School Board Work Session | September 26, 2023

001foreign [Music] thank you [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] thank you [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] good morning and welcome to the Polk County School boards work session we will now call the work session for September 26th 2023 to order I would like to thank everyone for being here especially our staff who are available and accessible to help and address any questions that we have we are humbled to serve alongside of you and along with the I would say the most highly educated Workforce in Polk County I would like to start by reading our who are we statement we are the Polk County leadership and governance team if we were to pick one phrase to Define us it would be student centered because when we

002come together to work we lean on our diverse backgrounds and experiences to assure that our decisions are focused on providing a high quality education for all students the four most important things to our governance team are one operating with integrity two respecting our students staff families and each other three establishing a culture where our stakeholders feel valued supported and have opportunities for personal and professional growth and supporting an approach of continuous Improvement to ensure student outcomes collectively we need to work on behalf of the children we serve and find Avenues of a group agreement so that we can govern The District in an effective manner there is no acceptable alternative we will always collaborate in a respectful manner in order to enhance opportunities for each student and staff members we will not disparage others our

003students will Thrive because we will remain committed to supporting the whole child we hope to engage and Empower our students and stakeholders to create a community of lifelong learners at this time I would like to turn it over to superintendent Hyatt to lead us in our work session today good morning Dr Allen board members community members and staff thank you for being here today our first item before us the first two items excuse me is a continuation of a new initiative that we launched last school year or began last school year where we bring some of our Community Partners forward so that they could share the work that they're doing collaboratively to help support our students and our community as a whole so at this time I'd like to invite Lieutenant Joe Parker from neighborhood

004liaison unit to please come forward and he will lead us in a presentation about our summer Trades Academy program partnership with Polk County Public Schools good morning good morning first of all thank you for inviting me a little presentation I'll give you I'll try to keep it as short and sweet as possible um it starts with a a little slideshow I have here basically it's just going to explain to you the summer trades program I put together at Lakeland Police Department so as Dr Allen has said we try to work with our Community Partners the stakeholders that we serve to give them what they want or what they need in their community so we were experiencing some spikes in juvenile crime over the summer you know when the schools let out these kids are out

005on the street with no structure so they're out roaming around getting involved in gang violence other juvenile type crimes and we wanted to put a curb to that as best as possible I wanted to come up with something that was effective not a babysitting program but something that can give them some guidance lifelong again as Mr Allen said you know we want to develop lifelong Learners so I met with our former Lakeland Police Department Sergeant Edgar Pickett we discussed the issue because it was occurring in the Northwest Community where he lived and we came up with this program that we thought would be effective I thought would be effective I'm a carpenter by trade my dad was a carpenter he taught me the skills that's how I earned a living and it's an honorable living

006and and our society we have come to see that we're struggling we're hurting for skilled Tradesmen and you can make a a really good career working in the trades so going through it the idea like I said was to come up with a free program through Lakeland Police Department and Community Partners that would give an indoctrination to these kids what the vocational trades were everybody's not cut out for college even the smart kids may not want to go to college and pursue one of the classical approaches to to learning so uh I was doing a summer presentation for a group of young kids and I asked them what they were doing I saw that there were some older kids in the class and I asked what their plans were if they considered the military whether

007they considered taking the ASVAB to see what their their strengths were and they didn't know what I was talking about so when I explained what the vocations were and explained that I was a carpenter by trade I had a little girl ask me if she could learn to be a carpenter it sounded neat and I said of course you can so I wanted to come up with a program that could quickly indoctrine attempt at what the trades are and then set them on a path to learning those skills and hooking them up with local business people um like I said I worked in the commercial construction industry I was a superintendent and worked on large-scale projects so two years ago I started the program and I partnered up with Laura Webster at your school board

008and Angela purples over at Travis so we hosted the first program there at Travis and it worked out really good we learned some things I tweaked it a little bit and just did the second rendition of it this past summer and we used Tenoroc High School Dr Looney allowed me to use that campus and Mr Isaac's let us use his Workshop over there and it was good the crowd was a little bit different than the first year they were engaged a little bit differently they were asking different kinds of questions usually I would break at the top of every hour to let them shake it out and get back to focusing but this past year they just they worked right through the brakes and I just started letting them go as they needed to so

009that told me that was effective we didn't advertise it really we posted it on our Lakeland Police Department Facebook page and within a week or two both years we had like over 200 something applicants from across the county so that tells me that there is a dire need for it in the county but also a a really strong want for it by the students and by the parents so I think that's important to note um I've cut it back to 50 students per session because that's a manageable number and um we've gotten 38 through the first year and I think 39 this past year right up in those first few days of class we lose some to summer school or injuries or sickness or whatever but I think 40 kids getting this program through is

010is a strong number we teach carpentry Electrical Plumbing Roofing welding drywall painting architecture and everything in between it's not just sitting in the classroom it's Hands-On so we build a little eight foot by 12 foot structure to include a roof so they get to hands on put this stuff together as they're learning to send kids to college these days but College may not be the best fit for everyone there are lots of opportunities out there for those who don't have a degree and as Fox 13's Ken Suarez reports the Lakeland Police Department's holding a summer camp to help teens look at other options at Travis Technical College this shop is buzzing with the sounds of learning welcome to the new trade summer camp sponsored by the Lakeland Police Department I felt like it was really

011interesting and I just wanted to learn some new stuff and yeah it's been really fun the free Camp runs about two weeks in that time high schoolers learn a hassle of practical stuff as one of their projects had made this mini room put an electrical Plumbing even a working bathroom they're also getting hands-on experience putting a drywall replacing a roof laying blocks for a foundation hopefully this is a good taste test and they will like it we're not going to get every one of these kids to go actually into a career in the field but we're planting that seed Milani marmal says it's a possibility but what you really dreams about is hopefully becoming a pro basketball player I would love to pursue that as like my first career and it's a huge commitment a

012lot of work so carpentry or something in the tray is maybe electrical this would probably be my second option even if they don't do any of this professionally campers are picking up skills so undoubtedly be able to use later in life it's important for them to learn all these life skills no matter what actual career they go into it'd be nice for them to know that they can fix their roof they can fix their air conditioner if it breaks they can change the light bulb or change the circuit breaker Sergeant Joe Parker who thought up the camp has done all that on TV before he became an officer back in 2004 he was one of the stars of ultimate home on Country Music Television along with the technical stocks Parker now hopes campers learn to

013be prompt engaged and positive traitset will help them now whatever career they choose in Lakeland 10 Suarez Fox 13 News so that's a general snapshot of what the program is like again the important thing for us to recognize is that we need collaboration with the community stakeholders the individual portions of this class are taught by actual practicing professions in the City of Lakeland all the plumbing electrical Roofing those are all volunteers that came out from their work day and taught the class they are experts that are working here in our community and building those relationships is what's important big picture I hope to expand it this was a Lakeland project but I'd like to see the other jurisdictions around the county pick it up I've talked to Winter Haven talked to the Sheriff's Office I

014want to get Lake Wales maybe Haines City involved so that those officers are engaging with the students in their own neighborhood I think that's important I mean I think you visualize a kid who has an encounter with a police officer in their developing years and they tell a story 10 years down the road and said you know when I was in high school the cops came and took me to jail or took my parents to jail as opposed to when I was in high school a cop showed up to my house and got me involved in a program that taught me a trade and now I run a business that's a big difference so it's important for not only our kids but our community members to have positive engagements with police officers and the other

015figures of authority that they encounter every day so that when we show up it's not just something bad and we do a really got a good job of telling kids what they can't do and we're not doing a good enough job telling them what they can do instead so that's what this program is about and again it's important to develop those Partners in the community so that's my big picture plan getting them indoctrinated hoping we plant the seed you know if the kid says Hey I want to be an electrician I want to develop a pool of contractors in our community that's deep enough so that they can start bringing these kids on as they get through high school so that when they graduate they can go into an actual apprenticeship program actually start working

016for these companies you know it's home growing our own Workforce here in our own community and I think that's important so that's my big picture idea Mr sharpless first I just want to start off by saying thank you thank you for the vision on this and the passion you have for it um you know I think you're making it you and all the volunteers that are involved with this is making a huge impact on children's lives and that's what we're here for I'm a big proponent of Career Technical education it's something that I've that's my background uh you know a brother and a father who are teaching here in the district in the construction field so I think this is a great great opportunity I promoted it personally on my on my on my Facebook

017pages and and my my question originally was going to be on expansion but you've kind of talked about that a little bit um but my question is um more long do you what what is your current you said that 50 was your capacity for this time and that was just for the June 1st through 10th so is there any plans um so first question is is there any plans to expand this at not necessarily other municipalities as well like you're talking but the amount of times you're offering it in the summer at your location I've been asked okay I'm just trying to figure out so this is the second rendition of it so I worked out some Kinks from the first year I've been asked there's definitely a want for it I just haven't figured

018out the logistics of it um one of the things we do is we provide lunch for the kids it's a pretty big expense and uh Community sponsors have allowed us to do it at no cost to the kids so I've considered whether we're going to have to attach a registration fee to it to help offset the costs um the volunteers that teach the classes they come out you know during their work day they take their time off I think it would be possible that we did you know a second rendition of it to maybe get a 100 kids through but you're talking about four weeks out of the summer that we're asking you know our Police Department staff to cover that I'd like to see that possibility again maybe in partnership with the school board

019partnership with some other community stakeholders that can contribute their time and expertise to it duplicating it in other jurisdictions I think is one way to accomplish that but just finding out the I don't think in the big picture it's that expensive when you're considering the need and the impact it has but it's definitely a consideration and I'm welcome to welcome to suggestions and and my second and last question uh you said in the presentation over 200 applications within a few days and you're at Fix 50 around 50 person uh cohort is where you're at so um how many of those were in Lakeland versus from around the county any idea are you are you meeting the need in Lakeland and and really expansion to around the county that would help with that need or I'm

020just curious what where where you where's the sweet spot for you I wanted to be careful to capture the entire spectrum of the demographic I wanted it enough kids from certain neighborhoods I wanted enough kids to represent the male population the female population the Hispanic population the black population I wanted to have a good coverage of everybody that we can affect and have them go back into their neighborhood and Grassroots spread this idea maybe they won't make it to the program but they go back and tell their friends at their school and in their community that over the summer they learn to trade and they were excited about it and that would encourage those kids to go out and find some Avenue to you know learn themselves on how to get involved with that um

021again I'm open to suggestions uh 50 was just a manageable number when we're doing the Hands-On portion we're actually building this in real time as we're going through these classes so 50 is a lot of kids you guys know that yes so how to duplicate it we thought about you know having separate work rooms and having them learning in separate rooms so we can expand the number but concentrate the focus to a manageable group but when you're building a building it was tough to do that so unless we're duplicating it in other jurisdictions or doing two Renditions over the summer I'm not sure how we can accomplish it I definitely can't accomplish it by myself at Lakeland PD so that's what I'm saying I want to get more people involved and I would like to

022see that happen thank you lieutenant Parker for doing this and for the vision you have for this program thank you sir Miss Cunningham thank you superintendent High I too want to Echo um our sincere thank you being a young man as you are with the knowledge and the um well relatives um with your knowledge and expertise to have taken a passion that you have and taken and created a vision and you actually provided the leadership needed to do this and sacrificing time away from your family and what you do to do this to impact these kids is incredible and as you said sort of in the beginning of your comments you know this puts those children in a program where maybe a spark will fly and this may become something in the future that they're

023able to do or something similar because they enjoy working with their hands and someone has given them the opportunity at relatively low to no cost to do that um so you took a profession that you had and you turned it into giving back to your community I just think that's so Noble and I thank you and I would love as Mr sharpless said to see it on the east side of the county um you're looking for maybe another jurisdiction I know you know Lake Wales the number of you know HVAC contractors in our area constantly looking for folks to work and good kids to train and put underneath their wings because it's it's not going away we're getting more and more people moving into this County and air conditioning Plumbing electrical Roofing it's all got

024to continue so I would love to see it like Wales Haines City and I'd love to work with you to make some contacts because it is so needed and I think putting it in a different jurisdiction as you called it is the answer because you can't be spread so thin but you can maybe work with another area and train those folks I don't know how all that works but I support it wholeheartedly and there's anything that I can do to assist you in moving this program forward I would be honored to do so and thank you so much sir for your time and talent thank you ma'am I appreciate it Miss Miller foreign thank you yeah I just I'm very excited about this program and wondering um dollars wise this is Grant funded is Lakeland

025PD picking up the cost of this how I mean I'm curious to how we're funding your expenses I know you have donations and I think that's easy to come by now because this is so popular with so many people in groups but I didn't know if there was an a cost that the city is providing well I've been fortunate that the program has been well received in the city so I've had support from the city I've had some funds um Grant funds donated from the city to the program Chief Garcia in that first year allowed me to use my unit I'm the Community Services Unit now I have the neighborhood liaison officers so me and my neighborhood ladies and officers and the Community Services Group actually staff at the school board provided through the first

026year and four the second year to help me manage things they have assisted me and like I said Laura Webster has been Monumental and helped me put it together so the food drinks and supplies have been generously donated these last two years through Community sponsors so again the police department has allowed me to use some expenditures and that has got me through it but again still looking for long-term commitment from our community sponsors to get it done so no I think that's great I think you'll find that this is great um advertising just to the public I saw this come out on social media and thought what is this what are we doing I hadn't heard of it um and so I'm excited to learn more about it and I think just having this where

027we can share the YouTube video with others will be great marketing to help get those my background's in real estate and I can tell you talking to contractors who can't find people to work I think you would get a lot of support from our our single family home builders that need these employees as time goes on and I'd love to track them to see how many go into our academies Tenoroc has a fabulous facility that teacher does an amazing job out there but you know Bartow has one I'd be interested to see how many of these kids move on into those academies that continue this work can you tell me like age-wise it says 8th grade to 12th grade which is a range do you get more older kids in this or are the younger

028kids the middle schoolers getting interested so again that's one of the goals of the program as I started putting together that first year I started learning about the academies that you have to offer and that's part of the goal is to get these kids in let them see what the trades are so that they can select one of these academies to go to so my target audience was eighth graders going into ninth grade so the kids that are actually attending the summer program need to be going into ninth grade through 12th grade and again looking at so the way we capture the applications there were certain um pieces of information that I wanted to capture so that I'm getting enough 9th graders 10th graders I didn't want a whole bunch of you know freshmen I

029didn't want a whole bunch of seniors either I wanted a good mix of everybody so that was something that we considered in picking those kids we had a lot of young kids this year we had a couple try to sneak in that weren't even in high school yet well they probably heard about how fun and cool it is now I appreciate you presenting today and I think this is something the community has been more than responsive to and shown interest in supporting so we hope to help make those connections for this program thank you Mr Nolte great presentation agreeing with what my colleagues have already said you're just doing a super job keep up the good work and hopefully we can expand it to taken more students that would love to do something like this

030with their hands rather than sit behind a desk and look at a computer screen all day so yes sir God bless you keep up the good work thank you Dr Allen Lieutenant thank you for being here obviously you're hearing so much uh support from the board and uh we're ready for an ask from you and uh I think we would be responsive to that and you know we talked about the internship component connected to Career Source so here's this information and you know I love your vision um in regards to that Pipeline and you know where they could transition out of this and pop right into an internship that's happening through Career Source so I'm excited about that if we can get that in sync and we talked about that Talent Pipeline and I don't

031know if this is something that we can do within the district or because we are that educational body within Polk County but creating some type of a badging in a sense not necessarily that type of a badge but were these students that have gone through the program earn a badge from Polk County Public Schools but then there's an opportunity because you know we always want to see them move into that job right into that position and getting commitments and you know if you want to mention the gmf apprenticeship program that's connected to see maybe other organizations that would step up and say hey we're committed to you know hiring a hundred of your grads per year that have gone through this summer trades and have earned this many badges and recognized from the school district

032something along those lines but if you can maybe speak to the apprenticeship idea around this program too sure so again the tracking of these kids going through this type of program I think is important to um consider I want to be able to track these kids and see where they went with their decisions as they progress through their high school years and then went out and took those first jobs or got involved in apprenticeships so again you know they say it's not what you know it's who you know sometimes so a lot of these people I've either encountered in my work passages or I've gone to school with them Brad Lunds his group teaches the architecture portion I went to Harrison performing arts school over here he was one of my schoolmates Andy Norman runs

033gmf construction with his brother they teach the structural steel and Welding portion of the class they have been accredited through the state last year and for two years in a row they've been supporting the program by coming out and teaching and they have an actual apprenticeship program and they teach these guys how to weld and gals and put them to work in the field through their program Partnerships like that Korean company and Stewart's Plumbing they come out and teach they are actively looking for people to hire on these young kids to come out and start an apprenticeship program again not to knock on anybody but when I was doing this research trying to learn what resources were available I learned that Travis does not have an active Plumbing program and we have businesses that are

034here that have the expertise somehow if we could figure out how to get an active program for Plumbing in the county back up and running that I mean we need that and they're willing so just figuring out those kind of Kinks but again tracking these kids as they go through this type of Engagement to see where it's Landing them in the big picture is something I'm excited to see to see what kind of positive effect it did have again whether they used it for a vocational trade or whether they use those steps that kind of mentoring it's not just the skills that we're talking about building and plumbing and electrical or whatever we're teaching them lifelong skills how to write a resume how to look someone in the eye when you're shaking their hand how

035to introduce themselves during a work interview how to dress when you show up how to appreciate the things that are presented to you and then take them forward for that lifelong learning that Dr Allen's talking about so it's it's a big ball of wax that we're unraveling for these kids during that short two weeks but seeing it and how they apply it later is something I'm excited about tracking so so you know further questions thank you very much sir appreciate it thank you all appreciate it thank you next item up before the board we're going to invite Miss Chandra Frederick she's a program volunteer who's here to do the presentation on Girls Inc good morning it's very nice to be to be to represent this wonderful organization um Girls Inc of Lakeland as a former

036member as a scholarship honoree and also a former board member and as a superintendent mentioned now I'm a volunteer volunteer before I start I do want to thank the school board the superintendent and Jeanette for inviting me here to talk about Girls Inc so who is Girls Inc I think many of you know a lot about Girls Inc but it's wonderful to always share and reiterate what we do Girls Inc has been serving West Polk County girls think of Lakeland has been serving West Polk County for over 50 years and we are in a local affiliate of a national non-profit organization but we are here we've been here and our mission is to inspire all girls to be strong smart and bold we serve girls in kindergarten through 12th grades here in West Polk County

037in fact we are the um only organization that solely serves girls in West Polk County in this manner and we serve girls again from kindergarten to 12th We Touch probably over 500 girls annually through our summer program our after school program and some of our Outreach programs we pick up girls after school through bus and vans from their various schools and we take them to our Center and from there our Center is in Lakeland it's known as the George Jenkins building as you can imagine one of our great benefactors has been Publix they've been very supportive of us almost the entire time that we've been in existence we run our program we are open when the schools are closed we are open when there's early release we are there for the girls and their families

