School Board Briefing Meeting: October 19, 2021

001good afternoon everyone it is tuesday october 19th 2021 1 o'clock and this is school board briefing we are going to start today with a short presentation by district educational facilities about the district educational facilities plan and we have ms kelly lecter who is the director of budget and she is joined by melissa rivera budget analyst and also kathy eba director of planning growth and capacity and so i will just hand it off to you ladies thank you very much good morning or good afternoon everyone as she said this is melissa rivera i wanted to bring her up here she is the budget analyst in the budget department that handles all of the capital stuff and as you all know that's a big job for somebody a lot going on in capital and so we just

002kind of want to make this real short and sweet kathy and this is a group effort this work plan between my department and planning i'm going to try and make this as short and sweet as possible we've been through the capital plan multiple times with you all in june and july and then again when it was approved in september we talked about bringing it back to you each time one of the projects before we move forward with a go or no just to make sure with price escalations and stuff that we look at everything to make sure that this is really what we want to do we still plan on continuing to do that the work plan that we are bringing to you is a 5 10 20 year plan the five year plan is

003exactly what was approved in the final budget with one exception and that is the number of rep the amount for the co and ds that came on this document from the state it's hard-coded in we are going to go back and look at that estimate the estimates that they have in here it's about a million and a half more than we had put in the plan which would be great if that's where it's going to come in at we are also going to like we had talked about look at the sales tax and impact fees estimates to make sure that we're on track with those and look at increases or decreases that are needed in those areas but right now this is the approved plan from the final budget for the five year as it

004stands the 10 and 20 year as it goes out gets a little bit more iffy as everyone knows everything changes so this is our best guess at this time of what we're looking at with the student growth and the numbers for the 10 and 20 year as we go out this is a required plan it will be presented to you in a public hearing on november 2nd as required by florida statute so we want to give you a chance to ask any questions that you may have at this time regarding the plan so with that i just want to open it up if there's any questions okay ladies who has a question or a comment i'm sorry no i'm pulling it out no one i'm just pulling mine up give everybody a minute to think

005i went through that really quick i'm sorry oh that's that's that's okay on the man all right yes go ahead miss kittens okay i think it's page 10 on the capacity projects do we have a list or all the data besides fish of capacity that we are working off of to do this and this new middle school in the east side is that lambs no that is a new middle school that's being proposed in the in the middle that was in our five-year work plan as well or five-year plan and not to be open until 24. yeah 24-25 school years when it's currently slated to be open is that the first one and the only one that you're that is on here i mean did i miss no there's another middle school is there any

006middle school prior to 24-25 no there's the addition of the new lehigh middle and then this middle and how many seats will we gain in the east zone with the addition on the old lehigh with the old lehigh let me i'm going to pass this over to kathy real quick and just before you get in there missy but just to kind of draw your attention to the next sections in there because there's additional schools out in the east zone that are slated if you go to the additional project schedules which begins on page 12 that has additional schools such as another elementary in the east zone the k innovation school the new middle school east zone new high school in the east zone all those are down kind of lower in that area as well

007i just want to make sure i drew your attention to those sections as well not just the capacity the capacity projects okay so the ones that you just mentioned dr savage the new elementary and on page 12 you said yes if you look in page 12 under the heading additional project schedules you'll see a significant number of additional projects that were located in the five-year capital i'm sorry the 10-year capital plan those are there but these are actually for the first five years as well they're just it's additional category in there if any of the team wants to expand on that yes they're they're separated because the state has a what they call a survey and the schools that are approved by the survey already approved in the survey go under the first setting and

008those that have yet to be approved through the survey process are the ones on page 12. and those are the ones that still have to go through the survey process but am i correct in saying that if we needed a school and we had the money in the tax money that we would not need state approval we could use tax money to build the school you do not so you don't need state approval but you still need to do a spot survey if it is not in our five-year plan survey when we and we will be opening up our new five-year plan survey this june it will be due in june of 23 but anything that's not in the current five-year plan survey does need to have a spot survey accomplished it doesn't mean the

009state needs to give approval for it but we do need to get a spot survey approved by the state okay and at the top of page 12 that new elementary school is zone is that j that is existing now yes that's j so basically until 2025 the only things that the sun will have is the remodeling of lambs and jay and the edition and the addition at mm and well that's in 20 that opens so here's what i would like to know just bottom line between those three editions between now and 2025 how many additional seats will we have i don't have that information in front of me but we'll include that in the board update this week okay i just want to make this point i remember sometime last year beginning of 20 and

010i crunched some of the numbers and presented to the board the fact that at that particular time we had enough middle school students to fill a one and a half brand new middle schools and that was in 2020 and it i'm sorry it's just not adding up that in 2025 is when we actually will be addressing those issues they've been going on for a while and it's it's not i'm not just talking about one zone i'm talking about the district as a whole and all of us up here should think in terms of all children and if there's any child in the league county school district that does not have the appropriate resources we all should be concerned about that and i don't know okay is there anybody else that has a comment or question

011okay miss jordan and then miss givenelli yes thank you ladies for presenting this can you please tell me is this the list that the schools send to you all like in the beginning of the year that has to be done the maintenance and everything no these are the routine maintenance the plans that are to be done the cip things that the school sends sends us there's a line item for those separate i think it's 250 000 is set aside to do the thing sent in from the school's request okay i just wanted to make sure because i know i was listening to one of the ptas and they were speaking on sign would that be something that's totally separate from here okay yes thank you yes miss given ella so i'm going to piggyback off

012of miss kittens because why isn't e zone moved up to have something sooner and that i guess it's for me that's for the superintendent really i mean why is it so far out because i see that we're gonna we're not gonna have seats for our for our students in the growth out in the east i will ask our after i'm just going to kind of briefly respond to that and i'll ask our planning folks to fill in the gaps on the in terms of the capacity in the seats as you're kind of framing it but but what essentially each of our projects they start with just like you have in front of you the plan that they are demonstrated that there is an effort and an interest in building a school in a particular area

013and it manifests in a document such as this it says we are going to build it and here's when we're going to build it but once we decide we want to build it there are a number of things that have to happen it has to be budgeted you know we have to have it designed and it takes a significant period of time in our schools about 12 months to design the school and that's even starting with our existing blueprints and all the site work goes along with that and then it's about 18 months of construction after that so what you're really talking about from the moment you decide and have it budgeted and planned it's really at minimum a two and a half year process and that's if all things go well that's if the

014supply chains and all those other issues and so it's just it's a pretty substantial ask to do that and so what i want to kind of direct your attention to is that if you were to compare this particular work plan to let's say prior years plans you're going to notice a substantial increase in the east zone construction projects but again if we wanted to build one next year's let's say there's prerequisite steps so everything kind of has to follow a logical progression of steps in order for us to actually open the doors to a school and in increase that new permanent capacity in those pieces so i can't go back in time and change what was but i can certainly say if you were to compare these plans over the years you're going to see

015a substantial increase not just in the amount of schools we are putting in the east zone but even when we're putting the eso so while there may have been no schools listed in the first five years in the past you now see a number of them that's why i want to draw your attention to those pieces because they are there and so by us adding them in in june when we produce the first draft of the capital plan the concept was to demonstrate to this board into the community that we see a dramatic opportunity to increase the number of physical buildings out in the east zone now that doesn't particularly explain the capacity side which i think is very important capacity you know in in our mind is okay so how can we actually assign

016children to go to a school well that takes all of the permanent capacity we have in our physical buildings and it also takes into account all of our portable seats which we use because there are students in those portables in a significant number of those portables not only do we do that but because of the choice system the way it's currently set up we and the capacity that we do have available in some of our permanent buildings we actually bus a substantial amount of students from where they live out in the east zone in many cases greater lehigh to actually travel in to town again i was principal one of those schools james stevens and so forth there was also an assistant at dunbar high school a lot of our students who are in those

017schools in that particular area in fort myers actually have a lot of students who live out the east zone manatee okay among many others so just the configuration of the way we do this we actually bring a lot of students in there so we do have the capacity for students because that's how we staff our buildings currently it's we have building room and that's where children go and they are assigned to those schools so the capacity as it stands today is what allows us to then enroll all of our students the way it is now as we look over the years what are we trying to do one of the priorities among others is diminish the number of portables that we have so that the in terms of that students are occupying those portals we

018want to replace those with permanent physical capacity which has certainly always been an objective but right now we've increased that as a priority and as is evidenced by this plan kathy if you don't mind ms ebaugh just kind of highlighting kind of what i'm talking about on the capacity side just so that there's you know there's a clear understanding of this so one of the reasons and i know this isn't a popular thing to say but it has to be reiterated is one of the reasons that we are now able to really look at permanent capacity in the in the east zone is because the portables have are aging out portables if we own a portable the state statute is for 20 years that is permanent capacity as far as the state is concerned they

019see the state makes no jurisdiction makes no difference between that a building and a portable if we own it if you rent it or you lease it then it doesn't count on your permanent student station count but if you own it and most of our portables currently we own they count in our permanent student stations the reason that we are now able to dramatically increase our permanent capacity in permanent buildings is because the portables that we own are aging out they were built they were bought about 20 years ago in our five-year plant survey that i mentioned that we will be doing next year and adopting by june of the portables that we own right now will be able to be taken off of our records so that one of the reasons you see such

020an increase today over the number of student stations that we are building in the east zone is because we are now at a point where those portables well we'll still own them and we will still use them for swing space and to capture unexpected growth or any of those other things we they're now free space to us they we have them we can use them so long as we continue to maintain them but we don't have to ca they don't have to count against us in terms of our capacity number as the state looks at us so if we own it so just if we own a hundred portable if we own a hundred student stations and portables or we own a hunt or we have a hundred student stations in a building up until

021that portable is over 20 years old the state sees no difference in them the key now is that they are aging out and we are able to then replace those portables with permanent student stations is dr savage is that what you were asking me to discuss yes just there's a misunderstanding about capacity develop relative to our fish as well as our program capacity which is the capacity we assign to these buildings that's very important because we assign the capacity to the buildings we have and we set up our choice system and our enrollment all around that piece so it's very important that we make sure we don't conflate all those terms and imply that we don't have room for the children it's simply a matter of where the students are currently assigned where the capacity

022is available within the buildings and then the fact that we bus students all around the district to serve that piece what we're trying to make efforts to do is build more facilities where the students actually live and reconsider the way that we currently assign our students hence the proximity plan that's really about trying to just get a more common sense approach to this while still permitting the opportunity for choice i just want to make sure we kind of set the record straight about the east zone side of this that the best way to compare our plans for the e-zone is to look at prior years plans and reconcile them with this year's plan and how dramatically different it is in terms of the plans for the east zone with an understanding that while we do

023have a number of schools coming along that 25 school year to do it sooner than that would be a significant challenge considering you can't how do you bypass the 18 months of construction the 12 months of design work and then of course any procurement work that has to go into a contract six months potentially getting through those pieces so you're really talking about a three-year process so this shows a very ambitious attempt to dramatically increase the footprint of permanent buildings in the east zone including a new high school that was put into this year's plan that did not exist in the prior years plan including two middle schools in the first five years again that was not part of the plan so just trying to make sure that as we're having this conversation we can

024focus on the plan in front of us here which really is a substantial deviation from from prior year plans so when it comes to and thank you about the difference of capacity versus student stations there are three numbers that we use in lee county the first number is number of student stations and except at the except for elementary number of student stations does not equal capacity so if you have a thousand student station elementary school that is a thousand capacity but if you have a thousand student station middle school or a thousand station high school i know those are both small but i'm going to keep the same number at the middle school level your capacity number is not is eight ninety percent of a thousand so your capacity is really only nine hundred of

025a thousand there's a hundred student stations that are not counted in capacity for fish that's a state standard at the high school level it's 95 percent so there's 50 students out of that thousand that are not counted in your capacity so your elementary is a hundred percent of your fish student stations your middle school is 90 of your student stations and your high school is and then and i'm going to turn to kelly and let her explain this there is the capacity number that we assign annually to each school and i'll let her describe how that happens so we look when we do that we do look at the capacity of the school and then we look at where the students have been and where we think they're going to come in and we place

026them based on that we try to grow growth in some schools that are underutilized in order to help those schools that are over utilized not always easy because that means busing of children further than what they usually are but we try to do that as much as we can but we base that on the capacity at the school and past history and where the kids are coming in and where we need to place them and we work around those numbers i also wanted to answer the question from before with the in the east zone in the first then this five year plan there's one middle school or two one elementary two middle schools a high school and the innovation k to eight school which will generate about 7 200 student stations okay and miss jeffernelli

027you had something else yeah back to the portables that are aging out are those portables all in the east zone that are aging out not all of them but the majority of them are and how long have they been there have they been there for the 20 years in that very spot i would have to look at the history of them okay so they've been moved around during that 20-year time frame but they went from west to east okay and how many so are there any in the in the south zone that it's aging out yes how many are reaching out i don't have those numbers in front of me but we do have we have portables across the district that are aging out okay thank you okay and this is getting you something else

028to ask go ahead well a couple of quick questions one you said the 102 stations at the innovation school and the location of that school if we go into proximity is really not going to help the east zone because of the growth on daniel's and all of that area by the time that those housing areas fill up there will not it's not going to be a viable school for the east south so when we developed the that school and i'm looking at david is in jay so when we develop j which is the zone the proximity zone that school is placed in we specifically designed that zone with the help of of davis and davis demographics and their assessment of where the students are to include large components of lehigh so that we could capture

029and ensure that long term those are captured in their zones so there is a large portion of the duplex area of lehigh and kind of the south west corner of lehigh is in is in zone j which is where the innovation school is slated to be located okay and i understand that but as growth continues i thought that our purpose of proximity was to reduce transportation and if you have a school right here and there are 1500 houses around it how are you going to tell those people they can't go to that school and it is far enough away that it's going to leave out a large chunk of the students that need a school now at one point going back last year or year before the conversation when you were talking about where you're

030putting schools the innovation school was even mentioned as possibly putting the innovation school as one of the schools we needed and then suddenly that was moved to a different area but my whole point is folks i and i understand no offense at all to anyone i've heard the speech over and over again about the process and how long it takes i've heard that many many times and i do understand it but if we keep putting it off i know we're doing something now but where i cannot wrap my head around if the need is so big right now that we are still spending time and energy and staffing and everything to build a school where we do not have that urgency and i will never understand that when when you handed this paper out with

031the portables and all that back in february of 21 and it's it's 95 of the of the portables in the east zone were owned and they were deplorable and because i brought it forward they put a band-aid on them and fixed them up because we don't have the space to take those kids out of them 22 were rented one of my questions was why are we still leasing them you know i it anyway okay it's very convoluted and the last thing i want to say is please explain to me how the three schools that you're basing building quadruple a on are three oaks middle three oaks elementary and pine woods and that's where the 117 percent is supposed to come from well on here the utilization and i don't know if that's different from capacity

