School Board Briefing Meeting: June 8, 2021

001good afternoon it is one o'clock on tuesday june 8th and this is a school board briefing meeting and we are starting out with reports from our school board advisory committees hopefully everybody's here but we'll we'll see we'll kind of we'll be flexible on this do we have someone here from the construction advisory committee to give the report so and each of you who are giving reports if you would introduce yourself when you get to the microphone so thank you i thought they were doing it from right here here we go good afternoon board members of dr atkins and staff and members of the public my name is ryan richards this year's chairman of the construction advisory committee and i'm going to stop by saying you can mix it up once in a while i don't

002always have to go first well i could reverse the alphabetical order but c-o-n-s happens to come before c-o-n-t so it's you but maybe i'll surprise you next time thank you i look forward to that so we've essentially had two meetings since our my last report april and may and our april meeting presented largely talking about some of the continuing contracts requirements in that if firms that provide either surveys or studies regarding to a potential project should they be excluded from the participating in the rfq of the actual project there was some discussion back and forth and that does not have seemed to been the district's approach in the past that they would be excluded but our committee essentially unanimously voted that we should not they should not be disqualified from the rfq process if you

003provide something like a feasibility study or a survey otherwise firms would not be willing to provide feasibility studies and surveys that seem to resonate with a lot of other school districts around the state of florida and the presentation we had on that i'm seemed pretty clear and we'd like to formally make that accommodation that they should not be excluded one of the caveats that was discussed was if there was a project leader or team member that was a direct contact for the survey or for the study they should potentially not be part of the voting team because there may be some relationships or personal contacts that happened in that regard so you know maybe you maybe you look at you pull out that one major con contact and then let all the firms proceed accordingly

004that would seem to be relatively unanimous request by the board by the committee i apologize and moving on we did have an update on the virtual meetings seems to be on again off again type of situation so that's an update every month and then going into the construction updates we did get some information on the new schools and their potential groundbreaking we had talked about subjects for next the coming year now that we're in recess will not be starting again until september there was some input from the committee that they'd like to be involved in the innovation schools should when that comes around would also like to be involved in any potential land purchases i know it's been a little light lately and i apologize for the wording in the report and what it says

005shortage of knowledgeable staff really shouldn't just say no shortage of staff there's been some departures and some people leaving i don't want that to be construed as a dig or anything like that there's just been some turnover at those positions and then again on the local interlocal agreements miss morgan gave a presentation or a discussion of who she's talking to with the county and trying to smooth out the process in the future i think foresight of them seeing it come down the road is going to be a really big point of discussion but keeping those those conversations regular we feel something that really should have been done for for a number of years in that regard and then we also did ask to start looking at the pka that's being done in estero and mr

006rickenbacker was nice enough to let us set that up for us at our may meeting so may was a long meeting we had a lot on the agenda ms morgan again updated us on the interlocal agreements and then you know reaching out and we would love to be able to help should you know something become fruitful from those agreements the existing ones vary in dates and ages and you know they're anywhere between four pages and 40 pages depending on how old they are so kind of standardizing them and i think you know that the county and the local would be the template for all the other smaller municipalities we went into a presentation of the aaa pre-k pre-k eight school in estera talked to the architects on that harvard jolly kind of walked us through

007the floor plan a lot of back and forth on the rationality of why things are the way they are where they're located why they're located there discussions quite a bit of getting traffic off of three three-year-olds parkway and getting them on site quickly and there's still some you know intricate wayfinding that's going to be associated with that where conflicts occur and then there's still essentially one way in and out but trying to get as much as that on site and then direct people to properly maneuver where they should be maneuvering we had talked about the rfq selection criteria at great length this year and we had a recommendation put forth by one of our members well proceeded to be asked for you know by us is there anything else in the in the procedure that

008we just didn't felt was really addressed by the last review that we had with procurement so we got a number of answers and the next part of the report i just want to clarify that the strikethrough fonts there's a little bit of a confusion at least in the wording when you say like motion passes having zero but the motion is to reject the comment so that was just kind of like a little point of clarity if it had a strike through there was a there was an approved motion to not follow through with the comment and that's what that's trying to convey in the actual reports but some of some of the recommendations we would like to move forward with include extending the seven year past experience requirement to something like 10 years and i

009know we've been talking about this for a number of years so it really wouldn't be much of a change or if you're just kind of holding that same status quo we thought that would open it up a little bit there's and on the rfq references we like them to hold them on for two years when batches of rfqs come out they are kind of onerous on other clients i know a number of other districts and other jurisdictions have stopped giving references because they all come in at once and there's a number of them and they're time consuming so you know some jurisdictions have stopped giving them out all together so the longer you can hold on to these and keep them on record the easier it would be for the firms in general to go

010and get we hold on to those for two years trying to find my place scratch through scratch through and i think at the end of the day that was really the only recommendations we were going to make emotion in the past i did want to follow back up i think i may have missed one item in our april meetings and that's specific to the continuing services contracts someone had brought up the idea that you know the actual presentations after submitting a book on a continuing services contract it takes a considerable amount of resources and firms that get selected or win may not actually get any work out of it in the next two years because there's a number of firms that end up on it and depending on the number of projects they may not

011get work on the design side it's a little less problematic but on the contractor side you might have 15 firms there and 12 projects so there's there's amount of resources that are expended on them and what's it really what's the value really when there isn't a project to talk about it's just you know the presentation has to be tailored about you know remote stuff because we don't have a project we don't have a schedule we don't have a scope so the recommendation from our committee was you know take the books score them how you score them how you've been scoring them and just go with that ranking and not seem to go over well with the committee at large and just not waste that expenditure you know whoever had the best focus number one second

012best number two create your list that way and i just kind of saved that expenditure and that was kind of a real popular opinion and with that i think i have covered all of our items the only caveat coming forward is for all of those rfq changes and recommendations for continuous contract we want to run it by procurement first to make sure we're meeting statute so we'll get their input over the summer and then in the fall when we reconvene our first meeting we will schedule a briefing and then hopefully an action meeting in conjunction with procurement to make these changes that have been recommended if it's possible to procurement to do that it should be noted that these were just done not just a couple months ago so none of this would take effect

013for another three years anyway so mr richard very very thorough report i just want to be sure that we're all we're all clear you're bringing forward official recommendations to the board on two or three different items i think there's technically four if you want me to quickly summarize yeah because i'm i'm looking and there's one when you were talking about the rfq process and it passed 7-0 i just want to be clear on exactly which which things are the rationale for my some of the strikethrough fonts we only approved a couple items out of the list that was requested to look at there's essentially two items in april one is not to exclude continuing services contracts or people that provide surveys from the actual rfq when it comes out and then the second one was

014to not necessarily require actual presentations or that second stage of the rfq process for continuing services contracts only correct so that would be you know architectural roofing contractors just those continuing services contracts we wouldn't recommend needing the presentation aspect of that rfq and then in our i'm sorry i think it would just be helpful the ones the ones that if you could specifically send the official recommendations because we as a board want to take each of your committee's official recommendation and it could be not just from this last couple meetings but throughout the year and you know look at them there's a lot in here that doesn't apply pulling out the three or four things we're actually requesting needs to be clearer so there's kind of a report of what happened and then a report

015of what we're recommending and absolutely i'll follow up with that yeah yeah just to make it clear which ones you are officially sending to us as a school board so that we can take a look at each each one of those miss and miss morgan's going to speak and i forgot to mention miss patrick are you on the line yes ma'am okay i'm gonna call on miss morgan since she's the liaison and then anybody who has additional questions well i think there's a little bit of confusion yes the committee has absolutely agreed that they want to bring this forward to the board but we also agree that it's got to be run by staff to identify any problems that they may have with it before it's brought forward to the board and then the idea

016as mr rickenbacher said would be to do a briefing on it with staff and i don't believe anything is there are any legal issues involved there may be one the feasibilities i'm not sure feasibility studies maybe one so really it's just a matter of tell letting us know informing us what changes they are making in process in the administration wouldn't necessarily be policy one might be so i think that's where we are okay and i wasn't sure if the recommendations i was thinking of it the other way around that the recommendations would come to us and we'd say here are the recommendations staff would you before we seriously consider would you take take away i guess i guess we could do that it's just that either way it's a multiple step the intent was to

017get all of our departmental staff to review and concur and then bring it to you guys as a recommendation for your approval that works too whatever works smoothly but we love to have our committees that's why you guys are out there coming up with these great ideas and so however many you have was there anything else you wanted to add before i asked people to ask your questions no i think we summarized it really well and you know point is well taken that we'll summarize and listen to a clear concise list of requesting you know you look at these changes and when we'll work with district staff and then you know what comes out of that when you bring it forward sounds sounds per sounds perfect did you want to add something before i okay

018yeah i just want to thank mr richards and mr rickenbacker it's been a good committee they've done some good work sometimes it's hard to corral everybody and get them to excuse me get to the do the spell check or whatever but it's been a good committee it's working hard and i think they're working to the best interests of the district and the contractors and the construction people who are involved on the committee so thank you both and before you exit i had i saw a couple hands miss kittens and then is your hand raised too miss jordan yeah i just had a couple dennis kittens and then miss jordan okay thank you first of all to you and the committee and for volunteering your time to the district my question and it may be for

019mr rickenbacker the cip process that was presented to us a few weeks ago showing how you know we would progress through a project has that been presented to this group for their perusal or input as well no not as yet the cip is the programmed jobs from various schools with their input yearly so it has not been presented to the cac but i'm sure they would love to see what the projected jobs would be for that fiscal year well and i'm just look and maybe i'm calling it the wrong thing but the process that we would go through from that you guys sat here and told us about the you know we're from start to finish right we have not gotten a presentation on that my construction process really has remained unchanged from the time

020the football is given to me i think the process document that you saw show a lot of the front end with community involvement until they get to me so they're pretty well versed in what i have to do from start to finish but we could certainly use a briefing on how we get to that point with all the front-end community work i'm just thinking that and they can say yay or nay but i think that would be a good set of eyes to to add to that he mentioned a couple of times things about you know involving this one and that one so just a suggestion to put it in they really want to get involved they want to definitely look at any ioa agreements we get prior to it coming to you board board

021for ratification they want to look at it with their professional eyes as well so i know they're working in both legal and planning now creating some revision language for ila's and i would hope that we can set up a time for them to come in and review them with the staff on the cac committee to kind of take a look and put a pair of eyes and comment as well okay thank you thank you and mr jordan i just want to say thank you for the detailed report i really appreciate that and as far as recommendations though i thought it was the liaisons who after they've decided what the committees have done that they are the ones we bring that back to the board not the i mean they're sharing the information but it's us

022who would bring it back to the board but thank you so much for this i really appreciate it yeah i just needed to be clear just for the sake of listening to the report miss patricka do you have any questions no thank you anybody else on the desk okay thank you again miss mr richards next is continuous systemic improvement advisory committee good afternoon everyone dr stork sends her apologies she is unable to be here today so you have me instead we've had two meetings since our last report the first one was in april and we had two main topics in april the first was mrs gittins did a thorough review of topics that the board had been had been discussing over the past few months and asked for input from the members and reminded them

023that they were free to to email or contact board members with their concerns the other item that we discussed in april was how the board members i'm sorry the advisory committee members would like to receive information about the strategic plan and ideas they had for distributing information about the strategic plan throughout the district and to stakeholders so they had several ideas there unfortunately in our main meeting we were not able to approve those minutes but we did not have a quorum for a meeting or physical form but there there were lots of suggestions so we will be providing those suggestions to the communications department and academic services department since most of them were mainly fell around those two areas we also agreed to be part of a signing a letter that went to our senator

024to encourage the passage of the bill that would allow committees to meet without having a physical quorum and so we believe that's going into effect so we're happy about that unfortunately it did not go into effect in time for our main meeting so we were unable to do any of our official business in may we were not able to make official recommendations however we did have a good discussion and mrs gittins was able to show the group the superintendent search web page and they were very impressed with that and we're excited about that so we will meet again in september and we are very pleased it's been a great group i will say as the liaison this group has just been wonderful to work with this year they've had great ideas they've stayed focused and

025on task and i believe miss kittens will agree with me on that we've just been really fortunate to have our members this year thank you thank you miss mcconnell anybody have a question or comment for her as a liaison may i make it sure okay and i agree with miss mcclung it was a very they are very enlightened they know exactly what the topics are and come with thoughts and ideas and questions and i did share with you as a board before thoughts that they had about the superintendent search process and i did mention that on the board before i have enjoyed working with them like i said very good ideas and lightning ideas and i just you know wish them all the best and they have a great group and thank you for all

026the work that you do too cindy with her thank you anybody else have a question or comment okay seeing none let's move to curriculum advisory committee representative whatever is more convenient bethany see if it works good afternoon my name is bethany quisenberry i'm director for elementary curriculum and instruction and i'm one of the liaisons for the curriculum advisory our chair and our co-chair were unable to attend so we kind of had the same problem as what miss mcclung was speaking to and we are very excited that we're able to offer a virtual option going forward our march meeting unfortunately we were unable to have a quorum so we were unable to complete that meeting our april meeting we also were unable to have a quorum face-to-face but we knew enough in time ahead of time

027to be able to offer a zoom virtual option so we were able to have an unofficial meeting for april in our april meeting we discussed i gave a presentation on the best standards implementation for kindergarten to second grade which included the professional development plan for our k-2 teachers for how we are ensuring that they are trained effectively on those new standards moving into next school year and then what will the ongoing plan be for professional development for onboarding new teachers moving into next school year we also reviewed the plan for 3rd to 12th grade for the best standards and when they received their new curriculum materials for ela moving into not this coming school year but the following school year and what how we could help to develop that plan we also discussed the professional

028development plan for the best standards for third to twelfth grade moving forward once those implementations are made miss fisher our board liaison spoke to us about the interim superintendent process as well and then she also gave an update on our health and social and emotional support for the upcoming school year moving into next school year we do not have any additional meetings until the fall but moving into the fall we will be a very busy advisory committee as we have another big textbook adoption moving into next school year we will adopt math curriculum for k to and then we will begin a tighter process for implementing the best standards not just for ela but for ela and math all the way through 12th grade okay thank you okay thank you dr quisenberry is are there

