001Heat. [Music] Heat. Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat. Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat. [Music] Heat. Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat. [Applause] Heat. Heat. [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] 10 hours of driving. Well, good afternoon everyone. So good to see you. getting some smiles indeed. It's so fun uh to just look out and see all the good work that's being done by you uh all around the school district. So, we appreciate the work that you're doing. Um we will now call the work session for March 25th, 2025 to order. I'd like to again thank everyone for being here. Uh thank you to our staff who uh you're going to be accessible to us today. Really appreciate that. uh to address any questions. We are humbled to serve alongside of you and the most highly educated and dedicated workforce in the nation.
002Uh just to set up our meeting today, uh reached out to actually one of our school administrators. I'm like, "Hey, if I was to roam into one of your classrooms today, uh what would be the standard that's being worked on uh inside the classroom today?" and uh he was responsive and um basically we got the standard and benchmark from two classrooms today. A fifth grade ELA and then a second grade um math course. And this is what it states. You all probably know, you've probably got the me the bit benchmark memorized, but it's ELA uh 5.5.1 and it states, analyze how setting, events, conflict, and characterization contribute to the plot in a literary text. And then the next, which is 1.2, uh says, explain the development of a stated or implied theme or themes throughout
003a literary text. you just see that higher order of thinking. And again, this is in, you know, a fifth grade ELA course. And then here we have the second grade math uh benchmark that's in front of our students today as our teachers are working through this. Uh and it says to explain the development of um or actually it's to interpret data represented with tally marks, tables, pictographs or bar graphs including solving addition and subtraction problems. That's our second grade class. So we're going to have an opportunity to look at a lot of graphs today and uh pictographs, infographics and all those things. So we might need their wisdom u with us. So again, I'd like to start our meeting by reading our who are we statement. We are the PK County Leadership Governance Team. If
004we were to pick one phrase to define us, it would be student- centered. Because when we come together to work, we lean on our diverse backgrounds and our experiences to ensure that our decisions are focused on providing a highquality education for all students. Uh the four most important things to our governance team are operating with integrity, respecting our students, staff, families, and each other, establishing a culture where stakeholders feel valued, they're supported, and have opportunities for personal and professional growth. And then lastly, supporting an approach of continuous improvement to ensure student outcomes. And then collectively, we need to work on behalf of the children that we serve and find these avenues of agreement. There's definitely no acceptable alternative to that. Um, we will always collaborate in a respectful manner in order to enhance the opportunities
005uh for each student and staff members. We're not going to disparrage others. Our students will thrive because when we remain committed to supporting the whole child, that happens. We hope and uh hope to engage and empower our students and stakeholders to create a community of lifelong learners. And at this time, I'd like to turn over uh our work session to superintendent. Superintendent, you're recognized. Good afternoon, Mr. Chair, members of the board, members of staff, and any committee members who are here with us today. Thank you very much for joining us. We have a pretty full agenda. Um, however, one item will be abbreviated. I'll explain it when we get to that one. Our first topic for today is um P County Public Schools Health Plan, the annual financial review and summary. So, at this time,
006I'd like to bring up to the podium Miss Linda King and Miss Jackie Walker and then Miss Jenkins and others will be here to assist as needed. Thank you, Superintendent um board chair and school board members. Thank you very much for the opportunity to come up to you again and talk a little bit about this past year's financial performance. And this is Jackie Walker. She's with Wakeland Associates. Wakeland Associates has been performing our um 1128 evaluation for a number of years now and I think Jackie's been in front of us a couple of years ago. So Jackie, yes, thank you all for having me today. Um so yes, I'm Jackie Walker. I am a senior consulting actuary with Bley Consulting Group. Um under that role, I do certify the actuarial soundness of the plan on
007an annual basis and uh submit that certification to the Florida OIR. Um the Florida OIR is looking for two things. So first that being the net assets of the plan as of the current year. So we need to make sure that the net assets of the current year are not negative. And then second the rate structure of the plan um going forward as we project claims and other expenses um that we can project that you will not get a negative surplus going forward. Um so as of now um we are seeing that the self-funded health plan for the current year and future projections is actuarily sound. So a few logistics regarding what the certification entails. Um it is due to the state 90 days after the plan year ends. So on your current plan year
008that ending 1231 you do need to file this by the end of this month. So not yet filed but um on the agenda and requires a certification um that that we are willing to sign me and myself and Allison Pool. Um so there is an annual approval process. So um we will uh provide the certification and then they may have some back and forth questions regarding um for example if you expect decreases in um revenue claims etc. Uh there might be some clarification questions as to the assumptions that guide um that direction. Um here the the actuary cannot certify the plan if the surplus balance falls below zero. Um as mentioned you all should be good for the current year. Um and hopefully with some uh adjustments going forward. Um and lastly uh something to
009hit on here as well is that in some of these charts um we talk about the safety harbor or safe harbor. Um it's what the OIR considers to be a uh safe threshold um of surplus within the fund. Um so technically that safe surplus is 60 days worth of claims. Um, if you do not have that 60 days worth of claims, then you do have to submit a letter saying that within the general fund, you have uh funds available to be able to um take care of the deficit in the case that there is one. So, I'm just letting you all know that as of now, you do not quite hit the 60-day threshold as long as you have general funds available such that in a worst case scenario, you could give funds towards the
010health fund. usually that YFR will accept um these terms. So keep all that in mind as we go through these tables. Yeah, thank you. So um plan your 24 performance you'll see in front of you as Jackie mentioned um and just to remind you we ended the year of 23 at 15.5 million in reserves. And at that time that was 42 days of claims. So if you recall last year we were also short of the 60-day reserve. Um and we have traditionally have been short in that in that uh area. We've not gotten to the point we've gotten 60 days of comfort level. Um and you'll see that as we go forward in the presentation. You'll see the expenses were up um according to this compared to the revenue. Um and if you remember with
011revenue, revenue is really consisted of our premium structure. And to remind you, we have not increased premiums in six years. So you'll see that as we go forward. Also, um there's an adjustment which basically Jackie can explain really what that is. It's basically truly an accounting adjustment. Um overall change in surplus was 2.6 million to end balance at 18.1. The U OIR 60-day safe harbor is 24 million. And so we have 44 days. So we did gain two days, okay, in surplus um from 24. Okay, this just gives you this illustrates your bar graph, Dr. Allen, that you were talking about. Could show this to our students, but um this is where it goes from 2018 until 2024. What you see in the numbers scattered throughout there are all of the claims that were over
012150,000 a piece. Okay? So, you'll see in 2022 we were up and we were up again this year. Um what you have the difference between 22 and 24, you also have some medical inflation. We can talk to you a little bit about that. The same service is not the same cost it was necessarily in in 22. Um, and you're also going to see that with the amount of the cost for the high-cost claimants. Okay, here's your group insurance fund balance history. And I left everything on here back to 2016. So, there's a lot of data here. So, it does give you the plan your year information, board contribution, revenue, expenses, gain or loss. So you'll see the losses there um over the years as well as adjustments which again are accounting adjustments and then you'll
013see the balance we had at the end of that year and the 60-day requirement as well. So that's just an illustration to show you and if you'll see with the plan years if you notice on the board contribution in the past we had a midyear where we would acrew more like July one we'd throw some extra money in the fund. So you'll see that um throughout through 2023. Okay. Paid claims over 150,000. Um here's where you'll see the total amount paid for 2024. We had 98 high-cost claims over 150,000. The total was 29.8 million. You'll see a star next to the 2 million. This is the first year we had stop-loss reimbursement. Um, our deductible is 1.5 million per claim. So, um, we did have a a high severity, which you're going to have that
014in a in a group of our size, a large group. So, we do plan for that with stop-loss insurance. And that reimbursement has been reflected in the financial statements. So, we've already received that check. It's already in the account. So, you see the top five claimments there. you will see that um until the third one, you know, they are higher than they were in the past. Um average paid per claim also is pretty close to last year. It's 304,000. Okay, this is this is pretty much been steady. Um that when I come to you each year, I show you the expense distribution. 96% of our total expenses that are coming in go to direct cost of care. be it the actual claim expense or the clinic expense. So it's just a small amount that difference
015of 4% that basically it's actually three and a half% that goes to the ASO and admin fees and the other would be staff costs on my team stop-loss premium is a half percent of that expense and we continue to buy that just because over the years and we finally did cash in on it this year. So the concern is you know insulating the general fund from those high-cost claimants. Okay, here's your premium history that you'll see. Um this year we ended with 11.5 11,518 members uh employee only coverage and you're going to see the cost there for spouse or the amount excuse me of the enrollment. One child two children. We have a seven tier um rate structure which is very uh different and unusual in the industry. Typically you do three or four our
016most traditional um and you'll see the history prior to 2014 what that was. I didn't put the board contribution on here just because it did adjust midyear as I mentioned on the other slide. So you'd have to go back to that slide to see the increase in board contribution. 2425 the cost was 959 per employee or 12,500 per year per employee and then you'll see the deductions for the U premium there and that those are monthly as well just to give you an idea. Okay, plan projections. Where are we? Actually, we're a little bit better than we were projected to be last year. We've kind of kicked the can down the road by a year. 26 is where we were projected to have deficit and have to make changes. We still are showing even though
017we're showing a loss um in 26, we're still going to projected at least to have 20 days in reserve at the end of 26. 25 you'll see um we're actually, you know, going to be about the same as this year. It looks like 43 days in reserve and um 19 million balance. 27 is where things change. Okay. And obviously this is looking down the road with just projections in order to make us positive with even four days in reserve. Uh premiums were reflected in there additional contributions from the employees. And to be honest, I have no idea if that's what we'll determine as a school board. Your committees will meet and make recommendations, but I can tell you that we're going to have to do some things different. And we've known that for some time.
018And just to kind of pivot on that, um we are working on actually some um some actually some options for that and we're exploring those options and I plan on it's too early right now to really provide a lot of detail. Um I've talked with Mr. Hyde about that and we are working on it. We'll be bringing that to your committees for vetting and recommendations and then at the same time as we share it with those committees we'll bring it to you as a board just so you that it's your invol you also are informed about what those look like. Um so next steps to be honest I've still got to work finish up the consultant. We're going to do an invitation to negotiate with that. We're very close on that and getting that ready
019and out the door and work on that to get a consultant appointed. RX connection strategies um you know were put into place this year. Um I will tell you that I'm I'm surprised that so many people are taking advantage of international drug sourcing. So that's been that will be one of those things that do save us some some funding. Um, and we're also, as I said, planning for 2026 and 2027 because the things that we are looking at are not necessarily just a one-year and some will take some time to to implement as well. We will continue to have to look at involving and and as part of that strategy, look at wellness programs and incentives as part of that. Uh, you know, the the cost of our of the care of our employees is
020very high and we do want to provide incentives to keep people healthier. We do want to provide a way for people to stay healthy and if they do have disease states to be able to manage those right so that they are lower cost um and we'll be filing to the office of insurance including our letter to the OIR pledging basically um the additional reserves we will need and we're going to be 6.2 two million short. And again, we haven't had to tap into that yet any of the years I've been here, but it is a realistic um realistic reality for us if the claims come in as projected. Questions, comments for us? Dr. Allen. Thank you, Superintendent. uh you know just noticing the you know crazy fluctuation of the claims over 150,000 I mean what
021are the factors driving those factors are degrees disease progression obviously you have cancers you have um cardiac situations every now and again we get a um a preeie you know which which those things are expected over a group of our size and to be honest we're no different from the other groups and the other school boards they're all dealing with the cost of these disease states you primarily a lot of what you're looking at is the increase in pharmacy and Jackie can talk a little bit about that but all the new biologics that are coming out we're trying to look at doing bioimilars and some other things other strategies with our our prescription consultant because that is where the highest medical inflation is right now there's some really amazing things happening but you also have
022to caveat with you know the cost of those treatments as well and then can you maybe elaborate on that $5.5 million adjustment that's uh helping to stabilize um the plan. Yes. So that's actually just more of a transfer of general funds. It's an adjustment if I was recalling um to reimbursements and a transfer. So ultimately our goal is to make sure that the final surplus aligns with your all's balance statement. We have to consider everything that's associated with the health fund as regarding revenue and expenses, but there are items that fall outside that realm. So, that's what we're putting into the other adjustment, but still valid to get to your final balance, which is what's truly being held as surplus. Yeah. Okay, great. And then, uh, lastly, um, you know, the 2027 date, like where
023did that number come from? Why not 2026? I mean, what's what's the thinking on that? Obviously, we're going to be trying to make to look at and talk with the union and looking with the health strategy committee about some of the things we can be doing to help um, you know, give employees excellent care, but also mitigate disease states and mitigate costs at the same time. So, we're not really waiting till 2027, I guess, is what I want to tell you. We've been I've been working on already for several months now. Um so we're not waiting until then to make a decision but we do have to um impact bargain every change we make and so the committee and your unions are represented on the house strategy committee as well. So and keep in mind
024that in our projections we are actually already building in a small bit of savings. So that know going into 2025 um we've been told that you all are expected savings on the pharmacy side that's been built in and then the downstream impacts of some of the programs that Linda described has also been built into 2027. So keep that in mind when you're looking at the big picture here um that we're already considering potentially 4 days of surplus by 2027 that's considering if all savings are met. So, that's sort of the situation. I think potentially you could move premium contributions up to 2026. Um, but you all have seen fluctuations in profit year-over-year because a lot of this is driven by your large claimments. So, you had a bad year this year. We have to trend
025that forward. We're using that year to to project claims for future years. Um, but if happen stance, you have a better year next year, not as many large claimants, this could be a different picture. So, you have to keep that in mind as well. Yeah. I mean, I I guess uh you know, how does our uh plan performance um compare to other districts? Well, I will tell you we have one of the richest plans, at least from my cohorts that I've looked at, at least as far as the others. Um and as far as the fact that we do offer a free rich health plan, um a lot of our major districts are offering a silver or bronze and employees have to buy up to the other option. So um so that has to be
026taken account and healthcare in Pulk to to date has been higher to be honest than Penllis and Hillsboro. Now we know we have new partners coming in. So we're hoping that if anything that will drive down costs. Um obviously concern is that quality is maintained as well and that we get access to those specialties that we need. So it could bring in hopefully I'm hoping better care overall for our employees and more options. Indeed. Yeah. And just, you know, I'll ditto that in a sense we, you know, if we look at the 15 states within the coalition, um, we are number one in regards to the employer contribution to the plan um, out of all 15 districts surrounding. So, thank you, superintendent. That's all I have right now. Thank you, sir. Miss Fields, thank you.
027We've been dealing with this for years and I I know that with the new health care provider, we're hoping that that's going to shift it in a positive way. We won't know that for a year. Yeah, it will take some time. If you remember anytime we had when we went to Alabama the first year I was here, we were we were shocked our claims were so low, but we think people were kind of waiting to treat or had treated before we changed. So it it's really hard to predict when we're going to see those costs come in. Correct. And and I I say it now and I've said it before and uh had conversation with Superintendent Hyde as well. At some point in time, we're going to have to make some tough decisions and I
028know that many of the board members uh that either are no longer on the board or you currently might be sitting here. uh we're going to have to uh decide whether or not we're going to keep having a plan that is not um sustaining itself and making contributions that we know that we're going to just be going in a circle every year. It's just a a cycle, a vicious cycle, and determine whether or not we're going to either um adjust the plan and make it not as as um glamorous as it is, if you want to use that word. it might not be the right word to use and and whether or not we're going to uh have our employees to make some type of contribution. I know some of you all don't want to
029do that, but um the the proof is right here in front of us. Look at the trend. Nothing is changing. If anything, it seems like it's getting worse in my opinion. Uh and at some point in time, we're going to have to do something. We just can't keep looking at it every year and then nothing comes of it. Miss Wyatt, thank you. I just want to confirm, Superintendent Hyde, that $5.5 million was not budgeted for the transfer originally. Heather, it was not that was done afterwards to to make up for the shortfall. Um, I have I am I'm It's budgeted a different way. We called it when we spoke about this, Linda. I don't think that's the correct Sorry. No. Okay. I don't think that's the correct terminology because we didn't transfer money into fund
030what Miss um Walker Walker I'll start to say Jackie what Miss Walker what their team looks at is our accounting um we have our accounting books that we run and then the insurance company you have your billing your claims and then they reconcile the two and what this number is is it's a reconciliation because we take monthtomonth and go through and make make sure everything was recorded with the invoices, with the revenue. So, that's what that number is. It's the true up when we did not really an audit, but more like a review. Let me clarify cuz I think I know what Miss Wyatt and other board members are now questioning. Is that a true up of a surplus coming back to us or is that a true up of a additional cost to us?