032three oaks middle is a hundred and one three oaks elementary is 112 and pine woods is 103. there is no way mathematically that you come up with 117 percent so please explain if my math is wrong i don't know the document that was handed out at that point so i would have to go back i'm looking at this that you have up here oh this okay which where was that on the utilization the column section of the utilization and that was 2122. three oaks elementary is a hundred and twelve percent utilization pine woods 103 and three oaks middle was 101. how do we get 117 so the numbers that we're presenting today are including of our code period which we thought where we saw a decrease in utilization across the district and we are currently

033evaluating and will be presenting in an upcoming meeting those those numbers and how covet has affected our utilization across the district okay and we are we're running quite a bit over so i'll entertain since ms patrick hasn't had a chance to speak and if anybody else has something short to say and then we need to move on okay mrs patricka thank you so refresh my recollection please how many portables estimate i don't want an exact number do we have across the district 178 is right here okay i'm just helping let them let them answer please but what it sounds like is and if you don't have that right at your fingertips it sounds like we've had a lot of questions about i know there has been information shared in the past on this but maybe

034just an update not just the portables that and i know similar information has been shared but if you just re-share that when you have a chance and give us the number of portables in each zone whether they're rented or owned and the ages of them so we'll know where they're age aging out and you just send that to the whole board mrs patricka what else did you have to ask so i guess the what i'm what i'm trying to get to is it's my understanding that about 60 of our portables are utilized in the east zone and as i look at these lists that you put in front of us today about 66 of the funding is going to the east zone and about 33 34 of the funding is going to the rest of

035the district and i understand that all of this construction although all of these upgrades and updates are not all to increase capacity the other thing that i understand is and correct me if i'm wrong it is staff's desire to eliminate as many portables as humanly possible but the state of florida does not really permit us to do that because we have to prove the need before we can build the school so as much as we might want to come in front of the board in the community and say our plan over the next five years will eliminate every portable that would be a lie because as new growth occurs we have to put those kids in portables so it's it is that an inaccurate understanding of the situation we're in no it's not so first

036we our goal is in the next couple of months as part of the process that we're going to be developing in the schedule we're going to be developing for the next capital improvement plan we are going to do a workshop specifically on these issues so you're going to see all of this in very detailed information in the next column problem between now and january so that's first secondly you are the understanding of the state's relationship to portables is exactly as you said even though we will age them out and we will no longer have to use them as capacity for us so they will no longer count towards our capacity total number they will still the state still expects you to use portables as one of there are a number of different tools the state

037expects us to use including portables that allow for the immediate capacity and placement of students while in a growth position because so i've used this analogy many times in my time as a school planner if you want to build a road or a police station or a park or a utility line and you're a local government go ahead do so if you want to build the school go talk to tallahassee first so this the state requires us to show what they call need and need is over capacity and you only get over capacity if your student stations exceed your number of your capacity number but i'm but that includes if you own portables they are concluded in the capacity number i know that doesn't make sense i know people think of portables as temporary capacity

038but if you own them the state looks at those for 20-year period as permanent capacity if you have any and we have just a couple of the concretables those are the state looks at those as capacity for 30 years so there's one at riverdale for example so things that other people may look at as temporary capacity if you own them then the state looks at it as permanent capacity and the reason that you would want to rent them even though there it is much more it's much more costly to rent them versus own them is just this because if you rent them they're not looked at as your permanent capacity so it allows you to build schools in permanent buildings quicker than if you own them all right my final question is beginning on page

039i cannot find it can i think project schedules those are the construction projects that have been approved by the state the state has said you have proven the need in terms of capacity to build those schools is that is that fair those are the ones that have been a spot survey has been done on them and gone through the state process okay and then as we move down to page 12 we have projects that we will do the spot surveys and even if the state says you don't need those seats we can still build with the half penny sales tax correct correct so we do have to in my estimation we do have to look to the taxpayers and explain to the taxpayers even though the state said you don't need this we're building it

040anyway and there's the sort of the efficiency we answer to the taxpayers being good stewards of the tax i would i have to assume that these state statutes are in place to keep school districts in check and not building schools that aren't needed so the other side of this is we are supposed to be good stewards of taxpayer dollars and following state statutes really ensures that we do that so i would suggest some kind of an education campaign or some talking points or some explanation we can give to the community as we get into these building projects to to explain why they're needed even though the state didn't say they were needed if i'm making sense thank you those are my comments okay and presenters did you have anything else you needed to add okay

041we really are way over on this and i'm going to thank you very much and school board members yeah and mr rickenbacker is going to come forward to set up his presentation i'm going to remind you that we do want to be cognizant of of time and although it's i love to have the discussions we i am going to start timing if we run way over on this so please be aware of that and if you have any other questions send it on to to the ladies to finish the answers miss fisher welcome we are right now at capital project update and this is mr scott rickenbacker who is the director of construction project management bear with me was shut down so i've got to find it i'm sorry it's got a load yeah you

042need some help with that i can't put it right on the screen make life a lot easier thank you all right good afternoon board members superintendent mrs this is your capital project update for october 2021 lots to talk about pre-k-8 quadruple-a pre-k and estero if you weren't aware we got our approval from the zoning committee of the village of estero on the 12th of october so we've met the needs of the design they've given us our approval and we're moving forward so that was a big accomplishment in addition we received a gmp from the subcontractor and to update you folks it inflation has hit us the assumed gmp i just want to give you some statistics this is our phase one process where we get estimations through the 30 60 and obviously 100 gmp from

043both the architect and from the construction management firm so we started out in schematic design with the architect assuming it would be about 55 million dollars the construction manager thought it would be about 68.8 million dollars that was at about 30 percent schematic design when we got into design development when the drawings came in at 60 the architect rose to 77 million and the construction manager went to 74 million so as they start coming together then construction managers are always going to have more fingers on the pulse of the cost of the market because that's what they do every day for their business so there was and the architect was roughly a 20 increase at that 60 percent station whereas the construction manager had risen about seven percent in his estimation then we got our

044gmp the gmp right now stands at 79.8 million dollars and that's the final gmp that was advertised put out for bid and compiled so i take that number and i now develop a total product cost estimate and right now the total product cost that i'm seeing is approximately 93 million dollars i believe that with some trimming i can get it down to around 92. we're working with our f and e components which is i t and furnishings we usually work with a percentage but we're asking them to tighten that down and come into a number so what i can tell you is because of inflation what you're finding is we've realized about a 14 inflation factor on this project and we always knew that this was going to be the first one out of the

045box that was going to tell the story for the next three years so you can assume an elementary's going to be the price of a middle a middle is going to be the price of a high school and a high school is going to go well over 100 million so i just wanted to give share that with you that's hot off the press we will be doing a formal briefing i believe november 2nd where i will go through the gmp with you and go over all the lines and so forth that are partaking to this before i hopefully bring the total project cost approval for this product to you in december i believe december 7th meeting okay next up cape elementary hvac where you're in the punch list and close out phase right now that's

046getting prepared to go to audit cycles lake high school renovation this is a new project that we took over from maintenance we're out in the field and we're engaging in continuing contracts with vendors and the construction department will be overseeing this for maintenance as part of their budget fort myers high school renovation is preparing to go to internal audit for review we're closing out that job is completed successfully another piping job that my department has taken as overseeing for maintenance will be fort myers high school re-piping again we're meeting with designers we're going out there putting our continuing contracts together and getting that design started fort myers middle school academy another water line renovation that we took over for maintenance we'll be overseeing that and again we're preparing for continuing contract engagement and design documents

047for that fort myers technical college renovation we're right now at about 60 documents drawings were actually about i think i told you this before we're about a million over on what the proposed budget of 12.7 would be so we're looking into grants to help support that project franklin park elementary rebuild all contracts have been executed and right now we're submitting documents and we're getting prepared to issue the notice to proceed which i believe the superintendent's already signed but we sit on it until such a time as all the documents insurance certificates and so forth are in place to begin the work so we're already starting design meetings so that's underway and i believe the movement on this although it hasn't been 100 vetted i believe the movement on this is to stage portables in the

048field across from james stevens that seems to be the most appropriate but you'll be getting briefed on that shortly that would be the closest to the school would have food service has all utilities permitting and driveway access access points already there g weaver hips pre-k elementary edition we're underway and the design meetings have already begun for that edition project as well these are just some of the projects we have a product manager in my staff that is half funded by the capital and also have funded by the food service department with federal funding he oversees these are some of the designs and freezer cooler renovations that we're doing at various schools across the district j elementary and mm new construction we have just received our package our structural package 60 for the drawings we should

049have at probably around january a pretty good feel of where this gmp is going to go we threw some numbers in there so that you can see at 30 percent this is your reporting to you of the cost impact on j elementary and the mm edition you can see right now that on mm the owen ames in kimball is projecting a 3.7 million dollar cost of construction the design team is at 3.7 and on the j elementary the design architect is looking at about 34 and a half million and the architect is at about 34 six and that's because we're having the meetings we're collaborating so they're a lot tighter than i would have expected but that's still working together on there so right now you're seeing about 270 dollars per square foot let's see

050what else can i tell you so where right now that's the station point again that's only 30 drawings as we get further into development at 60 percent those numbers will tighten up a little closer until we get to gmp and i'll report that station to you as well but you can surely anticipate that this is going to have an inflation factor once the gmp goes out to bid as well lee county public education re-roofing i'm sure you're all very aware i hope we're not disrupting your daily work environment or your sense of smell we do start them at 4am in the morning so that they can get all of the major nasty noise and dust done before you all show up for work and then we spend the rest of the day putting back the

051insulation and the first ply roofing to prevent your any floods from coming in the evening and that this job's progressing very well orangewood elementary we just sent out invitations to negotiate for this hvac project so that'll be happening the end of this week and in the middle of next week and the design is about 85 complete okay the duplicate side but that's basically the same same side for the renovation project riverdale high school we've had meetings and we provided staff with two different scenarios that were whittled down from about five to six the scenario that was received was what we call scenario d which was preferential to the school-based administration and what it does is it's going to due to the cost of this project and the engagement in here and the new buildings required

052this too we had a budget of about 41.5 million dollars and this is projecting anywhere from a five to a 15 million dollar increase over the 41 million dollars to do everything that is required for the gym replacement for the seats and replacement which also replace at the end of the game will replace the portables that are out there i believe they have about 14 and it shifts the expands the cafeteria which was severely undersized for a school with that capacity and it also provides where the old gym was that didn't meet the needs and the capacity that will become a multi-purpose room for the school and for testing things that they didn't have those areas before so again that we projected that's been with the direction that we've been given by staff to move

053forward with and we're beginning that design and completing those documents and i will be reporting the estimates and the station costs as we move forward but right now i can tell you it was budgeted for 41.5 totally and already we know that we're going to be somewhere between 5 and 15 million to to perform this schuyler skyline elementary another kitchen project through my project manager cooler freezer replacement tess academy this is another re-piping that we are overseeing for the maintenance department sunshine elementary another cooler freezer you know we do six seven jobs every year with their department so you can see we're keeping up with our cafeteria work three oaks elementary another cooler freezer replacement trafalgar elementary cooler freezer replacement i'm sorry if this gets monotonous but transportation east that job is underway we got

054our approval from traffic some minor striping and we will be starting that job shortly we're collect collecting our insurance our bonds all the contracts have been signed and that will get underway to replace the old rotted portables out in transportation east and provide a new facility for the transportation staff out in that project area tropicals elementary fruit freezer cooler renovation villas elementary another maintenance project that we took over for oversight which is a plumbing upgrade vpaa and old lambs right now we've put an emphasis on the remodeling of the old lambs we've seen the concept drawings we've worked and have had the principal participate in all of our designs it's really coming along nice and i can tell you the project team is excited and i think at the end of the day when we're

055done with this it's going to be a noticeable transformation providing a fresh new look to that campus and that school we're at about and a half million now remember i had 24 million allotted for construction and we've had to add sprinkler in here and do a number of things to really refresh this school so we're at about 11 and a half million is our estimate now it will leave us enough to do a auditorium building however the county has come and asked for that auditorium building to be hardened as a shelter so obviously the remainder of that money will not support the hardening we've alerted eoc planning has a meeting with them i believe tomorrow to talk about that they're working with us they want to be our partner and they certainly don't want to

056affect us so i'll know more as to whether they allow me just to build a standard auditorium building or whether it's going to have to be hard so that'll determine where we go with that and you can see the estimates that were provided for by the architect and the construction manager the architect was at about 9.5 and the construction manager is at 11.5 for construction costs single point entries i told you we had this is all the things that my crew are going out and looking at schools and getting ready for it to really kick off all the single point entries that construction division about 22 projects so you'll see this will be a slide every month you'll see that contracts are issued architects are out there we're preparing the drawings and you'll see that

057move forward there's quite a few a lot of information in there so feel free to look at it you can track where your schools of interest are moving i have in addition we had the construction change order reporting were there any questions on the change order reporting this month any questions board members and i am going to be limiting these to three minutes apiece miss morgan so you're saying that there's a 14 inflation factor for our projects other districts are building schools i assume i know there are some districts that are still expanding are we looking at their per pupil or per station cost versus our per pupil station cost and looking for ways that they might be cutting costs as a result of this inflation factor i just think that continuing to move forward

058with our designs without doing any comps with respect to perhaps innovation or materials or design i just think we need to do that so that's my first comment my second comment is that you may you suggested that we were looking for grants to support the tech college overages my question is of dr savage why aren't we looking for grants before we even start building these schools why aren't we looking for what it is that's out there that may meet our needs we shouldn't be going for grants second that should be upfront with our commitment so those are my two comments thank you okay so mr rickenbacker do you want sure you answer the first one and then quickly i can tell you no we haven't looked at other school districts this right now is a

059market-related issue my partners at the county and other areas have concurred what you're seeing right now to give you for instance liability insurance on this particular project using our comparables from when we do gateway high and mm middle have gone up a million dollars so all these people you saw getting the roofs and the advertisements it's driven the insurance rates through the roof and we're seeing that plumbing pvc piping half a million dollars anything that has metal involved in it has gone up 20 25 30 percent durations to acquire materials as you heard me tell you in the last meeting although we've always been successful in opening the school on the required opening date say august 1st materials lead times could put us in a predicament at some point in time where that's not possible

060we have things doubling generators 44 months elevators 40 months it's roofing materials although we that's why we pre-ordered and stockpiled everything here you can't get roofing materials now so it's it's industry-wide we certainly can provide some data from other districts if you like i'll reach out to our partners but this is a lack of it's supply and demand it's just not the market is depleted yeah and i understand my question's really more for dr savage the question is you know as we look to build five and ten years out you know are we doing the same old same old or are we looking for opportunities and efficiencies etc that take us out of the same old same old and you know support us from a from a cost point of view so that it's really