038during the entire school year so what is it that Girls Inc does oh by the way my timer because I'm a talker yeah [Music] so what do we do I mentioned earlier that we have an after school and summer program if I had to describe Girls Inc of Lakeland I would say they are consistent they are structured and they are fun you all know Miss K who's how she's referred to at Girls Inc structured is her middle name might not be on her birth certificate but it's definitely part of her name a day in the after school program is something like this the girls after having been in school all day learning with a little fun they come in they get their snacks they go outside if the weather permits and let's let we let

039them release a little energy before they start their afternoon activities their afternoon activities consist of classes like culinary arts life skill classes arts dance they also have after school tutoring and they do homework help one of the greatest things is when you know that your child is in an after-school program and someone's going to help them with their homework for a lot of our parents they're working until 5 5 30. they go pick up their kids they've got to cook dinner they've got to get them ready for bed it's really nice to know that someone has helped them with their homework make sure that they finished it before they go and continue the other activities that they have at the center so I'm really impressed with that another thing that I think is really interesting

040is the partnership that Girls Inc has with the school systems they communicate they know where the children are deficient if they are in reading and math they definitely do things to help with that they have something that they do call sustained reading if you've never been there and seen it it's amazing if you walk in the facility for 15 minutes I think it's like from 4 15 to 4 30. everybody stops what they're doing they pick up a book and they read staff the kids if a parent comes in Miss case like have a seat grab a magazine you know if that's the kind of structure and commitment that the program has for the children and making sure that they're doing what they need to do to be lifelong learners um in the summer program

041by the way um I talked about school so the summer is just an extension of that except add-in Dynamic field trips college and trade tours all of these things speakers from our community that come in and talk about their careers all of these things are offered to the girls during the summer to help enhance and to help them also not experience some of the things that children might experience in the summer when they're not in the classroom they try to continue the learning so that when they get back to school there's not as much of a drop in things for the teachers to have to catch up on so I mentioned to you that the mission is that we inspire all girls to be strong smart and both so how are our girls strong I

042think that our girls are resourceful they're confident and they're courageous based on a lot of the activities that they do um there's a picture here where the girls are singing they're singing at what's known as our Flagship um fundraiser and recognition program which is called she knows where she's going that she knows where she's going lunch and these girls are singing in front of an audience of adults a couple hundred people they they don't know them do you know how much courage that takes you all get up here every week or two and you do this I bet you still sometimes get a little butterfly or two well imagine you know being seven or eight years old getting up in front of adults to sing a song I think that takes courage and we encourage

043our our children our girls you can do anything you just have to put your mind to it and you have to know that you are worthy and that's really one of the things that we teach them that they are worthy um we we teach them things like um self-defense as you can see from some of the pictures we teach them things that they may not learn anywhere else but we expose it to them spoke expose them and then they can go out and try to find more activities to help promote that our girls are smart um we have again I said the sustained reading program we have volunteers that come in to read to the little ones to read with the older ones we have volunteers that come in and do tutoring in areas of

044deficiency we have staff and volunteers that come in and talk about career options so our girls are exposed to things that help them with their academic achievements as well we have children that were in our program in kindergarten and we got to see them graduate from high school and there's nothing more rewarding to than to know that you played a part in the role of a child matriculating through school and having a successful life finally our girls are bold they're adventurous this summer I saw pictures posted on the social network social media where the girls were skiing and I immediately picked up the phone and I was like what is this how is that we didn't get to do that when I was a member of Girls Inc not that I would have but you

045know these girls are adventurous and exciting it was just amazing to watch the videos and the pictures of them skiing also courtesy of our tremendous supporters all over the county for allowing our girls exposure to such a thing we also have very very successful graduates I consider myself a graduate of the program and I feel like a lot of the things that I learned in my that I practice in my professional life has definitely um had its roots at Girls Inc um so we you know Imani McNair she's the young lady in the the cap and gown she graduated from Collegiate with a a degree a diploma and an AAA degree she went on to the University of Miami where she's currently a student we also have um Dr Brianne miles she graduated with a

046Dr pharmacy from Florida a m she had been a member of Girls Inc since she was a kindergartner and she matriculated through the program she worked for for the program in high school and she went back in college during the summer to be a summer camp counselor and then the other person that I wanted to highlight here was The Honorable Nicole Tate Phillips I grew up um with Nicole Nicole graduated from Polk County schools and went on to Spelman College and then she graduated from law school and now she's a judge in her um count home county in Pennsylvania and she comes back um and she has communicated with the Girls Inc family she's volunteered once an alumni always an alumni always welcome into the program to share we have committed staff as you know

047Miss K Miss K will have been with Girls Inc for 40 years and with that tenure comes um acknowledgment of her commitment and com and passion for the program and it's not um usual to see people stay in non-profit organizations that long but Miss K has tenured staff who've been there for 10 years and you know in the non-profit world you don't make a whole lot of money those women are there because they care and so we are very impressed with our staff this picture of The Graduate that's Miss Madison and she um actually was a summer staffer and she has left the program graduated from um college and now is a second grade teacher at Dixieland Elementary so you know that's another feel-good story where we know that our partnership and our commitment to

048our community is lasting we have dedicated board members who are the basically the bones and the strength behind our fundraising and our policy making for our girls we have our she knows luncheon our father-daughter dance we coordinate volunteers for pig fest that's all done um at the behest and the the on the strength of the Board of Trustees for Girls Inc and finally Girls Inc would be nothing without her caring parents and volunteers parents who bring their children to our program but also our volunteers when we need them they come our other volunteers in the community are there to come and speak to the girls they come and serve at our our fundraisers it's really an amazing family that we have already mentioned our annual community events we are so glad that we have been

049able to bring the she knows luncheon back after having had a Hiatus during the pandemic it was an excellent turnout this year and it was very rewarding to see so many women deserving women recognize for their commitment to our community and specifically the girls in our community and I would like to close by just saying that we are very grateful for our generous um sponsors and donors Publix Charities the United Way on The Prodigy program and many of the organizations and Community businesses that come out and share their Knowledge and Skills with the girls and with that I definitely want to thank you for your time and we appreciate all that you've done to support Girls Inc and the girls that attend our program Miss Miller thanks for coming out today I just wanted to

050say when I was a teacher at Dr Annie Roberts I had students that attended Girls Inc and I could see the impact that it made on them so I appreciate what's done there and I and I hope that it can reach even more for a lot longer but thanks for coming to share Mr sharpless hey I want to thank you for what you do in the lives of these girls it's it's tremendous I also wanted to um ask that you know maybe either Miss Kay or you or someone keep me in the loop on when these uh some of these events are especially the she knows luncheon that really that really uh seems like it's very impactful and I would love to attend um so please just you know reach out let us know and

051just by the way many um many employees of the Polk County School Board have been nominated and successfully been recognized as winners of the she knows where she's going award and I think that just speaks tremendously about the talent that you all have here on staff as well thank you Dr Allen I just want to you know say thanks Miss Crowley just the way that you put our Community Partners together uh in this boardroom today because we we really get to see some of that strategic plan implemented by the great work that you're doing so I think as we have the goal of shaping the whole student you are doing that so miss Frederick thank you for the work that you're doing your professionalism and shaping our students the story so thank you for bringing

052those to the boardroom today and the impact that you're having so thank you Mr Nolte I agree with every everything's been said thank you for your energy and thank you for your dedication and you're doing a tremendous job and keep up the good work thank you so much I'm sorry I moved the slides I don't know what I touched that's okay so much you're welcome sitting here going like there are no further questions or comments thank you so much appreciate your time this morning board members the next item before you uh Mr Dan Talbot senior director of Athletics will come forward this is a topic regarding Tenoroc high school and a partnership with Southeastern University to update their track facilities all right good morning uh great to see everyone thank you for allowing me to

053speak today and uh Dr Allen speaking of Community Partners we have an opportunity to partner with Southeastern University which is located very close to Tenoroc High School to update their track facilities um put out a recommendation that we replace the current asphalt track that we have there with a with the synthetic surface the estimated replacement of that is 741 thousand dollars this will allow us to host obviously FHA District events it will allow Southeastern Who currently does not have a home track facility which is a nationally recognized program they've won numerous national championships they've kind of bounced around at all of our facilities to hold practices but have never been able to hold a athletic event at home this will allow them to have a home base for their meat which also benefits Tenoroc high

054school because not only does it benefit their athletic program but it benefits their clubs or ROTC they'll also have the ability to sell concessions work the events make some extra funds to benefit all the programs within the school not just the student athletes the beautiful thing about this partnership with Southeastern we're going to split the cost even right down the middle it's a it's a perfect partnership with the university that is wanting to do more with the school board Drew Allen the director of Athletics is currently in Denver we have a great relationship and he wish he could be here today but um the the student athletes at Tenoroc will have the opportunity to to mingle and be able to get life coaching from places to the from the student athletes of Southeastern you know

055where they want to go it's a great opportunity not only for the Athletics but the the academic part of the situation just to recap we do have some synthetic tracks in Polk County at George Jenkins High School Davenport Frostproof and Lake Region High School by adding this one at 10 Rock it'll give us another option for not only our student athletes but our youth around the around the around Polk County there is a growing interest in track we're actually in discussion right now with another partner I will not disclose it at this time because it's very preliminary but that would result in not only an upgrade to our facilities and enhancement to options for our schools but also an enhancement opportunity for us in our developing Academy program with sports management we're not just talking

056about sports management as far as you know being a manager of players we're talking about all the other aspects of sports management that go into this and so it's an exciting opportunity but again very very young in its infancy right now as a concept with various Partners who have a sincere interest but I was surprised to learn throughout the conversation what stimulated the conversation was the number of track meets that are held in our region and the lack of facilities across the area and so again Mr Talbot has demonstrated time and time again an ability to draw State competitions to Polk County that are the number of State competitions that we host continues to rise each year and this creates yet another opportunity and again a great partnership I think the board and the school

057district signaled a willingness and a receptiveness to Community Partners when we approved the enhanced field over at Winter Haven High School in partnership with the city and I think now we're seeing the fruits of that pay off because more and more partners are coming to the table to say how do we partner with you in this regard so I just wanted to give Mr Talbot some additional kudos for the work he's doing but to also provide lend my voice of support he's talked with me about this repeatedly and anytime we can develop a partnership with a College University we always talk about how do you connect K-12 to 13 and above and so this creates even through sports but Sports is a huge attractor and a huge interest it creates that pipeline an opportunity for

058our students to partner and get access and opportunities that they may otherwise not have so thank you Mr Talbot see if there's any questions or comments there are Miss Cunningham thank you once again thank you I love your shirt by the way um my wife wanted me to wear it just because it said it shows my softer side than there you go that's right I would have to agree with your wife tell her that was a great I will she dressed me this morning for today's meeting yep I I love that shirt so make too many decisions at home um I just wanted to say thank you this is awesome my question well first of all my statement is being able to split the shared cost and utilization across both organizations I think is Paramount

059and I really thank you for negotiating or working through that secondly my question is as we go forward and that facility will need maintenance is there anything in whatever agreement we've put together that shows down the road when there has to be repairs or whatever how do we do that are we also splitting that going forward we're actually drawing up the actual agreements of the people above us can actually look at it but it's going to be a share facility okay a shared responsibility not all the we actually you know Southeastern understands that since it's going on our property it essentially becomes our facility but we want to manifest and create a working relationship and partnership for from many years after we're all long gone I understand well just let's think about putting something in

060there regarding maintenance costs and upkeeping all that good stuff to keep us on Solid Ground sir thank you so much Mr sharpless first just want to thank you for your Visionary leadership on this um it's these kind of Partnerships are vital I think it's a way to save our taxpayers money as well which is important um my question was going to Echo what uh board member Cunningham said um but also in that agreement just how the shared use is going to work um you know at the end of the day who's going to manage that and that kind of stuff so um I don't I guess it's not really a question anymore because you kind of answered it but thank you well through the you know through our use of facilitron you know it's an

061online application that manages all the rentals and usage of our facilities so we'll have a shared calendar and things like that and obviously the school board will have priority for our events and our student athletes but with it being you know higher level education the times won't be an issue gotcha thank you the only issue for maintenance typically too just to just so the board's aware is if that field is used by one of our Pop Warner organizations for football or any other Athletics especially those who wear cleats we would put there's special rugs that you put down across the surface to ensure that they're not damaged in any way so our usage agreement would stipulate what precautions they must take and would actually outline any costs that they would incur if they are if

062it results in damage to our property and so that's important to note but I think you know Mr Bridges would attest to the fact that when every time we go into these types of agreements we always look at ongoing costs because again this is this is like a PTA who in in with you know with great credit says we're going to buy a cart full of iPads for this middle school and and we love that they want to do that but without a discussion the problem is it becomes a burden on the district after the fact whether it's the maintenance or repair replacement of those devices so that does have to we've learned a lot of lessons over the years about these types of Partnerships so I just want to reassure the board that yes

063we look at all of those aspects and that you'll get to see how those costs are broken down over time and with that Echo that we've learned our lessons in our previous facilities if you look at a normal track facility the runways for the long jump and those are actually on the sideline of the visitors which causes issues all our field events and all those are located outside the facility so it's just really like Mr Hyde said the getting on and off the field we do have the the proper materials the carpets to put in it'll just be entering and exiting the stadium all the other ones that usually see the most damage will be located outside the perimeter of the field Miss Miller since the center rock is located in district 7 I appreciate

064this upgrade to one of my schools it's also a great location for usage for people coming in from out of the area because of the um Parkway right there to I-4 so I think you're going to get a lot of usage out of that and I'm assuming the replacement on this type of covering is much longer than it would be asphalt like can you tell us when you have to replace when it'll be replaced yes we'll have a usually an eight year warranty on this okay I wanted to do anything for eight years and eight years we'll have a resurfacing and it really just depends on the actual wear and tear and what the weather does to it some just need a coating spray which is you know fifty thousand dollars and most the probably

065the biggest not the busy biggest expense but the most frequent one will be the repainting of the lines which usually about six seven Grand okay and we do that anyway because you have to repaint asphalt lines as well my question is we are educating the people running the facility running our facilities and our grounds but are we educating um the School site because we have a lot of clubs and things in our schools that may not understand the usage of those plenty of Education will go into you know with all our facilities we've learned lessons you know obviously when we purchased Bryant stadium and the turf went down we found out that you know teams love to enter the stadium with those smoke bombs yeah I was remembering the old times and just making sure

066that we but when you put a smoke bomb on a plastic field it tends not to do you know good things so we've learned but we will have a training obviously the right coach the track coach at Tenoroc will play a big part in this and we want the track coaches at Tenoroc to love and nourish this facility as well as Southeastern University thank you thank you Dr Allen just a couple simple questions uh I was wondering if it was pink or salmon in regards to the shirt color okay okay um I'm gonna go pink all right yeah you can I mean even though I I'm from Alaska I don't I don't eat salmon so I usually I don't eat any fish so well all right that was my simple question made a boy the

067harder question um I'm sure you're brilliant on the scheduling standpoint but you know if you want to speak to that maybe yeah basically um you know Southeastern has basically two track Seasons they have an indoor and outdoor and obviously we will have the first rice to scheduling in the Southeastern we'll go back on that it's a little bit easier when you have college student athletes because their times are more I guess less forgiving than you know High School structure we're in school from seven to two we know that facility is going to be empty from seven to two so scheduling won't be an issue but we have first priority in our events we'll obviously take place but we have basically worked with Southeastern before on scheduling when they've rented our other facilities so we don't

068foresee any issues with that because we currently do that now indeed yeah and I just want to say thanks to Drew for his patience on this as well and you know I'm obviously this has been um out there for a while and you've really thought through and you know from a discernment standpoint so I appreciate the timing on it drew is a great guy and I wish he could be here but I will bring him obviously when this goes to the board for vote I'll bring him with me so you guys can meet him he has a great vision and once you know he wants Southeastern University to be a part of our the Polk County Public School System yeah indeed and Southeastern is so active already I just think about their work at UH

069Crystal Lake Elementary with our community partnership school so it's really great to see uh students there in like the food distribution and so forth as they come alongside our staff and serve in that capacity so I get excited about the mentorship opportunities as well so thank you thank you and lastly Mr Nolte some batting cleanup thank you so much for all you do doing a great job and uh I can't say just I'm sure Theo Saliba is just looking down and just excited everything and who was who do we have before Theo uh so it's interesting so Theo saliva took over in um I believe 1974 right and I've always tell this few people always ask me how good is your job I'm the third person in the history of Polk County public school so

070there's Theo Saliba down Bridges and myself that's it there's only been three of us so this is a job that with our Community Partners and obviously our school board and and everything that Polk County public schools has to offer people don't leave since there's only been three of us in the history of the school district so are you doing a commendable job thank you anything down the line about getting a hockey rink and getting the bolts over here for some no no we um we currently have a hockey rink on uh by I-4 Memorial uh if you were out there Sunday night you saw my team get beat 11-1 so it wasn't a lot of fun um but you know I'm getting too old when you have a hockey game at 11 o'clock on Sunday

071night and you're chasing college kids around so I you know retirement is in my future but when you lose 11-1 but I enjoy it it's exercise and uh it's a great sport but uh hockey rinks are expensive pools and hockey rinks are holes in the ground you pour a lot of money thank you again God bless thank you about good work now with FHA say sanctions that Sport and we have enough interest and obviously we would pursue any of those opportunities but it is a great opportunity for us to continue to partner here locally it does create a better pipeline it does create mentorship opportunities it creates collaborative opportunities and I liked and I embraced the fact that our community continues to want to partner with us in this capacity to that extent I was

072waiting on a response from Mr Cochran earlier the officer shared that we did not have a travel we do not have a plumbing program at Travis that's actually incorrect um we do have a plumbing program at Travis the veteran board members will recall that you authorized that program and you heard about that program pre-covet when the coveted pandemic hit it was sidelined it launches this January they've been working again with a group uh four four people from the community who are well versed and knowledgeable in that field and so the program application and options for students relaunches this January so I want to make sure that we brought that back out so that everybody understands that was cutting out what about Ridge I believe it's already outrage yes ma'am well he mentioned Travis specifically correct

073and I just wanted to make sure that we put that out there because Travis is far more accessible to students obviously on the West Side um but yes ma'am good point to bring that up Mr Talbot I see no further questions or comments thank you sir appreciate it thank you and uh just a final update the uh the track project and feel that Denison begins uh construction begins November 6th so thank you thank you sir we're going to do one more item here this morning before we take a short break at this time I'd like to bring up Teresa Griffin senior coordinator for public records and School Board policy as well as Chad Davis our superintendent staff attorneys uh superintendent's office staff attorney who are here to present on three updates to board policies that

