was able to attend some of the sessions which you know as you know you all speak in really funky acronyms but there was one that kind of stuck with me and it was in a technology class our learning technology team was presenting and they were talking about samur s-a-m-r and so i always laugh at the acronyms but it was
013basically what they were saying was it doesn't matter what your lesson is sometimes you may get to level two and it may not get to level four but that doesn't mean that getting to level two whatever the substitution augmentation modification and redefinition i'm learning and so uh that that was just a great class as well as uh hearing uh mr sandy hovis and our uh esteemed view president do a presentation on ethics that was super exciting um it was i didn't know they they've probably been doing it for years i've just never listened to it and it was quite interesting to hear both sides of the contrast [Music] super super shout out to deltona middle to our building team to our administrative teams to our construction teams to our contractors which we've sweat a little
014bit in the last few days but um we did get our temporary certificate of occupancy and actually rt sent me a picture a little while ago where they've started tearing down the old school old school i didn't say yeah carl did but i'm excited because there's folks who are very tied to that really old building uh but i want to say thank you and and to all you know as you know the work actually starts tomorrow and so i was there today and the excitement is there and that's super exciting then i went to orange city elementary on my way this way and they didn't know i was coming don't often do that but i figured hey i'm on my way and i've got time walked into the media center and they were having a
015great time with the teachers talk you know focusing on and so uh you know kudos to them i know they're going through some things we're working through it over there with air conditioning and all that good stuff but please know that we are we are on it and that we acknowledge it and we're doing that work other than that um i have nothing else oh i did tell them i would say something about oklahoma i wasn't sure what that meant but i'm sure somebody's watching so there we go oklahoma twice very good thank you all right next item on the agenda approval of minutes we have the workshop for june 14th in the work session june 14th regular session for june 28 regular session for july excuse me for july 26 and the workshop work
016session for july 26 those have been posted everyone's had the opportunity to review it do we have any amendments or changes otherwise i'll entertain a motion to approve move approval of the minutes for those aforementioned meetings mr chair all right do we have a second motion's been properly made by mr person seconded by ms cuthbert any further discussion hearing none all those in favor say aye aye aye all those opposed say motion passes next time on the agenda 2.01 agenda changes superintendent are there any changes any changes to the agenda that need to be made before we present it to the board for approval yes chairman colon we have one change to the agenda we're removing item 19.01 the interlocutor agreement with the county of volusia for reimbursement of school shelter expenses and we will
017bring that item back at a later date thank you board you've heard the uh edits made to the agenda do we have a motion to approve the agenda as presented with the proper changes uh mr chairman i move that we adopt or accept the amended agenda as stated thank you do we have a second i second that motion has been properly made by ms cutler seconded by ms is haines any further discussion hearing none all those in favor say aye aye all those opposed next item super exciting 3.01 recognition of salmonella photography dr balgabin yes sir chairman i would like to call that gentleman sitting all the way the back mr simoneau from seminole photography to come up please to the diocese he doesn't have a camera in his head and he doesn't have a
018camera i want to tell you a little bit about us mr seminole take the seat sir right over here i'm gonna take your picture thank you here we go all right so this uh i was super impressed actually i had my professional photography done with mr seminole this is how i found out about him we start chatting in his office he's actually been in volusia county for 40 years servicing our students here for 40 years it's a family-owned business and right here in the land it's one of those business businesses obviously that's very vital to our economy i was so impressed to see that as we were chatting and having a discussion that not only he's been working with volusia county schools for the past 40 years but most importantly he's been hiring our our
019students you know there were about two students i believe that particular day but then he started telling me historically how many students he's he's hired from us so i just want to say thank you for the beautiful work that you've been doing for your great partnership of 40 years and i told mr seminole i said you have to come we have to recognize you he did a pretty decent job with my my pictures he didn't add hair to mine he did not well you know what he did say that he's working on technology for hair like next couple right mr seminar would you like to say a few words sir thank you you're speaking to the mic so the whole world can hear you there you go i'm usually behind the camera i'm sorry uh
020thank you for everything and um it's been a pleasure working with the county for all these years and all the students and seeing all the kids grow it's kind of cool now i'm seeing high school seniors where i did the parent senior portrait way back when so it's nice to see a second generation coming through so thank you awesome thank you thank you thank you and we have a certificate to present him with and if he will come up here we can take a picture with him please wonderful sorry yes thank are you ready [Applause] board do we have any comments i want to say thank you for your 40 years of service i know i've been in your studio several times and you have been a servant to our community you take every picture
021at advent health in the world yes you do and so i'm grateful because your your service extends beyond the reach that you think it's way beyond and it goes on for years and years because we all remember so again thank you for your service and to our community thank you [Applause] next item on the agenda 3.02 recognition of school grade dr b chairman colon board members i am so excited about this so as you know our school report card came out our district report card came out and we did not only maintain a b status but we increased we went from a 54 to 57 percent so that's much much closer to that a that we're all going to be at very soon in the near future what i'm so proud of it's it's our
022leadership in this in our county you know the past three years has been nothing but normal it hasn't been normal for the past three years we know that but these leaders here their perseverance their commitment to this county to our students is something that's all of us it's been well noted i will go back and say to you that during 2019 reopening we had one of the best reopenings of any district and it's because of the leadership exemplified by every single one of our administrators and their team-based uh support meaning teachers and you know paraprofessionals custodians operations it really shows the caliber of individuals that we have serving in this county so i'm super super excited and i wanted to highlight these 17 individuals instructional leaders are here in our audience here today because their
023school grades despite all the abnormalities that we have experienced this past year you know what they've increased at least at least one or more letter grade because of their leadership and obviously the teamwork right exhibited by every single member of their school and community so i want you to know guys that this work is not something that we can do without you you're very much valued the board and i appreciate you and this is just a very very small token to let you know that we are who we are because of each and every one of you so here's how we're going to do this when i call your names you're going to stand right where you are right we're going to recognize your school we're going to give you a round of applause and
024then when i'm done calling 17 names you're going to come up one by one you're going to stand with the board here and myself and deputy hazel and your assistant superintendent and we will take a picture with you and i know that chairman cologne said that at some point in the future he's going to be sponsoring something some celebration right chairman and board yes ma'am miss haines is going to be buying the food after purses is in charge of the punches we're going to bring the cookies and miss burnett is bringing the i don't know what do you call that what do they call the cheese with the ham and all that i can't say that so charcuterie it's a party all right now he provided details and it's all in record all right so
025here we go blue lake elementary we have miss holly bailey champion elementary miss angela polite cyprus creek we have miss tracy buckner [Applause] deltona lakes couldn't be here today but we're still going to give them a big round of applause miss ramonita ortiz and team discovery that ninth grader jennifer dietz [Applause] forest lake virginia freeman friendship dr eda edie velez george marks miss shannon young it was one of the first ones here this afternoon um horizon we have miss katie kern i don't know if she made it yet in the audience [Applause] yeah palm terrace tucker harris [Applause] theo kelly lewis burger mill laura figueroa [Applause] chris lonnie sent his ap he couldn't be here today michelle dr julie rose rosebum [Applause] julie gordon and west side mr duane copeland [Applause] middle school we have
026john devito peach susan tooten silver sands dr rick inch our high school principal for deland dr melissa carr [Applause] if we can just stand in the back here and in order which i call you please come on up we'll take a picture with you and we have your certificate of appreciation where's the champagne um where when is that we're on the clock here we go uh [Music] all guys [Applause] thank you all right come on come on congratulations [Applause] you don't have to worry about adding hair because not here okay are you ready [Applause] vcs um it's yours hey congratulations [Music] she's not competitive at all let's go bulldogs [Applause] or does anybody have any comments other than thank you i think we said it all i think they're ready to go very good thank
027you all so much and again thank you for all that you do and all that you're going to do starting bright and early tomorrow morning anybody get any sleep tonight probably not man again thank you all for being here and we appreciate you and congratulations to you and your staff [Applause] what mulch item we have is 4.01 administrative appointments dr balgaben chair colon we have four administrative appointments this evening for your approval so first i would like to uh introduce our nominee for principal volusia online learning and i would like to call dr anthony ceriani to join us please just a little bit about dr ceriani he has earned his bachelor's degree in secondary math at the university of maryland he has earned his master's degree in educational leadership from the university of cincinnati and
028he has earned his doctoral degree in educational leadership from the university of central florida dr ceriani was a math teacher for 10 years in maryland in florida he has served as the administrative slash academic dean at meadowbrook middle school in orlando he served as the edgewater high school assistant principal for instruction he was also the principal at deerwood elementary and the principal of union park middle school dr ceriani was a presenter at the ucf tony jennings executive leadership summit and also an adjunct professor for budget and finance with ucf today i'm recommending to you dr anthony ciriani is the principal of volusia online learning and if approved tonight dr saryani's effective date will be august 22nd board you've heard the recommendation superintendent to appointment dr anthony ceriani as the principal volusia online learning do we
029have a motion move approval second to uc too oh yeah go bearcats motion's been properly made by mr purses seconded by miss copper at any further discussion board hearing none all those in favor say aye aye all those opposed say nay motion passes welcome to volusia county [Applause] uh chairman colon board members dr belgelman thank you very much for this opportunity thank you to the members of executive leadership that i got to get to know through the interview process this is an incredible opportunity i'm really looking forward to the challenge and uh i appreciate the opportunity to take on this responsibility thank you i'm looking forward to getting started hey good thank you and welcome to volusia county [Applause] algebra oh we have to take a picture congratulations superintendent ready okay next i would like
030to ask uh todd sees to join us i was told it's pronounced like cease and desist nazis so board i'm recommending tell you a little bit about todd i'm recommending recommending him for the chief financial officer position that we have but before that a little bit about todd he has earned his bachelor's degree in accounting from florida southern college and his master's in accounting and financial management from keller graduate school of management in orlando he also served in the united states air force he worked for fortune 500 companies over the past 20 years mr seas has worked with financial operations in public schools some of the titles he has held are business analysts finance specialist director of finance director of budget chief business and finance officer and and that was just in osceola county where
031he successfully directed the operations of an 800 million dollar operation with over 60 000 students when he worked in seminole county he served as the chief financial officer where he successfully directed their operations of a one billion dollar budget and over sixty seven thousand student population he successfully directed the financial operations in other counties and we are happy that he wants to join us here in volusia county today i'm recommending to you board mr todd sees as the chief financial officer and if approved this evening his effective date will be august 22nd 2022 or you've heard the recommendation of the superintendent for mr todd cease to be the chief financial officer do we have a motion i make the motion do we have a second a second motion has been properly made by ms hayne
032seconded by miss burnett any further discussion mrs haynes i'm happy you're here along with that it's the finance department not out there anybody else yes i just i kept just saying we need to just be patient and we will find someone that can do this job because it needs to be the right person because you have a great team that you're walking into and um we have a wonderful group of community members that volunteer their time to sit on the internal audit committee which you'll get to meet all of them so we are excited thank you all right thank you anybody else all right hearing oh miss copper a real sincere thank you all right all those in favor say aye aye all those opposed saying welcome to volusia county [Applause] and and thank you
033board i'm actually very humbled so for the opportunity so thank you welcome thank you have you come up for a picture oh [Applause] all right so our my third would be the coordinator for research evaluation and accountability i would like to ask dr angel tyrone to join us dr tyrone has earned his bachelor's degree in literature from mercy college his master's degree in educational leadership from national lewis university his educational specialist in curriculum and instruction from the university of west florida and his doctorate degree of education in curriculum and assessment from the university of west volusia dr tehran worked as a new york city police officer and sergeant as an adjunct professor at lake center state college in claremont as a language arts teacher at east ridge high school in claremont as a psychometrician in
034the department of accountability and assessment at lake county school district where he supervised the development and alignment of all district level assessments within the comprehensive assessment system in this role he conducted the psychometric studies to ensure that the validity of assessments and reliability of use of scores today board i am recommending dr angel tyrone as a research evaluation and accountability coordinator for teaching leading and learning if approved this evening dr tyrone's effective start date will be august 22nd 2022 reported for the recommendation of the superintendent to appoint mr dr angel tyrone as a coordinator for research evaluation and accountability do we have a motion i'd like don't move go ahead i would say i'd like to make the motion because when you listen to what all you've done and the fact of what you've done
035with assessments that is so impressive and that's what we're looking for because we're looking to know are we using the right assessments and how we can limit the number that there are so that we can just have the data that we need but teachers can teach so i i'd like to make the motion that we hire dr terren we have a motion do we have a second second and you said in so that he's so knowledgeable he will know which ones to eliminate too okay it's just as important to eliminate the ones we do not need yes okay thank you board you've heard the motion by ms haines second by mr purses any further discussion um i'd like to make the comment it's it's nice to know you know numbers as an english teacher you're
036also very good with numbers i always scored higher in on math tests but even though i became an english teacher so language is numerically bound so it's nice to see you so successful with numbers and language so thank you so much sir and i have a question what is a i agree what's that psycho psychometrician yeah what is that i'm sorry i just the fancy name is basically um the measurement every assessment is a psychological exercise that's why our students get the weight when they're confronted with an assessment so it's just the measurement of um of how assessments are put together and interesting in order to do that gotcha that's impressive well very good board you heard the motion we have a second any further discussion hearing none all those in favor say aye aye
037aye aye aye aye aye say nay welcome to volusia county i want to say thank you um for having me um like a very special place and i've only been through um the interview process so i want to thank the executive leadership that put me in but i'm excited and i just want to thank thank you for having me you're welcome thank you and welcome and one thing about uh assessments that seems to be that that was brought up by the board i got into assessment as an english teacher um went through the race to the top because i wanted to be involved in the development of the assessments that were going to be used to not only assess my students but inform my evaluation so that's where my heart is at yeah good very
038good thank you have you come up for a picture [Applause] i swear congratulations [Laughter] yes sir that's that's the that's our four for tonight for this evening oh sorry sorry no i get super excited our last is the coordinator for safety and security so i would like to ask miss chastity burke to join us please she's in the back and just to tell you a little bit about miss chastity burke um she's joined us she's earned her associates of science degree in criminal justice and has worked with local law enforcement for 20 years now during those 20 years that she's worked with law enforcement she served the volusia county sheriff's sheriff's department as a detective and worked to protect children by participating on the north florida internet crimes against children's task force ms burke joined
039us in vcs in 2021 as one of our guardian commanders and today i'm very proud to recommend her as the coordinator for safety and security miss chastity's effective date if approved this evening will be august 9 2022. very good board you've heard the recommendation of the superintendent to appoint chasity burke as the coordinator for safety and security do we have a motion so moved do we have a second motion has been properly made by ms burnett seconded by ms cuthbert any discussion and so i want to thank you for all that you do you're usually in the background you're usually not trying to be anywhere up here and this is probably a little different for you but usually you're keeping us safe and i'm grateful for that so again thank you and thank you for
040stepping up i really appreciate it all right board all those in favor say aye aye all those opposed a motion passes welcome to volusia county again [Applause] mr chair board members and superintendent dr baldeman i want to thank you all for the opportunity to serve as the district's coordinator of security operations i have lived in volusia county most of my life this is where my roots are and this is exactly where i want to be for 20 years i've worked in law enforcement in this county and i've always strived to make it a better and safer place for everyone especially children i am thrilled to now have the opportunity to continue the honorable work of protecting students and staff in my new role as coordinator i want to thank my family and friends for their
041love continued support and encouragement i also want to thank chief newman and all who made it possible to be here today accepting this new role again thank you mr chair board members and superintendent dr bagelman for this opportunity i truly truly appreciate it for this thank you so much [Applause] dr b i wasn't gonna let you forget that fourth [Applause] all right next item on the agenda is 6.01 dr b are there any items that need removal from the consent agenda no chair board members are there any items that you would like to remove for further discussion i just have one item that i had a question about which one item 12.03 the science curriculum that it says is going to be used with 3rd through 8th graders in title 1 schools so um just
042didn't know how we had selected this and if there was a need for this because when you look at it it also says it could be other selected schools but it appears the fund source is title one money so i don't know if there's anyone here that can answer anything about that we haven't we have an explanation for that um actually miss hazel can share more if you like and i know is jen here but miss miss hazel has the explanation welcome actually i brought miss core with me as well um because it is an online intervention program for it's pent up this summer yeah this is uh panda software thank you good evening everybody um and uh the science department fell under my purview in the org chart and that's why i know a
043little bit more about it this is used by several other school districts and it is for intervention purposes and so it is being utilized grades three through eight and the reason it's grades three through eight is because as we know in eighth grade it's a fair standards test so it's sixth seventh and eighth grade standards on the eighth grade test um and at this time the grant it was one of the rollover grants that we received where we had money that we could that we didn't originally plan for but we could spend and it was able to cover it and that includes training for our teachers as well so jen taylor is not here tonight but she's the one that's leading the charge with that program and we haven't had anything like that like we've
044had in reading and math in the past we've never had anything this succinct for science may i share with you also because i did a little bit of inquiry on that one and you know how we always struggle with vocabulary development that's what it really focuses on and so jen taylor did extensive research and she put her stamp behind it because that's one of the standards that usually are always behind yeah all right thank you thank you thank you mr gomez do you have any cards from the public comment for consent for 6 p.m okay so not for consent agenda very good all right board uh so you're good all right so uh board you've heard the consent agenda as presented do we have a motion for approval move approval of the consent agenda as
045printed do we have a second second motion's been properly made by mr purses seconded by myself this is for later okay bye miss cuthbert any further discussion hearing none all those in favor say aye aye all those opposed say nay motion passes all right next item on the agenda is 15.01 superintendents announcements and comments thank you chair thank you board i have several reminders or announcements this evening um first i'd like to remind of all of our employees that our annual enrollment for benefits began today um august 8 and it will end august uh 21st 2022 so please visit our human resource page on our website for more information but that information is out today i would also like to share some information on how we're preparing for our schools and our children for the
04622-23 school year you will hear quite a bit actually we have a presentation for you this evening it has to do with safety and security but just that you know and a big thank you and shout out to all of the schools we've met with every single one of our schools individually school-based team and district staff to review their safe school plan and to ensure that those safe school plans are actually actionable items that will be implemented in every single school so it was a team of individuals that met with each school it transpired through a few days but it was a lot of work but well worth it because when it comes to the safety of our students and staff we will not be compromising that at any limits so thank you to all
