School Board Briefing Meeting: June 30, 2021

001hey good afternoon everyone we're ready to get started it's wednesday june 30th and it this is school board briefing part of our superintendent search and today on our agenda we're going to be hearing from the two search firms for our national search a couple of things first of all the other firm which will be doing a presentation and answering questions after ray and associates is in a room without access to their electronics however we respectfully ask that although you are welcome to of course video record what you see here we respectfully ask that you do not live stream this until until later and of course as always this meeting is videoed by our by our staff two of our members are unable to be here right now in person and so mrs patricka are you

002on the line yep ma'am okay so we have mrs patricka phoning in and mrs giovanelli are you on the line i am okay so we have both of our members that are not here in person that are on online and at this time i am going to turn it over to our facilitator mr scott cashman who will direct these proceedings so thank you good afternoon everyone i appreciate it today we will hear two presentations from the search firm finalist for the next superintendent just want to take a minute and walk through the instructions and welcome the group here today so what you're going to do is we're going to hear first from rain associates each presenting group will have 30 minutes up to 30 minutes to present and the board will have up to 30

003minutes afterwards to ask questions the board has a rubric just for guiding purposes which has six categories and separately i would ask after each presentation vice chair vaughn if i could have a short debrief with the board just to speak to the coordination of looking at cost and references as was referenced in a last board meeting and that would come after the next two presentations we wouldn't specifically speak to the evaluation of both the presentations that will take place on july 21st so as we go through the presentations you'll hear up to 30 minutes what i'd like to share with the team from rain associates is you'll hear from me when you're 10 minutes out and five minutes just out of respect you don't have to respond you'll just hear me say 10 minutes then

004five minutes and then thank you and the same when we get to the questions i'll say 10 minutes 5 minutes and thank you again continue your presentation continue the questions it's just to make everyone aware of the process we're going to follow and so i also would ask that the board members would turn in their scoring rubric to me and to attorney attorney dupree bruno no later than tomorrow morning at 9 a.m you should have an electronic version we won't review them until july 21st but it'll give me an attorney dupree bruno a chance to take a look make sure they're summarized it will not be shared with anyone else and on the 21st those scores will just be used for dialogue purposes and guiding the conversation at the end the board sits in the

005seat to make the final decision before we get started are there any questions from either a presenter or a board miss kittens you said it's online as well you send it to us you'll have it you should have it electronically electronically from you or from it would have been from the board office okay guess what anybody else it was from mr roman okay is there anybody else that has questions and ray and associates anybody have questions no thanks okay okay with that let's start the timer and we'll start the timer and we'll turn the floor over to you welcome thank you very much ladies of the board it's a pleasure to be with you on behalf of our associates here and our scores of associates around the country i'm michael collins i have the distinct

006privilege and i mean that with all my heart to be president of array and associates and we are very thankful and very energetic about being selected as one of your two finalists what we're going to try to do this afternoon is we're going to share a presentation with you which really describes not only who we are but how we operate and what procedures we will be facilitating for you throughout the process we then will very briefly just put a slide on a screen so you can see the searches we've done in florida not necessarily an all-inclusive list but to give you some sense of a feel for what we've been doing in florida for a couple of decades a couple of decades now and then we would then like to proceed with questions i will

007tell you we're going to do all we can not to use our full 30 minute because we're much more interested in our conversation with you than in just one way information so we will move thoroughly but rapidly through the presentation the only other points i would like to add there are two other members of this team that will join this team if and when we're selected one is molly swartzoff who is our senior vice president and she's in our home office in cedar rapids iowa and i will add that we are the only major firm in the country that has a full-time major office and it is based in cedar rapids and we'll also be joined by dr dale caldwell who happens as you might appreciate sits on three boards so it's a city school

008board a technical school board and a multi-district board also has done been in education for the last 35 years dale will join us he's in new jersey so that's the team plus i'm going to ask karen and steve to introduce themselves in our proposal it showed minnie frost brown but she'll be unable to be with us and we're delighted to have karen that we could pry or lose from st louis given her busy schedule to join us so we are three of the five members of your team so without further ado if they would introduce themselves i'll briefly introduce myself and then we'll get right to the presentation go ahead karen thank you mike good afternoon everyone as mike mentioned before my name is karen hall and i am recently retired from the superintendency from

009st louis county i am currently an assistant professor at st louis university for educational leadership in the doctoral program and i also am the president and ceo of rise coaching and consulting which specializes in equity centered leadership so it is an honor and thank you so much for this opportunity today good afternoon my name is steve cochran i have the privilege of being new to ray and associates i'm i've been with the firm for the last just under a year but i'm not new to education i've been committed to working with with students for the last 40 years i've been an admissions officer for princeton university as well as a dean of princeton i had the wonderfully naive notion at some point along the way that i could make more of a difference with kids

010by working with them at the beginning of the process rather than at the end so i left that to teach elementary school which is the hardest and most rewarding job there is i was an elementary principal a middle school principal an assistant dean of superintendent for curriculum and instruction for more than a decade i actively avoided becoming a superintendent because i believed it was one of those jobs that focused on buildings and budgets and sort of the dark underbelly of the school district until i received a call to serve as the superintendent of the princeton public schools and i realized now after serving for seven years in that role how critically important that job is to shifting the culture of a district providing the direction and overcoming the obstacles that are inherent in any large

011complex organization so that we can achieve the very best on behalf of our kids so i have served for seven years as the superintendent of the princeton public school i bring that experience to this work and like my colleagues debbie and mike i am thrilled with the opportunity to talk with you today and very quickly i my first 11 years both my degrees were in education at the local state and national level i then stumbled over creating a company which was a special events marketing company that i had for 32 years and sold in 2016 but most importantly i spent two terms or eight years as one of you in the suburban city school district of columbus ohio and then i spent two terms as an elected member of the state board of education ms

012patrick i also happened to serve while i was a city school board member as a member of the executive committee the ohio school boards association and congratulations on your new role good luck but in all seriousness so that's that's enough of the summary it's i so that what we are trying to share with you is that we have a team that based out of the home office that includes both previous superintendents one current and one previous school board member so we bring you the full rounded team because we find this as one of the most paramount searches we'll do in all of the 21 22 school year so without further ado karen the launch experience yeah so as you look at that slide on experience in brief summary it speaks to the fact that we've

013been in business for 45 years since 1975 entering our 46th one thing to keep in mind in our score of associates slightly over 40 percent are women and or persons of color this is by actual searching for real talent and it is also somewhat based on intentionality because we want to be as well-rounded as the student bodies and the school districts we were sorry mr collins can you give us a second we're trying to we're trying to see what's up here because we're not seeing that right sure so we're trying to get that shared buddy this is good can i interrupt please yes go ahead we are not live streaming this and unless i'm unable to view anything that's being placed on the overhead in the boardroom and i cannot fully participate okay okay and

014i guess that's a problem with with calling in which you don't i'm i'm just commenting on that there's nothing we can do about that but it will be available as you know afterwards okay right now we're trying to solve is there is there a reason why it's not being live streamed if the other preventing companies cannot use that live stream i didn't make that decision so i can't give you a reason miss jordan were you involved with that it was just the reason that they had discussed doing that was to make sure that no one could see that prior to the same reason we did the other ones right that's what i was even though i understand that since that's not an issue given about the other content where they cannot view the live stream

015we don't know that to be a fact at this moment if they are in a secure location where they cannot see this so and mr dupree bruno is going to respond to that and i'm chair the presentation is being emailed to the board miss patricka did you hear that i did but i still believe that well it's you know what can i say it's one of those unfortunate turns of events and we're doing the best we can for those of you who are phoning in you will be getting an email of the presentation and by the way we will be extending your time for while we get this settled right they've stopped at six and a half minutes just so you know you're at six and a half minutes we have not continued the clock

016okay and miss kittens has comment and my comment is that today we are hearing from potential the firms we are not this is not an action meeting we are not voting between now and the 21st i'm sure there will be plenty of time for all of us to review any information that you have sent to us and so i don't see where it would be an issue to leave the pres the process as it is at this time thank you miss kittens i agree with what you said we apologize for the delay but again you will have the extra time it's helpful for us to have it on our screen so are you going to it's going to give it to us on our screen and not up there correct that's what we were just

017told it has been sent to the board at this point i think what they're trying to do is to get it on the screens as well well i don't understand that because if it's been sent to us we can just open our email and not run into the issue of having it up yeah we can we see it okay well if that's the case then it is on our emails if you open the email right now you'll see everything that we're seeing right here jews steve do you have enough juice battery yeah i have a cord here if not steve has his laptop yeah if that's a problem we haven't we can pull it up on it on our laptop if we can if you can we can actually see what you've sent that's fine

018if you open did you see it on their emails he works we're fine just take your time whatever you need to do yeah it's not a it's not a glitch on your end it's just something there are a lot of moving pieces to this and so it was just to open it up tiny things that we hadn't heard of that we hadn't thought of rather we're fixing it welcome to florida oh there's that piece would you like us to go to the experience slide experience yeah thank you great so now we have it on our individual computers which is easier for you guys for us to see and i guess we're going to start the time clock again correct that's right so we'll have you at six and a half minutes back to mr cashmere

019and we'll turn it back over to you as you're ready okay thank you i'm gonna i'm gonna start that slide again very quickly so we sit before you as the oldest and largest search firm in america we are 40 starting our 46 years we were founded in 1975 of the scores of associates we have placed around the country three of us who are here and the rest are as i said placed around the country 40 plus percent of those people are women and or persons of color that has to do with two specific things one it has to do with the talent that is out there across the country and this is representative of the makeup of that talent we also want to be reflective of school districts student populations and communities and thirdly it

020is very intentional on our part so that we in fact can be reflective and representative regardless of where we are or where you all sit and then the last part of that slide that i'd like to share with you is that we do enjoy access to and have for more than two decades access to the largest candidate pool in america and we'll describe that particularly as we describe our recruitment process because it's a very significant asset to that process but we also have very strong connections here in florida so it is not just around the country we are we feel very comfortable in this part of florida in florida in general in the southeast region and then particularly nationwide so that's our background experientially karen it's yours from here thank you mike so the next

021slide for diversity and actually for the next slide after that our inclusion statement truly are our cornerstones for reign associates mike did a wonderful job of foreshadowing really the strong points of the search firm and that is the sense of diversity that we have and i always like to refer to it of like a camera where we focus in where we focus internally and then focus out in terms of the recruitment process we start within within our own associates that we have we ensure that we have diversity there something that is incredibly important to me and why i am an associate for ray and associates is that our voices are heard having that inclusive and diversive team makes a difference as we move out in terms of the recruitment process and our network which you

022will hear more about which is also very powerful and makes us different for ray and associates so moving on to the next slide as i mentioned before our cornerstone this is a very strong statement that together as rey and associates we decided and discussed this as i said before voices are heard input is all considered and it is challenging times but this is what we work from in terms as an organization and out recruiting individuals to be in schools so as you can see i'm not going to go through point by point but i wanted you all to know that from this point in what we believe in and how we go out and recruit and how we're supporting school districts this is what our philosophy is the next slide gets us into the process

023and as it was mentioned before you were the oldest organization and also we have very strong networks and an excellent reference reputation that we have with supporting candidates potential candidates and also school districts and as a result we have on average 40 to 50 applications per search it's remarkable but it's because of the reputation that all superintendents are familiar with i mean i familiar before i became a part of ran associates you know about the organization and as a as superintendent someone who's aspiring to be a superintendent those are the things that you want to know about and want to see you know what is the movement so we do have a reputation for that and people go to our site so the next page and thinking about the process is your input which is

024critical and also a strong point for us here in ray and associates so it is your search but we are the consultants so we have a well-researched and a strong process that we use with you to help with building this consensus to decide on the best fit for your community so as you see on this slide individual board interviews are critical so our associates use myself for example i would meet with one of you miss fisher we would have a conversation you could choose zoom which is lovely to see people face to face or it could be a phone call you all have the same questions but i then make notes on the conversation it's not shared with each other it's a confidential conversation however it is all a part of the data that we're

025considering which will come in just a moment and talking about the process that comes up with the profile for the superintendent so there's multiple data points that are considered with developing that profile for your potential superintendent then there are stakeholder groups again you can see and you've heard about the team members that will serve you that will support you will decide your groups we can give recommendations but each community has different stakeholder groups that you feel that really are engaged and you want to hear from and we have questions already developed each of the stakeholder groups have the same questions you have a person such as myself one of the associates facilitate the conversation and then you know i'm jotting down scribing the answers all of that is qualitative information i type it up i