061not for you i mean i'm interested but i'm more concerned about how we're planning long term thank you absolutely yeah i think that's a fair question just to kind of piggyback on scott's point one of the first things that i did kind of my role was analyze across the state the cost per construction looking for efficiencies where we were over under budgeting relative to the various segments that go into that total cost construction so a good example was that i found that our ffme numbers and our particular projects were actually a substantial culprit in driving up our cost and so while we put that as one of our legislative asks in reality when you look longitudinally backwards that was an opportunity for us to change our percentage that we assigned to that ff e value

062so it's just one example of an efficiency to try to get us in a more responsible place second question that you had specifically about the grants up front i know that a substantial effort on the grants department is just locating grants not just academic but of all different types and sometimes things even referred to as grants state funding opportunities and things like that it's part of why it's so important we work with our county partners as well just because sometimes we're accessible to monies that we wouldn't otherwise have even known so just having stronger partnerships and that effort allows us to benefit mutually for things that have potential shared use you know examples of the storm events that we are so commonly having so mentioning the auditorium the hardening costs there are things referred to

063as grants but in fact allow us to to get dollars whether it's through you know or some of the generator upgrades and things that we've done there's just a substantial opportunity what i would ask is that i'm going to ask the business services and our grants department for something in the board weekly just to kind of dialogue with the board about these are some of the proactive measures we use but i would argue we there's can we never do enough it's very important we continue to push the envelope on that so we'll give you kind of our just a response to that question in the board weekly if that works for the board thanks for now move on okay thank you mrs kittens and then miss jordan okay i have three things but i want

064to make a comment on what miss morgan just said just this week glades county received a 5.8 million grant from the governors from tallahassee to do a technical center personally i feel that's going to hurt our future opportunities to put a technical center in the east zone because right now the 38 percent of the students in fort myers tech part of them are coming from glades and hendry but that's another thing first question was about than now 93 million for quadruple a and i did not see in those current expenditures does that include the steel that we already purchased yes it does okay and the second question about riverdale and this is actually dr savage maybe an academic question how has the opening of gateway affected the numbers at riverdale and the attendance and capacity

065and all that how has that shifted because i know there was a concern of a lot of flight because of a brand new school and something bright and shiny and the third thing i want to mention again is that we are still not addressing the fact that we have not gone to the true community in any viable way to discuss the paa and lambs and especially what is going to happen there and every time i mention it we're just still going ahead with the plan that it will be a multi-school and i just would really like to see having the community truly involved in a couple of events or surveys or whatever it is to see is that what we really are looking at the last thing i'm going to say is my concern about

066bringing all areas of the county resources equitably up to where everyone else is just what mr rickenbacker is saying we are looking at a 14 inflation rate so when we do get ready to build and for example the east zone the costs are going to be up we may end up where we were just before the half cent sales tax so we don't have the money to build the schools just a thought thank you okay so dr savage do you have an answer for mrs sketton's we'll be happy to put all those into the board weekly if you'd like just in terms of the riverdale implication the true community involvement just give staff a chance to respond to those and then for the entire board to be able to read those responses mrs jordan you

067had yeah just a couple please thank you thank you for the presentation really appreciate it with the construction for the single point entry that is just what we're working on now because we still have some of the schools that have not they're not on this list as of yet correct my department's only 22 usually the bigger dollar ones involve multiple trades you have i.t that's doing some work where it just might be a badge swipe or or a door you have maintenance maybe just a single door with a frame that isolates that and then the it people put the badge in so there's a lot more than just the 22 that i show there's probably another 40 other 50 other projects that those other two divisions are managing and trying to expedite and fax track

068those to be complete too within a year okay yeah because first thing i saw was fort myers middle was not here and i know that there's a real issue at that school so thank you for clarifying that and then piping when they're doing the piping have we consider because of the cost is really we know it's skyrocketed now pipelining or other ways of doing the construction correct different products we do pipelining on our storm sewers and water mains that just physically can't be interrupted at this point in time but this is actually in the food service area where the piping is failing pvc is still your best bet cheapest bet it's gone up but copper has gone up even more substantially and is more labor intensive so everything we do is economy to scale you

069know we try to give you something that inside the classroom is the best classroom you can have i prefer not to spend a lot of money on the outside be frugal and economical which we do with our air conditioning systems our insulation systems and that's been our direction since i've been here since 2004. so you know we get some things where the county in areas they like a little cheesecake on the face of the building to break it up so it doesn't look like a box i think we've accomplished that for example the village of estero didn't particularly like our architectural design they thought it was institutional well last time i checked schools are institutional but you know i try to emphasize that we're not building a beautiful princeton campus with brick and eaves and

070go you know we're here to educate kids and best utilize that funding and i think we accomplish that okay thank you and then my last thing is i was always excited when i see franklin park on here and the fact that we would be moving into marsh avenue across from the other school that would then take it dr savage take it into a different zone so i guess when we do the workshop we'll figure how that's all going to work with the busing because that is a different that street itself is a different zone for the schools yes i don't believe that it's actually been decided yet it's just one of the opportunities just because of the current as as mr rickenbacker said the plumbing the site it's all available for me all the things

071that we already would need to have in place would certainly be a logical opportunity but we have to look at all those pieces well and that would certainly be part of the workshop material so well our biggest problem with that is because we if we were even lease a property and there were properties in and about franklin parks that we looked at i now have to go to the county i have to do an ldo potentially all that time creating those access points and the utilities that get that site could push that school out another year or two no yeah we don't want to do that exactly so from a perspective of being relatively close to the old campus food service meaning the kitchen of james stevens i would think that would be your best

072bet i'm with you there thank you just looking forward to questions mrs patricka so two quick ones the first is as you talked about the renovations at riverdale today and i envisioned their gymnasium workout area i think there's like a special weight room for the what for the wrestlers do you know what i'm talking about yeah this is this is separate from the wrestling building that they have out there this is this is their existing locker in gymnasium which was underside i believe they only had bleachers on one side this is getting rid of that because the locker rooms are shot the gym is undersized can't support real true games and but similar to what we did at dunbar high we took a building that was approved to be demolished by castaldi but we left

073it and mr burnside turned it into a multi-purpose room where he does all his sat testing and the testing and so forth and he actually utilized it with kovid because he pulled the kids from the larger cafeteria into there for that separation so it's not just a secondary gym they use it as a multi-purpose space okay and then my next comment i think is for dr savage so as much as i hate to bring this up bonita springs high school i remember looking at the per student station cost to build that school and comparing it to the per student station cost of other high schools across the state and that really was very convincing and really illustrated to me the gross underestimation of the initial cost to build i'm not saying there was a gross

074underestimation here i understand the process of coming together in inflation and all of that what i'm wondering dr savage is whether when you come in front of the board to brief us on that gmp could you try to find similar costs across the state with the understanding that other districts as ms morgan said are building right now so what is their gmp per student station cost yeah i would i am happy to get with mr rickenbacker offline and kind of reach out to other districts that are in experiencing some level growth or construction that would have similar markets to us and so i think there's an opportunity for us to bring at least some data and some information to help frame for the board great and then we're happy to do that thank you correct

075i can just share with you that my original budget estimate a year ago was 84 million dollars without inflation so if you attack about 14 percent on that'll tell you where we're at today okay anybody else we're gonna have to limit because we're way could you please miss kittens just email it to mr rickenbacker i have just a quick question please is it really quick well by the time you keep asking us yeah why don't you email it to him because we are timing this we're way over okay mr rickenbacker did you have anything more thank you okay and okay so then we're ready for the next presentation which is this is our main large presentation for today which is redistricting overview and this is our second oops i am so sorry that is my

076i'm actually timing my timer going off so if they will please get set up and we have a lot yet after this on our agenda and we're running about 25 or so minutes behind so i'm adam vice chair just i'm trying to sort out what i'm observing over on the other side here so i think maintenance just because miss sedania was here was the second half of that capital project update i think mr rickenbacker left off so i think i was just going to say that okay i was one i thought he was going to present on on that because that's the way it read on my script here so i apologize map redistricting people we can go ahead and finish the other presentation the other part good afternoon board members doc dr savage and

077fellow colleagues with me jimmy mr jimmy thompson and myself barbara sedina from maine student services we're both the administrators for the department we'll try to make this quick i understand your time is kind of short today go ahead i'm i'm going on the written script and i'm sorry your name wasn't on the script that i have but no by all means we need to hear from you okay thank you all right so some of it is just an it's a refresh of where we left off with some of the other projects that were mentioned at the previous presentation the first slide that we have here is for cape coral high school it's a sewer reclaimed water connection project that we're taking that's taking place concurrently a site service being performed in order to finalize the

078aspel drawings that are needed in order to submit a set of drawings to the city of cape coral for permitting our drawing process of finalization of that we're thinking it's going to take about eight weeks construction part of it will take also about another eight weeks this work is actually going to involve disconnecting and removing existing drain fields and septic tanks and connection to city sewer and reclaimed water for sports field okay this new system will serve as the new primary irrigation system for the campus challenger middle school is our next project and this is also one of the refreshes it's an update from the previous meeting and it is for gutter upgrades at this location concurrently we are waiting on materials once we receive the materials the contractor will be able to commence the

079fabrication that is necessary for the gutters and the downspouts afterwards we're going to be scheduling a pre-construction meeting this project is for the whole campus and where the total linear footage for this project is going to be approximately one thousand two hundred and fourteen linear feeds of gutters that we're anticipating and installing a lot of the ghosts i'm sorry a lot of the downspouts that are there are in good condition so we would not have to replace those areas so we will be utilizing those that's at the site next project as well as also a gutter project and we're actually ahead of schedule on this one when we submitted our powerpoint we have a date of 10 18 as a project start date but actually we have already completed this project so my apologies for

080the incorrect date on the slide this project entailed 752 linear feet of gutters as well as 480 linear feet of downspouts that needed to be installed additionally with the installation of the down spot some of the things that were migrating to is to actually when we do the downspout design we're cutting into the concrete sidewalks in order to install a corrugated drainage pipe in order to get the water away from the campus and away from those areas to avoid erosion in those in those green grass areas at the campus the next slide is for hancock creek elementary school as well this is a gutters upgrade project this project actually entails about 1023 linear feet of gutter space linear feet of gutters that is going to be installed this would also include installation of downspouts as

081well as some concrete work that will be needed in order to accommodate the drainage pipes that are necessary to avoid erosion at this location concurrently we're waiting for materials we have slightly re revise our start dates our underground drainage work would actually commence on eleven five thereafter we're going to it's going to take about eight weeks to perform this project and one of the things that's going to be unique about this project is that we're going to have to do the work after hours from about 5 p.m to 2 a.m in order to accommodate the school functions and school events that are taking place this project taking place at this time will not interrupt the school operations next campus where we're performing a gutter upgrades is lexington middle school priest construction meeting will take place

082tomorrow at 9 30 a.m pretty much during our construction pre-construction meetings we're going over work hours project layouts operations of the schools what's taking place so that we can work around those schedules this location is a larger project we're anticipating about 2 458 linear feet of gutters to be installed in approximately 1 680 linear feet downspout to be installed the existing gutters were made of steel have been been impacted by environmental conditions as well as sediment that's set at the bottom of the gutters so the new materials that's being utilized is an aluminum that's more suitable for this region our next project is littleton elementary school as this is also a gutters upgrades project this is for the entire campus this project is actually going to entail about 1 123 linear feet of aluminum gutters

083as well as the concrete work that's going to be needed for the corrugated pipes for drainage work as well will also be performed after 5 pm in order to not interfere with the school schedules underground work is going to be commencing november 18th through december 7th afterwards they're going to be doing the upper work which is more of the gutter and downspout sections of the project part of the problem here as well similar to other campuses is erosion of the sidewalk surfaces that was taking place as well as we had algae build up on the sidewalks limited on safer walking conditions our next project is pelican elementary school it's a playground equipment installation we actually had to demo the existing playground and this involved installation of a new system for the for the students some

084of the issues that we experienced there with rusty surfaces in the platform as well as the verb coating on some of the surfaces were also deteriorated and in very poor condition for the most part this project is almost complete we still have to perform a final walk through and close out this project our next project is the tanglewood elementary school pe pavilion our drawings are about 97 complete the next step of this project will be to provide the drawings to the contractor in order to obtain a proposal to obtain the physical work this model of this pavilion is actually going to be about 56 by 60 in size it will mimic the same designs that are currently being used by the construction services team associated with this project we're also going to include a bathroom

085and storage building for the for the pavilion and pretty much it will be one male one female one storage area as well as one pe office for that location our next one is the three oaks elementary school this is actually a gym roof renovation project we're still in the earlier stages of this project right now we're still working on finalizing some of the work authorizations and in order to obtain the proper proposal from the general contractor the next the next slide is for tyse elementary school this project is on hold until summer we had to push this project out because of the time that it's gonna that's needed to in order to perform this work and this work is actually gonna require about four weeks for completion basically with this system we're converting a two

086piston system elevator to a one piston system some of the problems that we were experiencing there is that there was a misalignment of the pistons so as the elevator is trying to to operate it's not syncing with each other so that was causing us a problem so therefore we're going to be converting that to system approach to a one-piston approach trafalgar middle school this is another gutters project same similar situation is happening at the other campuses problems with sidewalk water falling on the sidewalks creating erosion there this work will also include downspouts and gutters insulation and new drainage to carry away the water from the buildings concurrently we're waiting on materials thereafter fabrication will take place of those materials in order for us to prepare for installation our last slide for this afternoon will be

087for varsity links middle school lehigh senior it's actually a traffic improvement project this is actually a three-phase project that we're working on for phase one involved the concrete barriers on the southern side of the varsity lakes middle school entrance this part has already been completed the second phase that we're working on is the design work for the new pedestrian walkways and the new roadway for the buses the phase two design options what we have remaining are the we have like two different options of how the roadway would actually be laid out so between safety plan safety department and planning department as well as maintenance we're working collaboratively in order to arrive at the best solution for those roadways and last the third phase of that project will pretty much be construction just to make you

088know get everything done that was per the designs all right thank you very much okay anybody have any questions for mrs fisher thank you i don't have a question but i have a comment i just commented to superintendent savage that i had visited maintenance and i'm really quite amazed at the work that's going on there so i want to thank you guys for your diligence and for for such a detailed presentation and explanation of the problem thank you very much thank you thank you anybody else yeah and i was just going to say you make gutter upgrades and roof replacements sound about as exciting and fun as they can thank you really the comprehensive updates are essential for us so we really appreciate it thank you my pleasure anybody else with question or comment yes

089comment as well just thank you so much for this is great information and i don't recall ever receiving it like this and the depth that is i see that we're waiting on a lot of materials i think they're over out in the ocean floating around probably but i know they'll get here someday so much thank you thank you have a great afternoon everyone okay so now we are going to move on to our redistricting you okay and we have four people here that are presenting i think all the same as i have on my list mr jared edy who is the director of diversity and inclusion miss kathy eba who is the director of planning growth and capacity dr denise carlin who is chief of staff go ahead and introduce yourself i'm sorry and david