029any questions or comments from the board thank you yes i just want to compliment dr quisenberry and the whole team for the work that they've done on the standards and planning for the curriculum and especially for the professional development and the onboarding of new teachers so i think we're in good shape for next year and it was an honor to be the liaison to curriculum advisory committee once again thank you thank you just a side note we have already trained all of our kindergarten first and second grade teachers in the best standards this school year and we have also already provided training for k to five and all of the wonders trainings that's the new ela curriculum so we're in a really good place moving into next school year yeah and you'll definitely have some

030work to do next next year i was the board liaison a couple years ago for the ela reading adoptions and i know there's a plethora of things to look at in the adoption years yes one more side note if you are out at any elementary schools in this week or maybe even into next week ask them to see all the boxes of all of the new curriculum that is coming so we were we were very fortunate that we were able to get those orders complete that the board approved that purchase and we were able to get those orders complete early so that all of our teachers have all of their materials already at their schools and they're busy unpacking and ensuring that they have all of their materials that they're able to review over the

031summer if they choose for next school year thank you dr quisenberry and for any of you people who believe that teachers are ready to go on summer vacation i guarantee with the new textbooks all the teachers will be spending you know they all even if there's not a new textbook they're spending a lot of time reviewing and tweaking things but with the new textbook there'll be a lot of hours put in so i just wanted to put it out there because very true yeah it's summer break but it's not totally a vacation did i see another you know oh i just wanted to conclude by saying the whole academic services team is so well prepared and so proactive that you know they kind of made me feel like i needed to work a little harder

032so thank you again anybody else have a question or comment okay seeing none thank you so much and do we have a district advisory council representative good afternoon good afternoon board members jeff spyro our chair is scott hertz and it looks like mr hertz is not here this afternoon so i'm prepared to give an update in our last two meetings that we had we had a meeting back in march and april and both of those meetings there was not a quorum but we did have informational sessions that were available for all of our dac members our march meeting was brian mangan and the student services team they came in and provided an overview of the code of conduct to elicit feedback from our dac members that was in the march meeting april it was our

033culmination and that was roger lloyd came and talked about transportation and i want to tip my hat to roger lloyd who took two hours of questions from our entire dac family we were in one room for that evening it was right here in the board room he really did an amazing job listening to what the community was giving him as feedback and as a result of that they are preparing a pager that will go out to all families doing back to the back to school open houses that will have things such as how do i request a bus change how do i know if my child's bus is on time all of those questions that parents normally have they're going to be pairing a one page or that'll go out district wide but of course

034as you'll always hear mr hertz talk about they talk about actionable steps with our dac team and that's just another example of our presentations that have resulted in some sort of action our board liaison is miss patricka and in our eight our march meeting ms patricka talked about reaching out to the legislators giving her feedback as well and then in our april meeting talked about our superintendent search and providing feedback also so we want to thank ms patricka for her service to dak and that is our final update thank you dr spyro are there questions or comments for dr spyro that's kittens the question you mentioned that in one of your meetings you discussed the code of conduct where their suggestions questions and all that relate back to the board before we got to the

035point we're at now yes all of that was provided before the first reading came to the board okay thank you thank you okay who else miss patricka did you have any comments that's good anybody else thank you again dr spyro thank you very much and next equity and diversity edac advisory committee good afternoon madam vice chair board members dr atkins mr bruno jared edie representing chair dennis quisenberry who could not join us this afternoon the committee met in the month of april and received reports from lori brooks and mary lynn rodriguez related to mental health services and supports for our students the topics included universal social emotional learning for students additional teacher resources specific to covet and also training provided for school staff related to mental health services in addition to that committee members inquired

036and raised questions about students concerns and well-being after the trauma of covet resources for dealing with covet 19 trauma for students and school personnel and funding for additional licensed mental health professionals in the month of may the human resources team presented information to the edac committee related to teacher recruitment including current trends in education the closing of colleges of education across the state and nation reduced number of college of education graduates the lack of education job fairs provided through the colleges and university and also recently through the covet 19 pandemic poor attendance of virtual education job fair events additionally the hr team discussed with the committee district initiatives as well as survey results over the course of this academic year and rounded out with recruitment and retention strategies conversation about the ending of relocation assistance

037and discussing new ideas for teacher retention including district-wide mentoring programs social support groups and housing programs the hr team did allow the members of the committee to break up into small groups to digest that presentation also in the month of april board member vice chair miss betsy vaughn provided information to the committee relative to the interim superintendent search and that information is provided to the members of the committee as updates are available going forward the committee scheduled a final meeting for the month of june to consider their presentations for the year and offer any applicable recommendations to the board for their consideration that is our report mount of vice chair thank you mr edie and as the board liaison i can say that this is a committee that i really enjoy being a liaison with

038i know other all the committees have great great contributions but as as a person who was an english teacher and loves conversations this the members are not shy about any anything and i think that's that's wonderful because we do have good exchanges of ideas sometimes on topics that are slightly controversial so it's it's a fun fun and rewarding committee for me to be a part of i appreciate your leadership and i'm going to ask for any comments anybody have comments questions thank you thank you see annie so thank you mr edie and last but not least finance advisory committee my name is daryl tablum i've been this year's chairman in the financial advisory committee said to say we've basically been shut down from any official work this year since february of what we did in

039february really hasn't been voted on yet we did try to meet in march and during that meeting we discussed the fac purpose many of our committee members brought up the audit reports and the problems that we found within the audit to bring forward but again that was an unofficial meeting so we weren't able to vote on that one we tried again in april and it was a good get-together since we couldn't make quorum again we're basically down to just a few people that have been our core for the last five six years that i've been on the committee and most of us are also up for reappointment this year at this point that are the core we did discuss some of the updates going on at the schools and how they're keeping up with the

040school improvements such as ac and using cares dollars but again we weren't really able to have major discussions and take action just because we couldn't have a meeting with a quorum we were told that i was actually i was told at our last chairs meeting that we would be able to call a meeting over the summer to hopefully at least wrap up what we did do february march and april for those that attended and we look forward to coming back in september then well i'm really disappointed to hear that such an important committee has had these issues but you know completely understandable especially considering the unusual year that we've had and i thank you for hanging in there as as chair and presenting the information what i was going to thank you daryl really appreciate

041it and what he's saying is very true because when we went back to that you had to come in person it dropped to three people prior to that everybody attended every single meeting but people were still afraid to come in here and speak on that so they have you know the three or four i think we had the most was four who attended the second meeting so there was conversations as he said and they were kind enough to look at the booster club manual as well as the audit and they are sending back their response to actually to mr bruno on that so they're working on the side without being able to have those meetings and now that we can do both they'll be able to to move forward yes mrs kittens yeah thank you

042for your report and i tend to sometimes think outside the box and as i'm looking at this group of citizens and people that are experts in their areas and i thought of an idea that maybe once a year we can do a combined advisory meeting where they get an opportunity to speak with like you guys are finance so you talk with construction and construction talk to you know this one to kind of see how we all fit together and how all of the things do and i just wanted to kind of throw that out there to see if maybe there was any interest in doing it maybe we can you know hear back from you guys i just think hearing from a broader perspective rather than us working in silos and we get an opportunity

043to see how much work all of you guys are doing and share and maybe it will spark an idea over here that comes from here and we just all get better for it so i would like to throw that out as like an annual maybe a one day thing where everybody gets together and we have breakout rooms and we mix and mingle and talk and share maybe have one issue that is the concern not concern but issue that's on the table and kind of see how we collectively come up with you know thoughts or concerns you know issues about that so just throwing it out there that's a true yeah it's an interesting idea we had the chairman of the construction committee come to our meeting before and hopefully he'll agree that was a pretty

044good meeting where he was able to lend his expertise and we were able to discuss things with him to bring back to his committee we've brought that up several times and hopefully we can do it again i was hopeful to do it this year but there were there were a lot of challenges with co-founded our committee and i know covid was a real challenge but and even beyond just construction and finance maybe if you all knew some of the constraints of some of the other committees it would help you as as you're thinking about you know building a school or whatever and we think about all the things that go into it in the academics piece so i just wanted to throw that out there and see if maybe anybody has a an appetite for

045following up on that well it i mean it certainly sounds like an idea of merit and perhaps we can add that to our workshop agenda because i know having been aboard liaison now for a few years and also as a citizen member before that there have been times when there have been presentations when two groups have gotten together and there's an exchange but i think it definitely needs some looking into and the logistics and you know our protocols and policies and all of that to make sure it all works but again thank you so much for carrying on and i'm glad that there at least was some stimulating discussion i'll be with a rather small group any other board member questions or comments thank you again thank you appreciate your timekin's first time when he

046came to our board over the last few years i really appreciate it thank you thank you very much okay so that concludes the section on our quarterly advisory committee reports and of course the reports are online in board docs for anybody that wants to go back and re-read so now we move to the board procedures manual finalization this is something we have been working on for a while and this cindy mcclung has had the auspicious job of helping us out with both this and the next topic so mrs mclong if you if you would thank you thank you good afternoon everyone it's nice to be back with you today so we just have really one item left on our protocol manual and yes you're right we have been working on this for quite a while

047but i believe that at our last the last time it was brought forward we agreed on everything except for the one area which i believe is on page 16. it's about the process if a board member would like to bring a presentation during board member comments and at the last meeting the decision was made for everyone to go back and take a look at that process and think about it and make sure that everyone understood what was involved basically this is to help our communications department so that when there is a presentation during the board member comments that they're aware of it in advance and that they are able to make sure that everything works properly prior to the meeting so i'm going to let you kate are there any people and thank you direct

048the conversation if you don't mind i'll be happy to do that thank you very much so are there any questions or comments regarding this section miss patricka are you there i'm here i don't have any right now okay okay thank you hey is could we have a consensus to accept this process as presented in the protocol okay i see it i believe i can see everyone's thumbs thank you miss patrick thumbs up thank you looks like it is you know jordan is not here right now but is unanimous for not here so six zero unanimous on that thank you and that really was the only item i did want to bring up that on page 75 there had been a question at our last meeting around the protocol about the process if someone wanted to

049have information sent out to staff and they're i'm sorry i know it's probably making you dizzy because it's making me dizzy as i search through here page 75. okay so almost there there been a question about process and considering adding something to the protocol manual about what is the process of if a board member would like something sent to staff or sent to district personnel and other board members mentioned that well really that's that's probably already covered in our protocol so if we look at numbers 11 and 12. i think those probably do cover that channel any formal communications to district staff through the superintendent and then channel any substantial requests for information or action through the board to the superintendent and should reflect the desires of the board as a whole so if everyone

050is in agreement that covers that question then we would not need to add anything else i see miss kittens and then miss morgan my question about that is that i do send correspondence to schools in my area from time to time and i've just done that so i don't see i believe this was more asking staff members to send communications out it was what the question was asking staff to send communications to the district or to other staff members okay because i thought that like holiday things or whatever from the board usually comes from the chair yes i believe you're correct in the holiday greetings and items like that i believe this was more generalized information that wasn't coming directly from the board i guess i'm confused because i've i've never i don't understand what

051this is in reference to of people sending out i mean i haven't sent anything to my knowledge out to all of the staff no it wasn't a matter of sending things directly to staff i believe there have been times when a board member has asked that communications be sent out to the staff rather than than all of them from all of the board but the question came from a particular board member at different times so they just wanted to clarify that if a board member would like information to be sent that should go through the superintendent if it's something is being sent from the whole board such as a greeting card at christmas that would be a different situation miss morgan i believe you had your hand up yeah so i think the issue for

052me is that yes this is in our procedure and it tells us what we should or shouldn't do but it doesn't protect staff and so the issue is empowering staff to say no to a staff member and that's one issue the second issue is this we have become a really large organization and we are learning that sometimes things are going out without the superintendent's knowledge or without our knowledge and so we really do need to tighten up what gets communicated publicly you know from on a district-wide basis and so that's really that's my concern those are the two comments thank you miss giovanelli and miss fisher and i would agree with that actually i was going to add to miss morgan's comments we're not even getting the copies up like it's being sent out to

053everybody but then we don't even know that it went out like it would come back to us as you know a copy through someone else not even the board's not even get receiving a copy so i think it's important to really tighten this up somehow thank you thank you miss fisher yeah so as we're looking at our protocols this is for the board i think it's really important when messages go out from a board member that if it is not on behalf of the whole board that it's that's stated because i believe yesterday mrs morgan made a comment that part of our problem is and this is leading into our next section is that we are to speak as a board so we need to be in agreement about what we're going to present to

054the public and to staff and so we need to all be aware of that and we don't operate on individual agendas that's just not even legal so i think that's something that we do need to take a look at moving forward thank you is there any suggestion i heard tightening up to change this language or is it just a matter of people actually following through on the protocol and remembering that if you want something sent to district staff if you're asking a staff member to send something out then that should go through the board i'm sorry through the superintendent's office miss morgan yes i have a question does staff have a protocol with respect to a formal way to handle direct requests recommendations suggestions from board members that they distribute information do board members have

055i mean do do staff have a protocol this is our protocol to the best of my knowledge i believe that most staff members if asked to do something by a board member would do that miss fine yeah and i'm i'm going to add that there are exceptions to this and they're actually approved by the superintendent examples all of us have had specific projects for instance when i was working on census for instance and established here are the people i've been working with and instead of telling the board every little thing we're doing work with work with those people and then just give a report to the board so that doesn't need to be written in there but just again ever all of us have had those kinds of projects where it's it's a given that

056we're going to not send every request to our various committee members so that's that's helpful too for those of us when we're in those situations yeah so it sounds like it's just a matter of remembering to go through the superintendent when you're requesting something be sent to staff and maybe a reminder to our directors and our staff members that if you do receive a request from a board member to make sure that it's been approved through the superintendent's office before you follow through and again you know most board members i'm sorry most staff members are not going to question a request from the board but sometimes we might need to just send a reminder that this is the protocol and if you're not sure it's been followed that it's fine to to ask the superintendent's