026work with my team and we develop the themes that we see that rise to the top from each of these questions and so that along with the interview themes that is something that is helping develop the profile which will be presented to you will determine the timeline but we have a template we have recommendations and together what works for your community we develop your timeline of hiring and eventually placing your new superintendent and again as it says here we are going to finalize the profile which i kind of gave some foreshadowing a little bit but that is on our next slide with the profile development and this is very important and something that ray and associates is quite confident with oops there we go i didn't push hard enough and in developing for you because

027this is your touchstone in terms of what your values are and what you're looking for for your next superintendent so it's a quantitative and qualitative i've shared with you most of the qualitative information from having the conversations with you and with the community but you also have another opportunity to receive information through a survey and when you work in the survey we can also have it in many different languages and then also which i did not add before when you're in the stakeholder or community groups we can have translators there as well whatever you need we will provide that because we want to make it as inclusive as possible so everyone has an opportunity to give input in this process so when it is the survey it is something that is research-based we call it

028our 33 characteristics that you're looking for for the superintendent and then also there's an opportunity for people to give comments so this is rich data that you have available to you that we will present to you which then the next step from that we'll glean from that survey along with the qualitative information to help develop the profile for your superintendent search and then also there's public forums which will come later towards the end where the candidates your last few candidates two to three candidates will be available to the public and we'll talk about that process in just a moment but the community will be able to see how you've narrowed down your candidates and they'll be able to engage in an open forum process okay so recruitment as mike was talking before because of the

029age and the experience and the success of working with candidates we can aggressively go after highly qualified candidates and it's interesting as we had talked before people who know people superintendents potential superintendents regularly visit our website here we have 28 000 regularly visiting our website and that's part of the reason why as i said before once there is a particular opening you have over 40 people that apply because you're naturally getting people who are visiting the site so we have a wide net that we always cast regularly and then one thing when we talk about the relationships and being able to have these networks and recruitment we also want to make this disclaimer that once we place someone we don't go and try and poach them from a school district we leave them in that

030space for at least five years so that is a guarantee there that we don't don't do that and go back to a district that we particularly place so it is very important that we do have that promise with that so the candidate pool so it is very important and everyone values this is that we thoroughly vet our candidate pool so part of the process is that there is a thorough screening process that all of the candidates go through and you will see for all of the candidates in the beginning you will see the top ones that you will meet with us they'll have the online social media background so those are the eight to twelve when we have found the best candidates based on the profile that you have developed we've had conversations with these

031that are best fit to that profile we do a background search from the one at the top of this slide here and then you will go through a process where we will then determine the next two to three candidates once we presented then we will go through through a very well researched and effective process of coming up with consensus that we would facilitate that you would be able to narrow down to get to two or three two to three candidates will then have more of a rigorous background it's a company that we hired and you will see all of the different pieces of that background surge so there are no surprises because no one wants to go through that so there's different layers to the background the highest level of background search will be your

032very last ones that you have narrowed down and i'm reiterating this because i really want to emphasize that this is very important but when we bring to you initially the candidates that we feel are the best fit according to the profile they'll have that first layer background okay and then next so this is what i was alluding to before in terms of how you select the candidates where you go from eight to twelve and sometimes we've had like fifteen we did in one search but eight to twelve candidates to get all the way down to your finalists two to three it is this wonderful matrix that is a collaborative process in order to come to consensus that is facilitated by ray and associates that gets you to this final two to three so it isn't

033what do you think or opinion necessarily it is a facilitated process that you would do together to get to that point and then also in that process you have input in the question so we have questions that are listed so you don't develop them but you have input because you want to ensure that it represents your community so you have that flexibility to have some customized questions through this process okay and so that is the process tried to go through it quickly and also in in a concise manner and of course we're welcome to further questions but now i would like to turn it over to mike and he's going to talk about finalizing the search and beyond thanks karen and we're happy to follow thank you i'm sorry i was didn't want it to

034squeal but before us thank you and obviously our question and answer is we can get much more depth into the overall search process so now we've gone down to two to three we've given you an opportunity and a framework if you choose to bring them to the public and very structured but but impactful sessions so you can get feedback we will not ask the community to vote because in all honesty it's a false expectation the fact of the matter is by law in the state of florida and every state in the united states of america there's only one body that votes on the selection of a superintendent it's in every single state constitution it's called the school board but when you bring these finalists to the public we have a set of forms that will

035can be filled out online called impression sheets so the public has a very direct and concise way to get to you their impressions of each of the finalists we will tally those for you before you make the decision and you will see them you'll also be able to at a later date if you choose to see comments so that's that's finalizing the interview and the selection process the last part is you will have a finalist interview with each finalist obviously we will then come in again with this matrix score sheet which again is a portion of the selection we are very strongly recommend that you don't just rely on it on a numerical score that it's the consensus in the conversation that you have as a body that's just another piece of information as you

036make that final selection and then we will be of assistance to you to do your final contract because we know the candidate so well and i will tell you as the pool shrinks and the field thins as they say they will talk to us continuously so we can be helpful even in telling the candidate you know i know you might have had that somewhere else but in florida that might that might not play the palace as my father used to say so there'll be you know new so there'll be nuances that we can be helpful with i will share with you we are not attorneys you will have your own legal counsel kathy i'm assuming that might involve you but we want to be helpful to the process and helpful in the conversation but we're

037not here to serve in any form or fashion in a formal legal capacity if we're just an asset to reaching agreement we do provide you with a two-year guarantee in the contract and that is that if this search doesn't work out for some reason meaning you hire somebody and they don't stay for at least two years short of an act of god we can't compete with health issues and the only other thing is if you were to release someone and you pay them a severance if you pay the severance the guarantee goes away but if the search doesn't work we will come back and with the exception of advertisement and or travel we will do an entire search again for nothing this is our commitment i will tell you that we've done and completed over

0381600 searches in our history we have only been back 15 times in 45 years so and i didn't make that up i was given that data because i've only sat in the seat for a year i've been with the firm for six years so that's the two year guarantee and then the last thing is we don't just finish here's your here's your candidate congratulations bye we actually will come back we do it in six month intervals most districts ask us to come back two to three times so we do it in six months the end of the year sometimes 18 months or 24 months we have an assessment process where we come back and we actually do a time with the board and take them through a series of questions with your fairly new superintendent

039take them through and then we facilitate a conversation that is typically what goes on you can keep it longer if you choose you could not do it at all if you choose but it's all included list of services and now if you don't mind could would you mind advancing so what we're going to show you now and you all read better than i speak anyway but these are a list of comments from other board members from searches we have done the real reason they're broken up with this and actually they're about to be replaced now that the pandemic seems to be somewhat moving on in the school environment so we will actually have comments from districts during the pandemic because it has definitely affected all our behaviors so you'll see those which will be actually

040will be available beginning in september what we really wanted to show you is we do searches as small as 1600 and we did down the road from you all we did hillsboro 220 actually in in 2020. so it's more to show a scope of work you also have a list of a number of people that's in the proposal you can call as references we can give you others so that's that so i want to conclude here very quickly with summaries some just some summary points and a few quick slides we'll put up on the screen you have it in your possession the searches we've done in florida fairly recently and then we'll move on and then we'll move on to questions so i just want to review on a summary fashion our unique size and

041scope again i don't want to be overtly repetitive you know we're the oldest i gave you the number of searches we've completed we do have the largest pool of candidates in america and we typically provide particularly in this pandemic postpandemic time frame typically 40 to 50 completed applications that we review as we get ready to present to you the 8 to 12 mostly in your size your district you're going to see 10 to 12 at least as what i would call quarter finalists our engagement process is this comprehensive constituent community engagement karen outlined that for you in terms of these stakeholder meetings which we take care of typically when you say how many a lot of districts we do typically 12 to 15 different groups a district your size it could be more i don't

042want to tell you how many we've done for a district but i will tell you one time we did 31. just don't hear that in all kinder it that's your determination the team is the five of us the only thing i will add is that we have one of our outstanding actually he's our regional associate in southwestern part of the country also is ours is our lead spanish interpreter so he will most likely be joining us also in facilitating these constituent groups or if in no other way no other reason than to do interpreting as necessary so that's where we go with that and obviously we are all trained facilitators so this isn't just something we happened to pick up last week the dei and social justice commitment we've talked to you about our organizational

043positioning the one thing i'll say about it we don't talk the talk we walk the walk our behavior our placement and our associate representation speaks for itself in terms of leadership outreach as we've discussed our associates become one of your best outreach so you have to remember they're strategically placed all over the country they all have a rolodex or not in the rolldex anymore they all have a contact list in their computer probably no less than 200 superintendents each and so we fan this out to our associates as well as what we put online as well as what we do when placing your advertising etc but that contact element because of what we are and who we know in our regions is extremely effective and then obviously our long-standing relationships with with work we've done

044with your state organization so we will encourage you to place them with the florida school board association florida superintendents association etc most likely you will place them if we place them most often it is more expensive because we're not members than you are and there's usually a separate rate for each i don't know that's true in florida but i can tell you it's true in about 45 of the other states so we will do the work for you in terms of preparing the placement but you we will ask you to place it we also have phenomenal relationships with the with the national organizations in most cases we speak at their conferences as well as attend them and then obviously we have the largest website traffic there is the country and that's the 28 000 plus

045is unique visits per month and we have analytics that say that thank you we appreciate the presentation and and with that will breathe 30 minutes and we'll start to open up to some questions super all right do you mind just putting up the you can see the quote it's fine and then the closing i just if you want to for a second madam president or madam vice president just if you want to just see the slide with the searches on it just to have it flavor but you also have it in your picture we don't want to take any time from your questions that's fine i'll be facilitating the fielding of the questions okay that's all right yeah so schools are fundamentally about relationships relationships with with students with families with with teachers with staff

046with with community members with consultants we enter this as wanting to be in a relationship with this with you and learn as much as we can about the school so this next part where we engage in questioning is really important for us and for you know something about our backgrounds our values we have begun to learn a great deal about the complexity of this district a budget of 1.6 billion 120 schools 95 96 000 students mr steve could you please make sure you're speaking a district that is predictably growing in unpredictable ways and so you are trying to figure out how to to accommodate that with maybe more portables than you would like to see a declining capital budget you are looking at an incredibly diverse group of students many languages spoken at home nearly

047half of your students on free and reduced lunch you're concerned about kindergarten reading and readiness you have an excellent k-2 focus on reading we are seeing the work you're doing to try and have a school choice for sort of redistricting and the complexity of that program so we see a district that is wrestling with lots the learning loss of the over the summer the twenty five thousand we currently have in in summer school and there's something more that this district brings and it's it's it's palpable to those of us who who are looking and are familiar with districts and it has to do with the level of care we examine the profiles of all of you we know that we have school counselors teachers those of you who have children grandchildren great grandchildren in the

048system we've watched the videos of bus drivers getting cupcakes for kids we know the level of commitment that the community has and the partnerships with with local colleges so all of that is focused on the care that this community and that this board has for its students we bring that same level of care so you've we've talked about the who the how is the process the why is we're in this because we care about kids and the relationship that we develop with you and how we can improve the lives of our students of your students and give them a sense of joy and purpose and success in life so with that we're welcome to to hear all the questions and feel them as detailed or as broad as you would like to go now and

049chair jordan i don't know if you have a process for how you want to be all right let's and let me let me preface this with we're we're going to try to give each person on the desk and our and our two members that are calling and equal opportunities on the first round to ask questions and then we'll go back to a second round etc until the 30 minutes is up so i see ms gittins has a question so we'll start with mrs kittens and the rest of you get your questions ready okay thank you good afternoon and thank you for the presentation i'll take this down for this my first question is we are close to being a very close to being a two billion dollar corporation and one of the things that we

050had discussed previously is having someone with corporate experience and as you described your team is there anyone on the team that has more corporate than just education experience it's a great question i know in seattle that john they brought in john sanford who had military background didn't have an educational background and he transformed that district years ago i'm going to turn over to mike because he knows the rolodexes of our associates perhaps more than i do there are i don't wanna pick somewhere between eight and ten of us on the associate side that are somewhat similar to myself ms kittens and that is that i spent 30 i've owned a business for 39 years one almost 32 of those 39 years as well as having educational backgrounds i don't think anybody is i can tell