090cates with davis demographics oh thank you i didn't didn't recognize you and i knew you weren't kathy and also our attorney our board attorney kathy dupree bruno thank you very much and good afternoon board members dr savage and attorney daprie bruno it's nice to be with you today for our second conversation relative to redistricting we're going to go ahead and jump right into our agenda because you can see that it is very full we have 90 minutes with you today and i think we will use every bit of it so we are going to start this afternoon by just a quick review all good teachers always go back and review so we'll do that for the first moment or so with mr edie miss ebau and mr cates we will move on to some legal

091advice from attorney dupree bruno there were a couple of questions asked last time and so we want to make sure we pick those up for you we were expecting we're hoping that we were able to have the county with us today their meeting ran pretty late and so they were not able to join us but miss eba and mr cates will jump in and present map six a and six b we will talk with you a little bit about school district comparisons we took a little spin looked at large districts as well as some of our similar districts in terms of a hybrid model of at large and single member districts and so we did some homework on that for you we'll show you some of that data as well we're going to talk with

092you about some of our considerations and really walk through each of the maps and look at some strengths and opportunities within those maps and we'll have you have a conversation you do have a handout that was provided to you that talks about redistricting criteria so as we go through the strengths and opportunities we'll ask you to use that as your lens when you're identifying the strengths and opportunities for the maps we will talk with you about a little revision to our timeline based on some of the information that has come forward and some of the proposals that we have for you today and then any comments and questions we'll wrap up our 90 minutes together so at this time i'm going to turn it over to mr edie who's going to walk us through a

093part of our review followed by mrs eba good afternoon board members dr savage attorney bruno just to wrap up our conversation that we had a few weeks ago an important notation for our redistricting process lets us know that in varying stages the board has taken the direction of adopting the maps proposed by the county and then providing similar provisions for county staff to provide alternatives from a school district level i should say alternatives for their consideration we're now in the process of looking at redistricting numbers thanks to the 2020 census and the 2020 census conversation of which attorney bruno will talk about a little bit further lets us know that the board has a prerogative to redraw residence area boundaries and years that are odd number of years an important consideration also is that no

094one of our district or as for our work here board member residents area may be more substantially than the others and our optimum number is around 152 000 constituents for your district or once again for our conversation your residence areas so to go a little bit further miss ebau is going to review some of the demographic information that we discussed in our previous conversation good afternoon once again so david please jump in as all right this is what we presented to you a couple weeks ago we'll quickly just go through this information the slide you see here with the map on the front was provided initially by the county with the numbers this is essentially your current boundaries with the 2010 and now the 2020 census you can see the differences you were in compliance

095as of this 2010 census and you're out it's out of whack if you will looking at the new 2020 these are the numbers here you see on the screen a reference to your current boundaries and the variance or how far you off of around the target which i think i was 152 000 would be the average but dividing your total population by five and you can see where the arrows are pointing those are the ones that are quite a bit over or under so that essentially initiates the process of you having to look at new boundaries if these were all very low like one percent or less then your boundaries would more or less be in compliance and you can maintain your same boundaries because of your population growth you do need to make some

096changes and then this also is a slide put together by the county it's hard for me to read all the numbers up there but essentially it shows you your population differences between the two decades and the change in your the racial and ethnic breakdowns of your county over the last 10 years just this is and just i want to emphasize i know this might be mentioned later on whoever does do this work whether it's the county consultant or whatnot we're required to have to look at population and then once we look at balancing those then we can look at the racial ethnic breakdowns but these are not used for the actual creation of the boundaries they're more supplemental information okay good afternoon everyone so the first question that was asked is what standards must a

097redistricting process apply and the most important thing and it really does kind of go back to what we were just talking about it's the equal population that's the first thing and that is the mandatory legal requirement is to make sure that we the districts are as equally populated as possible the other thing that we need to consider is what we call diluting the vote and there's two particular ways that happens one is packing and one is cracking so cracking is when you split a minority community and then packing is when you have a minority community but you add additional votes to try to dilute the strength of that vote so a lot of times the litigation that we see is based on the packing and the cracking make sure that the boundaries are continuous and

098that we follow the 14th amendment due process as well as the second the voters act second section and this is where it also gets very very complicated because this is that delegate stands the balance that we were talking about before race can be used as a as something that you look into that you consider but it cannot be the only factor that you consider when you're looking at your redistricting and the reason is because of the 14th amendment that says that you cannot discriminate based on race and then of course your voting rights act says that based on the history and this is why the voting rights act came into being you can't try to dilute the vote or prevent minorities from being able to vote with what they used to do with the polling

099taxes and things of that nature so that's that's pretty much the gist of what the redistricting process is next slide this is this is the next line oh all right so additional factors that we need to consider so one thing is to be as compact as possible when you're trying to get your districts together and the other is we have to be careful with what they call gerrymandering which is when you're carving out these weird types of districts for a particular purpose and a lot of times is to dilute the vote so you want to follow as much of the natural boundaries as possible that's one of the defenses and preserve as much of the existing boundaries that you possibly can as well as trying to avoid splitting communities of interest a lot of times

100you have a community minority community they have same interests same desires and you want to try to keep them as much as possible again and this kind of goes back again to the cracking and the packing that we were talking about i talked already a little bit about the voting rights act another question that was posed was can we follow the county's maps absolutely you can follow the county's map if the county's maps are legally sufficient and the board feels that this is in their best interest and that this is how you want to design your districts you're absolutely able to follow those maps or create your own maps or keep your current map but you'll have to make sure that you have that balance if you're going to to do that so just a

101quick update as to where the board is with in relationship to the county's activities they following their october 5th public hearing they agreed to development of a map six which they actually end up creating a 6a and a 6b which we will go over in just a second then today they had a another hearing where they reviewed map 6 and 6 bay they also had a number of constituents speak about the process and what the direction and propose different comments including a map that was presented to presented by the naacp it wasn't necessarily when in detail but there was it was discussed by the constituents and then and then there at today's hearing there was also a map presented by commissioner hammond which he and his staff developed we have we are aware of both

102of these maps but we have yet to have a chance to really evaluate the maps and so we won't be presenting or discussing them today it is our goal to get the maps to be able to evaluate them we understand that the county has commissioner hammond's map in is going to be assessing the demographics assessing the capacity and all of the other information about that in preparation for their next meeting which is november 2nd as a result of today's meeting they agreed to evaluate maps one two three four five the naacp map and commissioner hammond's map they are not going to continue to consider maps 6 and 6b which we'll be discussing in just a second and then after the november 2nd meeting at the november 16th hearing they intend to select their new jurisdictional

103boundaries whether was there a question do you want to entertain questions now or do you want us to finish let's finish first thank you so map 6a is this one and then map 6b is this one the difference between the two maps is if you look at the boundary between district 3 and district 2 it carves the district just a little bit differently district 2 comes all the way down in in map b and you get a little bit more of the iona mcgregor in map a the goal as we understand it of the sixth map was they were trying to see if there was a way that they could combine the city of fort myers and the community of lehigh acres in one jurisdictional boundary area but the population of fort myers and lehigh

104is too big to have it be in one jurisdictional area and therefore you can see in both of these 6a and 6b options the south west the southeast corner of lehigh ends up going into a different district so it does in order to to do this they're able to keep you know a lot of the population together of the communities of lehigh and fort myers but they do have to take the community that is in the south east corner of lehigh and merge it into district 2. one of the things that you asked of us at our last meeting was to was a question about how does our process similar or differ from other school districts so we looked at a number of school districts both in terms of size in terms of its proximity

105to us and in terms of the kind of jurisdictional makeup it has in relationship to the counties and here are the responses of this i'm not going to go through each one of these they were presented to you in your packet but one of the couple of the significant things i wanted to point out is hillsboro is actually waiting until 2023 by statute we can only do redistricting in odd years so because we got our census data so late this year that means we have till december 31st just over two months from now to complete this effort it doesn't give us a lot of time hillsborough is the one jurisdiction that we talked to that decided that because they have so little time they are actually going to wait until 23 they're going to use

10622 as they're typically you have nine months or so to do the evaluation when you get the census data in the springtime so they're going to use 22 as their evaluation year and then they will adopt their new districts in the 20 in 23. you can see that in terms of school districts and whether or not they share or are different from the counties it's kind of it's pretty split they're it's kind of a 50 50. there are 50 percent of them who are similar to us where they have single same will member and at large there are some that have just single members and there are some that have just at large but it's definitely across the board and it doesn't really follow you know we looked we tried to look at patterns if

107it's larger districts or if it's smaller distress if it's more urban districts or more suburban or rural districts there really isn't a trend as to why different districts decide to do things either same or same or different or the type of jurisdictions that they have it really is a local determination that each district decides they also some of them have been the same as their county but either in the in the recent changes or in this one they're looking to go in a different direction but it really is a local determination so if i could just add to that kathy some of them actually have court orders that date back long time ago that they have to basically redistrict at certain times like miami-dade for example they have a very specific court order from 1994

108that requires them to do certain actions and take certain steps so that could be why we have some of the differences from the districts and so this is the ones that are under 600 000 but many of these are close to us so you're if there are any specific questions about this we're happy to take it but we just we tried our best to get as as good as sampling as we could from jurisdictions across the state okay any specific questions about this segment anybody okay mrs kittens well i do think i was at the meeting this morning and i believe they're going to be putting up commissioner hammond's map on their website by this afternoon is what they inform me and i think it's worth the board at least taking a look at it

109he did include quite a few of the things that we mentioned and make sure that they were in place so i would just suggest that you do take a look at that i'm not sure where we are on this today are we supposed to be leaving here i see as we go further down there's comments about each of the maps is it the goal of the board today to leave here having selected one way or the other or a map or another what is our goal now what so this was just the information part of the presentation the next section is that dr carlin is going to lead and i will be capturing your notes you'll be able to see your comments as on the screen as you're making them we're going to lead you

110in a discussion we have three options for you one moving forward there's three options you can either adopt what the county adopts you can utilize one of the counties map but adopt something that's different or you can create your own what we want to do today is dr carlin is going to lead in a discussion and we're going to start with map 1 and we're going to go through map 6b we're not going to do the naacp map or commissioner hammond's map because we just received those and we don't have enough information to present to you at this time but we would like to have a discussion about the strengths and weaknesses of each of these maps just so that we can start learning what it is that you think about these maps this isn't

111we're not making a determination today we're not making any final decisions today we just want to have a discussion about where you think about the maps that have been presented to date are so at that dr carlin if i'm going to turn it over for you and then i'll capture your comment the comments may i finish my comment please you know i understand what we're going to do what i am not so much asking you as the board when we leave here what is our timeline you're saying it has to be in odd years which gives us to the end of this year the county commission is doing theirs on the 16th how quickly or do we have a deadline do we have a timeline are we going to decide to do it in 21

112or wait till 2000 you know or 23 that's what i'm asking is do we have a timeline now to look at all of this and to make some decisions before the end of this year or put it on and if i may i can add to some provide you with some information where we're headed so we skipped to the end of our presentation just to give you a feel so if we do go with the county one of their maps their map you know however we choose if it's aligned with the county then we will continue to stay on track as we shared with you with the exception of a november 3rd board briefing which we are going to request as a special briefing and here's why we did receive a request as i hinted

113to you last week from the naacp on november 2nd they would like to come and present and because they are within the time frame as specified by board policy we are allowing for that to occur we have had some links of some other groups that may want to come and present and so we are going to certainly allow them the opportunity to submit a proposal so with that caveat in mind we would be on track you know to continue if we go with the county on november 16th we'd come back what do you think you know let's let's get some consensus around one of the maps and then we would move forward with december 7th toward adoption if there is a desire to go with another map let's say there's you know the nc naacp

114map another map that maybe that davis constructs for you then that will push our timeline back we do feel confident we can have that done by the end of the year so what that timeline would look like is again november 2nd we would have our community group presentations on the third again a special briefing so that we could go back and look through you know any of those maps we weren't able to pick up to analyze and double acp map to analyze commissioner hammond's map and any other map that you might want to consider at that point if there's other community groups that have come forward november 30th or excuse me november 16th we would come back and we would say okay anything additional and then november 30th is when davis had said if you

115do go with your own map he does need the time between november 3rd and november 30th to put that map together so let's say you say i don't like any of the options we're going to go with something different he does need some lead time to be able to do that so we would land here in a special briefing on november 30th where he would unveil that based on your direction on the 16th and then that still puts us into unfortunately it would be a special meeting but fortunately we have the time december 14th we would recommend coming back for the final public hearing and then a special meeting at that time and that would be to adopt the map that you all have created via davis so just to to go to mrs kitten's

116question you know we do have a way forward for you but again i'll throw it back to you for discussion with mrs kitten's question are we doing it now or you know waiting until 2023 well it basically is on your one slide where you're saying we have three options but those three options cannot be fulfilled today because we don't have all the information that's correct and we are really not looking to you today to make a decision today's really our focus is to analyze each of the maps that we currently have and the maps that we had prior to noon today and then we will certainly we can come back like i suggested on november 3rd and have another analysis of any additional maps that have come forward so that's just our proposal but we

117turn it over to you for that discussion okay does anybody else have a question before dr carlin moves on yes miss patricka so attorney dupree bruno on slide 10 if i can go back to it and figure out what my question was which slide is that side 10 please they're not numbered what's the title oh what traditional factors may a redistricting process apply thank you compact and significant natural a valid underlining public policy purpose does that include increasing minority representation on is that considered a valid yes underlying public okay because a legal test is compelling state interest so that would be part of that compelling state interest to increase the strength of the minority vote in that community interest okay and then gerrymandering yes is that it cannot be viewed in two ways is it

118gerrymandering only when we draw lines to dilute minority vote or is it gerrymandering if we draw lines to increase minority vote it can be challenged both ways okay those are my questions thank you okay anybody else before we continue all right dr carlin all right let's take a deep dive then move ahead all right terrific so as i mentioned before you do have redistricting criteria just for ease in a hard copy beside you and basically what we did was we took mrs dupree bruno slides and reduced those into a one page worksheet so as we go through each of the maps miss eba is going to scribe we'll have strengths and challenges so we would ask at this time that you pull up map one and again using the redistricting criteria as the basis for

119your strength or opportunity we would ask for your input okay the first one the main thing that i see on that is that it does split up fort myers and portions i believe of the of the fort myers and dunbar area into three different zones and districts so that's a challenge is there any way that i have to i'm a visual and i know where everything is if i see streets is there a way that we can pull this up on our own to see what streets these are because i know what miss kitten just said which when i'm looking at this it would only divide it into that particular area into two but if i don't see the street names it's really hard for me to is there a way that i can that