047of those schools we also want to say to our 12 elementary schools two middle schools who participated in the bureau of school improvement summer academy this year so those schools are blue lake touring t small orange city west side discovery pearson pride sunrise champion deltona lakes holly hill palm terrace galaxy middle school and campbell middle school the theme for that academy was resetting the route to school improvement and the focus was about reflecting and reflect refining on systematic processes to improve practices and students outcomes and i will tell you that i had the opportunity of speaking to some of the principals that attended that academy and they said it's probably been one of the best trainings that they've been to in years so i'd like to thank dr valli who took the entire team out
048there and i know that miss core was there and if i miss out some of her directors were there i'd like to thank you guys for taking the team out there also i want to thank all schools who are participated in one second some additional safety trainings that transpire this summer so we had a series again i'm not going to get into it because chief newman will share with you but pretty much all of our teams they have been trained in first respondent training so that transpired over the summer and 100 percent of our staff are ready to go i also wanted to do a big congratulations to the 460 teachers as i shared earlier i'm so excited about these teachers that join volusia county there's a lot of heart spirit intellect in good looking
049people that joined our team but i'll tell you they are ready they're ready to roll up their sleeves and i want to share this because this is really really important when i was in the audience talking to some of the teachers i had a gentleman that's there that joined the teaching field because he had two kids in a middle school that really there were a lot of turnovers last year and he said you know what dr b i wanted to be part of the solution so i looked at my degree val had it evaluated and completed half of the certification course work so that shows you when you want to be part of the solution right because we all have to be part of the solution if we want to do what's best for children
050that's how it needs to be um i will tell you that there was another general and i can tell you stories after stories because i got there a little bit early and i want to know who is joining volusia county and like i said it's a lot of hard spirit commitment and diligence so we're committed to ensuring that their experience here in volusia county is a good one now i will say this to you like any profession that you join there will be turbulence there will be ups and downs but it's all about how you come together to resolve it so one of the commitments that i will make is as their superintendent and i've shared this with them is that after the first semester i would like to meet with the entire team if
051if they would like to join in and listen and learn i would love to have miss albert there and our team so that we can hear from them what went well and what are some areas that we can improve upon because we're here to serve so with that said um congratulations again and welcome to the volusia county family middle school division we've completed all of the master scheduling wow body a big shout out to you and your team our director drew and all of the middle schools this was quite a task but as you know this is a system that needs to be in place for that level of collaboration to take place in a simultaneous and seamless way for our students for next year so thank you patti core for your leadership and drew
052olsen and the entire middle school division for the work that you guys have done um a couple other things high school we have a saturday sat day that's coming up board i want you to know that we will be doing boot camp for our sat before our students attend that that that uh that um sat day we will do quite a few uh boot camp to prepare our students in addition to khan academy uh pre-planning we know begins tomorrow so welcome to all of our teachers officially we are so excited to have you back for the 22-23 school year and finally on our next board meeting will be tuesday august the 30th at 4 30 p.m in our right here in our boardroom at the administrative complex and last but not least we would we
053were fortunate to participate yesterday believe it or not sunday in the deltona fire rescue annual back to school event at the center in deltona a special thank you for putting together this event to volusia county hispanic association they sponsor this event advent health fish memorial wanda bruce ministries and the volusia sheriff's office they all came together it was a great event we had a lot of families and children there they were all having fun we have kindergartners that couldn't carry the backpack but they were doing their very best carrying their backpack it was really was a beautiful really nice engaging event and before we we move on i do have a surprise that i would like to show i think we learned some of us learn about the shoes that we need to wear next
054time but you know we had an opportunity to do the hard hat at uh that took place um i think it was last week at one of the schools that's that's going to be open i believe in november i was told we were told so i want to actually just begin with the video so that you can see what transpired last week this side is all the media center what's different about something we would see here versus something we would see in downtown you have like two layers of caulk layer spray foam um there's certain building envelope functions that are just more robust for a coastal environment how many resources [Music] it's a beautiful view out we're there to have furniture that's collapsible so it's a big open space we can bring tables in can
055you imagine how many music teachers would love to have this is their room pretty big room with a great view right yeah exactly it is an enormous school it's beautiful i see lots of space and lots of natural light and i think the the students the teachers the community everybody's really going to love the way it comes out in the end i love the way they did the stairs or the steps going up to the stage because it's the perfect height for elementary students and they took that into account the colors on the outside of the building are nice bright warm and they just make you feel happy i was so impressed with the wide hallways with the color of the outside it will complement excitement and productivity for our students the outside is going
056to be amazing but we all know what's really important is what's going to happen on the inside and i am confident with the super staff that beachside elementary has they're going to bring it on and this is going to be one of the premier schools of the volusia county school district i'm going to tell you i'm so excited i think our taxpayers will be very excited too right project as beautiful as this for our kids in this community we are so excited about our new beachside campus i can't wait till our students are marching through the halls to bring these walls to life [Music] [Applause] and it was only about 110 degrees 111. grateful for the sea breeze very good thank you so much that's the first time we've seen that video that was really
057good shout out to our to chad yes chad did it all right next item on the agenda human resources update 16.01 so the brave soul man of the hour [Laughter] mr west is with us along with miss stephanie workman and they're going to give us an hr and payroll update excellent thank you dr balcombe thank you board members i appreciate you allowing us to be here this evening we've had a lot of excitement going on in the last since our last board meeting and uh would just like to run through a couple of things real quick so these numbers are are still higher than we would like but i'm just going to talk a little bit about some of the things that we have uh this this represents the entire number of instructional vacancies in
058our district 253 okay when we break that down actually classroom vacancies that's actually under a little under 200 but some other things that we haven't taken into account which we just did this last thursday which the board has actually asked us to do and that is to go back to our principles and and i i had a conversation with our elementary principals last thursday in regards to our counseling positions uh those counselors that were added based on a new formula towards the end of the year so because we have four elementary schools that have zero counselors so what we're going to do is take a look to see where we can appropriately take from those schools that have two counselors and shift that support to those schools that have zero counselors so we're in the
059process of that right now we are looking to reduce the number of counselors back to our original formula as needed we're not getting rid of any counselors though let me say that right up front we're holding on to everybody okay so the retrition is needed and that sort of thing we will look at the allocation process and work from there and then the second thing that we talked or that you had shared with me was that we're focusing on our classrooms of course and we know that ese is a very very critical shortage area so we did review our esc toas that we added just this past spring and we we are placing those folks in appropriate positions throughout the district we are hoping that they're going to be able to stay at their schools
060if those schools have esc vacancies and remember the whole idea of those ese toas was to support our esc teachers well they can't provide support to teachers that aren't there so we want to make sure that we're placing those ese toas appropriately and making sure that they're in the vacancies in our schools so we will be going through and reducing those allocations once again we are not getting rid of anyone we are keeping everyone and we're just more appropriately placing them into our classroom vacancies i have a question how many classrooms are we now able to staff as a result of this change we had 13 to esctoas that we were able to actually place into classrooms that's 13 ese classrooms that did not have a teacher before and now have a teacher that is
061correct yes sir and now i'm sure the next slide is going to tell us how many ese instructional vacancies we have actually no what we're going to go on to now no we actually have that breakdown a little later on when we get to it but what we're going to talk about briefly is paraprofessionals because of course those are very important as well to support our teachers that are in the classrooms um i wanted to show you kind of a comparison over the last time that i presented we have actually obviously we're continuing to hire every single day so we have now 31 pair of three positions available and 53 pair of four positions and uh so what we're trying to do is of course creep those numbers down as well and trying to get
062our prayer professionals in i will tell you that the 15 an hour minimum has increased or improved i think and made it a little more attractive for our paraprofessionals as well we do have transportation vacancies as well our bus operators are we have 10 right now and i did confirm this with mr smith as well as um i don't see is carol here tonight okay carol's not here we we've been in contact as well and nine attendants um however every one of our routes are covered as we have been doing all along to make sure that our routes are covered so every one of those routes are covered this is just the optimum situation if we had 10 additional operators we would be able to have everybody doing exactly everything they needed to do full
063time our edep and before the bill update we actually have a number more vacancies and this is because we have added allocations in those areas at the schools based on our last conversation the the comment was made that we we didn't really have the programs at the schools that we wanted to so we went back and we discussed that the obviously it means we have more vacancies but we're trying to fund those programs at the schools to give the parents the opportunity to have that edep program or befell before the bell program as is requested from our principals so ms fisher and her crew have been working very diligently with um with the principles to try to get that all straight our schoolway cafe um this actually number has changed uh since today that's right
064it is now our vacant positions are down to 17 heather sent us an email just before the board meeting so we're down from 23 and once again that's another one that allocations were looking at are looked at and being reviewed on a consistent basis so we're down to 17 right now for our schoolway cafe positions and our custodial update we have actually completed another 22 of our vacancies of our positions so and we have a number of them in progress but those number of vacancies have been reduced as well and then schools fully staffed we have eight schools that are fully staffed including these i hesitate to even say it because tomorrow is their first day of pre-planning and as a former principal i remember on the first day of schools there's always somebody that
065comes in and says great news i'm having a baby or great news my husband just got a job in colorado or something so i i really hate to to throw these names up here but um you know as of right now um these are the schools that are fully staffed and we're hoping that we're even gonna have more tomorrow okay that are fully staffed okay and then we have it by district and so what we have is our number of vacancies we have um as we have typically done our district one we have 73 of the excuse me 81 of the 253 vacancies are currently in district 1. you'll notice those numbers went up a little bit from last time and sayings i'm sorry but we did we have had some folks that as i
066said have had unexpected either loads or or they've decided to uh to move on in district 2 we're down from last time from 49 to 32 so those numbers are looking better in district 2. in district 3 those numbers are down from 19 to 16 and our support vacancies are down from 10 to 5. district 4 our numbers are down from 42 to 39 and uh in district five gaining ground mr cologne slowly but grain and ground from 70 down to 69 so so we are working to uh to have that as well you would ask me about esc vacancies district-wide we had 53 as of the time that we actually did this calculation now that includes both classroom and our support facilitation and everything ese vacancies so being able to put those 13 toas
067back into classrooms reduces that number of course to 40 but what we are looking to do is cover those classes that need to be covered immediately like our modified and our multi thank you programs but our support facilitations we're asking our district folks they're going to be going in and supporting those as needed okay so what i want to do and ask stephanie to come up and i'll let her get through this first and i know you all will have questions of course i'm sorry before i go to that let me talk a little bit more about what we're doing to make sure that we do have coverage and i discussed this last time but i want to make sure we still are meeting on a regular basis with the assistant superintendents our assistant superintendents
068are reaching out as well as stephanie to our principals to make sure to find out on a regular basis who our vacancies are where our hot spots are and that kind of thing um we have implemented a um we're going to call it a pilot program for some of our critical shortage areas that have the possibility of being remote or working virtually we've talked to some of our secondary schools specifically because that's where we have our highest number of math vacancies and so we are looking to pilot potentially having math being streamed virtually having a classroom set up for our kids so that we have a facilitator in that classroom which will of course be a substitute most likely but have that virtual instruction so they can actually get that instruction with a certified teacher
069and we're looking to do that to fill a number of our math vacancies so if we're able to do that successfully i think that's going to be a very popular thing that we'll be able to put forward that's not our first option but but it is an option for us and looking for something for us to do there okay so one of the things that you asked me at the last meeting also was that you wanted an update for where we are on our salary committee so i've asked stephanie to come up i'm going to let her take the helm here and also ask elizabeth to come on up if you would share as mr west said we have been meeting for the last what almost five months pretty much every week or every other
070week for both view support and view instructional to try to address some of the issues that have come about through legislation through the increase in minimum wage so our focus for view support has been that we obviously need to establish a new salary schedule because of the increase to the 15 minimum wage because the first thing that did was complete create even more compression than what we already had so our focus has been not only on reducing that horizontal compression but also reduce minimizing the vertical compression as well for those uh employees who have been around in the district 20 25 years because we feel like they have been um unfortunately they've they've been hit two and three and four times so and they've been with us through recession years when no raises were given
071they've been you know hit by this 15 minimum wage and so you may have someone who's 20 years with the district making the same as someone who is starting out so we want to make sure we can address that as well elizabeth would you like to add anything for this one so with support we are now seeing what we've been facing with in instructional so again the raising of the floor and keeping the ceiling where it's at doesn't work well so that's where we are okay with the view instructional we have also been having these same conversations and the the thing i want to point out and i know we have some members of the salary committee here with us this evening is that they have been listening and participating across bargaining units so instructional
072has been participating on the support side and vice versa and and it's interesting because they have provided input for each other because they're trying to you know support each other throughout the process which i think is huge um it just shows how well they work together both in the schools and and outside as well with instructional we have been working on um obviously distributing the tsia funds in accordance with statute and we did receive new guidelines about how we can utilize that with the 50 50 split so so right now we're taking our time and going through that to make sure we follow what the the guidelines are from the state we are also working on continuing an esc stipend like we gave at the end of last year we um as you all may
073remember we gave a thousand dollars or a prorated version of that to our ese teacher so we're hoping to continue that as well we are looking at adjusting our advanced degree supplement so that for our more veteran teachers it is no longer embedded as part of that salary but they will also get an additional add-on like like our um newer teachers so what that means i see you mr colon so we have two salary schedules we have the grandfathered salary schedule which is largely what those teachers who have tenure are on and then we have the annual contract schedule which was created via the legislature back around 2012 or so and so with when the law changed we could no longer create a salary schedule based on an advanced degree so prior to the law
074we had different tracks if you will we had the bachelor's master's specialist doctorate tracks and they those trains left the station individually and so when the law changed we could no longer do that and advanced degree supplements had to sit on top kind of like cheese on your hamburger right your base celery is your hamburger and your supplement is going to sit on top well back then no one could foresee that we would have a law that would raise the bottom and not do anything to the top raising base salaries and not proportionately growing those of mid-career and veteran teachers and so when we initially started with the law change those grandfathered teachers when they had a advanced degree or earned one subsequent to the law it was embedded in their base salary and their
075base salary just continued to grow as salary increases were provided but now that we've had this upending of how we have to do things because of the law what we found is that some teachers who are on the grandfathered scale who have advanced degrees are actually earning less than in some cases or just hundreds of dollar differences between folks with an advanced degree and a supplement form so we worked very hard to make sure that we could write that and i'm pretty proud of that work that we were able to do and then the last thing that we have also focused on again is is trying to look at our veteran teachers and talk about doing a retirement accruing supplement and that again is to try to deal with that compression piece because we have
076so many of our veteran teachers as many of you all may remember when they would hit that 25th year they'd make a nice jump in their salary well that went away when when all of this new legislation came into place that went away so we're trying to help make that difference up for our um veteran teachers so i feel like we are getting very close to um where we want to be i can tell you the one thing that really made me happy tonight was the appointment of our new cfo because that has been the missing piece in all of this is is truly knowing where we are sitting financially and what it is we can do and whether or not this is going to be a one-year process or a two-year process or so
077forth but but the one thing i can say is is that every time we've been at the table this team has worked collaboratively and we've bounced ideas off of each other and it's not there's there's not been any anything negative is what i like to say so i think we've done well okay so uh we get excited and we get passionate but i i know that at the end of the day we all want what's best for each other and it's it's important to note that we have come together we initially tried to have two separate meetings one just for support and one for instructional and then we just said hey let's all just jump in because everybody has great ideas um we have hit some challenges though that i think it's important to kind
078of just share and i want everyone who is here tonight and those who are listening to know that everything that we're discussing is still preliminary we haven't agreed and nothing's locked in you know we're just coming to you to give you kind of a status check of where we are we we're recognizing that there are certain encumbrances even uh to the t the ability of that we have to use the tsia money that five million dollars that was sent down by the state and i mentioned it to you the last time i spoke with you um we all thought last year when we hit the 47.5 that this year we were going to be able to do with the money as we so desired however we know that in the last legislative session they moved
079the goal post on us again and so what we are finding is that no matter how we come at it the base the increase to the base has to be 75 percent of whatever we give to those on the grandfathered schedule that highest increase to those on the grandfathered so easy math if someone on the grandfathered schedule receives a thousand dollar salary increase someone at the very beginning of their career must receive 750 dollars that's not going to help us reduce the compression issue so we have to become very creative and i can tell you the members of our team are researching um what other districts are doing tonight i brought what brevard has just settled on to share with stephanie that's what this retiring retirement accruing supplement that's what this is all about and
080we're not beholden to the name that's a name that miami-dade is using a very interesting way to be able to reward those mid-career and veteran teachers but again you know we've we've got some hurdles there we know that the implementation of the 15 an hour for support staff is going to cost about 3 million dollars that's it we're doing it it's the law and it's the right thing to do but that's 3 million dollars we know that we have about seven times as many employees in the instructional bargaining unit so you know we've had a conversation about well is there seven times as much money to to work with instructional personnel i don't know that's up to you guys and so we really do have pretty serious conversations about what we can do to make
081sure that we carry out what you want us to do which is prioritize people and make sure that we work to get this corrected but we've made a lot of progress we've got some good ideas but we need your help we need your help to figure this out so anything else um if the members of the committee that are here would stand up i'd appreciate it [Applause] lawrence is the numbers guy for review he he and michelle golden uh trade numbers back and forth he takes care of it for us and then we also have valerie jessup who is one of our support um professionals here as well and they have been uh giving up a lot of their time to make this happen so i just wanted to recognize them and one more thing
082because i you know always sit back down i'm like i should have said this um one of the other issues that we have been working hard to try to determine how to solve this this problem is to reward folks for their service and dedication and longevity longevity and loyalty to volusia county schools so one of you know when we particularly in support right because with that they have two different mechanisms depending on which bargaining unit there's a lot of laws there's more than 20 laws for instructional personnel about how you can pay their salary not so many with with support but one of the things we've been discussing is how to reward those folks who have stayed loyal to volusia county schools wanting to make sure that we recognize those years of service and we've