031It's a surplus. No. Okay. So, it's not coming out of operating budget. It's not coming out of our No. Okay. No. Did that help, Miss Wyatt? Is it I I don't know that that's ever how it's been explained. It's been explained as the complete opposite before. So, we can verify. I think we probably need to verify that because I think that's I don't don't know that that's 100% accurate. Um, I was concerned at the comment made of it's that it's too soon to start talking about some of these things because these things need to come before the board sooner rather than later. I will not approve changes to our plan again that happen after open enrollment. It has been a try. I don't know how many emails you all have gotten over the past several
032months, but I get at least one a day of somebody who's has something no longer covered and they did not know it. And on our plan, it says new name, same plan. That is not true. So, we need to have these conversations much sooner than we have been. But today is the time to stop start talking about it, not six months from now. Well, let me assure you that that's not the case. And I I've saved my comments till all the board members had a chance to speak. Um, so let me address a couple things. You you know my position on this. I've been very clear and adamant that I will not continue to invest in an insurance plan that hemorrhages funds. Um, this now puts us at $34 million in four years that we've
033had to add to the insurance plan. That directly, while it's a benefit that we provide our employees, you could make a strong argument that if we were more solvent in how we approach our insurance plan, those dollars could be better utilized with teacher salaries and other things that would go much further. So, and I believe that even Miss Yokum, I'm not speaking for her, but she was quoted in the paper of saying we're going to have to look at insurance. We're going to have to look at things because at the end of the day, if it means that teachers can receive additional compensation versus the insurance plan, you know, I think there's a reality to that and I think that's what Miss Fields and others we've gotten at. So, let me assure you this, these
034conversations are starting in April. They're not waiting 6 months. I simply asked Miss King not to get ahead of the committees because the superintendent's insurance committee is going to be charged with finding national, regional, and state averages for employee contributions. And then we'll specifically look at education as well because we don't want to compare ourselves against some other entity or group of of employees. However, we have to look at that. That has to be explored. Much to Miss King's point, that then becomes if if we reach some agreements on those, we're going to make a recommendation, then that becomes a bargainable issue that we have to address with pea, ask me, and others. Beyond that, there is something that's in the works, we've had some initial meetings that quite honestly would bring us a considerable
035amount of savings um and yet maintain a very high quality process for us. We can't disclose that because we're kind we're currently in discussions with these groups, but I can tell you this. Number one, the quality of care will be high, if not better than what we currently have. The cost share will be better. Our savings will be better. It will also significantly increase the number of clinic options for our employees because right now they're limited to two. And I believe that one of my own staff today spent well not one of my staff but someone who I know of spent over an hour on the phone waiting to speak to someone at the clinic and couldn't get through. So we realize 14 15,000 employees trying to get access to two employee clinics. Do the
036math. It does not work. So we realize those. But what I'd like to do for the board is when it goes to the committee, the board will hear about it before the committee hears about it. So it'll either be a conversation. It'll be something I communicate to you as I normally do on a Friday update, but you will be looped in as to these conversations. But because it's so preliminary and because there's some non-compete in conversations going on, we have to be very careful on how we approach this. So, but I did ask Miss King to make sure that that is one of the number one agenda items that both committees address in April. So, we are not going to wait. And to your point, comes to us to vote on by August, September. What
037is it? I I directed you to make sure happens that the recommendations come here to be communicated and voted on in what timeline? Uh very quickly, but to allow at least a year at least a year at least a year for us to make those transitions so that we don't have these types of issues. So if we're voting on it in August, September, then it would not go in effect until 2027. Probably. Probably. Probably. Yes. because some of these things are more of a long term and just the just the uptick is going to take time. And I I only say probably because there may be a shared interest in doing one part of that faster, but we'll wait to see how we get there. Thank you. Yes, ma'am. Miss Fields, I think one of
038the things that we really need to be uh mindful of is I don't I don't know if I would call it a healthc care campaign, but a better way of communicating to our employees from the beginning up until the the continuously because I think that's one of the biggest challenges is that the communication piece uh has not been as strong as it probably should have been. And it's with anything that's new, anything that's different. Uh you have to let let the employees know what has changed and what's the same. And I just think that's a lot of the uh confusion. So whatever we do, I think we really need to roll it out where it's going to be uh very detailed and simple for every employee to understand. And I think we learned some lessons.
039As Miss King pointed out, this is the first whole transfer we've done in over 10 years of our insurance plan. actually 20 20 years considerably. Yes. So there there are a lot of lessons learned whereas and many of you who did forward emails from employees about my prescription is no longer covered, my physician is no longer a network. The vast majority of as you know have been resolved successfully. But that was a miscommunication between the companies that we're working with and a lack of coordination sometimes in getting all those physicians processed. Even I found that two of my four physicians were allegedly out of network only to be told later on no we're still reviewing those and then they were ultimately were accepted. But we have to work through some of those and and so
040the lesson there would be much to Miss Wyatt's concern and Miss Fields and others who express this. We need a longer timeline for that transition to have better communication to allow employees to go in and look at what the change would mean for them. And if we can identify those issues much earlier on before the change takes place, then we're all in a better place because we can get those addressed before the transition. So we will provide a more adequate timeline. 8 to 12 months I think is more than sufficient for us to help our employees make those transitions. They did put together a video series. They've done other things, handbooks that they've put out to employees. So we learned a lot of lessons through this process that we will continue to repeat and expand
041upon, but all very valid points, very valid frustrations. We've all been dealing with those emails and there's been a lot of pressure exerted on on Miss King and her department to get these things done right and they've been very responsive to date. So, I I do appreciate that part of it. Mr. Keys, I just want to comment and and say that from what I'm hearing um being new to the process is that we've identified some shortfalls we had, but we're making efforts to get better. Is that what I'm hearing? that as we go through these processes that we're going to give ourselves more time to not only make those decisions but I think more importantly communicate to the overall um our employees that these are the changes coming down the pike and here's how to
042handle those. Yeah, this this will put us in a position where we can do town halls, we can do individual site visits, we can do all those things, which we did in some limited instances. But again, when we started to see a little bit of a surge in certain areas that there were consistent concerns with again pre-authorizations, medications, prescriptions, um, and more importantly, their physicians, retaining their physicians, which were the changes we committed to our employees they would not have to deal with. Um and that was important to our board when you first agreed to any changes was we don't want this adversely impacting our employees and so we remain committed to that. So we've been working through those process but again lessons learned now we can develop better timelines better tools to ensure that
043if we make any big changes again in the near future there would be a more adequate timeline. So, we're taking note of all of the things that we have been doing or needed to do in a response so we can do those proactively in the future. And and respectfully, I think that that we know in this particular industry that these things can sometimes be a moving target um as new technologies come out and medications and so on and formularies change that um but we're making sure that as those changes come and is very fluid that we communicate those effectively. So, I'm satisfied with that. Thank you. Seeing no further questions or comments. Thank you. Thank you, M. Jenkins, you can stay. The 2023 2004 AACFR report and audit findings are in. Um, we'll bring Line
044and the rest of the team down. We have Mr. Aoyo, the audit supervisor with the state of Florida auditor general. He did an exit meeting with myself, Dr. Allen, and the team. um we got several commendations and then several areas where repeat findings but again corrective action we put in place to help address some those um and align and the team have been incredibly responsive and worked to address those. So thank you Mr. Sir Royo, it's all yours. Afternoon everyone. Good afternoon. Superintendent said, I'm Mark Roy. I'm the audit supervisor of the Lakeland section of the Auditor General's office. Um, and here's a brief uh overview of the act for for the 2324 fiscal year. In accordance with section 11.45 Florida statute, as PK County District School Board's independent external auditor, we are engaged to
045conduct a financial and federal single audit for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2024. Management is responsible for the preparation and the fair presentation of the financial statements in accordance with the account accounting principles generally accepted the United States of America and for the design, implementation and maintenance of internal control relevant to the preparation and fair presentation of the financial statements that are free from material misstatement whether due to fraud or error. Our audit objectives were to obtain reasonable assurance about whether the financial statements as a whole were free from material misstatements whether due to fraud or error and to issue an auditor's report that included our opinions. Our audit objectives were also to obtain reasonable assurance about whether material non-compliance with applicable federal awards requirements occurred whether due to fraud or error and to
046express an opinion on the district's compliance based on our audit. In doing so, we exercise professional judgment and maintain professional skepticism throughout the audit. We identified and assessed the risks of material misstatement on the financial statements and material non-compliance with federal award requirements whether due to fraud or error and designed and performed audit procedures responsive to those risks. We obtained an understanding of internal control relevant to the audit in order to design audit procedures that are appropriate in the circumstances but not for the purpose of expressing opinion on the effectiveness of the district's internal control. We evaluated the appropriateness of accounting policies used and the reasonleness of significant accounting estimates made by management as well as evaluations of the overall presentation of the financial statements and accompanying schedule of expenditure of federal awards. We concluded
047whether in our judgment there are conditions or events considered in the aggregate that raise substantial doubt about the district's ability to continue as a going concern for a reasonable period of time. We examined various transactions to determine whether they were executed in both manner and substance in accordance with governing provisions of laws, rules, regulations, contracts, and grant agreements. We determined whether corrective actions were taken in findings included in the prior audit report. We assessed the reasonleness of the summary schedule of prior audit findings prepared by the district. We conducted our audit in accordance with the auditing standards generally accepted United States of America. applicable auditing um standards contained in the government auditing standards issued by the comproller general of the United States in title two United States code of federal regulations part 200 uniform administrative
048requirements cost principles and audit requirements for the federal awards also known as uniform guidance. Our audit disclosed that the basic financial statements of PK County District School Board were presented fairly and in all material respects in accordance to the prescribed financial reporting standards. Our audit did not identify any deficiencies in internal control over financial reporting that we consider to be material weaknesses. However, we noted a certain significant deficiency. Our finding number 2024-1 district we determined that a significant deficiency that the district financial reporting procedures needed improvement to ensure that the financial statements are properly presented in the annual comprehensive financial report or the acter provided for audit. Specifically, contrary to GAP, district personnel did not report all deferred outflows related to pensions and erroneously recorded insurance claims expenses twice in the internal service fund. The
049results of our test disclosed no instances of non-compliance or other matters that required to be reported under the government auditing standards issued by the comp driller general of the United States. We audited the district's compliance with applicable federal awards requirements. The child nutrition cluster, the student um the student support and academic enrichment program, and the educational stabilation educational stabilization fund, excuse me, were audited as major federal programs. The results of our audit indicated that the district materially complied with the requirements that could have a direct and material effect on each of those major federal programs. Any questions? Would either one of you like to translate all that into English specifically would you please either you or Miss Jenkins address the fi the nature of the findings a little bit more descriptively and then also um
050what what matters most to the board and to myself as you know is what corrective action because in our response I'm pleased to see that they noted we've already taken the initiative this year to make the correction to the AFR reporting. So would you mind outlining that for them? Good afternoon board members. Ali Nunes, the senior director of accounting. Um to the findings that Mark um explain uh mentioned, one of the areas was a um the June 2024 um claims invoice that was erroneously recorded twice for the month of June. was caught during the audit and we subsequently reversed that entry to make sure it it lined up with the actuals for the fiscal year. Um we we always acrew back our claims when we receive the invoice. We always acrew them back to the
051prior month. That's always been our practice to help the risk management department be able to track and properly report our expenditures in the month that they occur. Um in this case we always receive our claims invoice in the in the for the month in the in the following month we have one employee her job is to acrue that back to the prior month while the accounts payable pays the invoice erroneously this time for the June claims um the invoice was booked to June but also acred back as it normally is. So, we've already addressed this with the staff. Um, we also are going to put in place for this fiscal year and we we have the ability to lock the system down for any postings into the prior year. So, we're going to be ensuring
052that we lock the system down and that way any staff in in accounting that needs to post something to the prior month needs to go through management and have a review by us. And then a limited time where we would open up the system, allow the posting and then lock it back up to avoid something like that in the future. It also increase the fun. Yes. and and by doing that it it ended up increasing our ending fund balance in the internal service fund. Miss Fields. So if I'm understanding correctly, uh there were no material weaknesses, which is great. And the area of concern has been addressed. Correct. So overall, I would say uh good job because I know what what's involved in a very uh in-depth and detailed audit. So staff the staff did
053an amazing job, but I I would also like to thank Mr. Castro and his team. Um I've had the pleasure of working with them over the last few years, and you know, I know Miss Wyatt was a chair at the time, too. So they're incredibly professional. They're they're very receptive. They're very transparent. um they work very well with our team and allow our team to address these things in a timely manner because that's the goal is in a system as large as ours if we have an error how do we work to address it and I think you've seen the staff have done a good job at being very quick to address this issue Dr. Allen had the pleasure of sitting in on our exit interview um and get to hear the bulk of this
054as well but sometimes you know I joke about saying it in English but for for many of us you know Mr. Keys is in the banking industry. You know, I and I don't know the background of everyone else at the at the deis, but I know sometimes I need this stuff explained to me in layman's terms just so I have a better understanding. And I think it's important too since we record these meetings and broadcast them for the general public that they have a better understanding of exactly what a finding was and what we've done to address it so it doesn't occur again. So, I'm excited about that because again, the rest of the report came back very, very strong and I think it continues to show and build trust and credibility with our community
055that we manage our dollars very efficiently. As lean as we are, we manage them very efficiently and effectively. So, thank you to the both of you and your teams and thank you, Mr. Castro. Appreciate you as well. Uh, I apologize, Mr. Keys. No, just echoing what Mrs. Fields says. It sounds like these these findings were um attributed to postings, right? And correcting those and we did them very very quickly and very efficiently. So kudos to you and your team and we appreciate that and um I appreciate the transparency of doing that. I'm I'm I'm overall I'm satisfied and having dug into this area for the past six years. Uh um you guys do a stellar job. So appreciate you. Thank you. All right. There are no Dr. Allen. Yeah, just minor. And again, you know,
056I was watching Mr. keys of their nod in a sense as we are addressing the system changes that we've made uh and affirming that. So I appreciate the work. Remind me, you know, I didn't have my book with me today from when I took notes during that exit, but how long have uh you all been on site with us. Um just as a reminder because forget the date on that. Well, we conducted two op audits during the course of the year that we were here. Um so we did an operational audit and then this was a financial audit. I mean we were here from about this time last year. We started putting out the feelers for the operational audit and then we kind of cascade into the financial audit that was completed in re-released in
057February of last month. So y indeed so a long period of time. So again I mean I appreciate our staff and just being in that exit uh conference um just hearing all the tactics that were done uh in in the implementation. I I even recall like new language that um we received in that meeting. I'm like what does that word mean? And uh so anyway, I appreciate the work that we've done on this. So that's all I have, superintendent. Thank you, sir. I see no further questions or comments. Thank you. Thank you for your time. Thank you, sir. Next up, we have Miss Terresa Griffin and Mr. Chad Davis. They're here with updates to board policies. Yes. Good afternoon, board members, Superintendent Hyde. Um we're just bringing back one, excuse me, um one policy today.