057office if that protocol has been followed if everyone is in agreement with that can i see a thumbs up miss kittens i'm sorry i can't see your hand thank you all right thank you with that we've concluded the protocol piece of today's new question yes ma'am i thought you said yeah you came in after i said miss mcclung's going to be calling on people so thank you welcome by the way thank you so this came to me yesterday while we were sitting through our action agenda review portion of yesterday's meeting and i if i may ask attorney dupree bruno i think that the process i follow but i don't see it written down anywhere the process i follow is if i have questions i get them to stop 24 hours in advance at least at

058a minimum preferably the friday before but i get them to them 24 hours in advance i don't see that written in here anywhere and i know that none of these policies are law are i'm sorry none of these protocols are law and there's no way to hold each other accountable for them but it's basically an agreement that the seven of us enter into with the understanding that we will do our best to follow them there are occasions where things come up last minute and it can't be done but i'm seeing sort of repeated moving away from protocols with those meetings in particular and also with polls i believe it says that we're supposed to pull at least 24 hours in advance of the meeting and provide a memo explaining why and again i understand that

059sometimes last minute things happen and that protocol might have to be violated but when it occurs on a repeated basis i wonder whether we need to discuss those and determine whether we want to change them or just recommit to following them and does that language regarding action agenda review portion of workshop need to be placed in the protocol i think i think it would be best to put it in the protocol so that everybody's on the same plane and playing field and understands it okay so i'm sorry i thought i know you thought you were done but again this struck me yesterday so let me reassure you that i never believe i'm finished so no i agree that process has not been placed in protocol i believe the process was developed but with the board

060and either ms schaefer or ms stillwell so one of them may have an actual process written down so i will check with them first my understanding of that process is that board members are asked to put questions in by the friday before the meeting if at all possible and then that gives staff over the weekend to provide those answers before monday's meeting it does that sound correct okay so is everyone in agreement that we should add that piece to the protocol okay i'll be happy to go back and get that and add that and bring that forward to you thank you is that a question i'm not voting on this question so it's kind of difficult if on monday we're asking for questions and we don't get the answers like i had to pull today

061that wasn't 24 hours because i didn't get the information yesterday but they were just getting the information so i mean i understand then maybe we need to be having our meetings on friday instead of monday if to for the agenda review and so forth because that's where it's arising is that's less than 24 hours typically and so you know if if they receive the question on friday you should have the answer on monday which would be more than 24 hours because the meetings occur before 6 pm on monday so if if you were not satisfied with that answer on monday afternoon that would still give you a 24 hours advance notice of a poll i understand i understand not the 24 thing the problem is you know we're busy we're doing things i'm busy i

062can't get to it i'm my quiet time is usually on a sunday afternoon or sunday at one o'clock in the morning i mean that's or really it's monday morning so i mean i can't i can't commit to that completely because i'm busy i have a lot going on so i do two i do a job i'm i think i'm the only one on the board other than debbie that has a job another real job so it's not it's difficult for me to squeeze things in you know i'm doing it at the time i have it's available so i i can't commit to that just for the record i just want to clarify you can't commit to the friday timeline is that what you're saying the yes getting your questions in by friday okay thank you

063any other comments okay first of all this is a living document isn't it yeah i mean it's it's it is it's a living document and i think that this might be another workshop topic because we did used to have those agenda reviews on fridays yes and what miss juvenelli brings up is a good point because i know more than once a question that i've asked on on monday you know a lot of people think okay so aston answered but that doesn't mean because something's answered it doesn't mean you agree with it as a matter of fact if there's been a case or two when after i've heard the answer i was not in agreement with it because all my doubts were answered in in a way that a negative way so i really think it

064would be a good discussion because i know things then that i've said well i'm going to pull i've had the last minute i hate to call it an onslaught that kind of almost an onslaught of people visiting me in my office to well answer questions but sometimes i think it's just to try to change my mind and so it it just sounds to me like it's something that we need to revisit and the timing of that not sure how the rest of the board would feel about that thank you mr evanelli yeah and just for the record so i attempted to do my agenda i had part of it written on thursday evening then i didn't get back to it until like literally in the middle you know like sunday morning or monday morning actually

065so and then i kind of thought i messed it up which i didn't but that's because i was doing it in the middle of the night but anyways that's irrelevant what i'm noticing also is that the agenda is changing things are being pulled and changed throughout that time frame as well so when does it when does the agenda cease and not change because that sometimes throws things off when you're when i was forming my questions and so and then it you know gets pulled an item or is disappears or changed and there's you can see that on our emails how things are the you know the board docs have changed there's something changed or whatever even if it's just a word but it still changes so that's a little bit how does one handle that

066so thank you miss jordan i and i'm not sure about that but i just know that it has if a word changes because of the fact that we have to make sure that it's out there in the public with the right verbiage it's going to change so if it and it could be up to the very last minute because the fact that has that is an ongoing thing where and jen's not here or and i'm just talking i don't even know if i'm saying what i'm supposed to be saying but it is normally if they get a change of verbiage they have to redo the whole thing unfortunately right so i mean so that's done at the last minute as well so i mean how do you force others to do things at the last

067minute or you can't say that you can't so i mean that's so you know how do you it that's my question you know how do you how do you deal with that and right now i had someone call me about the code of conduct this morning saying well it's not posted i said well maybe it's being pulled because they were making changes but it doesn't have to be out there so i didn't know and they were trying to look at it so i'm and i didn't have time to even go and see what they were talking about so and you know maybe they just didn't know where they were looking in the right place i don't even know but i said i know there's some changes being made because i've had numerous phone calls regarding

068that so you know that's why i raised that question is that the time is an issue thank you so it sounds like this needs to come back for further discussion and in regards to when is the best time to have that agenda review meeting in the meantime i will bring forward to protocol and the date may change or the day of the week may change but the process would basically be the same so i'll find out that process bring that back and bring that to you thank you miss mor i'm sorry ms fisher so i was just looking at the protocol manual which is 81 pages and i'm wondering out of the expectations that are delineated in the different sections how much of that do we actually use because i frankly even after all these

069years i don't know them all by heart and i think that if we like isolate the ones that are very important like the agenda review and i think the pre-review as a group has been one of the best things that we've done over the years because if if i don't think of something then someone else has thought of it and we do get more information than ever from staff so i think we have to do that in a timely fashion and they probably staff shouldn't be having to work on the weekend to answer our questions so maybe if we did it a little in advance i mean that is another conversation but i think that at some point we might want to think about streamlining our protocols to make them more manageable also because we

070don't anticipate some of the things that we hardly ever address so yes and several others because we have policies that we have to follow yes man and some of the pages aren't protocol some are job descriptions but there's still probably a good 70 pages of protocol in there so that normally we review those in november we could certainly move that process up to whenever the board would like to do that normally november is when we do the major over overhaul of the protocol and that's a good time thank you thank you for all your help oh you're quite welcome miss kittens did you have a question i just wanted to say i mean i understand protocols and policies and procedures and all that and i think unless that we still have to be flexible i

071understand about following our protocols and and making sure that we're not you know impinging upon someone else's job or their rights at the time that they have to do things but i know that just like yesterday i had a couple of things and i did not present them ahead of time and i apologize for that but it was simple things that i had looked through the agenda and as i looked through it again and something popped out of me and i asked that question i just think that we don't need to be so regimented that's not allowed there have been times that even someone has brought something up and i said well i have a question on that and i have been told i could not speak because i didn't turn in that question and

072i just think we're you know we can't regiment ourselves out of doing the work that we need to do and i know on a couple of occasions i have said to staff well you know i just thought about this question you don't need to give it to me right now and just to get it out there and again maybe it's something a question that someone else may have and nothing against staff or i feel the questions that are asked are pretty generic to whoever's job it is that is doing that and that's what they do so you know it's not that they have to go back and go through reams and reams of material to find an answer i just feel that the answers are pretty you know generic but things that like miss jiminous

073said that now jimmy i'm thinking of dominic but that you hear things like i've gotten 50 emails this morning and we don't have another opportunity to talk about what we're going to vote on tonight and we just got the changes to this massive thing of the code of conduct so we don't have an opportunity to look at it again under different eyes the next day and putting in all the information that we have received from constituents in the community and we have to vote on so i just i'm just saying i understand the rules and the rights but sometimes we have to be flexible thank you so yeah miss jordan i'm just going to say you know in life everybody has to be flexible regardless because things do come up and we do understand that

074but i think that it is good to have policies and procedures and protocols so that's a guiding tool for everybody so that's something that we can use as a guide and mr chavenelli it is on board docs so just so that you know that everything is on board at this moment and i know as far as the timing for questioning you know we have multiple opportunities to speak to staff get information regarding everything that will come before us so i know sometimes it is hard to have that there before but we have to make sure that we give people ample time to get an answer to us you know so that way we can continue on and move on to whatever and i think that the hard part is when we have a pool at

075like the at the five the five minutes prior is you know it's like it doesn't matter we're still going to do it but that's sometimes you don't even know because you're not looking at your computer five minutes before you're walking in here and you don't even know until you get here so and that's just a little bit common courtesy as well and that's my comments thank you so it sounds like this definitely needs to come forward again in terms of the timing of that agenda review meeting so we will i'll work with miss shaffer and we'll find the time to add that to your agendas okay with that i will close the protocol and we'll move forward to the action plan around your self-evaluation so i apologize for the lateness of today's paper i really

076over the past week was thinking about it and said you know it'll just be so much simpler if i if i put this in a spreadsheet rather than just try and take comments around it so i sent you the spreadsheet the first page is just the overview of each of those dimensions with the average score and the average grade listed there so i took each dimension put it on a separate page and you'll see the last column is the average i sorted those from the lowest item to the highest item obviously when you have six different dimensions and around eight to ten items you're probably not going to want to do that many action steps or action items so i thought we would look at the lowest ones on and then you can decide as

077a board which ones do you believe are the most important to actually take an action around in order to improve that score or and it's not really about improving the score but improving the ability to work together as is really what it's all about so to the right you'll see that there is an action plan template this is just a very basic one with what is the action that you're agreeing to take whose responsibility is it to make sure that happens and then is there a time frame that should occur so we start with the first one the lowest in the contextual field was that the board effectively discusses the research about events and trends in the larger community that may affect schools so is there any discussion around that item and if you would

078like to work toward an action to improve that morgan i guess what i would like to see is what does that look like i don't know what other boards do i mean i think i'm just wondering if it's irrelevant question about our performance because i believe that to the extent that we have discussions about research it comes forward in the conversations about the district's strategic plan so you know i answer the question i know we don't do it i gave it a two i don't know why but i'm just wondering what does that look like what are we doing when we do this so that i know how we're evaluating ourselves that's a good question thank you so for me an example is critical race theory and i was actually going to bring that up

079during my board comments today that is clearly an issue that is gaining traction in our community and it's one that i'd like to ask staff to bring forward an explanation from an educational perspective what it is whether it's whether it's being taught in our schools i mean that's to me that's an example of exactly what this is that's a perfect example i feel like the lgbt issue was addressed too late i feel like when that started in at the staff level we should have been briefed before action was taken by staff that to me that's what this category is evaluating thank you because that really clarifies for me i appreciate that's just me no i know but i think that makes that makes sense that we should be doing that a perfect example so fine

080yeah this is one of the indicators that i think is not well worded events okay events in the larger community okay we could look at that and i'm separating events from trends we can separate that for for instance is the larger community anything outside of the school district is it our local community lee county so an example might be a real obvious one the effects on the community of of covid growing hunger in the community and things that have affected us so that would be one thing trends okay so we have educational trends and i agree that usually when for instance okay let's say academic services is reporting to us and i know at one point we were talking about k-8 schools versus dividing into middle schools well what is the data say what is

081so i think those kinds of reports many of them come to us when we have the briefings now when you get into other things the critical race theory is that's what i call a hot potato topic because that's that's something that's in politics in coming out of tallahassee and across the nation that certainly affects us and affects the regulations and the you know the best what are they called the new best standard just standards i thought there's another word okay best standards but some of those for us to have a discussion becomes yeah well it becomes a hot potato perhaps we need to do training on some of these i know i'm seeing a shaking head but i say that because there's there's no good answer for a board to discuss some of the issues

082with lgbtq which is political it's become political with critical race theory and some of the other issues that have been generated by the huge gulf that we have politically in this state throughout the nation i know personally i wasn't sure about critical race theory so i've done a lot of reading on it and i've come up with my own feelings and examples about it but i'm just not sure that the things that become these political hot button issues should be at the dais we should be my opinion trained to make sure everybody understands and then if there are things that we need to vote on that have to do with and well and we had our lgbtq training we had quite a bit of training devoted to that so everybody should be okay with it

083but if we need training on what is what's meant by that how and certainly it affects curriculum especially history civics even actually into literature maybe that's something academic services that'd be fun wants to present on right dr spyro yes i can see they would but does that make sense what i'm saying that yes ma'am this whole topic this needs to be broken down and i think that's one of the flaws and one of the reasons why all of us rated it no higher than a two because we do discuss and we are trained on some of these things but there are some things that maybe just training and not discussion so perhaps the first step would be to identify what are those topics so if we were looking at i'll get right to you ms

084kittens so if we were looking at what actions could be taken perhaps the first thing would be would there be members of the board or how would those topics be identified that you might want more information on and how they would affect schools miss kittens the way i look at this i see us getting into a whole lot of weeds and trouble if every time there is a political topic that we have to as stop everything and train and learn and discuss it in public and i'm just very concerned about political versus educational and some of these topics just like the critical race theory what what is our interest in it is our interest in letting people know what we or me gwen gittins thinks about crt or is our interest sitting up here on

085this deus how is crt going to affect the children that we represent and educate that to me is the difference so the way i would see it and i know you're going to wish you'd left the room jeff but how a topic comes out then staff needs to let us know how if anything does it affect the children and if if staff presents to us okay there's this issue here's how it affects children or here's how it doesn't affect children then we have the knowledge to move forward and decide what we need to do but just to it makes us look like we're just swinging the pendulum to every angle every time someone comes up with another topic and it's going to happen on and on again and we are going to remain in turmoil