083created this new salary schedule for support based on that new base of 15 an hour and again as stephanie mentioned you know we wanted to make sure there was space between the levels and across and down and so it's just been kind of you know we know what the goal is but we don't have uh unlimited funds but let the record show ms alford said we do not have unlimited funds noted um i'll take a stopping point miss cuthbert um it's so important to reward our veterans because we we are marching towards retirement and it's frs is so much more than what social security is and it's been since 2010 that's 12 years that have gone by that we haven't had that that 5 000. it was over 5 000 i know because i was
084the last one i was the last one to get it because i reached my 25th year in 2010 but what it did it encouraged us to stay for 25 because of that enticement and then encouraged us to stay for another five years because frs was averaged in your best last five years of service yes and that's what kept our veterans here but when we don't have that incentive our veterans can they don't need the stress i mean you get a little maybe lackadaisical and then it's so much easier just to greet people at walmart or do something so much less and you don't have to take any work home so i'm i'm fully supporting you know our veterans to have more how we do it we'll figure it out we will we've encountered so many
085other problems and we've solved them and with all these great minds especially at the base level back here because we all know behind all good people are great people so it we will figure out a way to do it and it'll come probably one night you wake up at 2 a.m and it'll just be so simple it'll be there we i have full confidence that we'll find a way to make it right so we i wish we did have unlimited funds i wish i did our state legislature would understand that every county has different needs and have different monies lots of money to work with as i'm sure dr balgovin found out when she went to broward county for a couple of months some have too much some have just enough and then there are
086those that don't have much at all so we will be we will find the goldilocks in our three bears story and i'm sure we will solve it it may be hopefully sooner than later but i think the way you're progressing i'm very much in awe of your ability to look at it objectively and do what's best for all of our support staff and also want to do an e a shout out to our edep it was 36 years ago that a young lady named libby ferguson came up with an idea for a pilot program to have after school care and she did it at chisholm i couldn't have made it my first year of teaching if i didn't have that pilot program so shout out to libby ferguson and chisholm who volunteered to have that
087first program so 36 years ago so thank you so much mrs haynes i know i'm the person you don't want to hear from i appreciate all the work i absolutely do and it's heartbreaking to me that there's that many laws that deal with our instructional teachers salary where ms cuthbert was the last group that got that i was the first group that didn't get it and we've got experienced teachers that when they signed on with us that was the commitment that was made to them that's the group that they committed that when you hit your 25-year mark we're going to give you this significant increase that then is going to help your retirement for your five highest year average my goal when the new law came out and i'm thrilled that we got everybody to
08847.5 but we knew it was going to cause a compression issue because of all the restrictions they put on it but we as a board we made that happen last year i mean there are still districts that don't have the 47.5 starting salary but the whole idea behind why i wanted us to get there was so that then it would free up the money so that we could go up to our most experienced teachers and we could pull them up and what did they do they changed their wording my heart says thank you for all of this thank you for all the work you're doing but my top priority right now are the teachers in the classrooms or at the school-based level and getting them moved up and the paraprofessionals that are in the classroom
089because without those individuals everything hinges on them yes you know i love the bus drivers i love the schoolway cafe i love the office specialists facilities and maintenance you know custodians all of those people but the people that make the magic happen every day and do the hard work are the instructional teachers and our paraprofessionals so we got to figure and that just 75 percent is ridiculous i mean we just took people and gave them an 8 000 you know what 500 raise in two years but we didn't do that for this group up here and i don't and it can't even be done in two years but they have the right to be bumped up and i'm not happy and so quite frankly i think we all need to tell tallahassee you know we
090did what you asked us to do and then you change the rules on us again and i'm tired of that happening because we followed what they wanted us to do and we did it in two years so that we could then take our experienced teachers and we could give them what they have earned and deserved because they've been sitting there since that beginning of the 2011 school year not getting anything and i i just i have to say this this whole thing with supplements and stipends and all of this all we're doing we're still taking the same pot of money but we're nickeling and diming it and it's not going to their base salary so it's not helping their retirement every time we give them a supplement or a stipend or something it doesn't count
091towards that retirement piece yes it does supplements and stipends are pensionable bonuses are not but i agree with you but like why nickel and diamond here's what i want i want a strong base salary for those people i want them moving up and i want it to impact their retirement so that when they have reached the time that they are finished they have something to show for all of the work that they have done here because some of these people have been through times where there wasn't really even a raise okay and or very minimal so i understand and i hear you clearly the problem with that is any any increase that is considered salary or in a salary adjustment is now is now encumbered by that legislation we don't want to go the route
092of stipend and supplement and i don't want to say this too loud but it's like a loophole to get the money to the people and i hate to say it that way but that's that's the game right now that we're having to play because of poor legislation that's affecting all of us if if the the rules would have stayed the same and we hit our mark and we were able to do what we needed to do we'd have been okay but they changed the rules of the game on us and so now we're having to circumvent those rules in order to get the money in folks pockets but still find a way to make it pensionable still find a way to make it count for their retirement we can't do it with a bonus but
093you can with a stipend or a supplement and you know we have to figure out how to get around those very bad laws and my challenge to you is figure out how to do it starting with a group at the top and working your way down in that instructional category because you've got people out there with 30 years in and 35 years in and this is where they're sitting compared to everybody else so so remember too it's it's almost like it's got to be a bell because there are and matt really is the genius matthew matt really is the genius that has figured all of this out david tyndall as well brilliant but it's the bell curve because we do have some people like mrs cuthbert who did receive that big bump right and then
094there are people down at the bottom that have grown significantly and then it's this middle group in here it's this the top of the the bell here that really we're really looking at how to do something for them we want everybody's salary to grow i mean that's that's right out of the gate but we we have some people that did receive it some people that got big bumps before and it's this cluster right here i like to say mid-career and veteran teachers because folks that are at lead like 14 15 mark 16 they're behind as well yeah they're very much fine and just so you know i have actually have set up a meeting with mr pinley for this week so that we can go through the q a that we receive from the state
095to make sure that we are interpreting it correctly because the last thing we want to do is come up with this grandioso plan that isn't going to be the letter of the wall so i have a meeting with him on friday for that okay thank you thank you miss burnett thank you i just want to extend my gratitude to all of you for getting together and thinking outside the box and trying to take care of of the people because that is what our goal is this year and i know that's a challenge and we're hope our purse is only so big too but i think it's great that you guys have come together to show both of your sides and you've brought the team that has also expressed and been there to help and i
096think everybody deserves a seat at the table so thank you i see it as a business and we are in the business of people and we want people from flagler county we want people from seminole county we want teachers what's going to make them come here what's going to make them stay here it goes both ways and so we are we have to we have to do something different because some are going some are coming they're starting the tide's starting to turn they're coming our cfo came from seminole county so if we don't have teachers in classrooms and we don't have paraprofessionals and we don't have cafeteria workers and we don't have bus drivers because we're competing you know it's that between that gosh a few months ago i would have said 10 to 20
097an hour mark but now it's the 15 to 25 dollar an hour mark wow we hit that really quick we were proud when we got to 11 and then we jumped to 15 and so you know while we celebr we celebrate the compression because we're grateful for the money but we've got to you know it's not just a matter of trying to make the wrongs right it's a matter of keeping up and i don't know that we've ever and i'm not haven't been here too long but i don't know that we've ever approached it that way how do how do we get folks to want to come here i tell you as a therapist i get notices in the mail all the time from hospital systems all the time sending me thing oh we're hiring
098here we're hiring there not because they don't think i have a job but because they want me to go there and so i think that's the only way that by looking at beyond it's going to sound bad but you can't just look at what we can do we have to look beyond that because until we start to look beyond that we're not going to be competitive and this is a competition and not only that but we're competing against companies that allow people to stay home and do their work now so it the games changed in four years i mean you went from you know you were a great technology person to now you can be in consultant sitting at home going click a click doing a lot of work i'm sure much needed work without
099a doubt and so that's that's i think the challenge for us you know i i get it when elizabeth looks over and says well you guys can fix that no i we can but i think as as a business model we have got to do something if not we're going to stay behind because let me tell you something if you look at some of those proposals that you know other districts are coming out with guess what they're coming after our jugular they are coming after our teachers they want those they want them up there they want them in their county so if we do this they're going to come from here because that's more than they're making over here mind you every as ms cuthbert would remind us every county is different not every county
100has the same but we've got lots of vacancies and so i i would encourage us to and i'm just planting the same seed to look at it that way because we're no longer we're no longer hiring to survive we're hiring to excel to be better than than to be above to be the place that folks want to come both from a cultural standpoint because as we know money matters but money is not everything okay but also from from a business standpoint what's going to make us i want to know how many teachers i can grab from seminole county next year they're best teachers who are the best teachers that we can get who live in deltona and travel to seminole county how can we get them to want to stay here and it's not just
101money and i think we're i'm very proud of the work that's happening on the cultural side of it but i i think you know the onesie twosie presents that's not cutting it anymore we are bad i mean we're battling other school districts that are and i don't know how they could come i don't know how they can do it i know i saw brevard brevard man they flagler took a jump you know and and you know i think we're doing it the right way because we're looking years out how we can it's not just what can we do next year it's years out how can we fix this compression issue but if we're not careful we're going to end up losing a lot of people but they're not going to go because we love our
102they love our schools they love our students and so yeah i went there and so you know i i think we just have to make it better so we can remain competitive as a business because this is a business it's a people business and so i as we have committed as a board i think that we've gotta think about things a little bit differently than we normally have starting with the classroom so that's all i have all right thank you anybody else that's it thank you thank you very good all right we have and do we have any more cards angel mr gomez any more cards so there's three or five very good so we'll go ahead and do public comment it is after six o'clock 607 thank you all for your patience first up
103mr scott cleary you'll have three minutes to address the board thank you welcome good evening chairman colon dr balgran board members every year this is a great time of year when we start off the school year this will be year 17 for me and just as a dovetail to the conversation that just finished uh with an advanced degree i only make about four or five thousand dollars more than a beginning teacher just something i wanted to throw out there because pay is a huge component about keeping teachers the other thing is that every year we start with hope you know with new programs new slogans but all that's irrelevant because we really do need teachers to feel supported in the classroom with discipline with their instructional decisions but moreover we also need our principles to
104feel supported you know when i started teaching we had this thing called a helicopter parent and i quickly learned that they could be your best friend they could also be your worst enemy but they could be your best friend and if you put them to work it was great as i sent to all of you on the board there's a new phenomenon known as the jackhammer parent and obviously they've never heard the lyrics you can't always get what you want because they want it their way and they're going to keep pushing until they get their way and a lot of times that can happen but there are some times where teachers and administrators have to draw the line and say no and make that a full sentence when principals feel supported and they know that
105there's a point where they can say no they can support their teachers because with every program that we have to promote positive behavior we also need hard consequences and that will solve a lot of our problems in the coming years and i hope that this board does support policies to make that happen because we've had too much i'm just going to let it i'm just going to say yes to get it off my plate we need to stop doing that because as a former district employee dr caldwell once said there's unintended inc curriculum and the unintended curriculum that we give when we say yes to things that we really should say know about is that we teach our students that if you say if you complain enough you actually will get your way no matter
106how wrong you are thank you thank you mr cleary mr willie williams welcome mr williams greetings to chair ruben colon school board member superintendent dr balgovin my name is willie frank williams jr i live in daytona beach i'm here tonight to continue to tell my truth in hopes that the margin lies on equal footing with those of privilege i stopped speaking to the board because of the toll it takes on me to do this then i got moved to high banks learning center as an ap the people at high banks it was love at first sight hearing the vision that principal strother has for us we're building relationships from changing lives for the better the hornet way i believe god is saying to me your work is not done it is not the journey that
107i would have picked for my career heading into year 30 not my will but god's will be done through me i'm honored to serve dr anthony mohammed who was our keynote this year said one of the workshops i attended last summer a couple of summers ago nothing really changes until you're outraged but i don't know if i'll be able to change anything but i'm definitely outraged and i've got to do something tonight my focus will not solely be on me it is not lost on me that i filed a race discrimination complaint in august of 2020 after being wronged demoted in the summer of 2019. now the number is up to 13 jobs i've applied for and i'm old for 13. my last three interviews was directive student services that went to thomas vaughn principal
108riverview that went to tom masoli and most recently coordinated student services that went to tammy fisher i have no illusion i will be treated like the privilege and perceived best employees in this district my fight now includes those coming after me palm terrace elementary when i watched tucker harris get promoted to principal of sea breeze i was happy for him then the outrage came when i watched the out of the box thinking to have karen trotman be the ap and the servant act the director of transformational schools oversee the school maybe possibly karen community principal after we monitor the data and that was confusing first i did a public information request to see if karen applied for the job i got the lesson she did she's brilliant qualified been at the school serving alongside mr
109harris yet she didn't get the job on the other hand tucker harris gets a job at a high school without having any high school experience as a teacher ap or principal then i heard chatter about the state mandates and rules for palm terrace if there is a state mandated reason why karen troutman was not appointed as outright principal i believe our community deserves to hear it during this hiring season we did not have one african-american working in volusia county promoted to the principalship crushing dr baldwin you've given us a charge to lead with grace and respect i read your article in the newspaper to listen to your address to the kickoff i'm inspired by your story and all that you've overcome as our new leader i have a few questions only you can answer but
110that's not for tonight this is the most divided we've been as a nation in my lifetime voting right to racism telling women what to do with their bodies the politicizing of our school board banning books and their attacks on educational freedom teacher shortage will be a huge barrier for us in a new accountability assessment this year i remain hopeful because of the staff we have on the front lines in volusia county schools your charge for us to show up as our authentic selves can only happen when every student and adult is valued no matter their income rates sex gender or how they choose to identify themselves how do we improve a healthy culture treat every employee like you treat tucker harris thank you mr williams to god be the glory thank you terry fuller for
111i tried sorry welcome my name is terry fuhrer i am from ormond beach um and i am here to address an issue ma'am can i have you speak into the microphone i'm sorry there we go so okay um i want to see who owes me my money go and give me my money um in december of 2019 um christopher wrench at seabreeze high school got together a trip for ace students only to washington d.c inauguration which was trip was supposed to be january 16th through january 21st um a lot of you know time you know first come first serve you're not going to be you know got to get in there you got to get almost like a salesman and i thought it was a great price for what they were getting and so i
112told my daughter i'm like i want to go too i mean this is this is great it's a once-in-a-lifetime thing to go to inauguration um got tons of text then all of a sudden about how there's openings there's openings and i'm like what what how are these all these openings um so he sent out a letter on september the 8th saying with much disappointment he had to inform us that the trip was cancelled the volusia county school district is not granting any permission for out-of-state field trips therefore we must cancel our trip okay in the same letter email it says one of your options is to come with me this christmas um on the trip out of country um and he was doing another one too so either one of these international trips and i
113know one of them was coming i don't know the other one but the christmas one was um through sea breeze so if you denied the one in january that was at you know dc why in the world would you approve an international one okay so father on this this is what he sent out to the parents i then proceeded to say wait a minute um because he was saying we could put the money toward another trip or we could pay the penalty and i'm like wait a minute that's 350 a person so that's like seven hundred dollars for us to have to pay because you cancelled the trip um i could never get anything from him he said that him and mr rollins met with the to advocate on my behalf with um explore america
114explore america says they have no such thing um then he blames one he says that the school board doesn't approve until he has to have all the names and he has to have all the names after money's put down um and then in part where he says you know i do not seem it prudent to apply for the field trip permission through the school board wait a minute you you just said that the school board turned it down now you're saying you don't find it prudent to to address it according to um explore america 13 people had signed up thank you ma'am your time is up however mr barrio who is our high school superintendent is right behind you and he will be one you can speak to who can address that thank you so
115much appreciate it thank you for coming and letting us know okay you're gonna have to teach me how to say that what is it pronovost pro no boast got it thank you on the vost welcome can you hear me yes okay my wife and i are very involved parents and we closely monitor the books our children read we became aware of sexually explicit books in the teen section of our public library over a year ago we did not know that this was also a problem in our public schools media center unfortunately it is it's a very big problem volusia county schools have hundreds of titles that contain materials that are either sexually explicit or graphically described male and female genitalia sexual acts and rape among other things florida statute says it is illegal to distribute
116pornographic or obscene materials to minors volusia county school media specialists hide behind a phrase in the statue which says about the materials taken as a whole is without serious literary artistic political or scientific value for minors the key word there is minors many media specialists will say that even sexually explicit books have literary and artistic value the question should be is it valuable to minors and why is it valuable to minors in our public school system to read books that graphically describes sexual acts male and female genitalia and acts of rape i guarantee most parents like i was are ignorant to the fact that these types of books are in the media centers the truth is you can say that anything has literary artistic value but florida statute clearly defines what is pornographic and what
117is obscene our current policy 320 is insufficient to keep books out of our school system that violate the statute on pornographic and obscene materials our media specialists have had too much free reign on ordering these types of books and a check against this needs to be made an update on this policy is in order to close this dangerous gap policy 320 has a challenge process but can this process function if 100 challenges are made what about if 300 challenges are made these books need to be weeded out by the professionals that put them there in the first place we as parents will put in the effort to remove them but i hope this board will update the policy and our superintendent will direct staff to remove these books i've prepared and submitted one example to
118you of what can be found in our media centers and that's the very tip of the iceberg thank you thank you sir and miss elizabeth albert welcome back good evening chair cologne members of the board superintendent dr balgevin members of the audience so i just wanted to come up and talk a little bit about positions i want to come up and and talk with you i'm sitting here i want to talk with you about what's happening in our schools right now you had the discussion a moment ago about ensuring that all of the classrooms have certified teachers in there and and we agree with that of course we do but here's what you need to know there have been some last minute reassignments made across the district my concern is that if we were moving
119in a direction to rescind certain positions or make some systemic changes across the district we should have communicated that to folks in a more timely manner because what's occurred now is these messages have been delivered to people and they have no options they're not able to transfer to another school to a more preferred position they're kind of now left looking at what's available and saying well great what am i going to do now and i know that wasn't necessarily your intention to to do that but it's what's happening and so it's not just with instructional personnel either we have support professionals who have just learned of their assignments and their non-preferred assignments school starts next week paraprofessionals will be on the job on thursday and so we've not really given folks a whole lot of