051you for sure there's nobody that's only corporate it's what we would call hybrids which are a combination of business or non-profit leadership as well as educational leadership but i will tell you that we are very comfortable and placed somewhere between ten and fifteen percent of the people we place in particular the last 10 years probably less since the pandemic it was more popular in the 2000s to 2015s and that was hybrid candidates were more popular in terms of being placed as superintendencies and we place more because we have more searches we obviously place more than anybody else so hybrids are common right and actual corporate leadership with that being the only experience is very uncommon and i wasn't expecting a singular i'm just saying that aspect okay next question i have real quick on slide

052six you were talking about the questions and all and that you develop and actually i think you answered that because you did say that they can be customized you had mentioned that ms hall that you have the questions already prepared however we can some input in there okay and then on slide nine you talked about you know what is the reality of selecting a candidate once school has begun we have discussed that and i heard you talk about not poaching a candidate from somewhere else and in my understanding once school starts it becomes a more difficult task is that correct and so our expectations once we get into this and get into the school year in august september that we really are looking at more of a longer term because in in my understanding i

053wouldn't want somebody that has signed a contract to work for this district and someone comes along and takes them in the middle of the year and i don't think that's the quality of person i'm personally looking for that does not follow through throughout that whole year so that's one thing my last question is i know that you have a quite a presence in florida and i am wondering have you or do you have a relationship or have spoken to any of the my other governance team members in the past or have a relationship with anyone else that's on the board on your board no no and i can speak for the other two because we've discussed it okay okay thank you miss jordan you have some questions we're just gonna go down the line and

054let's keep in mind that we have 30 minutes so try to limit so that everybody has a chance mike my question i guess is thank you for coming first of all i really appreciate it and sharing the information that you have but cost we haven't didn't hear anything on cost so to me that's really important and i do see it was definitely sent to us you know the cost breakdown and i just wanted to just follow up on that as far as and i know some had asked for an inclusive cost i know that's impossible because of the fact you know coming back and forth and what that looks like but as far as the estimated cost sheet that was sent to us we're exactly when i'm looking at this i'm just making sure of

055what i am looking at because it's saying an estimate of thirty thousand but then on the other page i know it was 26. yeah the if i may play the cost is twenty six thousand dollars okay the variables are how many trips we make and the advertising you select so that thirty thousand is an estimate of a combination of advertising travel on top of the 26 the 26 is fixed and and it won't be more so i mean this isn't yeah and then they'll be 10 for this and 5 that doesn't that's not how we do business what you see is what it is with the exception of how much travel and whatever the advertising okay so when we look at the excuse me so when we look at the travel that the top portion

056of that of the sheet is what we look at per travel every time you come here then over and above the 30 no no we're estimating that'll be that should be somewhere around the travel cost total okay for the entire yeah please keep in mind and i do want to share this with you we'll do as you request but that's based on the fact that we really understand this post-pandemic world and there are some meetings that used to in the past be everything done in person we don't believe those are necessary right and all i can tell you is we will have completed our 50th search in the pandemic environment where we have not been anywhere so there's a very important blend to that we recommend and that's how come those costs can be contained

057the way they are we will do as you wish that's the one thing president jordan that could move the cost above the estimated 30. okay thank you and i have to say i really appreciate the fact that you could tell you really did your research on all of us just by the comments that you made and knowing who we are and what we've done and you know watching meetings which i really do appreciate you know the fact that you have gone you know and made sure that was taken care of and then the my last question is when you state that you go after the candidates where do you go after them at when you made that statement we go after our candidates you go to other than the rolodex where else do you go

058like do you have like a pool of each of you have your own pool of candidates within the districts already that you would go after we will actually call people and tell them about this job but more importantly they will see this job everything goes through our website and that traffic the other side keep in mind is that we make everybody that wants to be known and registered they have to register on our site every single year it's not like it sits there for five years they have to update everything so that list is in the thousands so and we so we will send out roughly three to four thousand emails announcing this job separately you will actually get a report from us when we bring you your eight to twelve candidates about how many

059people have been contacted and how many states and what's and how many in each state that we know at least receives something in terms of an announcement as well as the fact you know as well as the candidates that finish the application also those that start an application are contacted twice before the closure if they haven't finished it so if we bring you 51 applica completed applications more than likely there are probably 15 to 20 that are incomplete they will have been reached out to separately earlier about hey if you're interested complete the application deadline's coming so but it so it's our associates it's our electronics it's our recommendation to you and your acceptance of the advertising that you place and then it's is i mean i literally have people that i literally call and

060say lee counties open who do you know and these are people that have been sitting superintendents and that are in the field now and it is a prestigious district yes with a vision and so an attractive place for people to want to be and i want to add also when candidates register they may be a sitting superintendent but they just you know want to know maybe they want to make a move when you go on the website you select specifically how many students so they say size they say stay and then you receive those profiles so it's not really a random thing it really is a fit for what that person was looking for okay thank you it's nice okay thank you thank you miss fisher do you have questions well actually i had questions

061about community groups reaching the candidate pools exposure and diversity but with the thoroughness of your presentation those questions have been answered already and i thank you for being here and i'm interested to hear the rest of the conversation thank you thanks member fischer okay mrs morgan i have no questions thank you all right let's go to our members on the phone mrs patricka questions thank you i have two questions the first is could you please provide us if you don't know off the top of your head the bottom line fox to hillsboro for the search you conducted there i'm sorry the bottom line repeat please the bottom line cost of the search that was conducted in hillsborough miss patrick i do not have that in my head it will not be hard to get to

062you and certainly we get to you this week i mean long i have to call the office a lot long before your 21st gathering go ahead i'm sorry i appreciate that thank you sure in your second question and my second question is from it indicates that you will bring the top eight percent candidates to the board for consideration but it's my understanding that sunshine laws in florida require the board and the public have access to the information of all abstinence yes that will be made available but it will be very clear that we will have screened them once for you and we will have done those first round background checks on those it'll be ms patrick i'm very sure it'll be at least 10 to 12 of those candidates for your review but they are

063available to all the apple completed applications are available there will be some slight redactions particularly as it relates to references and that's legal we're very familiar with florida that information will be available to the public correct excellent thank you those are my questions and i apologize for you for all over you but they're in the lab here fine we understand thank you okay mrs givenelli you have questions yes i have two questions as well when is it the best time of year to search for a superintendent can't have the best quality quality candidate well there is there is a yes there is an optimal optimal season there is an optimal season for for hiring but this time period that we're in we have worked with this before with hiring over the summer the good news

064for for lee county school district is you have an interim in place already where i live in broward county we're still searching for one the you have as i mentioned before an extraordinarily attractive district a large district with a vision of great things to come and so it will be an attractive place for people to look and if we're looking as we talked before about a firm with national reach the pool of candidates will be extensive and so while hiring during this time period is not always optimal i i believe and i invite mike and debbie to taught deborah talk about it karen to talk about it but i think we're in a place where we can find good candidates to bring here if it's any consolation i began my superintendency in january yeah that's

065often that often will happen yeah and it is in response also and one last point mr giovannelli and in response also to miss gideon's comment from before the fact of the matter is you're not going to make a decision until july 21st in reality and you're not going to do constituent groups i don't think until school starts we'll set you up you'll be ready to go the minute school starts so all the preliminary stuff we need to get out of the way i'll be done but you're going to want that input you're going to want that process so i think the earliest number one you're going to have somebody sitting in the seat if it's at all possible is the beginning of january to be upfront in terms of optimal optimal ones typically start in

066october november there's a good news part of that for you and i'm not just wearing my pollyanna glasses and that is that you'll actually be out in front of that search cycle which really runs late fall through winter and as and as stephen has spoken because you are who you are being out in front of that actually can be a heck of an advantage the search that starts at the end of may and right now that's the most challenging the optimal is probably starting before thanksgiving and going there and you'll be a step ahead of that so the you know and i agree ms gittins also is that you certain i think president jordan you said the same you don't want somebody that's not going to up and leave from somewhere so the earliest they're

067going to show up here is the beginning of january so i just to be clear and i'm sorry to take so long this is giovannelli i just wanted to be clear on that question okay thank you and did she have a second question well i think she didn't did you did you have a second question i did i did oh i'm i'm sorry go ahead okay so another thing in your presentation on page oh my goodness regarding equity and inclusion i crt is a hot topic these days and we are a diverse community yet we are conservative community as well what is your belief in the involvement of crt with this search process what's the involvement of crt within the search process this is giovannelli and i'm going to start but i think that karen

068and steve all encouraged to weigh in we're not we're not all immune or unconscious to what's going on in parts of this country as it relates to the subject first of all it's inappropriately used number one number two is there is no part of this because we don't deal within the search process of specific curriculum items of any sort we don't talk about certain kinds of math programs etc you're looking for an overall school leader what we talked about in terms of diversity equity inclusion and social justice and systemic racism is the behavior in which we practice and the candidates that we will bring to you who fit those descriptives that doesn't have anything to do with curricular content and i honestly don't believe that element has a conversation as you look through this any

069more than some kind of math program or a particular language arts teaching style would have so that would be my initial suggestion i'm going to go next but i'm going to sort of entre into to karen because dr hall wrote a recently published article an article about the importance of us having honest conversations about race in america but the way she framed the article was to be able to have those conversations in a way that unite us rather than divide and you know we hope that we are bringing candidates to you that are able are able to navigate a racially complex world because that's the world in which we are all educating kids but it's your search you will frame the questions that will bring to you the candidates have that have the expertise and

070the vision that you are looking for well and essentially to dovetail some of the comments steve made candidates that can navigate these situations more than trying to convince any this is a reality and you will have a spectrum of beliefs and philosophies and so you need to have educational leaders who are well-versed so they can engage and have conversations with everyone and ultimately do what's best for students and not to avoid not to incite or inflame but to be good listeners and not to be afraid of having these difficult conversations because everyone what's best for kids but it can be challenging right now because things are on extremes so essentially we're looking for people who can step up lead and listen to all points of views and bring people together build bridges so we can

071do what's best for kids that's what we're looking for that's what we're talking about we're not talking about division that's what we want to do as an organization because of our sense of diversity and inclusiveness we want to ensure that folks are comfortable they can talk about it can they operationalize it do they know how to ensure that there are you know disparities what are you doing to ensure that there's educational equity not just talk about it and put it up on a poster how do you operationalize it how do you do it because at the end of the day you want all children to thrive and they have to know how to navigate the politics and ensure they hear everyone's voice so that's essentially what we're we're trying to say and what we're trying

072to do when we're bringing people to districts that they can engage in are articulate around all of these subjects okay and thank you and thank you so much i'd like to ask a question about to have you expand a little bit on what you said about gathering stakeholders in the interviews that you that you are not the interviews but the surveys that you send out to the community and then looking at that the steps in that process what does it look like in terms of your involvement when we have when we get down to the final let's say three candidates and we have some public forums what exactly so you're not talking about the state called the focus groups and this yeah i'm that whole yeah if if you can i know it's two different

073pieces but if you could discuss just a little more in detail so we have an idea of what it looks like as you engage our stakeholders and then move it to the more specific forums just under five minutes thank you mr cashman and thank you for that question because it's critical when we talk about relationship those conversations the focus groups that we have the survey data that we gather is one way of of pulling people together and building those relationships so the focus groups the can look we can have as many as you feel is appropriate based on how you see your stakeholders so we've been in districts and mike you can speak to this karen you can speak to this where you know there's been focus groups with the custodians with the bus drivers

074with with small you know groups of people that have a different perspective right so you're trying to build that you have an incredibly diverse community here so mike referenced i know that 41 42 of your students are hispanic so there may be a language barrier that would be important for us to to consider and so have some focus groups that would be for that for those those families separately where we have someone who speaks spanish but we can we can tailor those the focus groups and then and the surveys are go to everyone but we can tailor those focus groups based on your desire and then the only cost differential would be if we have to bring someone in to do the interpretation etc but as far as the three candidates how do those focus

075which i know you've led a number of those forums the town hall forum so if you want to speak to that karen and before you start to answer and if you would include the cost because you would actually have people on site that would not be something you're doing digitally or online or okay so if you can kind of in that very very vice president three minutes we have left two minutes we've got two minutes so vice president number one is we expect that's one of those we probably do do on site yes okay so that's in that cost and you know anticipation that's one two is that the large groups are actual structured focus groups they take two to three days to do we do four five eight a day that's how we get

076through the front end okay that's why you have five of us okay i'm not counting not counting dr mata the two to three typically you're going to bring in your finalists it's going to take a whole day they're going to have certain you take these broad groups and you shrink them into a manageable number they meet with two meetings with different staffs at different levels or three and then you have certain collective groups you know that you put together for two or three other meetings and then you interview them so that's a whole day and normally it's one candidate per day okay and it's very in-depth those they we actually ask those groups to give us questions we modify them for you approve them or edit them and then the other thing is all the