086and you know people trying to decide well how do you think about it what do you think about it then let us let them talk to us individually that's why we have our phones and our emails and and town halls and stuff that we do but it creates sometimes dissension with this board because we do think and feel differently and is that something that we need to put on ourselves in public on this dais if someone wants to know how i feel call talk to me about thank you miss kittens miss fisher so schools are a microcosm of society and critical race theory to me is world history in american history you know and so back in the 60s 40 50 years ago people started putting academic concepts to some of these ideas as they

087became more popular and these issues do come and go and maybe i've been around too long but you know like this reminds me now this time reminds me a lot of the 60s at which time you know i was an adult already so i think that we need to from the perspective of the board i think we need to follow our constitution our roo our laws and our policies and i think that we have to agree not to give personal information i mean different people have different feelings about racism and about lgbtq and about all of these things that are hot topics right now however you know my personal feelings and my religious concepts are not something that i feel that this is my forum to share with other people that's my own personal business

088you know and so and i don't feel compelled as a board member to to say what my feelings are because we have rules to follow and we are supposed to work as a governing body not as a group of individuals with different ideals so i i think that what miss kitten said this it could it could get out of control because it things come and go and what's a hot topic this year may not be next year you know so i think that we have to really proceed with caution and yes you know we do get our briefings and we're informed by staff about things that do impact the kids changes in in policies and standards and requirements and funding and all of that are the things that we i think need to stay focused

089on so and google is an amazing tool thank you miss fisher miss vaughn and miss patricka and yet we have legislative committees and since the crt was brought up that concept and the concept of american exceptionalism if as board members we don't understand those we are we won't be able to well we pass on evaluations of textbooks but the standards the best standards the textbook makers now they're going to hustle to put those best standards in and that impacts us directly as a board on what our history books what our civics books are like and also on training professional training of teachers there have been teachers i'm sure most of you are aware that there have been teachers that are nearly crucified for different points that they make in the classroom well those teachers better

090know if they're teaching classes in civics and in u.s history they better go down they better understand what they can say and what they can't say we had incidents not that long ago about a teacher making remarks about slavery and that was a blown up issue but i can see that these are issues we have some political issues whether you want to recognize it or not or you want to as a board member say well i'm not going to share my political beliefs well i'll share my political beliefs i'm a democrat i'm a liberal i believe that critical race theory is very important and that if we lose sight of that as educators we can't be a world-class school system that's my personal opinion that's not the board opinion but like it or not these

091things are brought forward from tallahassee there's been a huge swing in tallahassee these standards have been changed and this absolutely affects what we're teaching in our schools what our teachers are subjected to if they use wrong words and so i'm not saying we have a debate here on on the dais because perhaps some people believe the way i do and others don't that's not the point is to me that we have to ensure that we as board members understand some of these concepts that have come out of tallahassee because of the change in our standards and i think it's part of our decision making and i think it's also part of our advocacy because what are we going to advocate for to our legislators we can't say we've never advocated for things that aren't controversial

092this was a school district that for years didn't want to include sexuality education in health classes in health education and finally the board voted well how did they vote on it because it was a hot button issue and people had to be educated on it so again my views on it i'm expressing my views but this particular indicator that we voted so low i think it's an important one but i don't think it's expressed well and i think we need to have some more specific language on it i'm done with my speech miss morgan so i am was not a teacher for my entire career so i don't understand the educational impact of crt on various students at various ages of of education that i mean that's when i say that i would like to

093hear about research and trends in education i mean from the professionals on staff who can teach me what it is and from there i can form an opinion and vote however it is my conscience allows me to vote i believe we could have avoided the politics of lgbt had we learned about this as a board much sooner than we did we learned about it too late in the process is it a political issue yes are we elected yes we can't avoid politics in these positions i would like to just you know you and i have had this discussion i would like to avoid the outright political i am of this i'm that you're this you're that like i think that is counterproductive in terms of communications in my four and a half years on the

094board 98 of the decisions i have made at this table have been apolitical they've had absolutely nothing to do with politics and when it explodes in the community it's it's on us to fix it and figure it out and it's also on us to be able to explain to the community from the deus and in individual conversations and emails why we voted the way we did what our understanding is of the topic in terms of lgbt people are asking me questions that i can't answer because i don't know what's happening in the district i can't respond to the questions so i don't want to be there on crt and when i see the news and i see what's happening in collier it's only a matter of minutes before it comes up to lee so i'd

095like to avoid that if we can and go about this in an educationally sound manner understand what it is so that i can answer the community's questions perhaps a better example in terms of events would have been the explosion on a legal corridor and how that's going to impact our schools and our need to quickly turn around and create more opportunities for cte in our schools so that we're preparing our students you know i read about that in the paper and i probably should have sat down at the table and said hey you know what is the district doing about this can we be briefed on this that's what i'm talking about it's not just political issues it's it's events and trends in in the larger community whether it be just our schools all of

096lee county state florida across the nation we can't avoid these things and if we can be prepared ahead of time then i think we serve our community better that's it that's all i'm talking about here thank you miss morgan so i think this is a conversation we need to have i'm not sure this is the time to have it i think maybe we need to schedule a workshop if we're going to talk about all of the other components i think we need to move on this is clearly struck a nerve and i and i think it does require further exploration but we can either stop what we're doing on the board development and do the workshop or we can put this item over for a workshop and keep going on the board development but i'm

097losing our focus ms fisher and the miss kittens okay so two things you know i think that we are not the only impact on students families are also you know they learn what they live and i share some of the attitudes and concerns and some of my colleagues but again i don't unless it's a definite decision that we have to make on behalf of our students i don't think that the board dies is the place for our personal or political opinions to come out we have to come to agreement as a as a group and stick with our policies our constitution and our laws and i and if i don't want to belabor this but i just need to i'm confused about the lgbtq thing because ms patricka if i may ask miss patricka what

098is it that we didn't learn about soon enough i mean as a board because i'm i don't know what that would be i'm confused i didn't i wasn't privy to the same training you were privy to from equality florida i didn't attend that training i don't know when you attended that training but it was quite some time ago i wasn't i wasn't privy to that so you so and this is not a matter of you got information before i did that's not what i'm saying what i'm saying is you had a much deeper level of understanding of what was happening in the district with regard to lgbt issues and students than i did and i'm still left with four kids in our schools not understanding how they will be treated on this issue okay and

099as a board member i should have an understanding so that when parents come to me and say our girls allowed to use the boys bathrooms i can give them a solid answer okay i'm not i'm not there no so i just want to clarify that part okay so as a school counselor for over 30 some odd years i've been dealing with this issue ever since the get-go this is not new to me at all so when equality florida came several times to fsw and to our colusa hatchery room and gave training to administrators and other staff we were all invited to go and i thought that we all did and there was a period of time at we had a workshop with mr edie and crystal and so and forgive me but i'm just going

100to say to me this is nothing new i've been dealing and we've been dealing with this in our schools on an individual basis in a tactful manner for years so that's why i'm a little confused about the whole to do and equality florida i will agree that the poster as it stood not necessarily the information contained in it but the name of equality florida being in our code of conduct was not a good decision i really i have to say that now and i did not see the posters until they were already created but for some reason they were given i think it was because i was the chair at the time they were given to me and then i passed them out so i think that the reaction of some groups in the community

101has contributed to the confusion but all i'm going to say is lgbtq is nothing new goes back to ancient greece and transgender is not necessarily have anything to do with lgbtq so there are a lot of innuendos and yes i've got training as a counselor you know and i've had those kinds of classes along the way so that's why i'm saying you know really we need to be handling this in a very much more dignified individual approach and look at it as we need to respect all people regardless of whether they have rainbow hair or dark skin or they wear funny clothes whatever that is i mean i that's the way i'm looking at it and so i appreciate the difference i think we're getting a little off topic but i will tell you that's

102one of the things but that's one of the things i love about you is that i know that on mental health we're covered but you got to know that's a huge deficit here so you bring that knowledge to the table and i'm confused i have no idea what's going on and so while that's your strength that's my weakness and i can rely on you on that most of the time but this is new to me it might not it might not be new to you but it's completely new to me right exactly so i agree we do need some more training as a board and we probably do need a workshop to clarify some of those issues and make a decision together about how we're going to deal with it and and i appreciate that

103but that you explain that so thank you miss fisher miss kittens i know you have a comment and then i would really once after that comment i really like to get us back to do we have an action step for this so that we can move forward with additional items miss kittens okay this may help to to get us back the first point i wanted to make is there's a reason that our positions are nonpartisan so that we can deal non-part in a nonpartisan way with the education of children as a whole in public school the other thing i wanted to say is yes i believe there should be some education on topics but i'm concerned in that a comment miss patricka made yesterday that we've we've trained on this side of the topic but

104we haven't got training on this side of the topic and that just to me gets so into the weeds with it i would like to suggest and i go back first of all to saying a topic comes up like this our first thing is to ask staff how will and can this affect children will we need to do a change in curriculum and that's not driven by us that's driven by tallahassee and doe so that's our first step to look at that and say they are giving us it's like the unfunded mandates they're giving us this mandate have they given us the steps to go with it and how we're supposed to do that or do they just drop it in our laps that's bless you that's where we need to start if you're giving

105us this then how far reaching and what are what are the points the education piece should come initially with the mandate to do it but then once we understand that we need to see do we need to change our curriculum do we need to train teachers is there a textbook change that needs to happen those are the check box check boxes for us as a governance team not how we feel about it and then finally the training to me should be more of we sit down in a room here's the topic here's the pros and the cons not from any biased way at all but this is what the definition is by this person this is the definition over here this is what we are faced at doing how do we take this and this

106according to doe and put it into our lessons and to teach our children and we keep funneling it back to we are told by doe to do this i think part of our problem right now is the public and everybody feels that the lee county school district and each school district is just making all this stuff up and saying we're going to teach our children and this is what we're doing so back to what you're saying cindy i have pulled out and i've asked this over and over again that we standardize our evaluation to be similar to that of our employees i'm looking at the one for the superintendent and the let's just say on educational leadership it's explained there okay recruits and retains all right so consistently frequently inconsistently rarely and it's very simple

107if we had all of that laid out for board effectively discusses research about events and trends do we consistently base it on this do we frequently do this and define it we need to sit down and take these two documents and mesh them together so we understand what we're evaluating ourselves on you know like miss morgan said she put it too i put it to and i'm thinking back okay why did i say it too but if we have it defined it makes it easier it makes it less controversial and it's all out there even if i hate to put it all on on staff to do but there's sections we could each take a section and work on it and make that our job it's our evaluation how would you put this in these

108five categories and then we just do it so that's my statement okay thank you i'll start with your last comment there yesterday i believe you did come to consensus to do that so we'll be looking forward to a date to look at the evaluation process in the meantime i believe we already have a method to address this in terms of your your workshop topics and coming to consensus around those so to me my suggestion would be that the action step would be that board members identify topics that they believe whether it's a topic around an event or a trend in the larger community that will have an effect on schools they would put that in the i can't think of the name in the google document saying that you were a request you would you

109would request a workshop one and it would go into our parking lot thank you that's the term we go into our parking lot and then once a month those topics will be brought forward as they are now and you would have that discussion of about why you believe you need to have additional information on this how it's going to impact schools and then would make a decision as to whether it needs to be a training if it needs to be a staff presentation or what is involved so that would be my recommendation if you have another way of doing that i'll open that for comment mrs kittens not necessarily another way but two things one i feel it's the superintendent's job to actually have a finger on the pulse of what's happening in education and

110in the community and to be able to bring to us and we here and we share as a governance team but as those things come up like you said bring up the topic if we haven't heard it but the superintendent would have a better view of it from academic from financial from all of the aspects that he or she controls so and the second thing i want to say is i see this process as a workshop and we break up into groups and we're given a section and you come up with fill this in and you fill in these boxes and the next group and then we put it all together we go on to the second part and we word smith it and it's done referring to the evaluation itself correct yes yes okay

111so certainly the superintendent is part of the governance team and always has the ability to to include things in the parking lot i would hate to limit it to the superintendent bringing things forward as many of you will hear from your constituents from other people that you may hear a topic that the superintendent would not be aware of could i have consensus around the action step being that governance team members would bring topics forward to the parking lot for consensus okay thank you so i'm going to type it in right now that's if it pertains to education correct yes i think it may affect schools not just what they're hearing okay i'm just gonna put shorthand in there so i don't know what that means and then the responsibility would be the governance team and

112the time frame would be ongoing as it would just depend on when things came up all right one action step completed hallelujah let's move forward the second area the lowest area was i have been present at board meetings where discussions about values of the district were key factors and reaching a conclusion to a problem so comments around this and whether you believe we need to take action steps moving forward mrs patricka so i'm looking at our values right now excellence integrity high expectations accountability belief in students and professionalism why i'd like to see them at each of our seats at the dais and that for me would serve as a guard rail as i'm making a decision or i'm making a comment does this fulfill the values that we as a leadership team have agreed

113to implement that's an action step can i have consensus around that's a pretty straightforward request have the values listed at each seat okay one can live with that okay so that's that's our first action step additional comments or questions on this number five on the same number yes okay if there are no others then we will move on to the next item so the board recognizes the superintendent as chief executive officer and educational leader of the district that received a 2.0 the range was from zero to two any discussion around that thank you no discussion so no action to be taking on taken on this one mrs jordan i think that we just have to as far as action we do have to recognize that so we have to make sure that we are recognizing

114the fact that they are the superintendent is chief executive in the interest of time i'd invite you to look at the others in this section and see if there are any others that you would like to address in the section of contextual and if not we'll move on to the educational dimension could you repeat that please send them a little quickly yes if you would look at the other items in the contextual section the dimension one and then you'd move on to it if there are no others that you wish to take action on then we would move on to dimension 2 educational mrs morgan yes i lost track the last one we just took a pass on that was supposed to be sensitive to board recognizes the superintendent as chief executive officer and educational

115leader of the district so we have one three one four a bunch of twos a zero and a one for an average of two we are going to have a problem with this score with an interim superintendent and a new superintendent if we don't have a common understanding of what the role of the superintendent is as chief executive officer and what our role is as a ward i think this is a topic for a workshop thank you miss fisher and mrs kittens yeah and i just go back to that yellow sheet with the black line down the middle where it says the board does this and the superintendent does that and i think that there has been some difficulty in understanding when you say you know the superintendent is the chief executive order okay that