058This is a policy that we presented on last month and there were a few um revisions to it. Um this is going to be brought for public hearing um in April. So we just wanted to address the revisions that to this policy. So if you looked at the the policy that I attached, this is a brand new policy. It's our academic honesty policy. We talked about it last month when we talked about artificial intelligence. Um, and it goes along with that policy. There was one line um that we struck through that talked about um strictly prohibiting the use of AI and natural language processing tools. So, it just removes that sentence. Um, it still goes into detail to talk about what things are and aren't allowed. And like we talked about before, there'll be more
059specific procedures um dedicated to this, but it just removes that that sentence that was kind of like definitive saying um it's strictly prohibited. And then we added in some additional language um that Superintendent Hyde wanted to make sure was in there in regards to digital graphic and video production. So this is just an update to this policy. So um when you see it for public hearing because it's a new policy, it's going to be a clean policy. There's not going to be the green and red striketh through. Um I only put the green and red strike through so you can see the difference between last month and this month um for the sake of today's meeting, but it'll be it's a completely new policy. So it's not like we're taking language out of an existing
060policy. Mr. Sharpless just uh wanted to say thank you for taking our suggestions from last uh work session and and um making some changes. I like the striketh through and uh the addition. So I appreciate it. even though I know it's all a new policy. So, thank you, Dr. Allen. Yeah, again, I I thought it was a great move as well. Uh, and the, you know, the comments noted last time, let's let's not see this as a punitive, uh, in a sense. So, I think there's some really good bones here and, you know, we all recognize, uh, this is going to be very fluid, right? This is technology that's just constantly changing. So, I think the the progress on this is good. And again, I I'm looking forward to our next uh I think in
061two agenda items where we talk about some of the pilot initiatives. Um but this is conversation around the state, right? And even at at the nation or national level as well. So I'm I'm happy where where this is. So thanks for adding that element about our digital technology areas. Um because it's in high usage. I mean it's embedded within the software tools that have been improved within our pure list as well. like a lot of the Adobe applications have already integrated AI tools and and the expansiveness of that is just never ending. So I see this as a good uh move in the right direction and look forward to just adapting as we move along in this conversation. So thank you. There are no further questions or comments. Thank you both. Thank you. Next up,
062board members, we have Miss Anne Everett, senior director, Office of Acceleration and Innovation, and she's here to talk to us about recruitment, employment, and retention of high quality, diverse teachers, instruction leaders, and staff. So, good afternoon board members. Thank you for your time today. I want to start and just kind of say that it's always a treat to work on a project that involves so much collaboration with other district departments. And so, this is a true collaborative effort from leadership with Mr. Hyde and Mr. Green, Chad Smith, our HR department, our division of schools with our regionals, finance, IT, uh, public relations, our union and Miss Yokum, as well as, um, Pulk State College and their leadership. So, this is a true collaborative effort. And so, today I just really want to introduce to you
063the teacher apprenticeship program, which is an additional pathway to help our paraprofessionals um, become teachers. And so, there is statute and state rule that helps support this program. And in a nutshell, basically what it means is we have pair of professionals as long as they meet certain requirements such as their AA degree with a cumulative 2 um five GPA. And you can kind of read down through the qualifications there, but they're selected and they actually serve for all intents and purposes as a co-teer with a mentor teacher in a classroom for two years. So they are a teacher parap or they are a paraprofessional teacher apprentice but they're really serving as a co-teer in a classroom with a teacher a master teacher for two years. At the end of those two years and well throughout
064the two years they're documenting competencies towards a bachelor's degree. And so they will upload different projects artifacts that support that they are learning teacher competencies under the guidance of that mentor teacher. Their last semester serves really as a teacher internship, if you will. So, they kind of take more control of the classroom. They finish all of their their competencies. They will have had to pass their exams. And at the end of those two years, after successfully completing all the requirements, they walk out with a bachelor's degree from Pulk State College in elementary education with their ESOL endorsement and potentially a reading endorsement add-on. So, it's a really great program for our um pair of professionals. And the whole time it's on the job training. So they're actually being paid to do their job but also
065document those competencies towards their master's I'm sorry towards their bachelor's degree. There are requirements for mentor teachers. You can kind of see those as well. They have to have at least five years teaching experience. They have to have a highly effective VAM score. They also have to participate in clinical education supervision training to make sure that they're able to sponsor and support that um apprentice. And then through that program, we have certain requirements as well. And so we have to make sure that we're providing opportunities to people that are qualified, right? We're going to support them. Um, we have to have a job description that supports their role as a teacher apprentice, not necessarily that traditional paraprofessional as we may think about it. And then we help s uh provide supervision and feedback to them
066as well. Pulk State College as the provider, they'll receive grant money from the state to actually pay for the it traditionally would be like a credit, right? We're paying their tuition, but really it's it's a competency based program. So, they're receiving funding from the state to pay the tuition for these um mentor, I'm sorry, for the teacher apprentices, and then they actually document all those competencies and then they sign off on that bachelor's degree at the end of that. And um Mr. Hyde, one of his um specifications was he wanted to make sure that we provided um a bonus for those apprentices to remain on track. And so you can see the proposed apprentice um bonuses if they remain on track with their study at the end of each semester. And then also um the
067state each year can choose to allocate this will be the the second year of the teacher apprentice program across the state. There's a couple districts already starting this year. So, we'll be in the second round hopefully. We are still pending our final approval. Um, but the state can allocate money for the mentor teacher to receive bonus money. And if they don't, then we would like to do that for those mentors. And then these are the next steps. So, we have a job description that is drafted. Um, I think we're in our final stages of that piece. We have anou that is going through the legal departments at Pulk State and um Pulk County. We also have a a anou that's working its way being drafted for our union as well. And then we're really just
068waiting on final approval. But pending that approval, we have every expectation that it will come through. We're going to go ahead and begin the marketing process to recruit our first group of 10 apprentices for our pilot program. Questions, comments? Mr. Sharpless. So, uh, I think this is a great, uh, program. Um, we need to get more highly qualified teachers into our classroom and what better way than to grow our own. Um, you know, they already know our system. They know our ways of doing business. So, I think that's great. Um my question um so for the teacher mentor the bonus you said if the state doesn't allocate that then we will um we will give them bonus from our basically our our funding. So um first I think that's critical uh if the teachers the
069mentor teachers are putting in the work to mentor as someone who you know who has uh done that before um not through this program but through others uh there's a lot of work involved in that. So I want to make sure that um if you know if that if the state doesn't follow through with that then we for sure will pick that up and I'm glad to see it in here. Um, and I also like the the keeping on track bonus as well for the for the apprentices. Um, I think that's important. Um, it gives them an incentive to not just start something but to finish it. And then ultimately our our goal is to get them in the classroom as as full-time teachers, right? Yes, sir. Um, so I guess my question is are
070the going back to the teacher mentor bonuses is this um are these amounts uh similar to other districts or or how how how would we come up with this? Yeah. So I believe and I would have to defer to HR who actually drafted these pieces, but if I understand correctly, these are modeled after the other mentor bonuses that we've had in the past. they align with that process so that it's equivalent. All right. Thank you. Great question, Mr. Keys. Well, thank you, Mr. Sharpas, for that because you just asked some of my questions. Um, but I will tell you that I'm absolutely thrilled about this because coming from the I guess corporate world, I found out that, you know, and and not a knock to higher education for those that are involved in that. you
071know, I have graduate level education as well, but um experience on the job I find is a lot more effective sometimes than sitting in an instructional classroom. So, um and then growing our own, we want the talent that we have here to stay here. That's exactly right. And so, the idea was let's take the people that have already committed to PULK and let's invest in them and keep them in these positions as well. That's absolutely fabulous. And and and to me, it's it's it's getting those teachers, certified teachers in the classrooms we need so desperately. So, I am I am really excited about this and I'm hoping in in the years to come we start off with 10 that we see this program really blossom into something that we can we can kind of um
072wave a banner saying hey look what we've done here successfully and and and bring that into kind of um um an avenue to get more teachers certified teachers in the classroom and and like again sounding like you know we're beating the death but how what what better way than to grow our own right this is awesome. Yeah. and potentially recruit pair of professionals into our system as well knowing that this opportunity exists. That's a good point. Exactly. Exactly. So, I appreciate you and your this is awesome. Miss Fields, I think it's a great opportunity. The question that I have is about the marketing piece. Uh we are now in April and it's just a couple months before summer. So, what are the strategies that we're going to have in place to make sure that this
073information is spread throughout and and give everyone that wants to have an opportunity to, I guess, submit. I don't know how how what that's going to look like. Yes, ma'am. That's a great question. And so, let me also say that this hasn't been a last minute type of project. We actually submitted our proposal to the state September 16th. I happened to look and I emailed them quite regularly asking for updates and what do we need and we're really just pending that. And so we were kind of doing that slow walk of wanting to make sure that these these opportunities we were, you know, providing to our pair of professionals really came to fruition. And so we've been working with PR. They've branded it. Um we have Pulk State reviewing that branding. But really it's about
074an all hands on deck, right? So we'll be working with PR on our side, PR and Pulk state and we'll be putting that information out through PR through uh email and soliciting those applications and then working with Division of Schools, Mr. Green and the regional superintendents to select not only the administrators that have the capacity to really support these individuals but the teachers as you said it's a lot of work when you mentor and this is more than just mentoring right you're really teaching a teacher for two years and so there's a lot of work to make sure that we have the capacity and the right places to support these oncoming teachers or these upcoming teachers but it will be an all hands- on deck to kind of get the word out and to recruit
075realizing that there's only 10 spots right they're going to be very precious And we want to make sure that we find the right people and that we also spread it across the district, right? That it's not in one pocket, it's across the district as well. Um, and then once we have those people selected, we've already got tenative plans in place. Pulk State's going to do an open house and kind of a big celebration with our leadership where they really celebrate them as being Pulk State students. And then in the fall, we'll do the same thing right before school starts. We'll have a great celebration for them. Again, that'll be marketing for our next group of of candidates. And that's where we will celebrate them becoming upcoming teachers. Right? So Pulk State's going to do the
076the student side backpacks, student supplies. We're going to do the teacher piece, making sure they have teacher desks, all those things so that they're in the classroom as an equal. Um, so that's kind of the post marketing, if you will, but that will also be part of the marketing going forward to make sure that all of our employees get that word. We they know about it. They can plan for it and prepare themselves for the next group of applications. But it's going to be a fast run to that finish line. And one of the pieces as well because we want to not only have them ready for the fall on our side, Pulk State wants to do a boot camp with them in the summer to really begin to get those skills and those ideas
077and those thoughts and those theories with them. So as they enter that classroom, they can walk in as a confident co-teer, not necessarily that that assistant, if you will. But yeah, your point is well made. We know we're at at at a very tight timeline. It seems like you guys are on top of it. So that's great. Well, and Miss Fields, what what Miss Everett's been very kind not to disclose. So I'll tell on myself was about two and a half three months ago. I I do attend the parah evenings when we have trainings and support. And so there was a room full of paras and I slipped and said that this was up and running at the time and we had a lot of interested parties reaching out and I had to be told
078to pump my brakes a bit because we weren't there yet. um we were trying to finalize our our ourus and whatnot. So there there were a room at least ofund and something pairs that are very much of this um appreciate your energy. Yeah, my enthusiasm but but what I have done as well they were excited. So what I have done and interesting, we just had the community meeting at Scenic Terrace and one of the parents who was incredibly supportive of the the relocation actually is a PAR educator for us at one of the high schools and I and he wants to become a social teacher. So I spoke to him about this program. I mean so all of us will be talking about this out there. It's it's it's frustrating to be limited to 10,
079but we want to have some initial success. We want to work through all the kinks. We want to make sure we get this up and running. We want to have 100% completion rate, but 10 becomes 20 becomes 40 becomes 50. And so I think very soon you'll see this up and running at full scale. But really kudos to Annne Everett and her team and the partnership. I mean she's incredibly collaborative. She's really taken this on with Carolyn JRO and many others who are really excited about this. Um this this absolutely for many of our pair educators and part of the incentive and we've been talking about this with pea. How do we create tiers within positions so that people see the benefit of progressing towards something else? Um, and so if we can create that
080here and use it as a model elsewhere, that would be fantastic, right? How do you progress from to be a custodian to be a head custodian? How do you progress to be, you know, a food service worker to being a food manager? How do you progress from being a par educator to an instructor, from instructor to a principal? I mean, there are opportunities there that we can create and pipelines and incentivize employees along the way to do that like we're doing in our trades groups and other places. So, it it's exciting to have this and and but thank you Ann for not tattling on me, but the the message is out there and it's growing and Pulk State's doing a good job of messaging this as well. Yeah, they're super excited. They want to grow
081it as well as you can imagine. They've got actually um somebody dedicated to this project as well. Yeah. Dr. Allan. Yeah, I mean we could have just ended that agenda item on that. So, Superintendent Hyde, appreciate your passion around this as well. Um, it just it resonates with all of us. Um, but I was going to just commend you. I mean, you probably have so much more you can speak to on this and you're trying to keep within this time frame, I'm sure. But with Miss Field's question, I mean, you just started to unravel uh the details around this plan. And so I really first of all appreciate there's been a lot of work and and I will say when when I started and talked about the collaboration with the other departments from IT to
082PR to to legal you name it everybody's been involved and that's what's made this really exciting. It's not from one direction. It is multidirectional and everybody's on board which is amazing. Yeah indeed. So we can see your passion and your innovation around this. So we really appreciate it. I'm like envisioning, okay, when they get to that 2-year mark, right? Um, how can we celebrate the next celebration? Absolutely. Indeed. Um, and then I'm, you know, my daughter, my oldest, 20, her best friend, uh, just moved into a par role. I'm like, I'm going to share this with her. Um, but no, I mean, you know, looking even at our, um, bargaining settlement, right? There's 16 over 1,600 pair professionals in the school district. So, we definitely have a a large base to recruit from for this.
083And who better to invest in? Indeed. Right. Yep. Yep. So, thank you for the work on this. Yes, sir. There are no further questions or comments. Have a good day. Good job. Next up, we have Miss Pasco, who's going to give you an overview of some of the AI pilots that we are launching or in progress of finalizing. Good afternoon. How is everyone? Good afternoon. I would like to first thank you for moving so quickly. I'm meeting with SAP working on a previous board project and I had to run to get here. So, thank you for making me sure I got my exercise in. So, a couple things you've talked I believe about the AI policies. I'm here and we're going to talk a little bit high level about defining AI. I think it's fair
084to say it's confusing. Fair statement. People say AI and we don't really know what it means. So, that's a challenge for us. It's a challenge for teachers, for students, for our public watching. So, let's just spend a couple minutes really, really high level unpacking three areas of it. First, got a question for you. Do you know when chalk was invented? This is going to be purposeful. All right, Dr. Allen. Chalk. Okay. Prehistoric. I'll give you one. Do you know when the pencil was invented? Century. Do you know the year? Well, I know the story of when graphite was discovered. So, in the Lake District of England, right? Yes. Very good. Very, very good. You got it. All right. So, I want you first to wrap your mind around this. You are a teacher. You're good.
085Yes. See, boys and girls, teachers can ask students questions and they can answer it correctly. Nice job. All right. So, when teachers were first teaching with chalk, boy, I want you to think about that. Could chalk be erased? Sure. We have a slate and we're writing on chalk and you just erase it. What What do you think happened when all of a sudden we got a pencil and paper? We invented erasers. We invented erasers. But before that, we freaked out. This is documented in every historical book you'll ever see, every topic because it was a massive change and we didn't know how to address it because now something that we could write and say, "Oh, I made a mistake. Let me just erase it real back and put something else in." Became permanent. So that
086concept is important when we apply it to AI. It's the same type of concept. When we look at these evolutional changes for us talking about technology, we have to rethink how we think about things. So first we need to know a little bit about how it's built. So AI broadly categorized has three categories. Machine learning, deep learning, and natural lang language processing. Dr. Allen, do you want me to quiz you on that too? I'm just kidding. We're going to keep going. Okay. Machine learning. So this is a lot of words here to say a couple things of it uses algorithms. So that's a rule. So that's first important. AI is going to be based upon rules and it's going to read data sets. It's going to categorize images together. It's going to analyze data for
087us. And it's going to predict price fluctuations. So, all of these have patterns. True. If I showed you a picture and it was real fuzzy and it I said, "Describe for me this animal." Based upon the outline, you probably could figure out who that animal is, right? Well, that's how you actually train AI. That's what they do is they give them really fuzzy pictures, give the computers really fuzzy pictures, and they go through that and train on that to get more detailed. It's actually five pieces. The data, the raw material that comes in for the training, the algorithm, which is the brains of the machine. Training, so constantly going back over and over and over it to refine your answer. Prediction. Okay, now I want you to predict what you see. We're going to refine
088this as we go through. And then an iterative process. And iterative means we learn. We do something, we learn, we build upon it. So speech recognition software. Speech has rules. It has concrete images. We can practice on that. Fraud detection. So, patterns. Believe it or not, they're patterns. Um, I happen to be out of the country over spring break. When I got back, I have a standard meeting with my team. The first thing my systems operations person said to me is, "Were you in Jamaica over spring break?" I was like, "Yes. Did somebody see me?" And he said, "No, my team wanted to make sure because we got a fraud alert and we wanted to make sure that was actually your login." Okay, good to know. So, self-driving assistance features. Not going to lie, those
089scare me a little bit, but you know, if you've got a car and it's doing some self-driving, it's based upon rules. So, that makes sense. This has been around for a long time. AI was actually first coined at Dartmouth in 1956. So, this is not new. It's just not a new topic we've really talked about a lot. The second type, broad category. Now, depending on what resource you use, you could get six categories, nine categories. So I'm just going really broad deep learning. So what's the difference here about deep learning and machine learning is deep learning is built on a network. So there's essentially three layers. There's an input layer, there's a data layer, and an output layer. So when you think about deep learning, you just need to think of it more complex than
090machine learning. Make sense? So, a chatbot. Um, if you go in and you anybody go on a website and all of a sudden this little box pops up at the bottom. Hey, I'm Velma, your AI assistant. Can I help you? Okay, that's a chatbot. We're really not talking to a person. The trick here is for years we thought we were talking to a person, but we weren't. Sometimes we were, and sometimes we weren't. We didn't know. I see. Uh, you have experienced this, Mr. Keys. Yes. Facial recognition. Lots of discussion about that. And this one's really scary. Autonomous vehicles. These are, you know, the way of the future. I'm sitting in the back. Yeah, Mr. Sharpless, I see you. Okay. You ever been in an autonomous vehicle before? Okay. Yeah. You let me know how
091that goes. I don't know how I feel about that one. Um, but that's what all of that is occurring. That's been around for a while, too. The one that everybody's talking about now is natural language processing. So, natural language processing is hard and it's difficult. Note, I want to show you at the bottom. Generated by Microsoft Copilot and Bing. Okay. Now, why would I do that? One, to make a point, but two, Bing could write this a little better than I could. I I'm okay to say that my skill set isn't necessarily crafting um board presentations or well-written emails, and I might need a little help. So, how does the natural language processing work? what is what occurs there? Because this is the key of what we want to think about. This is where I
092kind of have to have some glasses. It's doing all those things that machine learning did except it's going to the next layer where it's figuring out how the machine can do it itself. So in deep learning, we're still are looking at data. We're still looking at an algorithm relying on these networks. We're looking at human intervention. So the human is driving this iterative process, but we're going much more complex. And then we're looking at all these levels. Natural language processing, there's no human. That's the scary part. Anybody ever remember Terminator? So it's scary, right? Because we're giving up some control. But essentially what it's doing is it's taking this large database of data, whatever it is that was available to it. By the way, the internet's just a large database and it's taking all of
093that data and then it is learning and being trained on it and then training itself to say I did this based upon this data. I came to this conclusion this was wrong. Now I need to learn again. Now I need to go here and that can be a little scary. True. So that's what it is. Now the question is what are we going to do about it? So, you've got a board policy and we have some options. One option is I'm not going to say these are all viable, but there's still options. One option is we could just open up the floodgates and say anybody do whatever you want. That would be a problem in pretty much any K12 organization. We're all struggling with this because we have a responsibility to educate students. So, we
094can't just open up floodgates. Fair enough. And students depend on us to do that. They do. They I I'm a mom. I want to know that my students grade means something. Students want to know that they had, as you all talked about, well-trained mentors, people who are from this community that want to teach and they've got the right resources. Well, we don't know if they're the right resources if we just open up the floodgates. So, at PK County, what we decided to do is to do three pilots. Now, we might add more, but they are going to be controlled pilots. And we want to do three because we're really trying to hit multiple areas of discussion. The first one we're doing is a Microsoft co-pilot AI pilot. That's a mouthful. Uh Joe McNottton who is
095in the back of the room. I drew the short end of the straw. He told me I get to present. He gets to watch, right Joe? No, he'll come up if we have questions and want to include him. So Joe McNottton from the teaching and learning side will be bringing in people from the operational side. What they are doing is looking at our Microsoft tenant. So we have lots of data, One Drive, Sharepoint. There is an ability for us to use AI for it to manage some of that data for us and to do summaries, new content, reminders, automate processes. For instance, in preparing for today, one of my biggest frustrations was going back and finding the PowerPoint template in order to use. Anybody else have that problem? I just can't find my documents. AI
096can find the document for you. In order for it to do that, it has to be able to read the document and we might have some that are sensitive and we don't want it to read. Fair statement. Okay. So, first we have to label those with sensitivity labels and that's what the IT department, Joe's team and some operational people have been working on to prepare and look at six SharePoint sites and figure out that process. Once we do that and we look at what's okay, what's not okay, what does it do, then we look at expanding that out. There also can be a cost to this and that's important for me to talk about. One of the things that a that Microsoft offers, schooly offers, many people offer is they offer chat bots that someone
097can come ask a question, but there's a financial cost. And the financial cost comes at either a full price or a per request price. So go back to that chatbot that Mr. Keys was kind of smiling about every request which means I ask a question is a price I give an answer is a price and that's the footprint that's happening. So as a organization we have to make some decisions about what our priorities are. So this is in the beginning of this. Um I suspect this will take us about six months before we can produce back what the information is and what that looks like. And this is a collaborative process to um talk to use Miss Everett's words where the superintendent is involved. We'll come back and talk with you and everybody's looking at
098what should we do. This is not a defined answer here. This is an investigation of what what is available to us and what should we do? Uh this you want me to keep going or do you all want to ask questions about each pilot as we go? Okay. The second one is an Amira learning pilot. The Amira learning is actually a platform. It um is one that we the name lost me. IMA uh not Imagine Learning. It was I Ready. It was I Ready. It's turned into a mirror now. And essentially it allows the students it does the same thing. They have all their curriculum, all their data and they use natural language processing that they can read all of that and then the student can be can prompt them with questions and it can
099respond back. So this is going to be a pilot that's going to happen in 2526 and we are just at the infancy stage. So we're not ready to really tell you what this is going to look like, explain to people, but this is under the direction of Joe McNotton and Victoria McKenzie supported by the IT department and we didn't really want to launch this until we had a policy. So that's why we're in the infasy stages of that one. That will be at the middle school level. Um then the pilot number three, one of the things that we really want to be able to address is how do we teach students to use AI? Okay. As a teacher, my worst nightmare was they're going to teach the students before they teach me. So who do
100we have to start with first? We're going to start with the teachers. So Hayne City is involved with us their IB program in a collaborative pilot. We will be spending the summer working together to talk about what do we want to do, how do we want to do that. There are some conferences that the team will be going to, which includes um the Hannes City IB administration, uh teachers if they so choose, and we'll be designing all of that. Then we'll be spending the fall working with teachers talking about what does this need to look like? What is some of this? Um and then we'll move into the students in the spring and then that will give us some ideas about how do we move forward. One of the things about AI that's interesting um
101I did an ethics and AI presentation with some students actually the Lakeland lead students and it was fascinating. Um and here's the question and this is what the students taught me. Miss Pasco when you talk about ethics ethics are personal. they're based upon our personal morals or religion or how do I know the AI what it's telling me fits my ethics? I was like that's the question. So those are things we want to unpack in a safe space where we know that we're having collaborative conversations then bringing information back to leadership so that the proper decisions can be made. So Mr. Hyde that pretty much concludes where we are. Dr. Allan, well, I don't even know what to ask at this point, but I want to be the first one to talk. Oh, no. This
102this is very exciting. Um, okay. So, we we pull all this data from these pilots um and we we pull uh and we start thinking about implications. I mean, what what are you considering um doing with this and how do we deploy it? And before you answer that, I would just say uh if you notice board members in the board comment section uh today, I did include some documents and these documents were collected from the most recent Florida school board association, our board of trustees or board of directors meeting and Miss Pasco's name is all over those documents. So, uh I commend her for sharing her knowledge across the state. It's going to have an impact. So, thank you for doing that. So there um my question yeah implications what do we do with it?