074are directed or required due to changes in school code and or um state statute Miss Griffin yes thank you Mr Hyde as Mr Hyde mentioned we have three policies today the first one is um policy 2266 which is our non-discrimination on the basis of sex and education programs and activities and this is a new policy we don't currently have this policy in our manual and this policy is just created to comply with Title IX mandates so this will get us into compliance with um state and federal laws regarding Title IX the policy requires us to select someone as our Title IX coordinator and that'll be Dr Anthony who's our senior director of equity University and Dr Anthony and his team met with Chad and I and Wes we all sat down to take neola's suggestions

075they had different options that we could choose from and as you can see I attached two different versions to the agenda normally we only attach one like the strikethrough version of a policy with this one being new I wanted you to see what Neola suggested as far as options that we could select from but then also have a clean copy so you can just see what our policy will read like if it is adopted if you choose to adopt it um the other two policies are derived from our most recent legislative session and its policy 5136 which is wireless communication devices this policy is being updated um just to comply with House Bill 379 regarding student cell phone use during instructional time and then policy 7544 use of social media which is revised to address

076new guidelines and Senate Bill 258 and House Bill 379 just prohibiting the use of tick tock and other social media platforms on District devices and the internet if I may just to clarify a little bit further on the wireless communication devices it does not prohibit students from using cell phones it actually prohibits students for using them during the instructional period unless the instructor provides them permission to do so this is the policy if you recall during the summer before the launch of the school this was rolled out very quickly and so for us we provided some technical assistance to our schools because it creates potentially an issue that should be confiscated student's phone what are the ramifications and what legal liabilities do we then assume should that phone get lost damaged or stolen and so

077we have provided guidance to our schools but it is important it doesn't completely ban their use or their presence on campus it actually prevents them from being used in the classroom during instructional time without the explicit permission of the classroom teacher so there is a little bit of a difference there and some slight exception Miss Miller hi thank you I just you have said this I just want to confirm the new policy that we're putting in place is to comply with Title IX and meets both federal and state requirements correct okay Dr Allen yeah my comments on this one or questions would deal with the wireless communication devices policy um and I'm looking at because it references our bylaws but our bylaws Define wireless communication devices a little bit more broadly so I know the

078statute was specifically talking more so about smart phones right whereas the bylaw defines our devices as computers laptops tablets e-readers sell and mobile phones and or smartphones so um you know I just wanted to maybe bring that forward just as an issue maybe that you know maybe a bylaw is not in concordance with what the statute was intentional about addressing but just as a comment um but my question is as you were noting superintendent Hyde who who's enforcing like that because the language says May right um and so which part of the language are you referring to I think it says students may not use W's does it say shop because I think the policy says May so that below students may not use wcds on school property or at school sponsored activities anyway internet

079websites that are otherwise blocked to students at school and shall not download or access prehibitable applications for internet access provided by the district um so and it's again the may not is in there because the teacher can provide permission it shall not would preclude their use altogether in my opinion but I'd let Mr Bridges weigh in and Chad weigh in on that and I'll maybe other question I'm trying to get at is do we have cases that you know each School site would be enforcing this differently and then you know how does you know breaking this in a sense rule coincide with our code of conduct so those are really the two questions I was trying to get at um within this because um I'm just trying to give an example let's just say you've

080got a student that has a tablet and device and they have an apple pencil and they're in the classroom and that's how they take notes so I'm just curious how we're implementing and enforcing this is it more teacher-led in regards to the may not use or is it school-based um and then do you have different applications where they're enforcing it differently across the district I I would begin by saying that this is mirroring language from the statute so I believe you probably have a lot more experience than perhaps those who created the language for the statute and uh and are raising some questions that that are very useful for when we start developing procedure because I I don't believe that the intent here is to limit or restrict the ability the ability to use these

081devices and learning it's really just to crack down on the use of the devices as a distraction during the instructional period yeah go a little further this is an area that I think is going to be very fluid and very organic because it is extremely geometrically not arithmetically and so as as technology changes and as people discovered new ways to misbehave which is uh which is an ongoing challenge we're going to have to deal with those and as a superintendent Mission mentioned one of our great issues is that you know when when I was in was I was in grade school I wasn't walking around with fifteen hundred dollars in my pocket and now we have Elementary School students who are doing just exactly that and we have to be very very careful to make

082sure that we don't find ourselves in the position of being responsible the school district for for loss or damage to something that a that a an eight-year-old student has in his pocket so we are going to be we're going to be working diligently to to protect that and you know Safeguard the the rights that have been established for parents and children but at the same time keep us out of the business of having to having to protect and take charge of those devices so it's it's a quite a balancing test mm-hmm and I think Dr Allen though when you read the policy in its entirety it does clarify that situation so when you use the example of a pad where students taking notes that would not be in conflict with the policy or procedure of

083the law in any regard unless they're using that to communicate with others so a personal use of that device and in many instances that would be outlined for students either whether through an IEP or a student any student Could Have That device and utilize it but if they're using it to take pictures if they're using it to record if they're using it to transmit or communicate with others then they're in violation so I think yes there are a lot of examples of devices but this is specifically related to students utilizing and accessing the features of those said devices to share or disperse information and communicate and I think that because of that it I think the policy does speak to that but as Mr Davis said procedurally we will be able to address that I

084can tell you this is not left up to individuals schools to Define we've already clarified this for them we've sent out in fact the board has received those memos that we send out anytime we clarify a policy in the absence or excuse me procedures in the absence of us updating the board policy and so we were waiting for Neola it takes them a little bit of time to catch up then Mr Davis Teresa Ms Griffin and Mr Bridges and others talk through these situations before bringing the recommendations for revised revision to board policy or the development of new board policy and that way the schools are not operating in a void so as far as discipline as far as those things those will be consistent we do have student code of conduct it does already

085Express an outline for students the disciplinary actions that can incur for the use of Technology on unapproved technology on our campuses so I think by and large we have the core structure there but we'll seek to address through your input and others any other areas that we need to make sure in the procedure or we outline explicitly these devices unfortunately as you know technology continues to evolve and so you know what a watch can do right now who knows what it'll do in six months so I think we just need to track and monitor that functionality and make sure that students in particular understand what the restrictions and limitations are they can have a phone parents want their children to have phone it's a safety feature for most of our students and families call me

086after school let me know how you're getting home let me know if you've got club or sports or those types of things and we want to respect that but the use and disruption on campus through the use of sexting through the possibility of them texting and posting on social media the faming or or belittling or cyber bullying we're not going to tolerate that and I think that this policy enhancement allows us to get to those those issues a little bit more aggressively so all right thank you Miss Miller I want to comment um on the last thing that superintendent Hyde said about the The Bullying of on of students on social media I appreciate this policy providing us more um Authority in how that how we handle those situations I do have a question because

087this is a leadership question so it might be for the superintendent I've been in classrooms where the teacher has taken on already previously to having a policy um how they handle the phones either they use them in instruction I've seen teachers put them in bags and the kids can get them out and they're rewarded by the end of the school day but if it's not consistent I think it's going to be up to leadership up to the principals to enforce each teacher's rules that they have and I just want to make I want to make sure that we understand that we're pushing this onto the teacher to create that policy or her procedures but it'll look different in every classroom so you feel our principles are um are equipped to understand the leeway that teachers

088have but also the responsibility of how it looks and it's up to the teacher to decide if the student's using it appropriately and then what the contact desire for it not being giving it giving that to the teacher I think is a plus but it's also a huge it could be a discipline issue that they have to intervene and need support from the principal with right now as a district we would not support a teacher removing devices from students or asking them to place them someplace else in the classroom we were actually very explicit in that in our memo to teachers and we said that if a student refuses to put their device away in class that they're to notify their administrator and we will address it through the student code of conduct the reason

089for that is again the teacher in and of themselves is creating a liability for themselves and so we need time to explore this issue with other districts with Mr Bridges Mr Davis to ensure that if a teacher in and of themselves independently says you need to put your phone here and it's a brand new iPhone and it has a cracked screen but the teacher doesn't notice notice it has a cracked screen then the student picks it up at the end of the class period and says my screen's cracked now who's liable the teacher is and then ultimately the school and or the district is so we're not going to allow people to expose us to that type of liability and this you know Mr multi previously asked well can we do those bags those that

090are magnetically sealed and then yes we could we could explore that but the problem is if we were to have a real school emergency how then do students get in contact with their families or families vice versa so there's a lot of logistical issues here to address but we were very explicit with staff to say do not take away devices simply tell them to put them away in the absence of a procedure that will outline for them so that we can eliminate the ambiguity but we do expect our administrators to support our teachers in maintaining classrooms that are conducive to teaching and learning I do want to say I do not support the whole taking the bag as they walk through the door of the school because parents don't support that as much as some

091people think they do parents are afraid and they want to be able to reach their child and so I understand that some teachers have been very creative to use it as a reward like if you know if you put your if you choose to put your phone over here you can have it for the last five minutes of class I think with the ambiguity of the policy that the procedures will be what we need will we see that will that come just for us for an informational item yes okay I will share that with the board I will not share it at a workshop I'll send it to the board thank you you're welcome Mr sharpless I got a couple things first the policy that was uh submitted to us it says teachers shall designate

092an area for wcds to be stored during a structural time so it does say that um and so that's I think where you have not approved this policy yet okay that's the point okay so in the absence of an approved policy we provided guidance and technical assistance to schools I I do not believe that we will conform to that I don't at this time I'm not comfortable saying yes or no quite frankly because again the liability issue and I've dealt with this as both as a superintendent and as a school-based administrator there's a there's a reality that a twenty five hundred dollar iPhone that nobody really pays twenty five hundred dollars for ultimately we end up getting the bill from someone because the phone is lost damaged or stolen and we're responsible because we took

093possession of the phone how do you how do you how do you address those things and I've seen tremendous creativity amongst Across the Nation about how teachers address cell phone policies you know whether they put it into a drawer whether they put it into like the shoe holders that people have in their closets and they put hang the bags in the back of their doors and and it's not about not allowing teachers to do it it's about protecting teachers and our staff from that potential liability issue and and I'm the sad realities it happens all the time so we will continue to explore that and incorporate that into our procedure so then I would suggest if it's going to come in from the board then maybe strike that part of the policy um if if

094we're not going to do that in practice um it might so that's just my suggestion as a board member um my other question I have um and this is on the social media part I know a lot of our student organizations and clubs as a former uh uh Middle School and High School agriculture teacher RFA chapters had social media sites um and so the use of social media policy um my question is is if it says it's uh students are prohibited from accessing this um on our in our district internet what about uh for promotion of like a student promoting uh the student organization or using it during you know let's say for example after school they have a FFA meeting and or any or student organization and and the the student I'm sorry I'm

095running on low sleep as a new father here I'm trying to articulate myself the student is wanting to um use log into their FFA chapters or their whatever student organizations uh Facebook account or whatever and and promote that um they would be on our district internet it is allowed it is okay so maybe I haven't read that I'm sorry bottom of the page page one under social media for instructional and school sponsored activities is explicitly prohibits Tick Tock or any so they could not use tick tock no okay under any circumstances however if a school staff member AKA club or sponsor has a district approved social media platform site that's used for educational purposes if you read that last paragraph it'll be considered educational activity and it falls under the code of conduct School spot

096that says students use of District approved social media platforms and sites must be consistent with our code of conduct so it does allow for it but it does put the onus on the sponsor and ultimately on the school and in the district to monitor everything that's being posted to ensure its appropriateness no but that's also a lesson we're trying to teach students how do you post appropriately to social media and the understanding that even on some platforms that claim to be temporary where a message made to you know automatically delete or disappear it never disappears because somewhere someone screenshotted it and shares it someplace else or retains it so it's important for people for us to use these as opportunities to inform our students and instruct them on the appropriate use of social media but

097no in no way does this prohibit them through school sponsored activities from supporting so to your point fffa excuse me is on a field trip and they're taking pictures and so long as that student has permission and has access to the school-sponsored FFA site they may post they may not necessarily post to their personal sites while on campus they can do that after the fact and and so then maybe maybe we should add a suggestion would be to add at the end of that one sentence I read um you know it says we struck out except when especially expressly directed by a teacher solely for educational purposes maybe we should add something in there about school sponsored to reference or anywhere else in this policy or something to where if someone reads that one sentence

098and they didn't read the rest of that policy they would um they wouldn't prohibit a student from doing something that's just a suggestion um I I just want to add both to that and also the previous comment about teachers designating where the cell phones go both of those are in the statue that is lifted directly from the statute so um you know we can clarify our our procedures we can reference I mean when we when teachers direct to where cell phones can go in accordance with our you know procedures where teachers are going to direct them they go in the pocket they go in the backpack but those are those are a couple of areas that we have to work around using what the statute actually gives us so we may not have the leeway

099to just remove or come up with other policy to that and Miss Pasco if you'd like to address some of that as well hi just a point of clarification make sure we're all on the same page students I have a student Wi-Fi so all their devices go onto the student Wi-Fi and social media is blocked on the student Wi-Fi so there's a separation between students utilizing social media Mr Hyde's example is correct there are district supported social media platforms FFA might have one and they register that with the username and password with the district so the district can manage so that's separate than someone's personal social media page and students might be engaging in that but they would not be engaging on it during the instructional day or on campus so I just wanted to

100clarify that piece because it you can't really take a policy onto the internet and then say with the exception of this student or that student so it's pretty much all or none and this is coming from the statutes of how we address social media access for instructional purposes so that is one of the gray areas now a teacher might choose that they are going to utilize as social media based upon the statute for teaching we also are required to teach social media and we do that through the Flight Academy but they might they would not be doing it in the classroom because some of the statutes are giving us conflicting information we also have some requirements of maintaining with social media for our e-rate and pieces of that require funding so some of these procedures

101are to everyone's Point going to be extremely important but I want to make sure we didn't come away with any misconceptions about some of those competing requirements Mr Nolte thank you superintendent Hyde thank you doctor I don't want to kick The Hornet's Nest because this is a ongoing thing I have teachers parents many times a week a month or raise their opinions about the phones especially you know the teachers they tell me all the time come on Rick we don't want to be phone police we've got to come up with a way to take care of this matter because they want to teach they don't have to worry about the phones and things and we've got some very intelligent students out there the nada work to work around it so uh I think bottom line

102is we need to be super consistent each School from A to Z needs to be consistent in the manner that they enforce these rules because I've had guys at the golf course came up to me man I I transferred to this high school it's I said how do you like it and he goes well it's a completely different phone system than we had it you know and we had at Jenkins and uh vice versa so I mean I feel really I feel bad for the teachers because they've got they wear so many hats nowadays and now they have to be phone police I think there's got to be a a better way to do this because when I have parents come up to me and say hey Rick these uh these kids I know they're

103not supposed to use their phones but they're put in between their legs and they're you know putting them in a backpack and they're they're not even listening to the teacher and our test scores are showing it so I know this is thin ice and I know it's come a lot of stuff from Tallahassee we need to work together but uh somehow we've got to come up with something because I'm hearing a parents teachers even a kids come up and say coach I didn't learn anything in that class I was watching uh this that and the other and I go how'd you get on the uh how did you get on the internet he goes because my phone I can do anything with this thing I haven't got to get in the school's internet now I'm

104not tech savvy so I'm just repeating what I've heard but uh this is like a this is a glass mess we really need to come up with the best way we can come up today and then maybe two weeks from now they'll come up with a better system we can look at that so I appreciate everybody's two cents I appreciate all your hard work and let's work together Miss Miller I have one question about you've made it pretty pretty clear that the tick tock on our district-owned devices are not allowed we have a lot of especially Athletics when they're especially traveling to different events they record and do the videos on their own personal devices and record and do it later so I don't know that we've had an issue in Polk County with public

105school devices staff being on public school devices with social media I just don't want to end um whether it's Instagram or however they're telling their story I know this County the size it's it's good PR for us to see the games that are happening in Miami or in North Florida and cheering on our teams I don't want that to end so I just want to be very specific this is not using our devices on our internet to do social media posts about your events either FFA or Athletics but this is not discouraging for the promotion of our staff our coaches or our club member our club leaders to promote what they do all year long they just can't do it in the hours of school on a school device there's a difference between students and

106staff right tick tock is not allowed for students nor staff it's not allowed on any District device nor on any District Wi-Fi staff have the ability to get to social media on the district Wi-Fi many times exactly for what you're talking about students do not okay does that answer the question but it also allows staff to promote what they do on their own device on their own time oh yes ma'am we we don't control from the district Wi-Fi we're not controlling that but there is also a policy for staff if they needed to get on their policies and procedures for that and then we again are not blocking social media thank you Dr Allen you might have to come back to the microphone maybe um so you know social media is very vague in a

107sense right and this policy it's probably written at a time where there are very minimal channels you know Facebook and Twitter I think were referenced so now we're adding Tick Tock um but you have other applications that students are you know actively using in regards to communication and I know from you know a faculty position you know group me for example you know do you classify group me as a social media application so I'm just curious you know how the vagueness of this will I don't know and trap some of those ideas or other applications but I'm just I'm curious are you familiar group me is that one that's is it approved is it honor approved pure list so if I may when you think about everything everyone has said is correct we're we're stuck

108in a position trying to educate students on communication and social media that's become part of our everyday life while maintaining decorum in the classroom focused on instruction and I believe that's where everybody's trying to go with some of these laws and some of the other pieces now how we get there can be a little challenging so there's no way although I know everybody thinks it the I.T lady can't know everything so we have policies for this and we this is standard procedure in any District you have filters and the filters with your with the company that provides the filters they classify certain pieces of information into buckets based upon how that's classified it determines if it's open or it's blocked and you also take that down with staff with students and you look at different

109ages of students high school has a little bit more access than Middle School than Elementary and this also goes into the state statutes for age-appropriate internet access staff then have an opportunity that they can request anything be unblocked so let's use GroupMe for example GroupMe would be classified as social media that might be blocked if a staff member found that they needed it then they would put in a request and those requests all get funneled through me I've had multiple Communications with Mr Hyde and Mr Green when someone puts in a request I always check myself with senior leadership this is what we have do we all agree and then we go forward so there's a process for that because we just can't know everything all the time I mean you mentioned Twitter which is

110now X so it's constantly changing and that's how we empower the Educators who might need to have a different platform Dan Talbot was here Sports needs a different communication platform than someone else so we're trying to empower them to be part of that conversation we might not be able to respond as fast as they need to but they could then request that and then we have the ability to make an approval process for that and although it might be blocked in the group we can then allow it on top of it does that answer the question Dr Allen Mr Bridges thank you sir this is an area where it it probably does us well to stop and consider from time to time that we are not alone in this challenge that this is something that