116means we kind of make the rules and he executes that means he does you know he we say what and he says how with his staff and i think that has been a little bit difficult for some of the board to to live with and i think that we've and i'm gonna say this anyway even though i shouldn't sorry mrs kittens in advance but a lot of times there's a lot of stepping over the line and getting into the weeds where really that is not the place of the board so our unjust i agree with mrs morgan we need a workshop thank you mrs kittens thank you for that miss fisher as you see i did a three because to me when i read that question i read it is do i personally understand that

117yellow sheet do i understand what the roles are yes i do and that's how i graded this now whether the ones and the zeros i and kind of took the understanding of just what you said miss fisher that you feel that some of us do not understand i understand that but i also understand that if i have questions and i'm told to stay in my lane that is not appropriate of that position so how do i get answers to questions so i continue to ask questions so i did it fairly high because yes i understand the roles i understand my role but i also understand that if i as a member of this governance team have a question i should get an answer there are still answers that i have i have a list of

118them from two years ago that have not been addressed and never been answered so i'm just saying it's it's indicative of our board to see these scores and it is a statement to the rest of us on the board but i answered it as to whether i understood it i do understand thank you mr finale and i answered it the same way i just because we asked questions doesn't mean we don't know who the superintendent is or that he's the ceo so i think that if you don't ask questions you're not doing your job and rubber stamping is something that i'm not going to do and i'm going to ask questions what i don't understand i'm sorry that somebody doesn't think i answered this the same way i totally understand in who the superintendent is

119and so i'm going to continue that process i don't so i don't understand now i read this and maybe the people that said zero or one or whatever maybe they don't understand because i you know when just because i'm asking questions doesn't mean i don't understand who the superintendent is and everything has to go through the superintendent everything so i clearly understand that so i'm not sure i think maybe we need to go back to what our job is as school board members maybe so i don't maybe that's where the maybe we don't know our job in order to know his job i don't even claim to know his job or try to but i'm going to hold him accountable because that's my job thank you miss fisher yes and i don't want for anyone

120to think that i'm saying that you shouldn't ask questions because you should ask questions i have just seen in situations where questions have been answered to us in briefings questions have been answered to us in workshops we have an opportunity with our individual meetings to ask questions of the superintendent and staff and yet i've heard it repeated a number of times so it's i don't know whether the questions haven't been addressed or like someone said before maybe they have not been addressed to their satisfaction and so maybe maybe that is a good suggestion miss giovannelli that we do workshop it and then we do look at our role as board members and i think asking questions is imperative right questions are for the community as well and if we if we sit up here and

121always vote yes to everything and never ask any questions that's not what we're here for i mean we have to people have to understand why we're voting yes to something and it's not questioning the superintendent it's finding for everyone else to understand and be on the same page yeah we do ask we do have opportunity to ask questions and so forth at different times but still maybe the answer we got like somebody said earlier was not really didn't help so and you know and we're not going to always vote yes to everything we should be voting no on some things or we should you know when we don't think that we've got the answers that make us feel comfortable that's that's what i think we're elected to do so i think defining our job maybe

122is the issue thank you thank you thank you mrs kittens and just let me say this to to at least clear the air from my perspective asking questions and bringing something up multiple times is not saying that i do not understand who the superintendent is and what his job is give you just a quick couple of examples one the cip process that we were privy to a couple weeks ago and they sat here and went through how many times have i asked about a process how many times have i asked how do we do this when do you involve the community when do you do this how is this going i mean when do we know and there were no answers but almost three years later we said here and we have a briefing about

123a process if i had said nothing else about it we would still wouldn't have the tech buildings in the east i mean even miss morgan said yesterday why are we still going around why haven't we done something with this i cannot let things go and it's not gwen gideon's getting her way it is for the sake of children and the people that i represent and we are still not where we should be at all with the building of technical centers with the with the portables with all of the stuff that's going on that is why i'm here to be the voice for the voiceless so you don't hear from anybody else you're going to hear it from me you miss jordan i was just going to say i'm not sure where questions came in because

124i see nothing on here about questions and i appreciate everybody's questions but can we move on can we move on to the next please thank you i did put in as an action step that there's been a request for a workshop on the role of the board and the superintendent so if you take a look at any of the other items are you going to take consensus on that on that i would yes i'll go ahead and take consensus because we won't have another opportunity to do that until actually august for the work since there's only one july meeting so could we have consensus on the request for a workshop on the role of the superintendent and the board okay so i see one two three thumbs up two sideways and two down so that

125does carry as a consensus for the workshop thank you so we have a few more items in dimension one so if you would take a quick look at those there's establishes and maintains a systemic plan for feedback on policies to determine effectiveness their worth and whether they need to be amended modified or canceled kept informed about student growth and stays abreast of policies mandated by state and federal law a request by anyone to take an action on one of those mrs kittens when i read i guess it's showing up on mine is number two that very first one about discussing and researching events and all and the one about the board taking time to learn about important issues facing schools to me that's combined that is that is what we were saying about that first

126one we have to take the time to understand about these important issues that's where all this stuff comes in and so whatever we decided to do on that first one we should include that board takes time to learn about important issues because it's all one and the same and that's what i was talking about what is the effect is it affecting just the students or the teachers or whatever okay thank you stakeholders i mean really yes exactly yes okay any other requests for an action step okay if not we'll move on to dimension two which is the educational dimension the lowest average score there was a 1.6 and the board has discussions about the effectiveness of its performance comments around that this is the lowest so i'll start i do believe that i'll put it

127on me if i hear a repeated criticism of my behavior and my actions at the table i will self-reflect and try to figure out what i'm doing wrong and how i can be better and i don't i don't think that happens here i think that we discuss things as a team people bring up issues and then others say well i don't do that and i'm allowed to do this and i'm allowed to do that so i'm going to keep doing what i'm doing instead of like having a discussion about how individual actions are really harming the performance of the team moving forward i don't frequently hear the word team used with regard to our work and i guess that's i don't i don't hear those discussions taking place you know like you hear me say

128i know i'm not everybody's cup of tea i'm trying to work on that i'm trying to be less caustic in my approach to my colleagues i'm really trying i don't i don't hear that trying coming from anywhere else when it comes to issues that are raised with regard to board performance or or board actions or board behavior yes so today's conversation actually addresses this specifically as as the team is working to improve performance and so we've heard your comments and i believe miss kittens had her hand up as well i have a question for miss patricka how would you in a perfect world than see that working i'm sorry i didn't hear you how would you in a perfect world get to the point where you would change your vote on this where i would

129change my vote on this yes i guess just understanding that what i want and what i need is inferior to what the board wants and what the board needs if if i could get that sense from all of my colleagues i would think that would be a positive that would become a three or a four for me but i don't i don't frequently get that sense i frequently get the sense that i want to do x y and z and unless x y and z occurs i am going to continue to behave the way i'm behaving period end of conversation and you are saying that the behaviors are not are inappropriate i'm sorry i still can't hear you and you're saying behaviors are inappropriate are imperfect inappropriate inappropriate as to i think i think that

130when the board makes a decision and we actively and purposefully go against the board's decision yes that is inappropriate myself included okay and this is not toward any one individual person at this table this is a general statement regarding my experience on the board the school board of lee county okay and then i will finish my comments by saying my thoughts about behaviors and my personal behavior on the board will come up later and you will see it as we go further down but i still maintain that we are all seven individuals although we are a team and the best results from a team are not necessarily seven zero so i'll leave it at there thank you miss fisher yes so we are governance team and we actually had a bit of a conversation today

131that revolved around our effectiveness there was a period of time where after our meetings we took a few minutes to do pluses and deltas and to kind of evaluate our performance that night while it was fresh in our minds and while we were you know in the mode to say what we wanted to say and that seemed to be somewhat effective and i don't know if that might be a strategy that we could try one more time i know that there were some members of the public that felt like we were out of the sunshine which we were not because it was an advertised time and our board attorney was with us to make sure that we stayed within the confines of the sunshine law but that did seem to have some effectiveness a because

132of the timeliness and b because of the fact that you know we were all together and we all heard and saw the same thing so i think that might be worth an effort at another time thank you miss kittens miss morgan miss vaughn i would not participate in that and to the reason being it became more of a an additional time to attack what you didn't like and as far as following up i challenge anyone to tell me what was taken from that plus delta and used in a positive way to make us any better miss morgan well geez i saw it kind of differently i saw it as as combining both ms patricka and mrs fisher it was an opportunity to identify things that we needed to self-reflect on and correct and that's why

133when we really spoke to one another about what we felt was taking place and had a genuine understanding of the impact some of this was having we were and given our absolute commitment to doing certain things getting certain things accomplished we were willing to engage in that process so that we could accomplish what we needed to have happen which was the public needed to see us as a board and not as a bunch of individuals sitting at a table and and i think it was very effective and yes i think after a while it probably degenerated a little bit just because we had become much more comfortable with one another we had established a better working relationship at the table and so you know it the stuff we discussed was really not as significant as

134when we first started down that path but i agree i think this is a time to try something and it's and it's not the touchy feely whatever stuff it's just you know commitment of each of us as individuals to try to find a way that we can talk about our issues as a team and our performance thank you miss vaughn i think it's interesting that it's this seems to be shaking out so far into the 3-4 camp because i'm with miss kittens i saw no value in it i saw it as an opportunity for the majority and you can shake your hand you can say no it wasn't that but the perception was at least on my side which is why i didn't go to those after i went to a couple of them that

135it was just another chance for the majority to put the dagger in more and regardless of what you're saying no it wasn't that way and if that was my perception it was my perception it didn't work let's let's face it we've been together this is unique in that we've had election we had an election and none of the chairs changed it wasn't like in 2018 where we had a significant change in in the board and if it didn't work the first time it's not going to work now there just my opinion on it and i you know if anybody else jumps in on it i'd like to see if it does shake out to the 3 4 in terms of how effective the pluses and deltas were thank you miss giovannelli the miss morgan the

136mrs kittens okay well i won't support it because i'll tell you why it was it was supposed to be about this board it became about my husband who has had to had to leave because he was in his uniform and wearing a gun because he's a police officer and came from work here so that made it about him so no it's not about the board and and so i am not going to support that where it becomes about an someone that comes and attends the meeting so i disagree with it wasn't productive this board didn't stand up saying no this is melissa jovanelli's husband who comes all the time and this board sat quietly and let my husband be ex escorted out and so i will not support that sorry no one said no one

137took up for me as a board member and that being my husband not one person on this board not publicly yes i did and so and then which also let me remind everyone that it led them to for this district to contact my husband's boss tried to get him in trouble that we went to the oig they wanted an oig opinion that was already done many many years ago that this board chose to do which i didn't argue i even agreed with the award because i wanted to make sure that i was doing things and upholding our the board as a team and i even voted for that so i don't will not agree to it and because it wasn't done productively at all is done negatively and i will not support that so thank

138you mrs morgan so i guess my question is a suggestion has been made clearly it has not been well received by everybody so what is the what is another suggestion how do we get where we need to be how do we mrs giovannelli has just made it clear that she is still stewing about something that happened a number of years ago there are other board members sitting here who are stewing about things that were said to them done to them whatever and that affects how we converse with one another at the table now how do we deal with that you know is that how are we going to handle those emotions those issues and do they belong here at all are we if they belong here how are we going to tackle them so that

139we're a better team fine something that we haven't reflected on is as a governance team we have we seven but we als we have us we have yeah the seven of us and we have the superintendent the superintendent has been a constant there is a i believe there's an evaluation question on how the superintendent brings the board together and so we have the opportunity at this point to see if with a different superintendent who has more effective skills in bringing governance teams together whether things change but i really don't see a path forward considering and you know we have a lot of conciliatory and we have a lot of conciliatory remarks and i'm self-reflecting and i'm trying and we did this and we did that well it just didn't work and so i'm suggesting that

140perhaps the eighth member is at least partially at fault on this and perhaps someone who has more effective skills on bringing a governance team together will bring this board together because let's face it even though we didn't go through the evaluation there were definite divides there were the ones i mean huge golf divides in the people that gave the highest scores and the people that gave the lowest scores we had no mid middle scores although the overall came to that way and this is not about bashing anybody it's about talking about us as a governance team and the fact that we have eight people on the team and maybe that's a factor that we have not considered thank you miss kittens well i just would like to say one i'm i'm not stewing and this

141these are some of the things maybe because of my psychology background but we have to if we really want this to work we have to think before we speak some of the statements that are made and they you may feel exactly the way you feel miss fisher and miss morgan but the statements that are made how do they help men i was on the board for two months second month i was on the board i was reprimanded right back there in a plus in delta about my attire went on to be another staff member remarked about my attire so it's not a matter of stewing no one has ever apologized to me or no one has ever said you know we didn't mean it that way or whatever it doesn't matter to me i have

142a job to do and i am here but what you all have to understand is choose your words because words do cause division and the way you say things causes division saying that someone is stewing and everybody else shaking their head like yeah they sure are still thinking about that but that means if i say it or miss you know jivanelli says it maybe it means that there's still hurt there and maybe it needs to be addressed and maybe it needs to be well explained or someone discuss it means that there's still a hurt not a stew thank you miss fisher so we have hurt feelings we have anger we have people who feel that they can criticize others and that's unfortunate because in order for us to do the work that we are here

143to do we are going to need to put the past behind us and start from scratch we have seven educated intelligent women on this board who have amazing potential to be a great team but as long as we are worrying about our own personal agendas you know i'm just gonna do another one of my history lessons because that's sometimes the way i can communicate best but when i was a school counselor i had an opportunity to do a lot of groups and i'm also a state of florida family mediator certified and so one of the things that i've done with some groups where there were some issues i've said let's put all of our hurt feelings and our anger in a little bag and tie it shut and i would give them each a bag

144and they'd tie it shut and leave it outside the door and i promise you no one else is going to take those away and if apologies are needed then they should be offered and i remember those incidents because i personally was appalled at what happened with mrs giovannelli's husband who's a law enforcement officer and no betsy i'm not out of time you're not no no she's signaling a break oh no and we didn't mean to interrupt you i'm sorry that's why i didn't walk over there and when when mrs gittins wore her regalia i thought that was beautiful i mean and so we can't control some of the things that people say and do and we don't know where everyone's coming from but we have a job to do here and we all took an

