School Board Work Session | February 14, 2023

001good morning I will now call this Valentine's Day meeting for February 14 2023 to order work session to order we'll start by reading our who are we statement we are the Polk County leadership governance team if we were to pick one phrase to Define us it would be student-centered because when we come together to work we lean on our diverse backgrounds and experiences to ensure that our decisions are focused on providing high quality education for all students the four most important things to our governance team are operating with Integrity respecting our students staff families and each other establishing a culture where 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

002we serve and find Avenues of 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 member we will not disparage others our students 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 and with that I'll turn it over to superintendent Hyde good morning Madam chairman Mr board staff and community members thank you for being here this morning um I know many of you are grateful that this is only a workshop and we do not have to go into an actual school board meeting this evening so gentlemen you're still on the

003hook for Valentine's Day dinner and celebrations with your wives um I know I am so and I want to wish my wife a very Happy Valentine's Day our first uh two guests with us this morning has been consistent with our policy we've been inviting our community-based partners in to share and and basically get some free marketing so that our community knows about the extensive number of Partnerships we have in our community we have and I think you've seen to date so many the variety I should say of opportunities and Partnerships that we have established is quite impressive so no matter what interests our students have or their families have we have faith-based Partners we have Partners like you're going to hear today who really go above and beyond to support our students we have tutoring

004we have all kinds of intervention services YMCA Boys and Girls Club I mean it's quite extensive and so as you know we're capturing all of these and they'll be housed on a section of our website as we reach out and fulfill our goals and objectives for our strategic plan for engaging our families and community members so that they know what all these opportunities are and as we get closer to the end of the school year hard to believe many of our families will be using this information to make important decisions about types of camps and programs for summer for their children to participate in so it's my pleasure this morning as a scout myself and I was not a Girl Scout I was a boy scout it is my absolute pleasure um to introduce this

005morning we have Rebecca Brown Chief Operating Officer from the Girl Scouts of we said West Central Florida that's what I thought okay and then are you joined by Michelle Patton as well I'm okay thank you for being here and the floor is yours board members will either ask questions they'll save their questions for the end and I'll manage the speakers list so just look to me and then individual board members may have the other praise or questions or comments for you okay thank you appreciate the opportunity thank you um and Happy Valentine's Day everyone I'm really happy to be here and be a part of your strategic plan um today we're going to talk about Girl Scouts and what we're doing to build girls of Courage confidence and character here in Polk County our agenda

006is just review our girl scout model and outcomes and talk about our presence here in Polk County and discuss some potential Partnerships and how we can increase Polk County families at our upcoming stem of palooza increased Girl Scout engagement at schools to promote improve student outcomes and increased family engagement and increase awareness to families in Polk County about this amazing program and we'll have some time at the end for wrap up in questions Girl Scouts mission is long strong and proud 110 years Girl Scouts build girls of Courage confidence character who make the world a better place and how do we do that our outcomes through our programs and initiatives through stem Outdoor Learning life skills and our entrepreneurship programs our girls learn a sense of self positive values challenge seeking building healthy relationships and

007Community problem solving so what is the Girl Scout leadership experience our evidence-based model describes what girls do in Girl Scouts who they do it with how they do it and how they benefit this is our model for the high the high value leadership experience that we want for all of our girls through a variety of activities with supportive relationships going through our girl-led Cooperative learning and Learn by doing processes we expect all girls to have the same outcomes coming out with a strong sense of self-positive values again challenge seeking building healthy relationships and of course looking at our community problems to help solve those currently we have 1 376 Girl Scouts currently registered across Polk County a map of the schools that we have here in Polk County I'm sure you're familiar with we have

008a thousand of those girls are in volunteer-led troops and almost 400 in our community-based troops we've got some pictures we wanted to point out we wanted to show to the board these are the girls that are doing things to give back to the community looking at problems in the community and what they can do to solve those problems in the positive impact that they can make anything from taking the cookie boxes from the thousand cases of cookies they picked up and sold through their entrepreneurial program and turning it into scratching post for cats in um and shelters and whatnot making survival bags for the homeless working in food kitchens but then again we also have our girls having those leadership experiences either through stem or the Flying high surface event where they're courageous and brave

009having age-appropriate activities for our middle and high school girls to visit Sun and Fun Skylab all these wonderful Partnerships that we're lucky to have here in Polk County data shows that having Girl Scouts in schools boost family engagement in our students education and improves their academic outcomes and improves their attendance and it improves their social skills thus improving the overall climate in the schools we partner through a Grant from United Way of Central Florida and through their dime system that you're familiar with that helps us tabulate and really put a number to our outcomes instead of it just it makes us feel good what is it really doing and through those outcomes and using the dime system We Know That Girl Scouts in schools help our girls they have better attendance higher FSA scores higher

010star reading and math and they also perform better on a daily basis with fewer referrals as well so we have the data that proves that these programs although they're not tutoring still have a positive academic impact on our girls so how can girls participate in Girl Scouts we have our community partner troops which are true means letting led by our staff members and partner volunteers they're often free to girls they can happen during the school day or at one of our after-school programs like Pace Boys and Girls Club the volunteer-led troops because volunteers make the world go around in Girl Scouts we have troop meetings led by parent and neighborhood volunteers they can occur on a school or on a community-based site usually funded by the participants although we do have funding for those who

011need it currently the list you see is our school year troops and the recreation clubs Boys and Girls Clubs but also inside the schools we're really very happy to get our troops started back up at Crystal Lake and congratulations to you all for that accreditation I know that's something that we can all be very proud of but we also have some room to grow we lost some numbers during covid like a lot of other agencies and we really are putting the investment in to bring bring those numbers back up and in pink are the schools that we're working to get into currently and these are funded by the a grant from United Way of Central Florida which is evidence-based Grant the Florida Department of Education and Girl Scouts of West Central Florida stemapalooza is coming

012up on April 15th it's tax day and we've got we're partnered with Florida Polytech to host again last year we had 1300 attendees and really we're trying to spark that love for stem and children early early in their academic careers it was hosted at Florida Polytech it include Hands-On activities a University tour and a woman women in stem panel so how can we grow our Partnerships in Collective implant impact in our Polk County Schools some of the things I would like to bring to you all to consider As you move forward and also put out there for our parents using this as a reference we would really like the opportunity to give this to bring a hundred more kindergarten girls to some of palooza planting the seeds of love for stem early giving them that

013tactile opportunity and also looking at that beautiful campus and thinking of what they want to be create more school-based Girl Scout Community troops at three more elementary schools this year engaging at least 100 more girls and families and we really want to push forward the initiative to increase our older girl participation and get more Middle School girls involved in girl scouting troops thus supporting an improved School climate and student engagement we've got a long history and we're very proud of that with our Traditional Values we have Community Partners that we're very proud to work with here in Polk County of course you were considered one of our partners and we appreciate your continued support PACE Center for Girls The Early Learning Coalition United Way of Central Florida Florida Polytech the Boys and Girls Club city

014of fostproof and the Polk Education Foundation one of the things that United Way of Central Florida which is based out of Tampa serving eight counties has done to really improve and put a focus on Polk County and all the wonderful resources that we have here and the students the just the opportunity for growth is adding more leadership based here in Polk County so you have myself in the regional vice presidents I started with United Way in January after retiring from 20 years of service with public supermarkets I have two full-time Community managers who help support the service units and then joined with me today is Taylor Mills you want to say hi Taylor started with us the end of last year she's a full-time program coordinator and her job is to deliver those programs inside

015the schools and then we also have two part-time program coordinators Who deliver programs throughout Polk County questions and discussion how can how can we continue to be a part of your strategic plans and what can we do to build this relationship deliver programs in more of our schools and communicate the opportunities that girls have here in Polk County board member Surplus so first I want to say as an eagle scout myself I know the value that scouting can bring to a community and to the participants so I want to thank you first for partnering with Polk County Public Schools and having some of your troops in our schools um specifically helping our our young females get into the stem and get excited about stem I think it's a huge uh huge advantage that the Girl

016Scouts brings to our school system I'm also really happy to see that on that list of schools there's some quite a few schools for my district there so I'm very proud of that and one final thing I got to tell you this week I bought some Girl Scout cookies delicious so make sure you all go out there and support these Girl Scouts I Rebecca was supposed to bring the cookies so of course I had to text her and I'm like you're going to send me into this school board meeting without any cookies having been with Publix for 20 years and bleeding green a lot of my a lot of my cohorts were really surprised that I was that I was joining Girl Scouts and one of the things that I really like about Girl Scouts

017is that they're data driven where we do things that feel good but we are making decision based on data so we're talking about the schools and the schools that we're targeting in pink that's based on financial data personas what what kind of experience do those communities want because the one thing we know about Polk County is it's it's huge and it's diverse so you know this the Girl Scout Troop that wants to do a lot of stem and they want to do glamping might not be the same as the troops that I met last night in the Northeast part of the region that want to do more they want to do more camping and they want to have like tent camp like they want to have a contest to see who can pitch their tent

018the fastest you know so we have that large diversity and we've got the numbers to support creating troops that are girl-led so that was one of the things that really inspired me to make this change and to make a commitment to Girl Scouts and you know building that presence back Miss Miller thank you I'm glad to hear that we're looking at middle school I think that's important and we're um I learned that you don't have to start at the beginning and so middle schoolers can go into Girl Scouts without being a brownie or going through all the stages and I think that's going to be important to share that message that this is available to all students and you might find we have a lot of students who will be new to this and never

019had the experience of Girl Scout or even knew they could be so it's exciting to see us reach out to our middle schools thank you you I appreciate that it's um it's something about Community it's the uniform so in our community-based troops they're allowed uniform so those uniforms are provided for them often at no cost to them it's something about like my pen it makes me feel special that uniform makes it we know when I we made the decision to put uniforms in schools it brings everybody closer together and it takes those boundaries down and we really want to do that for our Middle School girls as well because if you feel like you belong to something then you're going to have that community-minded spirit thank you there are no more questions thank you very

020much I appreciate you all time next I'd like to bring up Miss Jennifer fasking and Chelsea gross who are here with us from State Farm Insurance good morning I'm serious for over 100 years State Farm has been in business and for just about that long State Farm the agents and Associates have been working to give back in our communities right now State Farm's Focus aligns with safety education and Community Development specifically today though we really want to talk about how the local Associates have been partnering with Polk County Public Schools before covid and before we no longer had a building in the City of Winter Haven we created a group of people that were designed to lead where we live and when we have over 2 000 employees in the State of Florida a vast

021majority kind of located in the central Florida area we have a lot of people who like to give back to the community so our lead where you live group helps connect those opportunities with the people that are looking for them and as I mentioned we don't have a building anymore but we do have Associates who love to connect and contribute we've been able to leverage internal social media and emails and really just the ideas and creativity of our employees to help start some of these ideas but one of our favorites is partnering with the Polk County Public Schools but we do also partner with several other organizations the mission Heart Walk kids pack Salvation Army and we work on different things so sometimes it is donating funds sometimes it's donating time other times it might

022be donating goods and services but by far our favorite and our Associate's favorite is working with the schools specifically on beautification projects this came from a conversation with Steve Warner a few years back really looking at how can we leverage State Farm resources and the benefits that the organization provides Associates with our schools and to date we have been able to work on seven beautification projects with 528 hours of of 132 employees time and give back grants of over five thousand dollars how does that work well State Farm provides every associate a community service and education support day which is otherwise known as paid time off to go do really good things in the community and also good neighbor grants so if an individual or a team of individuals contributes 40 hours towards an organization

023that can apply for a 500 Grant so each of those seven opportunities and you can see the the list that we have worked on so far since 2020. took a lot of organization Steve connected with the schools worked on what the beautification or the landscape plan would be looked at how can we find materials at a at a good cost connected with us we got the resources together and showed up and on any project we had between 10 and up to 30 people participating on beautifying and then after the fact we follow up with a grant request either one or two depending on the size of the project or the the number of employees involved so 500 and in some cases a thousand dollars here's a couple of our pictures we're very proud uh you

024can see we show up in our in our red we show up happy to work happy to help and we get dirty um it is hot and it is um sometimes muddy work and I highly recommend that and I have to give a huge shout out to Steve because when we are completing these projects He is there elbow deep in the mud digging holes pitching Mulch and all of that good stuff so um really really appreciate uh his effort and his connection with us and I'll turn it over to Chelsea because we have some other fun stuff we do so first of all just thank you um before I get started on my part just thank you for having us today um talking about what our employees do in the community is such a joy

025for Jennifer and I we get to do it um often and so thank you for having us um we're just here representing the very many State Farm employees that exist um certainly we could not do it without them and your partnership and so not only the beautification projects and the things that Jennifer's already talked about but we really have done back to school drives and so when you think about when we went to covid we were doing a lot of like in-person activities trying to keep our employees engaged and our employees have this really strong drive to give back and so this back to school drives are such an easy way to virtually support so we do have a huge part of our population is here in Polk County really mostly Winter Haven and Lakeland

026area but this gives the entire State an opportunity to give back and we're able to do this through Amazon Wish lists we've really streamlined the process the easier it is the more likely people are to give we know that and so we've been able to donate over 530 items and over 500 to supply students and teachers with Polk County additionally specifically schools this John snively Elementary we did 190 school supply kits and 120 backpacks Westwood Middle this was really exciting because we got to provide khakis which you know Jake and his khakis so we got to donate a hundred pair of khaki pants for their clothes closet that was really exciting and then Juanita Elementary 120 backpacks and so here are some some photos and you can see Steve's peeking out there he's a he's

027an honorary State Farmer at this point I think um and so um you know our khakis and this the kids and that's who we do it for I mean we love to give it fills our hearts but we also know um that we're extremely blessed to be able to do this for the school before I end I also want to just tell you um our corporate office supports um locally as well through we've we've donated over 25 000 to the Winter Haven chamber to support Scholarships in the community for our students additionally even though we have closed our physical presence we're hiring here so State firm has chosen Florida as a great place to grow and so we have added over a thousand employees in the State of Florida over the last year I actually

028recently changed jobs and at the time there was nobody in in my department other than me and now I have over a thousand employees that work in my department in Florida that we have hired and so just thank you for making this a great place to live a great place to work and a great place to partner thank you very much board members I'm looking at the speakers list I don't see any speakers or oh Miss Miller don't forget me superintendent so I just want to say as someone who's raised on State Farm both my parents over 40 years retired from that regional office my sister's an agent my other sister is working from home now with State Farm I was the community involvement has been forever I remember going to events like this as

029the shirts change with the different logos I'm in that bear I think is the same costume so they might want to check into that because I remember him from the 80s but um I'm glad you mentioned the scholarships because that's something I think that people don't realize that the scholarships that were available through State Farm not just for the employees children but to the community my question is now that there's not a building with the people in it is it do you find um reaching out to the ones who are working from home there's more interest or is that a challenge to get more people interested in in the different projects that you do because I would think it's a challenge that people are under the same roof but I'm learning that the new way