111is being presented across districts and across the country and I would respectfully suggest to you that this might not be an area where it is ripe for one District to innovate this might be an area where we're going to be developing practices and policies and we do so in the harness with other districts in Florida in and Across the Nation because they're going to be best practices that float to the surface this is one of those areas where I think Innovation you've heard you've heard the phrase Leading Edge I think this is one of those areas where more appropriately it might be referred to as the bleeding edge there's going to be some pain as as this develops and my suggestion would be of course you keep up keep up with what the requirements coming

112out of Tallahassee and out of out of Washington are but but do so in in coordination with other districts and and and being mindful that that we're all facing these challenges together and if you have if you have districts who are not who are who are out there with respect to other districts that's going to be the opportunity for for for Strife for litigation for risk so just my thoughts thank you sir so you know further questions or comments thank you very much at this time we'll take a break we will rejoin here again reconvene at 10 50. thank you very much [Music] oh [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] thank you foreign [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] foreign

113[Music] foreign [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] at this time I would like to call this meeting back to order and turn it over to superintendent High to finish off leading our work session today good morning everyone thank you sir good morning everyone welcome back at this time I'd like to introduce Miss Kerry Barkin director for preschool programs she's also joined by Lori Allen and so this morning they're here to talk with you about uh the Head Start Grant and ARP grant extension requests good morning a million 410 000 that we've slowly been drawing

114down in the changes that were brought about by covid and Gary can you get closer to the mic just and is that better there you go and improvements to the classroom we spent 1 million 86 000 we have a remaining balance of 324 000 that was to have been spent by March of this year and we did not spend that and they gave us the opportunity we are notified on August 29th that we could apply for an extension to give us another year they did a big webinar multiple Head Start Grants did not spend the amount of money and the time due to supply chain issues other issues of things that we were purchasing so we just need board approval to apply for the extension Miss Cunningham thank you my only question is in researching

115this and pulling up the actual letter from the school board of Polk County um this might seem weird but normally it's a superintendent's signature on items that require funding I think that needs to be changed on the letter it's a head start requirement that the board chair signs we can add my signature I think that would be most appropriate thank you yes thank you I see no further questions or comments Miss Miller um we talked about the request for an extension of the grant period so I want to afford you the opportunity if you have any questions before I move on I said on this committee and um understood what we needed to do from this so thank you for presenting thank you thank you very much thank you ladies stick close because the next

116topic is a good one as you know board members I'm excited I'll be doing this presentation with some assistance but preschool expansion as you know Polk County Public Schools continues to see our population grow that includes those who are approaching eligibility for kindergarten kindergarten Readiness continues to be a significant concern that we all face in the State of Florida if I and I'm again I'm paraphrasing but I believe approximately only 40 percent of students across the State of Florida or 40 some odd percent of students across state of Florida have access to a structured Pre-K environment and as a result we see our Readiness scores actually reflect that that our students are not prepared for kindergarten they need to come in without the letter recognition letter sounds different types of things and skills that they

117need really to be successful in the classroom and to help our teachers ensure that they can Master early literacy initiatives as well to that extent all right I'm encouraging and I'm going to make a recommendation to the board here that we consider a preschool expansion again I have some quotes in here but the most important part on this slide in particular is that Polk County public schools has approximately 1 000 students on a waiting list for pre-k that's not just VPK that's Pre-K and so again with our growth we're seeing an increased demand I was tagged recently we were just talking about Tick Tock a few minutes ago and I was tagged on Twitter by two of our teachers who actually put together a video and we're asking for preschool options for staff and while

118it's an interesting concept and there's a lot more to be discussed there we just don't have the available seats I I commend the board prior to my arrival the board approved and authorized that for any new elementary schools that we and consider the addition of a Pre-K environment as well and you saw that at Willow Oak we saw that elsewhere but unfortunately Garner is a great example of a school where that got cut out of the budget because of cost overruns and some other issue use with budgeting and so you know again there are not enough consistent places for us to place students and we continue to see again increasing demand and a longer waiting list and we want to assist and address these issues because there's a there's a strong and growing body of

119research that talks about early intervention versus late intervention and early intervention is far more successful and quite quite frankly I hate to bring this up but less costly because the remediation and intervention strategies that we spend grades three and above to get students caught back up there's billions of dollars being spent there not just by Polk County I want to make that clear we're not spending billions there but we are spending several million dollars there each year so if we can get at these issues earlier and use the opportunity to also to identify any behavioral needs that our students have any cognitive disabilities that he or she may have and any other issues that we can assist our students with just socialization a lot of students get thrust into kindergarten not having really experienced a

120classroom setting before or and may struggle with how to interact with their peers appropriately and so it takes a conservative amount of time for our teachers to get them ready you see here again there's some additional information here on this this next slide that talks about um I can't tell if we're on the right slide or not oh there we go about the four areas that students really would benefit from in a Pre-K environment obviously it's language and literacy development thinking skills development self-control self-regulation and self-confidence for our students and those are important things for our children to have opportunities to thank you there we go we also see the benefits of pre-K we see improvements in their overall attendance improvements in their fine and motor skills development improvements in language development as I've already

121discussed fewer disciplinary issues because again we're able to bring these students into a school environment and work on socialization and appropriateness and Rule following and the long-term economics economic benefits as I mentioned earlier this was from a study done in Georgia on their Pre-K environments they saw significantly reduced costs associated with associated with DJJ and students entering that prison to school or school to prison pipeline they also saw a return of three to five dollars for every dollar that they invested in the preschool setting in the State of Florida the data that you see here before you comes directly from the does website and it talks about knowing your schools and knowing your districts but I thought it was important to show the percentage of students scoring at level three or above on the grade

122three Ela assessment as it relates to those who attended a VPK setting and you see here that they outperform their peer groups considerably and I so that this has been a consistent number but again unfortunately in the State of Florida due to the lack of opportunity and those opportunities are sometimes lacking for several reasons number one economic access or the economic barrier for families because Pre-K and and environments and VPK environments can be very costly we have limited space as I mentioned we only we have a thousand students on our waiting list even though we partner directly with the Early Learning Coalition for which Carrie and Lori both partner with me I sit on the board but we partnered with them earlier this year and we were able to place 500 students into their environments

123however the the ELC has seen a decrease in the overall number of providers why the economy of scale the fact that many of them can't compete at fifteen dollars an hour in addition to which we're seeing rents Skyrocket for many of them as well in the places where they would typically be able to lease an area to host a Pre-K environment and we're seeing that across the board housing costs are increasing but rental costs and real estate costs are also going up for these types of commercial businesses and so we're seeing fewer and fewer people able to provide the services so as a school district what I'm seeking from the school board is and just really not necessarily approval but an acknowledgment that I will be pursuing three possible options here I want to look

124at three existing sites Kingsford Elementary School in Mulberry Gibbon Street Elementary School here in Bartow and Lewis Anna Woodbury Elementary School in Fort Meade Lewis and a Woodbury Elementary School if you recall we combined both of their campuses because of their enrollment numbers would allow us to consolidate them on one campus at the same time the Louisiana Woodbury Elementary School site actually needs a comprehensive replacement of their cafeteria you saw that in a five-year Capital plan when we brought out Engineers to redo the roof on that campus structurally they said it was not sound this was after one of the hurricane events a year ago so the decision was made to go ahead and replace the entirety of that cafeteria the problem is all the main electrical lines and conduit comes in through the cafeteria

125and Feeds out to the rest of the building so I had some significant concerns and serious concerns with doing that level of Demolition and construction and the possibility of intermittent electrical issues happening throughout the year if we maintain that smaller campus and so right now again we satisfactorily can place all of them on one location when I met with the community they had a real interest in pre-k coming to the their to their community and they said the only request that I had from the community leaders was that don't rename the school and just make sure you use it for something and so I believe in that we have a facility that arguably could be re-evaluated and reconfigured to better support Pre-K again because the demand is there now unfortunately none of these sites are

126in the Northeast and I think that there's other alternatives for us to explore on how we're going to address those issues rezoning will take take will help address some of that because it will ultimately create some open classroom spaces on more campuses as a direct result of rezoning and reconfiguring but again the sites currently being considered our Kingsford Elementary School Gibbon Street Elementary School and endless Woodbury we would just just their options here we could operate the sites ourselves as we would a Traditional School setting we could partner with the Early Learning Coalition and essentially we would operate the facility much like we do with some of our Charter Schools we have the facility and yet they're contracted to deliver the instruction and so that way the Early Learning Coalition can find vetted High skill

127providers in the community and we could allow them to operate on our campus similar to what we're doing right now at Oscar J Pope are getting prepared to do right now in Oscar J Pope with the Bezos Foundation offering that year-round Montessori program so I believe we could be good stewards by providing the fiscal space but also allowing others who are highly skilled and competent in these areas to function in there and then Lori's department and Carries Department would supervise those those initiatives and make sure that we're providing ongoing professional development we're monitoring the classrooms and ensuring that they're meeting the highest possible standard the other one is we've been we've been in touch with a national provider similar to the Bezos Foundation who has an interest in possibly partnering with us in this type

128of environment and so again we would retain possession of the facility um but we would basically allow others to operate the instructional side or the day-to-day operations but again that's just one these are just three options again one of them as I clearly indicate here so no one panics we could easily operate that there is some difficulty in that right now because it is a highly competitive environment and Staffing shortages exist in the Pre-K environment as well and so there might be a benefit to us partnering with someone outside of the district on these on this initiative um so basically here's the timeline for next steps I'm discussing this uh here with you today in October and November we could work with Mr Fix and his Department to make sure that we can get our

129Architects and Engineers into these three schools they can evaluate them there are certain code requirements for pre-k environments for example acts direct access to a restroom sinks in the classrooms those types of things so some of these schools would require some retrofitting other campuses may be able to be partially used because those classroom requirements are already there Kingsford is a good example two Wings in that building every single classroom has restrooms there are there have been concerns with Kingsford in the past but again that could be part of what I would bring back to the board for each one of these sites the plan would be to bring you back pricing and the options for each site so that you can make an informed decision and I can make the best possible recommendation to you

130to move forward with these and then in December again we would we would bring back the pricing for review with you and then hopefully in January get some approval for me to move forward and begin the engineering design phase with one of our partners So based off that I see that there's someone so miscunning him thank you superintendent Hyden yes you covered my topic but I'm going to go ahead and make a few statements um I think this is awesome we I mean research everything has always said you really truly need to have pre-K in place to be able to get those students ready and we see the schools that have them and how much better the kids are prepared to move forward in their K through 12 education that being said fastest growing part

131of the county Northeast Polk is once again not being represented in this first phase and that troubles me because everything's on the west side of the county there's nothing on the East had we done one someplace but I just it's unacceptable I'm just telling you and we do have space we do have space our new Scenic Terrace right I know that's being used for the other school but I know that it's not full into its capacity so I would like to offer I don't know what classrooms I I just don't know all of the specifics but at least to have some place on the east side of the county to start this I mean because this is unbelievably helpful to these children and the fastest growing part of the county is not being represented on

132these sites for consideration so I would implore you to revisit this I'm not taking anything away from these three I just want to see one more bullet point and have a school over on our side of the county to begin to offer that for our children as well I this is huge and with it being such a incredibly populated part of the county and the fastest growing so I don't know if that scares you because there's so many kids or what but I just if there's any way to add a bullet point there it would be so so appreciated so truth be told there was and there was originally an asterisk there to say the Northeast would have another option did you because again the whole point behind this was how do I make utilization

133of buildings that are under vastly underutilized yes or are available yes we don't have that luxury in the Northeast and so separate to that there needs to be a discussion about within the five-year Capital plan what are we going to do because while Scenic Terrace is a brand new facility none of those classrooms have attached restrooms and that's required in the Pre-K environment if I recall correctly and so we that would require a considerable amount of retrofitting to a brand new building whereas we might be better off adding another six or eight classroom facility like we did it at um willow oak that was that was the new model that the board had approved previously with elementary schools was to provide a separate pre-K school setting and so I'd like to explore that further but

134absolutely there's great intentionality and intent to bring an option back for the Northeast and I'll be sure to include that in future updates thank you sir I do appreciate it I knew you were going to say it that's why I tried to head it off yes ma'am okay thank you Miss Miller I have a couple of things one partnering with any third party second party I would like to see the cost of what that would be I agree that it would be very difficult for us to undertake that and recruit with the lack of teachers that we have now to take that challenge on would be difficult but if there's a huge cost to it we might have to get creative with how we're doing that also I'm assuming that these sites were considered based

135on information from pre-k's Department district 7 is also like the Auburndale area none of those are close you have three that are all in the same area and that might be because they've shown a high need but I would like to make sure that we're meeting the needs across the district with sites and I agree with Miss Cunningham that her area is the largest growing and I would see the need for them probably Rising close to the top Mulberry is a very um High population of people who do not have access to pre-k so I understand I definitely understand that area as well and Fort Meade's so rural so maybe this is if we based on on data these is why these were selected but I would be interested in what the other side of

136the district looks like so these were selected because of availability not because of the data analytics however there is a there is a significant need in Mulberry and Bartow these sites are just readily available for us to convert and quite honestly one of them in particular already has arguably the infrastructure in place but will require some UPS up because the school hasn't been utilized it will require some renovation to make sure it aligns to current code and then it would require some beautification so do you do a three to seven million dollar investment in an existing facility or do you go out and build one for 40 million I mean the costs are exorbitant right now and and so we we want to be somewhat careful but you're absolutely right the whole intent here is

137to find how do we expand Pre-K options across the district so that we can provide a more Equitable opportunity costs associated with this if we were to operate in an attempt to staff it we would have significant costs associated with this that are not going to always be offset however this type of agreement should we go into a partnership and I'm not encouraging it I'm just simply addressing the question we would only have the operational costs we would not have any of the Staffing or the benefits or those costs associated with it so we and we currently we operate these three sites now as far as air conditioning electrical mowing the Lawns maintaining the roofs all those things so we have no additional cost beyond what typically we would incur and if we were to

138enter an agreement that would be the agreement I would pursue which is you're assuming all of the instructional and and you know those operating costs we will maintain the facilities costs as an in-kind contribution to offset so but again I think it's important for us to bring back the specifics once we get further down the road but I did want to get um tentative approval or direction from the board to go ahead and keep moving forward with this and I do have a question do we have to use um School bill I mean I know their school buildings but we have buildings East area Adult School is a building those buildings next to Crystal Lake that have housed real Academy and things in the past those buildings are not used at capacity as well so

139I think we may have I don't know that we can fill them all though with staffings there's a lot to look at this but I I would definitely this we should have started this a long time ago with the group with the growth I think so I definitely support looking at this and just making it Equitable um across the district thank you thank you Mr sharpless first want to say the uh the data that you provided um from the state shows a real clear need why we need to do this um I'll also tell you during my campaign I looked at Polk County's kindergarten Readiness scores in particular and we're consistently throughout the years five to ten percent lower than the state average so Polk County needs more VPK we need more it's it's undeniable

140that we need we need more um I do like the fact uh if we start offering these even if we're partnering we can um control more of the testing on the kindergarten Readiness so we can uh you know at least have people that we can trust doing the testing on this so we know it's accurate I do want to Echo both board member Cunningham as well as Miller's con comments um the east side is a desperate need um for my background in Career Tech education um a suggestion potentially when we build we're going to talk about this later the school out in hatching Hall is to potentially create an early childhood Academy I've seen that in some other high schools where actually our students are receiving certifications in early childhood which helps prepare them for

141employment but we also can run Early Childhood Center with that so it adds additional capacity if we could potentially build that into the new high school that we build that's that's a long term that's you know that's not happening right now so we need something to address now but then also I think just a suggestion for the future um definitely need it on the East Side that's all I am Dr Allen thank you superintendent obviously there is uh in a sense a problem as you noted in regards to the demand that's out there and the extensive waiting list so I appreciate you know your noting the research along the way as well I would um love for you to share the Georgia research research would love to uh dig into that and to understand that

142um uh I don't know if we do we have in our AGS agis system currently where our pins are um around the county in relation to where the current um programs are and then heat maps on the on the pupils that are being serviced around the county it'd be interesting data to look at as we move forward and make these decisions as well um and then I was looking just trying to see what the forecasting looks like as well does the state do forecasting for Pre-K I think they do right for pre-k enrollment or yeah not that I'm aware of come on up Lori [Music] they do birth tracking um but even locally we don't get accurate data on on birth rate yeah data that we've put ourselves so I can tell you right now

143um currently we have 942 enrolled in Head Start and that's within 23 Schools 53 classrooms across the district we have right now we're currently serving 352 in title one I believe that's 21 22 class schools one there's two schools that have two but most of them are one one classrooms and then the other is the VPK we're serving about 535 kids across the bpks most of those are on magnet schools or schools that are not title one so we have right around gosh close to 1800 kids that we're serving total I believe there's six Elementary across the district that we're not in primarily because there's not space for them so we know that as Mr Hyde said we've sent about 500 names to the ELC that have been sitting on our waiting list we have

144well over a thousand and we sent about 500 over but most of them were on the east side because we have waiting lists 130 140 long for 18 slots so we that is a significant problem for us but we I can only go by what we what our own data here we typically enroll six to eight thousand kindergartners every year which means they're six to eight thousand preschoolers sitting out there somewhere all right and it's just growing exponentially especially on the east side good great data thank you that answer your question thank you very much I don't see any further questions or comments so board members I will be bringing this item back to you each month with some updates I'll begin to work with Mr Fix and his team Mr Pitts and Miss Jenkins

145to identify potential Architects and Engineers who can assist us with evaluating these spaces we will include I don't believe we have heat map data I'd have to work with the gis team to see if we can if we can configure it that way for Pre-K and VPK however I do know that we have the flags in there for where we have the school sites because we can search by program so I'll have to work with Mr McLemore further but I'm sure we'll be able to provide that for you okay thank you very much next topic before you there is no formal presentation you'll get a formal presentation in October but I wanted to do a public discussion about where we stand with the possibility of building a new high school out in the hatch nahal

146Poinciana community area board members you'll recall um there are two options really before you and the second option actually has two options with it at two so it's gonna get a little complicated the first option is for us to continue to down the track of a traditional design and build but something the school district has used successfully for any number of years um and as you saw it was successful again this summer with Southpoint and some others in Garner and so the board will receive a full comprehensive package on what that looks like the costs associated with it initially the costs were very high about 200 million dollars but through value engineering and the bidding process the the team estimates we can get it down anywhere from 145 to 152 million dollars however I need

147to disclose that that's just for the building that does not include property if the board recalls we went through a very thorough process of trying to find and evaluate multiple properties that would be large enough for us to suitably place the high school of the size that we anticipate needing unfortunately we're not able to find those we did revisit several sites based off Communications we received from some of you as board members and so we did reevaluate those sites unfortunately far too many of them are Marshland and other areas that would not be conducive to the placement of a high school at that at most very recently in fact within the last 24 hours the team believes that they have identified a possible location and property Mr Fix if you would please join me at