077impression sheets each of those groups fills out impression sheets by groups by identification so you know the three staff groups you know what they think you know with this community group and then we also recommend an overall large community meeting who can attend the last thing i want to speak to is the survey the survey has 33 characteristics people are asked to pick the 10 that mean the most to them we're going to ask you to publicize that everywhere it sits on your website when it closes we give you the hard data analysis it's a meeting that we bring all of it back to you the comments section of that document becomes invaluable to your new superintendent and to you it's almost like you conducted some polling yes and you didn't pay for the poll

078to be real blind great so i hope that's clear but we're also running out of time yeah i know you're running out of time and i thank you for that and it might actually if i can just close with this it might be helpful to all of us to have if you have an example or two of districts and it wouldn't even necessarily have to be in florida but districts where you actually did the survey not this well the survey and especially i'm thinking about the on-site what what that's going to use including all of these examples of schedules yeah that kind of yeah if you could maybe just send us an example of one or two of the schedules and what it looked like for you know medium to large district that you served

079if not in florida somewhere else and because i think we didn't really have a time to explore that and i know we're we're out of time for this yeah we'll just read back to you we'll redact the district that's all you'll see right right just to give us an idea of of what those schedules and what that looks like and how long and all of that each forum took thank you and thank you all for your time i appreciate that and with that vice chair of honor should we take a five-minute break and we have on our schedule we have a 15 minute break yeah thank you again thank you again so much take care our school board briefing and we are ready for our second presentation today and welcome to florida school board association

080group and i'm going to turn it over to mr cashman who will provide you with the different rules and the protocols that we're following for this and again welcome to all of you okay so mr cashman if you would thank you vice chair vaughn welcome and good afternoon i'll walk you through the process briefly it'll be a facilitated process so you'll have 30 minutes to do your introduction and presentation i'll provide excuse me i'll provide a 10 minutes before the 30 minutes is up so you'll hear me say 10 minutes then you'll hear me say ten five minutes and then thank you don't have to acknowledge it just continue the discussion it's just to give you that heads up once the 30 minutes is up i'll turn it over to the board for a facilitated

081discussion i'll also share 10 minutes when we have 10 minutes left 5 minutes and then thank you when the questions are complete do you have any questions before we get started no sir thank you okay maybe do we need to push a button on these or do the mics or the mic you should see yeah do you see the red button they're on i'm sorry you should see the gray button and then it should turn red when it's on i believe it's on sounds like it should be on okay it's on and so we'll we'll start as soon as as soon as you're ready okay perfect so thank you so much for having us here today i know all of you but you also don't know my team so i'm going to take a moment

082and introduce my team and then we're going to run through our processes and we'll have some important conversation as you all know i'm andrea messina the executive director of the florida school boards association and i'm actually one of the legs of what we call our three-legged stool which does the superintendent searches i'm a former school board member i think most of you know that but perhaps your community doesn't and so i'm a former school board member from just north of you in charlotte county where i served three terms 12 years on the school board there with me are my two colleagues who who have worked in florida education for more years than we could count and they are fine upstanding professionals i have mr john reichert with me now john reichert represents on our three-legged

083stool he represents the human resources background his background is that he was the executive director of human resources and professional standards in seminole county and for many years since he's been retired he's worked with the florida association district school superintendents he does some of the studies when they go into a district and they analyze the hr department and make recommendations for improvements john does a lot of that work as well as in some of the finance departments over here we have dr bill vogel who's a former superintendent among other things of course mr reichert also was a teacher and moved up through the leadership ranks in school districts so too was mr vogel dr vogel dr vogel was the superintendent in two different counties in seminole county and in st lucie county and he was

084named the florida superintendent of the year at one point he also works with superintendents across the state through the florida association of district school superintendents so we bring a team that is board member experience superintendent experience hr experience and that's really what we think is our strength so when we ask why you should choose our firm you know the first reason is because we know florida and the reason we know florida is because we're here every single day in one or more districts in fact these two gentlemen are going to be going to another district tomorrow they were in a district yesterday we continue to work actively with district leaders aspiring superintendents as well as seated superintendents and school boards if you look at the areas where we have stars on there well first off

085where the dots are that's that's where in florida we have appointed superintendents where we have the stars here those are the superintendent searches that we have done here with the florida school boards association so i wanted you to know we've been and that's just this team right here we've worked in those districts to help them place superintendents since 2015. we also are a member of what's called the national affiliation of superintendent searchers and the reason that's important is because just as i said we three work with all of the administrators in florida our colleagues in other states work with all of the administrators in their states and so when we get an out of state applicant i want to know before i the board members ask me what do we know about this person what

086do we know about their history in their district what do we know about their work with their school board and so we reach out to our nas colleagues and are able to get some boots on the ground information about anyone from any state additionally and through not just through nash but additionally we really pride ourselves in the number of out-of-state and non-traditional candidates that we get to apply for our positions we just finished the superintendent search in polk county and we had 53 applicants which was our largest pool to date i'm not sure if you guys can get that many applicants it was a little bit of a different time things have changed even in the last several months in in education so that might be a lofty number but we were very proud to

087have 52 53 applicants from a number of different states and we really were excited with who they eventually chose we my team here and i represent the board at various facilitation needed meetings like input sessions or community meetings anything like that we are on site facilitators we come down and we do a lot of that facilitation ourselves we also come and attend board meetings and workshops we do anything that is necessary to facilitate the conversations with the board sometimes that requires a lot of travel but because we live in florida these two happen to live in seminole county he actually sometimes lives part of his time in manatee county we try to minimize travel when we can my own self i will definitely be here at key points along the way but because of the

088travel i don't i don't come to everything because i we try very hard to be conscious of charges that were we're passing through to to the board one of the things that both boards with whom we work and applicants with whom we work tell us that they value greatly about the service we provide is our consistent availability to answer questions and help guide them in the process board members have questions along the way applicants have questions along the way and we make ourselves available to the board and to the applicants as well as to the media if necessary one thing that's really important and cannot be overstated is to make sure that whoever you work with has an understanding of florida sunshine laws public record laws and how to work with media outlets i know

089another district recently who was doing a superintendent search had some challenges because the truth of the matter is when when somebody applies the minute they apply it's a public record but the firm that they chose didn't want to make anything public until the firm brought forth some names and so that became a bit of a contentious issue so i'm just kind of going to let you know of some things that you want to look at and things that you want to talk about one of the things that we pride ourselves in is that we know your board we know your community and we know your district we know the history of your districts like i said we've been around for 20 30 years in some cases and so we know the challenges that your district

090has had we know the transitions your district has faced we know the current challenges that your district is facing as i mentioned our proximity reduces travel these two fine gentlemen have been involved in education in florida since 1977. it predates me a little if i'm being honest but i popped in on the education scene in florida in 1987. i don't know if you realize this but i started off as a high school english teacher and actually i did my student internship up the street at charlotte high school in punta gorda and i did my first teaching at port charlotte high school and i also taught at lemon bay among other counties along the way we do utilize a team approach and that is to say that any one of us can answer any question at

091any given time we meet regularly we have conference calls every typically it's a sunday evening to try to coordinate what's happening what's going on we work very closely with your staff we work very closely with whoever you determine on your staff is going to be the liaison sometimes we need to work with your i.t people sometimes we need to work with your communications or pr people or you're legal so we have a very team oriented approach that we know includes your district staff members as well as our full team one of the things that we pivoted to during the pandemic was we had to do a superintendent search almost virtually online because it was in the middle of that process they didn't want to change their schedule so we were able to pivot and the

092reason that's important is because at any given time we may need to pivot we don't know what's happening last year certainly gave us some valuable experiences and one of the things that we've implemented which really became very popular and we now we actually think it's better than the live version is when we do a meet the candidates and years ago well two years ago even we would have a live reception where people could meet the candidates which i'm i'm not saying that's not still of value but when we did a facebook live we had thousands of people viewing and watching and engaged in the process as opposed to a few hundred who would physically show up so just that small pivot really taught us a lot about engaging the community and the interest in in

093communities we really don't have like a plug and play here's what you do and this is the only process you can follow we try to personalize it to each district some districts want more involvement for example of internal staff some some districts want less some districts want more community input some districts want less some districts have a brand new strategic plan that they've approved and so they already have a vision some districts need more conversation about some things so we work with the board to determine what their process will be for that board at this time you might have a different process if you were going to do it last year or next year but for now under these conditions here's the process that you might consider or might be best for you so we're

094not dug in on it has to do this and this there are certain things that we have to dig in on things like sunshine you know things like that but other than that we're we're very flexible and work with districts one of the key things that i think you need to take into account is that the board itself the board seven people is the decision maker for this activity so you can involve the community in certain ways you can even have community committees that do certain things but all decisions have to be retained by the board and so we represent and we really advocate for the board to make sure and we protect your decision-making authority and we make sure that is in the forefront of your minds as you're moving through the process on

095the back side obviously we have some additional services that we do with regard to helping your new superintendent on board as well as working with superintendent evaluation and those are some of the you know we really feel as though the position that we're in we have a vested interest in the success of your district it makes a difference whether or not you all are successful and we understand that so we're here before during and after a search and that's what we bring to the table that being said and i want to be really really clear on this when you're doing a superintendent search the ideal outcome is the unification of the board the district and the community that's the ideal outcome as i just mentioned we worked in polk county recently we just finished their

096search they had a disparate board to begin with throughout the process members of the board didn't trust each other on certain things they didn't trust the community in certain ways but i will tell you at the very end everyone the education foundation the chamber the board the district they all said wow you know this really brought us together and that to me is something you have got to consider very very seriously one of the things that will help with that unity and that bringing together of people is that you have a process that is above reproach you have to have a process with integrity and you have to have a process that you can defend given that i think you all know that there are there there are working with fsba for some people creates

097a questionable process for you and as the fsba executive director i have to tell you we are not interested in working and doing anything contributing in any way to any hint of impropriety on a superintendent search for you i do not think that we are your best firm i do not think that you as a board will be able to come together if we are your firm i think we will be too much of a distraction and i don't think it's going to be what's best for your community that's not what i would normally say when i come here to do this presentation but my job is to protect your integrity of this process and the integrity of my association and so for those reasons i'm happy to answer any questions you have i'm happy

098to offer any services as our member to assist you along the way but it is not in your best interest to move forward with any questionable integrity on a search and i i really feel very strongly about that so i wanted to say that as as early as i could but i also wanted you to know we do run a process with integrity we stand by it every district we've ever worked with has been more than pleased with our work but i do not think in this county it's the best answer for you so we'll do whatever we can to support you coming short of being your firm and i'll answer any questions that you'd like me to answer at this time thank you with that why don't i turn over and for any questions

099turn a few vice chair vaughn okay so questions comments who would like to begin morgan i will just tell you i have none okay who would like skittens you have questions comments i do but i just didn't want to go first but i guess well i can yeah why don't you do yours since you always go last well it's it's protocol that the board vice chair go last in these so i'm going to go to miss jordan comments questions i really don't have any comments i think it's unfortunate that we're here at the situation and i have spoken to i really do appreciate what fsba does as i always have being with in the hospitality industry and always going to the florida restaurant and hospitality industry and our connection with them they were always our

100go-to as well because they understood what our needs were just like you all understand what our needs are so i'm kind of i understand where you're coming from i really appreciate that and i have talked to and spoken to polk county and the members on that board and they were elated with what transpired there and what you all did and they were available for anybody else to speak to whoever wanted to speak to them but each one of them that i did talk to i'm sorry they could not speak more highly of what you all do so i just want to let you know that i do really appreciate you thank you okay miss fisher yes so i'm going to add to that and say that as i'm wrapping up my third term on the

101board i want to say that fsba has always been my go-to and that i learned what i needed to know there was always support when you said that you were consistently available that has always been the truth and i'm i'm disappointed that we're in this position right now and are you saying then that you would not i'm saying your search has to be above reproach absolutely and working with us would compromise that and we will not contribute to that compromise and so i thank you for that and i and i thank you for the consistent work that you give all of our districts and the road map that you have provided for us to be as successful as we have been able to be in spite of challenges thank you but i do want to

102be clear in the same way that i've been available on other issues yes you guys working with somebody else and i don't have any vested interest in who that may be anytime you have a question along the way or a concern or you want to ask hey does this seem right or whatever i'm available in that way yes ma'am thank you very much that's much appreciated miss kittens are you ready now as ever good afternoon and thank you and i just want to say thank you for and i appreciate your honesty and you have you know history with this board and know what our issues are so you do have the right and ability to speak in that way and what you have said i too have spoken to fellow board members in other districts