120options and it's really truly i think maybe it got away from the district i don't know maybe it was poor planning maybe it was just the lack of of having things organized and here we are but what what's occurring is that people are now being affected and they're feeling they're going from the feeling of being empowered and encouraged about this new year the way we all are and want to be and want to stay and now they're feeling deflated and discouraged and we can't have those feelings at the beginning of the school year this school where this school year where we're going to make things better we're going to do good things for people the year of the employees right so we've got to figure out a way to do what we need to do
121to make sure that our classrooms have folks in them but also to show people that they are valued and respected and cared for and so i don't know how you're going to do it we would love to work with you on it but the rescinding of these positions the esctoa positions the additional allocations that were made for the counselor positions by someone else we we understand why you're doing it there's no doubt we don't we don't you know we get it but we've left people kind of in a lurch and and that's not a good place to be remember people first means 360 degrees all the way around so thank you thank you so much and that will end public comment we will take a 15 minute break and we will be back thank you
122c one minute c okay next item on the agenda is 18.01 presentation back to school safety update thank you chair colon thank you board members i am thrilled to be able to call to the diocese our very own chief newman along with miss rose roland the team has done extensive work this summer and getting ready and working with our administrators in our schools as you know safety and security is at the forefront when it comes to the work that we do ensuring that every single student in our school system that they are exposed to the environment where they are they feel safe and a sense of belonging but equally important the same value we want to instill for every staff member so chief newman looked at all of the state statute house bills that are
123out there looked at the impact reviewed our safe school plan along with the team and made some adjustments to our and bottom line is is that we will ensure as a village here in volusia county public schools that every single student and every single staff member feel safe in our in our schools and we will do everything it takes obviously it's collective responsibility and ownership for the work so we're very thrilled and and thankful for the diligence that chief newman and her team along with miss roland has exhibited in this area so chief and miss roland take it away okay good evening chairman cologne school board members and superintendent belgium we're here this evening to do a brief presentation on school safety and supportive environment and this goes along with our strategic plan and centers
124right around goal three which is safe and supportive environment for our students and our staff and as we all know that at this point in juncture that school safety is our goal and it's most important when children feel safe and supported their academics will increase so we're going to talk about a few things that we've done different that's for this coming school year to make sure our children are supported and and they are safe in our schools the first thing i'll talk about is positive behavior and admissions and support which is known as pbis at this we decided last year to have pbis all of our schools use that behavior strategy or intervention so when a child goes from school to school they won't have to go to school and get accustomed to a totally
125different plan that another school is using it'll be used district-wide and all of our schools now have been trained in the pbis process we had about 23 schools that were trained last year and so now all of our schools have been trained they were trained that volusia learned so every school had a team that was trained over a three-day period so all of our schools have been trained in volusia learns and we do have three schools that are pbs model schools by the state that's timber crest beachside and heritage middle i'm sorry to advance the slide and that's um those are three schools that are already trained and mr lon and ted marsh did do a presentation at our administrative summer institute um just talking about the strategies that he uses and the incentives he
126used at his school to keep his kids in line he's trained as teachers and as a matter of fact he's one of the schools that i hear very few um get very few things from when it comes to discipline wise and so he gave some strategies for his schools that he uses and then things that he do um on each and every day and what he's done he's uh incorporated five minutes or so every day to talk about being positive being you know keeping things in the front making sure you make us aware of something is going on so he shared with the principals the things that he's done at his school to make sure that he keeps consistency among his students and his staff at school and pbis is not a program it is
127a framework that we use um is positive it reflects values and relies on assistance that are in place so when you have systems in place at your school your students know what the expectations are they know what the procedures are in your school and procedures and expectations are extremely important because it helped keeps things organized and in order so he gave some things that he did in his school to make sure he had assistance in place and has expectations in place and educators that implement pbis use strategies that teach it teaches students how to achieve expected outcomes so when they know what the out what's expected of them the outcomes will be greater and it also teaches them to prevent things from happening prevent problems from taking place to take the proactive approach and make
128a teacher where if something is happening or something's going on so it teaches the children to be proactive and provide which means just provide incentives for those children that are staying um on tasks the students that are following directions in school um and you get the desired behavior outcomes when you have those expectations in place and the students and the staff actually know what they are so it starts with the staff the pbis does and the staff kind of challenge it down to their students in each classroom and it's across the school the school as a whole where the students and teachers know exactly what's expected of them our next slide is our school social work we've added as you know our numbers in our homeless numbers have increased um because of the pandemic you
129know parents lost jobs um they've had to move in with relatives whatever the case may be we've added three homeless caseworkers and these three homeless caseworkers will assist the one district liaison that we had dealing with our homeless students and what they will do they will track their progress toward graduation um they'll try their daily attendance um and they'll follow them academically and um social socially on a more regular basis and what they will do they will get with the attendance clerks at their school um to check the tenants of children that have missed the extended period of time and they will reach out to those families and make sure they are providing resources for those families as far as providing gas cards they assist with finding places for them to live it's a motel
130so they can find other places that they can reside and so there's a grant that was written for this these three homeless caseworkers that we've hired through our school social work department and also through the jack center the reef family resource center jack center we're providing two school social workers for that center as well and that is a program that chief chitwood has kind of taken on what they're deciding to do is they see so many of our children that are sometimes just walking down the street or they're skipping school it'll be like when we were children they would pick you up and bring you back to school or take another center over on madison avenue but what they will find in that center is everything will be under one roof um you'll have halifax
131behavior that'll be there stuart march will be there um we have two school counselors that'll be there mental health teams will be there so they will have the parents come in and they can get it's a one-stop shop we can have everything once they come near um to that center they can see this school social worker they can see the mental health therapist they can talk to there's going to be law enforcement that will be there to assist them as well so there will be everything on the one shop and we are providing two school counselors school social workers to go there to provide the parents with resources um and some support once they talk to children and get them in place our next in the school counseling the additional accounts we're going to add
132we probably have to put on a hold right now because we want to be sure that every school at least has a counselor in place so that you know all of our students can be served so that's going to be on hold until we can get you know our footing and get more counselors into the school district to provide support for all of our children so right now that will be on hold for a short period of time hopefully and bullying we um talk to some schools during um some of our bullying meetings and and just talk about one of the some of the biggest things that they were dealing with and bullying came up quite a bit um so we have a bullying task force that um has met since last school year and
133we've updated our bullying manual and the committee consisted of parents teachers administrators we want to hear from everyone a voice from the community and bosses from the school district as well to get input because we want to be fruitful for everyone and know what's expected it tells them who to contact parents can contact the school principal administrator report any bullying or harassment it tells them what the process is the administrator will conduct a timely interview and get with the students the parents and the guardians to discuss what the outcome of the interviews were and to provide support which is through interventions plus all students inspired based on the investigation of the results they're all informed of that and also we just had a little slogan we said take a stand and lend a hand tell
134who's involved tell what happened tell where it happened tell when it took place and tell an adult and sometimes children are sometimes a little afraid to report it so there are places where children can take and drop in the box being been the media center just drop by put in the drop box and the front office is put in the drop box and our school council will check those boxes every period and call those children down so that they won't have to come report it themselves they can be called down during class time to share their experiences of what has happened with them so the bullying manual will be reviewed soon and we'll make sure that all schools have a copy of it but the bullying is being taken seriously with the dropbox we think
135kids will feel confidence welcome by just putting in a box and going on the class and the counselors will check it every period to make sure that the students are called down and spoken with so they can provide support for them and our mental health teams a mental health therapist is being added to each and every middle school we already have them at our high school so each middle school will have a mental health therapist house on their campus as well so they'll have ready access should this be a threat assessment or a student is having a tough time they can see the mental health therapy right there on campus we also hired a internal care coordinator for student and family follow up with voluntary screenings and involuntary examinations of course we can only do
136this with parent consent so once a child is baker acted and they go to halifax people return to school we will make sure we contact the parent to see if they want us to follow up with those children what we found was when kids would go to halifax behavioral the service providers were backed up six and seven months and so that's a long time for children to wait to receive services so we hired an in-house care coordinator that will get those kids at least someone teach within one to two weeks it's only one of them right now but that's better than waiting seven months for to get some support for the families and our mental health videos will come from lauren's kids and it's also already been used in one of our elementary schools down
137in the edgewater area in the river does lawrence kids we've put it together for our district advisor curriculum committee to look at and that committee did approve the lawrence kids and we did have another one it was moaning bur and it's one that has been used nationwide and is research based we're looking at using that as well it talks about cyber bullying teaches kids how to report things whether it be abuse physical neglect but we're really going to use the lawrence kids and we're going to look into investigating the use of monique burr and that's to meet our mental health requirements that give that's given to us by the state so we're working to make sure that we have enough support for our children and enough resources for our parents now mental health continued we're
138increasing mental health school social workers and psychologists that are trained in a program called prepare um it prepares and teaches us for crisis that happen on our campuses it reaffirms the perceptions of school safety and security it talks about all the time it evaluates psychological and trauma risk it provides interventions and how to respond to mental health needs it examines the effectiveness of crisis preparedness and it's actually written by educators that have had first-hand experience dealing with school crisis um like the margaret stoneman douglas like the ubaldi's the individuals that wrote this program actually have experienced it firsthand and been trained in this area so we're looking with the national social and school psychologists to come in to help us and train those individuals in that program so that we are ready and can share
139it with those should it happen with us we hope it don't but you just never know and so what else we're going to do our mental health department is going to be trained and they're going to hold family evening family therapy and parenting classes for any parents that want to come after work up to having family issues at home if they need there before their children our mental health team would be hold evening classes to help those parents that need to support but can't get off work to come during the school day so we're going to do it in the evening is instead of having a parent come in because we do have parents that come in and sometimes cannot come to the school to actually see about their children so if we do it
140in the evening time the parent can come in and have some time to spend with themselves and a mental health counselor or school social worker or a school psychologist so we'll all be done with parent permission um it's not required but the service will be offered for those parents that want to take advantage of it okay are there any questions thank you i don't see anybody lit up but i do have a question so is some of this potentially billable uh well we do contact our individual does medicaid for us and we do take to civic solutions they look through everything that we do and our building has gone up the last couple years and so because we use them and so they will look at everything that we do to see if there's a
141billable expense through medicaid great thank you any other questions okay i'm going to turn it over to chief alrighty good evening mr chair board members and dr b thanks for allowing me to come up here and talk about what i'm so passionate about and that's the safety and security of our students and staff for tonight's presentation i'm going to do an overview of house bill 899 and house bill 1421 and then i'm going to hit some other areas regarding protocols that are implemented ongoing initiatives training and future goals and then accountability the first one i'm going to cover is house bill 899 which is the mental health of students and the main thing that everybody needs to know about this is that it required the school district to have a mental health coordinator and we're
142already compliant with that mrs roland already hired jessica mcintyre and one of the responsibilities of that mental health coordinator is to work very closely with me as the school safety specialist ensuring that all those data points that doe office of safe schools asks us for jessica and i will work collectively together to make sure that the district has that in and in on a timely fashion other things you'll see there is that it requires training and resources for youth mental health awareness and assistance and again this is something that jessica and miss roland have already been working on so this is not new for volusia county schools jumping to house bill 1421 as you know every year the legislation am i echoing am i too close the legislator legislation usually passes some sort of school
143safety bill this year it happens to be 1421. uh some exciting things in this bill the first one is penalties for false tips in fortified florida as you may recall from all those daily reports that i send you we have had some incidents where students entered faults tips which resulted in a mass response by law enforcement to our campuses sometimes upwards of 15 or 20 law enforcement officers which as you can imagine that pulls those units from being able to respond to other community issues happening so it's a big deal and it's a costly situation what we have now is that we advertise on fortify florida through the app letting students know that if they provide a false tip they can and will be charged that law enforcement will investigate the school will cooperate and
144they'll be charged criminally another key change for 1421 is that as you know the marjory stoneman douglas commission has been in act since the marjory stoneman school shooting it was supposed to sunset in 2023 but it has now been extended to 2026 and they're taking on more of a compliance and oversight stature law enforcement it requires law enforcement to be physically present and involved in active assailant drills which i'm going to touch on later in this presentation it requires all threat assessment teams to be involved in the process meaning that we have a threat assessment team that's comprised of different components to include mental health law enforcement counselors the principal and others that may bring a significant component to that threat assessment this prevents one person from alone handling a threat assessment just making sure
145that everybody comes to the table to review and when they sign off on it that it's either a transient threat a substantive threat that everybody's in agreement with that decision and the state has given us a mandate that those individuals administrator school counselor mental health individual must be a part of the threat assessment team so it's not just one person anymore it has to be a team of individuals that make the decision what happens with a child once they have an incident so also as part of this it requires that law enforcement on our campuses all the sros and srds have to have crisis intervention training and that school guardians have to have de-escalation and response training which our guardians for volusia county schools will have this friday by mr nick prince so security projects
146that have been implemented um this is something that i feel that we although you all are aware of what we've implemented since 2018 after marjory stoneman what i have found after the robb elementary school shooting in may is while on vacation in alaska i got a lot of phone calls emails and messages from our parents and they were concerned and rightfully so but many of their questions and concerns were about things that they just didn't know that we were already doing so i felt like i just want to review some of those things that we're doing here in volusia county to answer those questions publicly and for those parents that might be at home listening that didn't reach out to me just to encourage them of course to reach out so that i can talk
147to them about the protocols and practices that we have in place to keep their students safe when they come back on monday so significant changes that we've made of course as you all know is the access control to the lobby areas of the district which of course the reason for that was to restrict access and to allow only people who should come beyond those doors through the main entrance or through the access control active assailant plan we are required by statute to have an active assailant plan and we train on it every single year so all of our principals we send out the information and they basically do a train the trainer where they pass it on pass down the information through a power point that i send out and they train them on run
148run hide fight and this happens every single year so we we are compliant with that one of the one significant areas that parents did not know is that we have an armed professional on all of our campuses and that through school guardians sros and srds they are trained and they're equipped to deal with any type of active threat on our campus and when i tell you that they are prepared these men and women us and security operations included signed on that dotted line saying that god forbid there's ever an active incident on our campuses that we will go in immediately go in and eliminate the threat and that's not being harsh that's just something that i feel like everybody in the room and everybody at home needs to know every law enforcement agency every guardian
149of volusia county is prepared to do that additionally by having the we call them safe school officers that includes all of those individuals that i just named they're required to have annual training in active threats and active assailants so you saw some emails from me just keeping you in the loop with what campuses those law enforcement officers were training on they use our middle schools they use our elementary schools and our high schools we encourage it we want them on our campuses because when crisis happens we want them to be familiar with the layout of our campus we want them to know where those classrooms are the gymnasium the media center so we welcome them and we appreciate that they're there and training and preparing every person on their staff to come and help when
150we need it most in our district we have over a hundred safe school officers so without going into details of where all they are assigned every single campus again has at least one safe school officer on their campus the guardian program has been so positively received across the state that the department of education office of safe schools in my recent training they are pushing there's 47 school districts out of 67 that participate in the guardian program they are pushing other districts who don't have the guardian program to participate because it costs less basically to use a guardian but they find that they're getting the same quality of employee to work on a campus because their former law enforcement and foreign military so again they are pushing it heavily to those districts that don't don't already
151have this program and we here in volusia county schools i believe we have the best guardian program um so a lot of those districts who don't use the program yet call us ask us for our policies and protocols and how to implement it in their own we receive praise from office of safe schools we created a guardian appreciation day just to show appreciation for those guardians much like we have law enforcement appreciation and teacher appreciation and that was one of the first uh the first one in the state of florida so we got a lot of positive praise here in volusia county for doing that jump into after action reports this is just something when significant events happen on a campus parents wanted to know if something happens who who's investigating to make sure things
152are done right well security operations does after a significant event if there's a lockdown if there's a report of a gun on campus we go there we meet with them there's a team of us we talk to the principal or the staff that were involved if the sro or srd was on campus we include them of course and we talk about how we can do things better were there things that could have been done quicker or more efficiently and we address it uh every single detail of that event alyssa's law uh this came about after this became a law in i'm sorry 20 21 last year so um but it was a result out of a student alyssa al had deaf that was killed so the law was named after her and it required that
153every school district and every school within their district to have a panic or crisis button we chose to go with strategics and strategics was implemented prior to the 2122 school year so we were compliant and what that did for our employees it basically put a panic button into every employee's hands allowing them not only to have a cell phone to call 9-1-1 or a landline to call 9-1-1 but it also gave them the ability to push a button and request law enforcement assistance in a crisis we do security walkthroughs at the guardians and sros and srds on campus and this is something this is part of the new protocol that we're doing for 2223 school year is that we've created a daily report log which is basically a platform for every safe school officer on