030of operating is remotely um I'll I'll take that one I think it really is individual so I know for working from home for some people is like the greatest joy that's ever happened um for me personally I miss interaction like I miss people and so volunteering in the community is such an amazing way for us to be able to get together for those who are really like we you spend more time with your co-workers than you sometimes do with your family and especially when we were in the office so for those who miss that interaction I think we've really been talking about this as we recruit people is it can be work from home but you still have a family you still have a community you still have the support system and so I think

031it's a good balance for us to be able to support those who want that personal interaction while also those who would prefer to not see their co-workers right but I love your take on that I think that's important so you're not isolated you're still that's how you're involving community and each week on Wednesdays we have an internal it's called our Yammer site it's like a social media site for State Farm and we have one that's unique to the State of Florida and we call it we care Wednesday and so we will advertise the things that we are doing in the community we'll advertise the opportunities that are available and give people sign opportunities to sign up and and or donate and so they know it's coming on Wednesday and we get a lot of positive

032feedback on that too well thanks for being our good neighbors chair Wyatt I just wanted to say thank you obviously we get to see you a lot in the Winter Haven area um but we always appreciate all that you do and those State Farm scholarships will be opening up for Winter Haven students this month so have a look keep your eye out for those but thank you guys for all that you do thank you thank you very much ladies great job thanks Madam chair next up is going to be an internal audit presentation conducted by Carol Matthews senior director of internal audit services and also for the board members and and for chair um at approximately 10 17 we will pause for a moment of silence in honor of Marjory Stoneman Douglas the victims of

033that tragic event um that is a Statewide activity that's taking place today flags are at half mast is ordered by the governor late last evening um and so I just want to make sure I apprised you of that so if I have to interrupt Ms Matthews or anyone else during the presentation just be aware that I'm not being rude I'm just being respectful so thank you very much and you are not Miss Matthews I'm not but I'm going to introduce myself my name is Jennifer Christensen I'm a partner with car rigs in Ingram and we audit the internal funds and so I work with Carol but I'm going to come up here and present our audit for this past year and um is my PowerPoint do I need it there we go and what I'm

034going to do is give a brief overview of the financial statements and so again this audit that we conducted was for the internal funds and so the internal funds are the money that students raise within the schools so it would be for your field trips for your fundraisers for your prom tickets and so it there's no money from the state of Florida this is all money raised by the students and spent on the students then I'm going to go a little bit into our audit process and some of the recommendations that we have for the schools and then some of the recommendations that we had District wide looking at the financial statements this year you could see we had assets of about 11.7 million dollars and um liabilities 145 000 and that's normal for the

035liabilities to be a small number because at June 30th the schools are out there's not quite as much activity going on in internal funds so usually all the bills are paid by the time June 30 rolls around our additions this year was 10.7 almost 10.8 million dollars and the money going back out or the deductions was 9.7 and if you compare that to 2021 you can see the numbers increase significantly and that's purely due to covid if we go back to 2020 we would see that um the revenue was about 11 million and then if you go back to the year before it was about 13 million so we did have quite a decrease during covid because a lot of those activities I mentioned before the field trips the fundraisers they either came to a

036halt or they decrease significantly so now we're starting to see the amounts come back up and we're seeing the activity get a little back to uh those pre-coveted times the other thing I wanted to point out is with internal funds um a little different than um if a company a for-profit company or even your personal finances when it comes to internal funds we want to raise that money and we want to spend it in the same year so when you look at the additions and the deductions you want them those numbers to be approximately the same thing and so during covid and before you could see the money being spent when we came out of covid I've noticed this with all my school districts there's they're going back to raising the money a little slower

037on spending it and I think that's just being cautious because of um coming back out of that time where they weren't able to raise a lot of money so so nothing alarming here but as we go on we'll expect to kind of monitor that and make sure that the schools are spending the money that they raise because those students that raised it it should be spent on those same students our report was unmodified which means we had a clean audit opinion and as far as audit adjustments the only adjustments that we had related to accounts receivable adjusting the accounts receivable and also the allowance for doubtful accounts and um the adjustment for the allowance for doubtful accounts is likely going to be something we do every year only because the district's um policies a little

038different than than when our when we come in and do the audit we're probably we're looking at any accounts that are over a year old and these are amounts that are owed to the um to the Career Centers for tuition and anything over a year old we're asking the district to um to look at that and allow it um in because it the chances of it being collected after a year you know probably is is pretty low and so um and so we record that allowance based on Management's estimate during the audit but for purposes of internal purposes for the district they need to keep those receivables on the books and they keep them on for a couple years and then they have to present them to the board before they can actually write them

039off and so it's just kind of a difference in timing as far as our footnotes no um real high-risk footnotes or anything significant I wanted to point out the Investments we didn't have any type of concentration so anytime we have more than five percent of our investments in one type of investment we would disclose that but we didn't have any of that this year everything was pretty Diversified there are a couple things that I'm required by my Professional Standards to communicate to those charged with governments which would be the the school board and that would be things like if we had any disagreements with management which we did not have any that would be disagreements on accounting principles how to apply them when to apply them any difficulties encountered in the audit and we did

040not have any of those and if we were aware of any consultations that the district had with other accountants on accounting issues and were not aware of any of those occurring we're also required to communicate if we were to come across any fraud or illegal acts during the audit that were material to the financial statements and we did not come across any of those types of um matters and um and I always like to kind of stop at this part and mention this this audit is a is definitely a collaborative collaborative effort there are many different people involved the finance and accounting department with Heather and Luke and their team they pull lots and lots and lots of invoices for us lots of information when we come out here we also work with internal audit

041Carol and her team to kind of identify where those risk areas are to make sure that we're performing adequate tests on them and then we also work with the schools we we have to contact the schools at the beginning of the audit they send us some information and then after the audit we actually have an exit conference with each principal and financial secretary to go over our preliminary findings so that they can then we can have a discussion and see if there's anything additional that they want to send us to maybe clear some of those findings before we get to our final report so I always like to say thank you it all works sometimes at the beginning I think how are we going to do this with 150 different sites but it works and

042um and that's because of everybody doing their part as far as the school testing we do testing we do perform testing at 100 of schools and any departments that have activity in their internal funds some departments do have internal funds so if there's activity we're testing them that year so we perform compliance tests on a lot of different areas you can see them on the slide and so this compliance testing is looking at rules that they have the State of Florida the the State of Florida Department of Education has a red book they have a chapter on internal funds with rules school board rules and internal fund um the internal fund manual that Polk County schools has and so we go through and we perform a lot of different testing we pick a sample at

043each school and so because we're picking a sample and we can't look at everything if we come across any sample where there was a rule that wasn't followed so an example would be if a deposit's made into the bank timely and if it's not made in into the bank timely then that school gets a finding so for every item we see and if they had two deposits that weren't made timely they then that gets they get two findings and I just like to explain that so that when we go over the numbers you'll understand how that works with the findings so here we have a chart that shows the average findings per school or department and we had 146 schools and departments this year that had activity in the internal funds and you can see

044the lines pretty steady year to year it did dip down in 2021 I've seen that at every District I go to and that's because of the activity decreasing because of covid so we didn't have the fundraisers as much as we did pre-covered and so of course some of those rules the forms you have to fill out the reports that have to be reviewed and signed that that all decreased also because the activity wasn't there in 2022 it went up to about 0.88 findings per school um or department and so that did increase and it increased a little higher than what it was at pre-covid um and some of that's due to we may have one or two schools where they just had a higher number of findings um we had you know if we have

045one where there's a new employee that comes in and maybe didn't um didn't know one of the rules and so every sample we looked at maybe they they didn't pass that one rule that kind of skewed the numbers this year um I expect that to go back down where it's going to be closer to that point eight um next year here we just have a breakdown of the number of findings that each school had and so if you look we had just short of about 90 percent of our schools had two or less findings and so that's great that's consistent with um prior years and what I mentioned before if you go down you'll see five or more findings we had four schools and again that's consistent because you're going to have those schools especially

046we had um after covid we may have schools where a financial secretary is taking a leave of absence or maybe out and although there's procedures for someone to take over those those roles when somebody's out it's still um you know there could be some things that maybe don't always happen as timely when the financial secretary is not there so it's those special cases but every year when you have 150 you know you're going to have a couple where there's something like that where they're going to have some extra findings here are some of the more common findings that we had and um and this is just for um for for your review and this is something that Carol Matthews tracks on her own and um and goes through them and these are the areas that

047we like to um talk about and make sure that the financial secretaries and the principals and the schools are being educated on some of these rules to make sure because um there is going to be high turnover at schools in that Financial secretary role again I see that at every school district I work with and so um it's that training that we want to make sure we stay on top of and train you know the new people when those positions turn over this is I know a small graph but it's just something for yes clarification if you go back one slide please um so when you look at this number unlike the slide you did um Number Eight Is there a way for me to get a copy of this so when you say 21

048deposit slips were not dated I'd like to know how many of those events were related to a particular School so much to like you pointed out previously five of those could be related to one school and so that's where we need to focus our effort on training and support so is there a way for me to get that data I can give you that data and I can tell you that that is the that is the situation situation for that one in particular and um I think that's important for the community on the board to hear as well is that 21 schools did not have individual instances of deposits this could be two schools it could be one school it could be it could be 21 but thank you for clarifying and that's yep that's

049exactly why I wanted to explain ahead um the sampling process and how every time we come across an exception it's going to be on this number so you're correct it's not 21 schools um it's it's just a small handful and I'll I'll forward that information to the board thank you so here is just more of a visual for you to look at and they're you know different findings that we had and it shows how many um times that occurred um this year the the gold or yellow bar compared to the light blue and the dark blue which would be the two previous years and that's more just for you to be able to see if there's any kind of Trends and um for some there there are going to be Trends and for some it's

050not it's going to be um luck of the draw of what we sampled when we go through we have all transactions for the year and we have um a software that just randomly selects samples for us to look at so sometimes it could be luck of the draw um or you know or there could be something more like we mentioned the deposit slips not dated and that is something that that we did look into and talk to the district about now these are the district-wide recommendations that we had and so to um one that we did have that was a significant deficiency so just to kind of explain the three levels of internal control matters that we have the top level would be material weakness and that's where there could be a material misstatement of

051financial statements and it not be detected because of a lack of controls we didn't have any of those for Polk County Schools the next level down would be a significant deficiency and what that is is um there could be a misstatement in the financial statements because of a lack of controls but it's not going to be material it's something that's going to be small but we feel like this is important enough to bring to the attention of the district and that's where this finding Falls in and then the bottom one is going to be just recommendations more and and we'll get into those in a second so the one significant deficiency we had is that um this is what the technical college is with the receivables we had um in 2021 when we came out

052to do the audit we had um six out of the 11 invoices that we pulled were um should have been voided they were students that registered for a class but ended up never attending and so they should have been voided but they weren't voided so they were showing as being outstanding so last year we had a finding for that and then this year um the six that had not been voided last year I went ahead and looked at those again this year because I wanted to see if they had been voided and three of them had and three of them had still um remained on the list of amounts that were owed to the district and so um because it was something that I was following up on last year I needed to go ahead

053and include that as a significant deficiency so um so I just want to whenever we do have a comment like this we do ask management to give a response and I felt like it was important enough um because there were a couple different factors to to put it in here so that you can read through the district's response and um and part of it is really there was some some key turnover of of Staff where um where one there was some miscommunication one thought that the other had voided the receipt and and then the invoice and then the other thought that that they had avoided it and so um so I think some miscommunication also just some other things going on in the in the technical school colleges that year um but they have started

054having monthly in-person meetings to train everyone to make sure because that was one key last year we talked about is it was if a student registers um and then they don't attend class how how is that being communicated to the accounting department at the technical colleges and so that's something they're working on is making sure there's training so that they are communicating among departments so that they know if they're students that don't attend class if they drop out before school starts then they know to remove or avoid those those invoices also um something that they're doing is Contracting with a new collections agent um that's for collecting the the invoices that that are valid invoices they're going to be um working on that so that they can make sure they can collect um more timely

055and have a higher collection percentage the other as I mentioned we had recommendations Improvement points we call them and so these aren't internal control deficiencies they're just things we came across that we thought you know hey this is something that you might want to consider and so um the first one is the internal funds policy manual we had talked about this last year and um unfortunately that the plan was to update the manual during this past school year but again with some changes in management and some turnover in certain roles that wasn't accomplished but talking to them that is definitely something that they have on the agenda for this year this school year they're going to go through and update the manual and that's just to make sure that it um adheres with some of

056the new rules that have passed and you know if the manual is you know quite a few number of years old we want to make sure that with the change in how procedures are being done with things maybe being more electric electronic than they were we want to make sure the manual is also updated so that when we do have these new Financial secretaries they're going to get training but then um once they're on on the job doing the doing the work they can go back and refer to a manual if they have questions and then the um the other recommendation we had was to complete an I.T risk assessment on a regular basis this was something that was done in the past when covid happened they weren't able to um to do the I.T

057risk assessment um just due to there were certain things that had to be done on site where servers are and they weren't able to do that during covid they weren't able to get access to those locations but now that um that all of that is open again we recommend that they go back to looking at it um before it was done every three years we just recommend that it's done periodically so if they can go back to that policy that'd be great and that's something that the IT department had stated that in the 23-24 school year they are going to be going through an I.T risk assessment again I just wanted to mention no material weaknesses were noted so no no weaknesses and internal control where they could result in a material misstatement to the

058financial statements any questions comments Ms Miller thank you I appreciate that you mentioned um training of the financial secretaries I think we talked about that last time you were here and how important that was um and this might be a staff question our superintendent question that's ongoing I didn't even ask it I know um because even as staff changes there has to be procedures in place to prevent these things do you have um I know can you believe it does that um the samplings that you show the repeat finding superintendent what are what is the training or plan I don't know if this comes from your finance department to to address some of those you know multi-year repeat findings what are we doing to address those uh so specifically Miss Jenkins has been meeting her

059and her team have been meeting with all of the financial staff from the school at the school level to address these deficiencies and to make sure that they're fully trained on the proper protocol and procedures as was noted there are very few findings out of 151 traditional public schools to have so few findings is I'm not concerned I'm concerned that we make sure that we identify the individuals who are who are having those those are making those mistakes so that we can adequately support them and train them to prevent them in the future but again there were no material findings so I think by and large the system works Miss Jenkins did as based off last year's findings ramp up trainings this year I will have a follow-up conversation with Mr Cochran to find out

060exactly what's going on while I respectfully I understand some of the challenges at those sites I do not not to understand how they do a simple handful of students could not have been rectified in a timely manner over the last 18 months since the last finding additionally I mean the other finding that was significant um was the in the internal manual so as far from our perspective part of our issue is a lot of this information resides on the Hub the problem is it is not there we lack a cohesiveness on the Hub if you go there some content is is actually captured under departments other content is captured under specific topics or documents and so we are going through the process now I see my staff in the back nodding their heads or going

061through the process now of pulling all that information into one consistent location that's searchable so that everyone will have access to that so there will be an internal manual for individuals moving forward I think that's great progress the only thing I did the fact that you had that was a sampling and you went back and looked at the three you found three that had not changed at that technical school when you find that do you do additional sampling we did we did last year because that was when we initially um when we initially came up with a couple of them then we did extend the sample and um and so the numbers I showed were for the um were for the original sample um I did not this year I had to pick new invoices