103and again no issues at all with your organization and what you do and how you handle it i can only speak for me personally that the issue the roadblock i have is that the leadership of fsba and the close proximity and in our ethics policy it it's there's not a statute as we were told that prohibits miss patrick as the chair from participating but there is whenever we do ethics training they emphasize the avoidance of the appearance exactly and that's what i'm leaning on is the avoidance of the appearance and if it were me in that position i would have either recused myself or i would have made the statement that you made like i said nothing against the organization or the job that you do and i just that's one of the things if

104we weren't as closely aligned to the leadership and excuse me when you are executive director of an organization that the top leadership is on this same board you have to communicate on a regular basis you have to do the business of and it is not saying that i think that you would do unscrupulous things that is not it but i go back to the ethics the appearance of impropriety and it's really out of respect for that i where i am where i am exactly so and i appreciate that you have offered to you know at least help us on various things if we do have questions and in the past you have done that i if we had a different culture in our district i mean top down if we had a different culture it

105wouldn't be an issue we have a culture right now and i think everybody understands that part of it is distrust in not just here or out there or there it's a culture of distrust and we need to heal from that and that's why i'm thinking outside so that and i like what you were saying too you do not want to that you do want to protect the integrity not only of us but of your organization and that's totally clear so based on those things i understand what you're saying i appreciate it i spoke quite openly at the last meeting that i felt it was an issue because of the appearance so i appreciate it and thank you so much for being here today and in the future we may find ourselves working together again thank

106you okay mrs juvenelli do you have any comments questions i do so and i apologize for the echo that i get so it makes me hesitate and stop talking so i apologize thank you messina for being kander i really appreciate that unfortunately this board has a difficulty doing that as well and kind of stepping back and looking at us as a whole and what is best for the community so i appreciate you taking that initiative and telling us what we need to be doing so i do have a question for you and your question of professional opinion and recommendation should we go back and look at the applications that we had and finish the interview process with those other candidates for the integrity of the board and so that the community understands that we can

107do our very best to do exactly what you do and model what you do so i don't know i don't know enough details about how you got to where you are here today partly because since i had submitted our application i didn't i didn't watch the meeting i didn't do any of that so i'm not sure i could speak to that i would say to you my hope for you is that you will select a consultant that you all all feel confident using because i think that it's really really an opportunity for the board to find some common some common goals and so i would hope that whatever you could do you could find somebody that all of you could agree on and i hope for that for a superintendent as well because as as

108ms getting said you know there's there's a lot that needs to be done and the only way to do that is to really find common ground find someone to lead that so i'm sorry i really don't know the process you went through to be able to speak to that anything anything else they shouldn't be asking them that we narrowed it down to two however i didn't really agree why we only went down to two instead of interviewing all five and then making our decision at that and i would recommend let's go back to the drawing board and look at the rest before now that we have so that the community sees that we're exploring every avenue do that anyway mrs giovanelli we are going to have a debrief following this conversation with fsba and i

109think this is something that our board needs to discuss and debrief about it we appreciate the opinions of mrs messina and her colleagues but this is something that is for us so if if you don't mind unless you have another yeah so save your comments for our deep brief i'm i'm sorry go ahead okay so at this point at this point i mean since she recommends to knock at work with us i think that we i mean my convert my question really is her and her expertise should we just go back to the drawing board that's basically it i'm going to interrupt again i'm hearing point of order which was almost unnecessary because i was going to stop if if you want to contact if you want to contact them individually to help you in

110in your decision making but that's that's really not the purpose of this particular conversation and we will be having that debrief well we will be discussing exactly this in just a little bit is that does that help miss givenelia miss juvenelli is that okay let me make my comments and then we will wrap up to see if anybody else had in the second round anything else that they wanted to say i wanted to give my kudos and thanks to mrs messina it i really really appreciate your honesty and integrity in this as was already mentioned by mrs kittens this we've we've had our issues let's say our challenges on on this on this board and all of this also comes at a at quite an important time we've just ended i'll just say the school

111year from hell for everyone and we have a very short summer and we are scrambling to get things in order for the new school year in a very short time period and while we do this we have a new superintendent in place and of course he is interim but as all of us know interim means that dr ken savage is our superintendent and so this is also a time of huge change and it's been my experience i've been living here in lee county for 16 years i'm more used to growing up in the northeast where things changed rather rapidly but the culture in this neck of the woods is that change is just harder and i'm not saying that's bad or good or it just is and so we're we're in a period of lots

112of differences and lots of opinions in the community on this school board among staff members of of the school district of lee county and i really appreciate what mrs messina said and i totally agree that we do not need to add to we don't need to add another distraction to to all of this and i her heart comes from an excellent place here i believe because she really is putting the needs of us first and understanding our situation and whether we go with the firm that we've interviewed or whether we put that aside keep our notes and interview another firm or two that's for our decision that's that's coming up in our debrief but again thank you fsba thank you for your candor and i know that we will be reaching out for all kinds

113of things as as we have in in the past so we really appreciate it now round two is there anyone who wanted to add anything else miss kittens first of all a point of order was called it was not addressed by the chair or the parliamentarian i just want to make that the record for the record and my point was that i was going to bring up as well whether they had removed themselves from the choice or not that we need to have like i mentioned last week when we had our first meeting and i was voted down that we should see all of the firms and make our decision from that so i just wanted to put that out there and i wanted the reason for the point of order is that was not

114the time for to ask our guests per se to give us a decision that is not within their purview to do thank you yeah and just for the record i'm saying that there were a couple people calling point of order and at the very same time i as the chair and facilitator of this meeting was doing the same was doing the same thing so i think that we accomplished what we wanted to accomplish there in in our round two as we wrap up here an opportunity for everybody to add a second thought did you have a second thought well let me get the other people first miss jordan no i believe i've said what i okay miss fisher just once again thank you for making the trip we appreciate that okay miss juvenelli any final

115thoughts mr vanilli no okay miss patricka and ms kittens you said there was something else you needed to say go ahead yes and not asking you to give us an opinion but in your professional opinion in the situation that we are in right now what how how long do you say a superintendent search usually would take i'm not holding your feet to the fire but we did that asked that of the other candidates and can you give us your professional opinion on we are in july for all practical purposes and will not reconvene until the end of july and can you give us your impression on that because my understanding is that the music kind of stops once school starts and the candidates are pretty much in place and how does that affect the search

116i would tell you that you kind of need to work backwards from a start date that you might be interested in we have done searches as short as three months which we're on a very aggressive schedule and we've done searches as long as a year and a half for districts that originally had elected superintendents and then when the voters decided to change to appointed we've had a year and a half process so you can make it work in any time table minimally if you want to have what i believe is meaningful engagement with your local community with your district as well as a good advertisement period six months would be the minimum eight months six to eight months i will say you have to kind of build in the holiday season which i think we're

117looking at so that piece does play a role and if you're if you're looking into the spring for interviews you need to be careful working around spring break because if you schedule interviews during spring break and families or others have traveled away things we don't have to take into account okay so all right i appreciate that and thank you okay so i believe we will be wrapping this up now and again our appreciation appreciation from all of us for your taking the time to come here to lee county and i know we'll be seeing you again in definitely in other roles so thank you and please know you know we sincerely wish you much good luck and success i mean as i mentioned i lived in charlotte county for 20 years i want to say

118in fact i was telling bill and john i used to come to this building when it was a factory outlet mall i don't even know if some of you lived in town when it was a factory outlet mall but i sure did and so you know i know this area i'm from around here my i have you do not know this but one of my dearest nieces works for you she's a she's a speech therapist for you i shall not tell you her name and i shall not tell you where she works but i do have people that live in this community right over by the edison house i mean lee county is a place i visit frequently visit often and it's a lovely lovely place to to have family so i wish you much

119good luck in success and you know that anything you need please feel free to call on us yeah and we do know you wish us good luck and success or you wouldn't have been brave enough to come out and said say what you did so again thank you so much appreciate it all right so let's take a moment if you would like to greet take a moment to do that and then we'll be doing a debriefing before the public comments by mr cashman for a debriefing we'll be covering we'll be covering an extra topic we hadn't planned on which is how we want to go from here with in terms of search firms okay thank you vice chair vaughn in light of what we just heard i did want to suggest that we discuss you

120know as a board a decision whether to make determination based on the two firms you heard from or bring back the dialogue of considering other search firms i do want to share before we go into that the intent of the short debrief was a follow-up to a previous board meeting and that was just to coordinate from the board how you would determine the recommendations is there a board lead who would look for recommendations i'm sorry the board references the search firm references so the board was looking looking for direction on how you would coordinate finding more about the references and doing the reference checks and the second is to finalize any questions you had with the costs so those are two topics that you could determine if we need to resolve that today but that

121came up last meeting and then the third point of business is to address whether the board is going to make a decision based on the two firms you heard from today or add some additional firms so i'd like to first suggest since we heard from florida school board association that they're planning on not pursuing further that the first thing you discuss as a board is your decision to decide on the two firms you heard from today on the 21st when you have your next meeting or have consensus if you should consider bringing on back the other three i want to go through them you had the other firms were grr recruiting hazard young atiyah and associates and mcpherson and jacobson so i'd like to open to discussion on a recommendation from the board proceed with

122these two or consider bringing on additional search firms miss fisher and then miss kittens yes i would i would like to proceed with our original plan and proceed with what we have now okay miss kittens and then miss morgan i believe i brought up at our last meeting when we got to this point for today that we should hear from all of the firms and i still stand on that i believe that they are professional groups we should hear because even just like today there were things that i heard and understood better from being face to face with the applicant so i think it's only fair to just listen to everybody i mean some of the things that knocked out some of the candidates may have been okay for this reason or that but i

123think we need to give the opportunity just to open up if it's correct it'll still shift out sift out to where it should be thank you miss morgan so i'm prepared to proceed as is i don't see the need to bring other candidates in at this point i'm also concerned about timing i think where if we do not be if we're not meeting again until almost august and then we're going to talk about interviewing firms and go through this process again i think we're just we're we're wasting our time and we're we're hurting the district okay other comments vice chair bond this is christian yes ms patrick i'm going to hear from vice chair vaughn and then i'll call on you vice chair bone i was going to agree with mrs morgan i was impressed

124with the presentation by ray and associates and i feel like we should proceed as we as we started on this on our timeline okay thank you mrs patricka mr cashman could you please refresh my recollection as to the consensus votes on the other firms who include rey and associates yes just one moment this is the scoring okay in front thank you in the last meeting rain associates in the top two had five board members up front who picked them in the top two and florida school board association three of the board members had them picked in the top two the other three firms gr recruiting hazard young at associates and mcpherson and jacobson all had two board members who picked them in the top two so today you heard from florida school board association and

125reign associates they were among the top two and then so we have the consideration now is to thank you either stick with the two we have or consider the next three what i'm looking for is the consensus to hear from rey and associates so if i recall correctly at the end of the process we went through and asked for thumbs up come sideways and come down and bring associates and all the others you know those numbers rain associates was the right here 7-0 for rain associates hya had six to one vote for no grr five to two was no mcpherson four to three no and florida school board association four to three yes so the next closest was a 4-3 so you're prepared to move forward with the current okay chair bond in a moment

126i'll ask for consensus first can we hear from miss givenelli i'm sorry before you take that may i ask a question so we are moving to a consensus for ray and associates before we move to a consensus on whether we should accept and look at other firms i think that's a little bit backwards can you say that again mrs kittens i said we are making a consensus to select one firm when what was being discussed is whether we should see the other firms correct and all of a sudden i don't know what happened but it was changed to we're going to take a consensus on ray and associates no that's not what we were discussing that's correct the consensus is would the board prefer that you stick with the current two search firms from today

127or is the board providing direction to seek additional information from the other three firms oh that's worded differently but thank you thank you for getting an input mrs giovanelli well i think we need to do practicing inclusive and making sure that everybody's equitable and we're not even doing that i think we should be listening to all the other applicants and their presentations and then making a decision i don't see the rush when it's not the optimal time that you could be looking for a superintendent we had two applications suggested that this is hopping out the time i know there was one of those applications that i had a higher fee i think everything negotiable and i thought we could probably negotiate that if that's what we like don't even know because you can give opportunities