120i can pull that up i mean without looking at this map pull up my old maps is there a way to zoom in i know you're showing that slide there to zoom in for them do they have like a gis or the county maps try it on the website just for them just i don't think i can i like him yeah only gov i can't yeah if you could might be able to zoom in if you're looking on your own it's if it's in pdf form you should be able to zoom in and the name should pop up better yeah even when i zoomed it in as far as it could go i still don't see streets and i'm assuming i'm not streaming personally online it may show it more clearly if you want to

121check that oh let me see i'm sorry i should have asked this question before i mean i could hand it to him am i allowed to i see i happen to have a copy of the report that the county put out about a month ago it's hard to kind of even see the names are on there it's a hard copy i can hand it to you and you can see if that'll help you is that okay and while mrs jordan is looking is there any other strength or opportunity for map one anything else that you see that is a strength or any concerns that you have necessarily about this map okay miss kittens the other concern i believe one of the criteria was compact boundaries and then something to do with community or whatever and

122that district five is an absolutely huge area on the south side of lehigh that other additional yellow includes a very large area a corkscrew road down to the county line there's immense amount of housing and development down there that is different demographically from lehigh and buckingham and el alva so it's if we're talking about like groups it's not and so anyway i just think it's pretty large and it does not have the same focus okay thank you miss kittens anybody else miss vaughn if i may a vice chair yes it's mr savage over here just so there's an awareness miss jordan asked about whether or not there are any maps where you can actually zoom in and see the street names and whatnot so on the leagov.com website under the redistricting portal that they have

123just going down a ways you'll find one of the links is an interactive map and it has all the commission district alternatives with the census blocks when you click on that particular link it allows you to zoom in all the way in you can see individual street names it has different overlays similar to what we've done with proximity plan creating a gis map that davis demographics did for our work this has those various different overlays and it gives you a chance to kind of explore beyond what we're able to hear to do today it's also something that the public at home who has any particular interest very easy to navigate very intuitive so it's on that league of website and it does it's an arcgis map okay thank you okay so we are looking for

124any other strengths thank you or challenges and if you'll let us know which it is if it's a strength or a challenge which one are we on map one still on the first map well i mean go ahead district one is huge too it's not just district five that's not compact district one is massive i think about the person working out there trying to cover that whole area that's tough but remember you're looking at the equal population too understood and that's the plus the pluses it's pretty close to equal population you might i'd like to make one little comment about the compactness issue just to make a clear i mean in fact if you read the cat the report of the from the county they do a paragraph on what compactness is and how they

125analyze it's not so much the size the sheer size of it's more imagine drawing a circle around a zone and if the idea is that compact it could be very large but still could be kind of drawn a circle around it the idea is areas that are very lengthy i don't know how to describe it north south east west those are not circle shaped they're less compact so i don't want you to get confused that it's very large it could still be compact and be large because that is could be a very not very populated areas of a district could be large so compactness the idea was not to make sure you have very thin long boundary lines that's the concept behind the compactness okay i believe miss fisher had a comment a question no

126he took care of it thank you oh i thought you did i'm sorry anybody else okay can we move on okay let's move on to map two then so we're gonna move on to the next slide that shows us map two alternative two and we will go ahead and let's this time let's start with strengths if there are strengths of this map that you see let's go ahead and start with just strengths okay who wants to begin okay this year yeah i just have a question dr carlin so as we're looking at these maps and we have the redistricting criteria in front of us it might be helpful if we kind of go through and you give us an example of what you mean by strengths and challenges because if we're looking at you know

127the population is the big thing and that's was determined by the census so now we have a variety of differences in each zone i know like i'm district one and it's a huge area but a lot of it is water and islands so the population is more concentrated and you know i might say well the cape as you know it and where the population is has been divided you know what i'm saying so i think we have to keep our minds open that this is a global thing and that each voting district in each area is unique and so i think if we had an example of what you're looking for in terms of strength and challenges that might be a little bit helpful yes so that's a great question so a couple of things

128we've heard just listening to the county commission meetings and talking with some of our you know our constituents our colleagues would be things like the city of fort myers for example if you look at district four there has been a significant amount of community conversation around should the city of fort myers stay intact or should it be should it move to an adjacent district and so that would be an example perhaps of either depending on how you view that a strength or a challenge you know if i feel like the city should move and go with another adjacent district then i might see that particular area as a as a challenge if i believe that it is where it should be then that would could be perceived as a strength so then that being said

129i would ask it then when we look at that the city of fort myers has a very con condensed population and it has a high minority population so i think we have to be really careful about the pac cracking and packing so i don't know if anyone has any comments regarding that i mean because that is an issue and always has been you know is that particular location has always been a little bit divided you know when even when we were back to busting and busting kids to other areas so i think if that's what we're trying to avoid is cracking then what's the response to that and i don't know if davis demographics has some insight into that kind of a thing well referring back to that document that the county published about a

130month ago in that document they actually have the breakdown of the race and ethnicity so all the information for all these first five scenarios are in there so your answers to it's really to be really honest it's really simple first and foremost it's to divide these equally in terms of population and once that's done and it was done already at least seven times by the county the next once you do that is then you can unveil the racial ethnic information and i know at least in that first report they did it for the first five so all those answers is really all you could really provide one of those two and then it's up to you to determine physically where the lines are drawn do you like it or not but at least you know

131that these have all been vetted through their the legal counsel they would not be produced for the county commissioners to vote on unless their legal counsel has approved this so whether you like it or not that's another that's kind of what this is about what you like or don't like about the maps but yes to answer your other question the racial and ethnic information is supplemental and it's there in that report i don't have it handy i know i handed my copy of the report to one of your board members but it is in the county report thank you another example i might offer miss fisher is i looked at the third component of the criteria boundaries that follow prominent physical features so there might be a conversation around the rivers or some of those

132natural features like i like that part or i don't like that part because it encroaches on the river takes me over the river or it keeps it on the one side so there might be some feeling one way or another from the board on that yes thank you okay and i'll get to those i just wanted to see if we had gotten information from the city of cape coral or the city of fort myers excuse me madison here my comment had to do what they just said well i'm asking for some information and we'll get back to you in just a minute miss kittens so it is our understanding that they are still undergoing their work in that regard but we will you know once they went there to the point where they are feeling

133comfortable like we have made some decisions or at least we've got some consensus we will continue to follow up with all them mrs patricka so you asked for positives right yes please so as i look at the list it appears to stay close to the core existing boundaries and it appears to and i don't i don't know this to be fact you can correct me if i'm wrong it appears to avoid splitting communities of interest so of the four on the list it appears to do those two things thank you very much i can't tell a map i can't tell a river from a street from a highway on these maps so i can't i can't talk to natural boundaries okay mrs kittens okay it does separate communities of similar interest the fact that boundaries

134that follow permanent physical features on one side it does because it uses 75 and 82 which are major roads and that part is good however crossing the river and having a section of one land mass being with a another land mass on the other side of the river is an issue and there are not the same concerns or issues etc on the that one section of fort myers that's with kate corll okay okay all right miss jordan is your hand up i was but i just i can't i guess i'm blind i just can't see what i'm looking at because i at first it looked like fort myers was separated by i guess that's 41 that i'm looking at which i at first i didn't realize that it was i see where the bridge is

135at but i was thinking it was separating it does separate part of fort buyers because it doesn't go across i guess 41 so it's just the east side of 41. it looks like so i guess this is kind of where we're at right now similar except for this is encompassing thais now which it did not before okay so are you i don't know if it's good i'm speaking i'm talking about it i don't even i can't really answer that right now i'm just talking out loud so i apologize okay is there anybody else that has a challenge or a strength to add for this map okay let's go on to the next one then okay so now we're looking at map three and we'll start with any strengths that you see of map three okay

136he wants to begin okay this is morgan so to me the strength is that fort myers is all together and it also lehi drops down the way ms gittin suggested incorporating that community on the bot on the southern edge other than that i know so little about some of these areas of the county in a really specific way i can't comment so okay we've got that one all right any other strengths or challenges we'll take both okay i think the strength is that it does keep fort myers and all of that area together the for the most part district five is together a weakness to me is how far over it goes in the north i know particularly that straight line down there is more than likely slater road that's pretty far over into the

137cape area and this may be something for mr that would not be slater i'm sorry yeah it's not slater suncoast okay well it's slater was the boundary before so now it's further west than it was that's correct i know for sure very distinctly where that is and having to campaign all up in that area again the section on the other side of 75 is my only concern because the issues etc etc are different than those on the other side otherwise the two positives are 82 as a boundary and the fact that all of fort myers is in one i don't see where the cutoff is i think this may have been one of the ones where does this cut off miss off mcgregor does this affect you miss juvenile challenge is that district one is

138now comes across the river okay that's a challenge actually probably more for district one then district it encroaches district two which is but it's the river that you know bringing people into fort myers that's okay that's physical boundaries we're talking about don't please don't talk over each each other so for first miss kittens did had you finished and i don't go to miss juvenelli she asked me a question oh sorry i'm sorry i asked that attack they came over and closed them okay other comments questions yes miss morgan i'm not sure what has just been said but i would look at the river and the cape and the cape is really changed by this map it comes across the river on one side and then it looks like it's cut off yes on the northeast

139edge so i don't know what miss fisher's reaction to that is well okay you have a reaction mrs fisher yeah the reaction i have as i look at this one map number three and i see that district four you know is now incorporating a lot more the central part of the cape which is high population and then it is crossing the river and coming into the cypress area and i've always had like sanibel and boca grande and all that for a time there was fort myers beach and then there wasn't and so now that's incorporated again i mean it's a change but i think if it meets all the we're not looking at necessarily i don't know how to say this but the cape is big and we have over 200 000 people there now

140so the communities and neighborhoods are more neighborhood oriented and the communities are more spread we have the largest second largest area land mass in the state of florida so i think it would work i mean that's my reaction okay go ahead miss kittens and this may they may be for mr davis as i'm looking at this mistake i'm a little confused about the numbers district 2 is minus 1196 from the goal of what 150 152 whereas district 4 is actually smaller but because of the number of people it's only 832 is that's 832 under the target i'm confused about the numbers for district 4 in district 5. am i looking at this wrong district 5 has 153 which is the most but it's 12 44. i think what's happening they're not saying plus or minus

141of the goal is that right right the way this was set up by the county i don't have the exact number but roughly 152 000 is the target right and you're allowed a i think about a one or two percent variance and that's why you'll see some are a little larger some a little smaller but they're still still within the acceptable variance see what i would like to see is this map taking from starting in the north coming down 75 and to see what would the numbers look like if that if that orange section to the west of 75 was included in the cape because the thing is we don't know how many people that is there a way to to do that to see that's there's a lot of people in that area so

142sorry miss one yeah if you went and created your own maps we can do that the county might be able to quickly get you that answer that might be the route i would go first and ask the county specific parameters or areas and say how many live within that area and they can probably get you that okay yeah all right thank you and that the where the river is between four and two that yellow spreads all over is the is the yellow on the other side a portion of the north side of the river as well i don't think so the river is all in the jurisdiction of the fort myers but the boundary line is the land so the way this map is capturing the map is capturing jurisdictional lines so it's capturing the

143river which is in the city of fort myers but it stops at the at the land which is so and the other thing you were asking about the pluses and minuses the way the county has set these maps up is that if there is a negative in front of it that means it's a negative to the goal of 152. so for example in district 2 it's a negative 1196 that means it's 1196 under the goal where the 1245 which doesn't have a plus or minus it is assumed that it's plus because it doesn't have a negative so that one in district five is 1244 over so if it has a negative it's under the target if it has no marking what positive or negative it's assumed positive okay to me this one i mean you

144know i can live with it because of the things i've said previously if we were to either ask if the county or if we were to adjust it there's a few adjustments that i would make but that's my comment on that one okay and i do have a comment on on this what bothers me about this map is that three of the districts are well one of them's not significantly over but district five and somewhat in district four and then you have two districts that to me are and i know they fall within the parameters but are significantly under and that's like the whole south half of the county south of fort myers and i think just that alone from my point of view kicks it off balance just a little bit so that would

145be my i would say that would be a challenge on that map okay yeah one more comment and then we need to move those you have one too down here oh i'm sorry i didn't see it the one thing i wanted to say to your comment is those southern areas all of that blank space in there is quickly becoming highly populated and will be within the next three to five years so that yellow portion at the southern part of it and the east south east portion of district 3 are quickly becoming some of our most populated areas and i have brought this question up to one of the county commissioners about growth and again just like us with our charter we can make changes on odd years and i can see that with the growth

146that we're seeing in those areas we're not going to make it to 10 years to the next to the next census before we would have to look at this again because of the substantial growth and those numbers that are under will not be under okay okay and i just i want to get a point from our attorney on that am i remembering correctly that in terms of these maps we can only form the maps on what is there right now not on growth growth correct not on projections okay so yeah i mean we can only guess i'm i'm guessing that 12 years ago let's say the people in lee county had no idea which quarters were going to take off and go crazy and which so i'm i'm just making a comment that was my

147negative on the way this map is and miss fisher and then we're going to move on to the next well i think miss kittens really took care of it but my question was going to be to mr david about the considered considered population growth because you know just looking at if we are only 342 from the target in this map in district one i mean i see enough building happening where it's not going to be a couple of years before we're again you know at the max so i didn't know like how much weight actually was given because i see it's down on the list considered population growth for future population equity and i think that there you know there are those projections but i didn't know what the weight was given in in creating

148these maps and i didn't know if you had some insight into that well of course you know we didn't my company we didn't create these so i don't want to speak too much for the county but i do remember i did listen in on the county's presentation a few weeks ago and you asked i think then that question and they said they do take into account they do because they have the forward thinking of the development because they're the county but still first and foremost they are looking at balancing where there's some wiggle room with the variants maybe a one percent or one and a half they did say they kind of look not every single one but i you know you could indirectly leave a little bit of room but to be honest with

149you for the growth you're going to have even being down 1200 and some of those at some point you're going to blow right past them so it's the projections you really you really can't really think about that right now you really need to focus on keeping with a certain variance balancing your population out and like mentioned before if you need to make adjustments down the line you can so just to add to that to clarify make sure that the board understands when you are drawing the maps you are drawing it on the population that exists now and then once you have the you know you have an idea in terms of your population you can look at other factors you can because this is what the county was saying at the last meeting is that

150they drew the maps and then took into some consideration in terms of growth but you can't draw the maps based on growth okay okay so we're ready to move on to the next map please all right so let's take a look at map four we'll pull that up on the screen for you real quickly take a look at your monitors and then we're going to dive into strength so strengths for alternative four okay who wants to begin on this one or challenges that's right we'll take either we need a second go ahead and skins okay the challenge is the fact of taking contiguous fort myers across the river to me that's always a challenge okay thank you miss kittens any other strengths or opportunities hey mrs patricka they're pretty close to existing boundaries true and