062to look at and I didn't have any um of those where we had issues with them with any of the new maybe that's they're making the progress thank you yes Dr Allen yeah great thanks for the presentation and your findings going back to your average findings per school and Department I did see we had an uptick in internal accounts um I think my question or inquiry here is do you factor in how how many more transactions there would be within a particular account and and I think the the rationale in that question is the increase in our student population which would then I would assume at that point increase the amount of transactions per count so then does the sample ratio does it increase with the increase of transactions you know Middle High high and

063so um but that is something that I will at a minimum put a note in um where we I can maybe display a different graph next year that takes some of the takes the population into um into consideration because um I think that's a good point that um to be able to show with show the school board that we could have an increase in findings but we could also have an increase in population which is likely going to be an increase in the number of transactions at that school um definitely I can thank you there are no further questions from the board I have one follow-up question I'm looking to back to Ms Jenkins if she could make her way up front I want to make sure she has an opportunity to address this one

064of the areas you pointed out um and I'll look specifically at slide number three was the the volume or the amount of money that's brought in versus the amount of money that's spent there there appears to be well over a million dollars that's left over in this year's account versus a much smaller 100 roughly forty thousand dollars that was left over in last year's account Miss Jenkins Heather when when schools have that that much money left over in their internal account do we require them to identify where those funds are stated to be spent yes sir when when the funds are collected they have a specific purpose for which they're to be spent and some what we've run across over the last couple years is when field trips were scheduled and they were prohibited or

065prevented because of covid then those dollars remain those dollars can't typically be used for other students to take a field trip so we have a a process to go through and review how the dollars were intended to be or issue refunds yes sir okay thank you that clarifies it I'm sorry Heather if I can just one more clarification if if I paid for a field trip and I can know and I can't take it can I apply that elsewhere can I apply it to a yearbook fee can I apply it to graduation can I apply it to prom it could we were to um re so if if the school had a fund and and they wanted to use it for yearbooks they would contact those individuals that had originally given the funds and restate

066that it was to be redirected to a yearbook and I'll ask our presenter does that create additional findings as a result or is that going to make your life difficult if we were to do that no so it would if anything it'd probably make the school's life a little more difficult to having to gather all that information it maybe would be easier to do the refund and then have them repay but um but no as long as we understand that these things happen and as long as they have the documentation to show that they got approval to to use that money elsewhere from the person who originally gave them the money then then that's fine yeah I'm accustomed to schools having a cap on their internal accounts as to what they can roll and carry

067forward without an explanation each from year to year there are times where two seniors two senior classes for example may be sharing the cost of a senior project or donation to a school I've seen that where we've had to make exceptions so I'll have further discussion with Miss Jenkins and the team to kind of make sure I'm understanding what's where that million dollars is going and who's holding it and what the intentions are behind it so thank you I see no further questions or comments from the board thank you very much good job The Madam chair and members of the board this next item was going to be pulled and it in its official discussion it has been pulled because we're waiting on finance we're waiting on the final financial documents to go along with

068this but I wanted to go ahead and get this item before the school board because as you know growth continues to be a significant concern that we continue to look for creative and Innovative strategies to address Haines City and ridge as you know we we actually capped enrollment at Haines City this year shifted several hundred students over to Ridge Community High School but we've seen commensurate growth on both campuses in order to address that in the absence of a new campus which as you know will be coming back to you in a very short time um this is that what I'll just refer to it as the Southeast High School rather than get anyone concerned about where that school location may end up the board had committed to putting that item out to bid just

069to give you a brief update on as to the high school project that is out with the Architects the final programs were identified I think I shared this with you before the architect needed to know that they need to know what the what the Fine Arts spaces would look like or the requirements were they need to know what the athletic requirements were so we've provided all of that and so they're working on the package that we can then subsequently put out for RFP and so there will be a bidding process for individuals to come back and say we can build that school at these dollar amounts at this dollar amount subsequent to that we know that we continue to see growth I mean Dr Allen and I were having a conversation and I know just

070yesterday he looked at our our third calculation and it seemingly we've grown another thousand kids since the start of the school year we're now close to 117 000 students attending schools in Polk County so that shows that growth is a reality for us and we need to address some issues to make sure especially in those communities where we're seeing rapid growth and this really goes to Miss Lori Cunningham's Community as well but so at Haines City the recommendation that I'm going to bring back to you is that we lease the concretibles similar to what we have at Chain of Lakes similar to what we have at Citrus Ridge these are zero kind of I don't want to say zero lot line but there's zero space between the Portables they're built adjacent to each other we'll

071be looking to add approximately anywhere from 30 to 48 total Portables there'll be two additional restroom Portables two portables will be set aside one for administration one for guidance and social workers so essentially you'll have have almost a small campus into into and of itself students will have access to normal lab facilities so the science classroom for example science instruction may still happen in the portable but labs and activities that require traditional science space would then happen in a classroom environment and so this would be a short-term two-year solution for that community and then we would remove these Portables from that location and then rezoning with the new high school would help alleviate some of the growth and congestion that we have in those communities subsequent to that or in tandem to that there will

072be a heist a softball field recommendation that will also come before you so to date we've had so many Portables on their campus that Haines City's campus previously that the girls softball campus or softball field has actually been covered by Portables as a means to provide them equity and support we bus them to a local facility where they can play instead of doing that we're looking at the the property that we own immediately adjacent to the high school football field the reason and as for construction that project will be about a million million a 1.6 million total uh 1.5 million and the reason we've selected that location to move the softball field is there's already a field house or let me rephrase that a concession stand in built-in restrooms there adjacent to that facility so

073it would provide us with ready access to those things we would not have to extend and build or construct new facilities for those for that stadium so those are the two items that will come before you I just want to make sure that I explained them because they were on the agenda and then we had we had the intention to remove them it was kind of how we were just talking about adding the portable to Haines City and I'll subsequently follow up with you if need be but we were waiting on final cost and pricing as I shared the setbacks have already been identified by our Engineers but as you know it's it's a thorough process that we follow but these would be leased just for the two-year period of time in which we needed

074them there would be poured concrete or asphalt out in that area for students so we don't have to worry about mud and things like that and inclement weather and then some of those will have covered walkways and passages as well so plenty of space plenty of opportunity this would as a result if the board approves this and we're able to increase their enrollment and I'm hopeful that the board will approve the project for the next two years then what we would do is begin communicating that to families so that they know that they can re-enroll at Haines City if they so choose but this would also impact their overall Staffing and I know Dr Allen and Miss Cunningham and several of you I've talked to about Staffing recently so this would be a consideration where

075under their normal enrollment they may they may and you're going to see some of this in a few minutes they may be subject to losing a Dean or losing an assistant principle in this case we would not we would refrain we would keep that administrator there the guidance counselor there to support these students for the duration of their time on that campus until again rezoning a new high school were to open and Avail itself to these students so just wanted to provide that I see Dr Allen where's that left over Miss Cunningham yes sir thank you um just to add to the discussion on the Haines City High School softball fields that is something that the community has asked for for even prior to your coming on board at least three years that I know

076of that we've had discussions because they're currently playing at one of the fields I don't know what you've covered I apologize for being late it's been quite the morning um and so they've been practicing at uh the Poinciana Recreation Complex and the community would really appreciate obviously having that back on campus Because currently that site is used for the Portables as you probably know so so I'm in great support that we would try to get them back on their campus to be able to have the kids practice right on their own field on their on their own school property so I appreciate whatever we can do to move that forward I'll look forward to seeing now do you are you going to be bringing forth plans or something yes ma'am you'll see that at the

077next Workshop staff had asked for some additional time sure okay um because they were getting some different numbers and they want to make sure that what they bring is the most accurate possible final number worst case scenario right is what you always want to see and then you want to see cost savings as a result so that will come before the board at the next meeting the next one okay sir thank you very much seeing no further questions at this time I'll bring forward Miss Pasco who's here to discuss with you Google Drive transition to or migration to office 365. thank you superintendent Pasco be aware I apologize I want to make sure I preface this if we get to 1017 I will pause you yes sir good morning Madam chair School Board superintendent Hyde

078and community members as Mr Hyde said I'm Ann Pascoe and I serve as the assistant superintendent of Information Systems and Technology for Polk County so I'm here today to talk a little bit about how we are moving forward with our one-to-one initiative and supporting students and staff with integrating digital technology into the classroom and our business Polk County is continuing to streamline the technology footprint of the district and schools to ensure appropriate alignment of learning and operational platforms for implementation support and cyber security requirements this process is generally described in the IT world as it governance as we continue to ensure that students are College and Career ready and increasing emphasis is placed on data and digital access in the classroom simultaneously we have an increased need for cyber security protections and risk management in

079the digital environment as they've increased globally you heard our auditor mentioned the I.T risk assessment this is the type of thing I'm referring to too many options create confusion for users they create inconsistency in our business and our classroom processes and they don't allow us to concentrate support efforts in a way that can ensure that digital learning is not interrupted we also want to make sure at the same time however that we provide tools that allow for differentiated learning in the classroom for all students to be able to learn to the best of their ability so this I.T governance idea allows us to align our IST decisions with our learning Decisions by four important bullets we ensure that appropriate benefits are realized from the utilization of IST resources so fiscally appropriate decisions human resource appropriate

080decisions all of that we want to align we also want to minimize our risk just like we talked about with cyber security we want to optimize all of our resources to ensure we have Equitable access across the district while remaining fiscally responsible and of course we want to align our resources to the Strategic plan goals so we want to all be in one happy family all aligned moving forward together how do we do that so we have first chosen to support our users and our services within our framework to provide optimal digital learning environments in the classroom our first area of streamlining these resources will be to support only Microsoft productivity tools district-wide and sunset Google Drive productivity tools so what does that actually mean and why would we pick Microsoft currently we do have

081a Microsoft implementation and Licensing contract that was executed in 2019. so we've had Microsoft for many years you can see the descriptions here it is a robust environment that incorporates our email services including encryption it creates our user accounts and make sure everything is Flowing appropriately we have Defender which is security also all across all of our platforms it ensures we have built-in intelligence if somebody makes an accidental click on something then we have software that's watching that and making sure we're protecting our end users we respond to threats anything that comes in as we detect that we might have is typically called a DDOS the threat anything that's attacking our Network a young lady just called the other day to interview me for a classroom project and she said how do you keep us

082safe and I asked her if she understood castles and moats and that's kind of what we're talking about we create a moat around our whole network so that we can protect ourselves then we have Office 365 so those are our productivity tools Microsoft Microsoft Word Excel PowerPoint I'm sure you're very familiar since you're looking at that right now on the slide how those things work OneDrive is individual cloud storage so for instance I created this in OneDrive and I shared it out with individuals who could give me feedback before we presented today SharePoint is collaborative cloud storage so that's where just like we talked about different manuals we might keep those internally in one spot and then put them out there on our hub replacement for people to find in a searchable area and student

083and staff accessibility tools so this is key one of the things that has happened with our one-to-one implementation is we have been able to take accessibility tools that were no longer viable to all students and put them in the hands of students and Microsoft is very good at that they provide learning opportunities in the classroom where students can have closed caption they can have things for hearing impaired you wouldn't know but I'm deaf in my left ear so things like that that will help us be able to access our learning just like everyone else and that's a key component of the Microsoft platform another key component that we receive with Microsoft is significant support we have on demand and as needed support hours we have an online support portal problem resolution hours on-site visits and

084professional learning credits in fact as the IST Department although I'm here representing the department the entire Department's been involved in this the networking the digital learning our business and instructional technology operations and help desk we've all been going through with Microsoft looking at governance policies creating these documents and we've been doing that with their support now for Google Drive that was implemented prior to the availability of some of these Microsoft online tools so there was a reason at that time to have both and we utilized the free Google for Education Suite initially we utilized it for student email online productivity tools and cloud storage and internal collaborative sites all of these are available with Microsoft we do not have any dedicated Google support so we have decided to standardize on the Microsoft platform and how

085will we do that and how we support students and staff because that's the most important thing you can have a great plan but if you're not supporting students and staff that's going to be a problem so the way we're going to do that is currently we're discussing this with you we have talked with principals to make sure they are aware as well and tomorrow I will personally will be providing emails out to all staff in the district to let them know the plan so that they will get that and be able to review it we'll explain the rationale as well as assist in how to find their Google drive documents that they've created over the past three years during February we essentially will do Discovery open house sessions that we will be emailing out tomorrow

086where we will ask users if they have any concerns to come talk to us let us know what those are so we can make sure we have a personalized plan to ensure that everything is supported I've already had a few principals reach out and we will be providing one-to-one case-by-case support for that during March we will provide virtual face-to-face and self-paced tutorials so we want to make sure staff have all types of options to be able to receive that support on how to utilize the Microsoft tools note that for many staff this is not new they have had this before but we want to make sure anyone who was more comfortable on Google now has every opportunity to be comfortable in Microsoft during out April and May we'll continue to provide that and then in

087may we actually will move the documents over for the staff so they won't lose anything we will move it over we're working with a company that we will have a process for that both their shared tools and their personal tools and with that what questions might you have for me I'm good how are you great I think we've got 10 minutes left so might be able to get a question or two in here um besides Google Drive you know obviously there's a suite of tools do you see us moving to eliminate more of those as far as within the Google Suite of applications in a sense I guess and then other ones like for example now we'll have teams I don't know if you're gonna you know assimilate that out so then at that point

088do we like pull back on Zoom as an option I'll give you the full picture so yes we will be sunsetting all of the Google tools that we have typically Google sites was the only one you used and we'll be migrating that to SharePoint sites and we're working with staff to do that we did a full dive and most of the Google tools were not being utilized to their extent many people had moved over to Microsoft teams as part of Microsoft so that will be continuing we did pull back this year with student access and teams as we moved to schoology one of the key pieces with governance and I.T is to make sure that you have many tools that fit together we call that interoperability and so we needed to pull back for schoology

089and now we're working with Microsoft to re-embed teams for next year to create robust offerings so yes we will be continuing to maximize everything that Microsoft has in fact I sat on a call last week have a meeting with Mr McNaughton next week about some of the new learning tools they're bringing about as well and I would assume like uh yeah our LMS integrates very well but do you see any other barriers with other software applications that we are currently utilizing that that do not integrate well with our Microsoft move no by standardizing on one platform for Microsoft we're able to have the conversations we need need to leverage those Partnerships and and tell different companies this is what we need to do what's best for our students so we do a lot of work

090in the back end for instance that's why we're going to have teams because we asked them to integrate it into schoology so they're going to do that so students can do both so that's part of streamlining the support for the I.T department so we have time to work with those vendors to make sure they're providing what we need for our students does that kind of get to the question you're asking about so teams currently is not they don't have an API meaning our schoology LMS does not have a current API with teams they're going to have to develop that yeah well they're already in progress yeah yes and transparently with our size we have a lot of students so it's nice that we have that partnership with Microsoft because a lot of times they'll bring