145oath of office and we take ethics every year and we say that we're going to do the job but we're not doing it so unless we can say okay let's all agree to wipe the slate clean and start from now we can still do really good work as a team as a governance team and i just want to say this dozens of people have said to me you're the swing vote because there is no 4-3 and if you go back and look at the votes i am not consistently voting with any group of people i do my homework and i vote the issues and i'm not going to comment on the superintendent's evaluation but that was another issue we did not all have the same experiences and i'm fully aware of that so now we

146have an opportunity to move forward and i hope that we can self-reflect and be the best that we each can be take responsibility for our own behavior and don't worry about what everybody else is doing and let's get the job done there's a lot of work to do in this growing district and we have almost a hundred thousand kids depending on us not to mention our staff who have worked hard to take care of those children and contribute to the community in that way so i hope we can do that thank you miss fisher we've had a request for a break miss jordan did you have a comment about this i just want to apologize i have to keep getting up because i'm having this cough and i don't want to do that out here

147so i apologize you're fine okay miss kittens jeff come on short thing i know i'm the only thing between everybody in the restroom but i have a plethora and a list of all the things and the times that i have been demeaned and character assassinated and all that it's not that i'm keeping it up on my wall to look at it but in response to miss fisher it's not just that i was berated because of what i wore it's been continuous constant ongoing and it was not three years ago it has been consistent so it's when you say you know get over it i may jump over it today and tomorrow there's something else there is a plethora of times that i can refer to but i won't and i'm not harboring you know anger

148towards all of you i have a job to do and i feel i've been doing it to the best of my ability so thank you so there has been a request for a break and just to wind up this one area the board has discussions about the effectiveness of its performance obviously today there was a lot of discussion around that so far and then a lot of discussion about individual actions i would request that as you think more about this and think about an action that you think about what is the action that's going to affect the performance of the board not necessarily individual action and what's going to affect someone else's actions or someone else's feelings about actions but how do those feelings and how do those actions affect the performance of the board

149as a whole and then maybe we can come back and talk about an action step related to increasing that performance so we it is 3 21 now would it be acceptable to take a nine minute break come back at 3 30. yes okay nine minutes thank you let's do that and ms cindy mcclung is going to finish out the section that we started before the break and that will be followed by public comment thank you thank you miss fun so i was looking at the items in the second section and most of the ones that were the lowest rated are all very much related so my suggestion based on the time today is that we would look at those that you take some time and look at those over the next week or so and

150you have this spreadsheet was sent to you this afternoon i will update it and send it back to you with the suggestions that we have already been made today and then if you will look at those lowest scoring areas in each of the dimensions and put your thoughts in the action step area over here to the right and then send those to me or bring them back with you to the next meeting then we'll have a place to start our discussion at the next meeting i truly believe the conversation today has been needed and has it has been a first step toward improving the performance of the board however i do believe that this could be a multi-hour conversation and that we will not be able to get through the six dimensions today so in

151order to give time for public comment and board member comments i would like agreement that we will stop at this point and everyone will go back take some time to look and put some some actions in that place do we have consensus on that thank you thank you very much i appreciate your time today and thank you ms mcclung excellent job in facilitating i was going to say keeping us focused but i agree with what you said it was very it was a good call on your part because sometimes you just need to expand the conversation a little bit so thanks okay i think we have at least one person for public comment miss dupree bruno would you please read the information for public comment thank you madam vice chair school board policy provides the

152opportunity at this point in the meeting to address the board concerning any matter from the meeting's agenda if you completed a blue card please put in the basket provided i don't believe there's anyone who requires a blue card the rules concerning public comment are posted and comments will be made from the central microphone in the back 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 assign them 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 only personal attacks on individuals or abusive language are prohibited speakers who fail to follow profit decorum in

153the chambers will be ruled out of order the time for speaker is three minutes and you will find the count down clock on the big screen and the front of the room once your time has elapsed the microphone will automatically shut off we encourage you to address the board as whole versus individual board members as they act as a collective body please state your name prior to making your comment madam chair we have one speaker and ma'am if you may go ahead and begin hello christine divially here i only have a few things my first one is on the agenda today so i left my house today i printed the agenda right before i left my house and i printed all the attached documents as well that was probably at about 12 15 this afternoon

154when i did that and i have that copy of the agenda on me nothing was attached at that time to numbers two and three under your on the agenda items the board procedures manual finalization and the self-evaluation action plan it wasn't until i was listening to you guys speak that i was like hmm what are they talking about right there maybe i should go back on board docs and look again to see if something's there that wasn't there before and sure enough there were two things there that were not there when i left my house at 12 15 to come here today so i guess that would be my first issue is why i'm just curious why documents were not included in board doc's 48 hours shoot even you know before today's meeting would have

155been nice but i'm wondering about that i would like to implore you guys please please don't rely on governance team members to relay important educational information to you especially on issues like crt instead i encourage the board to independently research topics that are presented to you especially by the doe informed choice should be present in every aspect of your decision making and it is very disheartening to hear that anything other than this be even be suggested i was also i couldn't help but hear the hurt through the words of multiple board members before the recess i would like to suggest perhaps like i've heard you guys on numerous occasions now you've been dating back well over a year you guys not see eye to eye on things and rather than just sit here and berate

156you guys for that and just be another voice you know be another negative voice in the room i would like to suggest maybe i was looking into this the other day maybe you guys hire a corporate therapist i know it sounds kind of weird and modern or progressive but i was looking into it and it might be something that you guys would benefit from they take an entirely different look on on your situation and they give an entirely different viewpoint that you guys could possibly benefit from also i think miss gittin said it perfectly when she said to think before you speak as educators and professionals in the educational background perhaps we use the acronym think before we speak both to each other and to the public by asking ourselves is it true is it

157helpful is it inspiring is it necessary and is it kind i appreciate you guys and i appreciate all the work that you guys do this is a very hard job and no one is discounting that so thank you guys thank you so much mr dv jelly we appreciate your coming and waiting and expressing your thoughts actually we have discussed the problem of sometimes not having some of the backup items on boarddocs in it in a timely manner by and large our staff does an incredible job but well without making an excuse because this is the truth the end of the school year even for people that aren't in the buildings is always an incredibly busy time and then when you add the fact that we are in the middle of looking for an interim superintendent

158and looking ahead to our search company and all of that with the permanent superintendent yeah there are a lot of extenuating circumstances but that is an issue that all of us are concerned with and hopefully moving forward we will maybe have fewer changes and that would enable everything to be on board docs in in a more timely manner i agree with you totally about independently some of the issues as i have independently researched what we were talking about earl earlier because we do have differing viewpoints here on the board and i've never been shy about expressing what my political view is anyway i think we've had a corporate therapist sort of we actually have hired from the outside in in the past we don't i shouldn't say this but we don't want to waste taxpayer

159money no that's there's always hope and the bottom line is even though you do see a lot of picking and are arguing at the end of the day most of us even if it's a vote that we're not happy with we do pick ourselves up and follow what we as a body has have decided on so you can i think lee county is humming along quite well despite the fact that sometimes you see us and maybe not our finest moments but well i think i think in in the end we do get things done but we really appreciate your coming here that takes us to board member comments so let's just start in the middle today miss jordan you have it shall we starts with me how come he first okay because you have your

160you have fresh from your break and okay so my comments are it was a very very busy weekend with graduations and it was just fabulous seeing all these kids being excuse me being able to walk across the stage i was able to do lee virtual school which they had i believe it was 68 people i oasis charter school was one of them island coast with three almost 400 students north fort myers i believe we had almost it was over 600 students i believe i know we kept looking out and it just kept it felt like we were still in the beginning of the alphabets mariner high school was the last one that i did on sundays but just watching all these children and their parents and their their fan base even in the store we

161had a store right the storm on sunday and those kids came in got soaking wet but that was okay parents got wet but they were there they were smiling they were happy to receive their diplomas also i just wanted to i heard some some people had said about the superintendent i just wanted to have some clarification on that on the 14th we will be having a briefing meeting for that and that's where we will have the discussion and the conversation on who that would be and we will have a special meeting at four o'clock where we will then appoint who that person will be then on june 21st is when the firms are supposed to be search first for the superintendent the permanent superintendent everybody's supposed to be in at that time we now have

162we still have just four even though we have an ad out requesting more at this time that's what we have so that will be coming on the 21st and we will be moving forward with starting to work with the firms in order for us to get a permanent superintendent i did want to say too i also had the opportunity to go to buckingham and i'm not sure if i share this or not already but they had their prom buckingham exceptional center they had their prom and it was alice in wonderland that was absolutely gorgeous and they were dancing and it and i have some of their pictures and i did not i was not able to put those in so you'll be seeing those i have permission to share that with the parents and i

163just felt that they were worth sharing so you'll be seeing them on the next at the next meeting a little bit late but you'll be seeing them and just i appreciate each and every one of you and i know that we can be the best people that we can be and as we move forward and say that's my comments thank you miss fisher thank you i also had the opportunity to attend some graduations and that is always the most uplifting part of this job for me is being with the kids they were amazing well-spoken inspirational and brave and we appreciate all the work that the staff did in presenting them to the public the ceremonies were dignified everyone was well behaved and it was just all in all a good experience so i just want

164to say that i do believe that we have amazing potential to work as a team and to stay focused on the work of this district i would hate for us to just say okay let's disband this board because we're not doing anything but positively you know voicing dissent can be crucial to a group's overall success it can keep you on course and yield creative and unique results after all the purpose of any group is to come up with the best solution for the current project and our project is to give the best education a world-class education to the students of lee county god bless you all thank you okay this is morgan so i wanted to say this last time so this news is a little bit late but congratulations to its for their end

165week mark market brief oh i'm so sorry congratulations to its for the ed week market brief a district transforms its technology to make teachers lives easier so dwayne alton was interviewed and they talked about the creation of a digital ecosystem infrastructure to economize teachers time by keeping all the learning resources in one place another great plug for the work being done in this district we are a we are a local state national leader when it comes to use of technology i just wanted to point out for members of the public who might be watching you know we're always talking about how our kids are doing better so referring to the advanced academics summary data provided in the may 14 weekly update student enrollment in ap ib ace has grown since 1617. i'm going to just

166read the stats enrollment for white students has increased but is relatively constant for the past two years at 38 percent enrollment for black students increased significantly in 2021 topping out at 26 percent yes there is a gap but they're making gains and that's what we're really looking for enrollment for hispanic students has increased steadily it's now at 29 percent and enrollment for all ell students has gone from 0.2 to 15 so we're having an impact we're not where we need to be but i think the public needs to understand that the things that we're putting in place are really reflect our efforts to really identify opportunities to improve learning for kids and then enrollment for white males has increased okay enrollment for white males has increased and continues to increase annually now it's at 34

167versus 38 for all enrollment for black males increased significantly 2021 to 24 versus 26 overall which i think is a good number and then enrollment for hispanic males has increased steadily now 25 so in terms of hb7033 task force on closing the achievement gap for boys i think we're focused on that and i think that's something we want to keep watching so that's my educational comment i want to congratulate jennifer ortega she's the new teacher of the year she teaches 7th grade reading at lehigh acres middle school she's a career changer joined the district after several years working as a sales manager i want to complement jason sill and the lee county tv team if you haven't had a chance to watch the student film and television awards on youtube do it when you see

168what kids are even doing at the lower elementary level it is absolutely remarkable there are two things i'd like to talk to put on the in the parking lot for discussion at some point about whether or not we want to have a board conversation one is how this district handles non-renewal of high effect highly effective and effective teachers you know we have become again such a big district that doing it the way it has always been done may not necessarily serve employees as well as it should and i'm just thinking that some of the responsibility for helping these teachers who are being moved highly effective effective teachers being moved helping them at the school level as well as at the district level is something you know i'd like to explore the other thing is i

169would like to explore interest-based enshrining interest-based bargaining in board policy i think that you know it is something that has served this district incredibly well and it has been it was tested in some really tough times and it helped and i think that's one culture that this district would be well served to sustain long term so those are my comments thank you great thank you could i could i just ask miss morgan to send a an email with the parking lot so we can make sure that oh yeah okay i'll do that thank you okay miss giovanelli thank you yes i was gonna add it was a busy weekend with the graduations a lot of fun though just having the live graduations was exciting just and everybody was exciting everybody does it just a little

170bit different even though it's kind of the same it's kind of interesting how they do that but that's that's great i did want to bring up a couple things i've had a lot of phone calls today regarding in emails regarding the code of conduct and basically the concern is the parental rights bill that goes in effect in july and they're just asking why can't we wait to do the code of conduct in july after the and make sure that's in the code of conduct in before approving it so i don't know if that's a discussion that we could have that would you know allow opportunity because i'm i know we're gonna have speakers tonight on it and i mean it's only that's only like a month away to wait till do it in july so

171is that a discussion is there a statutory requirement for that to be filed approved so we definitely need to have it prior to school starting and with the rule making process you do need to add those you know that time for it the parental rights bill will become a policy because it's we're obligated to make that a policy okay can you hear me now not really but not real loud okay so the parental rights bill will be a policy because we're required to make that a policy with regards to the student con code of conduct we do have time limitations because of the policy making process can they get it all revised and done prior to you know schools starting we'd have to ask staff i can't answer that question so could we amend the

172code of conduct to allow for that or something or it may have to be like really a workshop or discussion but you know what i mean i don't even know but i was just i said i would ask the questions so that you know the community would have a better understanding so my recommendation is that the parent bill of rights not necessarily be in the code of conduct it's going to be a policy on its own that will come before the board sometime in july early august for it to go through its rulemaking process because the statute once it's signed requires the board to have a policy for the parental bill of rights okay all right anybody okay so it appears that we want to have a brief conversation on this miss fisher and then