151i see some natural or man-made boundaries being respected here corkscrew road 41 to a certain extent again those are the areas that i travel the most frequently so okay thank you miss patricka any other strengths or opportunities strengths or challenges mrs it's kind of straddle the fence with me the section on the other side of the river to the west of 75 they have shortened that area yet it still exists so plus and minus however you want to look at it okay mrs jordan well in north for myers they only actually took looks like a block away from what it used to be and then they extended the fort myers into thais where it was not at before because it did not reach moore's shores at all before it ended at marsh so it extended

152that east side yeah gotcha okay thank you mr and that's a challenge i don't think it's a challenge you have the majority of that you have this is a mixed community pretty much in fort myers so you have your hispanics there you have african-american you have haitian you have white so you have a in that area from fort myers over to more shores that's what that's primarily what the area is but then when you go across the bridge you have it's a whole it's a different world so you have people of all different age groups retirees and it's just it's a mixed bag there in northwest myers okay okay thank you very much anybody else on this map next map all right let's move on to map five can we back up a second miss

153jordan was that a strength or a challenge that there's a diverse population in district four well i'm going to say it's my district so i really have never seen it being a challenge of having a diverse community we just want to make sure we had captured it right okay thank you so let's move on to map five we'll start with strengths and see if we have any challenges as well if you'll identify those things and then miss skins this one appears to be the most balanced in terms of numbers so i don't know if that goes to compactness i don't think i really understand what compactness is it appears 41 is no longer a boundary really that's respected corkscrew road continues to be respected the existing boundaries are not all that different from this and

154those are my comments those are all positives by the way okay thank you i accept the 41 thing go ahead and miss kittens negative again fort myers is split up and going across the river negative the west side of 75 being included in district 5. that section it looks like tice again is included in district 5. my suggestion of course is natural boundaries 75 and 82. positive is that for most of it 82 the natural boundaries being used just give us a moment to catch up here and we'll make sure we've captured it all that's a challenge yeah are we categorizing come back in the interstate and some of the big thoroughfares as man-made or natural aren't they man-made hand-made right here okay i mean referring to it strengths or opportunities for map five okay

155anybody else any of the other districts anything else you see that might be a strength or an opportunity okay let's go ahead and move to the next one okay so now we're going to pop over to map 6a let's take a look at that in just a moment here as we catch up with our notes hold on just a moment we'll let you look at it and then we'll be ready to take your notes and these as a reminder are the two new maps that were promised by the county that we're bringing back to you today so 6a i'm sorry would you repeat what you just said yes the two two maps that we promised at october 5th that we would bring back these are the two maps that we talked about yes so 6a

156and 6b we thought we would just bring one six one map six but now they've been split into six a6b so let's look at 6a first any strengths that you have or challenges and if you'll identify those please all right mr skittens splitting up district five halfway in the middle of lehigh and including it with district two all the way over to 41 and gladiolus and down to corkscrew and aleco road in the south nothing alike at all so i don't believe splitting up that area is a positive thank you very much any other strengths or opportunities mrs patricka yeah it's not just district five it's really most of the districts with the exception of district three have significant line changes in this one and so core existing bounds or boundaries are not preserved okay

157thank you okay other comments any other strengths or opportunities before we move on am i missing something is there a reason the numbers are not on this one yeah that's plus the next one as well can i make comment on that yeah hang on but yeah so those were the maps that were provided so we will go back and take a look at that so on on these what we're looking at we don't know do you have an answer for that yes i do at the meeting with the county commissioners they mentioned that as well okay and said that they did not have all of the data at that time which was kind of a negative as to why they decided not to even look at this anyway she's correct i saw that too okay

158so maybe between the two of you or anybody else that i did not watch it live is there a rationale for how they drew this map if they didn't have the numbers so it's my understanding that the numbers are intact and that they do have them and that i think that was clarified later in the meeting it is also my understanding from talking with my counterpart one of my counterparts in the county that they are balanced in terms of population numbers that's the work that they did when they went back and created both of the district maps remember what's most important here is the equal population distribution and so they did adhere to those numbers we do not have them with us on this map but yes they were equally distributed but this is one

159that they're not they are not right what we're understanding is 6a and 6b are not under consideration that was what was decided this morning at their meeting so does anybody see anything positive that you want it to include on this one miss fisher yes yeah i would just say that it does preserve those already existing fully populated communities and geographically it looks a little bit more easy to manage any other comments on anything else on this say yes was one of the points about splitting up communities or something i don't know where it is on here but that is not being adhered to with this map maybe the limited splitting of established neighborhoods it's not the one you're referring to split right in the middle okay okay anything else on 6a right we're rounded out

160here we are was there one more i'm sorry is patricka did you have one for 6a no okay then let's move on to 6b here we go straight through this is patricka for 6b so this one clearly does not respect core existing boundaries and it splits astero for sure and natural boundaries are not not natural man-made boundaries are not entirely respected in this one either at least in the area of the county with which i am most familiar those are my comments thank you okay mrs gittins you can just copy and paste what i said about 6a okay okay yeah it almost makes sense that this may be why these were rejected they look very yeah i believe that's i think we're thinking we're all thinking in the same manner that's for sure okay okay

161any other feedback we want to provide on 6b strengths or opportunities we need more information we need the data yeah and i don't think anybody had any strengths did anybody want to add any strengths for a or b six a or b seems like that's a no okay yeah okay so here's where we're at at this point so we're going to go to our next slide so as we've been saying we have some considerations that need to be made one is we you know need to make a decision at some point and we when we come back for our next meeting that's where we're going to be asking for consensus from the board are we going with the county in terms of one of the county maps are we looking at another map to be

162drawn and like we said davis demographics is prepared to to make that happen so those are basically our three our three choices what we heard from you today is there are certainly strengths and opportunities for most of the maps we definitely paused like you did with 6a and 6b and did not see like you saw a tremendous amount of strengths and so we're we're feeling fairly confident that you would not be asking for us to come forward with a 6a or 6b recommendation moving forward into the next meeting if there's anybody that feels like a 6a or 6b should be considered please let us know if not we are probably going to whittle those two away is there anybody who wants to raise raise your hand if you would like to keep a and b6

163a and b in consideration anybody that looks like okay so that's a good thing that helps us with taking one more step forward on the on the decisions yes ma'am there was a comment at the county commission this morning too about a suggestion of just taking three five commissioner hammonds and the naacps to review the one of the board members said that everyone should have a chance to look at all but i did want to put that out there that it does kind of sound like a leaning of sorts but yep the other thing i would add if i could you know we have not had a chance yet and nor have you to analyze the naacp map any other maps that might come forward on november 2nd from groups as well as commissioner hammond's

164map so we would we would respectfully ask that we move that to the discussion at the beginning of november so you have the same opportunity to digest it we can get you some demographic information get you additional information then you'll be i think in a better position to make some judgments about that yes mrs patricka so if i could ask attorney to pre-bruno so the southern property law center came in front of us do you remember this ms morgan do you remember this mr evannelli ms fisher came in front of us proposing a change to our boundaries proposing a redistricting of our boundaries the united states supreme court handed down a decision from between the time that they presented to us in the time we had to make a decision and it made the adoption

165of their map unconstitutional could you dig into that a little bit please and help me to help us to understand how that case impacts any of the maps that come in front of us i will do that please and thank you point of order madam chair isn't a directive to the attorney supposed to come from a consensus of the board okay mrs patricka would you repeat what you would like for mrs dupree bruno to do yeah i think i think i'm allowed to ask the board attorney to help me understand the law in my decision making in my individual seat so i'm not entirely sure that i'm asking for a memo but i'm happy to get board consensus if that's what's required i'd like to know the state of united states constitutional decision making on

166our decision making here at the table with regard to specific cases handed down most recently okay so attorney dupree bruno is this something that is going to take significant amount of time that you would like board direction from or given that there was a point of order that was made i would request a consensus all right and let's do that right now you've heard mrs patrick's request consensus okay it looks like seven zero so if you would please do that and send out your information to all of us as you normally do anyway okay so thank you very much so as we talked about before we have a little variance in our timeline depending on what the next meeting outcome is when we come back to you again november 2nd will be community group presentations

167november 3rd we come back to you digest the a couple of new maps that were disclosed recently today at the county commission meeting we will have some additional conversation and at that point really be looking to you to guide us are we going with one of the county maps or are we going with a different one that is the decision point that we will need consensus on at the very next time we come to to before you on november 3rd and then at that point that will determine where we go from here it'll help us make a decision on if we're going with one of the county maps we're pretty much on target for our original timeline if we decide to do something different that's okay we've built in some adjustment where the final decision

168would be made on december 14th so we just wanted with that to leave you with any additional questions you have or any additional information we can provide to you as we prepare for the november third special briefing okay turn the floor back over to you additional questions or additional information requested and i'm sure that dr carl if any of us have a question that comes up on after we process a lot of information here to process after we process all of this that she would welcome questions absolutely in the next many times anytime you want to stop by and talk or send me a question you're welcome to do that and that goes for our team as well if anybody can answer questions we're pleased to do that dr carlin yes if i may for

169a second madam chair it was in 2017 in february to the question raised by miss patricka when the naac presented to the board so to miss bruno it was in february of 2017 in the research that we provided when they requested a special consideration in that odd number year to have the lines redrawn thank you thank you i have a question was it the southern poverty law center or was it the naacp and is that similar to or is that related to the paper the white paper that dr mccullars made yes ma'am miss bruno you're exactly correct it's connected to the white paper and i believe it was the southern coalition for social justice do we do you happen to know if our videos go back that far yes at least that far right i

170can find that meeting yes so what was what was the date again you had the date yes ma'am the conversation arose on february 21st 2017. so if i'm a man of chair you're not going to get a lot from that meeting in terms of the impact of the law you'll get the presentation but the law changed and then we had to come back to the table and say no so okay okay and obviously i some of us came on the board after that but it's it's just a good piece of information to have and you know just in case anybody's interested anybody out there in in the audience or in cyber land that wants to go back into and delve into a little lee county history february 21st you should be able to see the

171video hey thank you very much yes mrs i just want to say thank you to dr savage for helping me find this and i would tell everybody to get on here because it's really interesting how you can hone into an exact street so it does help you to to look at so you have an idea of what you're what you are actually seeing so i thought that was great and thank you for missing something yes actually i've had people in the community talk to me or ask me about single member districts and i don't know if that's an appetite or just a conversation that maybe we should have up here at the diocese so just to have the conversation and it was a discussion so and i don't know if anybody wants to jump in

172on any of that when you say that are you seven yes you would eliminate the two all counties and to make it single member and that could because that could definitely change our boundaries and you know with districts yeah i've had to go to seven and i have heard that comment made as a matter of fact i believe at least one person from edac brought that up so i just thought we should have that conversation and at least get the appetite of this board and that thank you okay so can we make a note of that for because that could be a whole before november 2nd yeah that could be a whole different map yeah yeah okay anybody else have anything to add to this all righty thank you so much thank you very much

173we appreciate the taken we appreciate your comments today thank you and so yes i know but we have some logistical things to do we would be taking two breaks so we're just going we're going to go on to public comment and then we as a board are going to be moving down into the pit area the tables that are set up in front of the deus and we're going to have to for video purposes have we'll take a break at that point i know it's been a long time but we this is important business so mrs dupree bruno if you will go ahead and read the rules for public comment now thank you madam chair school board policy provides the opportunity at this point in the meeting to address the board concerning any matter on

174this meeting's agenda if you completed a public comment card please make sure that it is in the basket please be advised that the board will not respond during public comment to remarks made by speakers speakers may not address board members by name and personal attacks against individual board members the board as a whole the superintendent or district staff are prohibited speakers who fail to follow proper decorum in the chain birds will be ruled out of order any speaker continuing with such remarks will be required to relinquish the microphone per board policy 1.11 and may be removed from the chambers there will be one warning for board policy 1.11 the time per speaker is three minutes and you will find a countdown on the big screen in the front of the room once your time has

175elapsed the microphone will automatically shut off you should address the board as a whole versus individual board members as they are a collective board please state your name prior to making your comment and i will call six individuals this time as we have six speakers madam chair all right do we have so you have cards for six yes ma'am do we have anybody else in in the room who wants the opportunity to speak and has not filled out a card okay let's then commence with the public speaking thank you madam chair for the comments sorry well the following individuals please line up denise nystrom jerry ware fred morgan adrian stevens mike love chrissy divijelli if i may i would really prefer to wait for mrs fisher to return because she is here and i want

176to be able to address the entire board so i will give up my place in line speaker please do we have anybody who wishes to move how many ahead they either speak or they don't point of order it's it's that point in the agenda they speak or they don't oh may i begin mr bruno weigh in on this please miss ware please begin all right good afternoon thank you ward once again for the opportunity to come before you however i really want to say that i'm very discouraged because at the last school board meeting i clearly asked you what is world war doing for redistributing and no one responded so to me you like transparency first of all i'm very tired because i was at the county commissioners meeting this morning participating and watching you

177go through the maps that we've asked them to throw out and they've thrown out you wasted your time we are not asking you to follow their guidelines because first of all we have two different types of elections the county commissioners have a at large you are a sega member district you should be drawing your own maps it's apparent that you're not knowledgeable about the population number give carl is too large to have 152. so therefore you know that means that you're going to have to pull from that area i know dr savage alluded to the way that you can draw these maps but hypothetically not like the firm that you've hired but it can be done because you have to take in affect the demographics but the numbers are in each area we asked the

178county commissioners to throw their maps out to bring us back from across the river when i mean say bring us that's del mar that is why you wasted your time with some of the maps they did however come back with 6a and 6b bringing us back from across the river the naacp has presented a map that should be considered if you all listen to the hearing this morning from the county commissioners you will notice that the maps that you all are trying to stay have been thrown out draw your own maps you can do this because you need to access the needs as they vary from area to area we brought us back from across the river because of one reason not contiguous takes a rubber band to stretch all the way from dunbar all

179the way to burnt store road once again i ask you ward take the time get the knowledge and get someone to help you draw your own maps thank you next speaker please hello christine divajelli i have a couple of things so first it's about the fiscal year 22 budget about an attachment that was on that budget the very last entry elimination of 20 bus operator positions i would like to see some kind of and maybe miss customers or somebody can help with this i'd like to see a breakdown or anything excuse me miss davidelli you're talking about buses i'm talking about the redis about what was discussed in today's briefing meeting the capital project no it was in the first it was in the budget i have all my stuff separated from action meeting to

180briefing i'm in the right one yeah because i don't recall anything about the buses we did have a report from maintenance it wasn't in the it wasn't in the first one the first topic that we went over today which was the capital project updates which are the projects that they're working on on the different schools that's okay that's right you know that's fine i'll talk about it tonight it's not a big deal anyway so in regards to the redistricting then i think in a perfect world parents would like to see the district develop their own map one that best represents our district and its unique demographics i think it's a wonderful idea to explore the idea or to explore the option of single member districts this is this is a large we have a very