091it to us ask us for feedback what do you think and we can be on the ground let talking with them about what we need for our students and our staff because our staff use these tools and as well as business I think that's another thing for us to talk about we just talked about business processes and really needing that transparent information so we've actually in the IT department split and we have business Technology support and instructional Technology support to make sure we're doing the same tools for everyone and making sure we're meeting all of those needs you're welcome thank you my question was similar but I had already pressed the button before he finished asking him so I've heard a lot of complaints from Community Partners about the use of teams because they're not

092able to get on the calls as easily they're not able to share um how are we managing that because we do have a lot of committees that you know we we do a really good job I think trying to involve our community members so I want to make sure that that doesn't get lost in the transition so last year the decision was made to Sunset Zoom prior to me starting with Polk County so I can't really advise why that decision was made we have had some challenges with teams I actually have a meeting today at noon about that very topic and our goal is to have that accomplished this week one challenge we have had this year is there are so many tools that when we're making decisions we can't make the right decision because

093we don't know what tools we're maybe out there for what purpose so that's this year of trying to build that so that we can ensure the decisions we're making do not cause negative impact for situations like that but that one should be resolved this week thank you I appreciate that you already knew about it yes ma'am thanks so every time I sit down at the dinner table I'm with teachers okay my whole family's teachers yes sir and so um one of my just concerns is and I know they're going to be asking me questions about this um how difficult is this transition going to be for our staff what I know you talked about you know providing office hours and that kind of stuff is there going to be any additional requirements for our staff

094teachers or anything to understand this new technology I mean I'm just curious to know what the transition is actually going to look like many tools available to them if they can come to the online support hours in February and that will be widely disseminated we have one per day for the entire rest of the month in February and up until spring break and then they'll have support they can do a self-paced tutorial they can meet with us one-on-one they can come to a face-to-face meeting so there will be a myriad of opportunities as far as how difficult it can be that's the piece with technology that can be a challenge because we're all individual I will be transparent I did not set up this technology today so Mr Spruce met me at 8 30 to

095make sure I knew how to use my technology to be here so there's always a nervousness anytime you change technology and you're using it to ensure that you provide learning and teachers get nervous with that and we understand that so that's why we're providing this entire semester to do that those Google Drives won't go away until the end of May when they leave to make sure that they have the full semester to prepare to then start in next year what I will tell you is if you're at the dinner table and they're nervous please tell them we don't judge they can come every day for support if they want we're not going to limit how much support that they need to do that yeah Miss Pasco please again historically we had office before we had

096Google correct yes sir we did well the vast majority of the tools that are being utilized are already well in understood this is the conceptually this is not something completely new and different this is just a transition between two programs and platforms because one provides us a much more robust support mechanism and growth opportunity for our district there are some utilities that are new in Microsoft Office Suite but if you think about it from that perspective Office 360 has been free for educators for probably the last 20 years and by and large was the platform of choice for many school districts for a long time I'm not sure when we made the choice to go to Google but that's become a problem is every one of us is still operating on Microsoft Office Outlook as

097you are and then but yet we still have Google utilities and so it becomes a conflict for us going back and forth so I I don't necessarily see this going to have a huge impact on our staff but I think that the plan that Miss Pasco and her team have put together that over the next few months and over the next year will be more than adequate to support the staff's transition because the biggest issue that you're going to deal with quite honestly is not adapting to a new platform or new utility the biggest issue is making sure they secure whatever content they had previously developed and transitioned that over that's the part that takes the most amount of time having gone through this before actually I was in a district that went the reverse

098Direction but they were we were willing to pay for some Google support and utilities which is so that at that point it made sense for the school district to do it so and can I ask one more thing and I think I I want to make sure I heard this correctly so whenever you're you're actually Contracting with a company to bring those documents from their Google Suite into this new Microsoft yes sir yes sir okay so nothing should be lost so that's what I'm trying nothing will be like well okay no I I I'd be happy to say should I'm not going to guarantee because again why don't we have certain handbooks that are readily available on our websites because documents exist all over the place in the hub and have to be unified so

099um I I will not be the one who sits here and says 100 accuracy will or all documents will be transferred I can't say that with all sincerity so thank you at this time thank you Miss Pasco oh Dr Allen was next but Dr Allen prior to you doing that it's now 10 17. so what I'd like to ask is for everybody in the room to please uh join us in a moment of silence um today is the anniversary date of Marjory Stoneman Douglas and the tragic events that took place there the governor asked for all schools to place flags at half mast and to participate in a moment of silence if appropriate our middle schools and high schools will be doing that elementary schools will not simply because we didn't have enough time to

100communicate that to parents so we are sending a message home for families this evening about why we had a pause today and encouraging them to have discussions with their children at home tonight so please join me for a moment of silence if you would thank you Dr Allen I think I'll just hold my thought and question and just address it to you via email thank you okay all right thank you thank you so this time I'd like to bring up Miss Mackenzie and Stacy Davis McKenzie's the senior director for K-12 literacy and Stacy Davis is a senior coordinator for library media Services I'm sure they'll do a better job of explaining even further but if the board will recall one of the requirements that we initiated as a school district was we ceased the ongoing

101procurement of Library materials meaning our schools were accustomed to ordering books throughout the year we have no long we no longer allow that we have asked every school to submit all of their procurement requests within a specified window of time each year so elementary schools have a window middle schools have a window high schools have a window the reasoning behind that is to allow this team and several others who operate in the background the opportunity to review all of those materials prior to them being submitted to the board for recommendation for procurement the same rules apply as I shared with you before nothing that is not currently in our media centers or would be deemed appropriate nothing that conflicts are included nothing that's in states that would be in conflict with State Statute um are

102on these lists but again what you have is a comprehensive list of all School requests for procurements if the board were to approve all these then the community has 30 days in which to file open appeal remember the board's approval of a purchase list is not does not mean that we are purchasing the books tomorrow it simply means we are we are setting the stage for that procurement we wait to 30 days if there are no appeals at that time then those procurements will take place even subsequent to that if there's a book at a later date that someone finds objectionable then they have a right under statute and then with board policy in her school code to object to a book and have it reviewed further if need be so I'm just providing you

103a brief summary before I turn it over to these two amazing ladies who have done an incredible job and really are the real reason why we got invited to Tallahassee to share our first policies and procedures about our books and and how we've managed this process throughout because really they're they're the workhorses behind the scenes that make the magic happen so thank you ladies for being here today and I'll turn it over to you thank you superintendent hi ladies and gentlemen on the board I apologize for the large number of orders that you have in front of you but again as the superintendent already mentioned these are all the orders that will be all the library and classroom book orders for this school year typically we would have different ordering Seasons but the orders before

104you come from library media material funding that's State funding Esther funding so that's our Federal grant funding which we are fortunate to have this year so next year we will have spent that money next year we will not have those included Title One monies and any other local school funds used to purchase library or classroom materials we held off doing any ordering this year as other districts did as well why we waited for the state to release the Mandate mandatory training which was in January 1 when that was released so no new library books have been purchased this school year which means that we also have students who are anxiously awaiting for the next book in a series or the latest book about their favorite team to be released um just I want you to

105understand also that we have trained certified staff which we do have a portion of those who hold master's degrees in library information studies who created the orders following the process which I like to take just a minute to explain to you so a hundred percent of our certified media Specialists attended the state mandated training that was released on January 1. we held this in our district on January 11th and they have completed the required follow-up paperwork that the superintendent will have to certify at a later date they attended previous trainings on collection analysis collection development action plans and creating orders using professional peer review sources and utilizing our district rating system for purchases by September 1st each certified media specialist created a collection development action plan that included a collection analysis School demographics identified weeding

106or discontinuance candidates based on age and circulation and recommendations for areas of collection growth I might add that this is an annual task that all of our schools complete as required by Statute they work to create orders rep orders representative of each school's unique population teacher student request and support for academic standards all of the titles were selected using our district rating system for elementary middle and high with exceptions made for best titles because those have already been approved by the state they also used professional periodical review sources such as carcass booklist School library journal and Publishers Weekly crowdsource reviews such as common sense Amazon Goodreads are not considered professional periodical review sources so our certified staff go to the professional periodical review sources first after the media specialist spent I might add hours and

107hours of evening and weekend time working on these orders all of these orders were reviewed by their school stakeholder committee as required by Statute you might know that better as our school media committee so when we have book challenges or book reviews that's that same committee that serves in that capacity um so the stakeholder committee is made up of teachers parents community members administrators and students at the middle school and high school levels as required by Statute principals also reviewed all these purchases and signed off on the order verification form we do have 30 schools that are staffed with media paraprofessionals or non-certified staff so for those schools the library media Services team created The Collection development action plan and we share that back with the media staff member and the principal so they would

108know what were the needs of their collection what do they need to focus on for reading books that were outdated the orders were created Again by our library media Specialist Team at the district level taking into consideration the wish list that each school had the opportunity to submit in the collection analysis needs the orders were then sent back to the school for the same process of the stakeholder committee to review those and for the principal to sign off on I would like to thank the media Specialists and media paraprofessionals across our district for their diligence and dedication putting students first and ensuring that these orders represent their diverse student populations and the needs of our schools questions I just want to say thank you for presenting today and and making that available that information available

109to the public and I appreciate the work you've done to make him look good in Tallahassee um that always helps I'm interested in the media committees so all of our schools have media committees for reviewing new orders and any concerns that can that a parent may have in that school yes that's correct and those are in place by August and that's not something new that's something the district has had for a number of years thank you there are no further questions or comments thank you ladies this time we have the instructional calendar for students teachers and para Educators Mr Warren board members as he makes his way up because this will be a sure very short presentation if you recall the board approved the tentative calendars for the next two school years we will be

110bringing you an additional calendar in the near future the only things that were not completed on this calendar was the first week of school for teachers basically outlining what their week would look like upon that first week that's a non-student attendance week it typically is a combination of both personal plan or independent planning time for them to structure their classrooms and do some lesson planning as well as professional development and or School culture climate conversations with the overarching faculty and or by the department so there was a lot of conversation about how to best structure that time in collaboration with pea and our school-based administrators and so we're bringing that back to you all calendars were published this weekend in a draft form they'll be finalized after today there's no vote required the board is

111already approved and authorized these calendars we simply wanted to make sure that we had conversation with you and with our community so that they knew what we were what these teachers would be doing for the first week Upon returning to school so Mr Warren I'll segue from there we were in discussions as recently as yesterday relative to the memorandum of understanding that we need in place for the six days that's been discussed with you regarding I call them the six days return to school calendar and one of the benefits I believe that occurred through the calendar process this year was kind of embedding a discussion of how return to work would look in repetitive years and it was a good collaborative discussion relative to the half days of PD and teacher work days that occurred

112furthermore yesterday at the table with the union we provided opportunity for schools to have a site site-based latitude whether they provide that PD in the morning or the afternoon to assist with those schools and their needs individually because we also were collaborating with our district folks for how to provide that PD across a district platform as well so the mou is in place the calendars are on the website and should you have any questions we're here to assist we had community members represented folks from Polk State College we had your individual Representatives some of you board members had folks joining us as well as yourselves personally so we appreciate that feedback we met twice I would say both times we had I would say at least 35 folks in attendance and it was a great

113collaboration any questions Ms Cunningham thank you just wanted to commend the calendar Review Committee I mean they're just a great bunch of folks and I know I've had a young lady on there for Holy Cow close to 18 years and she can continues to serve our community well miss June Allman um in addition to that I'm I'm noticing um is it true that are we as we go forward both in August of 23 and August of 24 there are those six days okay and it makes more sense obviously on the in August of 24 because students start on a Monday but we talked about that last time I actually asked you know having them come on a Friday but you had indicated it was a transportation thing so with us starting on a Monday is

114Rob going to be upset with us so is it the second year that it fell on them yeah so Mr Davis wanted this year this year the problem solved but he he's insistent that he would like that extra day right right um he did not win out in the second calendar committee okay all right just trying to make sure it is it will continue being the six days and are you looking forward to this continuing after that that was that was the mindset I believe of the committee moving forward is that this seemed to be a return to work schedule that seemed to make sense okay it met the needs of both parties and we look forward to presenting that for the 25-26 I believe calendar for now two years out we have 23 24

115and 24 25. that are in the back because taking it to six days we were able to pull a full release professional development day out of September and reassigned it I believe it was September we reassigned it to the start of the school year so there's less disruptions once the school year begins and I think you mentioned that the LA at the last meeting we have a more consistent calendar moving forward okay well that's great okay sir thank you very much you to all the folks that serve so diligently on that committee year after year we really appreciate your time and talent so thank you and to staff Mr Nolte yes uh thank you for all your hard work but as I go around and talk to my different teacher friends and everything I just

116keep hearing the same thing why do we go back on Friday I think I'm a little bit better educated now in it but I do hear that's the biggest thing I hear from my the teachers custodians lunchroom everybody said please when you get on the board get them to open up on a Monday so anyway thank you again for all your hard work though yes sir thank you foreign thank you very much at this time Madam chair we've been going for about an hour and a half I believe it's time for a restroom break if we could if we could take a 10 minute short recess it is 10 31 we will come back we'll do more than a 10-minute recess we'll come back at 10 45. morning again and we are officially back and

117I'll hand it back over to superintendent hide Madam chair members of the board members community and staff thank you again for allowing us that short break at this time I'd like to bring up um pardon me I had the wrong highlighted Andy I have Miss Candy Yamato senior director for my office of charter schools here to discuss preliminarily some conversation about language or literacy Academy and their renewal all yours Miss Amato today is the Sixth and final Charter renewal for this school year so we have language and literacy Academy of Learning up for their very first contract renewal this statute this slide is very familiar it was the same slide that I provided during the December work session it talks about what we can do and how we can do for Renewal and the requirements

118associated with the with the renewal process and I added this piece for cause for non-renewal or termination of Charter it is referenced as when we do not if a non-renewal is recommended or suggested these are the terms that have to be met in order to recommend that this is the review process the charter review team looks for the following things is the academic Pro is the program successful is it a viable organization and is the school faithful to the term of its Charter and when the review team is doing the process those are the three main focuses that we've we look into when we're reviewing the documentation provided by the school sorry I am freezing so so um we have here language and literacy Academy for learning the background of the school is they opened

119in 2018 they are an ESC Center School located in Winter Haven The District staff the charter review team conducted a site visit back in October and the school is requesting a 15-year contract to begin July 1st and run through June 30th of 2038. so this is a breakdown of the student performance now please know because this is their first five-year renewal they're Limited in the data that they have available language and literacy receives a school Improvement rating because they are an ESC Center School so as you can see their very first year they received a grade or School Improvement rating they were listed as unsatisfactory obviously in 1920 there was no grades issued 2021 they opted for no grade again and the 21-22 school year they did increase to maintaining this is their current demographics

120they are approved to serve 290 students and they do serve students from Peak pre-k through 12. so this is how the charter review team voted and I did provide you with the breakdown of the tally of the votes because as you can see the charter review team was kind of all over the map with some concerns and it is truly reflected and their vote so these are some of the findings and I don't want to read all of them to you word for word but some of them are extremely important and very valuable to the conversation so um some great things that we did see as they do provide the service services and accommodations are provided directly into the classroom and they provide transportation which is huge for the population of students that they serve