154our campus when they go and they see an open prop classroom door an unlocked door a gate that is open and not monitored they are able to enter the information into this daily log they report it to their principal on campus just to ensure that the principal or the security liaison on campus can follow up with that teacher or that person who has propped the door open and talk to them about the consequences of what could happen just like in uvalde where the door there's some back and forth on whether or not the door was propped open or maybe if the door wasn't propped open there were issues with the lock that had never been reported to their facilities team to repair it so this daily reporting log that we have implemented in security operations
155allows those individuals who are doing these checks to enter the information into a log and then we would be able to search it and see basically how many times has this happened on a campus it will detail the building number the classroom number the specif specific person who left it open just again so that we can address it with that person provide retraining as needed and just really emphasize the importance of locking those classroom doors and keeping them shut that it truly does save lives there's not one single active assailant incident where the assailant forced their way into a locked classroom we have drill monitoring 24 7 district wide response that as you will recall we did this to benefit the principals and aps and staff on campus they were responding to after hours alarms
156and then they were back on campus the very next day after responding at three o'clock in the morning so our school guardians they are the ones now that respond to those intrusional alarms and fire alarms to check the campuses when those things happen and the principals really appreciate it i'm not gonna lie they love it so we hear lots of positive feedback on that we've implemented a law enforcement go bag which basically in crisis if a person can't run out and give law enforcement maps of the campus emergency shut off information or emergency contacts for the individuals inside we have go bags that they can throw outside and that law enforcement would collect when it's safe to do so and it would put the information into the hands of law enforcement again looking back at
157uvalde marjory stoneman there's always issues it seems that surface with either the right the good guys and the good girls that are coming with guns they don't either either have the keys to be able to get into a classroom they don't have the communications available or there's some sort of situation that could be addressed so we've tried to address that through law enforcement go bags that can be thrown out and we also have a law enforcement lock box that sheriff chitwood after hearing me talk about needing to get the keys into the hands of the the good guys he donated lock boxes that we were able to install on all of our campuses so this is on the outside of our building next to the fire department knox box where they have access to keys
158to be able to get into our campuses so that was another positive change that we implemented raptor visitor management is another one that our parents didn't know about even though some of them had used it to go in and sign out their kiddo they didn't realize that we have this system and what the purpose of it is and again for the parents benefit raptor visitor management is really two-fold not only does it allow individuals who come to our campus when they scan their information in it checks them against every sex offender and predator database and as you know if you're a sex offender and you're a parent you can come on campus but it has to be arranged through the principle you can't just come on our campus unannounced for predators they can't come on
159our campus at all so this is an important piece to keeping our students safe the other thing that it does for us is god forbid there's a crisis situation on campus it allows us to account for every single person on that campus we can pull a report and we can say there's 500 people on this campus or 500 visitors because when there's a situation we also are accountable for those maintenance folks that are out there doing work we're accountable for those mental health crisis teams that are responding to our campuses but if we're not allowing if we're not in having them sign into this system then we don't know that they're there so again parents weren't aware of this the security assessment protocols we revamped those uh it used to be a 100 or 200
160300 series where security would go to a campus it would take five four four five hours to go through the process we've revamped it we mirrored our assessments to the department of education office of safe schools because we wanted our teachers our principals to see exactly what office of safe schools how they were going to be assessed the process takes now about an hour to an hour and a half our team can usually do three to four a day which allows us to touch every single campus four times a year that moved from once a year to now touching it four times a year through announced and unannounced visits so those have gone over really well and it truly has helped us to prevent us from getting when office of safe schools comes and does
161their surprise visits where we might have somebody at a front gate shack on a high school where they're not maybe stopping every single employee well when that's an office of safe schools representative that comes through that gets written in our report that they weren't talent not challenged that they weren't stopped at the gate and vetted and properly called into the front office so again we address that through our assessments just to make sure that they're aware of all these policies protocols and best practices reunification plan this is a requirement through state statute again volusia county schools we were ahead of the game we developed a plan we implemented the plan we trained with law enforcement we met with the sheriff's office brought them here at dak reviewed the plan with them and so we are
162good to go we have a plan in place just for anybody who doesn't know what reunification is because some parents didn't when i talked to them is that is the plan that when there is a crisis situation on a campus it could be an active assailant situation it could be a chemical spill where we have to take our students from one location and move them to another safe location so the reunification plan basically addresses all the pieces and parts that you would imagine that go into that to include media staging areas law enforcement fire department incident command post pretty much everything transportation bringing it bringing them buses to pick up kids and transport them so we do have a plan in place in volusia county we've implemented other things like single point of entry storefronts
163standard response protocol the one thing i want to say about standard response protocol this is basically moving away from codes signals and colors to use plain language so that when we're communicating in a crisis situation whether we're talking to the fire department whether we're talking to law enforcement whether we're talking to our parents everybody understands and it takes away that miscommunication that can happen that could really get people hurt threat assessment teams we continue to do monthly threat assessment review meetings this is above and beyond what is required meaning that when an incident happens the threat assessment team addresses it immediately in real time the monthly threat assessment review basically takes all the threat assessments from a given school say sea breeze high school they get together every single month and they review if there
164were 10 threat assessments they review every threat assessment to make sure that those students who have a handle with care or some type of follow-up need then they're making sure that everything's addressed that everything is accountable that nothing's slipping through the cracks making sure that if that kid that had a threat assessment uh transfers to another district or another school that those files are following because again that's another key piece that was intricate to either marjorie stoneman or in uvalde where there were significant pieces that could have and should have been detected and reported and followed and tracked and investigated that slip through the cracks uh the one thing i didn't didn't have on the powerpoint but this is uh really fantastic we have a need in addition to strategics in addition to cell phones
165to be able to have our school-based personnel in an emergency to have yet another ability or another way to summons help so the sheriff he this is not the radio but i just wanted to show you as an example he has old radios that his deputies aren't using so he's going to give us a radio for every single one of our campuses that basically would go to surplus if he didn't otherwise do that so he has graciously donated these to us they're being programmed now and what that will do for our principals and front office staff is there's a red button right there if i were to push this red button and i'm not but if i did that would immediately communicate with our volusia sheriff's office communications center it would basically tone out the
166radio system meaning that the only person that they could hear or could communicate would be me so on a school campus if a principal had the need he or she would be able to push that button and it allows them to directly communicate with a dispatcher in the sheriff's office office communications center which is again huge that's another level of communication that we didn't have in another security enhancement that i think is very beneficial so thank you sheriff chiltwood the ongoing security initiatives that we're working on that we've already discussed are the bi-direct or previously in previous meetings bi-directional amplification testing and that just allows or ensures that our first responders and school guardians can communicate from within side the school buildings we're revisiting fencing projects mainly because as we spend more time on campuses
167and as i've heard from you all and from parents there's other pieces places nooks crannies that maybe now looking back when there was a rush in 2018 after marjory stoneman to put the fencing up some of it didn't just didn't make sense so we're revisiting that and going back and evaluating to see if additional if there's classrooms that their doors open outside the perimeter fencing if there's vpk classes on a campus and they're outside the perimeter fencing school clinics where our school nurses are outside the security fencing we're reevaluating that and as we see those things we're putting in requests to get quotes to get fencing put there buzzers if buzzers are needed and things of that nature we are looking at lock upgrades um again in uvalde there was this uh scenario that i'm
168sure you've all heard about where a teacher due to the locking mechanism she couldn't be sure that her lock or that her door was locked because the type of locking mechanism that it had we don't ever want our teachers to be in that situation to where they may have to go out in harm's way to check the outside of the door to ensure that it's locked so our facilities folks are putting together a team and we're doing a survey of every school to determine if we need new locks on our doors or if there's a simple fix on some of the doors it's a thirty dollar fix which clearly we're gonna do and others it's going to be more pricey because it's older doors needs more hardware so we are working on that and after
169we get the survey we'll kind of come back together and put a game plan together on how we're going to do that because that's a global project across the district that's going to have to take place gaggle we're implementing gaggle at the start of the school year we just finished our training last week and as you call recall that's the proactive monitoring platform that will help us with those students who are searching concerning information suicide threats to self-threats to others and that will basically go straight to the gaggle folks and they then have live people who are former law enforcement former teachers they monitor it 24 7 if they evaluate something and they see that there is a threat to some kiddo even if it's at two o'clock in the morning and a kid at
170home is saying that they want to kill themselves gaggle will notify us which at that time of the morning would be security operations and we can work with law enforcement to get somebody at that house to check on the student do a well-being check and take action in hopes of saving this person's life and getting them the help and resources that they need the student hero reward this is something again we got positive praise from office of safe schools that we developed which as you know this is something that we got donations from the business community so that when we get reports when a student comes forward and reports a gun on campus a weapon on campus a significant threat we can then after we investigate that and address the issue then we can go
171back to that student and present them with a certificate and a uh fifty dollar usually a fifty dollar gift card real time access to cameras uh this is something that is important to all of us is not only for us to have access to it but also law enforcement so the sheriff's office and his uh real-time crime center they have access to our cameras and it's going to continue to get better and better through a platform that he is working on on his side called fusis we've already signed the paperwork that has to take place it's just a matter of getting the cameras and everything online with his platform so that only during a crisis event or an emergency situation like we used mrs roland and i were at an elementary school recently where there
172was a report of a missing student and the sheriff's office real-time crime center in real time was able to get on those cameras and start looking to see and verify if the mom truly did drop off the kiddo um or was there something suspicious suspicious or nefarious going on and maybe we should be looking at this from a different angle so very beneficial for uh our campuses for them to have real time access the meraki security camera enhancement we're still working on that we finished middle and high schools with the exception of some cameras that are on backorder we're now doing surveys on all of our elementary schools and as soon as we do our surveys then we'll roll right into implementing or installing those cameras for the elementary schools i'm going to go very
173quickly through training but this is just an example of all the training that we're doing whether it be through the through the principals and staff on campus or specific to security operations but we have a lot of training new training and things that have been here previously um and then focus so the focus for 22 and 23 again for uh based on what happened in uvalde based on the things that we saw from marjory stoneman collectively we all agreed that we don't need to continue to implement new resources new platforms we really need to focus on enforcing the positive policies and procedures that we have and that's what we're doing is we we have great policies it's just a matter of educating our parents educating our staff members to make sure that we're all on
174the same page and enforcing the rules to maintain safe campuses and i just want to read to you out of our policy manual because i felt like this was significant it says safety is the responsibility of everyone all should be active and engaged in our shared school safety and security responsibility and that's in policy 208 that's significant to me because that's not saying security operations responsibility it's not saying dr balgovin's responsibility it's all of our responsibility to include uh our parents our stakeholders when we see something happening on a campus we have to take action and that's the plan for 22 23 is uh to do exactly that so i've listed some policies here that are common policies that i think have been forgotten about so just uh reminding parents at home and our faculty
175and staff that we have a policy that prohibits certain backpacks of a certain size and that those those things that are larger than the the measurements identified here that they're prohibited and they can be confiscated as needed on the the school site that about the clear bags on after school events sporting events graduations things of that nature and that they're subject to search this is already in the policy this is nothing new backpacks bags carrying devices or musical instruments in a carrying cases subject to search prior to entering the campus on school board sites again policy 208 regarding id badges this was a big one this is required for uh grades 6 through twelfth and it's in policy again nothing new but i think it kind of fell to the wayside but this is important
176this is what helps administrators it helps guardians and sros and srds to clearly look around on a campus and if they can see a 2223 id card then it helps them kind of identify that this person or that person belongs on the campus so really again holding people accountable not just students but staff as well to wear your id and help each other know that you belong on our campuses in policy 510 it addresses no weapons and firearms again it's no surprise to us but i want parents to realize and understand that we do have a policy against it and there's also statutes that prevent bringing firearms and guns on our campus and that having a concealed weapons permit does not change the fact that you can't bring it you can't keep it in your
177vehicles uh you can't have it have it on our campuses any person visiting a school campus during school hours has to sign into raptor again this is already in policy so we are just re-emphasizing the importance of that through our principles we understand that when there are events on campus that it may cause a delay for parents to get into that concert that play that event happening on campus but we have to remind them that to maintain safe and secure campuses and to protect their kiddos and our staff we have to maintain the security policies and protocols and they need to be ran through raptor and then the last one is just talking about locking our facilities we spend a whole lot of money on our facilities not just our school campuses but dak olsen
178and we have routinely calls throughout the night that guardians the nighttime guardians get dispatched to where gates are left open on our facilities they find as they're doing security walk-arounds which guardians do at night time they find open office doors open custodial closets that lead into our buildings and again not beating anybody up just as an overall reminder that we have to protect our investments these are investments and they need to be locked and secured so with that um i know that went a little longer dr b than i planned but i felt like it was very important to make sure that our parents are on the same page and really wanted to re-emphasize some of the questions and issues that have surfaced post uvaldi so that they understand volusia county schools has done a
179lot to prepare our campuses and that our teachers our faculty our staff we are all ready for them to come back that it's going to be a safe happy hopefully campus but that we're ready for them and with that do you have any questions very good board thank you so much miss cuthbert i just have one very quick just clarification on side 19. at the very top no duffel bags or large bags in book bags no longer than 15 by 21. a lot of our high school and even middle school athletes carry big duffel bags full of uniforms baseball bats equipment and they carry it with them all the way you know during the class time from the morning all the way to the evening that is a clear violation of this policy what would
180you instruct our athletic directors to do on campuses great question miss copper i would recommend that they secure those in a locker if they have a locker room locker oh okay locker but these are the lockers in high schools are not that big anymore so then they have to come up with protocols then this is my take on this and and again i'm open to whatever the board and dr valgovin think but if we have a policy that states this either if we do away with the policy or we enforce the policy so if we have people walking around on campus with large duffel bags obviously the concern is that there might be an assault rifle a shotgun or something that could be concealed in there so maybe rather than saying you have to go
181secure this in your vehicle or maybe you secure it in your coach's classroom or something to that effect maybe they search it maybe they search it and that's the protocol but i think that it it if it's that common on campus from what i've been told is that most high schools where this would be a problem they have a protocol in place it just has kind of become a little lackadaisical so i think that it has to be established it has to be announced and then they hold people accountable for it so that everybody's on the same page that one person doesn't get a pass basically that if this person is accountable for putting it away and securing it somewhere that everybody does okay thank you thank you thank you miss haynes my question is
182um this page isn't numbered but the page with the um basically the two bullying yes so are we making these into posters are we putting these out on social media what are we doing because to me this is information kids need to know parents need to know you know here's the process of i mean i really love the take a stand lend a hand yes we're going to make posters out of those and send them to each school you have we're going to absolutely can put them in the students hands and also post in the front office and put them in classrooms as well we want to be as visible as possible and um dr bagaban i actually think there's some i mean i don't know how rails feels but i think it should go
183out on social media where our families can see it i agree we're going to upload this okay and highlight a few pages i mean slides okay i just think you know this is something that could run periodically throughout the year just reminding everybody because i think still a lot of people don't know about the four five florida app also and um but i think you did a great job thank you thank you we're going to have a page dedicated to safety and security with constant updates thank you mr purses thank you mr chair i don't really have a question i just wanted to thank you um i mean this is just excellent it's it's what's on the minds of parents um it's what's on the minds of our i'm sure some many of our m
184our our employees too it's good when you when you know that we have protocols in place it's good for parents to know that we have frequent trainings it's good for parents to know that you inspect what each school is doing to ensure that they are keeping up with all of those protocols i'm so happy that you meet regularly too with various police chiefs along with the sheriff they really have a well-coordinated plan in uh in our county and so we're not going to end up the way some other districts have in the event that there is some emergency and so i'm really grateful for all of the law enforcement people that serve in our in our county in that in that they have this shared concern for our uh students and it's a lot of
185work for them i mean it's this is a lot of extra i want to say extra but it's just a lot more time that they have to put in because it's it's hard enough to be in law enforcement when you're just a i'd say just when you work for your city but then to think that not only that but now you have to coordinate everything with the school district and the school district has so many facilities and so many students and so many parents involved it's it's just a major undertaking so you can see why there would be gaps in in places if it were not for this just constant training and and review and to make sure everyone uh to use your analogy there with the radio that we are on the same frequency
186when you push that button you know it goes directly where it needs to so i just want to commend you uh for all of this effort and i want to thank dr valdebun because we had a conversation probably the first conversation i had with you when you accepted this job and you said well what's on your mind and i said safety safety that's what's on my mind i mean you know we can deal with the other stuff because we're educators but i don't know anything about this part of it and so we we rely on on you and then all the other uh law enforcement people in our in our district so i lastly i just want to say uh i'm so happy that you're going to do this joint would be calling it a
187press conference right from here correct i don't know whether you want to say anything about that uh but you want to share it it's upcoming it's it's what's yes yes ma'am it's this week but i wanted to touch on something else first that mr purses and i apologize for but you're absolutely right what we do here in the school district does impact our law enforcement and there are some pretty um i don't wanna say contentious conversations but when i reach out to them specifically with house bill 1421 it requires that law enforcement respond to our campus for active assailant drills and be actively engaged well as you know we have a lot of campuses they have staffing shortages they have calls to respond to and this is this is something else that that they have
188to be involved in but it's required by legislation so in to what you're saying i've been trying to communicate and coordinate with our law enforcement and what we came up with initially was that we were going to try to have them come to campus four times a year however in talking to our municipal partners that don't have sros and srds again due to staffing shortages that's a lot for them so we're meeting wednesday at four o'clock before the unified press uh release or press briefing press conference we're meeting to talk about exactly that because we have to come up with a solution that not just works for volusia county schools because we have to do them every month that schools our students are on campus that's basically 12 because we have students on campus through