173miss kittens yeah i have a question for attorney dupree bruno so isn't the parents rights bill just a like a combination of rules that already existed and so there's as far as health care and education so the basis of it is pulling up all of these rights that already exist in the statutes in different places and putting it as one but there are little things here and there within that statute that i think will give it a little bit more teeth a little bit more substance in terms of how it's applicable to districts okay okay the skittens i'm suggesting then since there are yeah between the chair since there will be some changes and it is the main thing that i keep hearing as well about parental rights that we mention that this evening before

174the public comment and perhaps mr p bruno can give that you know legal definition that you were just telling us if if the chair would allow her to do that and bring that up just before public comment and that we are considering that and how it will affect us going forward with the student code of conduct and i think that may at least help some people understand that this is not it that we are moving you know forward with that so i just wanted to make that suggestion to break into this that sounds like a good suggestion so everybody can hear it can we just have a quick consensus whether chair jordan should add that right before the public comments mr pre-bruno all right well we are gonna get to say it or she will

175okay that someone will do that all right so miss patrick are you on board with okay so unanimous so no i don't i don't understand what you mean what is she going to say specifically what she said to us already with the suggestion miss miss juvenelli suggested we wait and what we were saying what the attorney is saying it's going to come up as a policy anyway and people need to know that this is our local you know code of conduct but that this state because i've gotten a lot of calls and suggestions too about well the governor said this and so that's why we need the legal statement saying he did and this is how we're going to include this so thank you so in other words she's going to say it earlier so

176probably right before yes so we have 100 on on on adding that and so attorney dupree bruno would you be able to add basically what you just said about policy and of course the policy takes precedent over anything that might not be in line with it in in the code of conduct correct i will explain that okay okay so is the best time then right before the public comment since you're already 100 okay all right so mrs chief and emily okay i'll finish i guess i was thinking who was talking originally yeah is there anybody else that had a comment regarding what miss givenelli was talking about all right let's continue with your public comments or your board member comments sorry yeah so and then another another thing i'd like to have a discussion on

177and we've i've brought it before and i just want to make sure that it's not something that this board wants to have the discussion on is having that lgbt q advisory committee i still feel like that somehow if we could get that to be the right diversity group that they can and have both sides in this group that has been mentioned at the table before i still think it's a need because in one of the meetings that we our training that we had that was a question i brought up and they said that it's important to have these groups because it just brings awareness and in in i think it's it's important and we i want everyone to feel that they have a voice and all parties so i just i just want to bring

178that out throw that back out there because it's been mentioned again at a meeting and i'm i brought it up twice this is my third time and so i just wanted to see if anybody wants to have that conversation okay miss fisher and then mrs gibbons yeah so could you explain what you mean by that well i actually i don't know that this would be something that the board needs to discuss completely i just know it's been mentioned by the community to have that have an advisory group i know we have edact and i appreciate that but edek doesn't have edek is still small and it's not exactly made up of actual completely lgbt or even it's a it's it is diverse but it's not it's not it's not solving the problems that we have

179and that's my concern so unless we can give better direction towards eat act i don't know you know what else to do i just i want to make sure that everybody has a voice at the table and i'm talking about both sides that's my concern i think if that poster had went before edact or prior to or i think we would had a better outcome and at least awareness and it would have been went through a process better and i just think we missed the boat completely okay so we do have the gsas at most high schools and several of the middle schools we do have e-dec we do have dac and we also have mr williams our staff attorney for the next couple of weeks is a member of the state school board attorney's

180attorney's advisory board with equality florida i'm currently representing the board as an advisory board member so are you saying you want a student advisory that's i don't know it needs to be i really wasn't saying student i really didn't i really don't even know what the expectations of the individuals that's been requesting it but i wanted to respect that's really where i'm at today is just for us to give them right shed that light and give them to know that they didn't fall on deaf ears how's that and so i and i do want to mention also that our current student advisory group has several members of the lgbt community and they have made themselves known and announced their pronouns and everything so they have a forum for their voices also so i just didn't

181want to dismiss those groups that have already been in effect and are correct i don't either i don't need kids a forum okay thank you okay i think mrs kittens had something to say and then miss jordan yes well you know i've heard that request a couple of times i am really not in favor of it because i am concerned of silos again and i do have an idea that i have run by some of the people in the counseling department and that i will be bringing up to the board that may help with that situation i mean i've been around the district for a while and i've been through where we had a you know hispanic council we had a african-american council we had this and that and nobody knows what happened to them

182so we need to do it more thoughtfully and i do have a suggestion of a plan to do that is a little more inclusive and as soon as i kind of finish talking it through and looking at the possibilities and not then i will bring it to the board and that may help to answer that question but i just think at this time it would be very tricky yes i agree with that you do one group and you've got 50 others that will say yes i want a group too okay and thank you i just wanted to say we do have edac and it is our diversity and they are highly highly diverse we have people from all aspects of life that belong to that group and as far as the poster they absolutely did

183see that poster not until after it was done though it should have been a process they've seen it the process they've seen it before they've seen it dooring they seen it the whole the whole entire time and they were exactly they are the ones who edac was the actually recommended that poster yeah but the poster was i don't want to get into the whole poster thing again but unless but they didn't want to clarify that i've talked to people in need act and they did not see the poster until after it was said and done and the board hadn't even seen it really so at that point too so that's just a that's a whole nother source subject so we'll see not to interrupt but rather than get in okay i think miss patrick had

184a comment yeah guess and then let's kind of move on and actually put that as a possible discussion on how we might just want to have a conversation thank you that we have that conversation okay i don't think it's appropriate to bring a group of children together to discuss sex or sexuality so i would not support that i wasn't talking about children but you did say students and students or children no she asked me about students i said i didn't know how that looks i said that would be a discussion my statement is that i am not comfortable having students come together at the board's direction to discuss issues surrounding sections madam chair of order because we have already said we're gonna i'm taking out that i'm taking care of it right now thank you

185we're gonna have that discussion it's an important discussion and let's just hold thoughts on on that until we get to the point where we have time for that discussion okay other comments that you have oh okay i'm finished i'm not finished yet i got one more and then guardian program update i know that miss patrick brought this up recently and i want to bring it back around for a conversation i did reach out to alleged actually ray rodriguez and the state gave six and a half million dollars to the guardian program and so i would like to have another conversation maybe we can put that on the parking lot agenda about the enhancement of our sro program through going after that especially since its budget time this would be a perfect time to have a

186discussion about how we can enhance that i know there's several charter schools that are in would have rather have a guardian and that's more suitable for them financially and they have approached me about it and i know there's other schools that would be interested in that as well so there's money that i just don't want to see left on the table so every how we can i would love to talk about that more okay this board had that appetite and does that conclude your comments yes but i'm asking a question parking lot yeah it's a parking lot we decided thank you and that's it thank you okay mrs patricka just graduations that's really all i have to talk about it was phenomenal to be at buckingham exceptional student center i would like to publicly say

187that my son will be attending south next year so i hope you'll offer me the grace going forward ms giovannelli of allowing me to attend the self graduation just you know in years future i'd like you to start considering that please miss jordan's always been really good about letting me do dumbar i did dunbar sunday night mr burnside is incredibly fastidious about the appearance of the students and the conduct of the students during the graduations he has the biggest box of ties i have ever seen in my entire life and he is so serious about it that he made a kid who was wearing a turtleneck or a tie whereas miss stillwell's not here but he literally walked across the stage in a turtleneck and a bow tie because he wouldn't let him do the

188turtleneck without the tie i thought it was hysterical but the ceremony was beautiful as always the kids were incredibly well behaved and they earned their right to throw their caps so i thought that was really fantastic i've never seen anything like buckingham i mean those kids were there were probably i don't know maybe 10 of them that were graduating and it took as long as a regular graduation and each kid like the first kid that came down to take her position waved the whole time she just waved the whole time it was it was really cool and that's really the time of year that i smile the most my face hurts at the end of a graduation because i'm smiling the entire time so i'm always very grateful to be able to be a part

189of that and the other thing i'll report to the board is i had a town hall meeting last night that's why i had to run out of here as quickly as i did and it was an interesting collection of people i think a lot a lot of them were there to gather real information and some of them were there to create you know 30-second youtube videos of me that they can put out in public and try to make me look bad but there are about 60 people there i would say and i you know on balance i think it went pretty well because there were people who were genuinely interested in the issues those are my comments thank you okay thank you is it on what mr patricia said yes okay what was the topic

190of your town hall meaning any question you have i will try to answer it oh and almost every question was about lgbt and crt and that's why i brought critical race theory up today because of what's happening in collier and i'd like that actually to be a parking lot issue that we discussed please okay mrs kittens oh okay graduations were fun as usual riverdale had the largest number of graduates and it was dr atkins and i told him he was going out in a big way having the biggest one but i just thought you know how you look in the back of the room and follow the rose i couldn't even see the back of the building at the rose and i'm thinking okay we're almost there but it wasn't so but it was really

191great and so it was dr atkins and i and we had a good time with that one lehigh senior i did on sunday and that was great and you'll probably see some pictures of the shoes the shoes were absolutely incredible these girls were walking across in stilettos across the stage and i thought if they could just make it from here to there will be all right one i had to kind of reach out and catch but it was fun and i think the most the funniest was there were two guys that came across and the one guy gets his his diploma the case because they give them the diploma later so he gets it from the principal and he stopped before he got to the rest of us and he looked in there and he's

192just shaking his head like you know now there's nothing in it but he was so amazed that he was on this stage and at least had the cover it was hysterical but it was a lot of fun and the one with lehigh senior i was with dr desmore and she it wasn't funny because she said well this is kind of bittersweet for me because last year she had a student that graduated but because of covet they couldn't walk so you know she was like oh this should have been last year so we comforted her in that on the buckingham one i think everyone during your time on the board needs to do the buckingham graduation because it really shows you what we're here and what it's all about and when you understand that some of

193those students have been there for many many years and they have actually aged out and the parents are just like okay this is our life and has been so for some of them like 20 years and it just really is touching to watch them and yes they dance and wave the whole time i wanted to mention that dr ann murphy knight passed away a week or so ago and they had her services on the weekend and as an educator and a contributor to our community and to the district i asked the chair if we could do a short distribute to her and she agreed that we will do it right after the before the public comment some of her family will be here there from out of town so they will be here this evening

194and it's just a short thing that together with jared edie and his historical self he wrote some things and i'll just read through it real quick and recognize the family she has a very you know long history with the district and even helping to name some of the schools and all that and you'll hear that this evening so i just wanted to let everyone know that and thank you i think that's it for now thank you of course just as i'm about to speak i get this frog oh she what oh she went already yeah yeah oh yeah did you go in everybody has gone okay thank you based on the discussion and the question that was posed as well as by msg of vanilla is your microphone i'm not sure can you hear me

195now i need to bring it up okay so based on the discussion in the question that was raised by mr giovannelli and the question that was raised by miss morgan in terms of the timing for the code of conduct and reviewing the statute it just simply says that it needs to be completed at the beginning of every school year so if i may during this break let me talk to staff just to see if there's any time between now and the beginning of the school year to do to review it one more time because there really isn't any rush and i want to make sure that the board is satisfied with the document i still maintain my position that the parental bill of rights does not belong in the code of conduct because the code

196of conduct is only about discipline and conduct of students but there's no rush let's make sure we get it right this time yeah make a quick comment yeah if if you do find that's the case and we are going to postpone it i say that we need we need to put a blast out to let the public know that will be the case for tonight i have to talk to staff first because it's not just because we still have to do the rulemaking process in addition staff needs to do whatever the translations that need to be done there's some other administrative steps that will go along with that so before i say we can i want to make sure that this timeline will be appropriate for staff that's fine i'm just saying we need to

197let blast it out let the community know that okay miss patrick you had a question yes attorney dupree bruno page 13 notification of parental rights so i hear what you're saying about the purpose of the code of conduct but we currently have a statement in here of parental rights we have a statement in here of student rights as well so not as long as what the statute is going to be i mean sorry i'm thinking about the length of the statute and the policy that's one of the things but if if we're gonna delay this and we're going to put parental student rights and a separate policy i'm sorry parental rights and a separate policy then why would we have it in the student code of conduct if it's not complete and in whole compliance

198with the new law that's been passed right i'm just raising that as an issue for you to please take a look at okay thank you okay anything else on on that yes yeah so in the compliance is really it's important because i'm not all of our policies are in compliance with the law so that's really important second i and i want to make sure that we started to talk about it in our protocols today and everything our evaluation but we didn't get to that really that i don't think we do talk about policies enough and making sure they're compliant one was the situation again with regarding my husband our policy didn't comply with the law so and i brought it up i've brought it up several times and nobody wants to have that appetite don't

199have the appetite for that to change that policy but also i know there was changes to the code of conduct right no our policy wasn't with regarding that it wasn't it's not now no then we never changed the policy from that situation and i brought it up so the issue that you're referring to is the ability of law enforcement from another agency to bring a weapon into a school board property that's a whole nother issue with different different laws some school districts have have have the law in there regarding it you know as long as their employer allows for that which is was my husband's case but our policy doesn't state that our policy is too generic that's what raised the question to begin with okay you know but i just want to get back

200to the changes being made to the code of conduct that's been changed for us to look at and see the changes because i haven't had a chance to so in my understanding between last night and today staff reviewed the code of conduct and did some changes to it i have not had an opportunity to view all the changes myself right but that's my understanding based on the conversation yesterday can i fill in a detail there can i fill in in detail yes please ms stillwell emailed all of us the changes i was under the impression that so the conversation i had with you at the break was inaccurate i was under the impression when i received the email from miss schaefer that it had been updated in board docs it has not yet been updated

201in board docs they're waiting for your review to update it your review attorney dupree bruno to update it is that am i right you can speak miss schaefer yeah actually there were no changes to the code of conduct on the agenda as of yet the items that you receive notification for were for the briefing and then the two good causes well it bro okay so it brought me there for the good causes that's right okay so i thought it brought me there for the student code of conduct and so i went through the student code of conduct and i was really frustrated i was like they didn't change any of them and that's why i was really frustrated because it was the old code of conduct so attorney general bruno as soon as you review