121they provide transportation from Lakeland to bartowed Winter Haven Haines City Davenport Auburndale Lake Wales if you know where they're located they are caddy corner from Denison middle school so they kind of are in the heart of Winter Haven so just knowing that they're reaching all of those other outskirt populations it speaks volumes to the services that they do that they do provide to their students and the physical and culture environment of the school was friendly safe and it was inviting they do submit their monthly financials and their audits as outlined in their current contract and they were extremely excited that they were renovated the auditorium they updated the front office they installed a beautiful Ada playground equipment I mean they've added three modular classrooms so they can accommodate the additional students that they serve some

122other concerns areas of concerns of findings that we did find during the 21-22 school year there were some test security concerns to the point where the assessment accountability and evaluation Department did require the school create a thorough assessment plan to ensure that security breaches would not occur again in the future just please note that the person who was handling testing at the time is no longer with the school and we have not had those concerns since then they do only have at the time at the visit they only had one ESC facilitator the charter review team felt for a school that serves 290 ESC students one ESC facilitator was not significant to provide adequate support so it was a recommendation to add a second ese facilitator when I reviewed language and literacies January board minutes

123it did appear that they have added a second Lea which is huge that's very important it was also recommended that their student-to-teacher ratio should be lower it is an ese Center school so we felt that based on having a lower significant population in the classroom would be the students would have better service in regards to the best standards this one was a huge um concern is although it is an ese Center School they do have students taking regular algebra one one-way one one b or algebra one in general and during the walk through in October it appeared that the students were only on chapter one based on our learning Maps the students should have been on chapter three there were three students who although are parentally placed there their only service of need is speech

124so the question to the review team was is that the best placement for the students we're going to circle back to this top one in regards to a high need for a certified school counselor that has since been rectified but there are additional conversations that need to be added at the time at the visit though there was not a certified counselor which is a concern in regards to providing accuracy for schedule they do serve high school students so making sure they're satisfying those graduation requirements the master schedule has significant layering of courses and grade levels it is the charter review team's recommendation to eliminate the stacking of different content areas courses and stacking of grade levels meaning Elementary and secondary in the same class period so what I mean by that is so for example

125we have a staff member here who during fifth period teaches two students access geometry three students grade four math two students grade five math four students MJ U.S history three students MJ Civics two students MJ world history and one student algebra 1A and all of those are access courses that is all in one class period And there are that's just one example of what we discovered in their master schedule that was of its huge concern for the charter review team um another major concern is in a recent grad check they do have six graduate six seniors scheduled this year um as we started uncovering their academic record we noticed um huge discrepancies in regards to the students eligibility to graduate we did call in a meeting the school responded quickly they did come within a

12624-hour notice we did have an extensive two-hour plus meeting to work through all of these concerns and again I circled back to having a certified guidance counselor on staff could have maybe helped preempt some of those concerns after the conclusion of that meeting the next day the principal did notify me they hired a guidance counselor so I think they understood the magnitude of that position um teacher certification is an ongoing concern at the school with not all certified in ese content area reading endorsement and esol endorsement there's a low percentage of Highly qualified teachers that are fully certified according to fldoe requirements again based on their January board minutes 13 teachers on their staff are considered long-term Subs and with that if you have 13 vacancies there are currently no employment opportunities posted on their

127website when you click on employment opportunities when you click on it it does take you to another link when you click on the link for employment it tells you that the link is no longer active and Jane or excuse me in October when we had our face-to-face site meeting the school had planned to purchase the current facility that they were in as of mid-January with a phone conversation with the CPA and the executive director principal they notified us that they intended to no longer try to purchase the building at that time but they were going to extend the current lease they did provide a copy of the lease the lease does have an expiration date of October 31st of 2023 upon further research based on Grace Lutheran's Church's website they have indicated that the church

128has since bought the building from the owner but language and literacy does have the option to stay through the 23-24 school year I have no other updates in regards to their future plans and or what that's going to look like for the students and the staff Financial concerns in April of 2020 that was right when the world shut down um Polk County public schools in partnership with the finance department did have to send a formal notification to language and literacy indicating that they had a negative fund balance to the tune of negative 95 000 555. um in May of 2020 the school notified the district that this they had received their very first PPP loan therefore they were no longer in the negative so Polk County Public Schools took no further action as we aren't

129obligated to at that point um the school has an ending unassigned fund balance of 2.76 percent both of their PPP loans have been forgiven language and literacy does receive supplemental revenue from Charter School Capital without access to these funds it is the district's opinion that the school's expenditures well the school's expenditures do exceed their current Revenue without access to those funds it is potential that their balance would continue to remain negative however for the remainder of the 22-23 school year Polk County Public Schools is scheduled to mail their January March April and May fefp's payment directly to Charter School Capital if warranted so from our understanding the way it was explained Charter School Capital sends those assignments ahead of time there will therefore if language and literacy does need the extra Revenue they reach out

130directly to Charter School Capital they get the money and then it's in turn paid back as needed if language and literacy does not need to access any funds from Charter School Capital if we do by chance mail the fef payment directly to Charter School capital Charter School Capital does turn around and re and send it right back to language and literacy um language and literacy did provide notification based on from their CPA that they do plan to move away from reliant on Charter School Capital however they're not looking to forecast that until the 24-25 school year their current monthly Revenue has decreased by approximately seventy five thousand dollars based on their updated October 2022 FTE reporting if the expenditures remain consistent with prior month the fund balance will be negative language and literacy provided a

13115-year Revenue projected budget as required because they asked for a 15-year contract which included Capital outlay Medicaid reimbursement and donations all of these items are subject to change and are not guaranteed Revenue for example a Medicaid reimbursement typically runs two quarters behind I'm in capital outlay funds are allocated to eligible charter schools by section 1013 establishes eligible criteria and allocations procedures and distribution of capital outlay funds to the charter schools and let's get there that gets verified every year um and those are these are the actual Capital outlay requirements that's not something we typically discuss so I did want to make sure I provided what those requirements are for you so during their in their application this is for their 15 year the length of their contract that they're requesting these would be the enrollment

132projections that they would like to add um to serving students of ese on needs now my my next slide is just to let you know is how the charter review team voted please know we had extensive conversation we had several meetings Mr Bridges did provide legal counsel in regards to what does it mean to non-renew he did provide we did have extensive conversation on what it would look like if we offered them a one-year there was extensive conversation on what is the minimum we are required to give them but at the end of the day seven voted to approve however there was a caveat that they wanted to ensure that there were some conditions and Provisions and a renewal process that would come through contract negotiations that was the only way the seven felt comfortable

133providing any type of a renewal um with the conditions being attached one member did vote to deny and then the seven that voted to approve with conditions were split between the two and the three years next steps will be um this will come back to you at the February 28th board meeting for the superintendent's recommendation and a vote and then if approved the general counsel myself and the school would move into contract negotiations if you voted to non-renew general counsel and myself would then be drafting a letter to meet statute language to notify the school of the of the board's vote to non-renew any questions thank you all right thank you very much um a couple of things uh first of all when you indicated the information regarding the curriculum and having all those different

134classes in one class um that needs to be very strictly monitored because I don't know what type of learning is happening in that environment being married to a teacher if he had to teach seven classes within one class that would be a wee bit difficult to say the least so I'm really uncomfortable with the curriculum piece that I've heard this morning and I'm going on records saying that because I think they need to do something about it secondly you indicated that there were vacancies substitute teachers that's a vacancy to me but okay it's a substitute teacher but with no plans to fill that so a couple questions number one is 13 teachers are substitute teachers out of how many total for the school so they have when I pull their master schedule they have 30

135staff members but that includes all of their therapists because students when they have therapy the students get scheduled into therapy so those the therapists do appear on the master schedule I would have to pull how many of instructionals that's what I'm asking but I'm going to assume that that substitute teaching that substitute teachers are more than half of the current academic staff that are teaching core academic classes I might be wrong but that would be a guess and that is yes if there's 30 if there's a few people on their master schedule including therapist yeah 13 are considered long-term Subs right we we have an issue there now I'm not I'm not trying to say anything negative against a long-term sub we've all had them and some are really excellent because they've been in that

136job for a number of years so I'm not saying anything it's just it's a little bit alarming that there wouldn't at least be the opportunity to hire a permanent teacher for those children and I I don't I don't know why but that's a question I would like you to ask what is their plans to move forward are they waiting for those long-term Subs to get their certificate I mean there's a myriad of questions okay because those children deserve better and that completes my questions for this morning I'm just sad to hear about that and um I'm not very favorable personally at this point in time to renew a contract um based on what I'm hearing and of course the the charter review committee's comments as well so I'll be sure to go through that when

137are we voting on this how much it'll come back to the board February 28th for the board vote in two weeks okay thank you very much Miss White thank you Mr Hyde and thank you Mr motto we um I Echo some of Miss Cunningham's concerns can you talk a little bit about the fund balance because I know if we as a school district are under a three percent fund balance we're sent into State takeover or on that path at least so what statutorily what are the requirements if their fund balance dips below three percent I'm going to refer to the finance expert Miss Jenkins who sat in on numerous meetings with us so she's very familiar Bishop was here with me next week there are recommendations for Charter Schools but they're not held to the

138same three percent compliance that we are however it is recommended that they maintain a three percent fund balance um looking forward that recommendation is because some some charter schools are owned and operated by corporations whereas they have a multitude that they can fund that answer your question yes yeah I think my biggest concern I mean aside the man seven or eight preps in one class period just sounds I I'm pretty sure I saw Stephanie's entire head roll in the back um that I I just can't even imagine teaching that many classes at once um but my biggest concern I think is the finances and that it's just not sustainable moving forward especially if going if adding in the PPP with the Forgiveness only brought them up to not even three percent um and they're not

139showing a positive Revenue in the in the future positive trend there um but I do have a lot of concerns but I look forward to seeing what my other board members have to have to say Mr Nolte I concur what my colleague said because I know it's difficult to teach one or two preps to have more than one or two preps that would be unbelievable did I hear you say that there were six openings but they're not advertised or seven so they have 13 long-term Subs right and when I looked on their employment opportunities on their website there are those positions are not posted as if they are actively searching for a full-time teacher because I would think that if they're not posted on their website that they're really not very actively looking for people

140there's so many teachers out there that I think would love to have that opportunity but I do appreciate your hard work and your colleagues hard work but that's a little big question mark in my mind but thank you Dr Allen yeah definitely uh some good discussion here and appreciate the analysis and reflecting on that the situation that you're observing in the classroom and then you note the low percentage of fully certified teachers what was the credential in that particular situation I know we we addressed the layered academic you know rigor in a sense I guess or different class um grade levels you know what what was the analysis of the certification level in a sense so and the certification of this teachers that they currently have in that particular situation yeah where this I don't

141recall the teachers I excluded names so I'd have to go back and look on my original notes um on regards to the teacher that was not following the curriculum map so to speak in chapter one chapter three is that what you're asking for specifically yeah I mean I think you know when you're saying there's a low percentage of fully certified teachers and then you unpacked that one situational analysis I was curious if that particular instructor was actually even certified is what I was asking okay I would have to go back and check the teacher's name because I didn't include that in my in my notes or in my my write-up but I do know they do have five teachers currently on their staff that are listed temporary certificate out of field and then they have

142the 13 that are long-term Subs okay um and then you know you mentioned that they did turn around and quickly hire a guidance counselor uh did we get an update uh on the budget in in regards to that expenditure thereafter so the the conversation where we met with the the school in regards to the graduates that just happened last week so no we have not received an updated budget from the CPA we did have multiple conversations when we were diving into their budget that they provided both their 15-year and their current budget and we did have a phone conference with the CPA and did provide and he we did ask for additional information however even the additional information we asked for wasn't necessarily what we needed so it was very hard to dive in to

143determine that but we do not have a new expenditure with the new guidance counselor sure okay um maybe one more oh yeah I was thinking on the building situation right so um you're looking at you know in a sense a guaranteed one-year extension on their lease but with new ownership so if we're looking at say a three or four year extension do you is there any type of plan or anything like that if that was not available to them after this next year so the the we did find out after the the charter review team voted I did find out that the building had been purchased and language and literacy was only being being provided in another year so that was information that was not available during the charter review team of vote and conversation

144that came in after the fact um we do have schools that relocate we had another situation with another school that did relocate in the middle of the summer so it does happen um but considering the population of students that they serve the ADA compliance you know the beautiful playground that they just built um those are factors that would need to be concerned they wouldn't be necessarily be able to go into just any location it would have to be something that could meet their needs so that is a question and a concern yeah but I was just wondering if there would be a potential to to hear from the new owners if they would do a multi-year contract on the property rather than a year-to-year lease but I I can't speak for the church but I

145do know at one time the church did occupy that building that they're in and it did serve as their pre-k program so I'm not sure if the church is looking to head back in that same direction but it needs to be noted as well that this information did not become available to us through the provider we became aware of the housing issue through second and third party so there is a lack of transparency here that we're also dealing with and seeking to address so you know and to your point there are different certification requirements for elementary middle and high in the case of six classrooms being taught my concern Rises not only it you can absolutely teach a three four class or four or five class or a one-two class that those combination classes happen

146all the time especially in the in the world of special education what becomes alarming is when you start infusing middle school and other courses because the certifications do become far more explicit for those content areas and not even on a temporary certificate I would find it hard to believe that they are well knowledged and well-versed in that content area and are able to differentiate at a level commensurate with that type of strategy in the classroom I I it's not possible yeah and that was that really at the core of my question yeah you know and I think to miss Amato's point we just need to go back and determine how many of those positions are instructional positions I think we'll be surprised I don't think we'll be surprised finding a large number of them are

147they're also cheaper I mean when you're looking at long-term Subs you don't have to have some of the same commitments that you do with traditional long-term employees such as benefits um and so depending on the number of days they work you can actually exclude them from from actually qualifying for benefits so but it's it's just a members game so I'm concerned about the finances concerned about the instruction concerned about their Staffing um ultimately concerned about what their location would be and I think Miss Amato answered it the best she could even if the church were to tell us today the current owner were to tell us today that yes they don't see an issue in the next two three years that could change overnight if all of a sudden they choose to open up their

148own facility and do something different for students and as you know as Florida looks to expand voucher opportunities that will become an interest of many of our parochial private entities so it would not surprise me if they were to change their mind at a later date I'm not saying they would um but these are things that we have to take into consideration um and so I think Miss Amato and her team did really had did a fabulous job evaluating the application prior to making a recommendation or bringing recommendation to me Miss Miller thank you I have a few questions and um unfortunately I haven't been out to visit yet I have been invited and I plan to go um I have several questions um I figured you would only because this model there are there

149are other model schools similar to this EOC when you call it a center school I don't want our Center School staff to watch this people need to understand that our Center Schools only teach access so we don't have Florida standards classes in our Center Schools because of the type of students we have the most significantly challenged students in Center Schools and I'm not sure if that's the makeup of this school to understand that but I but I'm I'm sure I'll plan to visit my question many of them um are on the finance end of it and so Charter School Capital when you say that that's not a parent Charter School company that is a funding source correct in the real estate world we call it hard money lending so these people aren't it's not money