128for them to have a presentation i would like to see and hear from all applications that have a presentation and that's what was equitable and fair in the process and we need to start leading by our actions and instead of talking to talk we need to walk it out and i think we need to listen to everybody and looking at the breath presentation so we can't even practice what we try to breathe thank you ms juvinelli chair jordan and then miss fisher thank you what i was going to my concern is the fact that yes they ray and associate did a great presentation but they're winning by default because of you know someone not being here i do have a problem with that when we look at the scoring and i do as i just

129showed you i have everybody how we scored on that particular day so and the next one that would come even in line with the fsba was actually mcpherson was the one who came in next with the same scoring and then grrr was the next one h.y.a pretty much everybody said no to that one so to me that would not even be in consideration because of the fact that we had that was a six to one vote but the other two mcpherson as i said was the same as fsba with the still the no and grr was five to two so i would definitely and i know that there's the time and everything but i think that for us i think we really need to to have the opportunity to hear someone else where this one

130group is not winning because of the fact that fsba has withdrawn i just i have a problem with that thank you miss fisher yes so i think we've already done the work as a board and we have vetted these firms so with a seven to zero yes with reign associates we already made that decision and i disagree that they're winning by default already vetted i just want to remind the audience because we are hearing you up here so if you could please i we appreciate your engagement but it is distractive to the board so if you could thank you excuse me you're out of order you're out of order you are out of order please sit down this is the last warning i'm sorry miss fisher thank you so we have already vetted all five

131firms and we legitimately came to an agreement seven to zero seven to zero that reign associates were the top choice anyway i appreciate florida school boards association making a stand and not putting themselves in a position to jeopardize the integrity of the board or their own organization no that was your that was your second time would you please escort the gentleman from the chamber just a reminder that we do have to keep decorum in the chamber and we do ask you to please cooperate so the board can do their work officer this isn't negotiable then i'm going to call for a five-minute recess while this matter is taken care of five minutes not oh now we are sorry we're going to reconvene before we continue i'm going to ask the board if they would approve

132changing the public comment from the way it is in our policies which is after we finish our board business so just gonna go no we're we're just gonna take a quick vote on madam chair just so you know it's not necessarily changing the policy because it does not changing the possible yeah i missed it not changing the policy but changing just for this meeting and we don't need discussion on that do we well may i please make a statement we need discussion on that ms bruno no so the board you can pull the board to see what the board would like to do let's just pull the board on on this one time all right i'm just going to go straight up to change the order no okay i say no any skittens i say

133yes because we did it in a previous meeting for the same reason thank you miss jordan for the mistake now just yes or no please yes okay miss fisher yes okay and miss bruno are the you have two more okay excuse me are the people on the phone allowed to yeah this is on the physical consensus good i thought so all right miss juvenelli i'm is for this meeting only to change our time to do the public comment before or after so are you willing would you like to change the public comment to before we finish our discussion and consensus yes or no what does the public want it want i don't have any idea your own opinion if you want to change public comment as you know with a briefing meeting we do it

134after the board business whereas in an action meeting we do it beforehand after in a briefing and we do it before in an action meeting so what i'm asking is if you are willing yes or no to change for this briefing the order yes or no yes yes thank you miss patricka no thank you okay so i think we had what three three no three knows and four yeses so that means we will change it okay so madam chair i just want to make sure that everybody understands that we're not changing the policy right so the policy allows for the public to speak during a briefing meeting at the end of the meeting we've already had a significant portion of this meeting complete and you're just pretty much dealing with some loose ends at this

135point so that's why we can move forward but we're not changing the policy i want to make sure that's very very clear so at this time madam chair would you like me to move forward with public comment did we finish the last train of thought please please please we can't call out we can't call out please please please okay so let's go ahead and then if we're before we give that direction let's hear the public comment attorney dupree bruno would you read the information on public comment is there anything else in terms of the discussion from the question that was posed by mr cashman that's what i want to make sure that everybody had an opportunity to make their comment okay miss kittens yes my comment was i agree with miss jordan because when in

136that meeting when we had five potential candidates the two that were finally selected were not my choices so therefore i did by default have to go along with the two choices that the majority of the board chose so for that reason i think we need to look at other choices thank you okay if there are no further comments i'll move forward with public comment and this will be the one time public comment for this briefing school board policy provides the opportunity at this point in the meeting to address the board concerning any matter from this meeting's agenda if you completed a blue card please put it in the basket provided if you need a blue card they are located in the hallway outside the rules concerning public comment are posted in the back and will

137be made from the central microphone please be advised that the board does not respond during public commentary remarks made by speakers at the end of the public comment period the board vice chair will address concerns or the assignment of any concerns to the superintendent speakers and those attending the meeting are expected to act in a respectful manner the purpose of public comment is to provide feedback on today's agenda personal attacks on individuals or abusive language are prohibited in addition clapping hissing and booing unreasonably loud and or offensive language swearing cursing or display of temper are prohibited speakers who failed to follow proper decorum in the chambers will be ruled out of order any speaker continuing with such remarks will be required to relinquish the microphone for board policy one point eleven the time per speaker

138is three minutes you will find a countdown on the big screen in the front of the room once your time has elapsed the microphone will shut off we encourage you to address the board as a whole versus individual board members as they act as a collective body please state your name prior to making your comment and madam chair we have speakers okay is there anybody in the room who wishes to speak who did not have a chance to fill out a blue card okay would would you mind giving the blue card okay there you go anybody else who wishes to speak all right so mrs dupree bruno would you please call the first speaker will the following individuals please line up mark gillespie amy moore tara jenner daryl slack karen ressy mark gillespie cape coral

139florida i was very pleased with the actions of the second search company that came in and for a second i thought i saw a little bit of a ray of hope with trust issues that we have every one of you sitting up there i think is in agreement that there is a lot of dissension between the community and the school board there is some distrust between the community and the school board and as adults i think we have to ask ourselves how that happened the community is not the ones making these decisions it's it's the board so if there's a distrust issue if there is a trust issue between the community and the board and maybe the board needs to take a step back and analyze actions motivations and decisions that you've made that has

140led us to this point i haven't been involved in this all this long but when i sit back here and i look at the faces and now that i can see faces because most of the masks are off i see the stain on some faces i see i've always seen eye rolling i've seen some some physical you know body language that's spoken much louder than words ever would so from sitting out here i see a trust issue i'm having a difficult time believing what i'm seeing and hearing right now the best way to fix that is to change your actions change your motivations and i believe the best way for us to start with this would be to go ahead and introduce the other three companies and what everything thought were to make we're not

141going to have a new superintendent by the start of the year anyways if you truly believe what you told the second company that was up here about the importance of being above board being above reproach and instilling trust back into the community which is what i thought i heard you say to them was a good thing then it would be in your best interest and the community's best interest for you to put a little bit of hustle behind the muscle and call those other three companies back in and go ahead and hear from all three and then make your decision based on that thank you hello my name is amy moore i am from lee county i live in estero same pretty much i equal i'm not going what he says how can we feel

142that the actions of the board are legitimate and in the best interest of the students and the families of lee county when behind behind closed doors the board went rogue and suspiciously narrowed down the playing field from 30 to 2. we have a group that is representing in my opinion ideas of the radical left leftist agenda that i think are absolutely corrupt especially for the minds of very impressionable young students i don't know if i need to remind you that this is in this country officials are elected by the people and in coming before the people and choosing freely to offer yourselves as candidates you are literally voluntarily stating that you will make decisions that reflect those which are in the best interest of the people and are of the people lee county in my

143opinion there is no voice for the members of the community through the board when we are not agreeing to hear from the other companies it has not been my what i've seen what i've seen as far as when you guys are saying you're unwilling to listen to the other groups we need to listen to the other groups because right now we have a very the group that was here has a very the agenda is very poor for for the people the kids especially you need to serve as the voice of the people and not overreach your not have power i mean it seems like you're being more overreaching your power as far as let's see it's it's also my observation that you guys are promoting an agenda by not listening to the other people the

144language of the agenda that you're promoting is suggesting socialism communism this is and i assure you that the american people don't want those kind of things here in this nation next speaker please tara jenner to paraphrase people don't care what you think until they know that you care obviously it said better than that but let me go ahead and just say that the people that are on this side of the dais care about the school district and you guys have said on many occasions you care too and i will take that at face value so i'd like to start with the common ground that we all want to do what's in the best interest of the school district specifically the students but also the rest of the community the teachers the staff the taxpayers the

145employers the future employers and the future employees in this district who will be served by those who graduate and go through the ranks of the lee county school district and as such what i would like to do is i'd like to focus on the fact that we've now had two occasions the interim school district superintendent search and this one where we've had a nutrition when you have already decided to narrow down the field that you are going to interview and as such i think that it is imperative that you open up this particular search option again and add in the other three candidates specifically the consensus that you guys reached before included the fsba in that matrix if they weren't there that might have totally changed how that how those numbers came out i don't

146know that but we won't know that until you actually interview and evaluate those people another thing i'd like to point out is one of the companies was basically dismissed during that consensus because of financial reasons sometimes you actually pay for what you get and without knowing what they stand for and who they are we don't know whether or not they might not in fact be well worth the dollars that they were requesting as part of their profile the second thing third thing that i'd like to mention is that you were going to interview five candidates for interim hour and 25 minutes each this is five candidates now excuse me three more candidates that would only be an hour additional so it's not that big a burden and even fsba who pulled out they said that

147you're not behind the power curve in fact you're ahead of the power curve as long as you get started by october you're fine so there's no super duper rush to be able to get going to be able to start by october i mean excuse me by august and the final thing that i would like to do is i would like to caution the board members to consider as a consensus vote you don't have to consent say no and demand an actual up and down vote so that it's very clear where everybody stands on this because i think that you're doing us a disservice when you do that and i would finally end up by saying that there's a real potential thank you very much next speaker please line up denise nystrom timothy peterson christy divijelli

148stephanie house denise nystrom the 4-3 vote it really comes as no surprise with regard to the people that voted no you know i came from a school district where there was a lot of transparency i was blessed i was an assistant superintendent in two districts where the board did not have their own agendas it didn't mean they always agreed with each other but it meant that they talked things through and they did what was right for the benefit of the community i would wish the same for this board we and the public have been belittled i'm trying not to use the word cost accosted by a particular board member you know that i sent you an email last night that kind of behavior is intolerable it should not be accepted the school the florida school

149board association in my estimation needed to recuse themselves and if there was the professionalism on the board that deserves to be there they would not have been in that position and that's incumbent upon all of you to do something to stop those kinds of things from happening and i do want to thank the four of you that allowed us to speak before taking a consensus i don't know if you remember but a while ago i stood here stood here and i was explaining to you the process of interviewing because that's something that i oversaw and conducted thousands of interviews i asked you then please narrow it down to 10 or 15 candidates and then narrow down your search from there that is exactly what ray and associates said to you they didn't say out of

15031 choose five have three drop out they also told you that public involvement was important and that they sent out impression sheets and that the optimal and that there is an optimal season for hiring and that is not now it's not at least until october or november and that's just the beginning of the process a midterm hire gives you the candidates that have interviewed in other school districts and did not get selected did not get selected and it certainly does not give dr savage an adequate amount of time to show this district what he is capable of so that you can make a fair assessment when you are deciding who the next superintendent will be and i agree with tara's point that sometimes you do get what you pay for and you need to hear

151the last three search firms and then try to negotiate with somebody if they're too high but at least see what it is that they have to offer in fairness to our students i am not going to be told again that i don't love this county or that i don't love these children which is what we have been told by a board member i love this county and i love these children next speaker please next speaker hello my name is timothy peterson this is the first time i've been to one of these boyd meetings i don't have kids i was homeschooled so i'm very don't really have much reason to be here but i'm trying to do what i can and so i'm here i have some notes here so give me a second kittens mentioned

152that the culture has some distrust in it and you would post it out on the door out here that anybody who causes disruption can be taken out removed as i saw and you did exactly what it said i actually looked up the reference that you said that was on there to the law and one of the things i noticed on there is that it said that this meeting is required two days prior to have has to be posted in a newspaper and it has to be on the radio and i realize that's actually part of why the distrust is here because you don't put it on social media or tv and i'd like to recommend i don't know if this in your power to do that or who it is but that needs to happen

153because that's the reason why there weren't 200 people here like i had expected when i walked in i was very surprised to find the five people who like i happen to know i want to say that i was really happy that someone did bring up the critical race theory and did ask that first firm about it and i was impressed that they answered the way they did honestly i thought that was a really good answer and like i just i don't think i like those people as far as like their beliefs but they gave a good answer that it's not really part of the decision so i just want to say i was impressed by that from what i understand u6 up there are elected and from my perspective i kind of see this idea