148the microphone I believe it was approximately 200 Acres if not a little bit larger but what I don't know is what if and if you do know Mr Fix I don't recall seeing the anticipated cost for the land or potential cost for land I should say thank you superintendent Hyde you're correct this just came to our attention and so we haven't even got to any of that yet in fact we're still looking at it we're still looking at the site to see how much of it may be Wetlands it appears that there is some Wetlands on it which would not be unusual up that way um it is about 250 acres in size we haven't begun we before we get that formal we try to do a lot of our own in-house looking at the

149wetlands the soils the the floor the fauna any mitigation on those things to make sure it's even viable and we're not even sure of that yet so we're doing that and like I said this just as you said superintendent came to our attention and so we'll we'll do some homework on that this is one of the reasons board members you're not getting a formal packet today in addition so let me move on to the second option the second option is the PS member do we want to disclose that a lot of them well yeah the property the where it's all still very up in the air okay I will make I will make you aware as soon as possible yes ma'am the second option is the P3 option and board members if you recall we

150built Scenic Terrace under the P3 option which is authorized under Florida statute essentially what it allows us to do and what we did at Scenic Terrace and we have yet to even have any discussion with you as board members about you're in you know your interest in pursuing this so again I'm going to bring you the two options one is a traditional build design and build the other one is the P3 process the reason why you don't have a formal packet before you today is we're still in discussion we received formal presentations from that group formal documentation from that group who has submitted under the P3 option and we have subsequently been communicating with them for follow-up questions so Mr Pitts and his team have been in communication with Lauren and others um as recently

151as last week to try and address the remaining questions questions about you know parts of the budget questions about the design and build those types of issues and so until we get all those answers I'm not comfortable bringing you the formal presentation but I felt the need to bring this back out and be transparent with the community and with you where we are so under the P3 process aspect there are actually two options that they can bring forward they do provide property they do have land that they have temporarily put a hold on that could adequately meet the needs that if you recall going back to the prior conversation the Hassan Community was was felt very upset that we were potentially building on the Baxter property there was property across the way that's away from

152the water that's away from other areas that's already pasture land and has largely been cleared that my understanding is they have secured a temporary placement whole placeholder on that so their Pro their proposal will include the land we have asked them to price it out separately so that the board has complete transparency in what we're paying for the building what we're paying for the land so we've asked to do that the second part of that option it again it gets a little complicated because we can procure and just go a traditional format where we would borrow and pay or use impact fees and other fees to pay off a majority of it and then borrow against the rest and enter into traditional repayment schedule or we can do the least own option at the at

153the price point that may not be something the board's interested I can't speak to that you will have to make that decision we will do all the financial analysis behind it I do know that the financial analysis behind Scenic Terrace has shown and actually I had somebody stop me the other day at a community event and said you can build as many of those in our community as you want because it was a considerable tax savings and because this is one of our larger Bankers in the community who looked at what we're paying for that facility versus what a 20-year traditional mortgage or purchase price would be for us and actually we save or can serve on money additionally we found out that we saved a little over four million dollars during the construction process

154because we weren't charged for change orders and so and again they built that school in approximately 10 months I'm not encouraging you either way I it may sound that way I'm not what my intention is is to bring you both options fully vetted with all the information you will need and then we will make a recommendation to you the recommend the recommendation will not be initially about whether or not we would do a lease to own or traditional procurement or purchase approach I think that has to wait until all that financial analysis is completed it's for you to have all the information but I do believe that we can make a recommendation about which proposal makes the most sense for the board you will start to see that information next month so the timeline that

155you're going to be on is we'll present information we'll provide you another update in November the board will have plenty of time to ask questions into December I will not ask the board to vote until January because again in November and December we have limited meeting opportunities and I do not want you to feel rushed and I think it's important for us to Workshop this a couple times so that you have adequate and ample opportunity to ask as many questions as you have of Staff of anybody else involved so that you can make an informed decision come January for us to move forward we are not in any rush for this building we have always anticipated a 2026 opening date so we have plenty of time logistically speaking for the building construction and opening phase

156and if you recall we actually moved up our timelines for any and all School renovation and construction projects they must be completed by June we will no longer push projects into July we're getting far too close to the opening of school with some of these programs because we've had delays with electrical hookups and air conditioning units being delivered and other issues that we need to expedite our timeline a bit to make sure that we have more than enough time to adequately plan but again I just wanted to get this back out there publicly so that you are aware that we are making progress we've been working on this for several months since our last conversation about it and you received if I recall correctly you did get notebooks about the P3 submission you'll also get

157answers to all the questions that we've submitted to them so that you have that information as well and I'll hopefully provide that to you by the end of the week Dr Allen for resist from last hang on leftover from thank you superintendent Hyde I want to go back to what was brought before us just for the sake of transparency as well when something just appears um can maybe we clarify like how would that typically unfold uh in regards to like another property option so yes we can't disclose that information to you today because they just identified the property and became aware of its availability yesterday so there's a lot of information that our team literally yesterday I got a text last night saying we found a property potential property um and so they need to

158do the evaluation that's why again you're not hearing about the specifics of that property because we have to determine what percentage of it is actually buildable each time the board has been presented with a high school option we have found that a large portion is unbuildable due to the Marshland or other types of issues that we have to address and Remediation and mitigation are big concerns too there is a benefit to the pasture land if you recall this conversation previously the pasture Land versus the Baxter property I I for Life me I can't remember the other name it went by some ranch and I apologize I mean no disrespect I should probably know that still but I don't um the concern with that was it was still largely wooded there's a lot of scrub property

159in there so it would impact potentially some of the concerns that the community brought forward was the impact of the environmental impact right The Scrub Jays and other issues and I believe they identified 12 potential species endangered species that we would have to mitigate everything from gopher tortoises to a Florida panther there was a black bear that was on a property and seen on trail cameras and and things of that nature so it's there's a lot to that so that's why you're not seeing that but yes you will get all the information about that potential property that's why you have an appropriate timeline I feel you have an appropriate timeline to get all the information and ask all the questions that you need to ask and how does that timeline impact the P3 option to

160my knowledge it has no impact to them they did I believe they have a hold on the property my understanding is that us moving forward with the high school proposal would give them an extension of that that lease holding that's my understanding I can verify that and determine if there's any other impact I would assume if there's any other Financial impact should we go with that option we would be it would probably be asked of us to cover that cost if there was a cost I'm assuming I'm excited to hear more about the considerable tax savings that you noted um you know and what who the banker was and and their analysis on that so I'm really excited to hear more about that absolutely who's Cunningham superintendent Hyde couple of things um okay so we

161evaluated three or four sites prior to now seven okay so there were some I did not even know about that's fine so the only one that has remained on the radar is P3 because number one the cost effectiveness of it number two the ability for them to get in and get the job done in record time frame which is being talked about throughout the state of Florida and thirdly their relationship with the district and the community that they're in I mean I think Scenic terrorists speaks volumes to their ability to do this so my question is if there were seven to start with they have actually come in and proven themselves as here it is and as you indicated a banker expressed to you that this is quite a financially feasible direction for a school

162district considering its taxpayer funded ultimately so it's us being good stewards of that money and all of a sudden last night location X whatever it is comes in I don't understand why we're now all of a sudden jumping to evaluate too why aren't we just moving forward with throughout the seven the one that moves forward I I don't understand can you explain that to me we have always had the original design and construction proposal on the table always we had never agreed to review the P3 until we had proof of concept that's that's on record stated multiple times okay school board meetings okay so we didn't have proof of concept with Scenic Terrace until just this summer okay and so they resubmitted their proposal so we are considering it the board authorized us to move

163forward previously with the traditional design and build process so that's why they're running concurrently and so that's why the board ultimately will I will bring a recommendation to the board as to which one makes the most sense um but again full transparency we did we I wanted to disclose originally for the traditional design and build process we did not have property so the costs associated with that would not include those property cost and then again by luck we found a property yesterday landed in our laps apparently and I was made aware of it last night and so I again in full transparency disclosure I want to make sure that you hear that but I know nothing about the property I don't even know if it's buildable I think Mr Fix addressed that I don't even

164know from a cost perspective if it would make sense for us to procure that property okay so but it is different than the other seven oh yes ma'am okay it is unique and different from the original Seven that we evaluated and the and the one the several that had contacted us did we we did get back to it all yes we did all the due diligence on those as well Mr McLemore spoke several times with that gentleman in particular who contacted you about adjacent properties yes ma'am sure okay great thank you very much you're welcome Mr sharpless um my question is um you mentioned that this was going to come back before us in November um however we have a work session on October 10th and a work session on and board meeting on October

16524th and I'm curious why it couldn't come before us in either of those October meetings rather than wait till November it may it depends on whether or not we have all the answers the analysis concluded so I I will not bring the board half the information again so I I think it's imperative I wanted to bring this topic publicly again so everybody knows where we where we stand but I will not commit to a timeline that I don't feel that we may be able to meet so the second meeting in October might be doable but to get them it will not be brought back to back um as far as the board getting it in October and in the second meeting in October being asked to vote I won't do that in good conscience I

166think there's a lot of moving Parts here we're going to break it out by by different topics and allow the board to review those and then make an informed decision based off our recommendation I'm not in a position to make the strongest recommendation right now because I don't have all the information so so um the reason you're saying is that you're not is not the analysis will not be able to be completed is that what you're saying I can't say that it will do you know about how long that that'll take or no I don't okay I don't because again we're still as recently as last week we were in conversation with the P3 group or the P3 submission um group to to make sure that we got all our questions answered and then that's

167going to raise other questions so this is an ongoing dialogue and I can't speak Mr Pitts unfortunately was detained this morning um and won't be here with us so I haven't gotten an update from him yet this morning so all right I just I was curious if if the timeline will permit I'd be happy to modify the timeline and bring it to the board sooner okay thank you yes sir Miss Miller I appreciate the informational session I think I have it's a little bit along the lines of what Ms Cunningham was saying for this project in future projects do we have a certain time um frame or cut off time because is it up until we vote that people can still come in and say wait a minute my grandfather's selling his Groves and I

168have like I would like to know do we have a time frame where we say this is what we're looking at and we're not going to accept other you have it's a very it's a gray area because you don't want to move on something that people thought you weren't um you know you didn't spend sufficient time in but I also feel like this is on YouTube and once it gets out there's a lot of land in that area um the club I mean probably not in that area as much as moving um towards Haines City where people are unloading land and we're known to buy it um for high rates and so I just want to make sure that it's clear to the public what we are doing so if someone has property the problem

169that we face now is the same problem we faced originally if the property is not currently listed we have no idea whether or not the property is available of the seven properties we evaluated not a single one was listed they came to us by word of mouth or through community members and so that I would be honest I think we're always going to consider those properties but by the time I bring this to the board you will have two options and you know my hope is that we will have a property option for the traditional design and build for you to make a balanced decision in the absence of us securing property for the traditional design and build I have to be honest with you I I can't lean towards that option because we don't

170have a place for it so that makes that difficult that's why the timeline right now is important for us to make sure that we we have all that information to you but as far as how you know when can somebody notify us or when will we tell them we're no longer interested in evaluating new properties I think quite honestly come November we'll be at that place where we will say um we're no longer evaluating properties for the high school placement but I think we'll always I mean the way that area is growing we're probably always evaluating property that direction but that was one thing I think I talked to Mr Fix about having someone who's spent time in Polk County and here who knows the people of Polk County whether working with the county um

171in land but building the relationships to where people will call because most of the land by the time it gets listed it's secondary like to get to get access to to land available land to build it is relationship building and I think that's part of what our staff and Facilities or just in general I don't we could assign somebody to do that but I don't think that just working in real estate on the commercial or residential side or vacant land by the time it hits that listing system everybody who's really been interested in that kind of build has already seen it thank you yes ma'am Dr Allen yeah I think with with the financial analysis I would love for you to speak through that like what what is that process going to look like for

172us as as a board to um to understand and and who's what what division which office is doing that I mean because this is right this is um something that's different uh it's been disruptive in a sense and Innovative and that you know to put it in context um you know I see it almost like Polk County has had this sort of David and Goliath story where you've got the coastal regions that are out there and you know they've been scouring and building their power and we've been that forgotten District but that's no longer the case and I will continue to say this in our four you know three short years of time that we've had you uh as an elite superintendent you know there you are right there the elite superintendent um but you

173know you think about our Recruitment and Retention efforts and the way that they've been recognized around the state I think our implementation of the Varsity Tutors and that one-on-one live in class personalized learning um that has been pretty formative around the state and us being at the Forefront of those initiatives so I think the welcome mat is is out on Scenic Terrace and we have people traveling from all around the state to see what Polk County has done and obviously it's still being studied and scrutinized and that's okay and I think we we should do that so I'm eager to see the financial component to that and all within a very short period of time so if we're seeing as what the P3 document says a 20 to 25 cost savings to our taxpayers I'm

174going to support that um and and then I don't even think the we've Quantified yet The Accelerated you know project delivery and the impact that that has had on cost States cost savings as well um so you know what I don't know if you've looked at our numbers and where we've landed um with our FTE counts and what those projections were but I'm eager to see that to unfold so I appreciate you putting time on this I just want to be cognizant of timelines as well absolutely absolutely Miss Cunningham thank you and going back to miss Miller's comment about timing of things um this project is long overdue and secondly with us now opening it up publicly to say oh we're going to be bringing you the information because the piece of land just came

175available last night at some point we got to close the door and I'm saying we need to close the door only on property for this site I understand others may come forward with an elementary school middle okay we're going to always evaluate but at some point we've got to close the door and say we have two sites two projects financially evaluate them and move on because if not you're going to get one tomorrow and the next day and next week and next month and then here we are going to be waiting another year before we even talk about this again and I think we don't have that time that area is growing we know Leaps and Bounds all of our high schools are over there way over we already know so I implore you to

176to close that door for this project if you like that piece of land wherever it is fine move it forward give the two alternatives and at least for this particular project let's evaluate just the two so that we can move forward thank you yes ma'am I don't see any further comments or questions so we'll move on last item in the superintendents report is the year in review so I'll ask I see it up there so unfortunately I do not have it on my desktop and I at the age of 53 cannot read that from here um yes ma'am I don't have it it's not showing up on mine board Docs well we may have to refresh I apologize yeah quick presentation okay nope foreign there we go so Polk data we are currently the seventh

177largest school district in Florida with over 116 000 students and we're the 24th largest school district United States it is very likely that we will surpass one of our other school districts this year several school districts continue to see declining enrollment large districts in Florida continue to see declining enrollment so it very well could be that we surpassed Duval County public schools by the end of the school year if our growth continues on a commensurate trajectory as it did last year our growth this is a reminder comes at a time when nationally Public School enrollment has continued to decline especially in the Midwest and in other areas nearly 1.3 million students have left Public Schools since they started a pandemic and Most states have seen enrollment declines for two straight years now going on to

178three straight years we were talking earlier about trades and it is interesting that since 2010 college enrollment has declined several million students so we're actually seeing more direct competition for our students in that environment so the year review contains a brief summary a synapsis of areas where we've seen Improvement during the 22-23 school year Sony area of school Finance we finished the school year with a total fund balance of 7.85 percent this is on top of us actually adding positions on top of us having successfully negotiated two prior salary raises and competitive salary packages for both the askme and the Pea and excuse me for askme pea and our nug group our non-union group employees the district received an unmodified opinion for the 2122 Financial audit which was a good thing we initiated new electronic

179payment system for our vendors to begin to shift away from paper checks that's an incredible benefit to our staff contract negotiations within a 12-month period for pea apsme and nut groups have gone successfully we hope to be in a position here to finalize our negotiations with pea which would then subsequently lead us to afscme and our nug group our non-union group members as well revised School Staffing allocation model has allowed us to make adjustments at individual School levels we've added counselors we've added to other positions and we've seen adjustments based off actual School enrollment just as a reminder to the board because several of you have asked me questions about well this school feels like they need this position there are still mechanisms for schools to appeal or to submit a request through their Regional

180so that they can request additional positions please also keep in mind that many of our schools received an additional position supplement within their budgets especially those who are shifted to the site-based staff modeling they were provided essentially a flex position that they could assign those dollars where they felt that they had the greatest need they could use it for an instructional position they could use it for an interventionist they could use it for a para so they could work within their budgets to make sure that they can adequately meet the needs of their students it's not enrollment alone that drives some of our decisions when a principal comes to us and says you know I have this special program or I have a cluster of special needs students and the classroom sizes are getting too

181large can I get additional units and the answer is yes yes so there's two processes that go through like I said that goes through the Regionals Mr Green our Deputy superintendent but for example anything involving our students with exceptionalities goes through Tammy Williams and so she and her team evaluate the needs of the students in those classrooms and they'll assign additional pair Educators or other support positions as needed in an ongoing basis and so that's important that the Staffing allocation model provides the base allocation now if they don't hit their numbers then yes schools will lose positions and those positions will ultimately be reassigned elsewhere to other schools if I recall the number correctly after eight day count we had a total of 41 positions that were being freed up first from certain schools and

182ultimately will be reassigned or are in the process of being resigned to other school sites where enrollment may have grown or may have been higher and they have existing vacancies so again no one's Rift there's no reduction in force no one's released everyone's simply reassigned to another spot and HR works with them to make sure that it's convenient and you know close to home those types of things we want to be respectful of our of our staff but again staff work for the district and we have to reassign based off actual enrollment numbers primarily and again we do take into consideration programs and others you'll recall that when previously when magnet programs were launched we provided attractor units the purpose behind the attractor unit was allow the school to essentially have a magnet program Ram

183that operates as a school within a school because these were not school-wide programs so they operate as a school within a school and then the intent was over two or three years they would actually attract that's why they're calling tractor units they would attract additional students that then therefore they offset the FTE cost to the school district we have found found by and large that has not been successful and so in the future we will be reevaluating those attractor units and those programs to determine how we would best adequately fund them but that's next step initially the goal for this year for last school year and going into this school year was to create a better standardization of positions board members you'll recall that when you approve the school allocation model that we went to

184a funding formula that was Equitable for all levels so we do not have elementary schools with 1800 or 1200 students let me rephrase that with 11 or 1200 students that only gets one school counselor now they actually get multiple so there are triggers in there and if a school is right against them number of 750 again we take into consideration other factors and then ultimately we can approve additional positions in the area of payroll and purchasing we provided the first ever yearly payroll calendar to help the district and schools better plan for gross to net and meeting deadlines for payroll processing we've also put additional measures in place through Mr Green the deputy superintendent and our regionals to ensure that we are reducing the number of errors that we're having in payroll we continue to