150they're holding they're charging to hold that money is what I understand them to be yes they do pay interest on the money that high interest correct and so um I don't want with people with good intention trying to do good for students this is the finance end is what will end up closing a school so I have I have concerns about finances if we took let's say the long-term Subs are working but we need to find teachers for Best Practices if we put in teacher salaries into that budget what would happen how does that change the figures because then you're talking much more dollars exiting and it looks like we're struggling already I without looking at numbers I would have to probably agree with you Mrs Miller that if we replaced the long-term Subs with

151full-time certified teachers that would have a huge negative impact on the budget expenditures exceeding Revenue um when is when is this coming to us do I have time for more questions at a later date so it does need to come to the board for a vote okay on February 28th due to statutory language I want to make sure I provide you all with the correct information and have an opportunity to explain that if you all choose to non-renew we have to provide the school 90 days of notice prior to the end of the school year which will be March 1st you said with the there's some information that was found out outside of the Review Committee but you also said the votes to renew had a caveat of things can I can we have cop

152have we sent us copies of that I have not provided you the copies of that because it's not a com it's not a compiled list of all the Departments it is but we do have some from Finance we have some from ESC and we have some from certification I would like to see what your committee you know who said we're going to renew this but we'd like to see things happen I would like to see that list thank you Mr sharpless I was wondering if uh Wes could speak to this I know during the presentation it was mentioned that you had a conversation with the charter Review Committee um correct me if I'm wrong I think I heard this uh what it means for our district if we don't renew if we or versus a

153one year or two year or three year legally what what does that mean for us I was just wondering if you could recap briefly what you mentioned to the committee standard s and they basically are significant departures from environment and especially in the financial world what we've discovered through the years with with regard to Charter Schools is that you politically they are they have received some favor in in Tallahassee and nationally through the years but and and so you can you can go up if you if you wish to non-renew our terminated Charter School um that is a tough road to hoe except when the rationale for it is financial that is one area where the the State Board of Education and previously the cabinet I have have listened carefully to what districts have said

154so so we know that that it is um it is difficult when you wish to to non-renew or or to terminate a charter school so we went through that stuff pretty thoroughly and we will also go that through that pretty thoroughly when we make this presentation to the school board and I'm glad you asked the question I wanted to point out that uh you know Charter School capital is a lender they're a commercial lender and they they lend charter schools um we're all watching right now as a society as as people find themselves in financial difficulty because they're living on credit credit card companies charge you serious interest rates and it's not a question of paying back principal it's a question of whether you can pay the whether you can maintain the payment on the

155interest and I think that is a a reality that that is that is present here and if if a school is relying on borrowed Capital to maintain a fund balance I have an idea that ultimately the accountants and the Auditors are going to pull the plug on that so if if in fact this this fund balance is is based on on revenues that are that are either borrowed or non-recurring uh those those things that we're going to have to pay attention to and and in time as things unfold that that may be uh it may be a problem for the school now that said I think the one important thing to consider is the statute does talk about long-term charters and it tells you that in certain circumstances Charters are are entitled to or should

156be given long-term contracts 15 years this school does not fit under that statute so the this is one where we we have the option to look at Short shorter terms I will I will will tell you that if you if you try to renew a charter school for one year that that put you in the in the position of having to start looking at non-renewal immediately upon renewal it really does not give much time to to try to try to solve problems and improve so I think that's why the why the charter Review Committee has looked at a two and three year contracts there whether the school would would agree to that I have no idea they've asked for a 15-year contract my impression was that I don't know that there was anybody on the

157charter school Review Committee who was interested in in investing in in that length of time based on the current difficulties um Candy do you know what the current enrollment of the school is you're sitting at about 290 students 290 and if you if you look they've they've included projected enrollments they based it based their budget on projected enrollments of 350. for the next three years and going up to to 500 over the next 15. um and and so that's that's a question as well the budget that they provided did have the funds co-mingled rather than separated and we did ask the CPA to update update the budget so that the the funds were not co-mingled um just to have a better indication of the budget matches so there's there are a lot of issues here

158that have been scrutinized closely and once again there's it is a high bar if you want to terminate our non-renewal a charter school but this is one where there are enough questions enough enough red flags I guess if you will that have run up the flagpole that that suggested it's worth closely monitoring and and making hard decisions based on on facts and trying to get emotion out of the out of the conversation as much as possible you know but we yeah we'll we'll have a more in-depth presentation about about the the the factors that that go into it and if you have uh and several of the board members have been through non-renewals and terminations before and have seen the the gyrations and the difficulties that are associated with that the costs um both in

159terms of money and in terms of political capital so we'll have those conversations very carefully but if you if you wish to give me a call and and then go through individual questions and circumstances I'd certainly be open to that and I got one additional question for superintendent Hyde will this be brought back at the work session on the 28th or straight to the board meeting all right thank you okay my mic is on I believe thank you I just a couple questions um the I didn't realize they were only at 290 right now do we expect that they'll have more than a 20 increase by next school year because it looks like they're projecting 350 for the 23 24 year based on the fact that they do provide transportation I think that you know

160where they're they're eliminating the transportation as a barrier for the population of students that they serve um I it is feasible to say they could potentially reach the 350. okay is that their current enrollment cap is 350. no their current enrollment cap is 290. okay so it would come back to us again for an increased enrollment Gap if the contractor if the application is approved and it goes through contractor negotiations and they come back at 350 that would be their that would be their cap okay thank you um the other thing I just wanted to mention is that the I think it was Dr Allen that asked about the organization that bought the building if they'd be interested in leasing back they came out with a pretty excited statement this week about being able to

161expand their classrooms at their school to be able to have increased security making a new office suite they're already working on designs I believe of how they're going to be using that building as soon as they gain access back to it um so it sounds at least from the murmurings in the area that that will be unlikely because they've got some big plans over there so that's all I had oh that was a speak about the charter school Capital funding and and the question of whether they were relying on on borrowed money to reach their their end fund balance and to talk about the enrollment as well Chris Miller I have a question that the chair brought up with building so we've had another charter school with similar issues finding a building and in the

162end the students once it gets out that there's not a building in place or different than other we've had one charter school have a building fund raise capital and and had the plan to the public that they're going to go here they're going to build their building and they've done that another Charter I've sat here and heard their intent for a building it never happened and slowly kids started leaving that school until they were less than probably 15 even enrolled so what is what are the rules with Charter maintaining or securing the building within that contract period unfortunately there isn't a requirement they have to notify us 30 days prior to school starting where they're going to locate and provide us a copy of the new lease can you remind you don't have to name

163the school can you remind the school me what happened to that school that could not are they even are they even around anymore yes so the school that you're referencing dead landed location they did have to delay their start at school they started after Labor Day but they are fully functioning and okay good they have students but there's no what's that what's their student their student calculation population is around 17 18. students students yes okay that's a concern for for building what I can ask later thank you Mr model you're in the clear there are no further questions or comments all right I'm running I would still recommend that we go ahead and take our scheduled break we will have lunch from 12 to 1 and then we will go to closed session if I

164recall correctly we'll return to open we will then immediately subsequent or subsequently go into closed session for attorney-client session and then we'll come back at approximately 1 30. to finalize the two last excuse me the three last topics before us today in today's Workshop so with that being stated we can conclude we can go to CL we can thank you welcome back to our Valentine's work session for February 14 2023 and we will now recess this meeting to go into our attorney-client privilege session I believe West you have to give a little Spiel yes ma'am is that correct thank you madam chair we announced earlier at the last meeting that the the need for an attorney-client session pursuant to Florida statute 286.011 which says that the school board can meet privately with its Council to

165discuss matters that are currently in litigation for the purposes of settlement negotiation and litigation strategy there are two matters that I wish to bring to your attention I think that this should be fairly fairly quick um right as we've as we've gone over before these meetings are closed to the public but we do have a court reporter we should be having a court reporter they're moving her okay then we need to I'll wait to finish that until she gets here thank you and we have concluded our attorney-client privilege privilege session and we will be moving on to the rest of our work session agenda superintendent Hyde are they on their way back I think they're also working on reloading them because it's only two pages so I was in the process of sending a message

166to Mr Bellows and to Heather Jenkins requesting Mr Bellas mm-hmm everybody got yes the hard copies right okay so we just can't see any other s Jason could you get with Miss Jenkins right away um in the board in the board docs only one school is reflected for each board member we need all of their schools thank you you can address it when you address the board I swear my mic's not on it means because it's on there we go okay all right Madam chair members of the board staff members and I don't community members thank you for being here at this time we'll resume our Open session for Workshop um under budget and Staffing the first item we had before us is the school Staffing plan Updates this will be presented by Mr Bellows

167senior manager for Staffing and finance and Heather Jenkins associate superintendent and our Chief Financial Officer Mr Bello's there's been some questions from the board let's start with that each one of them had an attachment here in board docs but it only reflects one of their schools do you want to address that and when they can expect to see a copy of each one of their schools it should bring up a drop down and then you should be able to change the school Within the document itself hopefully if it's a PDF and it won't work okay so we can yeah so it has to be in the Excel form so we can get that fixed for you but you should have a paper copy of it okay so that's all the attachment is thank you we'll

168get the file I miss miss Winchester we'll send the file on my way after the board members okay as Mr Hyde pointed out I'm the senior manager of Staffing Mike for those of you who may not know we handle all the school allocations um and then also position control for the entire District uh so the very first title slide I have on there that all intended Staffing allocations are dependent on available funding it's super important to know obviously we have this idealistic Staffing model but everything is dependent on funding and how much money we do actually have available to us I know Mr Pitts when he's presented before said that one teacher at every single one of our schools is almost 10 million dollars so that's kind of what I just wanted to free state

169for all of you that you know it's the magnitude of Staffing is pretty pretty big in most cases so um also as we move forward we're going to talk about how we're in a little bit of Uncharted Territory for polt not necessarily for everyone because some school districts are currently doing what we're enacting yes ma'am okay sure based on budget but there are guidelines for Staffing allegations correct so we can't say you don't get staff because we have no doubt correct okay well that's what I heard I apologize yeah no I apologize no so it correct we have you know class size laws and there are certain requirements that we have to meet um but we do have you know in Staffing plan every single and even previous models of our staffing plan do say

170that it is based on funding but we'll talk about that as we go through and then um as I was saying we are kind of venturing out um with new models that we're taking on and then obviously revamping our current model uh so we are still trying to develop as we go uh so there are things that I might present that may change in the future but this is the road map and where we're trying to get to eventually so the first slide this is the Staffing plan document should have been provided to you in the PDF form so the entirety of the Staffing plan I'm not going to show it in the slide because it's I think 40 pages it used to be 80. so we Consolidated it but there are certain changes in

171the beginning that are just these first few bullet points like formatting changes removal of Watermark pictures miscellaneous pictures consistency in the headings and the in different sections so updating years throughout those are just General changes and updates that we would have needed to make and the main changes that are actually going to that we're going to talk about a little further are going to be the appeals process and then the singly singularity model Staffing plan so those are what the next slides are about but the first few on here are just kind of updates and and realigning the Staffing plan since it kind of hasn't been revised in a while to just what we're currently practicing so the first one they're going to talk about is the removal of the appeals process so historically we've

172evaluated enrollment changes at reappointment time when we're projecting for the next year and that's pretty much it until Eighth Day so then once Eighth Day Count comes we re-evaluate the actual enrollment that's arrived at the school we make any adjustments we may need to and then don't revisit it at all throughout the entire year so the way that the schools would advocate for positions were through an appeals process it's very lengthy it's cumbersome and a lot of times if position is appealed for it may not get even a decision until two three weeks out just on the nature of the process so we're moving to a new process where we're going to reevaluate the Staffing at different points in the year once at reappointments for projections for next year again at Eighth Day similar to

173what we have been when the enrollments have been confirmed and then again at survey 2 which is usually after winter breaks we're going to try and follow an FTE model and we'll kind of get a little bit more into that in the later slides why we're going to go that route but um at these times and like I said since we've always kind of had the appeals process we're going to reevaluate how we go about actually letting the schools advocate for those positions but those will be the certain times when we're going to be looking at uh enrollment changes if I may Michael let me interject here for a moment board members please please don't misconstrue the fact that there are still opportunities for schools to receive or retain existing staff those conditions will persist

174as we continue to expand Academy programs so for example if we were to add a new Academy program to a high school or to a middle school that would come with additional Staffing they would receive that Staffing enhancement for three years this is the proposal that we've provided and at the end of that third year they must have the FTE to sustain the program we're not talking about students moving from within the school into the academy that's not the same thing they must market and attract new students to that campus by Virtual School transfers that would then make the program sustainable over time it doesn't mean students within the same school cannot apply to the academy and attend but at the end of three years if the if the FTE has not grown to match

175the Staffing allocation then they will lose those staff and historically that's not been our case we continue to put staff into schools with in the entire time our intent has been to grow academies and yet we've actually had academies decline in enrollment but retain large numbers of additional staff that other programs do not benefit from who's Cunningham five more from internally if the school is able to open up their enrollment for five more does that accomplish the goal as long as the enrollment for the campus grows campus grows correct okay because the academy program cannot simply just take students from within the school campus I understand then enough okay all right thank you there are other opportunities for schools for example as I mentioned earlier today with Haines City with Haines City's projected growth over

176the next two years while they may on paper due to decline due to their current enrollment appear to lose administrative staff and or a guidance counselor we would retain them there for the next two years to support that school body and population that we know is going to grow into those Portables until they can be reassigned into the new high school it's just it's a common sense approach to how do we staff schools but to Mr Bello's point one of the problems that we had as a school district was we've had Legacy programs and Legacy enhancements to schools and with with very little follow-through at the end we also in our previous School allocation model if you were if you were given a dean of discipline the high school for example was allowed to convert

177that to an assistant principal's position but then the school district had to pay that difference there was no request there was no appeal it simply said if I choose to do this the school district will pay the difference and that's what happens is so we convert positions and then five years later we get a new administrator and then lo and behold they say well I didn't get the same Staffing as everybody else yes you did but historically other people have cashed in those positions and converted them into new roles we're not going to keep funding that so this is basically our ability to right size and reevaluate every Campus based off their actual ft enrollment or special specificity of needs clearly El students special education students receive additional enhancements due to the specificity of their

178nature of their disability and or supports that are required so so we exclude them traditionally from from the conversation but I didn't want anybody to walk away saying there's no way for a school to get additional staff because that's simply not the case it's just we've taken away a very cumbersome appeal process that we had embedded previously that went through the Regionals it went through everyone else and quite frankly I think at times put schools at odds with each other because there's only so many available positions due to our budget so Miss Wyatt I'm sorry Miss Miller that's from a previous Miss Wyatt so as you talk about the FTE for I understand the goal is to be able to have the FTE dollars to support additional units what happens if we're looking at they're

179attracting them from XYZ Academy now they're going to PDQ Academy will you we will we be looking at where the enrollment is based on because obviously if if you have the students to support the academy even if they came from within the high school it may be a different Academy that needs to lose units so is that process being built in okay thank you it'll look systemically it would also look internally okay thank you Mr sharpless um are we looking at weighted FTE specifically um or in our CTE programs since they're bringing in more dollars are they in our staffing plan or is that is that um factored in at all no we base it off of the base FTE allocation because there's no guarantee of the waiting that's commensurate with student completion for example