103Okay so this was my happy presentation. Um here's my a little bit scared presentation. I just received a Florida cyber alert that there was an AI attack started January 29th and it was aimed purposely at government agencies because they're assuming that we don't have good cyber practices. Now I haven't been able to unpack it and look at it. It didn't impact us. it's not involved with us. But that's my big fear. Um, you know, the more data we put out there, the more data we have, the more somebody can take. The more data we have out there and the more profitable it looks for somebody take it, the more they hold us hostage because we can't get to our data and we can't do what we need to do. So, we need to balance both
104sides of the fence and we need to harden our um network, which we've been doing. And I will admit when I first got here that was a real challenge. But I don't believe that that's a challenge for Pulk County. I believe that that is one area teachers, administrators, board, district, we're all united that we want to protect our safe resources, which is our data, our students, our staff, the things that that are important to us. So everybody's involved in that and we continue to do that and continue to utilize those pieces that we can do to harden it. So that's what we're do. We're always looking at that and eventually this will be part of the pure process. I mean we have to look at that when you come through the pure process we have
105to weigh where is our opportunity cost and that's not an IT decision it is the facilitator for that and then those decisions happen cross collaboratively on the operational side or the instructional side to decide where are we willing to take a calculated risk and where are we not so that that's kind of as polyiana as I can be about the things that really are scaring me but I will tell you that that scares everybody It it scares any IT person and probably scares most organizations, too. So, we're all in it together. Yep. Indeed. So, yeah, I appreciate the work on it. I mean, I I think Mr. Murphy's over there probably pondering things on this one as well from a law perspective. and just coming back from COSBA uh up in Atlanta which is the
106national conference um session after session after session even you know to the point of the nuances of okay if we have a laptop board members and we've used AI are the prompts that we're um pushing into the machine is that part of public record and you know so I mean there's really good conversations around it but again to see it as an innovative tool uh to make sure that we're we're building sort of parameters um guardrails for students so what they you know know what they can and can't do with these tools is important. So, thank you. You're welcome, Miss Wyatt. Thank you. This is exciting and I appreciate us realizing that risk is something we need to mitigate, not something we need to avoid completely. Um because there there are always going to be
107risks, but there are so many benefits to AI and being able to utilize it for good. Um that I appreciate giving our students the opportunity to do that. That being said, I know many of our students are already using AI, whether or not we want to believe it. Um, as we look at some of the pilot programs, while pilot programs are running, are we offering any type of support to um teachers or staff that are wanting to allow students to utilize it, whether it's in research for their papers or things like that? I know like for example at SEU, basically you just have to site this is what I did and print and and attach the transcript of this is where it came from. Are we doing anything like that in the meantime or are
108we just telling them they can't use it until the pilot hits their school? Well, that's a a kind of a complicated question. So, AI is not open on our devices and that's for a reason because we didn't have a policy. We aren't using it. And again, I can't have the wild west, but let's also unpack it a little bit. Cheating is cheating. Documenting your resources is documenting resources. Let's go back for a minute. I I did not use true statement. I didn't go through and use the AMA format or whatever, but I gave credit to where this was. Correct? That is the same foundational expectation any teacher has. If you are going to use resources that are not yours, you must give credit to those resources no matter where you got it. So, those are
109important things that I am confident teachers are doing. And I can't really speak to the support that's being given to them because that's not coming from the IT department. But what I can speak for is I do know the curriculum department um and I know the division of schools spends a lot of time talking with teachers about that. How do you site your resources? What are we doing? What does it mean to be ethical? So I do believe that is still happening. If students are using AI, they're using them on their personal devices. They're not using them on ours and and they're not using them at school. That's the same thing as you know, hate to say it, but had my son one time in the car and there were four other kids and I
110all of a sudden it got real quiet. I was like, "What are you and they're like, "We're copying each other's papers." I was like, "You can't do that. That's cheating." And so it it it's the same concept. It just scares us because it's a whole brand new thing. So, yes, there's there's the same supports that have been given consistently through all of that. And that's part of that Hannes City IB pilot is if we're going to allow this here, what does that look like? What support do we need? Where do we need to go? And that's part of, you know, I really liked Miss Everett's words of it's the slow walk. We we need to do a little bit of a slow walk to make sure we're making the right decisions and then because I'm
111confident once we open it, the floodgates will open. I don't know if I totally answered your question or not. Mr. Keys, let me just say that I am glad that you are on the task because I take it as this is such a a bad analogy when you you walk around it and you kind of look at it a few times and then before you reach out and touch it, you want to walk around another time. Thank you so much for your cautiousness because um while this is scary, I can tell you um on the banking industry side, we've jumped in full boore on AI and seeing what it can do for us um and the implications from a fraud standpoint and and customer data um is is a big concern and it's kind of
112it mimics what we're doing here too with protecting student data and district data. So again, I thank you so much for your cautiousness and it we're going to get there, right? Um and it's going to be an excellent tool to use. Um, we used it uh this summer in in banking school to do kind of a presentation and and the things that it came up with were absolutely amazing. Something things that I never would have thought of. What a powerful tool, but something that we need to be responsible with using. So, thank you again for for making sure that we kind of do do our due diligence before we jump into it full board. Thank you. You're welcome. For sure. But that is my obligation. Part of my job is to uh Miss Wyatt's point
113mitigating risk. And the way I mitigate risk is we're going to do as much as I know I can walk us back. If I can't walk us back, then I got to make sure I can walk us back because you once you get past that point, then you just can't. We don't want that to happen. Thank you. You're welcome. There are no further questions or comments. Thank you. Thank you. Board members, I'm going to ask, do you need a break after this next item? Yes. Okay. So, knowing that this next item will be ra relatively quick, I'm going to bring Mr. Joshua McLemore, director of facilities planning and real estate. Mr. Fix, I believe, is in the audience or I thought he there he is. Uh he's also available. This is the Addison Four Corners
114apartment mitigation agreement. Josh, before you begin, just go ahead and let the technology team in in in the other room know that at following this item, we will take a short recess. Mr. McLemore. Good afternoon, Mr. Chairman, members of the board, superintendent. Uh again, this item before you uh this afternoon is the work session item uh for a mitigation agreement that has come to our office from a developer that is seeking to secure binding school concurrency for a development that is located in the northeast part of uh P County. Uh the prop uh the project itself is a 259 apartment unit uh development. uh to give you a rough bearing of where where it's located on the slide in front of you. If you see those ball fields on the right side of the screen,
115uh that is the PK County uh four corners regional uh park. Uh so again, uh this is an area that is seeing massive uh residential growth. However, this is also one of the last few vacant parcels left uh anywhere along US 27 north of I4. Uh so that this parcel is um get proposed for development. Long story short, uh this uh applicant um first uh came to our office trying to achieve binding school concurrency in December. Uh after we did our analysis based off of student enrollment uh analysis, uh they were deficient. eight student stations uh which again we give them that option of okay you can either wait and see if u capacity becomes available later on or you can enter this go down this avenue of entering into a binding mitigation agreement which
116is what this developer has sought to do. Uh long story short um in terms of cost figures associated with this uh the developer is only paying for what they are deficient. They're not paying everything that they're going to be required because, let me unpack that a little bit more. They're still going to have to pay educational impact fees. They are only just going to have to pay what they are deficient sooner than what they would already do on the back end when they pull building permits. And at this time, uh, they're deficient eight student stations. Uh, so that comes to a grand total of $228,648. And how we arrive at that figure is if you look in that bottom table uh cost of student station the department of education facilities uh up on the state
117level they have a ma matrix table that they publish every year and they generate uh what a cost a student station is at each level elementary middle and high and those tables get updated every year. Uh so we use that data to use as our uh how we generate the total costs. Um and one clarification here up on the top you can see where I have today's board shop date. However, uh the this is not coming back to back. This will not come to the board meeting for final adoption. This will come back in April uh and working with Mr. Murphy where there are some items we need to address in terms of the actual agreement itself. Uh just to make sure we have it all cleaned up properly. Pending your questions. I see no
118questions or comments. Thank you, Mr. McLemore. Thank you, Mr. Fix. Board members, will we take a 15-minute recess? Is that sufficient? I see hedge nodding. Um, so for the tech team, please put the clock on 15 minutes. Thank you. [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] Hey, hey, hey. [Music] Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] No, I uh Yes. Yes. Okay. And I'll something later, too. Just FYI. I'd like to call this meeting back to order and appreciate the little brief break there for us to collect our thoughts. It's been a great uh work session thus far. So, superintendent, I'll pass it back your way. So, again, I'm going to introduce Mr. Josh McLemore and Mr. Harry Fix. They have a second item on today uh the
119Massie Road City of Hannes City Resolution. Good afternoon again, Mr. Chair, board member, Superintendent Hyde. Uh so this next m this next item uh that we're going to be discussing, I'm going to try to really summarize it and keep it very straightforward and simple. Um but really what this is amounts to is pretty much following up on uh a right-of-way dedication that this board approved uh back in January 25 of uh January 25th, 2022. U and and at that time the board agreed to dedicate some uh rightway off of property that the district owned. And the area that we're talking about is up located up in the northeast part of Pul County. Our property is located just west of US 27 south of I4 along Massie Road near the uh actually at the intersection of
120FDC Grove Road and Massie Road. Those who are familiar with that road, that road takes a weird bend as it uh circ circumnavigates around a wetland area and that's actually the area in question that some of the rightway dedication occurred. Say all that to say, uh, in addition to actually doing signing the warranty deed and a rightway dedication, um, it came back on on a review of title that also needs to have a resolution uh, approved by this board uh, to actually follow through with the actual final uh, dedication of rideway. And with that, if there's any more, I may have to lean on Mr. Murphy to fill in the gaps on this. I see no questions or comments. Great. Thank you. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Correct. Board members, the next item is just going
121to be very brief. It's actually come back to you on April 8th ba based off some follow-up conversation with the providers and others who have submitted. Um, as you know, we have a vacant early childhood learning center on the campus. It's a dedicated site. Um, it's been vacant for some years, I believe seven or more years. So, we had recently reached out to the ELC, identified several high profile, high performing providers. I provided you the definition of what qualified them as highquality providers. We invited them to submit applications uh or an interest letter um based off the availability of that space. We had several um who were interested, three who ultimately submitted their applications. I want to thank Miss Wyatt. I want to thank uh Coneryl Adams, Lorie Allen, and Carrie Barkin, who Barkman, excuse
122me, who all assisted us with interviewing each one of the three candidates. We then looked at their submissions. We looked at their written responses. We took into consideration their their in-person responses and ultimately we rank prioritized them. We did select one overarching candidate. It was very close. Um please keep in mind that there will be other opportunities within Pulk County as we can again as we continue to look to maximize our current occupancy and utilization of our of our of our school spaces. Um, and so this was one good example of how we provide a better ROI and a great partnership where, you know, we already have the operational costs to sustain and maintain that building. If someone else can come in and eliminate those costs from their overall budget, it provides a better price
123point for parents. Um, there's a set aside requirement in there for staff and so staff can apply and it be a lottery based so it's more cost affordable, but it creates some opportunities for our staff. Um, I think it's a great model for us to consider. We'll see how this works out. So, we do have a final candidate, they're being notified, and then they will enter into contractual agreements or discussion with us. Um, if they are successful and we reach an agreement, then I will bring that back before the board before the end of the school year. Hopefully, we can get that done in the next month or so. Um outside of that, if we reach a place where maybe the provider says we're not we're not comfortable with that requirement, um there's an understanding
124in the letter that's being sent to each of them that then it moves on to the next highest score. Um and so there's great opportunities here for us. So I just wanted to give you a little bit of a background, give you an update. I didn't know if Miss Wyatt wanted to contribute. I do see she raised her hand here. Um but I think the process was good. I thought I think it was very thorough and the submissions we had some great great great providers come to the table. Each had their own strengths um and none had weaknesses or deficiencies but some just really really hit a home run during their presentations. So, Miss Wyatt, thank you. Yes, it was it was extremely impressive. Each of the the candidates that submitted um from their presentations
125to their written questions um written responses to their questions, they they know their stuff and they they're all well equipped to serve our students. I'm excited um for the top selection, but also excited that it sounds like there will be other opportunities for um the other two candidates as well. I did have a question with the shift in timeline. It wouldn't be able to come back until April 22nd. How does that affect because this is something we're looking to launch in August. How does that affect I believe we have a workshop April 8th. I can ask for consensus support there. We'll start the contract negotiation and then hopefully if we can have that wrapped up by late April, early May, we'll be able to do that. Um, we will include the adjusted timeline with the
126providers so that they understand. Um, we will not put them under the gun to basically have to start or rush to start. We want them to staff adequately and appropriately, but there's some things we have to work out with them as far as FF and E. Um, but all have agreed. They know they have to use Raptor. They know we have to have access to the CCTV, the security systems, those types of things. So there's just I think the majority of issues have been resolved other than the price point, the calendar year that they will follow. Some have indicated they might be year round, others have indicated they they would follow more of a traditional school schedule. Um but we'll we'll have to iron those details out over the next month. Thank you. I would
127encourage us to do everything on our end we can to have it brought back to sign off for us to sign off on on the 22nd. Um just be for planning purposes. I want to make sure that they can start with for families with the school year. We're we're we're essentially going to model it after a traditional charter school application and just modify it to suit this specific purpose. Thank you. Yes, ma'am. Miss Fields. I just wanted to know, maybe I missed it. Are we going to have an opportunity to know who the provider is? Yes, ma'am. I will provide that to you. They competed as well. Yes. Well, you received all packets for all three applicants previously. Um, and I will apprise the board once the letters get finalized and sent out. I plan
128on sending those out this evening. I will copy the board on those letters. Okay. Thank you. Appreciate it. Mr. Sharpless. That was going to be my question. If we could see um, you know, how they have we got we got the rubric, we got everything. If we just could see how they performed, I'm just curious. Um, or or just some over like this was selected for this reason. I don't know. Well, I can I can just basically tell you that rank prioritized the the committee reached consensus as far as the top number one, two, and three. Gotcha. Um the point sheet, I'm happy to share the point sheet and their written responses. The thing is that often gets miscommunicated or misconstrued sometimes is that the point sheet is not the final indicator of who gets
129selected. Sometimes that gets misconstrued a lot during interview process. It's one of three components that we review um in their totality. Now, in this case, I believe it actually worked out in favor of the top three and how they ended up ranked, but I just don't I want to put it out there on the record that that's not I I I want to mislead anyone. I want to rephrase that. I just I basically would would like to know like from the consensus of the group, you know, we went we decided to rank this overall first because XYZ just in case any community people are asking me, well, why was this person selected? I can be knowledgeable. It'll be in the letter. Okay. It the letter summarizes you were selected based off the following. All right.