154of you using a firm to hire someone as a shield to protect you from being blamed if it doesn't go well and maybe that's not the intent of it and i also talked to someone else and they said that you don't know how to like you're not equipped to hire someone just this you guys on your own you really do need help and so i understand that but i'd rather have it be elected but you can't have an election if there's nobody here and there's nobody here as you can see so like you guys are really in an impossible place and like you really need more people in on this in order to get the trust of the people so the last thing i want to mention is that brain associates brought up was on

155one of those slides that they had 33 characteristics that they're looking for nobody asked what those were i am all for having people of character but i happen to know there's 49 of them and so my dad taught character so i kind of know this and the number 33 is a bit suspect just from like a religious point of view and i could not find those 33 qualities and i called and the lady said she would email them to me but i haven't gotten that either so i'm kind of thinking it's hard to find thank you next speaker please hello christy divajilla here so i emailed you guys last night and i emailed all of you including the superintendent so i don't know that i need to repeat all of it's in my email however

156i do feel that i want to touch on just a few things one is public trust obviously that's been talked about a lot today it's really hard to have trust in a board that makes it very difficult to find things to get answers to questions you know you've made it very hard for us to believe you when you say that you value our input considering a majority of these meetings that they take place during business hours and they take place in the middle not just in the middle of the day but in the morning as well like even at a time that would be unreasonable to ask the average everyday working person to come maybe on their lunch but even then you know you're going to have to take half of your day off because

157these meetings are never short so that's an unrealistic expectation that you're asking of the public number one number two your youtube channel so mr vigelli excuse me so this is a briefing you can only address what's on the agenda it has to do with the superintendent search right yes yes and this has to do with the supervisor with the search firm which is what the board was talking about i would love my time back because i'm having a conversation with miss bruno here and this is not part of my public comment so you could just back that up like a whole 30 seconds please i would really appreciate it but it is i'm coming around to it i promise i'm not just gonna go on i'm not going off on the off on the rails

158here i have a point to make and it has to do with the search terms so i'm still waiting for that 30 seconds were you gonna bring the clock back or are you going there we go no i just went from one minute and 37 seconds to 45 minutes you don't want me to talk for that one i don't want to talk for that long i'm just going to start talking and you guys can kind of figure that out so anyway what i was saying was you want transparent we want transparency from you not just from you guys personally but in this whole process that has to do with yes the way that you conduct the search has to do with your youtube channel and the fact no public comment is allowed it has to

159do with the superintendent search the website that is probably the most transparent part of this entire process that we've seen so far the candidate search that you guys are doing that we were just talking about today you can't decide from two people from two firms when one of the firms drops out it's no longer a decision between two firms it's now do we decide on this one firm or do we go back and we interview all for all firms that's the decision here do you care about what we have to say if you do then act accordingly don't just sit up there and say have a 4-3 vote again that's no even though you've heard the public so please take into consideration what we have to say please like i don't think it's too much

160to ask of you guys thank you good afternoon my name is stephanie house and i know all of you and i'm sure a lot of you know me too you know i don't really need a microphone well i'm here because you invited me to come you're always asking me to speak up and let you know about my opinion and that's what i'm offering what i saw here this afternoon first of all i was late because i didn't know anything about this meeting i don't really care for that when i go to your website the last meeting i attended you say you put the information out there it wasn't out there on your regular account calendar then i find out well you got a lot of links to that calendar well your general public and i'm

161part of them we don't know that so i'll take care of that later on i keep people informed so that's why you have this little small group here today i don't know why you don't want everybody to know everything that's going on but i'm going to make sure the word gets out everybody should know about this meeting because we all want to know what's going on when this superintendent's election is going on and i didn't speak about that at the last meeting i attended okay we'll move on to the next case when you see your board members that can't get along together that's not a good thing diversity that starts at home right there on that board when you don't get along we can't trust you we can't trust you we're not going to really

162respect your opinion and your opinion says you're going to narrow it down to two selection committees no committee should be selected by default from five to one by default who should i trust a defaulted committee i've been in this county long enough to note some of your superintendents came in by default they didn't last i don't like that they didn't do i don't even know if they were in position long enough to do a great job i know a couple of them i really didn't trust either when i look at some of those people on the board up there i really like you but god tells me i need to love everybody that doesn't mean i can respect your position and your title that doesn't mean i really have to like you i pray that

163you like me because we're all god's children we love one another that doesn't mean when you select your next superintendent i want you to do it in haste you know the other ad just says haste makes waste so that means when you put that superintendent in place you might not have him or her there long and i said her that means it's time for you to start selecting some minorities minority means male female some people might be a different skin color you need to take your time and choose who you're going to put in that position and that board when the group you had their selecting said you don't need to do it quickly so that doesn't mean when school starts thank you ma'am madam chair that concludes public comments okay thank thank you attorney

164dupree bruno okay so let's get back to our board business back to mr cashman i'm sorry oh it doesn't sound like it is how about this mike is this mic working so based on the discussion you've started having you've heard from the public input and florida school board association had shared that they were not be moving forward as i'm facilitating what i was looking for is direction from the board if you would just stay with the existing firms presenting today or if the board would provide direction in reviewing the other firms so i want to have that discussion and then get direction from the board attorney dupree bruno am i asking that correctly and since they've already made their comments and had discussion really a poll of the board at this point for a consensus

165okay so to clarify the poll and the direction would like to hear is there the board direction in terms of bringing the other three firms in for presentation or sticking with the firms that you heard from today hearing that florida school board association has dropped out so journey to pre-bruno perhaps just ask them whether or not they are in agreement to add additional firms to the list yes or no consensus perfect so getting consensus and direction to add additional firms to your list for review which start with mrs morgan i have to say i'm still prepared to move on at this point okay ron no mrs kittens yes add additional chair jordan add the audition miss fisher no mrs giovanelli i'm yes yes thank you mrs patricka thank you so vice chairman based on the

166direction of the board the board is not interested from a four to three in terms of poll not interested in exploring other search firms okay so that's our that's our directive then that we are going to finish we need to have the conversation just to put before we go to a formal vote at an action meeting on this that we need to take a look at the ex the expenses and that we also need to check out the references just to be sure that we completely vet this organization yeah that's correct and so taking one at a time the references direction from the board how would you like to pursue the references and coordinate that effort okay lord what ideas do you have on that can i may i ask mrs dapri bruno is that

167something that we would your recommendation as far as the references would it be us who would do that or would we ask procurement to do that for us the department who would as far as who's going to ask for references i mean i know we've called on references already for the for these different companies so we well i assume we all have i know i have but i'm assuming that we all have had the opportunity to to speak to all of their references so i don't know if we need to do more calling on the references or is that something that it would not be procurement now if the board chooses to make some additional phone calls or if the board wants a staff member to make a phone call for them and check all

168the references that's up to the board's directive but who would they look at to do something like that in what department vhr would be hr that hr make a phone call for for a firm yes in this particular circumstance because you're not going through the procurement process for professional services so we're doing it ourselves or the board can do it so it's you can designate one board member to make the phone call i mean it really is up to the board's desire i thought in the beginning that we talked about the board doing this search and not involving in in this case it would be hr to vet and also have we not vetted to get down to the two didn't everyone make phone calls and discuss it with other districts and you know customers

169that they had and you know i i still say it was by default for me it was either them or fsba and i felt because of the circumstances i didn't want fsba so but here we are and the majority has spoken so i believe that we vetted i don't know what other vetting and who else you can include in this process perhaps i would like to have an opportunity to speak to them one-on-one and that can be done we've got between now and the 21st to make this final vote so i just don't see where we need to add another step or add another person or another department or i think we've done it so that's my opinion thank you vice chair vaughn what what i would suggest since we are in the final step

170that those who have made made those phone calls hopefully if they have records of you know how ray and associates put up a list and they had quotes from from different people i think that in our final our final presentation our final the final finals if if you will that it would be helpful to show the general public and i'm talking about the public out there that we don't see on on a regular basis but who are following and interested perhaps some of the comments that we received okay may i'm going to ask those of you who called do you have quotes and comments exactly that we could share with the public when we put on our website that we have selected this firm and these are the reasons miss jordan i'm sure we can

171gather that and then they also had stated that they would send us the update because this is from 20 20 20 but i believe that the gentleman oh my goodness stated that bill stated that he will do that he would go ahead and send us updated versions of their comments for the 2021 and the covet area so he was gonna i'm sorry michael mr collins that he was going to send that to us so we will have those as well however that's gathered and i think it's probably more compelling if it has been gathered by one of us or several of us i think that should be out there on on the website with our rationale for selecting this firm albeit by default but you know when you when when you say the default it

172makes it sound like you know i think of two teams that are going to play and one team doesn't show up at all and but they were the champions and the other team i mean it's not like that it's it's not like you know we haven't had a chance we haven't obviously shared our rubric but you know i'm thinking that you know certainly the presentation that we had doesn't seem like it's going to be one where you know no we can't possibly think about that firm unless i'm unless i'm totally wrong about about that so thank you miss kittens and then i'll go back to see if there's just to get some direction how you wanted to coordinate that effort mr kittens my suggestion for courting it coordinating it is we have until the 21st

173we have the opportunity for any one of us as a professional board member to contact them we have the contact information we have their resource information we have all of that so leave it open for those that want to or choose to make those contacts and then maybe send you something us to our findings so that on the 21st we can have it all together and say you know or we can give our comments then so i'm just i don't want to narrow us down to choose somebody to do what i can do for myself and that's pick up the phone and call the company which i will do because i have a couple of questions so i just don't think we need to formalize it have a deadline the 21st is when we meet

174have the 19th or whatever that we have to get our comments and suggestions and our whys if that's what we want to put forward thank you chair jordan sorry i'm i'm going to speak again so yes we don't even have to do the rubric because we've already kind of we're bringing this one to the board but i would i would say like like i said before i know that i did and i'm sure others have already contacted people and had multiple conversations regarding you know information about each and every one of these candidates or firms excuse me so i think that if there's new after hearing them speak to us if there's more questions that we now have in our mind that we need to have answered like you just said miss kittens let's pick

175up the phone we have the phone numbers for hillsboro we don't have the phone numbers for some of these but obviously if it's marion county we know how to find these places all of these in florida that the list that they had given us we have the ability to find those resources and actually when you call there and you talk to the office they are more than happy to give you as much information as you want so we have that ability to do that and i agree let's just do it ourselves okay so i'm i'm hearing direction that the board will look up the information themselves and if information is shared with me or attorney dupree bruno before the meeting we could certainly make sure that's shared with everyone attorney dupree bruno did you have

176a comment so okay so we have ray and associates and some of us have made calls to some of their districts that they've done searches for my experience with a couple of them was if they were several years ago like 2015 and 14 there were people didn't have that information and there were different people in the board office and even different office staff and hr staff so you know everyone's in the throes of change like we are and i just want to ascertain if we're going to make these calls ourselves that we would call those that dealt with reign associates most recently and also that we're not all seven of us calling the same people over and over again that we should have an assignment you know who will call marion who will call late

177who'll call hillsboro because i think it would be a little counterproductive if if they got four or five or six calls from this board regarding the same firm that's my comment mrs gittins i disagree with that because i may not ask what you ask and if i need to make that decision and when i mark my yes or raise my hand it's up to me to feel comfortable with that vote and therefore i feel confident that you know it's a it's a search firm they're aware that people are going to ask questions so we don't know if everyone is going to call and even if they are it's a professional firm so i don't want to be a sign that i call this one and you call that one i really don't thank you cheer

178jordan and then i'll see if miss patrick or mrs giovanelli have any comments just real quick in my conversations with multiple people they did not care and they cherish the fact that anybody could call them and be more than happy to to speak to them so they were very kind and cordial regarding that they were happy to be able to speak on it okay yeah thank you mrs gibinelli any additional comments regarding reference checks okay thank you mrs patricka any additional comments okay so it seems there's there's direction that each of the board members will take it upon themselves to call the references for ray and associates the only other question that came back based on feedback before today's presentation was coordination of costs you heard the cost today from rain associates is there any

179direction or discussion any further direction or discussion how you want to get additional information on their cost beyond what they shared today not seeing any comments okay chair jordan i was just going to say i think they explained that thoroughly for us yeah i believe that they do okay thank you vice chair bond and then attorney dupree bruno well based on some of the additional costs that i know we're going to at least very seriously consider i think we should hone in on that and the smart thing to do would be to develop a budget in other words we know that the base cost is 26 000 what are we willing to expand you know get more information because it did sound like let's say we have three final candidates and we were told that