180just like with ap we get additional the teacher gets additional dollars in funding for their classroom if the students pass with a commensurate score there's no way to and we cannot budget assuming everyone will pass and So based off that we go based off of the actual FTE allocation okay thank you Dr Allen so you know the language on the um previous appeals process inefficient and cumbersome a lengthy how many did we typically have um and every school would ask for something yeah yeah so there's no longer so that window from reappointments which happens in March to the eighth day so there's not an opportunity to appeal moving forward so there's there's two other opportunities that occur within both budget com and Datacom but those aren't those are not included in the appeals process and

181you and I discussed those at the other day okay all right I think that's all I have and I'll clarify Datacom is when schools will come and share their school's performance in their performance indicators if a school says and comes and says at that time that they believe um let's say a school has seen a 42 percent Improvement in overall third grade reading proficiency from the Baseline assessment to the mid-year assessment of that FSA um and they believe that they could see further Improvement if they could reduce their class size and get another reading interventionist they'd have to provide data at that time in real time to justify the request moving forward everything has to be justified based off actual data and information related to the program related to student specificity of needs and we

182are prioritizing where those dollars will go some some requests are just that I request I it's a wish list others are absolutely directly tied to student outcomes and student academic performance and or behavioral needs and so those would get prioritized over others mm-hmm yeah and I I think in this one just and I I appreciate the the model I was just curious where you may have a leader you know school-based admin that could you know based on their experience see that well that projection is going to change it's going to go up right so then they cut units right in a sense our units are cut and maybe they've lost uh you know a great teacher in a sense so then when that eight day count comes they're they're based on their experience they knew

183that you know if you if you get what I'm saying on this situation so what I don't want us to do is leave admins um in a place where they've lost teaching units and uh I do and then trying to get those units back at the eight day count go ahead Heather if I may um when we do our initial projections but we work with a large team of individuals and that includes the Regionals and our Deputy superintendent of instruction we look at several years prior we also look at potential growth we work with our student information system we work with facilities and then Mr Bellows comes up with the projection once we have those we go over them with the Regionals who have been in contact with their principals and he sets the allocations

184based on that at the Eighth Day account we that's our double check to make sure did we have extra growth in one area or less growth than another and the way the appeals process had worked before it was an email system so the principal would fill out an appeal it would go to the principal or go to the regional then it would go to Mr Bellows he would pull a lot of data together and then distribute it to an appeals team which is why it took so long um in order for us to have everything we needed so now what we're going to do is we will pull the numbers based on enrollment and we will do an initial projection and then we'll pull that team together all at once to discuss what needs to

185be added shifted moved to kind of clean it up and make sure that we're more efficient with it and of course if we have exponential growth mid-year that's absolutely something we'll take a look at mm-hmm yeah no I appreciate the the energy on this I'm I'm curious where will we be able to see how many moving forward if like with this new process um at the a day count how many um lost units and then how many had to bring units back and do we have that from last year we do track that yeah yes sir okay but we very seldom do we retract positions at the at count and move them and that's something our school district has not been comfortable doing so you could have let me give you a different example you

186could have three again we assumed based off of um my you know personal opinion personal reflection that I'm going to need three kindergarten teachers and each one of those kindergarten classrooms opens up and each have 10 students in them we would absolutely under normal circumstances and most school districts would do this at eight day count they would eliminate one of those positions and transfer it to another school that had that does require another position we have not historically done that yeah as a school district and that's why we are largely over staffed across the entirety of the district other times the numbers don't make sense to consolidate and to move because the numbers are too tight you don't really have the ability you end up with very small class sizes across three or four sections

187of teachers but there's not enough students there to stay under the class size cap or we may feel for that school in particular given their circumstances we don't want to constrict those again that does but at the same time we're adding more positions elsewhere so as a school district we've got to put some controls in place and with respect to our building administrators I think the process that they've defined is a far more thorough process which looks at historical data looks at actual enrollment and will allow us to allocate our resources best that way in real time and so for example Miss Castle's Department as as her she provides a lot of ancillary services to students through the leas they're assigned to either an individual school or multiple schools depending on their caseload we have

188flexed up to nine positions this year knowing that that the number of students we need to service will grow but those individuals positions have not been fully filled yet and as the needs arise we will fill the position and reassign them to a caseload of students so it just makes more sense but from a budgeting perspective those nine positions will be there and if they're not utilized they go back into the general budget at a later date to offset additional costs elsewhere again I've recognized the challenge I mean we talked about this yesterday that you know we are the second fastest growing in the State of Florida within the last two years next to Miami-Dade so ten thousand increase for them 5 000 for us so I definitely understand and and see that so I

189appreciate um the new system here Miss fields I had a couple of questions one of them you made the statement that we are largely over staffed can you elaborate on that please I can't um we do not have a large significantly large number of our classroom sections that are at or exceeding class size and so if you were to look across the system in its entirety again in individual classrooms it may not seem or individual schools the numbers are not there but when you look at sixth grade in its entirety when you look at a grade level in its entirety and a number of students are being served by the number of Staff the average class size ratio makes it seem as if we could actually consolidate more positions but because these students exist in

190Pockets across the district and different schools we can't consolidate those students but we are overstaffed as a school district and this is where zoning and other factors have to be addressed so that we can maximize our Roi we are operating schools well under their overall capacity and we have other schools that are well over their capacity by redistributing those students the average would change for those individuals and we could consolidate staff in a much more meaningful way and reallocate them differently which would allow us to better serve our students in the end so that's the best explanation I can give you I can give you some examples of schools for example we have schools we have one right down the street Stevens where the average class size is considerably smaller than it is in other

191commensurate elementary schools now part of that is we have a comfort with that because we also know that we can get more one-on-one attention with those students in a smaller classroom environment but it's not this it's not the same as another class we could easily consolidate some of those grade level classrooms and free up a position but we made a conscious decision this year not to do that to better support those students and their needs given their data and the history of the academic performance on that campus so I hope that's making sense so when you look at the total number of students by the total number of teachers yes we are overstaffed based off the ratio but again the way our way they were zoned and the way we support our campuses um some

192campuses are much closer to the class size cap and some campuses are much lower than the class size count it does make sense and I was basically going to say that it all depends on the area and what is necessary to uh to benefit the students so uh thank you for that answer that's why we think that's why we think this process works is it allows us to address students in real time in their needs and again I don't want that's why I tried to clarify and I'm sorry if it's it's become a belabored conversation here in just in slack too but I don't want people walking away saying schools cannot appeal for additional staff they can however there's a different process in place now and it's actually going to be better streamlined and it'll

193be done much earlier in the school year versus much later but to your point Dr Allen none of us want to wait till eight day count if we're watching numbers climb and we know we're going to need an additional kindergarten section that's typically where we see a lot of change we want to do that earlier because the longer we allow students to sit in that classroom the more disruptive it becomes for the families if I get complaints and you would not think that you get complaints about adding staff to a school but you do because my child has been with that teacher now for two or three weeks maybe four weeks depending on the hiring cycle and how long it takes us to add a teacher to a to a campus and now I have

194to take two classrooms that are oversized and somehow pick a group of students out of those classrooms to move into a new teacher's classroom we always ask for volunteers you do not get the number that you need and then you start asking students to move and parents rightfully so call and email and say why does my child have to move why can't somebody else's child move but somebody has to move and over time it's it typically resolves itself our principals do a very good job actually of managing this process but it does become a disruption for our family so the sooner we can recognize that a school is on a trajectory where they're going to exceed their class size and we need to pop I call it popping a section right they qualify for an

195extra unit we want to make that happen as quickly as we can so it's the least disruptive transition for everyone foreign and I have Miss Miller sorry ma'am I'm I'm changing a little bit but it has to do with this so and I know this has to do with size what's a half of media specialist so schools have the opportunity to either fund the rest of the media specialist so a full library media specialist position with Title 1 funds or it will turn to a media para but they we allocate 0.5 so they have that flexibility those have the principles have negotiating power and discretionary units because some have zero but I a couple of these schools from their academics side I would if I was the principal I would want a discretionary unit to

196push in support when needed so the allocation of a discretionary is right so if you have a lower enrolled school but they're high need how do we feel that support it'll have to be on a case-by-case basis but if they don't meet the need for a discretionary or if they don't meet the enrollment threshold for a discretionary unit then they wouldn't be allocated a discretionary unit but we do have lower enrolled schools with high levels of need superintendent those are also addressed through title one they're also addressed through D.A so if that school is a D.A school they're required additional supports and interventions that have to be provided so they do get those enhancements by virtue of that I also get additional allocation of Title One funds okay so I'm hoping that's where we can

197make it up because if I was a principal trying to avoid da I would not want to not have a discretionary unit that answers my question thank you well I so let's that's an interesting topic and I think it's worth exploring more quite frankly a discretionary unit is not going to have the impact that many of us believe it's going to have because the sheer number of students who require additional intervention in our supports is going to be incredibly large so you have to look at students and differentiate them based off of where their actual skill set needs are and and how frequent that intervention has to be provided so a discretionary unit is is read to do it we allocate units based off academic performance needs not necessarily just by like we provide a

198standard through enrollment but then those schools to your point that are academically fragile receive additional enhancements through other means for example Miss Barnes and her team do an amazing job of evaluating the school's performance and adding coaches interventionists and other positions to make sure that they have their actual number of resources they need to be impactful but if you have a school with 600 kids you have one reading interventionist they're just not going to get the support and intervention that they that they deserve on a daily basis or a regular basis to make a difference can we can they use discretionary units to hire like we used to do the I don't know what we call them the permanent substitute instead of pulling instead of pulling support teachers or inclusion inclusion teachers to cover classrooms

199where we had the permanent sub at the school is that a discretionary unit or can that be funded some other place see what I'm saying so the only thing that we use discretionary units for are interventionists coaches guidance counselors and then Deans so the schools should have their own sub budget the uh The Substitute budget is that it's been maintained district-wide for several years um prior to my arrival here we used to actually charge the schools whenever they had a substitute so now we using Kelly Services have a a district-wide management of that there are certain schools we have a pilot sub that that's what we call them pilot size which is your at school we have a process for that it's um we we go through an evaluation to look at how many absences

200they've had how many absences they typically run the ability to fill that position through Kelly and if it's feasible we can add that positions to to mitigate the situation do we add that or is it a employee through Kelly that serves as a pilot sub or it's it's an it's one of our employees can you send me what that requirement is because I'm interested because I think schools would I hear because of my background I hear way too many calls of these kids got no inclusion hours because I've got to cover other classrooms and I don't know that our schools are asking for pilot Subs do you know what I mean it's not something that we've done prevalently right was done more so in the past I'd be interesting what getting away with ese to

201find out how many inclusion hours in some of our schools that were not getting based on support needed for other rooms because that might Define the need for the pilot sub thank you you're good Mr Phillips okay so the next one is a shift from differentiating the allocations between elementary middle and high to more of a like a singularity model I've coined it um so whereas one Elementary School who's at a thousand might not ever get another assistant principal just based on the old Staffing plan you have a high school that's at a thousand that might get three so we've reallocated the units based on enrollment alone instead of differentiating between elementary middle and high and then the thresholds are there on the slide so the next one assistant principal twos so they've been removed

202from the Staffing plan and they'll no longer be allocated to the schools this mostly impacts middle schools because those were directly allocated and then as Mr Hyde mentioned Deans were typically allowed to convert to an ap2 but they will no longer be applicable for that situation Mr Bells please explain where they're going and why so we are reallocating the admin staff to the elementary schools because historically the elementary school has never got an additional AP despite their enrollment so you have schools that are over like I said a thousand that only had one AP so now we're redistributing those units throughout the entire District to make it more Equitable among all of the different schools so the ap2s did not have any authority to do any evaluations so they were essentially still a dean and

203operating in the dean capacity so they couldn't operate as an assistant principal with specifically evaluations so by eliminating the ap2s and in essence elevating them to an AP one they now have that AP status to be able to conduct those evaluations and assist in the actual admin at the school uh secretarial units those will be different but there's no change the allocation we're just identifying what their responsibilities are so every single secretary either was a principal secretary or a school-based secretary and then we identified the different months we're changing them now so they will have a specific job description for a finance Secretary of 11 months a registrar for 12 months which was historically RTO terminal operators and then we also had the school-based 10-month secretaries so for our specialized programs we've removed the programmatic

204Staffing so what that means is the Staffing plan identified that regardless of your enrollment at a specialized so your IBS your cambridges your cfaas your Summerlin regardless of what your enrollment is you would get this number of units this number of APs this number of teachers but it didn't matter what their enrollment is so we've eliminated that and we're saying each of them will automatically get ahead of program or the head of school for IB or a commandant for Summerlin they'll get a school-based 10-month secretary and then um that says two it should be one one Clinic LPN at the campus is over one mile from the home school for situations like your cfaa um and we're almost to the programs in conjunction with the home school will determine the units earned so for example

205you're going to combine your school a and then your school aib and if that earns you four counselors then four counselors will be allocated to the school and then this principal will have the flexibility to say I want two of you to work half time for School a and then the other half for school a IB or they could say one full counselor will go to school a or school aib and then the rest of you will be school a just the general population so the principals will then have that flexibility to use whatever allocation is earned through the combined enrollment the principal okay thank you yes ma'am because Ms Cunningham they're using their existing allocation I got it just want to be clear people listening so this slide just basically shows that we're no

206longer automatically allocating these units to these programs these are the ones that were only listed in the Staffing plan so if one was left out it just means it was not specified which is another reason why we're going through this process and making everything equal and Equitable um just because it doesn't say that they're not going to be automatically allocated a counselor does not mean they won't be allocated one it's just gonna be based on enrollment for the entire School so where we see Bartow IB would have automatically regardless of enrollment been given one AP 11 month a 10-month secretary a resource specialist or guidance counselor an 11-month secretary um and then a certain amount of units even if they only had 100 students so now we're changing that to say whatever your enrollment is

207that you generate you're going to get your head of program or your head of school and your um that should actually say a 10-month secretary but a secretary Talent secretary and then whatever you generate moving forward with your enrollment unless the administration chose to flex a position over to provide additional supports correct Miss Wyatt so if a school has multiple of those programs is there a minimum enrollment for each program to have the head of school position so right now the head of school program is has already been capped so there's one per high school at this time who because of the conversation we had with the with the board um that we landed at a head of school or had a program for Bartow IB and because of Summerlin Academy they were retained a

208commandant so it is different but they also have a head of program correct they have a separate head of program that oversees all other academies and Career Tech Ed programs and so does Haines City has the same setup with the head I don't recall Haines cities Mike Mr Bellas is saying so every yes every high school should have it so the IBS still have a head of school and a head of program but Cambridge just get ahead of program that's not my it's not my recollection at all okay Mr Bellas because that's what the sheets are saying yes so every High School will get had a program for their academies regardless of whether they have an IB a Cambridge or a cfaa then the additional program of the cfaa or the IB regardless of what