181large county and there are areas like i personally being a member of district one don't see why sanibel and or me i don't see why a lot of those islands are included in on that like there we could be a little bit more creative especially if every member on the dais had representation or had an area of their own so i do look forward to seeing hopefully seeing some of those examples from your team as well so i don't have any comments about the maps that we saw today i don't think any of them accurately represent our county especially our school but all right thank you denise nystrom i have been attending these board meetings and have heard board member district six expressed the need for construction and renovation in eastleigh and lehigh more times

182than i can care to count and i have stated many times that i feel the lack of attention to that area is discrimination i live in bonita estera and i find the building of these new schools deplorable you can stop the building of the middle school in estero and put the money toward eastleigh i'll support that this is not on the superintendent because he was not the superintendent for all those years when these decisions were made however the appropriate thing to do in any district is to create a building utilization committee consisting of board members administrators principals and operations so that you can assess the needs of every single building every year need could have been proven if the correct procedures were in place but the former superintendent the district 3 member and others were

183running the play for pay game excuse me you know the rules excuse me i have a lot of i'll have a lot of history on this i know but then they did not know the communities i've gone on okay when you don't have that kind of situation you can be good stewards of the community's tax dollars but having advocated for the half cent sales tax to build these buildings and give teachers and staff raises should not have occurred and by the way the teachers and the staff didn't get that raise and this is on video recording i have never once heard that board member offered to visit east lee or lehigh schools until now until after the racially charged comments have been made about the guatemalan students but i have heard the district six board

184member ask repeatedly for data that supports the building on three oaks because a half a million dollars is being spent on new portables a half a million dollars have you gotten it have you gotten the data all of the schools should be looked at because they should all have science labs auditoriums libraries gyms athletic fields and regarding the innovation school who will be paying for the maintenance turf custodial staff at the quadruple a for the park area and the additional fields will that be the school district it appears that because of the superintendent east lee and lehi are finally being looked at you couldn't you would have not been looking at the same old same old if you were looking at the entire situation all of these years regarding the redistricting maps you should have

185your map drawers draw the seven different districts in several different ways so that you can assess whether or not the at-large works better or not just for your own choice so you can make a better choice thank you good afternoon superintendent school board members and attorney bruno my name is frederick dunbar morgan ii representative from the naacp we would like the lee county school board to draw its own maps we urge you not to adopt the maps from the county and draw your own maps the board has the opportunity to draw districts that will not undermine the political participation of voters of color and keep communities of interest together we feel that the 2021 lee county school board redistricting process has lacked full transparency to ensure meaningful participation you still have an opportunity for that

186participation zero public hearings have been held feedback from public has not occurred create a public hearing schedule to allow the community to give you input public hearing times should be made convenient not during the morning in the evening when people can get here and at least voice their opinions offering online public comment is not a replacement to in-person testimony people should hear from you personally there is still time for the board to create an inclusive transparent and participatory process and draw maps that will prioritize our children's future not political gain thank you good afternoon my name is mike love member of the naacp we urge the board as you heard mr morgan said to not to adapt the same map as the county board of commissioners it's very uncanny and weird to sit as a

187member and listen to a swot analysis strength and weakness being done on maps that the county who created the maps are not going to use that was very enlightening and depressing to me the school board and the county board of commissioners used two different types of election methods this alters all voters elect their preferred candidates of choice and our members interact with voters if the board adopt the same reduced redistricting plan as the county board of commissioners it would ignore the unique needs and challenges facing children and their parents in the county school district the board has an opportunity to draw districts that will not undermine the political participation of voters of color and keep communities together i also must stress the fact that to have meetings at this time of the day when parents

188are at work is unreasonable and unthinking there is still time for the board to create an inclusive transparent and participatory process and draw maps that will prioritize our children's future not political gain but i also must say if you adopt the county's map one or two of you not might not be here next time around okay is that concluded yes ma'am okay just very brief briefly regarding the comments on on the maps please be aware that we have made no no decisions that we are today we looked at what the county commissioners have and also keep in mind that we have not ruled out drawing our own maps as you saw in the in the timelines we will be by november 2nd making a decision whether we're going to be going with one of the

189county maps or if we are going to ask david's demographics our firm that are our consultants with proximity plan to help us draw our own maps and you know for for me a couple of us are at large through the whole county and as as far as i'm concerned it doesn't matter one way or the other to me which way we go and i do understand what the people that we're here from naacp are saying because i have heard that was mentioned by at least a couple people at our last edac equity and diversity committee meeting so you know that's something that we have not ruled out if you'll recall right before we started public comment there was a request i think it was mrs juvenelli i think that requested the conversation that exact conversation

190because she had spoken with some of her constituents four seven single member districts so nothing is off the table at this point yes we are coming down to to the wire on these but you can rest assured that nothing is off the table and we are looking forward to the special time the meeting for naacp to present their maps so you know perhaps some of my board colleagues will have further comments all right we've been going for a really long time and what we're going to be doing next is we have some additional pieces that we're going to be covering as a board and for that we are going to be moving to the area in front of the dais and so to get the logistics going we will have let's say we'll have a

191seven minute we'll have a seven minute break and then we will reconvene at the tables below okay hello again and we are about to commence a very special part of our briefing meeting and we are going to do this until five o'clock so we have 50 minutes and there's some things that mrs dupree bruno has asked us to participate with and i am going to turn it over to her thank you for this portion of the meeting thank you thank you ms vaughn so everyone should have their statute everyone should have their robot picture and we're going to go through this a little bit we had our training last year about the responsibilities of the school board responsibilities of the superintendent so this is a quick 15-minute refresher as we move forward towards our training

192so the statute really is the constitution article 9 that creates i'm sorry article 4 that creates the school board and then you have the statute that pretty much codifies the school board so florida statute 1001.32 creates the district school system and then it creates the district school board which what does this what is the responsibility of the district school board anybody a real question yeah that's a real question oh i thought i'm sure that can everybody here make sure everybody is speaking in chinese and control all public schools and then what about the district school superintendent dr savage the responsibility for the administration management of the schools and the staff okay and then we also have section four which is the school principle so what i want to do is for you to imagine something

193think of an onion and we're going to peel it so the first layer is being an elected official and part of that being an elected official is also all of the personal things that goes along the politics the agendas and all of that the next thing we're going to peel off is government in the sunshine the sunshine law open government and does anybody know exactly what that is what are the requirements statutorily notice open to the public and minutes be taken whenever there's two or more school board members going to look at a formal action or a rule or something of that nature right we're going to peel that off next thing we're going to peel off is the public records law public records sunshine and being an elected official so what do i have

194left people us school board human beings and what is the system school district school district but when i peel off the elected official i peel off the sunshine i peel off the public records i'm really just looking at a corporation right i know that some of you have had that private sector corporate experience and so this is what i want you to imagine because what kind of changes it is all of the regulatory things but we're really looking at a legal organization or corporation now in a corporation you have a board of directors what is their job in a corporation overseas management oversee management they govern what are they looking for performance and how do they know if it's if they're performing if the company is performing well outcome profit and loss p l statement

195right what am i doing and who are they responsible for the board of directors of a large two billion dollar corporation shareholders right so what are they trying to do for their shareholders maximize profits maximize profits get dividends now underneath the board of directors what do you have ceo cfo ceo chief executive officer chief financial officer what do they do implement the direction and vision of the board maximize profits okay and then underneath that what do you have let's say this is a company that sells watches what do you have next salespeople manufacturing so you have all these other people underneath the cfo the ceo and then you're gonna have your storefronts too right because you're going to be selling these watches and those storefronts are the ones who you're relying on to be able

196to get those profits as it trickles back up to the ceo and trickles back up to the board of directors who then has to make sure that their shareholders are getting their maximum dividends p l profit and loss right so what is the board of directors for a school district or the board of directors we are minus sunshine and when you peel all that stuff off so who is it the school board yeah you yeah the directors and what's your job same as same as the board education maximize time so what's your profit and loss student achievement achievement that is your profit and loss and then you have shareholders who are your shareholders public your stakeholders right staff students parents community they're your they're your stakeholders are your shareholders so as the board of directors

197you're there to maximize student achievement which is the profit and loss for your shareholders who are your stakeholders does that make sense okay then you have your ceo so who's your ceo superintendent and what does a ceo do in a two billion dollar corporation where's the operation runs the operation oversees the operation manages the operation administers the corporation right and he reports to whom he reports to the board of directors very similar to this situation so what i want you to do is with this graph write down board of directors at the top and school board in the same box because they're one in the same in our scenario and then what goes in the next box superintendent superintendent ceo and the statute actually calls your superintendent the chief executive officer for the school district

198and what are these your storefronts your schools geez your principles probably your chiefs probably be over here somewhere but these would be like all your schools your principals your storefronts that are working for what you're looking for your profit and loss which is your student achievement makes sense now let's talk about how this is supposed to flow and a corporation is there the board of directors here ceo here storefronts there in a corporation how does it work are you talking about direction direction direction and working the system corporation is like a system too right so how does it work it's supposed to work like that depends is it supposed to work like this depends on the leadership is that how it's supposed to work yeah okay i agree with you that's how it's supposed to

199work you have your board of directors you have your ceo that's running the business the corporation going back to the board of directors and say okay here's my profit and loss for this year here's what's going on this quarter here's the problem that i'm foreseeing here's the help that i need that's that's his job her job to go to the board of directors and board of directors say okay this is what we're going to do this is what we want you to do this is how we want you to you know that kind of stuff am i correct miss morgan absolutely and then so the ceo then takes the direction from here and then goes to the storefronts and of course there's people in between you have all of your chiefs and the managers and

200all that stuff in between but eventually it gets down to the storefront because the storefront is the one that's actually getting the profits right and then it goes back up that's how a corporation operates and when you peel back the politics the elected official the agenda the sunshine law the public records law you're really left with the corporation does that make sense now what do you think happens when board of directors is over here and the ceo is over here and it's not connected what happens to that corporation miscommunication what else what happens to the corporation when the board of directors and the ceo are not aligned it fails anybody disagree and then what happens to your profit and loss if there's no alignment goes down goes down how do you support your storefront and

201your profit and loss if this is messed up here that make sense mr evanelli does that make sense i know miss kittens you were in the private sector as well what are your thoughts that's the way a corporation works that you follow pretty much the procedure if there's issues that the board of directors finds they would be able to communicate with the cfo to make a difference and the board of directors would know that the difference or changes have been made because of the profit and loss at the end of a quarter or period or whatever and then it kind of goes back up the chain because the cfo then would come to the board of directors and sit down and discuss what the intention is to fix it exactly the company goes like this

202it's a flow right up and down up and down that's how it works now we get muddled because we have other things and granted there's some statutory obligations as well we've got to take that into consideration but we get muddled with some of the other stuff and forget the skeleton and the basic structure of how we're supposed to do business i think one another example i want you to think about is the body system what is the statute 1001.32 what's the first thing that the statute says the district system and within that district system you have a school board you have a superintendent you have principles doesn't the statute align with this does anybody think it doesn't does anybody think that the statute does not align with this basic corporate structure is fisher yes it

203definitely aligns with it anybody think it doesn't it's a district system that's the way it's supposed to work now when you're looking at a system what happens when a part of the system is not working non-functional derailed i think of a train just totally derailed do you agree anybody disagree i mean think of your own body system you know if you hurt one part you just don't realize how that one part is integral to everything else right so what do you think happens when the brains the head of the system is not working there's no system yeah it's done right isn't that it's not it's not am i correct or am i not correct so we're going to work on the system and go back to the basics peeling all those layers off so we

204can fix the system because these guys down here your storefront they are so dependent on the brains of the operation but yes ma'am we are also dependent on them because absolutely we cannot succeed if they don't give you the student achievement it doesn't flow back up so you can go to your shareholders and say hey here are your dividends for this year right so it's it's it's a system that goes down and up down and up but there is a flow to the down and up it's not like this it's like this corporations that are successful have good systems and they follow the legal structure this is a legal structure now i'm gonna talk we talked a little bit about the ceo i'm going to bring one other thing that's that's i want to bring

205up so in this system right here you have your cfo you have your ceo your ceo vice president all these other things but you also sometimes have well not sometimes in a two billion dollar corporation you're gonna have a general counsel right if the ceo relies on the general counsel to defend against the board of directors what do you think not good or vice versa if the board of directors relies on the general counsel to defend against the ceo or against each other how does that work everybody has a role to play and you got to follow the system go back to the basics so that was my 15 minutes for today and i'm going to pass it to miss morgan but can i ask the question yes ma'am because the general counsel in this

206scenario would be you but you would not be defending him against us because you're our counsel so just a little bump in the road so it compromises things yes so but but but let's talk about what you just said this is a system so how is the general counsel defending in the school district there's two times when you're gonna have a conflict between a superintendent and board the first is when you're negotiating the superintendent's salary clearly a conflict because the superintendent has a personal interest the board has an interest you're negotiating that salary the second time is when there's a recommendation for termination of an employee or term or expulsion of a student those that's the other time that you may have a conflict where the board may not agree with the recommendation that's being

207made by the superintendent and it comes to you in a quasi-judicial hearing and in your particular case you don't even make those decisions because you have an alj that you hire to actually conduct your hearings and hear all the evidence so by the time it gets to you're not even deciding on the facts of the case you can't your policy doesn't allow you to so all you're doing is really adopting the alj's recommendation or adopting you know there's some minor times where there may be an issue but for the most part you guys farm that out an alj does your actual hearing for you yes ma'am the other issue that has always bothered me is that we don't unlike a private corporation we don't have a fiduciary duty in the law we don't have a

208food we should all exercise it but we don't have one and in that remember last year when we had the training and we talked about the potential statute that was floating around to create a fiduciary duty for a public agency and it didn't pass you're absolutely correct the issue with regards to a fiduciary duty and it's not written anywhere and trust me i've looked but as an elected official you know that your charge is to protect the public trust right so if you're protecting the public trust right there in eight in a in that is a fiduciary duty you're you're stewards of the taxpayer dollars you are there to work with your district to come up with student achievement to maximize that so you do really even though it's not codified in the statute you

209do have a fiduciary duty at the very least of responsibility but the essence of the fiduciary duty is always putting the corporation ahead of yourself yes always you can never make a decision that is in your own self-self-interest that's absolutely correct and we can go deep into that but you have the duty of loyalty you have all kinds of duties in the corporation and one of the biggest ones is your duty to your shareholders which is to maximize their profit so your biggest duty in the corporation or in this scenario is student achievement for your stakeholders for your students your parents and you have to put the district the corporation first that's why we peeled back the onions to remember this is the skeleton any other questions we're going to talk some more about this