189the summer so can we really ask our law enforcement partners to come on campus 12 times times how many of our schools at different varying times and the concern with that too is when you have that many drills with law enforcement involved you got to make sure that those law enforcement partners aren't responding with lights and sirens that they truly understand that it's a drill because we don't want somebody to get hurt or killed in a car crash coming to what we're having a drill on our campus so there is a lot a whole lot that goes into this planning and again um just trying to bring in the chiefs definitely the sheriff and the school district to to figure out what's going to work for us so that not only are we compliant with
190what we have to do for the school district but what works for our law enforcement partners i have a question on that point there wouldn't that be an inter i get the difficulty and the complexity but i believe that if we went at it with an interlocal agreement because we don't have a choice this is law this is not up for and so if we present it to municipality and they choose not to sign it then we go from there this is non-negotiable it's the law or or we need the department of education office of safe schools to say okay this city you don't have to do it so very interesting very interesting i mean this is not i mean sign here or don't sign here so in the marjory stoneman douglas commission hearing that
191i went to i say it's interesting because of this i had met with the chiefs and the sheriff that have sros and srds on our campuses and we collectively agreed that four per year was doable until i took that information to the chiefs that don't have sros and srds on our campus and they said uh-uh that's not doable we can't do that hence the meeting on wednesday however sheriff galtieri who's the chair of the msd commission his interpretation of house bill 1421 is that law enforcement will be on our campus every month for every active assailant drill so i called boe office of safe schools to say what gives we're trying to work with our law enforcement partners but here's the situation and they are running it up to their illegal they didn't really have
192a definitive response shocker but that they will get back with me and let me know what the final outcome is so i can assure you of this that wednesday we're going to meet we're going to talk to the police chiefs and the sheriff and we're going to try to come up with something that works for volusia county to ensure that those officers deputies and our students and staff are actively engaged in the active assailant drills that we're required to have and whatever we decide from that meeting i will of course let office of safe schools know i'll let you all know so that we're all on the same page and that we have clear communication on what's decided very good miss burnett thank you a very good presentation and i just want to thank you
193for making this meaningful and and actionable that we're actually going to take um the measures we need to take to keep all of our students and staff safe and it's very evident that that is your passion and that that is our goal to do that and hold everybody accountable so thank you very much thank you ma'am and i think the part you just said is accountable and i think it is the expectation from our board to our district to our superintendent and down is that we you know one of the things uh shortly after dr b accepted the position dr b and i had a conversation with chair of chitwood and we're upping the game on safety we're not looking to be compliant we're looking to be a leader in the pack we're looking to
194be the district that folks look at to see how do we do this how did we do it how are we doing it and so you know as we saw in uvalde which the details are fuzzy but there were doors left open there were there was a lack of process and policy even after marjory stoneman douglas and so a lot of times what happens is you know your guardians they are loved dearly in their schools and they don't want to get the teacher in trouble but that teacher oh i mean she's got a door prop but it's all i mean the fight you know what we do when the fire department comes around we hide all those door props right that's this i mean i don't know about you guys everywhere else hospitals et cetera
195but i think we're taking it to the next level and and that's what i'd like to see this year is us take it to the next level it's us say hey this isn't right maybe that gate that you guys leave propped open because we know it's un comfortable to go all the way around you can't use that gate you know supervision where's the supervision and i know in the in the school safety plans you know we're outlining who's going to be where and how and so i i think that is a you know we're upping the game and so more will be expected yes because you know that there's there's not one of us i don't i can only speak for myself but there's not one of us who doesn't want to be that school
196board member to have to do that school board conference in the event something were to happen it's my worst nightmare i couldn't even imagine and so uh that's going to take all of us and it's everybody everybody from the you know extended day person in that gate because it sucks to go back and open it every single time you know how do we remove the barriers for that do we add a buzzer do we add a camera do we put a ring camera there doesn't even have to be complicated so that they can get a visual on who's there you know what what are the things we can do and and i would also encourage our employees to share their ideas they know they know where the where the nooks and crannies as you called
197them are and so you know i i'm committed to helping us up our game anything that we need to up that game let's do it because you know the safety of our students means more than than a lot mrs cuthbert very quickly i just have a couple of comments thank you again this is both of you it was very succinct to the purpose and it's doable you provided us with so much information um i highly encourage all our visitors families staff students do not discuss safety and security measures or concerns on social media we can't have that because then that makes the entire campus unsafe if anyone sees anything that needs to be taken care of it needs to go to the appropriate administrator to the principal because only the principal if it's a lock
198that's not working the principal can't put in a a ticket item to get it fixed from maintenance if the principal doesn't know that there's an issue so that's one thing and also when we are all sworn in when we are elected we are sworn in as constitutional officers and part of that constitution which behind us is framed it says that we have to provide not just a quality education but has to be a safe and secure environment so we are constitutionally held accountable for that so thank you for making us look good both of you so thank you thank you ma'am i did want to say one more thing i wanted to give a shout out to the assistant superintendents and the directors for each level we as dr bal gavin alluded to we we
199met with every principal we we got and mrs roland and mr west and mrs wiles we met with them face to face looked them in the eye they provided us their security plan their schedules and uh they sent a very strong message and the principals were very receptive they were very receptive and hearing the principles pass it down to aps and to their staff members people are receptive they're they expect this they want to be accountable they want people to be held accountable for doing what's right to keep our students safe so again thank you to the assistant superintendents and ms roland and mr west and everybody who sat in on the meetings they were very meaningful they were like those quick dates there were only 20 minutes we hit it hard and fast but
200it was it was very meaningful thank you great thank you dr b i want to thank chief newman and miss roland and our team were up for the challenge as you alluded uh we had a conversation i believe when i was in broward prior to coming back with sheriff chipwood and i think it was like close to 10 o'clock that night and he committed he committed to working with us as a as a true partner and i'll tell you so far he has delivered we're very thankful for him and all of our law enforcement officers and the camaraderie and the collaboration that we have this is just the beginning when it comes to the safety of our students and staff it's not about what's most comfortable it's about what's right and that's what we're going
201to be focusing on so this is just the beginning that's my commitment to you and every single member in this volusia county as your superintendent you can count on that i'm a firm believer that everywhere you go you learn something right and my opportunity of serving in broward county has given me an experience that when it comes to to to really putting everything at the front line to as it relates to safety and security you do not compromise that's one thing i will tell you so i'm going to be relentless about it and i need all of you with me because again as uh chief newman alluded it's going to be collective ownership responsibility and accountability for the safety of every single one of our students enroll into our school system and every staff member
202and you have my commitment for that thank you very good thank you so much thank you for your support or do we need a break or do you want to keep going keep going keep going very good next item on the agenda is 18.02 proposed reorganization of the information technology services division thank you chair oh he just looked up when he was already there yes dr khan you are ready actually this is in full transparency as you know our cio has been with us for a little bit now um and he's had an opportunity to really look at his division and really looking at our most precious asset which is our human capital and knowing the charge that's ahead of us and knowing that we're that one-to-one district you know what it will take for
203us you know moving forward into the future to ensure that true support is provided to our schools on our families he did a complete re-evaluation of that most precious asset for the i.t division and in full transparency he was given a few guardrails which he will share with you what those guard rails were but he's got a proposed uh restructuring of the division and it's to enable two things what we need in the future to support a one-on-one digital district that's one and obviously efficiency and effectiveness in as it relates to our work so take it away sir thank you very much members of the board chairman colon superintendent belgium i'm dr matt kuhn i'm the chief technology officer and leader of the information technology services division as i've dug deep into the division i've
204found it's it's kind of like a large jigsaw puzzle that's been sitting on a table a long time and lots of people have had a crack at it but nobody's ever really put the thing totally together and it's really time for it to get put together it's been sitting on this table quite a while and so as i dug in um i found a few things that need to be changed but to change those things we need to have the right structure in place to do it to use an army analogy because i'm a former army officer we have lots of lieutenants and captains but no majors or lieutenant colonels just this one colonel doing everything he can but no staff officers to assist and the other divisions in the in the district do have
205directors they do have that kind of middle level uh skilled leadership that its also needs it also provides a career path for those managers to go up to say director when they've been here for a while we've lost a lot of skilled people over the years and part of it is because of our structure small part um i am going to be a little critical of the division but i want to be clear that i'm not criticizing the individuals i'm criticizing it more as a system as a whole more criticizing myself you might say as the leader of it than the individuals there's a lot of great people in its and and i don't want them to feel that i'm criticizing them but our structure is not working we're in 10 subgroups in the its
206division the smallest one is two people and the largest one is about 45. they're not balanced well and they're very difficult to lead because they're so siloed in those 10 different groupings uh there's been many half done parts and starts over the years as i mentioned like that puzzle that's half made and i can see parts like of that i can see where something started to go a particular direction but then it didn't get fully fully baked we need to improve workflows supervision and cross training we need to create a structure that allows for more coordination and flexibility between subgroups why now you might say you know what what's the urgency i've only been here five weeks this is my sixth week so you might say well don't you want to wait a little longer
207but when i started to really dig into it i saw that the iron was hot and it was time to strike now there are certain pieces that there's no reason to wait any longer but we're between school years barely still but we are in the summertime still and that's a good time to make big changes like this we're a one-to-one school district we have been for a while now so it's time to structure ourselves to support a one-to-one school district we're really on a legacy kind of organization before we were one-to-one which is very different for example we need to improve and up our game in educational technology because that potential is sitting there millions of dollars worth of potential these student devices and and software we've got to get the most out of that
208that investment and that means doing a good job with educational technology so i'll be showing you some improvements in that area as well and we have many vacancies right now so it's also a good time to make a big change organizationally if you already have a lot of vacancies because you can use those vacancies to change some pieces around without hurting current staff members who are employed now a lot of these efficiencies are just plain overdue and it's time to get something done with them uh as dr baughman mentioned there have been some guard rails some parameters so this is not the ideal structure i'm not trying to say like you know in the ideal world this is how you would structure an its division it's the best we can do under the current circumstances
209but it's a lot better than what we've got one of those parameters is it needs to be cost neutral you know we have tight budgets and it would be great if we could enhance some areas of staff that you know we're short on but we're trying to not do that we're trying to just work with what we've got and be cost neutral i also wanted to make sure we were creating a structure that allowed for flexibility so there needs to be groupings that make sense so that when someone has a certain skill set that could also be used in another area when that part gets a little busier some jobs will change some will change supervisors they'll be moved around but one of the promises i made to all the staff in its was that
210we would not eliminate any current staff and that are employed and we would not decrease anyone's pay so job titles could change groups could change but we won't get rid of anyone or anything like that this is the current structure i'm going to go through this fairly quickly so if you have questions you know please ask at the end and i'll go back to some of these uh this is where i'm currently at these are all the leaders essentially there's a few other leadership spots you also notice in the red there's quite a few vacancies that's very difficult on us when there's a leadership vacancy uh for example right now in the back is mike brown raise your hand mike he's got a vacancy in his area he's right now leading about 46 people by
211himself and they're supposed to be another manager but we have that spot vacant right now there's been a lot of vacancies over the last six months i'd say including my own position so that's been very tough on its and i think the new structure won't necessarily solve that problem but it'll make it better as i mentioned that career path will be inside the departments that will help some of our leaders stick around more there's me and my small group this one is mike clayton who manages our business applications on one side there and then on the right side was tina skipper that's a vacant position right now with cis support and fte and state reporting this is uh systems engineering and matt hilton i have to give his group a shout out because last wednesday
212they were here all night long literally till 10 in the morning rebuilding our server systems which are over eight years old my predecessor did notice that they needed to be replaced but it takes about six months to get everything going with supply chains and such and it was six months too late uh they should have been replaced probably last spring instead of now um they rolled the dice and unfortunately about two weeks before we actually were going to replace the system it completely failed so matt hilton and his group stayed here including adrian right over there all night long until they just basically couldn't stand any longer and had rebuilt as much as they could so that the district barely noticed so like i said we have some really good folks in its uh the
213next group over there is network engineering that's our infrastructure that's the part you don't notice much until it breaks but that's the internet and many other pieces of our network that support for example security that we just mentioned before you know technology is so much more than the computers in front of us they're that raptor system they're that gaggle system they're the cameras the door access systems all those pieces supporting that security infrastructure as well as all the other infrastructure of the district this is that group right now part of it at least for educational technology that's currently in place and it needs a lot of reform and it needs a lot of elevation this one is that client services while i'm calling client services right now mike brown's title is manager enterprise customer experience
214that's a mouthful isn't it manager enterprise customer experience we also have some other long titles that don't necessarily need to be that complicated so we've also done some title changing many of the job descriptions will be queued up for your next board meeting in case you're wondering so a lot of these titles will change and so will the duties that go along with them i'm already working on that with hr so we'll have those for the next meeting okay and then this is cyber security this one is the copy center okay and now we move on to the new the one that's in color so the old one's in black and white the new one is in color modernizing analogy there right proposed organizational structure this is the division level um these are all of
215the for the most part leaders there's a couple people that aren't leaders but they are direct reports to the directors so those four directors all have those particular direct reports and then there's others that flow down from them you'll notice each of my slides have a box at the top called changes there's a delta there that talks about the the financial change in that that's changed a little bit since i last presented this because i got a little more dialed in with finance you know we did real numbers instead of like estimates so this is as close as we can get it to the real thing staff is decreasing by two from 110 to 108. leadership is increasing by two from 14 to 16. leadership at all levels all the way from the bottom to
216the highest kind of level very balanced across the board instead of kind of heavy at the bottom and just one at the top so first off we'll talk about the client services department there are four departments within its in the reorganization client services is all about what we do to support people in the field to keep everything running this is repairs this is tickets that come in when we need to fix something that's broken it's installing new software it's deploying new computers it's um it's a machine that goes from a call to a visit to a repair that then comes back to them if it needs to go that far and you can kind of see that as it goes down the line this is the largest department has a lot of field techs because
217they all are assigned to schools typically we like to assign only three schools to a tech that's about the caring capacity of a technician is three schools depending on the size of course you know larger schools are different than lots of small elementaries but in general it's about three that's why you see those pink boxes those pink boxes are contractor technicians that are being paid for with s or three dollars right now that is a temporary situation that's been going on now for about a year and a half and that's something we will have to address down the road when those funds expire the next department is the infrastructure department this one is all about the wireless access points the data center down on this floor at the other end it's our cyber security because
218the cyber security starts right at the the door where the internet comes into the building something called the dmarc where fiber optic cable comes in right then we have to secure it and make sure that nothing is getting into our ecosystem that shouldn't be there it's also things like security was talking about with gaggle gaggle is a ai system that scans all of our domain and looks for evidence of self-harm of violence of proactive things we can do to stop something before a catastrophe happens this is the most complicated or probably the full of the most high skill level positions and that's the software and systems department it looks pretty complicated with all those purple boxes and lines all over the place lots of systems administrators and analysts there's a lot going on here that
219needs to be done really well especially if we end up trying to do something with our erp systems which we are looking at doing so as we go down the line of improving systems like erp and many others this department has to really have their act together and be perfectly aligned with our structures so you can see it has the most direct reports business applications systems engineering student information systems and the uh scheduling system master scheduling this is the last of the four departments and this is and notice this is a big difference between the old structure and the new structure in that the the new structure has a department with a director for four areas that's even they all have a director whereas right now we only have a coordinator as the top level
220of educational technology with higher levels in other areas so i'm trying to even it out and say everybody is as important here including our educational technology i'm concerned about educational technology the most because i feel like the time the clock is ticking we have technology that's in kids hands but are we getting the most out of it uh chairman colon mentioned samar and samar is a digital learning taxonomy there's lots of them there's ones like digital blooms there's uh iste standards there's one called tpack all of them are really about making sure that you're using technology to its most potential not just at that lowest level of likes mr which is called substitution that's like saying you're just doing a worksheet but instead of doing the worksheet on a piece of paper you're doing it
221on a pdf you know why do that now you're just paying for electricity too so you you need to do more than just the lowest level of semi you need to get the full potential i'll give you an example of why educational technology is so important and so powerful you might know of a typical thing that you see often in a fifth grade room studying plants where they grow a lima bean in a cup with a wet paper towel and they do it not because the lima bean is the best plant to learn about plants think about why they use the lima bean because it grows fast and it's easy you know grows in a paper towel you don't even need soil they're doing it because they're getting the most out of that one little
222experiment that they can in the time they've got but with computers i can simulate any kind of plant i can simulate dangerous plants i can simulate ones that i can't even get my hands on in this country i can grow a whole forest i can grow trees i can grow 50 generations and i can change their genetics i can do so many things that let me see the whole world of plants not just the lima bean and i can do that simultaneously integrated with growing the real lima bean so it's not just about switching to technology it's about enhancing the old lima bean growth with technology and seeing the larger concepts of plant growth instead of just a lima bean and i can go you know in many different examples like that but we need
223to get the most out of our technology to go up that semi level so that we're really expanding our ability to teach our students questions thank you board does anybody have any questions i have a comment you want to grow a lima very very short i would love to have you be a guest speaker in some of our stem classes wouldn't that be i you know well not right now but i think it would be great for you to go through and see some of our our stem schools you know just you know i'd be glad to do that i've done that sort of thing how can we yeah well how can we elevate and make them more productive any suggestions you might have you know to support teachers i'll give you an example of
224something that's pretty um recent on my mind uh in the district i came from we were converting old computer labs to something we called innovation labs and innovation labs we didn't call them stem necessarily but that's essentially what they were they were they were becoming stem labs and the innovation labs had eight different kinds of modules and this was also kind of a pipeline for cte so it was stem yet it was about making sure there were paths to success beyond just going to college so we had health programs we had multimedia programs we had robotics and computer science i mean there were eight different modules and it was all about using this space that was once this traditional computer lab before we were a one-to-one situation you know it was like the only way