180they schedule all the forums and these are the times that they actually have somebody here so we would incur travel costs and that sort of thing and so we're going to need to at some point gather more information how much you know kind of get an estimate of costs and then come up with a budget we're not just going to expend you know whatever just keep spending we shouldn't should have a budget an attorney to pre-bruno do you have a comment also you may be able to comment based on the agreement that's put in place well this is what i was going to access for board directive to instruct me to get the contract start reviewing it so i have enough time to provide it to the board for you to review it within a

181reasonable time frame and get your comments back can we take a consensus on that please can we can we do that prior to the action meeting now this is just you're not voting on the contract this is for me to start looking at the terms of the contract reviewing it discussing it sending it to you to review it and then if you choose to move forward with this firm at least that part is done and you guys would have had ample opportunity to review the terms is there agreement in having attorney dupree bruno move forward on that consensus from the board or direction from the board is morgan yes vice chair vaughn yes mrs gittins yes chair jordan yes miss fisher yes mrs giovanelli patricka yes please thank you here jordan i know i'm sorry

182i got all these questions now this based on the so the contract is based on the estimated cost sheet that they sent with the quarterly payments and then everything up 30 thousand dollars which he said was gonna be the maximum and then the other would be the two thousand dollars for like other expenses coming okay yes i'll look at all of the stuff that they have and move from there okay thank you vice chair vaughn there's no additional comments on my end thank you all for what mrs kittens i just want to make sure because i'm the one that puts things on the website to have a quick discussion to say what do you want on the web page because do we make a statement that this is whom we have decided upon based on

183consensus and discussion at this meeting and then the final decision and vote will happen on the 21st i think you need to be very careful with that so i would wait until the board makes its absolute final decision and has the formal action vote before you announce who you will be using as your national search firm no i understand that but i'm saying at this point we have one person and this is going to be out there on youtube at the end of this meeting am i correct this meeting will be publicized on your channel that is correct i believe alternative things that we did here today will be public once they hit send so it would just be confirming what we did today okay so then in that case you're saying don't put anything

184out there and just tell them to just go watch the meeting the board is still under the process of reviewing and analyzing whether or not he wants to move forward with the search firm the board that's the comment it's not a comment of saying we've chosen ray and associates the statement would be that there was discussion and all of that today in the interviews and there's that we are in the process of finalizing it on the 21st i still my red flags are up with regards to that i don't think that it will be in the board's best interest to actually make that announcement the public is not going to necessarily understand the nuances of what's on that website if that firm is up there they're going to assume that it's that from you can

185link the youtube if you want that's what i said i'm not going to tell them we've selected this group but to say to know what's going on they're going to see it when they pull up the website is making progress the board is making progress towards the selection and here's the youtube link if they want to see it but i will be very very careful with that well for all practical purposes we've taken a consensus that it is them i know but that's not a formal action vote and i don't want to create a property interest for them that they think that they've been selected in case something happens and vice versa with the public's expectation that this is the firm i think we need to move cautiously because it's not finalized okay may i

186ask that you write a statement that will be acceptable and legal that we can just put on the website and then refer them to this meeting on youtube if that's if that's the boards if any everyone agrees so the question is can attorney dupree bruno write a statement that will go on the web page where people are going to be looking to see what where we're at and what has happened and at the end of it will and you can give it to me i'll make sure that it gets up and just at the end say refer to this meeting on youtube and get the rest of your answers can we ask for a consensus on that all right so asking consensus for attorney depre bruno to put something in writing for the board to

187review before it goes on the website of chair jordan yes thank you so it's for the important date so we did not take we gave directions we did not take a consensus correct on this we gave direction no we took and took consensus on you going starting to work the contract but we did not do consensus as far as the main associates correct well you took a consensus not to add anyone to the list and by virtue of not adding anyone to the list and having fsba withdraw you only have one so that is way an associate okay because i know that he has a direction so we went from direction to consensus that's what i want to make sure that right terminology is a direction or is a consensus so and then going on

188here on the important dates so that would be july whatever that date is and i'm just like not with it today so i have to apologize to everybody that we would could put on there what that meeting would be about like ms getting said so that we're keeping that up to date on what we will be doing on that date i just want to clarify what exactly that was and may speak and what i'm asking attorney david bruno to do is to write the verbiage and then we will make sure it gets up i mean it's going to be very simple the board is making progress and here's the link thank you any concern with the board with the attorney debris bruno moving forward with that hearing none thank you any other comments from the

189board vice chair that ends my comments as well thank you okay thank you thank you i have a question to i guess just to ask the board one of the things that i'm concerned about is the comment that was made by a couple of the members of the public about things not being posted on our website and it wasn't it wasn't having to do with the specialized it had to do with the board meetings and you know i'm just i was just using my phone to take a look and okay when i looked at this one of the things that pops up are the icons that say board meetings and you tap it and it goes right to board docks so i don't know have you i'm curious if any of the rest of you

190think that there's an issue in general we're not talking about the superintendent's search our special page but in general on not finding things on on the website miss morgan and then miss kittens so i'm not going to comment about things not being on the website but i did bring up the question i'm going to say it was probably almost two months ago about whether or not we could push out agendas to members of the public who register as being interested in board meetings so you know date and time of the board meeting in the agenda when it's published for us it's it's pushed out now i don't know if staff has made any progress on that but i think that would solve certainly some of the problems of people who feel that they're invested in

191the district but they're not up to date on what's going on is that on a is that on our parking lot list morgan would that be or was it would that be for how how i remember you saying that i have to go back and look but what was next how was that to be disseminated so it just the same way we have at one point i think maybe during the sales tax we had a list of everybody in the community who was interested in information so every time we posted information it went out so this would be the same thing it's it's a list of people in the community who are interested in receiving information about board meetings and every time something is posted for our use it's also distributed via email or text

192or however to members of the public who are interested in receiving it i know i believe other districts may be doing it i'm not certain but i know that organizations are able to do it because i was asked by an organization that does that if we were able to do it so okay so is it on the parking lot so is it yeah are these is it like where the school how they said the district sends out us a text saying check your emails or like for the whole entire community they'll tell us to check our emails there's something important and then we go to the website and we check that no this is just the whole list i'll get what i'll get with them and yes i'll put it on there miss doewell knows

193what i'm talking about she's the one who i believe will be working on it for staff i could be wrong but i got it thank you okay miss kittens sorry okay what i'm trying to say about the web page is this when you go to our site you have to go one two three three to four steps to get where you want to get to the point you go to inferior badges pulls up the website you go leadership drop down goes to school board got drop down goes to and you have to find superintendent search which is near the bottom then you click on that and when you click on it doesn't go directly to it you have to wait until it pops up on the right side okay then when you get to that

194we do have on the calendar the date and it says whether it's public comment or not and if you click on it takes you directly to board docs so all of that happens then the process you can also click on youtube the problem is it's too many steps something this magnitude and of this importance should have and i know it pops up on the side periodically but we need to have it somewhere on that first page that people can just click on superintendent search and have it up there you go from here to here to here down to here you click and then you wait to open it so my point is you know no offense on the website it's too many steps and if you're on your phone it's even harder to do that

195so all i'm asking is that we have a banner we discussed that way back when of having a banner with superintendent search that is prominently on that page when you click on leeschools.net you click on it and the information is right there that's all i'm asking there's too many steps and my understanding what they were saying today is that it is not easy to get to so that's that's what i think that we should do especially since there's so many questions about what we are doing it's all right there but you have to look for it and i'm thinking we make it easier for the public click on the website and click on the page and there it is okay okay yeah my initial question when we come back to that was just in general

196about the meetings which brought up ms morgan's comments and i don't see where the meetings is a problem i don't often use a desktop for this but i was leaning over and i see the same icons as on my phone there's there's the icon that says board meetings it's like a little person and a couple other people and for board meetings and i'll just say that for anybody who happens to be listening it's one click that but that takes no dude because now i understand what you're saying miss kittens but that's a slightly different conversation but an important conversation but in terms of getting to the meetings and finding the agendas on the meeting once you get to the website it's one click so i'm not sure well those exactly the members of the there's

197two if you click on leadership then school board then i know i'm looking at it the icons you either have board meeting calendar or you have board docs or you have superintendent search there are three possible ways to get information that will give you information about the search all i'm saying is keeping it simple and just have you click on the main page and you click on superintendent search and it takes you right there on that page it takes you to either board docs or youtube or whatever so it's it's difficult to find no no and i totally agree with you it's an important conversation but it wasn't the conversation i started with which is the comment by some people that they can't even find the meetings not about the superintendent search but just in

198general about the meetings which brought up miss morgan's and what i'm saying is i don't understand how they don't find the meetings when both on my phone and on the first page of the website there's there's an icon and you just and i know it's kind of a pain to go through the leadership and all of that do we not have that what is it called the banner or the doesn't that go across the screen anymore it shows up periodically on the right hand side different things pop up on the right but if you click on there looking for something you either have to wait for it to come up or you click through it okay so all i'm saying is for this time for this importance for this matter to have a banner on

199the top of the page somewhere the whole thing with the meetings and all that is another conversation and people have said it's difficult to find things so right right and i know i underst i understand that so now on this board comment about what you would what you would like to do to make it easier to find superintendent search page specifically a permanent you're saying a permanent banner one that doesn't knock the miss still well can you can you help us you know what can for the sake of time can i get with miss stilwell in her department i kind of like to hear what she has we have the banner up there and then we're scrolling through other things because there's other important stuff we have to get out there but one of the

200things that irma and i were just talking about was putting an icon down below where you have board meetings where we could create an icon under there that would say superintendent search so you'd have it in multiple places on the main page the main page with the other icons can we do that then totally do that everybody on the board thumbs up if you agree that we should all right thumbs up good deal perfect okay miss juvenilly okay well it takes us to good of the order and board member comments about the phone people first miss juvenelli do you have a comment or as good as the order or expect okay go ahead i'm just a little disappointed and that we didn't really listen to the community and allow for opportunity for all and be

201in the example that we should have been but i guess the will of the board i just i'm shocked that we've got we really own it by default that someone who's going to be our search committee so thank you miss patricka no thank you okay miss jordan no thank you it's kittens the only thing i have to say is that when we started this process there was an urge urging to you know get started on the process and board members stated that we needed to take our time and do it the right way and it seems like there has been a shift in that to suddenly go faster i hope we reiterate and go back to what we said initially we need to take our time we heard what the companies said today and make

202sure we get the right choice that's pretty much it thank you this morning well i've lost my go to the order comments so i will try to recall them i would like to put some things on the i would like to put some things on the workshop page for us to discuss and prioritize one is the virtual school another is you know the status of the virtual school where we are with that another one is the oh gosh oh the operations department i would like to explore the option of moving our meetings that are non-action meetings back to the training rooms because i think we work better when we're in space where we look at one another and i think we're we should be able for the most part to accommodate the public in that

203space i would like to see from the superintendent a report on the data that's been collected on the grade 3 scores aggregated by demographic and by school and then i would like to see how we are using the federal money and state money to support the challenges that we see in the data oh folks i'm sorry there were a couple of other things oh i know the other two can you please tell me for because i'm writing this down operations department yeah operation tomorrow i just want to know who's going to run it and who's how it's going to be staffed et cetera the other two are the fact that we if we're going to open the innovation school on august 20th in august 23 we have to make a decision by let's say september

204which way we're going whether we are going to go with the traditional model or we're going to go with the enhanced model that meets the needs of fgcu i think what we're going to end up having to do is we're going to end up having to postpone that school until 24 because we're not in a position to make that decision but we need to have a conversation about whether which way we want to go and if we want to go for fgcu then we need to find out how we're going to come up with the 12 million dollars and then the last thing i want to talk about is we've lost the mirror lakes pro property for the east lee county technical college i need to know you know what it where we are with

205respect to backup plans for the for some sort of site for the eastleigh technical college and i would like to see the staff plan fleshed out with respect to how we're going to expand the cape expand the technical college create the wing in the east zone and nothing is in the budget about the psa and the question is are we going to do it at all are we going to ask the partner agencies to fund any renovations to that particular facility so for the cape no the psa public service academy does not have any funding in the budget are we going to fund anything that they're looking for or are we looking to our partner agencies to do the funding for the enhancements that they expect to see so those are things that i would

206like to put on the on the table for workshop agenda priorities those are my good of the order thank you okay thank you and i have no comments at this time attorney dupree bruno i have none thank you okay so we've come what is up to you i asked her oh you did okay yeah we started with the phone we started with the phone people thanks so seeing no other business we are adjourned you