130Thank you. No further questions or comments on that item. Next items, the additional millage levy for school operating use. Um I'm list as a contact. However, I'm going to defer to Mr. Murphy. Uh Mr. Murphy and his team developed this ref this um this language and I asked the board to go ahead and make sure that you reviewed it. Um, I did get some commentary from Miss Miller because she's unable to be with us today. Um, and her questions and comments, so I was able to address those. Uh, primarily, she asked, uh, about the board's, you know, the the term that she would be supportive of a 4-year term. Um, she also asked some questions about um, communication, partnerships, those types of things. All of which I had to share that would not be finalized
131until such time as the board basically took some action to to indicate that we need to move forward. So I I'll open it up to any comments or questions um that you may have. Miss Fields, I don't have any comments, but I was wondering if Mr. Murphy could give us a very short summarization, please. Certainly. And I have with me my law partner Drew Crawford who uh was largely um in conjunction with me worked on the memo that's before you. What this does, board member Fields, is it provides to the board a schedule of times of, you know, calendar-wise, uh, jiving it with the Florida statutes and with the board of county commissioners practice in terms of when do you have to have the resolution to and the ballot language to the board of county
132commissioners so that it can be placed on the next available ballot, which would be November of 2026. six. The other uh information, it really is going to require work on the school board in conjunction with the superintendent and his professional staff to uh enlighten the board on number one, how much of a millillage do you want to, you know, ask the voters to approve. We've provided you some information on what other districts have done. It varies from 0.5 to one mil. Um probably more commonly it's one mill I would say. Um and that we also need to come up with a methodology or some plan of how we're going to use those those funds so that can be demonstrated to the electorate and to the voters frankly what you know what what are they doing?
133What are they voting on? Um how are you going to use that money? And it's more often than not used for operating uh expenses and in part perhaps even large part it can be used to fund uh even things as salaries. Uh and so that and then the other thing that the memo does is that it it outlines for you that the board is prohibited from spending public dollars on electioneering or on promoting this via, you know, direct solicitation to the voters. You may put information out, factual information. You may have a website and probably encourage you to do so. This is not reinventing the wheel. In fact, what we would do is we would look to perhaps some of our adjacent counties that did this that were successful. Um you'll see a website, you'll
134see direct um uh information, mailers, I think, uh printed possibly printed materials for sure. Um but there's there's certain rails that have to go up for the board members and for the expenditure of funds the superintendent would is also aware of. So that's what the the gist of this memo was intended to provide was a an outline for the board of what is entailed in this effort. Um so I think at this point um you know the board needs to have conversation at appropriate times as to what you think what kind of millillage how much and then probably the superintendent with and and his staff would have to you know come up with opportunities for the use of those funds uh in conjunction with your your input. So if that makes any sense. In other
135words, you have to come up with uh a plan um that would then be something that would be the the the basis for the uh the voted millage. Bless you. And board members, please recall that you previously had requested, Dr. Dr. Alan, you in particular had requested that we look at other school districts that either renewed or had a new referendum um to determine how they used uh any potential dollars that were generated, many of whom kept uh a hold back percentage to support the arts, athletics, um workforce career development, other types of things. And so we have that analysis. We're ready for that. Um we can share that with the board at a subsequent workshop. Um, but again, the board at one of our previous meetings indicated a a real concern with timelines, which
136is why Mr. Murphy and my office worked um, and thank you to Drew Crawford and his and his hard work to get this developed for you so that you would see what our appropriate timeline would be. Um, there's a whole other aspect to this. I I know that, you know, um anytime you talk about an increase in taxes at at a local level, it can become um it become a heated conversation. It can become there, it raises alarms or concerns from time to time. Um I think, however, in this case, in order for us to continue to demonstrate that we want to be competitive. Um if you look at the history of raises that we've given over the last four years, excuse me, that you've given over the last four years, uh you are to
137be commended. I mean they are considerable and yet we still lag um in many areas whether it's administrative pay whether it's instructional pay Dr. All and I had a recent conversation about teacher starting salary has been frozen now for two years and our first year entry level salaries are not competitive with many of the surrounding districts at this point. Um so this would allow us to help offset and address those things. There's two important bills that are making their way through the House and the Senate right now um that I know Miss Miss um Yokum and her team are supporting. They've asked for our support um which allow us to go back to a traditional step in lane which had been previously eliminated. Um from a district perspective gives us great um forecasting ability and
138much much more stability when it comes to planning our finances out multiple years in advance. Um but this is something to be entered into cautiously. I know uh related to that and I know related to some of the concerns that you have each expressed to me about a potential referendum. You start with me messaging how do we use our money and and Mr. Keys, Dr. Allen, others, Mr. Sharpless have requested a committee. I I've sent the structure for that committee. It's going to be on our next workshop for us to discuss. Um and that's a committee comprised again that will be kind of an efficiency audit. Uh that will also be the committee that long-term much like the half penny sales tax committee would be in place to audit and hold us accountable for the
139expenditure of any dollars and revenue brought in. But they can also magnify our voice within the communities. We have our district advisory committee. We have others. Um there are other I think organizations and entities that would stand ready to support us in our initiatives. Um, but again, it starts with transparency about how we currently use our funds. Um, because it can easily be misconstrued. Dr. All and I had a great conversation today about this. You know, we give what's being labeled as historical raises and then we're going out for a referendum and it seems a conflict, right? And it it's it it but for the layman it can be and and so for us, we have the obligation then to make sure that we're educating them, bringing them along, providing the explanation. Um, and I
140think that we'll be very successful in doing that in partnership with others there. I think there's a sincere interest in seeing us flour, continue to improve and flourish, um, and demonstrate our commitments to our employees. So, I I say that to begin with, but again, this was this was prompted by your last conversation about the sense of urgency to get started on this sooner rather than later. And and thank you um, Superintendent Hyde and and thank you u, Mr. Murphy and your team for doing this because we've been talking about it for a minute and we know we know that we need to have all of the knowledge that we can can have to make the best decision. Uh, one of the things, Superintendent High, when we I guess we're going to have a work
141session on this, I would imagine. Uh I would like to know exactly what uh support we're going to be getting from PA and the state organization as well because I know that uh Miss Yokum has indicated that they have a lot of tools that we can use and uh utilizing those tools and even though November 2026 seems like it's far away, it's really not. So if if we're going to do this, I don't know, it's probably here in this document somewhere as far as when we would have to have approval to vote on it. I would imagine it's here somewhere so that we can work towards that and and and make a decision to to do whatever we need to do. That's just my take on it. We will work with pea asked me and
142others um and potentially may even do a shared presentation to the board on April 8th. That's a morning workshop, so we can definitely bring that back. um for further discussion at that point. There is no there is no board meeting that follows. So there'll be no vote that night. So it gives you plenty of time to chew on whatever it is we present to you and then we can bring it back backto back at a future board meeting workshop so that the board can have continue to have discussion and dialogue about this. Mr. Sharpless first just want to thank um our partners um for this uh document. I think it it lays out a great timeline as far as I always love at the end of the of each one of the dates it says
143or earlier. I like that too on the board. Correct. Correct. But that was the late those were the late. So I like the or earlier part especially. Um, and so really what I also like about it is it shows kind of it kind of shows that this kind of decision isn't something that can happen last minute. Um, very clearly even if it was push come to shove, you you it still takes uh over six months for this process to even hit to to until we get to the election. um of that. So my point is I I think this is something that we can get started earlier rather than later. I wholeheartedly agree with you, board member Fields, on that. It's it's not time to wait. Um and so um yeah, I would love to
144see this come through in the April 8th meeting with the suggestions and that so we can get started with it earlier. And our goal would be to make sure that you each have a packet on on all of this so that you have talking points and you can help address any questions or concerns that may come up. Um I think that's important for you to have the facts, right? Um and but I and so we have to be very cautious and make sure you have that to preempt any dialogue that may develop within the community. And I I want to reiterate that point. Um Superintendent, thank you for hearing us as well on the efficiency side of it. I know we did that audit a while back and um you know we got results of
145that but I think an ongoing committee is is needed because we don't want to ask our taxpayers to pay more money you know to get to increase their taxes without showing that we are using their tax dollars wisely improved it. Thank you Miss Wyatt. Thank you. And I think that my question has been answered, but I just want to confirm because one of the things that we talked about last time was is there a too early or is but it looks like everything says earlier. So we can we could do this today hypothetically if it was on the agenda for presumably there's not a there's not a too early there is not a 12-month limitation as we used to be in statute but then was amended. So yeah but from a practical standpoint and I
146know that Mr. Crawford spoke to the county attorney on this matter. Um the county generally likes to have at least six months the ballot and you know the proposed the proposal which would be a resolution of this board at least 6 months before the they would you know transmit it and put it on the ballot so that well my hope is that we're giving them much more time than that. Yes. So but I just want to make sure there wasn't too early. the the work now that needs to begin is what we've just been discussing and that is what's between March 10th of 2025 and March 24th of 2026 or earlier. We need to start that right now I think. Um and the superintendent has indicated that he's prepared to do that. Probably already has
147been. Um, one of the things that I I just want to impress on the board as we go through this process, this is a I don't think any of these you all have participated in this particular type of a of a of an effort before that I'm aware of. And um there are some relatively recent prohibitions that have gone into Florida statute in terms of the expenditure of public dollars on elections or matters that are going to be put to voters for referendum. you can't spend public dollars on vote yes on this or you know directly what we call electioneering. Um and so you can however provide factual information and it's incumbent I think on the board in conjunction with the superintendent and his professional staff to develop that desired facts you know the the
148information the um the distribution formula you know all of the things that are part of what make up the use of these dollars to include the amount um you know we we've done some some uh comparisons and I think you can See, you know, you know what your general fund is and that information can be provided what what one mill would generate uh in Poke County for use by the school for operational purposes. But you really need to set out what is your plan for that. Um because I think that gives credibility to the voters so they can see you intend on doing this. And I like the idea of having an an audit or an efficiency committee, uh, a committee that's charged with looking at and and and delivering, making sure you've delivered on
149what you've said. Um, and so I think that's probably very important accountability, transparency. At the end of the day, the voters are are looking for that and uh it's it's it's abundant here. I would say editorially, you know, we we have a lot of things going on. There are a lot of things going on in the legislature right now. And so, you know, the the the fate of real estate, you know, adalorum taxation in Florida is certainly under discussion right now and perhaps even under study, you know, in terms of whether that's going to be something statewide. I don't know yet how that will play out and and all, but um right now this is an analysis of what the current law would allow for us to do. And so I think that's that's probably
150there are other as you can see the memo uh in a in in a rather summary fashion. There are other forms of of taxation that are available. You didn't want that. You didn't ask for any in-depth analysis on those, but there are others that are available. But I think where you want to go is this voted millillage that can be used for operational purposes, which it was what the other districts have done for Hillsboro, I think 2024. Um, and I think they were successful. No reason why we shouldn't be either, frankly. Mr. Keys. Um, thank you, Superintendent Hyde. Um, thank you, Mr. Crawford, Mr. Murphy, for getting that to us. A very informative memo. Um and also thank you to the superintendent for bringing up the efficiency committee so to speak. I think that, you
151know, I need to push the button earlier to speak because all these things have been said, but um uh big fan of transparency and and showing those out and I think that if we can show that we have a a real need and we show that what our purpose is going to be in that that that um definitely paves the road u more effectively to present that to the taxpayer um because as a government entity we have to be transparent and and state only the facts and where these monies are going. So, I think that um the board's willingness to look at this and then come ahead and have real conversations in the public in the public spectrum and then the say to say we're we hear you and we're we're making our best effort
152to move forward earlier rather than later shows that we're being proactive and not reactive, which speaks volume. So, I'm excited about seeing where this is going and and taking very deliberate steps moving forward to making sure that we do this um the right way and that we do it the most effective way we can. That's good. Dr. Allen. Yeah, thank you, Superintendent. Yeah, just to, you know, add brief comments at this point. U we're still uh young in the discussion. I mean, ultimately the voters are going to make this decision, but I'm excited to hear our passions and our vision moving forward where we see the highest need that's going to benefit the most uh amount of students. And um so with that, I look forward to the research phase at this point. That's all
153I have. Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Allen. Seeing no further questions or comments on that item. Board members, the last official item that we have today on today's agenda. Um, as far as the superintendent's report is an executive summary PA collective bargaining settlement 2024 2025 and I will ask Miss McCabe or Mr. Warren please come forward. Good afternoon. Good afternoon. I know that you have the uh presentation in front of you. That was quite a long PDF. I'm hoping today by the time we're done, we can summarize that and kind of reduce that down to uh some information that you can leave with with respect to what happened at the table while we were negotiating. Today, the superintendent and district staff were pleased to recommend the approval of the collectively bargained agreements for teachers, parent
154educators, and ESP. A vote was held for these groups on March 14th, 2025, and it passed at 99% in all three pea contracts. The information in front of you says that we'll provide the results to you quantitatively, and I'm going to do that at this time. For teachers, there were 3,233 votes tallied or cast. 3,201 of those were yes and 32 no, which attributed to a 99% uh success rate for teachers. PARA educators, there were 615 votes tallied, 611 yes and four for no. And that again attributed to a 99% success rate. For ESPs, there were 273 votes tallied. 271 of those were yes, two were no, and again a 99% uh success rate for passing on the contracts and the TAs that are before you today. This is a culmination of a lot of
155work on both parties accounts. Uh there were eight meetings that occurred where we came together and ultimately reached settlement and negotiations on February 26 25. The proposed tenative agreements are for the three employee groups and it revises contract language as well as 2425 salaries and supplements. The term of the three contracts concludes on June 30th, 2026 with salaries negotiated annually. The proposed TAS or tenative agreements as we call them for the three employee groups revises several contract articles of interest to both parties with union ratification and pending schoolboard approval. The tenative salary adjustments will be retroactive to July 1, 2024. And then the contract language pieces that are before you separate from the salary will become effective July 1, 2025. I will give a highle summary of uh the teacher salary schedule um increases and
156we can get into more details of those in a moment if you prefer. The performance pay schedules for teachers that are on a 10-month contract with no prior experience maintains the state standard of a 47,05 starting salary. All additional pay scale levels will receive an increase that range from 2.65% to 7.07%. Our most experienced teachers would also that hold a continuing contract or professional services contract would also see those same ranges as well. The most experienced teachers that are 13 years or more of experience will see an increase from 3.73% to 7.07%. And if you've not already done so, you can go back to the to the salary grids and the schedules and you can see the percentages broken out by the various levels and years um as well to see how those spread across
157various levels. The priority here was to work on compression and that was a success. Within the teacher supplemental salary schedule, there were specific supplement improvements and additional supplements added. Most notably would be school counselors. You may remember a year or so we were before you and we talked about the dean supplement. We rolled that into their own salary schedule so the supplement wasn't taxed at the higher rate. We followed that model and we're doing the same for school counselors. So the 2500 that they typically would see as a supplement they will receive this year in the 2425 school year but going forward it will have its own schedule where it will be part of their salary and not be taxed at the higher rate as a supplement for ESP and PAR educators. Educational support personnel
158will receive an increase at all levels of the pay scale. The starting salary uh being $15 to 1534 was an increase of 34 cents. PAR educators also receive an increase at all levels of the pay with the starting salary increasing from $15 to $15.39 per hour. I would like to pause for just a moment and let you know my next piece is to take you through the TAS. uh not I'm going to go through article by article but some of the language that I'm going to discuss with you and I'll highlight when we get there it covers all three groups because when we talk about the language we do the same uh language for teachers that we do for payers that we do for ESPs. So before I go forward I'm going to pause and
159see if there are any questions. Mr. Sharpless. Yes. Um so I was just looking at the initial um I just have some questions. Uh so it says the the PA represents approximately 91 uh 9144 employees. Um is that that is how many they represent total or is that membership? Want to make sure I got that clear first. That would be total total. Okay. And then um when you break it down by how many uh teachers, PAR educators, and educational support and then you see how many votes were cast, each one of these were um ranged anywhere from 37 to 48% of the population depending on which ones. And so um I the question I have is when the contract goes out to be ratified, is that only going to pea members or is that going
160to the total population? Total population. Okay. And so that means less than half of our teachers voted voted at all. Positive% of teachers and 52% of ESPs turned out to vote. Yeah. That's the highest turnout we've ever had. Um last time Yes, you do. Yeah, that's good data. Thank you, Miss Yokum. Um last ratification in October 23 we had 35% turnout in teacher and parah 47% turnout in our secretary contract. This time we had uh 41% turnout in paras 47% with teachers and 52% turnout in our secretaries. So that turnout is continuing to increase. Um I'm very proud of the ground work we did to get that turnout and we're just going to keep getting more turnout each year. And are you seeing that trend? Yes. Not just this one time. Yes. Yes. And it
161was it was even lower in the 22 ratification. So each year we've gotten better about getting turnout. It goes out to every employee um covered under our contracts. Okay. And I do want to make one thing with the support staff or not the support staff, the student services with the $2,500. Uh it's not just for school counselors. That student services uh pay schedule incorporates school counselors, mental health and uh mental health counselors, uh social workers, school psychologist, speech language pathologist. So all of those will be getting the $2,500. They'll get a supplement this year and then they'll have that added into their base salary starting in July 1. I have a couple more questions. And so that 9144 total employees that pea represents um h out of how many total employees for our district do
162you know? Our total employees are about 13,400 total employees. So we're looking at about 70% of 70%. And and what percentage does ask me uh represent and nug if you could just kind of break those out so I have the I'm going to say ask me cover maybe 20% 15 to 20%. Okay. So this is a big majority of our of our employees. So I just want to big chunk. Yeah. Okay. All right. That's all the ask me units comparable I think to the parah educator group about 1500. All right. I just wanted to make sure that was public knowledge. So okay. Yes sir. Thank you. Any other questions? All right. S Oh Dr. Allen. Thank you superintendent. uh on the supplement schedule. One thing that I I like when I'm looking through the teacher
163salaries, I could do the comparison. Um but there's not a comparison. I mean, I could go back to last year's um settlement to see the changes. I mean, obviously no like minor like categories, but collectively when I look at that full list, can I see if we've changed other areas of supplements? You are making a segue to the next part of our presentation. Okay, very good. And then secondly um you know when we went through um and we received our salary allocation right we touted the 4% um that we were offering and extending to teachers what was when we got to this end point here um you know we we can see there's a range 2.65 65 to seven, right? Um, which by the way, I mean, other school districts around the state, they're like,
164"Wow, how did you get to that?" You know? Um, but where'd we go from 4% to 4 what to extend, right? When we came back to the bargaining table at the very end here, we had 4% that we initially gave, right? And then we came up with a certain amount of extra dollars. I think it was approximately five. So, so the I think so my question is you know is it that we gave you know 4.2% to um the PA to then distribute that. I was just trying to get to that final number that we extended out to our teacher unit. Mr. Pitts. So so I want to clarify because you you made mention of something that I want to make sure we don't miscommunicate. Okay. We never said it was 4% for every employee.