225you could get kids to computers was the old computer lab but now we said what technology do we put in there that that is specialized that everybody can share and that you wouldn't put it into every classroom like a big multimedia studio for example but but that everybody can get to and use um so stem is is one way of going about that but there's there's other ways to now i wasn't suggesting now okay as we go forward but you've inspired me to think forward you know to think what else could happen based on your presentation so i want to thank you because you got my juices right well you know what stem stands for right science technology engineering and mathematics um stem is it is very important to me because i have an aircraft
226engineering degree right now i work in technology as a chief technology officer i was a former math and science high school teacher so i have all four stem he needs to see atlantic high school yes yes you need to tell them about our aeronautical uh program i think dr b wants him to stay here i'm sorry i'm just telling you i just i'm you got me really excited about what you're doing so thank you thank you it's all about collaboration right miss cuthbert he can help with that later he's been a principal too oh yeah miss haines i'm just happy that you're taking away the ten silos and bringing it into four areas and the whole part about cross training is so important cross training is needed so that people can have a vacation they
227can you know if they're sick not be worried for a day but i want to say this i want to say thank you to everyone that worked throughout the entire night the other night into the next day to be able to bring servers back up so that basically none of us knew that you know it had come down i want to apologize to you for what you walked into and that you didn't know what you were walking into but i want to thank you because in just a short period of five weeks you're the first person that's ever analyzed the entire system and come up with a plan and walked in here in front of us and presented the plan with data behind it and in a way that it it's clear i mean will
228there still be some bomb chests well you have to iron out something along the way or you may find you need someone to cross-train that you didn't think about that but this is the best plan i've seen in a long time and so thank you thank you miss burnett thank you i kind of want to just repeat what what jb said um but i know that you talked to us independently about your plan and it sounds like you have a good solid plan to go forward and um my only suggestion would be to to make sure that all your staff is on board so that they understand your plan but i say go for it thanks thank you and i will piggyback off of that you know it's having been part of restructures and restructures
229and restructures and restructures and everybody who comes has a plan to restructure a lot of times we lose focus on who are the folks who are affected by it and i think that's the biggest challenge and so i'll i'll challenge you to you know because this isn't really something we're voting on this is operational but our theme is leading with grace and respect and you know just looking at the number of vacancies that we have in these departments we've got folks that are tired they are tired and i'll be happy if this is fully rolled out by the end of the year because while it looks good on paper some of it may not be doable tomorrow and we can't we've got some real valuable folks that i would hate to lose because they're already
230at their wits end and mind you you just got here i just got here these folks been here for a long time and so as we bring these changes let's make sure that we're leading with grace and respect because you know even today we we went on a field trip today so we finished our workshop early and i said hey guys let's go over to brewster you know reuben and his ideas of course it was raining just a little bit so all the ladies were worried about their hair and all of that and so we just walked into and so we just walked in the folks office to say hey how are you and i could tell they were just tired and i i don't know how to express that because it just brought concern
231and so the hard part is the implementation that that was in always in the details and so as we bring these changes let's make sure and some of it's uncomfortable i get it but let's make sure that we're doing it in the most graceful respectful way positive possible to some of the folks who have served us for a very very long time and do a great job that's the only thing i'd add you know which again i don't want you to think that at least for myself i don't have the expectation not that it is our expectation because really that falls under the superintendent but you know just just just do it right and you know i was a little concerned which we can talk about later where we say this isn't the best organizational
232structure well what is and so that's my question another presentation but that would cost more money well but again that's like saying we're going to spend 12 million dollars to replace a school that would cost 20 to to remodel a school that would cost 20 to replace and we're going to have to replace half of it in 10 years i'm just saying so i'm curious to see because you know again again this is all organizational but what can we do now that maybe we can do differently i don't know i can give you a hint but like i said this will be down the roadways as you mentioned you know it's not going to be like wham everything at first but uh you did notice that one department that has contractors you know i didn't
233notice if we go if we go to a five to one ratio of five schools to one technician instead of three schools to one technician as we are now with contractors that's going to be really hard on our schools so that's one example another example is we don't have an av team that i i have name is cliff i've looked into it and we used to in the past have a couple of folks but right now we have nobody that specializes on audio visual and and systems like intercoms and uh and theaters you know high-end mixing boards that sort of thing we don't have anybody that specializes on that and we get a lot of people that are confused about it i just did an all staff meeting at mainland high school and it was
234all we could do to figure out the theater system in that room because nobody knew anything about his name i know somebody who can do that name is cliff what i'm saying is that that's just staff that's not in my chart right now you see no av team and most districts you'll see an av group within their its and we need a sure mic his chart and he's the one person that knows how to work probably every av system in volusia county right you know and and i agree with you because i've said this for years we need a sure uh mic cart that we can take to plays in schools that so parents can actually hear their kids do their performance and it works you know and so i mean like i said i'd
235be curious to hear those things because you know some of this may rock someone's world today and then tomorrow we're going to rock it again so do we really rock it once and so that's that's what i'm i'm just throwing out there all right very good we will take a five minute potty break we'll be back in seven minutes thank you c 15 seconds good thank you so much next next one i'm super excited about 19.02 application of high impact reading interventions and targeted supports also known as hits h.i they come up with the acronym before they come up with the title hits hello thank you chair you're absolutely right it means high impact reading intervention and targeted supports we have with us here today another great addition to our team here dr julia nazarova
236who's joined us how many weeks you've been here dr valley because it seems like like a whole year already it's about 27 days and six hours [Laughter] and counting and it's been great and he's been doing really great work and chair you asked um for dr valley to share a little bit about this grant and specifically how we will be utilizing these dollars to support our students through that mtss multi-tier system of approach as we move forward so dr valley good evening school board chair golong and our school board members our community that's watching and of course our superintendent dr belgraven i'm so honored to speak here today and it started off with congratulating our principals elementary middle and high in terms of increasing their school grade by one or even multiple letter grades and
237that was phenomenal you know this district five percent away from an a i used to be in the bureau school improvement for the florida department of education and from looking from from that end down to the different districts into volusia to be able to do that in a year where many districts became stagnant or even decreased or district grade says a lot about the teachers and the administrators here so i've had the honor of meeting all 45 principals working with them even going to some of their schools the academic coaches and the teacher leaders recently at our slt meeting um training day for the school improvement plan and i will tell you there's a lot of strengths that are here present and so the focus here is to really um strengthening what is working and
238then addressing those opportunities for improvement that um that that we can really perfect our craft and when i think about this high impact reading interventions and targeted supports it's not just strengthening the craft of our teachers but also of our paraprofessionals of our administrators school base and even district leaders that are really trying to make sure that we do and offer the best quality education for our kids so um this obviously goes very well aligned with our two goals high quality instruction and high quality staff and i'll be speaking about these throughout but i want to just really talk about the purpose of the funding which is basically supplemental support to promote high quality reading strategies and literacy professional development based in the science of reading and we did receive um over close to 900
239and 2 000 so it's really 985 dollars for a period of july 18 2022 to september 30th 2024 there are four assurances that i want to focus um on within this um the this fund funding which is assurance one is the target population so one of the things that um governor desantis did last well actually was september of 2021 through house bill 7011 7011 was to improve the policy and practices to improve literacy outcomes for all students specifically there's a new section that was outlined 1008.365 in the florida statute which established the reading achievement initiative of scholastic excellence and you're going to hear the acronym raise and that's again for reading achievement initiative for scholastic excellence the raise program basically established criteria for identifying schools in need of additional support i'm going to tell you
240that when we talk about the science of reading it really is the five components of reading that educators are well aware we know that early literacy is very very important to ensure that we're really focusing on that learning to read in those early years up until third grade and then fourth and fifth grade it kind of pivots to that um reading to to to making sure that we are um focusing on those multiple pieces of text um how do we really gauge in terms of um reading to to actually learn and so in this in the raised schools if we look at just vpk to third grade we're focusing on those schools with 50 percent or more vpk through third grade students scoring below grade level and early literacy skills and if we look at
241the race schools that were just released by the division of public education last week we have 23 elementary schools that that that we're focusing on within that raised category and again it's 50 percent or more of their student scoring level um below grade level and so you see here the list of schools that we outlined we talk about professional learning assurance 2 is professional learning and how are we going to focus on that early learning literacy and one of the things that i have gleaned from in working with the department of education and being able to go to many different districts many different schools across the state is looking at at best practices and research that we can bring back hone in on our skills and not just provide professional learning but how do we
242transfer that into practice many times we go and we we participate in a lot of professional learning but really being able to come back and practice that with an instruction is very important and is key and i'll talk about that in a few minutes so basically in this assurance we're looking at those vpk developmental standards we're looking at the best ela standards grounded in the science of reading and include professional learning and evidence evidence-based practice and programs and within the science of reading so we know that um there are five components of reading that we focus on in early literacy we have phonological awareness we have phonics and word recognition fluency and vocabulary or language comprehension and then text comprehension that is the science of reading and when we think about the science of reading
243and why is it a science it's because not any not everything can be a science um we we know that multiple research is what makes it a science and so they now have transition from the five components of reading to really calling it calling it um the science of reading and so we know that it's clear about what matters to teach in early literacy instruction which is those five components and we know that if kids can't read proficiently by the end of third grade they basically face a lot of hurdles that's going to be detrimental for them and you know when we talk about and i know that assistant superintendent dr barrio will appreciate this that graduation rate doesn't just fall in high school it really starts in elementary school but but struggling real readers
244rarely catch up with their peers academically and are four times likely to drop out of high school lowering the power as adults to have that earning power and possibly even costing us the society with supports that we have to provide due to that so this has been um a funding source that if districts and volusia county we're going to utilize it wisely it's going to help us with really targeting our vpk through third grade students through professional learning and through curricular resources that i'll cover in a few minutes so there are three different research-based curricula and programs in terms of training that we're going to be focusing in within this funding and again it's not just for teachers it's for paraprofessionals it's for coaches it's for administrators the first one is the aim institute for
245learning and research and i did some research within all of these three different components that i'll talk about in in in this slide but one of the things that i also did is looked into other districts that have utilized some of the same research um and some of the same companies as well to make sure that we're also getting a return on investment so aim institute for learning and research it actually has a digital teacher training platform and it's designed to deliver research and evidence-based content and it also includes that asynchronous virtual professional learning which i think is very important when we're thinking about how we the different modalities that we learn and as teachers i think it's very appreciative in terms of us honoring their time because it is something that's also self-paced um
246and so again it focuses on behind the science of reading it's a part of the first tier supporting teachers to be able to really take the opportunity to deep have a deeper dive into phonological awareness decoding spelling and again it provides a vast knowledge behind the science of reading and evidence-based practices the second one that you see listed here on this slide is nemours reading bright smart bright start sorry and this one really focuses on that early learning in the vpk program and what's great about this is that it encourages early childhood development and promote early literacy skills to help prevent reading failure this actually has to do with brain science experienced educators actually are part of this designing this curriculum as well as medical experts so when we're talking about the science of reading
247and taking that holistic approach to professional development for educators in vpk this um nemours reading bright start is is is obviously something that um is a plus um and we i know firsthand of a few districts that actually utilize this um as well and then the third one is being a reader and this one is really honing in on foundational skills and comprehension so remember the first one in aim it's really a training and it's a self-paced course and we talked about that they in ames they're focusing on the phonological awareness the decoding and the spelling when we're thinking about being a reader that's not just the training it's also curricula that goes along with it and it really focuses on foundational skills but also the comprehension pieces so remember that in the science of
248reading we talked about that there's that oral piece of comprehension it's also that text comprehension as well and so in this um particular um third bullet of being a reader there's also a component where there's 250 hours of side-by-side coaching in classrooms so we can have a lot of training and we can offer all the professional learning in the world and i think we can all agree about the what what's important but it's the how piece that we really need to be focusing on because again i think we can all agree that this is all important but teachers want to know how it's going to look like with my kids on at my school and so i think that this will bring a great um i think it'll strengthen already what we have within our
249teachers and our school leaders and then there is a third assurance which is strategic partnerships and so in strategic partnerships we do have a state regional literacy director that we have already partnered with this is not anything new what would have been you is how to really strategically partner with them for the purpose of these the the funding and the monitoring and the support that they will be providing us as well as guidance from the state level her name is sarah hall and she has been here in our district supporting we do meet regularly with the state regional literacy director and within this particular grant that'll be on a bi-monthly basis that i would want to make sure that next steps are outlined and that we really are planning um very intentional in terms of
250getting the most out of out of not just the bank for the book but obviously increasing our student outcomes and building our teacher and staff and administrative capacity we also have um the vpk regional facilitator which we partner with um and that's amanda moore and we've we've had already had that partnership but again i think that that will strengthen even with this one component of adding vpk into this and then of course the support of implementation of evidence-based practices that we want to see in both vbk and with our other grade levels up until third grade with our srld which is our state regional literacy director and they identified 23 schools and then the final assurance is you know when we're dealing with money there obviously is accountability factor to it and so part of
251of this assurance in the final report is both qualitative and quantitative and so in the qualitative um standpoint we want to really look at the number of administrators literacy coaches teachers paraprofessionals that are participating in the professional development the number of students that we're serving um obviously we want to make sure that we um that we administer the different types of surveys that can give us and glean from their feedback as well and so that will be important in the race schools that we are targeting but then there's that quantitative piece as well and the quantitative is really the impact that it's going to have on student achievement through the progress monitoring assessment that we have with the state as well as the florida assessment for student thinking which is our fast assessments remember that
252this year we no longer have our fsa we have our fast and so that's what we want to look at along with our common assessments that we already provide within the district so we want to make sure that we triangulate that data and that we're able to see that impact on student achievement and that is it that's it for me i don't know what a way to end that's it very good board does anybody have any questions thoughts feelings or concerns very thorough thank you welcome so i do have some questions so yes he did so how big of a change when you think of change management coming from the state how big of a change based on our district's current state do we think that implementing these things is going to be so i
253think any time you look at the science of implementation you really have to be thinking about who are your key players and you're thinking about how you're disseminating the information and the professional learning and so i always um you know i've started with this is the way that i've always run even my departments when i was in in the bureau of school improvement or when i was a regional superintendent or even in this role and the principles in the in the last few weeks and probably attest to this is i always start with the why of things so that people understand um and so while i don't think that it is impossible it has to be some something that we scale up so that we do it correctly again i think having those right people
254um leading the charge and being able to understand why we're doing this is going to be very critical it can't be this is a professional learning because i just needed to increase student data which is sometimes unfortunately what i hear and see in a lot of different places i think it's really sitting down and really having those conversations where district principals and our district leaders understand the why we're doing this and it's not just a program that is just going to go away because that's another thing people get i think a little bit exasperated when it's this is the flavor of the month now and so we're going to be doing this so we're going to be doing that again i think we need to stick to things but make sure that we do it
255systematically and that we are really honing in on those right folks that can help us put this more in a larger scale throughout the district you must be in my head how does our current tech so we just recently purchased the la books how does this align with those textbooks so it it does actually and part of this slide for the science of reading um with core instruction benchmark advance is what we utilize and that does outline all of it so it really does align really well because that is something the state has been focusing on is making sure that we are really addressing those um those skills needed especially for those little ones because we're always trying to play catch up and even in the bureau school improvement that's what we've done we go
256in and we focus on third fourth and fifth and it's not just third fourth or fifth or fourth and fifth because that's where you happen to have the learning gains and so people tend to put in all their resources and that it really is k1 pre-k k 1 2 and 3 and so when we look about look at benchmark advanced that aligns really well with all those evidence-based practices and remember this year with it being all k-12 there is a learning curve you know with our teachers with um with everyone really and so i think for us it's really making sure and i say us as the district to go in and really roll up our sleeves and again i'm just really um focusing on if i were in their shoes you can say a
257whole lot to me you can just talk at me i really need you to show me what it looks like how do you want me to do this because i do believe that our educators are um are are awesome here and so and that includes with our with our own leaders and so um so to answer your question yes it is well aligned great and my last question is oftentimes we add we add we add we add have you found opportunities where you know what you know we're adding this but what are we taking away what may not be working are we just doing things the way we've always done them and so have we found opportunities to because i mean we carl kind of put it to the testing guy earlier today in the
258data but you know this is kind of groundhog day for us and so have we found opportunities and i don't need to know what just i just need to know that we have found opportunities to sort of leverage maybe we don't need to do this anymore and we have as a matter of fact i won't talk about the what right now but in k1 and 2 i actually have after looking at the data meeting with several people school leaders principals and our district staff and looking at research i always go back and i really think about that return on investment um i actually did away with a certain program that was used a lot in k1 and 2 that really we're not we weren't getting a whole lot of return on investment really none at
259all and so um and so that was one of the things that i did and not just replace it with just something else really be very um i think fiscally responsible but also responsible in the terms of in k1 and 2 we already have renaissance which is the progress monitoring assessment that the state administers there's a component for renaissance that will also help you with being able to identify where the students are and how we can use almost like a growth model a learning path if you will within that program and so utilizing that wisely utilizing um you know the the um the programs that we currently have that we are getting return on investment but there are there there's a couple of things that and principals were very thankful very good those are the