202those changes they are going to post it to board docs unless and until you get different answers to the questions that have been raised so you're going to be busy in the next hour and 40. so is that proper notice for the community that's my question so how i would like to end this conversation is to please allow some time for me to talk to staff to see what the possibilities are because i haven't had an opportunity to review this document from whenever it was revised till when it was sent to me and nor have we either okay and what i would what i would suggest is that miss that our attorney talked to staff about that and my opinion would be that unless there's something that some some reason that it would mess up

203everything in terms of getting that code approved i know i have not had a chance to look at the because we were changing quite a few of the pronouns and there were some pronouns that we were turning back into nouns or possessive nouns and i certainly would like to have a chance to review that as well and the public deserves a chance to look at the final final final i guess you could say so attorney dupree bruno you'll be able to talk with staff if you can make sure i get a copy of it because i don't see it thanks and can i say what we received our copy on one one minute i'm sorry i don't mean to interrupt the documents that i have are the updated code of conduct and then there is

204an actual document that shows what was updated it shows the new and the old so that would be attached as well thank you man okay and yes skins what i'm saying is i know i received it while we were here on the dais so that does really not give us time to review it yeah well and that's exactly what i was just saying that unless there's some extenuating circumstance that perhaps it can be pulled for this evening and giving everybody both the community and those of us on the board a chance to look at it because we haven't seen it yet either is there anything else about that particular issue okay well i haven't given my board member comments yet but we'll come back to miss dupree bruno in a few minutes for her official

205comments okay so in a note i have written down the code if depending on what is what is decided on this something that i would like to see that i actually sent on through the proper channels dr adkins and mr mangan and chuck bradley was the possibility of part of that really really long document being made into hyperlinks because there are some things there's maybe the cliffs notes version or the abridged version but sometimes when there's too much all there in front of somebody it just bogs the reader down so my thought which was just an idea that popped into my head came very late so it's just for me it's something to think about for for the future on these documents that we're sending digitally to the different homes that perhaps some of the

206things and that would include for instance when well the parental bill of rights if we were to approve this tonight we might even instead of having to have an addendum that we have a hyperlink to it and and there it seems to me there's some other items that go into great great detail which is great for transparency but probably the vast majority of the students and the parents and the shareholders unless a particular situation applies to them they might not even care to read through but they would have the ability to read through so that's just something for the future another thing i was really glad that miss mrs morgan brought up the issue of the non-renewed effective and highly effective teachers because i've had a few people reach out to me and talk about

207that and something like that to a teacher when you're effective or highly respect effective and you're used to being in a particular school and it's your home school and all of a sudden you're told no we're we're not going to renew you at this site that's very demoralizing to to have come up as a very effective teacher and then all of a sudden it's it's it's a punch you talk about a punch in the gut it is and those kinds of things to my way of thinking have the effect it's not just affecting that one teacher because don't you know the word gets out did you hear what happened to susie susie jones susie's been a wonderful teacher here but she's not getting renewed at our school and she's going to have to find a

208job somewhere else so my thought is we work really hard in hr to recruit but issues like this make me think personally that we're not doing all that we can to retain and again it's not just the one person because the word gets out and a lot of people are saying that's not right before i give the several little positive things i have i did also have a question it was the one that i was going to ask yesterday at the end of the workshop and everybody was so excited that i forgot what it was but i it took me only an hour to remember it you know who you are those of you who rejoiced because i couldn't think of it but it's oh darn but it is it is who is responsible for

209making the updates to our page about the superintendent search on our website now you but okay and i know you've been in charge of that but could you explain to us i mean there there were a lot of things over the weekend and i emailed because i honestly did not know if that was still not your baby to do the actual changes or how how is that working right now mrs kittens because we need to be able to do a better job of keeping everything up to date okay and i am in constant contact with between the stillwell and goodness i just lost her name laura because and one of the things i asked them a couple of questions and things are changing and i asked about the list and removing people and updating it

210but what they staff suggested they felt was better was to leave all five names and then to put either withdrawn or you know still in the running or whatever so that you know we didn't just delete someone off of there so that was a discussion that we had and that was how they felt it was best to handle it and yes we do keep the calendar piece updated and i believe they will put the interview the links to the interview are if they're not already on there we'll be on there and i'm not sure what you're saying is not up to date okay so i was checking it this weekend and there were a lot of things that weren't up to date actually on friday this past friday and ms stillwell made made a change

211but then we still had that list and i agree that's but the purpose was to leave it up there so i'm not done yet okay i agree with what you said leave the list up there but to add the comments that you thought and they thought would be applicable withdrawn the bottom line is it's we've had a lot of changes in that and we've gotten some criticism from the public and i think it's very legitimate criticism when we don't have that page up up to date and i'm not trying to point a finger i'm not trying to blame anybody we are all super super busy however it is what it is and it's there and it is okay it is up to date though and they constantly do make the changes to it as we

212are going you know through our process the only thing as a friday that would have needed to be done was updating the list and making sure the calendar was where it was supposed to be well okay well there were still two dates for interviews and numerous things i'm i'm going to ask do you need help on no i'm fine and i'm not asking that in a derogatory way it's it's a big job and there are a lot of movies i'm fine and the thing is i'm working with staff to make sure that everything is up today okay thank you for the offer yeah and again i'm not casting dispersions on anyone i personally just want to see it remain up to date okay most all of these things have been mentioned already the student the

213awards although i love a couple years ago the first time i'd ever seen the student film awards going and it was like a hollywood premiere and it was done so well and that was really fun i'll have to say that pulling up the youtube and my tv at home and sitting back it was at seven o'clock and having dinner in front of the tv watching was also a good experience and as as usual it was a phenomenal phenomenal job it's amazing what some of these little kids can can do you know fifth graders fifth or sixth graders i'm thinking how'd they do that anyway it's it's on youtube so just look for the student film awards and it definitely is worth a watch like all my colleagues i went to a couple graduations this weekend

214as well went to sunday morning gateway charter high school and on saturday afternoon went to estera high school which that's kind of my home high school since i used to teach there and a highlight for me was that two of my good friends that teach at a teach at estero their daughters were graduating so i got to be up close and personal when my two good friends came up on the stage and handed their daughters their diplomas and i'm sure all this all the schools do that and that's that's a very very touching thing when when the parent is able to do that and in terms of i really appreciate what what mrs patricka said about mr burnside because i go way back with graduations and actually even being a senior class sponsor and just

215a real quick thing on on that back in the day at my high school if you can believe it all you young men out there listening to this used to boys didn't weren't allowed to wear earrings back in the day so i'm thinking this was the late 80s early 90s and so they weren't allowed in high school to wear the earrings and don't you know we had those of us helping in the lines we had to look at those boys ears and i'm serious and take out your earrings and finally there was a year when the principal decided it's not that big a deal and they'd kind of you know the kids would kind of be like this to cover up that they had the earrings and oh it's fine and including the ties that

216there had to be everybody had to wear black shoes and they were some phenomenal sparkly pretty sparkly heels on the girls and i mean beautiful shoes but yeah at least we didn't see i didn't see anybody with like they do in college with taped messages like hi mom or something or worse on there so the graduations are always really fun and many of us will be heading to tampa either tonight or tomorrow and one of our board members will be honored with being now see i can't think of the word the she's going to be miss patricka is going to be the president of fsba you're being what's the word sworn in you know what i was thinking of words like inaugurate it and i even thought the word crowned i don't know why but

217congratulations to you and some of us will be there to see the coronation sorry i had to so that's the end of my comments mr briefer de prix bruno do you have any other so during so during your board comment i had a chance to take a look at my email i planned it that i planned it that way so you'd have plenty i guess we could say you're welcome you weren't hanging on miss vaughn's every word i heard everything that she said i can tell you a couple more graduation stories about the time after dracula this is important after dracula was a banned book at our school there was a big deal newspapers and all of that guess what happened at graduation at university of north texas stadium guess what flew in the air

218i'm back a bat that was the kind of graduations we had in in texas with one year of bat flying around all right so i did get the misshaper i did get the updates to the code while we were on the dais and actually responded and asked if there was any substantive changes but i did not have a chance to review it so i will review it based on what i've seen so far it seems like it's more grammatical changes than substance but i'm going to send this to the board as well for you to review and make sure that these changes are acceptable to you and if you can take a look at it and provide your thoughts directly to me not to the board that would be helpful in terms of how we

219proceed and with regards to the parents rights there is the parental notification but we could put something in there that talks about the board policy on the parents rights which is going to be more comprehensive based on the law if that's acceptable to the board we can put in there is that okay are we good with that so there is a section that just talks about notification of parents fights and it's been there for a long time it's not reflective obviously of the statute but we can put a sentence in there that basically just says that the board has a policy in line with the parental rights statute but we don't have a policy yet we will have a policy between july and on private school start by the time this starts yeah so if

220that's acceptable i think we can move forward so if we yeah just ask if we vote on it tonight and make those changes later then that's sufficient legally repeat what you said miss kittens if we vote on it tonight and maybe if we were to vote on it tonight and then those changes are made afterwards are we legally okay to do that or do we need to word it differently as to what we're voting for with in light of amendments coming up well the unless the board when you look at it during the break feels that there's additional things you want to change it appears based on what i've been able to review thus far that these are more grammatical changes not substantive changes so that's the first thing with regards to the parental bill

221of rights that's going to be a policy sometime between july and august because it has to be based on the statute so we will have a policy but there was a question as to whether or not we should put that in this student code of conduct which i think is just it's going to be long so in lieu of putting that in the student code of conduct we can just put a sentence that says that the board has a policy that specifically addresses the parental bill of rights we already have something in there that talks about notification of parental rights that has a few little subheadings in terms of access to educational records and things like that we can just add that sentence and that probably would cover it unless the board wants something that's

222more substantive then you'll have to wait until the actual policy is drafted and then pick what you actually want to put in the student code of conduct i'm just my concern is the public and the information and emails and questions and calls and texts that i've got they're not going to be okay with just saying we're going to do something i just by the responses that i have gotten so my suggestion would be to put in there exactly what we're going to have to show them that this is in there you know that you do still have rights so i mean that's just me i don't know so it's up to everybody else so let me let me go back then to what i said originally let me talk to staff and see if there's

223a timing issue and then my second would be to add that sentence that just refers to the parental bill of rights we can even make it as simple as the district will follow the parental bill of rights upon its effective date or something like that i mean there's some language that we can put in there or the policy and if you if you if we get to the point where we are going to do it tonight then you need to explain that very very carefully and clearly so before we make that decision please make sure that you review the changes and ensure that those changes are acceptable to you if they are not acceptable please let me know and then i will also talk to staff in terms of timing well and also keep keep

224in mind that this is not a consent item that this is a separate item which allows the public to speak once again which actually gives you attorney bruno and all of us a chance to say that we've not forgotten about this and also to listen if there are enough negative comments or not trusting or it doesn't seem like it's working to make that consideration okay mrs patrick you had i'm just wondering when is it going to be posted right in board docs because i've got a system of how i go through it and i go through it based on that document that's in word docs and what i got from staff is confusing to my brain so i want to be able to go through it the way i go through it do we know

225we have to okay as soon as i get notification either way i will make the change it won't be anything that should take very long again it depends on staff and if they have to make any other changes to the documents but otherwise it will take me just a couple minutes to do it could you just it sounds like with everybody the conversation we're having right now could you just check with staff to see if we can postpone this yes ma'am i'm just yeah i i agree with what you said doesn't the vote have to occur a specific number of days after the second reading yes it does that's why we're going to have to go through the rule making process again that's why i have to check this stuff in terms of timings i

226don't think we can because you have to go through the whole process again all right let me let me just bring and i'll come back to you in in a moment this is supposed to be it sounds like there are a lot of people that unless the a lot of people hear on the desk that unless it's going to cause a huge problem why we just delay it so that all of us feel like we've had ample opportunity to look at it to go through it in whatever way our personal learning style desires so madam vice chair i actually did just get some information from staff that says really we can't postpone it because in addition to the rulemaking time that we would have we have branding and printing translation and all of that needs

227to be done too so this will be cutting it very close okay and let's get okay here's here's what i would like to suggest and it sounds as though statutorily and everything that we really and time wise that it's going to go on we talked about singing off the same page and saying the same thing and making sure we have the same message i'm sending to you guys a couple of questions i'm sending it to attorney bruno and the superintendent i would like to have an answer to these questions for one these are questions that i get all the time i want to make sure i'm saying what everybody else is saying so for example you know will students of different sex be allowed to use the same restroom i would like for staff and

228superintendent and the attorney in the legal manner to give us an answer you know not a long drawn-out but here is basically what we are saying because i mean i know what i might say but i don't know if it's the same thing that everyone is saying and if we're going to be singing off the same page then we need to at least see that another question was will parents not be informed if the child or child's teacher or educator talks to them about their preference we just need a solid answer that we all agree upon that is saying this is where the district stands another one is what is the set sex education curriculum being taught in elementary middle and high school to students i know the answer is we don't but we need

229to have the official answer so that when we are speaking we are speaking off of the same page and if anyone else has any other questions to add to that i just it would help me i don't know if it would help anybody else but i don't want to be out of sync with everyone else in issues like this so cover mr any more comments yes miss morgan it sounds like what we need is a frequently asked questions section on the website so that the public and we all have the same answers to the questions and maybe what we need to do is figure out a way to with communications to put up a frequently asked question and put these questions out there and then then it's you know then it's anyway knows because there

230are a lot of misconceptions yeah a lot and no you're men you're right actually i was thinking faqs when miss kittens was speaking and i i don't i'm not sure why there is exactly this these misconceptions because certainly we have said from the deus numerous times not just from one or two of us but basically from all of us i'm going to say that in part there seems to be social media and other messages totally apart from the board or the school district that continue to go out and continue to stir up these these questions so we just need to continue to find better and better ways to get the message out and have an faq page don't we actually i think we have an faq do we not on the district website about the

231it's not about but of conduct but it's about on the district probably yeah there's facts on the district but maybe this needs to be you know i don't want to be rude but we've all got to review this thing before our meeting starts at six o'clock the attorney has work to do and jen has miss fisher so no you're you're absolutely right we've contemplated this let's go contemplate individually it is four five oh 4 50. we're adjourned i'll see you at six o'clock when miss jordan miss jordan is the chair after public time i can't i can't midnight you