185see and we have identified some of the root causes for that board members you may recall veteran board members you'll recall that we had an employee come to us who had been receiving a stipend while a Middle School employee that never existed for Middle School staff and yet this employee received it year after year after year and so part of that was the coding issue and we have we have fixed and identified that we recently came across this situation again with what we call well again we we're cleaning up our terminology we call them administrative assistants but they're really Deans right um so it is so in board members you hear this all the time when we talk about um promotions of our administrators we talk about an administrative assistant being promoted to an assistant

186principal and you know every time I heard that initially I'm like we're moving somebody from the clerical secretarial pool to a school-based no it's a Dean position so it's it's sometimes it's just the phrasing that we use um but we've really been intentional there to ensure that we are addressing these issues with them because what we have found was while there was a supplement specifically stated for high school the dean supplement at other levels was not explicitly stated in our pea agreement and yet some schools were paying it some schools weren't because again the code for administrative assistance was available to all schools K-12 so it's a little convoluted there but unfortunately we found inconsistencies so we have code where we'll be coding those slightly differently but this is something that we're finalizing through negotiations

187right now but we've reached the tentative agreement I feel comfortable saying that yes if you're in that role you're going to get the stipend or supplement for that role because you're doing you're performing the duties and responsibilities in purchasing um I'm sorry we also have a new verification of employment process that ensures a turnaround within seven days we've really worked with HR and payroll to make sure that we're Expediting our hiring this year just as a reminder with two and I sent you the recent numbers the number keeps ticking downward which is a positive thing a number of vacancies we have fewer vacancies this year than we've had in the last three to five years open vacancies and yet we grew almost 7 000 students last year so without that growth we would be fully

188staffed right now and so again we continue to try and be competitive and do things that will Allure and help us retain and our retention rate continues to be in the atheist percentile and I'll provide you some data with that about that in the near future but we've been very adamant about reducing the time it takes for someone to get hired the only delays that we ran into this year unfortunately with the fingerprinting and you heard about this at the most recent board meeting were not a result of any delays in Polk County public schools because any potential candidate can go to a UPS a sheriff's office a law enforcement division or come here to the district school district to get their fingerprints done it was the processing at the state level because the system

189went down for about a month at the state level which created a significant backlog if you think that we process near a little over a thousand new employees every year now multiply that across 67 districts of which we're not the largest and the number of employees that have to be vetted and reviewed before we can allow them to have access to our campuses and our students so again those delays were not created by us but we have done a good job in reducing the amount of time that we take for processing and hiring in purchasing we created a single repository centralizing all bids and proposals we are also working in purchasing through the office of diversity equity and inclusion with Dr Adrian Anthony we're reviewing our district policies and procedures many of you have expressed

190to me concerns that many of our local construction or other contracted Services providers are typically feel like they're excluded or do not have a fair Shake in in the bid process so we have been Dr anthy's office has been reevaluating that meeting with individual departments reviewing our policies and procedures reviewing board policies as it relates to this topic and ensuring that we're putting those things in place and you'll actually receive a presentation and an update about that here in the next month or two we created functional reports to show bids due for evaluation over the course of the coming year we created a Furniture Stock Program to help expedite occupancy of our Portables we did also just this is unrelated to purchasing I'll come back to that when we get to um facilities and um

191and maintenance the topic of how we're addressing timelines to ensure that we're prepared for the start of School Federal programs and grants this 2.6 million dollar is actually low if you recall between the msap Grant and other grants are competitive grants again those that we actually have to submit an application for and we're truly competing with other school districts or other states with we've actually exceeded five million dollars six million dollars again this year in those areas and so that's important because that's new Revenue that we bring into the school district so it's highlighted because you'll receive an updated figure here as it relates since over the first three years we've brought in if I recall correctly close to 30 million million dollars in additional Revenue just through competitive grants and that's not Ester dollars

192that's not our funds none of that these are grants again that we compete with and out compete other school districts and other states to to get access to three staff earned their designation as return for as return on investment professionals this is important because we're doing more internal analysis I know Dr Allen's gonna be thrilled to hear this what is the ROI we provide to our taxpayers we did the efficiency audit that showed that we are incredibly efficient as a school district however how do we continue to demonstrate to our taxpayers that we are providing the best possible return on investment for their current tax dollars part of this is by embedding these individuals within our organization who then evaluate our programs to ensure that we're doing a good job um and you'll find here

193in the second part of that first bullet that their first project was evaluation and the impact and tangible benefits in in the ROI of the teacher engagement ambassador program which reflected an Roi of 80 during the 21-22 school year so that's a very positive affirmation for that program and it's showing that the investment that we're making in that program is paying off we're able to retain more of our staff we're able to reduce the number of vacancies and as a result that benefits our students in our community the federal programs and Grant Management Department successfully completed for the first time a district-wide comprehensive needs assessment all school and District level initiatives included in the Florida esea 2324 Consolidated Grant application respond to areas of Greater needs across our district so rather than having an organization

194that says okay we've got access I'll just make up a number we've got access to 300 million dollars what are we going to do with it what have you always wanted to do well nobody cares what you want to do in a superintendent or cabinet's office because our connection to the school at times is not where it should be we needed to make sure that we did a comprehensive needs analysis to identify where should these dollars be spent versus where do I have a pet project where I'd like to spend those dollars and so it was very important for us and for that team to conclude that needs assessment so that we knew we were allocating funds adequately to each one of those areas HVAC is a great example replacing over a thousand scholar units

195this year or over the course of this year and into next school year which had already been in plan and planning to make sure that we're addressing some of our older facilities and that will address AC issues moving forward but more importantly they also have a Fit Energy Efficiency upgrades that are included with their with those they also include better um biological filtration and other factors that will help us improve the overall health within the classrooms because even outside of an endemic you still have cold and flu season which runs rampant in every school district every year and so if we can do anything to help improve and reduce things that are in the air that could cause our students our staff to feel sick or ill we want to make sure that we take

196care of those things we provided over 1.4 million dollars in USA grant funding towards stipends for highly effective and effective teachers and administrators at our most fragile schools The Hearth program identified 4 800 students as experiencing homelessness and provided over 11 000 services to help support those students and that's still not enough that number continues to grow especially now in this economy but also with the number of people moving here to Polk County we're finding the need continues to grow as you heard today you know we had two great partner agencies that presented today and yet to date I think you have met with well over a third almost close to 30 probably of Our Community Partners and yet there's still a need out there for our students in our in our families the migrant

197education program identified almost 1100 migrant students and provided over 4 800 support services and over 6 000 hours of additional instructional support in Human Resources we implemented the incident IQ with a process to track onboarding metrics again how do we measure and evaluate our systems and protocols and policy policies how fast do we hire someone and what's the onboarding process how do we make sure that we're actually reducing those times incident IQ allows us to do that it actually gives us a much better opportunity to do a deep dive within the analytics themselves this is Miss pasco's baby if if she had her way incident IQ would take over the entire world and she would be able to monitor it effectively from her laptop or her mobile device and be able to tell me what

198I need to do on a more frequent basis but she's done a great job with this process and getting all of our systems starting to migrate as many of our systems as possible in here incident IQ is not only you know initially you heard about it because it's our help desk ticketing system so everybody has a technology issue you can submit a heat ticket through incident IQ to get some assistance but it's expanded far beyond that it's now facilities issues and what we like about the opportunity here in instant IQ is not only can I see the number of work orders that are open I can see how long they've been open I can see if a technician has attached notes to it so let's say we have an air conditioner that requires a motor

199to be replaced the technician has gone in there and said okay we ordered the motor we expect it to be delivered on here's the expected repair date so that way if anybody comes to me and says Mr Hyde what are you doing about this issue I can give them an actual answer it also helps to address concerns that were expressed by many of our site-based leaders that you know I feel like I put in work orders and then I come back and I look at the system and the work order has been closed out but the work hasn't been done so this prohibits that from happening because there are several checks and balances in place that prevent and there's always a history of the items still left behind so we have a much better program

200and procedure in place to track and monitor these things um we also track our recruitment data on how many interviews were held we are reevaluating it's not listed here but we're reevaluating our exit interview process I was asked recently by a board member do we mandate the exit interview you can't mandate the exit interview you can provide an opportunity I do have the data on how many exit interviews we've we've done over the last three to five years what I've asked for before I send this to you as board board members I'd like to see how many positions left the district and the circumstances did they retire did they leave did they transfer elsewhere so that way you have a better account of that information but we are reviewing and revising that process as well

201the recruitment team held over 21 job fairs and attended 20 other recruitment events again we are very aggressive on that Forefront for instructional positions school-based positions one of the areas we we just have to do a better job is in the trades um and we have captive audiences at both Travis and ridge you'll be pleased to see some data later when we talk about Workforce Development and some of the internships that have led to us actually hiring some of our student interns here in Polk County but we do need to do a better job in those areas if you're if you recall board members again veteran board members you previously approved an expansion to that team so that there was one group that looked at the instructional side now there's another team that looks at

202the operational side and helps us through recruiting and retaining custodians and other trades and so we wanted to create that Equitable system in there but that was something we implemented um in the 2122 school year recruitment tracked vacancies each week you get an update from me as frequently as I can to provide you with updates on vacancies and any additional information that you need we audited our organizational charts we continue to update to job descriptions and databases as needed we constantly find Opportunities to reflect on our job descriptions and create new opportunities for example the student interns that were hired those required an entirely different type of job description because hiring interns within the district and creating a pathway for payment was the difficulty and without it without an approved job description we weren't able

203to to do some of that we had to get creative in how we funneled those dollars and so it's important for us to constantly review our job descriptions and update those implemented leadership pipeline for feedback from administrative interviews recall that we completely revised the training process and the feedback process so that when somebody interviews for a position they're given more explicit feedback on areas where they can improve we implemented Florida doe extensions for Teacher temporary certifications we also implemented extensions for drop which was announced very very late we were very grateful for that we had to move very quickly to help make sure that that didn't adversely impact any of our potential retirees that wanted to stay within Polk County um we developed targeted recruitment plans for our top schools our turnaround options schools and

204our our schools that we've identified as being high needs so we we truly prioritize the placement of staff there and recruitment initiatives because those can be difficult schools to hire for and we have other schools that have had consistent reoccurring vacancies so we try and Target those as well we continue to partner with our local College universities we have a partnership with Polk State College to initiate the para Academy we also eliminated barriers to Paris making the transition to the classroom previously one of the requirements for a para educator to move and do their internships was that they had to have worked in Polk County for seven years we've eliminated that and it's now been reduced down to one year so that way we can create a faster pipeline for those parties who are truly

205interested in pursuing you know teaching as an option and an opportunity recruitment initiated destination education for degree holders to transition to teaching we also Recruitment and implemented a Signing Day offering 17 high school education Academy students a conditional offer of employment so so long as they graduate so long as they're getting they'll be offered a position or here in Polk County and then obviously they have to meet the expectation for continual employment but we're creating that pipeline right we're creating a feeder process and then board members to recall very recently it's not listed here we also revised created three unique Pathways for school counselors and so constantly we were trying to innovate and create opportunities instead of barriers and you know we're a system Miss Cunningham once said made a comment at a board meeting

206um as it relates to the bureaucracy of education and she's right and many of you are frustrated by that that how do we create we have all these policies and procedures and it's it's they're all very much written in black and white right but the reality of it is the world is 90 gray and so how do you operate and function in that environment where you have to have create some flexibility so I think what HR has done over the last two years has started to show their responsiveness to those needs and being far more receptive to change and Innovation and creating opportunities again and eliminating those barriers for future success and for our continued success as a school district if facilities and maintenance you know it's a very long list one of the things

207I would share here is the list of completed designs you've received a five-year Capital plan one of the things I'm really excited about in The Five-Year Capital plan is when you looked at the budget you actually see preventative maintenance now included in there it's a scale up which is appropriate but that includes projects like seal coding stripping striping redoing basketball courts redoing tennis courts you know those types of things that typical maintenance that has largely been ignored and there's two new Concepts that we're just beginning conversation about um built with buildings and grounds in particular for example pressure washing and mowing we don't have enough teams and yet we keep adding more schools and more acreage to mow we may find ourselves in a position where as a school district we retain the Mowing and

208the ground service for certain schools and maybe we allow smaller companies to subcontract based off the amount of space we would parcel it out to make sure it's manageable they still have to meet the expectation and I'm not saying we're going this direction I want anybody to believe that somehow we're not trying to continue with hiring employees but there comes a time when we have to get more creative and when as you visit schools pressure washing is a huge issue for us the custodians are working as hard as they can every summer and soar our grounds and maintenance teams but pressure washing is an issue and I know as a principal you know one of my biggest concerns was the cleanliness when as you came up to my campus I don't want black spots on

209the on the concrete where everybody spit out their gum I mean first of all let's address the gum issue but but a secondary to that you know what I have found in the summers in particular when I'm visiting our schools you know who's pressure washing teachers they're volunteering to come out there and do pressure washing and yet we've had a couple get injured as a result of that so is there a better mechanism for us to get at this type of preventative maintenance each year so take that burden off the schools we could supplement it somehow benefit the local economy and some of our local vendors who ultimately could benefit from that contracted work without diminishing our Workforce or having any adverse impact to them so there's some opportunities here we're going to be discussing

210and I think that's important to note also with facilities and maintenance ongoing design projects ongoing with Combee Elementary School wastewater treatment plant ongoing projects with Homeland Community Farm joint venture that's an exciting one as you recall we received an appropriation last year for this um from the legislature and so that project is moving forward that's going to create a great field trip location for us to reinforce agriculture with our students and give them an opportunity to come out there'll be everything from growing areas and and and and basically our own Marketplace they'll also be animal husbandry chickens and pigs and goats oh my there is the random cow that apparently comes onto our property from the neighbor there's a large pond with Tilapia so we're going to be talking about Horticulture with our students for

211example I don't know if you all know some of you may know this Miss Miller may know this but we actually we actually contract with a gentleman to come and actually take the tilapia out of the pond and he actually pays us a very small amount for for each pound of tilapia he's able to catch and secure so it's an interesting process but I think there's plenty of opportunities for our students to learn more in that area so I'm excited that we made progress on that last year um for the offices we implemented bluebeam a coordination software for more efficient information sharing of changes and revisions during the design development of construction uh facilities is now part of the 21st century I love that Mr Fix thank you for adding that um but talk about

212an entity that largely still operates paper and pencil or email and that can be hard to trace and manage when when information is constantly coming and going so I'm proud of them for implementing new software there our construction Department again continuing here construction Department Garner Elementary South Point Denison got is got a new gym Bartow Elementary Academy is getting an upgrade AC to building one Lakeland employee health clinic expansion these are all projects that were started and many were concluded during the last school year but you can see in addition to that building multiple schools they are a very busy group and they are very lean I will say Mr Fix and his team doing absolute amazing job with the Manpower that they have but they're highly skilled they're highly talented and quite frankly they

213are an amazing team and there's every one of them lends themselves to making sure that our school district is functional I have yet to have a no from facilities of Maintenance I can come to them with the craziest of ideas and yet they always find seem to find a way to get to yes and that's what I appreciate about our departments is that you know again we're trying to eliminate barriers and these are not just projects that I have an interest in but for example why aren't we doing the epoxy seal coding on more of our older restrooms so that we get uniformity and we can help address some of the hygiene issues and other issues that have taken place over the years far cheaper to do that than to try and remove the tile

214Abate all of those issues and then have to put new tile in so we have used epoxy sealing very successfully in multiple sites so how are we Expediting those and so they're they're asked they've shifted the culture in that department has shifted significantly away from you know just doing things because I text them or send them a picture of something to systemically what does this mean for the district and that's really the most impressive part of the change that I've seen today the planning department again quite a bit here we mapped out all 114 117 students in GIS this was at the time um we have eliminated contracts with outside providers and outside vendors we created new attendance boundaries for South Point Elementary School bellacita Middle K-8 I should say McLaughlin Academy of Excellence we

215created four possible School Board member redistricting options the board has one option we will be bringing those back to you again in October for any feedback publicly because the goal was to get the new redistricting approved by December was our initial goal if I recall correctly Mr Mr Bridges for another four years correct we secured one and a half million dollar Grant from the Florida Division of energy management for window and envelope improvements if you recall initially we'd only received about 180 000 we went back to them to ask for an extension and we were provided additional Revenue as a result of our projects that we had listed we could coordinate an additional million dollar Grant from the Florida Division of energy management for the purchase of portable generators these are the ones that are

216trailable and we'll have hookups at all of our identified sites and then essentially if we're not using them we will relocate them to other places within the state we're very centrally located obviously and we're able to provide that type of support post hurricane to our neighboring counties and and partners in education for Information Systems and Technology this is Miss pasco's domain she's done a real job of really evaluating our current systems and trying to help us move in a very positive way while also in the midst of multiple changes from the legislature that have created potentially a lot of hurdles and roadblocks for our teachers I know Dr Alan and I talk about this almost daily if not weekly we talk about the frustrations he hears and and he has concerns from his level you

217know for his unique perspective of what he does and what he teaches you know where are we at with adopting appropriate software and making sure that our teachers have the tools that they need to be the most effective in their classrooms and that's not an easy answer sometimes because some of these companies are are a little bit more Cooperative than others and yet miss Pasco when she finds an entity here's what I like about the approach from the I.T department since I've been highlighting the change in the culture in other departments we've gone from just simply saying well if they won't work with us and they don't sign the DPA then we're done her team actually puts the effort in to find Alternatives and that's the important difference there we're not just a fast no

218we want to make sure that we're getting an opportunity to be a slow yes but we're providing viable options for our teachers that are safe and meet the expectations as outlined in the legislature and that's important and you know I know Mr Bridges has a considerable role here because every DPA that has to be reviewed has to go through his office and the pure process and then It ultimately ends up with Miss Pasco and the rest of us but it is it is a task to really when you think about it if I recall their number correctly 650 programs or software utilities had to be reevaluated and and I don't believe that that's all of them yet I think we're still identifying individual classroom usage issues that we want to be able to provide support

219for correct not even the stuff that we've thought about doing absolutely so Logistics department they completed their first district refresh in over seven years completed and implemented a professional development plan for building Network managers during early release time so that they can best manage that new deployment but also take on the role of assisting teachers and schools with their ongoing daily issues it's not just connectivity anymore there are some instructional issues schoology all the other things that we utilize so we really need them to be in a place where they can help and assist under Systems Operations we're responsible for piloting designing and implementing incident IQ you heard me talk about that earlier we did Implement a new district-wide asset management system for technology Asset Management we're currently tracking 316 almost 317 000 devices in

220our system district-wide that's a lot um and so asset management for me as a school district superintendent is incredibly important so we we are still in discussions about what the cutoff will be for the value of an item to be included in Asset Management typically it's anything 250 or 500 and above so that way we can track it so that every every single device or every single item is assigned for example to Mr Hyde at the end of every year I resubmit it it scans it takes it off my inventory but that's one way we can mitigate loss right and theft and we have to be very careful with those things and I know as board members when we first were going one to one there were a lot of questions about well how are