165We said it averaged out to 4% for every PEA member. However, we were very clear in that very first meeting. I stated it that we would then work with PEA to to assign those dollars to help address compression, which was our commitment all along. Um the additional mill or rough well less than a mill or less than a full percent that we had to bring back into the collective bargaining agreement. um would have brought us to what Jason if you had to average it across for all teachers or for all pea. Do we have that number? If not, don't don't guess. We can give it I'm not going to guess. I'll bring you back that that number here in just a bit. Um but it wasn't that we had extra money. It was that we
166will have program cuts in the near future to to and that would be my next question. Um did we ever get that list of program cuts that were addressed? So, that was a request from a singular board member. That was not a directive from the board. However, I'll be happy to satisfy that. Um, yes, I have been highlighting every single budget contract item and you will get a copy of that. They are colorcoded. Red means it's going. Orange means it's under consideration. Yellow means it's under consideration. and those will be determined based off my followup with conversations with um individual departments because I don't want to just go in haphazardly start slashing programmatic supports without understanding the full extent to which they may impact classrooms and students. Uh Mr. Pitts will provide me. You were
167you were made aware of a dollar amount in a program area um during a recent conversation with the board in close session. Um and so I can give you an update on an estimated amount because that's not a contract. That is an existing program outside of contracts that will be phased out. Um and so what and then so you'll receive that before tonight? No, sir. Okay. I was under the impression that we were going to receive that collectively as a board, but um I thought that was communicated. All right. So then I'll get a number as far as the 4% and comparative. I appreciate that. All right. I think that's I all I have at this point. Thank you. Now we'll move on if there are no other questions. There are none, sir. Okay. With
168a summary of the tenative agreements. Now what's going to come next? You saw a chart of all the articles for the teacher pair of ESPs and you had a bunch of PDFs for pages of documents we signed. What I'm going to do is walk us through those item by item as it walks across contract to contract. The first I want to talk about is teacher article three and six which also walks across to para educator 8 calendar change and planning time. And you know what? I just had an idea. I can also let you I can send you my notes that would have this when we're done if it's helpful. So you'll have it for reference and for any uh points that you'd want to uh to offer highlight when you're out and about in
169the communities or otherwise. All right. So under teacher article 3 and six also walks across to par uh article 8 for calendar change and planning time. The first thing we did was you'll find that in article 6.3A and 6.3B of the teacher agreement, it establishes that principles may now get to have up to one collaborative planning PLC or faculty meeting or other data together planning to increase student achievement. Now the new language here that was a that was a big piece for all of us was even on weeks shortened by a holiday. Previously we were limited and we could not meet on those weeks. We work very closely with teaching and learning as well as bargaining at the table. And so at the end what this ended up doing for us uh this new language
170for those articles uh increased for 17 days of planning for administrative use during those weeks. They could have faculty meetings, they could do BLC's. So that was a big a big component. The other component in order to get that to come about was the fact that we increased from seven to 10 early release days. and that uh that contract language is now before you which was in a previous and so uh those changes now are in place and they align with our uh current calendars and nous uh in place from here forward in that regard. Another piece that was a key win or or an important takeaway was for our seedats. Um, over on the SEDAT side, those are our SEATs that work um, as teachers with our young students. It provides them the opportunity
171to have self-directed self-directed planning time um, on those days that teachers um, in article three of the school calendar are getting their days as well. So now they're going to get some accesses to plan and to go through the trainings and to do the necessary pieces they need to do um, what is required of them in their classrooms. The next one I'm going to go to is teacher article 6 and parah uh article 8 and ESP article 12. This is the 30-minute lunch discussion. The tenative agreements before you establish a 30-minute lunch for teachers. It also establishes that 30-minute lunch for parent educators and for ESP. Uh we do have a planning year of the current year that we're in the 2526 school year. Uh we collected a lot of data with respect to what
172our lunch periods look like and how our facilities were oriented because we were concerned that some of our facilities couldn't accommodate a 30-minute lunch. Furthermore, we knew that we had scheduling challenges as well. But I will say that the data the data put us at almost 83 84% right now or 30 minute. We're within striking range of I think it was 27 minutes. I'm citing the data that we we collected but we're real close. and then we would have an implementation of the 30-minute lunch in school year 2627. The next tenative agreement comes to us from the TAC committee which is a joint committee that meets um and then they bring proposals back to the bargaining table. that committee met and the three items that specifically you'll see there is previous language stated that in
173the event of a procedural error, a rating of not evaluated and that the teacher would be considered to have an overall effective rating. So um we've now changed that if there's a procedural error and um in the event that there is the error and a rating of not evaluated is is put for the for the teacher and the teacher would have been considered for an overall rating it establishes then an appeal process for the SAO. Um what we noticed was sometimes teachers are getting moved, the assignments are changing and so what the committee brought back is it provides a process for appeals um for added criteria of a change in position or assignment after the second semester or andor after the SEO deadline has closed or passed. So uh we worked our way through that
174and that impacts article 15 of the teacher evaluation. Next item is teacher article 21. This is unpaid leaves. It also walks across for para educator article 7 as well as ESP article 11. This language establishes that when a combination of medical to personal leave or vice versa is used within a school year that the position will only be held for the initial 12-week period. It limits an employee from having a position held for 24 weeks when to when returning and using these leaves within the same year. So what had happened to us previously is someone would go out on a leave. They would return. They may work for three or four weeks, six or eight weeks, and then they go out on another leave. So we would have held your position for 12 weeks before,
175we're going to hold your position for 12 weeks after. And so we worked with building principles and worked with the union in negotiations to say if you're taking those and and and they're consecutive in a in a school year, you're only going to get the your position held for one 12-week period for teacher appendix B and appendix C. I think this may be the one where we begin to tease down your question, Dr. Allen. Um for 2425 uh we have already discussed the uh the group that's receiving the $2,500 stipen and how that's going to migrate into the salary. Um I want to and then I want to conclude the counselor supplement will be phased out and then July 1, 2025 we look to roll over to that new schedule um for teacher appendix C
176which is the supplements. Here's the the summary of changes to appendix C. We added assistant weightlifting for boys and girls at a value of $1,300. There's also a criteria that it has to have a minimum of 15 rostered students to to receive that stipen. Um the second item that you'll notice as a change there is we added JV flag football for girls at $1,200. It's a spring sport that was uh necessary to be added to make sure we're complicit with our Title 9 and other components in that regard. Roman numeral 3 qualified that the first responders and certified trainers are for fall, winter, and spring at a value of $1,800 uh per uh supplement there. And the very last change, we added the criteria that for multi-grade schools, a person will be paid the higher
177of the two supplements as applicable. So if we have a 912 school or a K through 8, a middle, for example, a middle senior high teacher would receive the senior high supplement and not the middle school supplement because as you do look at the supplement grid, you'll notice there's elementary, middle, and high. So we we uh wanted to highlight that. The next piece I want to talk about is par actually that that's a lot of teachers. You I can pause for a moment and see if there's any questions. Seeing none, we'll we can continue. Seeing none. All right. Par educator appendix B. In appendix B, that's our list of all of the PAR educator positions. We move the ESOL parah educator from a PA1 to a PA3. And next in the PAR educator the salary
178schedule, we've already talked about that at the beginning in the ESP contract um article 15. This was a very important discussion with respect to college hours. Um, employees that are covered under the ESP contract will receive additional money for semester hours related to position or other degree program as specified. There was a chart that's broken down there and I'll summarize it for you, but for an ESP that documents that they have 30 hours um, relative to their position, it's a value of $500 extra. If it's in an other field, it's still 500. If they go further to acquire 60 degrees and they have the amount of hours and may also have an AA or an AS degree relative to their position, it's $500. If it's for an other area, it still remains $500. And now
179I was excited to hear the PAR educator discussion that u an presented earlier. This too begins to uh move in a direction where we can have ESPs that are working toward uh education uh certification moving beyond 60 to 90 hours. If it is in within the area of a area of uh certification of education, it's $700. And if it's in an other area, it's $300. If they come all the way through to their BA or BS and it's in an area uh relative to a college of education, it's another $700. And then out of area would be 300. Um I do want to make a note that those values I quoted to you, they do stack. So if they're earned incrementally, they do add on one another. Um the hours have to be from a
180regionally accredited college accepted by the state of Florida for certification purposes. And credit for participation in an education degree program requires documentation of admission to that college of education. And lastly, there's language that says if they transfer out of the ESP group to a position that does not have the college hour supplement, the supplement's going to be removed. Uh my last summary is for ESP appendix A. And this is the chart where we have a list of all of the ESP positions. And some of this was clean up with respect to what we went through with Perk, I believe, as well as some other positions that we had decided to move in collective bargaining. We added accounting clerk Specialist Head Start, PGO3. We added district office systems assistant one, PGO4. We moved professional development specialist,
181planning and assessment specialist, and child care service specialist from PGO5 to PRS12. And lastly, we added Secretary 3, executive and fine arts specialist to PRS12. That's a summary of the TAs that you have before us. Um, and then I w I won't rehash the the financial impact as I believe we did that at the front end of our discussion, but you'll notice they're on your documentation of financial impact provided as well. Thank you. Questions? Seeing none, Dr. Allen, I will give you a point of correction. Um, since I had forgotten that you will be spending time discussing attorney candidates, I may have adequate time to finalize and compile that chart for you so you can see estimated savings. Again, please understand they are color-coded. I'll give you the key. So, no final decisions have been
182made yet because I'm bringing that to you for discussion um for further discussion, but to to ensure that you see the totality of what we're looking to help cover costs, not just those associated with the pay raise with with basically to help address some of the concerns that have been expressed before that we've tried to build a fund balance and we want to make sure we don't begin deficit spending. So, programmatically, what are the essential services we can provide moving forward? So, Dr. I believe if you do run about 60 90 minutes, I should have enough time with Mr. Pittz and Miss Jenkins to finalize that list for you. Yes, sir. Miss Fields. Thank you, Superintendent. I believe I was the one that asked that question about the programs. I believe I was. And I
183knew it was going to take a lot of work to get it done. Um and so I believe but my memory could not be 100% that that was one of the determining factors for me uh as it relates to going forward with this because I understand the value of it and Lord knows we had a lot of discussion uh we uh we spent a lot of time and effort but I want to make sure going into making a decision like this that we understand that there will be some impact there will be some things that we're going going to have to make tough decisions on this. We talked about health insurance and we're going to be looking at other uh factors as well. So, I don't know that you will be able to provide it
184before we uh are expected to vote on it tonight. But even if you can't, I think as soon as possible, we need to know that so we'll know what we're having to chew on and how we going to chew it. There's just one program area I need to work with the team on to update my Excel spreadsheet and I believe that will give the board a very accurate picture of what we're currently looking at immediately for possible consideration for elimination. Thank you. Yes, ma'am. There are no further questions or comments. Thank you. Uh board chair, members of the board, there are three items on information. And I don't typically go into much detail on these, but I do feel I need to give you some background and again to address um community concerns that typically
185arise related to this topic uh surrounding human growth, development or re reproductive health lessons. Um just to give you a little bit of background, I know each of you has the document and hopefully you've looked at it. Um please understand that because of an a statutory change, we submitted our plan. So, the board has to review and approve our uh reproductive health lessons each year. However, last year we did not bring them to you because the state took an entire year to review our submission. So, our 2022 plans were approved. Our 2023 plans were submitted in September. We received an update in September of 2024 saying, "Here are some things that need to be changed." And there were no substantive changes. They were language changes. Um you can see that on page one. Um basically
186their vocabulary edits like for example in the high school lessons the term birth control or the phrase birth control was replaced throughout our lessons with contraceptives or contraception. Um, additionally, the high school lessons addressing family planning, the slide addressing emergency contraceptive was removed and the new 2023 Florida State academic standards and health education were added to each lesson. Um, you you get a lesson summary for each one. We still continue to deliver lessons through our nurses um and those types of things. And please understand that still to my knowledge, I believe we're the only school district that notifies parents of the daily lesson plans and allows them to opt in or opt out of those plans. For example, middle school, I think we've talked about this part of the health curriculum involves hygiene. We don't
187want students skipping that with parents assuming, well, if they're going to be talking about human reproductive health the entire week, well, we don't. We break it out by day and we allow parents to see that well in advance of those lessons being delivered so they can make an informed decision. Um and so board members, I just wanted to provide that clarity to you. Our lessons have been approved with the with the requested re uh edits. Um but I wanted you to understand why you did not see it last year and that was not a PK county issue. That was really, I believe, the Florida Department of Education adjusting to new statutory requirements throughout their review process and updating their curriculum first and but it has been approved at this time. Mr. Chair, that concludes anything
188that I had for the board, sir. All right. Thank you, Superintendent. And and a reminder that that curriculum is on our website as well. I was just looking at that last evening. Uh for it's under the student and parent section labeled curriculum and then healthcare reproduction. All right, board members. Uh we are going to now transition to work through our agenda for tonight. Um, so give you a moment to transition and I do see I thought I saw yes Doug Thomas is out with us in the audience. So we'll transition to connect with him in a few moments. So let's quickly go through our agenda for tonight. Any questions on sections A through F? Um just our our typical set up here. Uh, just as Justin's trying to track down his documents here, Travis Keys,
189Mr. Keys, you'll be stepping down for special recognitions. I do see Bishop Mincy out there. Good to see you. Uh, he'll lead our invocation. And then sections G through J. Sections G through J. Any questions on that section? All right. Sections K through M. Then moving down section N through P. Any comments there? All right. And sections Q and R. Mr. Sharpless, you're recognized. Um, questions about uh consent agenda R workforce. I don't know if anyone is able to answer the grant continuing grant. Any question if any of the people are here for that? What's the question, sir? Um, sure. I just uh I've had some community people reach out to me and ask um who is the targeted population for the grant. U are these uh you know because this is basically from my
190understanding the grant is for uh students to be able to go to um to help with costs that to go to Ridge Technical College. Correct. Correct. Um and these are students that are um with intellectual disabilities. Right. Make sure I got that clear. Will include that population. Yes, sir. So, um, are these are these former Poke County Public School students? Are they current P I'm just um I just had people ask me some questions that I wasn't very clear on. Sure. So, they're transition students. Correct. Is correct. Okay. Okay. That but that's part of the group. So, I don't want to speak you definitively. So, what I'd rather do is bring Leanne Bennett and her team back later on. Okay. Um, to address those questions for you this evening. Um, so if the item needs
191to be moved to action for further discussion, um, we can make that happen. I don't think it needs to. Can I can I just ask the questions during consent? I will defer to Mr. Murphy. I don't see why we couldn't provide questions. I mean, if the board chair is willing to allow for that, then I don't know. It's not for debate. It's just forformational purposes. Yeah. Okay. And we'll do that during the approval of the consent. Correct. Absolutely. Okay. Happy to do that. All right. Thank you. All right, Miss Wyatt, you're recognized. Thank you. I apologize. I missed the one I wanted to comment on. That's J2. Um, and I just wanted to thank the staff for working on this. This is a heartou with Hartford Winterhaven. They approached us earlier this school year and
192were interested in helping assist with some social services for our homeless students. Um, their primary goal is to eliminate homelessness in those under 18, which is our target demographic. Um, so they actually will have someone from their team that is co-located on Winter Haven High School's campus um to really support those students with all of the resources that that they can. So I just want to thank the team for thinking outside the box for how we can make that happen. All right. Thank you, Miss Wyatt. And now we're moving to our action agenda tonight. We have one item which we just discussed during work session. Any comments on that one? All right. And then we'll move to the superintendent's report. I see Miss Matthews in the back. Any report? Okay. I'll just note uh what
193we've all received uh since our last meeting from Miss Matthews. Do we have anything from you? No, sir. Not Mr. Murphy. Oh, man. All right. Glad you're here. Thank you, Mr. Chair, if I may. Yes. This is the steel program, Mr. Sharpless. So yes, I we will have staff here to address. It is it is targeting transition students, some of whom may still be within the school district, some of whom may be exiting and transitioning out of the school district based on becoming overage. But we will provide further clarification for you this evening. I I apologize when I opened it and started to read it. It's a program that began about a little over a year ago for us to begin working towards this. So we will provide additional clarification this evening. Thank you. Yes,
194sir. All right. Very good. And then from there, uh, we'll wrap up with our comments and public comments and then we'll call it a night. All right. Uh, at this point, any other questions on the agenda? Just a reminder, we will have student one student discipline item to follow your discussion. Um, and then I'll go ahead and when you transition to your attorney discussion, I'll I'll vacate with my staff to go finalize that report for you. Okay. Thank you, Superintendent. Yeah. All right. So, uh, as we make, um, strides to get our, um, external consultant, Mr. Thomas, up, we're just going to take a, a twominut break at this point so we can get our technology set up and transition quickly. So, we will now journ. [Music] Welcome back uh to this fine meeting on