210but this was one exercise thank you now miss morgan and miss fisher okay so you are asked to read an october 21 post on bloomerang five tips for dealing with difficult board members and i would add dysfunctional board a dysfunctional board so i'm just going to briefly read the tips and then i'm going to go through some examples but i'm briefly going to read the tips for the listening audience who hasn't had a chance to see the article tip number one confront the issue head on and in person initiate a frank discussion of the issue provide an opportunity for open honest discussion the worst thing you can do is start a he said she said or she said she said public conversation focus on the organization not the person if you believe that board member

211conduct is the problem ask yourself how do we deal with the board member problem in the context of the mission and that is that is a solution that requires the entire board not one person confronting poor behavior is a business decision so focus the discussion on the business part of the relationship you want to change behaviors not because anyone is a bad person but because doing so will serve the district well tip number three use specific examples describe behaviors and i'm going to i'm going to give you three examples when board member a begins talking board member b rolls her eyes and puts her head down when board member c talks board member d is not listening but has raised a hand and preparing a rebuttal or retort when board board number excuse me board

212member e puts her head down and does not appear to be actively engaged in the work so how do you deal with that tip number four use imessages describe the behavior in terms of its impact on you and your perceptions of it when you when when i say you i'm attacking you if i say i'm asking i'm asking you to come into the conversation so for in the examples above instead of stating you put your head down and roll your eyes when i am speaking say i feel like you have no respect for what i have to say at the board table or instead of saying you aren't interested in what i have to say but are judging my opinion negatively before i've even finished or you don't respect what i have to say say

213i feel you are not listening to me and it seems my opinion doesn't matter to you the goal is not to hurt feelings but to engage in an honest conversation and then tip number five and i like this one state your objection then shut up i thought that was great that's putting it right where it needs to be give the other person a chance to process your information and respond don't interrupt what you perceive to be a problem may simply be a misunderstanding people have to have a chance to talk so attorney dupree bruno talked about peeling back the onion i was on the school board so i'm going to show you an example between being in a sunshine state and being in a in a good state i was on a school board in

214new york i was a school board chair i had a new school board member who sat very quietly for the first couple of meetings we were also we were allowed to have executive sessions with respect to personnel in addition to legal matters in in executive sessions so we didn't do everything in public the way we do here this person sat quietly for a couple of meetings and one morning i got up and i read my email and there was a scathing damnation of the board of the superintendent of everything that had been done wrong so i fired off an email saying you're out of your ear you're out of your lane you're in the wrong place you can't initiate this with an email to everybody that you work with we all need to talk about

215it as a board so he called me and he said will you have lunch with me in new york you can do this so we had lunch together we talked about the issue that had had so upset him but he had not discussed at the table it was a great conversation because basically what we learned is that i process information very differently than the way he processed it so when we had an issue with the table we really had to be careful to understand that when i explained something the way it worked for me i had to give him time and i had to make certain that i included him by addressing him specifically i need to hear paul what you want to say about this and you need to say it now and i'll

216give you time to think about it but we need to hear it so that's the kind of thing you can do when you don't have the sunshine law so now i'm going to move to an example here of my bad conduct using the tips after a very dispiriting board board meeting for me very dispiriting very frustrating ready to walk away i got home i picked up the phone and i called two board members and i told them they didn't know their job they didn't understand what they were doing i didn't respect them as board members and i didn't trust them at the table of course they said nothing they hung up i hung up and as soon as i hung up i realized that i had vented my frustration i had gotten it off my

217chest but i put it on the chest of everybody else at that board table so i'm gonna just stop for a minute i'm gonna give you a little personal anecdote see if i can get you to loosen up a bit so i was the oldest of three daughters a couple of years apart so i was like the second mother and by by the age of six i was a schooled you know don't do this don't do that i was a scold and i got away with that for a long time i my name one of my two nicknames in the family was paragon or virtue my as soon as i started down that road somebody would say ah that's the paragon of virtue she knows what everybody should do and how they should do it

218so you know ultimately as chris was saying yesterday we grow up we mature so i learned that you don't do that with people because you don't have any friends and you lose the friends you have so what should i have done when i was so friggin frustrated i should have asked each person individually if they would meet with me with the board attorney and sit down and talk about what our understanding of our role was in each each of us what our understanding of our role was and how it should how it should appear at the board table i should have focused on the fact that it's not about what you were doing that frustrates me it's about the fact that i'm trying to earn the confidence of the public i'm trying for the board

219to be credible and when we don't have their confidence and we're not credible we're not doing our job so it's not about what somebody else did and it's not about how i react to it's about how i feel it is undermining the credibility of the board and the confidence of the of the public so that was tip number two focus on the organization so tip number three use specific examples well i think i've covered it i didn't provide detailed explanations of how i felt i but i will tell you that i was ashamed and embarrassed and i said to myself the scold that little six-year-old girl who got frustrated that paragon of virtue came up to the surface and and did it so let's see use imessages instead of stating that the actions at the

220table were unprofessional i should have explained how i believed our tolerance from unprofessional conduct at the table undermined our work and public credibility so i said that listen is the fifth tip i didn't open the door to anybody else's understanding of what had happened at that table the only understanding that i had was mine i didn't listen to anybody else have any expectation that somebody else had a different understanding my understanding that scold was up was operation so bottom line that was one drop of poison that i put in the pool of water that this board drinks from and that's not the only one i have in in the three years i've been on this board i have misbehaved in more than one instance and every time i do every time that scold comes out

221every time that paragon or virtue is in the forefront a drop of poison goes in our well but i will say that i don't believe i'm the only one putting poison in the well and that's why we're here all of us have done something to this well and i'm i'm trying betsy to rip off that band-aid and put out there some of the things that i know trouble people so that's my take on this article i hope it helps thank you ms fisher so the other article was by alex counts spotting and fixing dysfunctional nonprofit boards so this really was more appropriate for non-profit boards however the information can be generalized so he talked about how building and sustaining high functioning governing bodies is arduous time consuming work but it's worth the effort run well

222boards can bolster an organization provide access to influential figures and inspire confidence in stakeholders help manage risk and improve leaders performance so that sounded really idealistic to me and the author goes on to say that drawing on his personal experience was tricky and i sometimes do that i draw on my personal experience because i've been around so long that i have grown roots here and so he observed three main types of unsuccessful governing bodies the rubber stamp board and boards in the past have been accused of that not this board the micromanaging board and i think we need to look at ourselves when it comes to that when the board takes on key management functions in addition to its proper governing role you know the staff becomes disempowered and i think that we have a

223situation where our behavior has negatively impacted the performance of our staff and their ability to feel confident and appreciated in the work they do and then the balkanized boards and that's kind of where people have their own agendas and i think that's another area where we need to look at ourselves someone said to me the other day you know we need to get rid of somebody you guys don't need that and i said this is a seven member board and we each have responsibility for this board every one of us is responsible for the situation that we have here today so i hope that we can look at ourselves one of the other important parts of the article i thought was how lack of diversity compounds dysfunction and that ethnic racial and gender diversity are

224important and i think that i expanded that a little bit in my mind's eye to some of the situations that we have now with our reports from our public and our situations in our schools with the kids that there's a lack of tolerance and understanding and that it's our job as the educational system to try to help people understand better what those diversity issues contribute rather than detract from our community once a board becomes dysfunctional turning it around requires immense effort and patience so the usual things that we do self-evaluation external review or retreat term limits and recruitment of new members are often ineffectual and lead to improvements that are difficult to sustain so to inspire the members of a balkanized board people with their own agendas to really care about the entire organization and

225for us you know we have someone said to me one time you know the students the staff and the parents the community they are our customer they are our stakeholders and they are our finished product so the community support the parent involvement and the success of the students really depends on the climate that we create and the author goes on to say that it's easy to notice red flags early and nip it in the bud but i don't think we do that so i think we have misplaced loyalties a lot of times we use serp the functions and the authorities of the management we have unexamined performance and i saw something the other day about you know we should have these 360 evaluations which i think mrs morgan has brought to us over the years

226multiple times we have stifled dissent so a lot of times i know i'm guilty of this during the board meeting there may be things i don't say because i don't think it's going to do any good and god rest his soul anthony thomas used to say to me mary fisher you just go along to get along well when i already know i'm outvoted i might as well go along to get along because getting along is critical to a governing body being successful another problem that this author identified was tolerating misbehavior and he writes more than once i have observed people behave unprofessionally and even unethically around a board table in ways that he doubted they would ever do in a business setting so we've seen directors berate staff ignore or minimize obvious conflicts of interest

227and disregard people's novel solutions without acknowledging them so poor behaviors lead to widespread dissension confronting these situations can be challenging and i think that's what we're here to do with these series of meetings that we have agreed to participate in i hope that we can become a healthy board of directors focus on our mission and vision and do those things that we each individually and personally need to do to help this board become a functioning governing body we have some board priorities connected with our strategic plan that we have agreed to work on our names are all on here all seven of us so increase focus on social emotional health of students readiness for kindergarten provide additional opportunities for student learning increase school safety prepare for future growth and miss kittens god bless you're persistent

228if nothing else because i think you are trying to get attention to do that build a future ready district workforce and increase business and community partnership as i was looking through a bunch of my stuff i thought i would leave you with something that i received on november 15 2011 from larry feldman in miami-dade he was my mentor and he said only words of wisdom treat everyone with dignity and respect you that you expect from them and toward your own children and family except nothing out less if you don't already start each meeting by stating your board's mission and that all decisions will be to benefit the students we serve a couple of meetings ago i think i said well where are the children because that has not been part of our decision our discussion

229at the table and it really needs to be we need to be focused again on our visit vision and mission end each meeting thanking your board members and the superintendent and staff for a good meeting and let them know you are honored to work with them go to an event in each of the other board members districts during the year helps find the notion that all serve all keep your humor your smile and your aspirin with you at all times and call me anytime to let off steam thank you ten minutes is there any reaction to mrs fisher or ms morgan's presentation i have some but i'm not i don't know if i'm prepared to do it you peeled back the onion so i'm i'm just not sure i have to think through it because

230whatever i say is going to be taken in a different way than my intent so hold on to it because we're gonna have continuous discussions continuous meetings leading up to our retreat so jot it down don't forget about it and then we will i do have one thing i would say the reason that i put on my email quite some time ago my angelus quote when someone shows you who they are the first time believe them and i have struggled many times i've looked at other quotes and thought okay i'll change it and then when i sit and think about it i just can't i thought again a couple of weeks ago i'll take that off and put something else on but it is so it is so true this fisher touched on something about

231the diversity piece and you said something about that you need ethnic and gender and racial difference in order to expand your board my picture is this and the reason i have this is to remind me why i have to put one foot in front of the other to sit here so the last part miss getting you said one foot in front of the other i missed the last part because there are times that more than not more than you know i get in my car to come here for a meeting and i literally want to turn around and go home what's the point nothing no one listens to the issues people will give lip service and say how can i help you it's terrible what you know is happening how can i help you but

232it's at times i have felt like i'm entering a an episode an ongoing episode of the mean girls i really do and you talk about the rolling of eyes and all that kind of good stuff i and the cutting me off and the looking and saying we you know it's not about you one of the things that you mentioned i think it was number one of your numbers and you were saying something about the i statement okay and i have tried using that method and then i am told very forcefully it's not about you so i'm kind of up against a wall and i just decided because of this i will say what i have to say you don't have to agree with me you don't have to help me but until the last day

233i'm sitting here i will say until someone listens and understands that there are other issues and see honestly that's why i think i'm here so that you can understand you honestly do not understand to the depth of your soul some of the issues i'm trying to explain you all can say the word underserved or forgotten don't really understand until i explain it to you but you have to listen to me with your head your heart and your mind to understand what i'm trying to say just getting miss fine i'm kind of going in in a different direction here because i'm a little bit piggybacking off a comment that miss fisher made about go along to get along that's how do we affect change when i ran for this position i saw as a teacher for

234eight years i saw a lot of issues in the school of course i look at governance and money spending and and those kinds of things but as a board member my heart and i have a depth of expertise in the schools i it wasn't geeking i'll be frank in lee county it was gained through my years in texas when i was a department chair for 19 years in a district that actually gave teachers respect and input into what was going on so one of the things that i have tried to do is pushing that as an agenda another one of my agendas so to speak is i feel like our best and brightest are forgotten of course the lower level kids the bottom 25 percent are important i'm not saying they're not but we don't

235serve there's a whole host of issues this morning i had a brief meeting with some people in academic services about book censorship and i have lots of experience with challenged books and i shared some of that with with them and i'm not trying to toot my horn but i'll be honest there have been things where i've talked to people in academics including back when i was at astaire high school that they had no knowledge about and i shared it i wasn't there to do anything but share it and make the district better and my feeling is and i'll just use that is that all of us do come with our own strengths and my perception is and this is from before dr savage assumed his role that because i was not a i like to

236call him an anointed one member of the school board because i had different views and i wasn't afraid to say what my different views were i was not regarded as a cooperative person i wasn't regarded as a person even by the former superintendent that he even though we were always mutual respect at least in public always that i was not regarded as somebody that had anything to share and the door was not open to me with my wealth of expertise because it was viewed as well that's not her role or that's well maybe not exactly but it's my expertise and if i have a way i can share it and i shared it at estero and we actually george clover moved ahead with some of my ideas some he didn't but some he did bottom

237line on this because i'm kind of i'm rambling is that i came i ran for this position not because i desired power or fulfillment hey i've had my fulfillment i showed all of you the picture of the class of 88 reunion and my kids who have grandchildren some of them i've had my fulfillment this is a different kind of job and i personally feel that unless there is debate which is often viewed as she can't get along or she's not cooperative i have felt that i have had to be assertive very assertive and sometimes i've gotten angry can't help that but i try but and so you know there's a lot of things to unpack with this and i feel like we have the on the surface not getting along but it goes way way

238way deeper than that it goes to each board member being viewed by not just the superintendent but by his or maybe at some point her staff members it kind of trickles there's a trickle down effect and that's huge until that can be solved where each of us can talk to the superintendent and then have access to talk to some staff members you know like hey i have this idea could this possibly work or i feel like that door has opened a little bit just lately but i'll tell you my first whole almost three years on this board there was nothing that i could say where i was welcomed and there are other people that could just walk in and get favors and tell write straight out i think this person should have the job or

239i need this to be done that to me underlies this whole problem so there you go that's how i feel about it i appreciate you owning and focusing on you and admitting what you did wrong and i look forward to my opportunity to do that as well it's five o'clock so hold that thought miss fisher we're going to jot that down and before we leave just think i heard two things about how people are contributing to this board one is being a voice for the underrepresented and two with the strong expertise and the educational background so every single one of you has something to contribute to the board imagine how it would be if you are putting it all together and then realign the corporation which will help with what you talked about miss vaughn

240so oh we are adjourned thank you i'm trying to get her you