221we going to manage you know device loss and theft and quite frankly to date it has not been an issue because we had a good management system in place and we have good procedures in place to follow up with students if they fail to return a device so Information Systems we implemented the focus Triple S model for student data collection and threat Management Mental wellness and bullying mtss Section 504 ESC and student services we also implemented a district-wide scheduling plan to standardize ESC scheduling methods across all schools and provide better data on reporting the eers department implemented a new technology purchasing approval process to ensure cyber security requirements were being met previously we were a little siled in certain areas we needed to make sure that we had cohesiveness across departments so everybody had their

222eyes on things it's not necessarily just because Miss Pasco wants to control the world it really is about making sure she's protecting us from ourselves I tease Miss Pasco if she had her way she would take over the world tomorrow business process support I think she's after my job actually this business process support we began the Erp upgrade process to transition to sap for Hannah Miss Pasco would you please join us at the microphone and make sure that all the acronyms are being explained I know our board members know what sap is but I want to make sure that the community hears it from you as well are you waiting for all questions yes ma'am yes sir for the record so um basically sap has put an end-of-life date on the current system that we're

223at they will no longer maintain our system after the year 2027. now this sounds like we have a lot of time but we don't the resources for sap are very scarce in order to utilize an sap system every entity also uses Consultants because of the complexity of the system so we need to upgrade by 2025 which means we are currently reevaluating all of our processes reevaluating our system and in the world of sap for the current version that we're on they let anybody have any type of database SQL Oracle didn't matter in the new version of sap they all have to be on the Hana database so we're currently transitioning from our database to a Unicode system which is just what it means one code Unicode that then lets us get to Hana so all

224of this work is being done behind the scenes this is going to be a significant lift for our staff both on the business side and the IT side it also gives us many of the other streamlined processes that people have asked for in HR and finance so they're a big partner with us and lets us create better processes it's also easier to utilize and more transparent as we shift from one staff member to another thank you under software development data changes were made to align Focus schoology and the roster server allowing All Digital curriculum to be fully rostered in classlink and support a full integration with schoology which is incredibly important that is the tool the window in which our teachers reach our students right and parents can go in there essentially under a single

225sign-on approach and get all the information about their child upcoming assignments how they're doing academically attendance discipline all the functionality is there so we've been migrating to schoology now for a little over two years or almost two years or and so it's important for us to make sure that all of these systems communicate effectively we've created a strategic Plan app we also designed and implemented the library book opt-out process for our parents all that came out of it last school year information or instructional and business technology Services I'm not going to cover all of these but if you look at the second bullet you see that we process 738 pure requests between April of 2023 and August of 2023 to meet compliance with Florida student data privacy requirements that is a heavy lift on everyone

226that's involved and the pure process is basically how we evaluate curriculum software and other utilities before they're used in classrooms but because of changes to the law we had to re-evaluate all of these things so you can see just alone in that short period of Time how many items were reviewed by the pure team in the pure process and and again that's Miss Pasco Mr Green Mr McNaughton Mr Bridges and others who have to take the time to do all of that so we provided all teacher technology professional learning days with an average attendance of 5 382 participants we supported district-wide transition from Google Suite to Microsoft 365 including a development facilitation of over 60 live sessions to support all staff created a tech liaison program of 72 classroom teachers to provide technology information to

227their schools and communicate needs of to ist thank you Miss Pasco under academics we implemented Datacom Datacom again is a process where schools are invited there's a number of reasons why a school may be invited but I sit at the table all of the decision makers are in the room so that if I need to direct resources to a school I can do so there in a timely manner and again all the decision makers are there it's important that they be there so as we start to see patterns emerging or issues emerging at the school level we're able to adequately address them we increase the instructional coaching support for our schools you saw that through the reorg grades five through eight science and U.S history teacher cadres were developed if you recall we identified High

228performing teachers in those areas and we tapped into them to ask them to coach and mentor and support others um over 80 percent of our staff that work directly with students our youth mental health first aid certified we hit the threshold established by the state last year we were far lower than that at the beginning of the school year I believe if I recall correctly we're only in the teens or the 20th percentile so the team worked very aggressively throughout the year to get air to hit that percentage of 80 percent which was required by the state we implemented the learning arcs in course planning instructional reviews were started at schools instructional reviews for those of you who may not be familiar with them or having attended one I would encourage you to attend one

229if you have not the instructional team meets in some instances the State of Florida Department of Education has staff present in other cases we're doing them independent because these are schools we've identified that may not necessarily be on the D.A list differentiate accountability list and we walk classrooms we observe instruction we use their rubric to determine whether or not we need to provide additional supports for staff it is not about individual teachers it's about what's happening cohesively are comprehensively across the school but by default we can work and assign coaches and support to individual teachers if needed we revise the school-based coaching meetings many of you have heard we significantly revised principals meetings assistant principals meeting they're part informational but far more of the time is now spent on instructional topics and needs and actually

230working with them through their own data and other data to make sure that they feel that they can help address these instructional needs on their own campuses we have provided additional Medicaid billing training to our staff again we moved everyone from idea budget back over to the general budget so that we could seek additional reimbursements so we've retrained staff to make sure that we are maximizing that and if you recall at the most recent meeting I provided you with some data about how we're already seeing an increase in the return on investment there because we've seen an increase in our billing submissions um we edited the master scheduling guidelines document to clarify further for school leadership um we've we've revised their lead plan partnership with Grand Canyon University on instructional clothing patchway initiatives was launched

231we created a gifted curriculum for K-5 gifted pull out classrooms msap Grant was implemented starting last school year and 16 Educators representing Polk were recommended for the fast assessment team so they were the ones that were in attendance from our school district that provided feedback to the state about cut scores and level scores here's our comparison to State performance you'll see if you recall last year's state of the district or year in review you'll see consistency in some of these tables from the 21-22 school year you see that how we compare to the state we are ranked lower than the state in several areas but we will continue to try and work harder to close that Gap that is Our intention is to make sure that we're closing the Gap we don't have the Baseline

232data yet for grades that will not be available until October at the earliest school grades will likely be available come January the final grades but we'll wait to see and just to remind you and remind the community no official grades are being issued to schools this year why two reasons number one it's the first year of the assessment and number two there are no learning gains included in this year's scores and you'll see that here in the next couple in a table I'll show you here in a moment our year-to-year comparison Ela 21-22 to 23 3 we saw we went down by we excuse me we went down by three three points there in ela in mathematics we went down by one in algebra one we increased by two geometry we we went down by

233one science in grade five we declined by five science in grade eight we declined by three Civics we remained neutral U.S history we can proved by one and biology we improved in three I'm going to touch on attendance data here in a moment as well because it's important to keep reminding people that chronic absenteeism is our biggest issue right now facing us not teacher quality it's not the length of the school day it's not the instructional materials it's really chronic absenteeism and students not being in attendance at school here's our algebra Trends and I'm going to keep pointing out some of these because and I've been using these slides in many of our community forums where I'm presenting it's important to note that overall algebra performance has gone up in middle school and why we

234see ninth grade and 10th grade algebra scores lower is because we're testing more students successfully in grades seven to eight in the overall algebra calculation and yet the only data that ever gets published is 9th and 10th grade algebra performance well guess what wake up everybody we start teaching algebra in seventh grade so let's give our teachers and our students the credit they deserve by including them in the overall calculation and so what you see here is we've seen a considerable improvement over the last three years in our middle school algebra attainment which means we've preparing far more students these are high school level courses and credit that they're taking at the middle school level if they're taking algebra for High School Credit in seventh grade they're taking geometry for High School Credit in eighth

235grade and we're seeing great data as a result of it we are looking at ninth and 10th grade I'm not by no means am I making an excuse for ninth and 10th grade algebra performance and I will tell you Mr McNaughton and the math team know exactly what my expectations are in that in that regard and we are exploring some new opportunities there are some new tools um very excited about that may actually help our students we're talking about double blocking we're talking about all kinds of different options for these students because we've got to get their math skills up the other part to that too is I need to be a little bit careful and I'll provide this in you board members you'll see this if you recall we developed a matrix of all

236of the um of all of the academic components and you'll receive that as soon as Sandy and her team are finalized it this week um with all the data that we currently have we this was the year to establish a Baseline so even though you see students who may not have passed the state assessment for algebra many of those students for example in English language arts over 80 percent of our students end up graduating not because they passed the state's Ela assessment of the group of students who have not passed the ELA assessment by their senior year over 80 percent if I recall the number correctly it's 86 percent of them passed through concordance score in SAT and ACT same is true for Math and so our students are meeting graduation requirements by virtue of

237the SAT ACT score but they're not necessarily getting it on the Statewide assessment which calls there's a lot of questions that have to be asked there is it a testing issue Ela in particular I will tell you for reading many students are frustrated because they were retained or they have been in a reading program since third grade now I'm in 10th and 12th 11th and 12th grade and I'm frustrated because I can never get out of this reading class so they stop applying themselves and yet when the ACT SAT comes around for graduation they end up being able to be promoted as a result so we are actually shifting our focus in high school to being more s-a-t-a-c-t prep and now with the new assessment the CLT it'll be interesting to see what that new

238test will do for our students and their outcomes as well in mathematics in general you can see here there's a lot of things on these slides I apologize but there's a lot of information here so when you look at the actual bar graph itself you'll see that math in Polk County we saw an increase from 2021 to 2022 in learning gains we don't have learning gains again this year but it was a considerable improvement from 33 to 44 in that one year span of time again we'll get learning gains this school year but not for last school year because again that was the first year of the assessment that was given and they have to establish the Baseline for that data also for math in particular you see an improvement in overall improving Trend in

239mathematics which is a positive thing the dots and others show Statewide data and how we perform against the state in Reading same thing District Five Year Trend we do see a downward Trend in the overall proficiency score we saw 2021 2022 arguably a little bit of stagnation your call last in 21 and 22 we had great Improvement in third grade reading scores those third graders continued on that performance trajectory in fourth grade this year with this last most recent school year however overall Ela saw a decline but so did the state so if you look at the yellow line at the top overall State proficiency and reading also declined at a commensurate level as Polk County however we need to close that Gap we need to match or exceed the state we need to set

240we need to help set the average not bring the average down it's the best way I can say it but again in learning gains for the two years back to back from 21 20 or 2020 2021 and 21-22 we saw great improvement in our learning gains which is an indicator and again I'm proud of the state so many years ago learning gains only took into consideration if a student made a Year's worth of growth well if you're a level one reader and every year you only make a Year's worth of growth guess what you say a level one reader so the state actually modified learning gains and so for in order for us to get credit for learning gains you have to make more than a Year's worth of growth so you're closing the Gap

241so I I am impressed and I am proud of the fact that for 2021 or 2020 2021 and 2021 2022 we saw Improvement in the overall learning gains as well so and I would have expected that to continue this year had we gotten learning games but we'll see what data they come out with at the end of the school year Middle School and High School acceleration data again this goes back to the master scheduling reviews we saw great Improvement in Middle School acceleration across the board in fact many of our schools doubled the number of points the data earned previously and that's important and at high school we need to continue to focus on those areas but this is a direct result of the master scheduling reviews that are done each summer to make sure

242that we're creating the opportunities we we ran a report recently at the start of the school year and that report basically tells us our students properly placed in certain classes and what we found was some were not close to 200 students across the district were not placed into more in the appropriate math or Ela class and so that information is shared back with the Regionals they then take it back to their school principals and then they work with them to make sure that those Corrections are being made now please understand in in a greater sense these are not students that were placed in too high a level classes these were students who are actually scoring threes fours and fives but were placed into lower level classes and so now we've moved those students back to

243where they should be in more rigorous coursework to continue on with their overall performance and so I'm grateful that we have a system in place thanks to Miss Everett and others that were able to pull that report and identify these students who should be in certain classes but they're not and so that's a great Testament to our ability to Monitor and make sure we're putting kids on the right trajectory to have access to these courses and be successful Career Technical and adult education we saw a huge Improvement in a number of Industry certifications that our students earned last year in fact you see that number from 2122 is that 3161 students and in 2022 2023 that number grew to almost 4 100 students so that is a huge jump in a number of Industry certifications

244guess what once again a direct result of master schedule reviews are we creating opportunities and acceleration points because the master schedule review takes into consideration the acceleration points at high school and it's important for us to make sure we're maximizing our points there when you look at our high schools and the fact that the vast majority of our high schools are grated to see they're not C high schools but because of their graduation rate and because of the the lack of focus at times on acceleration points they're losing out on points that would take them to a b and so we're focusing very heavily there on the academics on acceleration and on graduation because those are the points we need to be focused on and I will stand behind my statements before you know we

245want to have a high graduation rate but that diploma has to mean something we are not in the business of socially promoting kids and so our graduation rate will be our graduation rate it has been adjusted downward two years in a row because the state changed the graduation requirements recall that during the covid we had one of the highest graduation rates we've ever attained because graduation requirements were waived and every student arguably became eligible for graduation regardless of them passing the Statewide assessment that's no longer true and there have been other Corrections that I've outlined for the board here publicly that have explained why our graduation rate has adjusted back to where it was pre-covered but our expectation is and should be that we will get back into 90th percentile for our students graduating but

246that diploma will mean something we will not socially promote students we will do the best we can for our students and put them in the best most competitive position possible but I am impressed and grateful that we were able to increase the overall number of Industry certifications across the district additional areas we held approximately 90 Educators from we hosted excuse me approximately we didn't hold them we hosted them 90 Educators for Hawaii on tours in our middle schools and our pre-academies and high school academies to learn about creating stronger K-12 career pathways they then reciprocated Mr Cochran was able to visit Hawaii and see some of their programs we hosted five Regional School showcases during the school choice and open enrollment process approximately 3 200 parents attended to learn about their magnet CT and career

247choice programs this process is is going to be reevaluated and redesigned as well it's a great opportunity but it's it's it's Reliant upon somebody being able to make it that evening to that event and so much like what I do when I do my community forums I'd like to see US expand it and do them within the various communities throughout the year so parents can make informed decisions this will also migrate to a video series where parents are able to get all the information they can about the various academies online and so they can make the best decision with their child about which types of programs that they want their children to have access to we launched the first ever Elementary agriculture program at Willow Oak very grateful to the state of Florida Jessica Anderson

248who works in our department really took the lead on this and we were very grateful that the State of Florida provided us an opportunity to implement this program and we are the first and willow oak was very receptive they already had their Greenhouse up and running and so we're excited we'll to see what comes out of that school as you know most of our elementary schools have an informal AG program if you when you visit your schools it's not uncommon to find chickens and goats and other things on our campuses Aqua Hydroponics and other things and so but now we have a more formalized program we completed our first year of CFA Winter Haven which has been incredibly positive and popular and it continues to grow to the point where we may need to do

249something for facilities there very very soon they're at a cafeteria space and there may be some things we need to do to help offset or or do some bring some additional Portables or some other facilities out there we can collaborate with our community Liaisons to create the new ITV Academy of Southwest Elementary School who launched the first Junior Achievement 3de program in the district at Tenoroc high school I'll be bringing a recommendation to the board to expand that one to two different sites one hopefully will be fully sponsored like Tenoroc was and then we would take the cost of the second one but I'll be bringing that to you in the near future that program has been incredibly successful and for those of you who have had a chance to meet or listen to those

250students as they talk about the impact that the program has had on their ability to interact with their peers to speak publicly their gpas all improved their attendance is all improved their overall School engagement has improved and those were all the things that 3de had promised would happen and we saw happen in Pinellas and other counties that we visited the program before adopting it here and we've been very very pleased with what we're seeing we play seven teachers in business externships 25 students in internships and 15 students in registered pre-apprenticeships three of the three of the pre-apprenticeship students were employed by our pcps facilities Department students and teachers attended a national Career Technical student organization competitions the construction Academy at Bartow High School placed first in project management at International Builders Show in Las Vegas

251we had a chance to talk to them Mr sharpless and I visited we were at an event this summer where they bring our students out there and our students are actually Hands-On on multiple projects very similar to what you saw are the Lakeland officers speak about today it's a little bit more comprehensive of our program but with to listen to our students talk about this that they were competing against schools that had won every year you know that that they were the they were absolutely the goat last year and they they showed up and they won and they were very impressed and they were excited about the future as well and there was a great group of kids we received almost 6.4 million dollars in ctae Grant funds 2.6 million dollars of the total Grant

252funds were from competitive grants cfaa Kathleen was recognized as a model academy by the national Career Academy Association Summerlin Academy was recognized as a certified Academy with the national Career Academy Coalition we issued 224 geds through our adult ed programs last year an increase of 100 from the prior year we created new programs and aligned Partnerships with air traffic control LPN medical assistant Network I.T network security High School Civics and hospitality under Athletics we did add additional Sports we added girls beach volleyball girls flag football boys volleyball boys bowling and girls bowling we hosted three FHSAA State finalists final programs girls and boys volleyball girls and boys basketball girls and boys weightlifting and if Mr Talbot has his way he'll have every state championship hosted here in Polk County and he's working on that as

253we speak under academics which to me I'm going to be honest with you I love that we have a high school that won a state championship too actually high schools that won state championships for football I love their kids are competitive I love you know that aspect of it but at the end of the day I'm here for the academics and so district-wide our student athletes unweighted GPA is a 3.229 and so I think there's a lot of credit that goes into there that these coaches are able to motivate students who otherwise may not be motivated and many of you realize that some of our students come to school because of sports and because of other factors the relationships they have and so it's important for us to acknowledge that academic team state champions Auburndale

254High School girls soccer had an overall GPA of 3.767 or basically a 3.8 Bartow High School girls golf 3.9 Bartow High School girls tennis 3.9 and Lake Gibson High School girls track 3.681 or basically 3.7 so our student athletes are just that their students first and they get great academic or athletic opportunities as a result of that student discipline and attendance the total number of students increased by almost four three and a half percent last school year but the total numbers of students expelled decreased by 15 percent several racial groups also saw a decrease in their overall expulsions for example African-Americans saw a decrease of 27 percent Hispanic population saw a decrease of 44 percent we saw a decrease in the total number of alternative education placements by over 26 percent and we also saw

255demographically a decrease in the number of students assigned to Alternative placement for African-American students it decreased by 50 percent for Hispanic students decreased by 50 percent and our white student population decreased by 65 percent the number of students assigned to in-school suspension increased 42 percent which is a positive thing because those are not at home suspensions those are in school suspensions where students can still receive the services that they need and still receive academic support throughout the day and so that suggests that ISS is being utilized at a much higher level student attendance we had last year's seven Outreach facilitators you've recently increased that number each facilitator had seen had overseen 18 to 21 schools at all levels and as of January 9 2023 they had spoken to almost 13 000 or almost 14 000