260questions that i have miss haines so i saw this when it came out on friday from jacob oliva's office and i was wondering which of our schools were here so my question is were they selected based on prior to this year scores being released um the schools that are on the list like was it based on last year's score no so that one on that list is is based on 22 so those um scores that were in third grade ela scores that is what is based off that particular list however what i did do is i got in contact with our own department the research evaluation and accountability department with christine ellis and she was also able to triangulate some data with me with our own common assessments and what i saw was that and
261flickers as well for kindergarten so what i saw was that there actually was some correlation between not just those third graders but also those other grade levels that were also low in certain um aspects in components of of literacy so it really did match um and i'm and i was thankful when i actually saw the list and saw some of those schools added on compared to a list that i had that was a little bit older it was a year older okay because um because that was one of my questions because one of the schools on this list you know actually moved up by two letter grades because they really did a very focused concentration this year and the teachers worked really hard so that's why i was wondering what data was being used and
262you mentioned flickers but did we also look at like the four-year-old standards and how the four-year-olds tested coming out of epk so when i contacted the rea office i had asked can you please get a hold of the assessments for the not the flickers with with our five-year-olds but um and so i'm still waiting on those results um i i have not gotten those yet so i do want to say that within this list um board member haynes um for example a school that had gone up two letter grades this list is just the third grade um and so in fourth and fifth they might not have been so there's three schools that are not even on this list that are on the raised list because they had 50 percent or more of their students
263score below grade level and fourth and fifth and those three schools are not here because obviously this target this is targeting our early learning well and i'm a proponent of that um because it used to be years ago when i started second grade was the grade level that everybody wanted to teach and you had your strongest teachers there and then when we moved into this assessment piece where we were going to retain third graders you know principals moved stronger teachers into third fourth and fifth but the truth of the matter is it starts down well for us now in vpk but at that time it started in kindergarten and kindergarten is now kind of like what first grade used to be a long time ago and if we don't build the foundation strong we're just
264throwing money at the other especially at high school you know these people that just want to throw money at high school i'm like we need to throw it down here at the bottom and build the foundation strong so i was happy when this came out from jacob oliva's office that we were going to finally focus on you know the vpk through third grade and i'm looking forward to it because i truly believe if we will build that foundation strong you just keep adding the next leg and so um thank you for your speaking to my heart because i'm the assistant superintendent for elementary yes mr purses that's the truth thank you mr chair uh yeah i couldn't agree with miss haines more we're we're both there my my certification was uh reading when i was
265a teacher the first grade the first grade that i taught was first grade and uh so it's all about reading and how important it is you can't start early enough there you know you just you just cannot and every year that you miss it it's harder to recapture what what you missed and third grade to me is just like way too late i mean you've already missed four four years basically and while we have parents who are affluent or parents who are educated or parents or grand grandparents or whatever the wherever the more nurturing background the child has had and that background with that was rich in books and reading and all of that that helps that child enter vpk and enter kindergarten knowing letters and knowing sounds and just knowing what a book is
266and knowing how it goes from this page that and top top top to bottom i mean it's just amazing what kindergarten teachers deal with today even i thought it was bad when we were teaching but the differences in the abilities of children those 20 children that walk into your room i mean it is it is phenomenal and then that teacher has to try to help each of those children at the level where they are because you don't want to bore the kids that are in there just ready to go with the child who has never held the book in his hand and that sounds sad to say but we do have children that come in and have haven't had the opportunity to hold the book my question it to you is that according like with
267mr colon was saying our teachers have you know they have had so many programs and every time it's rolled out the ball this is the one you know this is the one that's going to do it trust me just do this and your your your children your students will succeed and then we do it for two years and we say let you know that's not working try this one trust me this is the one and then we two years and no not so much try this one and you know if you're a teacher it's like you know why should i trust you i mean i've been trusting you and it's just not working and i want to do the right thing and i want to help my students and i'm listening but it's just not
268working so i have uh i just want you to be aware of that because you are new to our district and and you i want you to know some of the things that they have heard the other thing i'm i'm concerned about and i know jamie would under understand this is that uh so you we have our you know our title one schools and we have those let's say you you have identified 23 schools i think it is on this list to help those schools but we also have children in the other 22 schools that are way below level two so maybe the school as a whole in third grade did pretty well but that doesn't mean correct all those students did very well and those there are students in those schools that are a
269a schools and b schools they have a lot of students in there that aren't aren't performing at at all and sometimes they get left behind because they don't get on our radar because the school as a whole does well but there's still maybe 25 of those students that aren't doing they're doing just as poorly as the students in those 23 schools so i'm not going to say yes we should put this program in every school because i don't know whether it works i mean you know i would love to say it is going to work and i hope it works and i hope it helps them but i just i don't want our teachers in those other 22 schools to feel left out and i don't want certainly don't want those those children to be
270left out of any program that works so i don't know what at one point you measure the success of of this one but i think if in fact it it it does seem to achieve the success that we all want here that i i hope we can ex expand it yeah is that what you were thinking or i don't want to take no definitely um you know obviously we have for this particular funding source we have very strict guidelines of what you know the schools that have to be included however this would be something that we would definitely be looking at in terms of scaling up that within the district because what works for one we might be able to replicate that in another school that may not be part of this so absolutely that
271would be something and then you know within board member purses within our structure at the elementary schools i've i've created a lot of systems in place i don't i don't believe in by chance you know i don't like um hitting a bullseye and just hoping to hit the bullseye you know i gotta have a plan in place but then i gotta know how to execute that plan and monitor the plan and so um there has been um a lot of things that i have really tried to put in place within my own team at the district level to be able to support our principals and our teachers and what does that look like when you're sitting in a school versus a bcdf not all schools are created equally but definitely it's something that i look
272forward to not leading of course leading but really walking side by side with the principal and with those um school leadership teams and have that second pair of eyes of what can we really do in in in your school and again i really do believe in the why and the how um because i think and i say this because i've been there where we've we all can agree on the what we know the what the data status staring at our faces but sometimes we don't know what to do with that and so i always say to the principals listen a lot of times you are managing so many things leading so many things in the screen your and your staff as well sometimes you get clouded judgment but it's not clouded because you don't know
273what you're doing it's kind of because you're in it every day and so sometimes from the outside coming in to kind of guide and help you and ask you those questions so i think that's exactly um what you're referring to too is not leaving those a's and b's and kind of not on the radar because they do have right and and and you know just uh just that yet you understand i was a principal of title one schools and then i was principal of uh more affluent schools but i still had those children who weren't performing well and when the title one dollars would come out jamie would not give me any of those dollars and i would say you know hey i have needs here too but but it was always like sorry but
274the way to allocation you know i'm just teasing her but it was it was frustrating though for those prince principles so i just want you to know that yeah thank you mr chair and so that was going to be my point and you know as our school grades came out last year you know one of the things that i would challenge the superintendent because i can't challenge you is you know we really took she challenges me i'm just saying we you know we we put up we put a lot of our energy in some pockets where we knew where the challenges are and then we were surprised at the outcome of places where we didn't think the challenges were and so finding a way to ensure that all of the principals have access to that
275growth model i'll call it a growth model whether it's for your lower performing students as mr purses alluded to because i tell you i had some surprises i had schools that i thought for sure i mean they're not an issue they weren't even on the radar you know and and now arguably they're on a list the list whatever it is so you know how do we ensure that we provide that level of support to everyone to ensure that you know they go from good to great and that we go and where we need to go from bad to good we go from bad to good and so on because i think you know our our folks are you're you know they know what they know they know what they've been taught and honestly i think
276the game is elevated i think dr b has elevated the game um and you know for you and i totally agree with you we've looked at numbers for a long time but we've never really understood how to make that change um and so i'm excited and i was actually pretty excited because when you start when they started to talk about this grant we usually don't have a whole lot of conversation about it but i asked dr b to to do this presentation so that for those who are looking at the reading scores the last time around they can know that we're not just doing the same thing all over again expecting a different outcome that we're actually methodically and this is only one aspect this is only one grant so i kind of took advantage
277of the one grant approval to have that conversation to have you come and sort of tell us what are we going to do differently and i think by the looking at that list the schools that i was most concerned with without having seen the list were all on there and so thank you for that mrs haines i want to thank you but i also want to say that you know the reality though when you do look at this list they're all title one schools and so you know we have to remember that so many of these children just as carl said they're walking in the door and they've never held a book no one's ever read to them and in the mix of all that though there'll be some children that have been read to
278and so when you take on the challenge of teaching at a title one school especially vpk and kindergarten you have from this spectrum to the spectrum walk in the door and you know i i've taught those primary grades and as we well know there'll be that child that turned six last year on september 2nd i mean i mean five last year on september 2nd that's walking in the door this year getting ready to turn six with along with the child that just turned five on august 28th and that that's a year's difference between two little ones and i always remind people go back and think about you know a newborn baby and a year old and that's kind of what kindergarten is and the way they come in the door and it's just it is
279what it is but we have to we have to these children deserve every opportunity the same as the kids at the affluent schools and so i just appreciate the time you've taken i appreciate that you went and looked at all of the data and you came up with a plan and i think you know there may be some tweaks but i'm looking forward to it because every child deserves that wonderful education so they can move on forward thank you that's right thank you thank you anybody else superintendent do you have a recommendation i do chair i recommend approval to submit an application to the florida department of education requesting funding for high impact reading interventions and targeted supports hits for 22 22 24 school year or you've heard the recommendation superintendent do we have a
280motion i so move that we approve that second motion has been properly made by ms hayne seconded by mr persis any further discussion hearing none all those in favor say aye aye aye elizabeth thank you motion passes thank you next item thank you thank you next item up 20.01 we have one more public comment mr matias cabeza welcome good afternoon chairman colon school board members superintendent balgabin my name is matthias caveza and i'm a student at sea seabreeze high school there are two things i want to address tonight i want to start by thanking dr balgabin assistant superintendent roland and chief newman for the safety and security measures that were introduced tonight to be implemented i appreciate the multi-tiered approach that focuses both on prevention through mental health initiatives and on policies and programs that
281encourage a safe and secure environment i also want to thank you for what was noticeably absent from that presentation random student searches like you said chief newman of course all bags are subject to search upon reasonable suspicion and i certainly hope that staff exercises that ability to search any suspicious individuals however policies that indiscriminately search subject persons to search without any use of discretion or unreasonable and your students parents and the community appreciate that you employed common sense and heeding our complaints regarding that initiative moving on i want to address the teacher shortage that students are facing across the district seabreeze high school gave students access to our schedules this morning and i was disappointed to see that on my sixth period schedule three of my classes had the teacher listed as vacant ap statistics
282apus government and cambridge ace environmental management i'll give you the benefit of the doubt i'll assume that some of the aforementioned 460 new teachers are in the process of filling some of those vacancies and if vacancies are still present i appreciate that the district is taking steps to ensure all classrooms are staffed the fact remains though these new teachers will not have the institutional knowledge of those who preceded them and their familiarity with the curriculum may not be the same this will inevitably diminish the quality of my education and the education of other students across the district as i've stated before the students in volusia crave stability we benefit as a result of it and students can only have stability when our teachers remain with the district i encourage you all to heed the advice
283of miss albert and teachers across volusia whatever you do as a district and board retain and recruit great teachers in volusia let's make vcs the best district to be a student in by ensuring all our classrooms have experienced certified and supported teachers thank you for your time thank you so much mr cabeza next item 21.01 items for the board of superintendent will start on the left mr persis thank you mr chair i appreciate the student from sea breeze that just spoke and appreciate you coming to these meetings that's awesome i mean um yeah and and you are from from sea breeze too all three uh youtube you two are students i know that okay all right try to get mixed up there um no i just wanted to say to dr balkerman uh all these
284new people coming in i'm i'm like really impressed i don't know about the board members but i'm just man they got they got it going on and i just love it i love what i'm hearing and seeing and uh and you know they've only been here weeks and some point days some haven't even started yet but i just can't imagine once they are here for a while and really get to you know work together i just envision like a year from now how how strong they would be and where we'll be in the summer of 23 you know as as the school year ends and in the programs and things that will be moving into the fall a year a year from now so i just want to thank you for your leadership and thank
285you for making good decisions in the hiring i just wish you could wave a magic wrong and bring 250 more teachers in other than that i think you're you know i think i think mr west is going to make that happen oh mr westwell challenge accepted mr west thank you mr chair i i know the hours late and i know tomorrow's a big day and people are starting way early tomorrow morning i know thank you thank you miss cuthbert many clear focuses were brought up tonight and i'm deeply um thrilled that we addressed safety and security thank you chief newman a new focus on elementary reading especially when uh ela is is so much needed um also a reconstruction of our i.t department so many things that directly you know couple little swerves here and
286there directly impact the performance of our students and the comfortability and the support that our staff needs to in order to do their jobs so it's i could tell there's a lot of time a lot of work a lot of going back and forth to in a lot of deliberation with department people to make a lot of these decisions and so i want to recognize the time that yes the leaders had to come to the dais but i also want to celebrate their departments that made it happen as well so it's all the men and women that we have there so tomorrow starts our 22-23 school year it seems like yesterday we were turning the century and it was the class of 2000. so it's it's a whole whole generation has gone by since then
287so much has changed in the eight years there weren't even fences you know when i was elected fences were not around our schools so it's we've come so far in a very short period of time we have an awful lot to accomplish but let's not forget what we already have accomplished so as our new staff teachers and kids start coming into our and families come into our campuses this week for meet and greets and to get their schedules and our teachers to come back tomorrow it's always an exciting day pre-planning first day of pre-planning is always always always exciting so i'm looking forward to going past campuses with full full parking lots again once again so thank you all and wish everyone good luck godspeed this year thank you mr wolfe uh nothing at this
288time very good miss burnett thank you um so the presentations were spot on tonight and and that kind of goes with the accountability that you're holding everyone to which is what we all want and and i think that the staff needs and the students also would like to see us do and um that just goes with the whole program and they are exceptional staff and i've shared that with with dr b many times that i feel really good about the place that we're in so as you said tomorrow starts a new school year so i hope everybody has a blessed and safe school school year coming up and that we only talk about happy things in the next coming year and we can all move positively i do want to mention the book issue that
289the gentleman brought up though and i hope that we can kind of look into how that occurred that was a pretty strong phrase that we were given so i just hope that you can take that back and see where we failed on there but we're we're looking into it all right and i already spoke to our deputy so thank you thank you that's all i have to say thank you mrs haynes there's a lot of things going on this week and i'm trying to figure out who's going to cover what on august the 11th because we have two conflicting things but i feel that both deserve attention so i didn't know if everybody else had looked at their calendar so that because we have the bus brigade piece but we also have the greetings um
290that dr johnson sent us with all the schoolway cafe staff that are going to be in one location and so i just wondered i don't want to leave a group out and so i didn't know if everybody had already made their plans on which activity they were doing or you know because i'm volunteering to do whatever needs to be done because i just don't want to leave a group uncovered and and that's a good point i i'm ha i think the bus brigade starts over in the daytona area right right so i'm willing to do that it's at 5 30 in the morning right yeah yeah okay i'm willing to do that okay so no no no bus brigade is at 8 o'clock what time is it it's when we're welcoming our uh first day
291of school it starts at 5 30 in the morning yeah i i i'll be but the 11th that's me i'll be there for that too you'll be there okay but the 11th this thursday is the best brigade it is and it's in dayton at the daytona okay what time is it guys eight eight o'clock okay we leave at eight four locations a year yeah okay well what i was thinking for it um but we also have the schoolway cafe back to school meeting going on so that's a business or um i don't have a third event yeah i could be you i i i don't remember it's been a long week i mean i'm happy to go to pine ridge high if that works for everybody else oh the dinner no no it's in the
292morning they're doing a schoolway cafe staff kickoff they're using their auditorium which coincides with the bus first so i think and we'll work with i think we can work with karen because the question is where are they going for the bus brigade and so if it's a surprise correct and so if you know i i'd be more than happy to go to pine ridge however if they're going to a school in my district or your district and so i think we may we may have to work something out there so we can work with karen to figure out who's going where because again if if they're going to be an arm in my neighborhood which by the way it is a surprise so we have no idea then arguably i you know i would have
293you cover in the same fashion if they're coming to your neighborhood i could cover it and i'm flexible that day so i can help wherever yeah so we'll work with karen on figuring out how we're going to cover it all i just wanted to say um uh i won't be here um be in hollywood florida uh for the league we got your back yeah so i won't be here thursday i won't be here when well um we'll even wednesday night so yeah okay well i would i would think it would either be you or i will figure it out on the west side of the county we'll figure it out all right we'll work with karen to figure out who's going where all right cool and i'm looking forward to tomorrow morning i'm i'm gonna
294start my day at deland high um and welcome them back and cheer them on because they gotta be that's a great thing for high school so it's a it's a big day for the principals who are at a school different than the one they were at last year not just the new principles but we we moved a few around so it's a big day for them as as well so big day for a lot of people that's all i have to say thank you very good and we have a busy week a few days coming along it's always fun the first day because i try to get to as many schools as possible first thing in the morning so you kind of wish you could just kind of plan on going you know from one
295to the other but uh really exciting and so again thank you to everyone who made today's meeting possible i know it seemed like a short agenda but man those presentations were on fire so thank you to everyone who took the time to make those and dr b uh i just want to thank our staff thank you so much guys for being so prepared and also uh matthias great job you keep you keep inspiring us okay and also i want to do a shout out to another seabreeze student that's in the audience she's going off to college her name is adriana bronson we've worked i'm sorry bartoloni sorry adriana i got the first name correctly we worked quite a bit together and just in case you didn't know adriana is going to be perhaps your future
296superintendent here in volusia county that's what she would like to do as she completes college so you're going to be in good hands volusia county and so i asked her i said boy you're going to miss these school board meetings and she said no i purposely took no classes on tuesday night and so she will be watching so we will be cheering you on while you cheer us on okay deal mr purses just wanted to say thank you to aaron lieben um this year's last one [Applause] very good with that being said this meeting is adjourned everyone have a great night you