195March 25th, 2025, our work session. And we are extremely happy uh that we have uh an incredible individual in front of us and we appreciate the time and commitment around this uh which is a huge um opportunity for Pulk as as well as around the state as well. I mean I have individuals hey is it happening today? Is it happening today? All around the state. Um so we are very much appreciative of Mr. Thomas and the work that he's done. Um, and I'm I'm sure you can commend the amount of materials that we've all received um, in written form, but also in in visual form as well. So, uh, Mr. Thomas, if you can set the stage, give us some context, and then we'll move from there. You're recognized. Thank you for those kind words,
196Dr. Allen. Appreciate that. We, uh, we like to think that we bring value to your process in terms of trying to understand it. And I will tell you, um, all kidding aside, rarely do people say that we don't give them enough material to review. So hopefully hopefully you get a chance to to see the breath of the background that we've uh we do as as we're evaluating your candidates. Um so just to set the stage uh as you know we were engaged to originally uh do a n a national search for your next general counsel, your successor general counsel after Wes had retired. Um we've we went through that process. We reviewed candidates about a month ago. That got narrowed down to nine semi-finalists. Um, as I mentioned at the time, we often will lose
197candidates because there were in other searches or for other reasons. So, we ended up losing one of those candidates. So, you end up with eight semi-finalists that were uh provided uh an opportunity to submit a fairly detailed response to some written questionnaires which talk about their background, their history, their style, how they would bring their experience to the table or the challenges and opportunities that you identified that we used in the marketing of the brochure. Um, and then we also asked them to participate in uh pre-recorded video interviews. you get a chance to at least see how they communicate in a relatively short period of time. Um, and then we started some background research on some of their their exposure in the media and things of that nature as as we also asked each of
198those candidates to provide that information as well. Um, so what we had done is package all that material up. Those individuals were selected about a month ago. Uh, gave them a chance to complete the work, package it up, send it all to you to give you a chance to do your homework and review that. And the goal today is to really uh have a conversation with you to hopefully land on typically our clients select somewhere between three to five folks that they want to bring in for the on-site interview process. Um I'll walk you through uh a high level of who those candidates are just to bring everybody back to the table again and for those that may be watching in the audience. Um and then we'll talk a little bit about what the next
199steps look like and what that interview on-site interview process looks to be as well. So with that, um, as I mentioned, as we've done this in the past, I know rarely do we have candidates reach out to individual board members, but if they do or to your staff, please have them directed back to me, especially so that we can make sure that everybody gets the same information at the same time. Nobody's in an advantage or disadvantage situation. As well, um, I, this is a slide I often use just to bring everybody back into focus because I mentioned when I went through the first process a month ago that we know a little about a lot of candidates. Um, and so we're just trying to get a handle and that's sometimes harder to to to cut
200the chave from the weed, if you will, with regards to that. But as you get into this stage where now you start to see more of their background, more of their personality, more of their experience, the things that they will will deal with if they ultimately selected, we find that the selection of this process gets a little easier actually at this stage because now you've got a little more uh meat on the bone to to debate and go forward with. But the work does not complete there. uh whoever you ultimately select as as finalist, we will certainly do some additional work with them. We'll talk about some other assignments that they may be doing as part of the on-site interview process, but we will also complete criminal history, credit, academic, all the database searches, reference
201checks, things of that nature as well, including a much more detailed what we call a stage 2 media search, uh which goes into we have individuals on our staff that look at all the different search engine and all the media exposures that's out there. We'll send those informations to you in a separate report. uh they'll bro they'll be broken down into items called findings if there's anything that may be of controversy and then the balances whatever may have occurred at various board meetings or anything in their background as well. So we try to do that heavy lift for you if you want it it's there. We know that many times for a position like this many of your your constituents will try to Google into all that work. So we want to make sure we
202don't catch you by surprise with any of that. So that's coming next. Um so what I want to do is just quickly go through just for the benefit of the audience and those may be watching and just to bring the board back uh the candidates that are under consideration uh we have Mr. Adam Patton uh pre presently serving as a general counsel uh with the state of Florida at the department of citrus uh here at BTO. Uh previous experience as a private practice uh law firm also involved uh in some other private practice work in Lakeland in 2015 and 2016 and was an assistant state attorney uh with the state of Florida here in the 10th judicial district. Um, Adriana Treasure, uh, currently an assistant city attorney with the city of West Palm Beach, uh,
203down in Palm Beach, South Florida. Uh, has been a senior attorney with the Florida Rural Legal Services there in West Palm as well. And also an attorney working with Y, uh, YW.CA in West Palm Beach that was not just really kind of for it was a very specialized work dealing with women and battered spouses and children of of of in troubled situations. uh was an assistant county attorney in Broward County uh in Fort Lauderdale. Also director of compliance with the government relations and licensing division with a learning experience in Deerfield Beach and then also in-house legal counsel with a uh a child focused um uh program called ChildNet in West Palm and then a couple other positions working with the DCF positions as well um and previously as assistant city attorney in Riviera Beach also
204in South Florida. Uh Mr. Brad Butler Jr. uh currently a senior attorney working with the Florida Department of Health in the office of medical marijuana use, Tallahassee and Elatcha, Florida. Uh a variety of other positions with the state including a senior attorney for healthcare administration and general counsel. Uh also working uh with the University of Florida as a research contracting officer and under the office of clinical research, an assistant general counsel of the Florida Department of Environmental Protection. uh was also a legislative analyst and attorney with the Florida House of Representatives and um one of the candidates that we have that are board certified in state, federal, and administrative practices. Uh Mr. Carl Brody uh currently serves serving as an assistant city attorney with the city of Tampa, Florida for the last several years, had
205been a team leader in a transition position with the US Small Business Administration in a virtual capacity. uh prior to that served um from 1997 to 2020 as an assistant county attorney over in Penllis County uh and then also has done adjunct professor work with Barry University uh and also is board certified in city county and local government law. Uh Mr. Jim Green. Uh currently servicing as a general counsel to the superintendent over in Pesco County. Uh had served prior to that an extinguished career with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. First as chief legal uh chief division counsel most recently in that position, but prior to that served as deputy chief counsel with the FBI um in Washington DC as well. uh Jasmine Gibbs uh various positions working with the US Department of Education, the
206Office of Civil Rights uh in Washington DC. That is a um uh a remote position. She is actually based here in Florida, but doing that work remote. As you can see, a couple different positions she had held both as supervisor attorney and also as a general attorney with them. uh served also as an associate general counsel equity office and title 9 coordinator with Santa Fe College there in Gainesville and a title N program officer with Harvard University up in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Um Mr. Ray Pool goes by Ray Jerry is his first name. Uh currently servicing serving in a very comparable position as chief legal counsel for the Deval County School District. Uh and prior to that served as chief of legal services of the Nassau County School District in Fernadina Beach. uh Florida and has
207served in public private private practice work uh in um with Const Brooks Smith and Profit uh in Jacksonville, Florida. Uh also a board certified in education and also board certified in labor and employment law. And your last candidate is Kevin Henson, currently servicing serving as an assistant state attorney with the state attorney's uh office in 12th judicial district down in Sarasota. Had private sector experience as well. had a non-traditional background, actually came out of communications, marketing and technology, and then ultimately wanted to be a lifelong learner and pursue uh a law degree. And so you can see background working uh with brand strategies, also working um in marketing components and also working with NASCAR. Uh also has a JD and has indicated he's expressing an interest on pursuing a u a board certification state and
208local government as well. So very qualified uh diverse set of candidates that you've selected. uh hopefully out of this process uh there's somewhere between three to five folks that you would like to learn more about and invite them to come to the process. So I will open it up for conversations. Uh it's a smaller group. I know you're missing two of your board members today. So whether you want to talk through these candidates or whether you just want to advance some folks or whether you want to actually go through a formal ranking similar to what we did when we had many more candidates under consideration, I'll I'll defer to you Dr. Allen. We can we can handle this any way you would like to proceed. All right. Thank you, Mr. Thomas. Uh, board members, I
209will open the floor to you at this point. Um, maybe a question I could pose to you as well for our two board members that are uh not with us today. How how do we want to handle collecting their data um would be a a good thing uh to consider. This is a bit of a challenge. I'm going to defer to my friend and uh colleague off to my left because there was a state um or attorney general's opinion dealing with how public selection processes work. It dealt with Florida International University. It's not exactly what you're dealing with here, but they were a public body and they went through a process where individual board members kind of provided feedback, but it wasn't done in a public session. And so I'm going to stop there not
210being accused of being an attorney and defer to to Mr. Murphy to respond to that. Yes. Thank you. Um, and Mr. Thomas is correct. Unfortunately, there are some there's been some recent u developments in the interpretation of Florida Sunshine Law that make that a little difficult to to get information like that when it's in the nature of deliberative or it's part of the decision-m process. Um, so yeah, we're probably going to be, you know, to the extent you're you're building consensus and finalizing the funnel is getting smaller today. It's going to it's going to be as a result of the five of you. Mhm. Okay. All right. And we have a quorum at this point. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Doesn't take any certain Yeah, you have quum. So, you you can you can certainly All
211right. Would love to hear uh with that position. Just note it from Mr. Murphy if you have any thoughts. Miss Fields, you're recognized. Oh, I'm sorry. a long day and we just get long night ahead of I would uh recommend that we give our top five and then go from there and see if we're in consensus and and move it along. I think everybody should have done their homework indeed. And that's my recommendation. All right. Uh thank you, Miss Fields. Miss Wyatt, you're recognized. Thank you. I think it may be beneficial to do the same as we did last time to to see where the averages land. Um I was a little I I say that mainly because I was pleasantly surprised with a couple of the applicants that I did not have ranked as
212highly as some of you did that in reading their deeper um responses um changed a little bit. So I'd love to to hear everybody's scores for everyone. Okay. Thank you, Miss White. you know, I I guess I'm I'm thinking more here um questions in my mind as well. So, if we we're we're going to move forward, right? Is that what I'm hearing from everybody? We want to move forward on this. Okay. All right. Very good. So, let's at this point then I'm going to give it back to Mr. Thomas and if you can work through each candidate and then we can do a roll call on our scores. Sure. Um and so not knowing when I did this, you may remember when I was here a month ago, we had one member who was off
213and I had to recalculate and everything else. If you're okay, I'm going to do this by man hand man hand man hand man hand man hand man hand man hand man hand man hand man hand man you I'll do old school and then we'll kind of see where things land if it works out that way. Otherwise I'll be I'll be fumbling around with your device again to try to make my averages work out. So what I think I'm hearing you say Dr. Allen is um based on um board member Wyatt's comment you want to just basically go candidate by candidate and do a one meaning you're interested a two is you could be potentially interested in that candidate and a three is you're not interested in that candidate. Everybody got the same same parameters. So
214we'll try to go to low score being like a golf score, right? you're trying to achieve here. Okay. Um, so why don't we take them in the order in which they were just by alphabetical order by their first name. That's how we've we've identified them. So your first candidate is Adam Patton and I'll take whichever members come first and I'll just kind of tally scores manually here. I'm going to open up all microphones and we'll just do roll call and we'll just start with district one and go down. So, so to make clear, we're giving a one, two, or three for the remaining ones that we have. Yes. Yes. For the eight for the eight candidates. Got to rethink what I I just picked the top five, but okay, we can do that. Okay. Um
215I would assume just to to keep everybody on the same page, I assume if you got your top five, they're probably one or a two. So, um that would be a correct assumption. Okay. Just try to make sure we're all kind of on the same page in in how you want to process this. So, okay. I will take your lead then. Follow. All right. So just from my perspective just collectively I'm just going to give comment in regards to everybody. It was amazing. I mean I I love that last question that if there's anything outside of the materials that you know we've received the questions something that we should know about you. Um I I thoroughly love that. I almost started with that one at times. And so it was it was fun to move
216through the candidates and then hear their sentiment in a sense with their tone and facial expressions but then to look at their written documents. So again, I just want to say thanks to all the candidates uh that has they've put in so much time on this. So um starting with Adam, for me, that would be a one [Music] one two one two. Okay, next candidate is um Adrienne Treasure. Three. Uh let's see. Three. Two. I'm sorry. It was Travis. Okay. Gotcha. Two. Okay. Three. Three. One. Three. Three. Okay. Next candle is Bradley Butler. Three, three, three, three, three, two, two. Okay. Next is Carl Brody. Two, two, three, one, two. Next is James Green. One one one. My comment on on Mr. Green. Uh when I looked at the video and his information, especially the
217video, it reminded he reminded me so much of West Bridges. I think from the laughter, everyone agrees. Mrs. Fields. Yeah. Yeah. So, I would say a one. One. Okay. I was hopeful you were going to say one after that. I was I was awaiting a date after that one as well. Wasn't sure where that was going to land. So, well, love Wes. I know I do. I'm a one as well. You're going to leave it at that. Okay, got you. Uh, next candle was Jasmine. Jasmine Gibbs. A two. Two. Three. Two. Two. Three. three. Okay. Next is um Ray Pool. One one. And the last is uh Kevin Henson. Three, three, three, three. All right. So, um, just give me one second here. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. 6 9 12 5 6 11
21812 14 2 4 7 8 9 10. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, five, six. Okay. All right. So, um, you have two candidates that had ones across the board. Um, so that would be Mr. Green and Mr. Pool. Um then your next lowest was Mr. Patton with seven a total of seven votes. Uh once again low score being the best there. Um and then you move into um Mr. Brody which is uh with 10 and after that you're 12 13 14 and 15 in terms of candidates. So let me um get a sense of just looking at where the all ones and twos with Mr. Mr. Patton um uh with Mr. Brody. Uh, ones, twos. There is one, three. Um, there. Um, not a problem with green. Not a problem with pool. And
219then two, four, two. Mr. Thomas, whenever you finish doing that, can we go back down the list and do the final tally number of those if you have that catch? Sure. Yes, I do. Okay. Gotcha. Yeah. So, I've got I I've just I haven't done the math in terms of the the average scores, but just in terms of rank scoring, uh the lowest scores, you've got two that are at number five, Mr. Green and Mr. Pool. So, those are obviously in um and then after that, the scores, I'll just go from top to bottom. Um Mr. Patton has seven, total of seven. Um Adrian has 12, Bradley has 14, Mr. Brody has 10. Uh, Jasmine Gibbs has 13 and Mr. Henson has 15. Okay. So, if I'm just going You said Mr. Brody had 10.
220Mr. Brody had 10, right? Let me double check. Four, six, seven. Yes. So, um, you're you're if you went with three, you'd be with Mr. Green, Mr. Pool, and Mr. Patton. green patent and pool. Um, if you wanted to go four or five, your next lowest then scores would be um, Mr. Brody followed by M. Treasure. Miss Treasure. That's correct. With 10 and 12. Brody and with treasure. Okay. Um, so in the case of Mr. Brody, um, we have one board member that had rated as a three. The others were twos or ones. So I always ask the question, um, in this case, uh, board member Wyatt, if if if we're about to ask these candidates if they're going to do some more work and invest a considerable amount of their time and put themselves
221out there, um, anytime there's a three, my question is, are you okay? Could you be convinced if if ultimately that person, you know, does very well in the interview process that you're okay with that or is that a hard three? I could be convinced. I just was concerned. There's not a ton of education or any education law, which is concerning to me, right? His background was more in the municipal municipal side. Um, uh, but was also board certified. And so that's the that's the only question I had there. And then the other one is it related to um Adrien Treasure. Um the challenge we've got is three of you had um her rated as a three. Let me go back to look at that so you get a chance to see her background as well.
222Um and so the same sort of question that if if if she were to participate and she was able to convince you of her background and skill set and she was the right person, uh I just want to make sure there's not a hard three that they can be convinced otherwise. I realize right now you're screening based on what information you have before you. Mhm. Yeah, I would be fine. Yeah, indeed. Okay. If I can add something, please. Sure. I uh on both of those candidates, I think that it is important for us to look at diversity uh and not just ethnicity, but just uh their level of experience. And Miss Treasure has a wealth of experience, and a lot of that is targeted towards children. Um, so I just wanted to to make the
223comment on both on both of those. Your statement. So I guess I my question would be is is would we be doing ourselves a disservice if we went down to a top five because it sounds like there is a almost a breaking line there between that. Yeah. Is that is that is that too many is I guess what I say many times five is a number we land on. Um what I'll tell you is that um we that there's that's a full day of interviewing uh for you as a board. Uh on the second day I I'll walk through the schedule. So be prepared that they um uh typically our our public interview process for positions like this are about a 90minute process. Uh it gives you about 60 minutes for a full-blown traditional interview.
224You may remember we talked about a a presentation, a TED talk kind of PowerPoint presentation that's intended to be no more than 10 minutes and then some dialogue back and forth between the candidates. So, um that's the only I'm I'm totally comfortable with five. We manage three to five on a regular basis. just you be prepared that if you're going to go to five that that's a that's a full day for you as long I'm going to comment on something like that is that at least my individual opinion is I'm more than willing to to put forth the effort on an important decision like that that to take a day to do interviews I think it's very important and we should give it our full and undivided attention so in addition to that too uh
225some some of these candidates maybe one might decide they don't want to come for the interview I don't know and so then you know we end up not having enough candidates. So I think we need to keep that in mind. Great point. Well pointed. That's why I never like to go below three. Um because sometimes they get another offer or something happens and to your point um a board member feels that that you can lose that and all of a sudden be backed into a very short number. So yeah, and that second day we've already blocked off the full day. Yep. Right. So we're we're comfortable with that. Okay. Great. All right. And what I'll what I'll just I'll add I'll take it. So because obviously the candidates will be speaking with me as well.