256so 13 573 parents or Guardians they'd communicated with schools or other resource officers or other resources excuse me 607 times you see the number of phone calls parents spoken to some of you asked me about the door hangers are these legit and so yes if they go to a house they knock on a door they hang the door hangers saying hey please give me a call it's important and again this is not just about being punitive towards students and disciplining them or or you know being discourteous to their families there's a number of reasons why a student may not be in attendance our goal is to make a contact build a relationship and find a way to get that student back in school so they can be successful 678 home visits were conducted during those

257home visits they made contact with 318 families they left door tags for 317 and 43 of the families had moved we have found that informally this is a great way for us to verify addresses and contact information I was recently at the district advisory committee meeting last week where attendance was one of the challenges I gave them to help us come up with solutions to to address chronic absenteeism and the the team that was there was sharing that what we have found is a lot of the addresses now are inaccurate for these students but this the one thing that remains constant is their cell phone number so we keep calling them we try and reach out we're able to send or verify their new address get in the information corrected in our system which ultimately

258leads to better communication and relationships with our families you can see here what we see as far as attendance by race and ethnicity not a lot of that disparity here amongst our student groups again by race one of the questions is did attendance improve for students that missed more than 50 percent of the school year and 2122 this was really the justification that we brought to you in order to hire those truancy officers and what we see here is yes we did see an improvement for those targeted students remember these were students that missed 50 or more of the school year there's about 550 students last school year that were in that cohort um that are being identified and being targeted and addressed now the total number of students at the time during the 22-23

259school year was 417 the total remaining in our school district was 323 the total number of students that saw an improvement in their overall attendance was 220. we started out where we saw 68 percent of the students actually saw some improvement schools also improved 57 schools saw an improvement in their overall student attendance it means they're being proactive and working with us to make sure that we're addressing these issues as we identify chronic absenteeism and attendance or habitual truancy issues we work directly with those schools 417 students 50 percent or less from from 21 22 360 students remained enrolled this was the data I basically just provided you 112 students were withdrawn 248 remained in schools 198 improved their overall attendance 80 percent of the 248 students improved community outreach contacts we made phone calls

260sent text messages emails to parents and Guardians over almost almost 29 000 of those messages unique messages were sent home visits 20 2700 visits were made School Communications and referrals 2 900 total Communications 34 550 individual Communications were made or contacts were made with parents and or Guardians here's the impact from due to Chronic absenteeism again based off these numbers we would see a 10 percentage Point not an improvement in each one of these categories if we were able to get students to attend school regularly School Safety and Security we implemented random searches last school year at all six through 12 campuses it has had a great deal of success and while has not yielded a large number of weapons that's that's a great thing it has helped us reduce the overall number of Jewel

261or vaping devices on our campuses we did as you recall Mr Bridges shared with the board previously that we were part of the jewel lawsuit settlement which resulted in nearly two million dollars being assigned to Polk County public schools once we get additional information about that disbursement the intent behind those dollars is to put those dollars into Vape detection devices in all of our middle school and high school bathrooms and other areas so that we can adequately address these issues Mr ridges I misspeak okay of additional revenue from it that has come to pass and it will be brought to the school board next meeting even better yes indeed we also implemented new security features and procedures regarding data privacy and Internet safety we did initiate the transition this last school year or began the

262conversations and the transition for this school Year to one unified law enforcement agency presence on our campuses at the end of this year we will then in the 24-25 school year we will bring on the last remaining municipalities into the overall program community outreach I held over 10 Community forums last school year to make sure that we continue to stay connected with our families beginning in January I'll begin that process again I'm not going to wait till the last couple months of school because it creates a very different very difficult calendar schedule so we want to make sure that we hit as many communities as possible we're going to try and get to 15 this year we do I continue to do with my team presentations at various Community meetings like an economic development council

263local Chamber of Commerce various rotaries and we present at the state of the county also very pleased to have had a great article written about us in the lakelander they could have found some skinnier pictures of me and they could have airbrushed it but other than that I loved the coverage of our academies I loved the coverage of the district and the Workforce Development aspects and all of that the district got great coverage there so I was very pleased to be able to do that we're also working with Vivo Polk so we've partnered with them this year we're actually sending them articles each quarter so that our community can stay connected to us and their magazine for the first time is actually going to be half in English half in Spanish and so we're able

264to reach a different demographic that we previously were not necessarily reaching other than through our translated Communications we brought in Community Partners to share at each school board meeting to date I believe we brought in close to 30 because again we want to not only thank them but recognize the Partnerships they have but a lot of our parents don't know that some of these opportunities exist for their children so we want to make sure that we were highlighting them after a few years of smaller scale virtual celebrations we relaunched the Inspire Awards as an in-person banquet and awarded ceremony honoring nominees for teachers school-related employees of the year please recall that we also did a makeup last school year so we brought in those that missed the opportunity due to covid and we held a

265separate event for them at Lake Villa if I recall correctly and and that was a fantastic opportunity for us to recognize them as well and we partnered with the Sheriff's Office to produce this is an ongoing process still to produce additional public service announcements for students and families about social media social media threats and more importantly pedestrian safety as we've seen this year the need is is very large so that concludes the year in review and I will open it up for questions and or comments Miss Miller thank you for that you're welcome I um it's a busy year it is a busy year and I've been lucky enough to be at some of the other meetings to hear a lot of this information but that was a lot and I have written down a

266few things I might have other questions later um just when you talked about staff allocations and I've talked to Miss Williams and the others in the ESC Department I just want to make sure that staff knows as well as staff knows the process including the principals knowing the process to request help by the time I get a call from a classroom it's a it's verging on crisis and I want to believe that maybe the principles I always tell you know direct people back to their principal and that they have direct instructions on who to contact and how to ask for help because it's happened twice now with IND classrooms and so I want principals to know what you had mentioned that allocations are available they have to reach out they have to follow the process

267that we've given them now also regard with regards to Behavior by the time I get a phone call there's a crisis in a classroom and one time I called you and they even asked about you know what they were doing and I don't and I don't want to speak and poorly of principles but I'm not sure that all of them readily assess understand that to get to a situation before there's a crisis is ideal and the district does have Pathways for support whether it's allocations to a classroom or bringing in behavior supports before law enforcement is involved like I want to avoid crisis and so I think we've done a good job with that I just don't I just want to make sure it's communicated well down to the principals and we've talked about it

268and you've talked about how it's been communicated so when I get crisis calls my first response is have you taught you know is the principal involved get your principal involved they have access to avoid crisis um School payments you talked about I laughed I didn't mean to laugh out loud but I do understand why our district as far as finance and some of our processes are still paper pencil I bet I'm going to find one of those um the papers that you'd write two or three copies in remember they used to do those I think we still use those um but I've had a couple of high schools ask me and I've already texted Jason and he said there is a goal for this to to make payments for things at school electronic we have

269schools that you have to buy T-shirts with cash or check and it's just a lot of people don't carry either one of those so I think he said there's a goal to make more electronic payments available and that will be easy for our front staff and also will be easy for parents who may not have the cash on them when they arrive so I was I was glad to hear we've made improvements in that exit interviews I understand we can't mandate them but I think HR needs a mandate to offer them I've been told people have left and I've said did you fill out an exit interview and they said it wasn't offered so you can but we do have a system where they are offered exit interviews and they're informed of their opportunity because

270they actually receive a letter from HR okay I do have a couple of bright spots I wanted to share that we're in your report because your report has a lot of information and you can't include all the great things but not only are we expanding prop opportunities and academies we've expanded what you know as project search at Lakeland Regional it's not called project search but it's an employment opportunity at both Heart of Florida and Lake Wales for students to be employed at the hospitals and to have on-the-job training and transition through both hospitals and that's something that I tried to work on years ago and we couldn't you know the collaboration that's now happening with the Lake Wales Community is is that wasn't in your report but I want to say that's very much improved

271and that's only going to help students and I think that's important to mention um when we talk about when you talked about pay and going through that was very this stuff was at the beginning because I gave up writing notes but um because it was such it's going to be on the YouTube and we can go back and watch it when you talked about going through different positions in different departments and we've had private conversations um examples like with the SLP and finding that the way things were structured were probably not incentivized like they could have been that's something that we're trying to do everywhere which is going to be a lift I'm sure but I'm hoping we make progress in that um but overall I I've set during this presentation and I can tell

272you that the community is very supportive um I like how you educate some of our community members I won't mention a county person who did not realize the number of ela students I mean esol students that we had or the number of students at the ESC services that we had so every time we can tell this story whether it's you or the we're going to send Mr Green out because we don't get to see him enough or at one of the Regionals anytime we can tell this story to the public I think it helps it helps us in general helps us improve a lot of things but I know I'll have more questions and I'll bring you my list as usual thank you Miss Cunningham thank you Mr superintendent um okay can you bring the

273thing back to I have I can't do anything because we can't see it so like page three I don't remember where it was I can't see it on here it's the one where we got carried away six sites were pilot something you took it off too quickly before I could make my notes so keep go stop let's see no no it's all the way it's in facility all the way at the beginning like the first like the third thing down on the list hold on on his list if you click on your review and give me control I'll find it is there no are the pages numbered slide 46 there you go apparently all I can go down just go down not there up up up up you're starting at the beginning and going down

274or going we're he's controlling it I'm not okay start at the top it's like the third third page down from the beginning yes sir just a year in review yes sir sorry go up go up you're in view okay now from page 40 I didn't know that because I'd have wrote it down now go down once I can see them though go up to 40 and go scroll down hit each page so I can read it and then I can tell you where okay stop keep going sorry Finance nope next one next one 45 it did where was it was sorry let's go to payroll and purchasing yes yes successfully piloted six schools on the site-based Staffing model what six schools oh I do not recall I will get you that answer okay hold on

275I'm writing what it is hold on Staffing model okay yeah I'd like to know where that was piloted it was a variety of schools we made sure it was elementary middle and high okay so that we could get feedback and then begin transitioning all schools to more site-based management well you know where my question will be were any of them yours correct yes on the east side of course so that's where that's leading um because I think that's important once again that's why I'm on this board 20 years ago there was nothing over there and little by little we're making progress so just trying to keep us in the Forefront um my next question um doesn't pertain to anything here but there was absolutely not an indication of any science data whatsoever we did mathematics

276we did Ela and zero science but I know that the science data from the beginning whatever the numbers were going down I want to see a comprehensive review of the science data as well yes ma'am if that can be included that'll be included in the in the Baseline data but I can do I can provide you the analysis on this yes yes um and then the new software the blue beam um I've never heard of that software is that something new in the industry does any I mean it just was it's something new to us new to us like Miss Miller just indicated we don't use NCR forms anymore which are the triplicate forms if you press down Harding right the white right yellow and pink Pages anymore right um and there's nobody here from

277facilities but it's not a new software to the industry it's new to us new to us yes ma'am okay I'd like to have somebody contact me about that I'd like to learn more about the software thank you and then um you know you said School Board member redistricting options um what for is that announced yet or not or okay what are who are they and where are they and so I might have missed that I said the board members um two or three emails now over the last uh four months that had the gis App application and if you clicked in it and accessed it there were multiple options for you to review I did get feedback after that initial wave of redistricting the concern was that we did it based off student population not

278based off of population of the cities and so we did go back we Revisited it so the board received that I'll resend it to you and make sure that you still have your active access but it did basically redistrict your District in particular sees a significant reduction and because right now if I recall correctly off top of my head each district will have approximately 103 to 104 000 residents within it and so your District was the most adversely impacted because of the growth and so basically the the districts on the West Side were least impacted districts on the east side were the most impacted you saw narrowing of your in that recommend that proposal you saw narrowing of your region and so you'll be able to click on that and see which schools you can

279actually there's a shaded portion as well as your color highlighted portion that would show you any schools that come out of your District well I miss that and I apologize no ma'am it's okay I totally missed that no ma'am it may have been well might have been correct so maybe we can have a call yes ma'am I'll catch up with you I'd appreciate it um and then lastly could you provide a copy or an email with this PowerPoint in it it's really important as you'll actually receive a more descriptive narrative from me like you did last time okay I would appreciate that yes ma'am okay but I'll be happy to send this to you as well all right sir thank you very much that concludes my questions Mr sharpless yeah um I gotta say I

280didn't without a review being able to review this I it's hard for me to come up with questions that I it just is a lot being thrown at you I like to be able to review and and look through it all um but one that just did pop up um you mentioned you know uh visiting during one of these instructional reviews um is there a way for us board members to find out when those things are happening so that way you know we could actually attend because I I haven't I don't know I did I did sit through uh one with Spook Hill um but I don't know of any other so that would just help me if we got if I could find out when I you know so I could have this Winchester

281can work with Miss um with Yvette Miss Vega and make sure that you know which ones are available within your District okay and this would not be an appropriate time for questions about read the redistration we're gonna have that correct another time and ask a question well I was I was just curious with the redistricting of board member districts have have we looked at because I mean it's getting kind of we've got people that have already filed to run for these offices um and so I really think we're getting there towards the end of we should be making a whole lot of changes um so have have any of the individuals have we looked up you know are we are we redistricting anyone out of any candidates out of the districts that's what I'm aware

282of okay just want to make sure that we're not I remember what it was like when I was running for office and I would hate to have gotten to this point and be like oh well guess what I just got just redistricted out of my office so no okay thank you review has revealed that no but I would do want to touch on your your comment about not being able to review this this was not for your review before this meeting okay you have time now because you I provide this to the board and then this gives you opportunity to ask additional questions because you'll be asked to do my evaluation here shortly so this helps inform and provides you with a summary of all the things we worked on throughout the year so that

283you have the best background knowledge you can to inform your evaluation that plus your interactions with me and other things so and my evaluation consists of two components there's a qualitative and a quantitative the qualitative is the business of managing the district to quantitative are the outcomes right and so this year the board agreed to establish new Baseline data because there was a new assessment and we expanded what we had done previously to make sure that we that we actually included demographic subgroups we had not done that before in in our overall analysis of District performance so again this you have plenty of time to ask additional questions and and to seek further clarification it was not intended for you to come in prepared today for questions the year in review is really my way

284of summarizing the work that we've done as a team to try and highlight as many of those key areas as possible you saw I heavily emphasized facilities and I.T and academics there's far more to the academic slides too than that are there and not just the science data there's a lot of the work that's being done on our campuses one-on-one with staff and others in the coaching and but I think it was a good synopsis of all the things that were done but you know again any questions that board members may have I'll be happy to address Ms Miller we'll have some I know she always comes to me each week with a list and as all of you do I mean so I'm always receptive and I always respond back as quickly as I

285can so I will definitely do the follow-up but please it just allowed me to explain that normally if this were any other presentation and you were going to be asked to vote or anything else in the future you would get it ahead of time but it was it was not intention tended to be that way so understood thank you Dr Allen yeah I was just going to say uh thanks for the review here um as as a faculty member we have a chance every summer to do a f a far which is a faculty activity report it focuses in on teaching scholarship and service to the college um so it's it's typically a daunting process but it gives you an opportunity to reflect back on the the past year so I just want to commend

286you on pulling all this together I think about your cabinet and your staff members and collecting all this data I look forward to definitely sifting through it and again I just want to say appreciate the work and the opportunity to reflect 50 minutes cannot demonstrate the excellent work that's been done around our district so thank you thank you Mr Nolte I agree with what Dr Allen just said reminds me of President Reagan's plan of leadership surround yourself with great people obviously you have and I thought it was highly enlightening and was a excellent presentation and keep up the good work thank you sir all right last item before the board Mr Warren under budget the Staffing will discuss briefly the division of schools leadership changes good afternoon if you wanted to take a look with

287me there please I wanted to discuss with you the division of schools There's a summary of leadership changes that we're presenting to you today there have been recent leadership changes and resignations that necessitate adjustments be made to ensure that the needs of schools and school leaders are met as such to address these critical vacancies the following changes are necessary for the school board to review first is we will take the senior director of school transformation that is a position that has currently been vacated and we will downgrade that to a principle on assignment and then we'll post that position secondly it's proposed that the senior director of school transformation be upgraded to Regional assistant superintendent transformation that's a second position by the way and if approved that senior director position would be eliminated this comes

288with an overall cost Savings of about 10 987 and you also saw an updated org structure attached to this presentation as well if this is moved forward you'll see it at your next board meeting for your consideration that will be all Mr Warren I think I wore him out with my 50 minute long year in review I do not see any questions or comments sir you're good Mr chair that concludes the workshop for today thank you superintendent Hyde so the next item on the agenda is actually to hear from you and if you have any items that you would like to bring before the board in regards to your committee work now would be the time so I will look to see if you have anything to give a report on and at this point

289we've got some in order so I'm going to start with Miss Miller you are recognized thanks so much Mr chair I mean I actually accidentally call someone Madam chair because I'm used to that I'm sorry I do have um one and Miss Yvette Vega will send this out I sit on the head start Pre-K committee and there is a conflict with my next meeting which is this Thursday so you're going to get an email to see if anyone's available to attend that which is going to be really important meeting because there'll be some um votes taken I'm sure and they'll need Quorum but they're probably going to discuss what we did today I was asked to join Lake Alfred City Commission in an event that's been rescheduled for that day so it's caused a conflict

290so I hope someone can attend I know it's last minute but the Hedge if you sit on that committee even as a visitor you'll get to see um you'll get to meet people that represent different pre-ks across the county and understand that need that we discussed today and how vital it is so I'm hoping someone could attend that but if not I will get a report to share at the next work session of what was discussed thank you Miller and next would be ABD Mr sharpless all but dissertation I do want to say one thing to all two things um first on September 18th I was able to um uh I believe it was September 18th sorry I'm but uh board member Miller asked me to step in for her uh with poke Education Foundation

291um which is her responsibility and I got to attend um their teacher to teacher connection developer Awards um where they were able to award grants um and I I just want to say from that um first of all pef that does a great job of that and awarding our teachers and also our teachers are doing some really Innovative things in the classroom um there's I know they're going to have an expo to highlight those next month and I highly suggest board members going to it because that those the funds that are available to help help with those projects come through pef and it's something that we should be supporting um but kudos to all the teachers who won these those developer grants um another thing fsba I know I'm a um alternate on the board

292of directors there I was supposed to be going Thursday and Friday to a conference in fsba and I just want to publicly say I had I had to um cancel my reservations because of some family issues but I did do that in time to where our district will not be losing any funds for the registration or the hotel so um I think that's a good thing we were able to get that canceled and ahead of time and speaking about that I just personally I'm gonna try to say it's not getting emotional um I just want to thank everyone in the district um uh my fellow board members uh the staff the superintendent everyone for uh for you know reaching out to me asking me how how my wife's doing after some complications with our uh

293with our child uh well with her because of the uh of of her operation so I just I just want to say thank you to everyone who is who it feels great to be loved and to know people truly care and um with that that's all I have thank you Mr sharpless any other business to come before the board all right at this time this meeting will be adjourned wow