226I'm taking your rankings at this point based on what you've seen them ahead of, you know, basically you're comparing them to each other. Uh you're not selecting a final candidate today. You're just in the process of a triage. And so candidates always just want to make sure, hey, if I if I come in, I got a fair shot that I'm not as a prejudge and I'm certainly gathered that from all of your comments. So I'll convey that to all of them as well. So that's certainly helpful since I didn't say anything. Yes, I'm the same. Yeah, I I assumed as much. I thought I saw a nod on that. But yeah, I I I follow the lead. Definitely. Thank you for the clarification, Mr. Sharp. Um, well, let's talk a little bit then uh about
227what that looks like for the next round. As I mentioned earlier, we'll notify these candidates, ask them if they're willing to participate, assuming they're on board. We'll go forward. Um, we'll do criminal history, credit, background, education, the stage 2 media searches that I mentioned. Um, we traditionally ask for our our our finalists to participate in what's called a firstear game plan. It's a written assessment of if they get selected, how do they approach the job in the first 30, 60, 90, 180 days and kind of the balance of the year. It really gets them focused on a work plan. And they will all do that differently. I know it'll sound like it'll all be similar. I've seen thousands of these. They all do them a little bit differently and they give you some other insights
228about kind of their getting their head and their heart around the position. Um, we offer it's a it's a extra service if you want. It's entirely your call uh to do a a personality a disc assessment. It's a well-known establishment process where uh the candidates take an assessment online. They get a copy of it, you get a copy of it, and we compare uh those candidates so that you've got that as you're interviewing them, and you can kind of see where they kind of fall in the categories. Uh that's that's an optional service. If that's something you would like to do, we can do it. It's it's totally your call on that one as well. Um and then we also talked a little bit about this assessment or presentation exercise, and it sounded like there
229was a desire to do this. Many times we'll have them do maybe on a challenges and opportunities or something of that nature, but to try to get a 10-minute TED talk. Uh the nature of this position, they're going to have to do concise presentations in a public fashion. And uh we want to kind of see how they do that work as well. So, uh if you're comfortable with that, we we certainly recommend that. So, that would be the first year game plan and the assessment exercise is something that uh we would strongly encourage the DISC. I'll I'll defer to you if that's something that you would like uh to include in this process or not. Well, yeah. Yeah. So, we do have a open floor here. So, but yeah, if we get a little out
230of order, we'll we'll um I don't I don't think I'm familiar with the assessment. I don't think it the disassessment is needed for this position. It's just my personal opinion, but anyone else could certainly persuade me. I don't think so either. Okay. Yeah, I don't think so. Okay. Okay. As I said, totally voluntary. We have some that do, some that don't. Not a problem at all. From there, uh let's talk a little bit about I've been working with uh Caroline and your staff in the HR department about what that process looks like. Uh we would envision that um now with five candidates. Now we know how many panellets that'll impact how much we can squeeze into the day and how long those would be, but we've talked about having at least some sort of facility
231tour, community tour with five candidates. Uh that may be more facility than PK County is a big county. It's hard to get around to all the different spots and still make the timing work. but we'll work with your staff on that. Um, we traditionally recommend that although this board, this position is reporting to you as a board, they're going to be working with your superintendent and the senior staff. We typically uh encourage an opportunity where um each of the candidates have a chance to interact in a group session uh with your senior staff here um just so they can get a chance to kind of meet the team and vice versa. That's an important element for the candidate as well as for us to kind of see how that person fits into the culture of
232this organization, kind of the DNA of the of the district. Um, so that would normally take place during that first day. And then I believe we've talked about you doing your one-on-one kind of musical chair process uh in the afternoon. I just want to verify that was still the case. And once again, I haven't set that schedule not knowing how many candidates you were going to select because that'll have a bearing. there there likely to be kind of a first round and then probably two of you that would be in a second round in order to to make that process work and and fall into play. But I just want to make sure that one-on-one session is still anticipated to be the afternoon for you. And that's on the first day. So yeah, 9 to
233one is our scheduled time on that. Okay. So we did yours first. My mistake. All right. I was thinking you're in the afternoon. Okay. So 9 to1 is the window we've got with the board. Okay. With board and that's on the 15th. Correct. On the 15th. Yes, ma'am. on the 15th. That's on the first day. Yes. That would give you a one-on-one session. Um I'll figure out the math and the timing on that. It may be relatively quick, but we'll stop the music and shift shift everybody around, but there will be some breaks in there because of just with seven of you and only five members of that. All I need is enough time to play Twister or shoot some ladder. Duly noted. So there. Um okay. So we'll plan for that in the morning
234and then work through the press of the day um in the afternoon. Um then day two we anticipated that that would be uh each each candidate would spend approximately 90 minutes with you assuming it takes that long but we'd like to 2 hours is too long 60 minutes is too short. So 90 minutes just seems to be about right that would incorporate a traditional public interview probably in this chamber or in some we tal I'm sorry you talked about that's right I forgot board member why had asked maybe to do it in a different area. Um, but it would be done in public um pursuant to the Florida statutes and that would provide a traditional interview process with you coupled with a PowerPoint presentation um and then uh Q&A back and forth with a candidate
235as well. Uh from there we'll work with you at the conclusion of that process if you come to a point where you're prepared to to make a recommendation on who you would like to uh extend an offer to. Typically, um, what most of my clients do is work with either the chair or representative of the board and your legal counsel myself, and I help try to negotiate whatever that package and terms would look like, uh, based on direction from there. And then I believe you're scheduled for another board meeting, uh, about a week later, as I recall. I don't have that date right in front of me, but I I remember there being a subsequent meeting that the formal document would come back for your formal review and approval at that stage. Correct. It would
236be the following Tuesday. Following Tuesday. I thought it was coming up shortly thereafter. Right. So, that's what I've got for you. Told you I'd get you out of here quicker than 90 minutes today. Well done. Well done. Sorry. Do we need to have anything additionally public noticed for the 16th if we're going to discuss that today and you're going to make sure that's done appropriately and that we don't have to wait two hours to then have that conversation. Right. I I I think that you need to decide where you want to have that and then I would notice that as a special meeting of the school board as opposed to a work session so you can actually take action official. I mean you're taking action so you can vote formally to give direction to be
237able to to give direction on the commencement of negotiations and then as Mr. Thomas said present a contract back. So normally what happens on that point is we would advertise the schedule saying starting and stop is estimated. Um and you know there may be appropriate breaks for lunch and things of that nature for recess at that point. Uh typically just to confirm though we typically would have although at the conclusion of that we don't normally have the public asking them questions per se. That's your this is your time with the candidates. Um but typically at the end and Mr. Murphy will identify this. Normally before you reach any conclusion, you may want to take public comment from those that are watching or what have you. But that that's different than actually candidates being interviewed by
238by the public per se during those sessions. You very definitely want to afford the public the opportunity to comment prior to you taking any official action. I think Florida law requires that. Yeah, indeed. and Missette if I think uh we're comfortable with Jim Miles. I know that was part of our conversation or the superintendent's um yeah large conference room. The large conference room. I think Jim Miles would be better. Yeah, especially for those breakout uh individual interviews. So, if we can um just check on the availability of that space and then we just need to coordinate those um spaces for each board member as well. I had I had a a question unrelated and maybe I missed it with everything going on. Uh are we generating our own questions or I was going to get
239to you. Thank you. Thank you for raising it. So, uh with your your consent, normally what we'll do, we'll develop the master schedule and I'll work with your staff and the location logistics and make sure it's all been noticed for with your attorney. Um we would typically generate a list of proposed questions um for both you as board members as well as the senior staff. Um but normally the schedule I'll build in a time to meet with them before they start that process to go through those and there may be other questions that want to be asked or something. We we'll work through that to get um get them in in order. We'll do the same thing with you before you go through your session on the second day of the interview. I just want
240to kind of make sure you're all prepared to go. we'll give you more questions than you want. We can talk about prioritizing those um and um that way we can make sure you're prepared to address it and there may be other questions that you want to ask candidates that I haven't necessarily developed and we want to make sure you got that opportunity but you won't have to start from ground zero. We'll give you some basics. Do do you intend on doing that on April 15th at the open work session meeting? Yeah, this is the challenge of doing this in in public u because at that point anybody's aware of what those questions are likely to be. We don't we do not share those questions ahead of time with any of the candidates. They're getting them
241as they come forward. But for us to do it in a public session, that becomes a bit of a challenge. So, I'll defer to you if I if I send you a list of proposed questions and can I accept responses back from them um on proposed questions individually and then we can develop kind of a prioritized list so we don't have to spend as much time talking publicly about those. I mean, I as much as I'd like to say yes, I'm I am concerned that that potentially that's is problematic. That's part that's an important part of the deliberative process. So, you know, there's nothing that would prevent you as a consultant uh meeting individually with board members as long as you're not acting as a conduit, you know, uh at convenient times that board members
242could be available. But uh you know that's I you know in terms of the questions that are asked I don't know um if you want to develop a uh develop some I mean do you have a script of some well type that you well typically for an hour interview not counting although it'll be 90 minutes for you're going to get about 60 minutes in an interview process with a candidate um that's going to be about 12 to 15 questions. So what I often will do is generate a list greater than that and then sometimes what we've done is we're in a session like this we'll just say okay how many how many of you like question give me your top 10 or 15 questions and they'll say number two number five whatever we can quickly
243determine kind of where the priorities are without necessarily talking about the questions but if that works for you we've done that before. Yeah. Um and I'm looking at Mr. Crawford in the audience because I know that he and I have discussed this at in detail. Um but I do think that's fine Mr. Thomas, if you want to develop the questions, they would however be a public record and to the extent there was a request put in that I know of no exemption or confidentiality that could be asserted. So, you know, if a candidate were to do that, that would be telling on the candidate perhaps. Um I you know I think I don't want to say much more than that but I I think my my main goal here is to keep you all in
244the rails and to make sure that whatever is done in this process which is not something that you do on a on a routine basis. Thank goodness um is you know we want you just want to make sure it's done. So I what you've described is presenting a list of 15 questions or more. Yeah. Or more whatever you would recommend. um and providing that to the board then the board in open session discussing amongst themselves well I'll take questions you know five two five six or I'd like this or I like that and then if there are additional questions that board members would want they could bring those up uh in that open session so that's how I see that in mind yeah because we definitely don't want to surprise any of our candidates with
245you know questions that are not on that database of questions because if we're discussing that on that Tuesday Right. Right. Um we wouldn't want to bring any new questions at that point and I think for the process I think you wouldn't want to do that. And also we don't want to give questions to one candidate and another candidate not get the same question. So we have to make sure that whatever we agree on that's why I think that's important. Generally want you to ask the same questions. Although that's not to say that a particular candidate has a response that may need further elaboration or something in their background may mean I'm going to ask the candidate something different because of their background that varies from another candidate. We want to make sure you have a
246body of questions that you generally can make a fair comparison of your candidates. Um so let me let me go back and try to land the plane and see if this makes sense. So as I say you're going to get around 10 or 15 questions in that session. What I would suggest is I send to you as part of your briefing booklets which will have their cover letters, their f their resumes, their first year, their questionnaire, all the material you got plus your plus their first year game plan. Um, and each I would give you a list of proposed questions that will probably be greater than that 12 to 15. What I normally ask my boards to do is saying just circle your top 10 to 15 questions you you would like to ask. And
247then normally what I'll do is just go by board member. All right, board member, you know, give me your give me the numbers you've got. I'll go board member to board member. That will then prioritize where you kind of land without necessarily talking about the questions. It's a public document, but it's a way of of getting through it a little quicker. And then from there, normally that'll get us typically, if you're like most of my clients, between 8 to 10 questions where there's consensus, not necessarily unanimity, but consensus on it. And then from there, there'll be some other opportunities. Say, I would like to ask the candidates a question about X or Y. We can kind of talk through and make sure they're worded. And then we can work that through to make sure you
248got your your 15 questions you're ready to go with. And I'm good with that. I think that that works from a public records and sunshine or pardon me, Sunshine standpoint. And then my anticipation would be that once you all do that, then you'd assign the board member to ask that question for each candidate. Yeah. Yeah. We just normally make sure you're and that's that's part of getting you organized so that you've kind of got every everybody knows kind of what the script is to work from there. And and the last point is I always ask my candidates especially in Florida because they're public meetings to say listen if you're the first candidate versus the last candidate we encourage them it's a public meeting. I can't physically bar them from watching or being in a meeting
249but I do ask them for professional courtesy that if you were the first candidate you really would like to you know not be at a disadvantage versus your last candidate who has seen all the questions and all that ahead of time. So, I'll do what I can within the parameters of what I what I can ask. Sure. And and I think that's just a matter of professional responsibility given the position that you're interviewing for. Um Yeah. So, we do have another opportunity. We could tackle that on April 8th. We do have a work session scheduled. Or would you rather address it when we meet on April 15th? Good point. See what the ETH looks like here. What time is the meeting on the 8th? Uh, Dr. Allen, is that at 9 9:00 a.m.? Mhm. Uh,
250I may not be in town on the 8th. Um, so my suspicion is it would probably be it will probably be um when we we meet at the beginning of the second day of the interview process. We'll just do Either way, if you gave us direction um we can list it as old business and we can address it on the ETH which questions we would like to select. That's true. I I we could do that with staff and with the attorney. We could try to do it that way and and save some time if you need extra time. Yeah. Okay. Okay. All right. So that would be the eighth then. Okay. But in any event, if if we go with the 15th, we generally like to get the agendas done to comply with the APA
2517 days in advance. So So that would be, you know, April 1 for the 8th and April 8th for the 15th. Once once I get a draft schedule, now I know I got five candidates, I can start finalizing the schedule. I'll work with staff, one of the attorneys, and we'll I can get you that schedule. Once the schedule's in play, then that you can do what you need for public advertising from there. That's great. That'll work out. Yeah. And we work with the superintendent and his staff to I mean, we don't do that. I understand. Generally, we work in conjunction with the superintendent and his staff. We'll we'll we'll figure that out with your staff. We'll get it together. Yep. Okay. So, I had a question about the um debriefing information. I guess that's what
252you called it with everybody's resume and all that. Is it basically going to be a replicate of what we have now? Parts of it. There'll be some additions to it. Um the the pieces that you will not have are the first year game plan, the written assessment. Uh so that would be something we would add to you. The list of proposed questions, we may do that ahead of time, but we would have that in your briefing booklet as well. Um and then the PowerPoint that they would be doing for their their kind of TED talk, if you will. I don't normally have that ahead of time. I let them work on those. Canon's got a lot to do to get ready for these interviews with the background. I normally let them work on their PowerPoint
253up until the date at the start of the interview and then I get it work with your technology folks to make sure it'll all work out and it all there's the the systems work out fine. We typically in response to your question, okay, is we typically put all of that in one book so you've got it all together. But you've seen pieces of that. You may have already made notes or highlighted their background. If you don't want to have their cover letters and their resumes and and their questionnaire responses, we can just we can just do an abbreviated piece to say here's the first year game plan, here's the list of proposed questions, those sort of things. My my sense is you should give every board member the same information. I agree. So that was
254my question. Do you want do we would normally replicate what you've got now and add addition things to it, but if you if if you're like me, I keep all my notes on my previous candidates. I don't want to have to rehighlight them. So, it's up to you if you would like their cover letters, resumes, and questionary responses as part of your briefing books ahead of time, as part of the next round. I do, but I don't know what anybody I'm I'm from the old school, but I know there are more folks that don't really want that. So, I think it just depends on what each person want, but I know I want it. Okay. I've already printed out most of it already. So, indeed. Um, how about we do this? I'll I'll work with
255your staff if and then they can work with you collect individually if they if you want a replication of what you've already been provided it'll be there if they don't they can pull it out and if you want to make a hard they can make a hard copy. Is that how did the hard copies get made for you? Would you make it yourself or you deal with all electronically or a little bit of everything? We did not do hard copies this time based on we haven't seen each other since. There was a hard something. We do it for ourselves too. I think it just depends on the person. Okay. Yeah. Okay. I'm I'm So I'm gonna ask for clarification. Would you like me to put when I send to the staff the links with everything,
256would you like everything included per candidate, including what you've already received? That's how we would normally do it. Indeed. And then Yep. And then our board members can direct to our executive assistant, you know, what they need as far as uh printed materials, lot what? Okay, that's fine. That's all I needed to go. I'm I'm good. All right. I've got direction. All right. Very good. Right. Any other questions? No further questions at this point. So, thank you so much. Thanks much. Look forward to working with you going forward. And as always, give me a shout if there's any questions. Any board members have questions. Great. Thank you, Mr. Thomas. Uh, okay, board members. I'm just going to finish up our agenda so we can transition to our next um at this point, we're now at
257new business, which is the charter review team discussion. I just wanted to put this out there. Um that has Miss Vega has communicated with you. Uh we do need uh to bring forward some appointments and that is coming from district 1, 2, and four I think at this point. Um and I've got a date of April 9th for the placement on the April 22nd board meeting. So that's really I just want to keep that in front of you. Uh then we are now moving to board member comments. So, if y'all have any comments that you would like to bring forward, now would be the time to do that. Committee work, any of your liaison work that you're doing. Miss Wyatt, you're recognized. Thank you. Um, I just wanted to share we conveniently got the email
258from Avette as I was presenting to Pulk Vision's um newest leaders uh ser Pulk County service leadership class. Um, and so I used it as an example as a great way to get involved because as Mr. Keys has taught me that's the best way to get people to sign up for committees. Um, and I actually had two people send me their resumes that were really interested specifically in charter committees. So, I have forwarded those to Miss Amato um that she's happy to share if if those of us that need appointments are interested. So, that's always been the hardest committee for me to get filled. So, the offer is there. Very good. Thank you, Miss Wyatt. Not seeing any other comments at this point. Uh I I'll just bring this to my um comments tonight in
259regards to some of these documents that I've landed here for you to look at. Um at this point, this meeting is now adjourned. Can we have fun?