209campus is at we'll also get ahead of program to oversee that program so these then may not be completely accurate is what I'm no these let me rephrase this these are accurate this is specifically for the program so for Winter Haven Cambridge They will receive ahead of program and a 10-month secretary they also receive which is not reflected here because we're not talking this is only for Cambridge as a school they also received that 11-month AP who oversees all other Academy programs so they still get that programmatic enhancement that the board agreed to last year okay but there it's listed as an AP for some schools and ahead of program for other schools at a program we reserved for Cambridge for IB and for Summerlin those were the three programs that the board agreed because

210you wanted a different we wanted a different title right I just when you look at the spreadsheets it says head of school or had a program for like Bartos has a head of school for IB they have a head of program and a commandant that could that could have been an error on our part had a program it is at cfaa head of school should be at Winter Haven for Cambridge if I recall correctly for the IBS we use head of school and then head of program would be for all the other programs listed it's how we have it we can change correct we can change it for consistency it shouldn't change yeah but what I'm saying is that the spreadsheets that we received show that the IBS have a head of school for their

211IB program and ahead of programs for their academies okay so these are not accurate I spoke too soon they do but so does Winter Haven okay because that's not reflected in there for the winter Havens that shows they only have ahead of pro one head of program which would be their IB so the spreadsheets that you have don't consider the IB programs so it's only looking at the program is what's on their Academy they only consider Ivy okay yeah so yeah so your specialized programs on the actual Excel sheet because we're limited with our Excel sheet it's not going to reflect the two that you get for IB also so it does say head of school IB and how does that reflection on the on the Excel sheet Cambridge correct okay no that's why we'll

212make the corrections then we'll yeah we'll make the corrections I didn't realize that I had added that on there for IB I'm I'm thrilled that it's just a technical error yes you don't want the technical air there was a lot going on we spent a lot of time adhering to the directions of the board you know the ap2s it's really important for us to elevate them and move them to the AP1 um because otherwise really when you think about it if they can't evaluate staff they are exactly the same as a dean there there is no difference between the two of them because a lot of your ap2s are still doing they are not doing necessarily they're doing some academics but they're doing a lot of discipline as well so elevating mtap1 we get we

213actually get a better I would say a better pipeline for future leadership as well because now they're having to evaluate instruction provide feedback learn how to coach others and Mentor which is a skill set that many of them otherwise would not be able to develop because they're not put in that position where they could so so those are the workups um as we discussed a little bit uh just to note again several factors May contribute to some descriptions you might see uh so funding appeals to mysterious decisions enrollment changes uh the specialized programs all of those even though it says what they were allocated in school year 23 which is what we're currently in it may not be accurate it's just what the intended allocation would be with the basic the current Staffing plan and

214then shows the changes of what it would look like if we were to follow exactly what the next Staffing plan so it's just to show the differentiation between the allocations so the next piece of this is a site-based model so it's a pilot program that we're using for six of our schools and it's to shift from the district way of us telling them here's what your enrollment is this is what you're going to get to now we're saying here's how much FTE you've generated this is how much money you've generated you're going to tell us what you want so it's giving the schools the opportunity to the principals to be their own CEO of their own campus so it gives them the flexibility so all of the changes that we've talked about up to this

215point are kind of helping pave the way for everyone to eventually end up at the site-based model so historically we've been District based which is where we tell them you have a thousand students so you're going to get this this this and this based on the Staffing plan um but we're going to shift the site base which is going to be the funding that's actually generated through your FTE so there are a few differences obviously the flexibility of the school level to allocate the units based on the individual individual needs at the schools since we're so large this we recognize that the Staffing plan may not work for one school like it does for another school so this will help alleviate that it'll help the schools actually see their available budget how much they're they're

216generating so it gives us a lot more transparency um it will follow the same timelines as the Staffing model currently so we'll true up the funds essentially at survey two um similar to how we would verify the enrollment with the current Staffing plan but it's it's looking at actual FTE instead so that's one of the main things that's going to be FTE versus our enrollment so as most of you know schools funding is generated by FTE they're weighted differently so a gen ed student receives a weight of 1.126 for Polk County which equates to approximately forty four hundred dollars per student if you have a matrix level five student they receive a weight of 5.4 which placed approximately 21 000 per student so those variances in those FTE Generations will actually be visible and usable

217at the school level with the new site-based model and it'll be up to the discretion of the principal uh so another example why the shift from enrollment to FTE is prevalent because we have in some instances where a student may be enrolled at two different campuses and enrollment would count that as two so one at one school and one at the other so it's one full student where they may only be at the school half time so your FTE would count it as 0.5 whereas enrollment would count it as one so it would be a lot more proficient in being able to determine the needs of the school based on the actual FTE at that school Ms Miller I have a question before you get too far away from it this is something I think

218is very positive for schools who complain that there's just cookie cutter that they don't fit into here's my concern you just set a 255 Matrix gets 21 000 a student in my years of community advocacy I could pull site-based budgets where that money did not go to that student and so I know it goes to the whole this is a big shift to what we were doing I just want to make sure there's oversight for the dollars flowing into a school that they are used not only to fill areas of testing needs but to meet the needs of the diverse population that those principles have and I don't know that we've always and we may have because I know we've changed how we train and give support we haven't always trained principals in that and

219so some of them struggle with how to use those funds to differentiate in population so my question is these are site-based budgets or site-based selections who is is the Regionals oversight who is the oversight of this it will be the Regionals to assist the schools but we have specific instruction for the schools to communicate with each necessary department so the very first we'll we'll get into it but the very first slide on the actual Excel spreadsheet that they're going to be using to determine their allocations is ESC and it instructs them they must meet with their either ese senior manager or the ESC Department to determine what those needs at that campus really are because it looks different everywhere sure yeah and they cannot cash in certain positions I want to make sure we're clear

220on this while principals administrators will have some flexibility with their overall Staffing allocation there will be expectations that are set that for example there's a there's a minimum number of ELA teachers they have to hire a minimum number of Math teachers a minimum number of el teachers and so they'll go through that spreadsheet and then there'll be additional dollars that are provided to them that they can then or positions that they may be able to flex and you know and Miss Miller raises a very good point sometimes we see that number for the weighted FTE for a student and a school says well I get every one of those dollars you don't because in many instances we provided Terence services and supports for those students that the district has to then subsequently pull some of

221those dollars to offset those operating costs occupational therapy Physical Therapy speech therapy you know behavioral interventionists I mean all of those nurses become quite crucial for us to make sure that we can allocate those funds adequately to provide all the services that that student needs so a school would not simply say oh wow I got twenty one thousand dollars for Fred that's not how it works they get a portion of that based off what the district's operating costs are for some of the positions that support him or her overall I think this is a great change template it doesn't work for them my concern is that need has been consistent of a app the application of the dollars so thank you for clarifying who's responsible for that Miss Cunningham thank you um I can't tell

222you how many years I have been asked and requested that we get to this point for those of our Educators out there that are principals and our leaders they say Hey you entrust me you give me the building you give me the students you give me the resources but my hands are tied how I allocate those resources because every school is different every campus is different every need is different based on the students so I just want to say thank you this is so refreshing when I was reading through this last night I just thought that was amazing and I'm going to ask as we move on how you got to how you chose those six schools as Pilots because I thought that was interesting too they're all over the board so to speak but

223I think it's great I think if we hire individuals to be our principal leaders in our schools you know it's kind of like a mini CEO of their company and they need to be given the resources and the ability to allocate those based on their individual needs and their student population so I just want to say this is awesome I understand it's going to be piloted right for this coming year and then as we go through you know and learn what worked and what didn't then perhaps are we looking to take this system-wide is that what I'm hearing yes ma'am oh man so awesome so awesome thank you sir just wanted to commend everybody up with this I I've been saying that for years so whoever came up with it it's amazing it has been

224an effort of love for many of us okay Mr Green and I were very fortunate um to be in a school district when we were administrators that did this that did this so you understand so we had a great deal of flexibility and being in a title one setting you know I I had extra dollars I had essay you know supplemental academic instruction and I had other funds I'd title dollars so I was able once I filled all of my required positions yes sir I was able to get quite creative with how I wanted to best address the intervention strategies on my campus some monies were spent on tutoring some monies were spent elsewhere we did some things with with substitutes for example every teacher you know once a month the entire department would get

225half a day off to come in and co-plan with their coach and we would Flex the subs throughout the day and it just took a lot of coordination but dollars dollars had to come from somewhere and they you know they were really appreciative of that because they felt like they were being treated as professionals they got extra planning time a half a day of planning um so I think a lot of us come back with that mindset and that perspective how do we Empower our building administrators and this helps us get away from those the double ask right I get an allocation now I feel like I have to allocate I feel like I have to develop a compelling argument so now we're giving you flexibility within your budget to say okay how do you

226best want to approach your and problem solve with the understanding that you're going to be ultimately irresponsible you know the decisions you make um you live or die by but that's why the Regionals and that's why every and to Michael's Point Mr Bella's Point excuse me they'll meet with every single Department that signs off so they'll meet with special educational meet with ell they'll meet with everyone careertech Ed and academies that way everyone has their eyes on it and can support them during this initial transition period so that we don't make mistakes that are going to cost us in the long run I just want to come you Mr Hyde and Mr Green for just doing a tremendous job because I can tell you how many years I understand and I mean but leadership starts

227at the top I think they thought we were crazy when we first started talking probably probably Mr Bellas has had to reinvent the wheel that's for sure well it's going to be appreciating you wait till you start hearing information come in from your principal leaders out there because this is something that I know I've personally been asked for at least 10 if not more years so kudos to everybody involved I it's going to be so well received so thank you for being Innovative and looking outside the box so we appreciate it Miss fields I had a similar question to Miss Cunningham I wanted to know whose idea this was and you've answered that and then my other question is leadership of the schools have they been involved in it at all or how how have

228you guys uh brought them to the table yes ma'am this has been an ongoing conversation with our site-based administrators there's a lot of excitement and enthusiasm they knew that we were going to Pilot it and slowly roll it out I think many of them are waiting anxiously because you know with with anything new there's there's going to be something that they find that's really enjoyable and then other moments of frustration like why did I ask for this do I I'm taking on more responsibilities but I would leave you know Mr Bellows and Miss Jenkins do you want to highlight I mean we've talked about it in principles meetings we've talked about in other areas we selected a pilot program as was aware of it so I would say we've done a pretty good job communicating

229conveying it to them and if it were not a sincere interest on behalf of many of our schools as you know many of them are kind of requested this type of flexibility then we may have gone in a different direction but this is something they're excited about and I feel very strongly that this empowers them as Leaders on their campuses because they're not cookie cutter and while the cookie cutter approaches how do we give them positions internally they then need to problem solve and figure out how to best place those positions to elicit an outcome or an expectation for students so but Mr Bellows is Miss Jenkins is there anything else you'd like to add as far as other information we've shared with building principles and yes so we've actually provided training to them on

230how to work the spreadsheet and they've done their own calculations with a sample school with sample FTE so they've been through the process essentially for a sample school and they've had the opportunity to to play around with the spreadsheet and see what their allocations might look like if they had that exact population so it seems like it was like he said well received and exciting for them Mr sharpless thank you superintendent um I first got to say I'm excited about this model I think it's great um what I come to think when I you know when I think about it I I wonder the evaluation component um I know we're piloting this in six different schools what determines if this is a successful pilot and and then having this go district-wide how do we evaluate

231uh principles based on this Staffing model you know making good decisions a bad decisions right just like you would in a business wondering if you had any answers to this if they're being allowed to make bad decisions well no I I how do you evaluate whether this Pro this pilot program the Staffing model is successful so I think it's to roll it out I think can we adequately ensure that students can be can receive the instruction that they deserve can we ensure that class sizes are appropriate can we ensure that school staff feel like they have the resources they need to be competitive we'll get feedback from our building administrators I'm sure we'll get feedback from pea and from askme and from other groups about this based off what their impressions are as well um

232but at the end of the day it's it's outcome you know I think at the end of the day if we're going to empower people and say listen we're going to let you you know not only pick your players but we're going to let you field your team and we're going to be there on the whole throughout the whole thing I assure you there will be no mistakes meaning there will not be an opportunity for a school to say we're just not and I'm going to pick on Miss Miss Miller for a moment a school will not be able to say we're not going to do special education services this year we're just going to focus on every kid as if they're being mainstreamed and we'll cash in all those extra positions and we'll add

233this this and this that that can't happen um there are safeguards in place that prevent that so I think from a from an outcome perspective it's the Regionals evaluating from the get-go it's every single department or associate superintendent reviewing those budgets you know critically providing coaching feedback to staff to our administrators asking the question why do you want to do it this way help me understand because that might be just a breakdown and understanding about how to better support and serve those students and you know I so I I think it's going to take us two or three years the pilot schools are exceptional schools as you can see they have exceptional leaders who have shown a willingness and an interest in doing this and being on a front edge so I think it's just

234going to take feedback from them and from others to really determine whether or not it's been ultimately been successful and then if we see an overall reduction in their the request for extra positions that will be an indication of success as well gotcha thank you yes sir Miss Miller yeah I just want to follow love that never I don't think principals go out saying they're not going to meet the needs of students but the way our system is created is they are rewarded if certain students make certain achievements and in the past we've had something very similar and I'm talking probably 15 plus years ago and I think what we were missing was the site-based support and follow-up through the Regionals because people are only doing what they know and I don't know that we

235were ever good at explaining um federal law to some of our principles and so I think this is I have great hopes for this but for someone who lived through the days where it wasn't working as well I I'm a little shy of it so I can't wait for you to show me how successful this program will be foreign so the pilot schools are these listed um we Mr Hyde has answered a bit of why we picked these schools but we did rely a lot on the Regionals and and Deputy superintendent um when these selections were made so those are some of the reasons why these schools and obviously we have a wide range High School a couple middle schools um and then obviously your elementary schools so the next few slides um as with

236everything that we've talked about it's all in the works and there's a lot of room for improvement and there I mean today I was working on how to make it better and we're still working on looking at adding Federal units because we're only really discussing local units in this current model so we're still developing it so as we go through this it's really more to show what it looks like and what the flow will be and what it will appear to um as well appear for for the principles so the very first sheet that they will get is an Excel sheet that shows pretty much the instructions for how they're going to fill it out everything we've talked about the times that we're going to make our adjustments the expectation that they maintain good budgets

237and then hold back funds all the intricate details and obviously this will grow as we go through them and then the process of how to actually go through these slides so each one of these slides will be sequential order so the next slide that we go to will be the first first sheet that they'll see that they'll be able to review their information and then make their allocations so this is the first tab like I said ESC would be the first tab that they have to work with so this is probably the slide that has the most going on this is a sample an example of a school it's not one that was actually on the list it's just arbitrary numbers so we have the FTE that is generated to middle school so you have

238six through eight students the additional funding for each of those ese at the top it shows your full District budget which is the total budget less purchase positions to this point and then your remaining budget after you've made your selection you have your actual FTE counts and your enrollments on the right hand side at the top and then at the bottom is where they're going to actually make their allocation selections the left white column next to the the title of the position will show you what our recommendation is based on Staffing plan they can choose to follow it they can choose not to follow it it's totally up to the school but we give them a recommendation based on what student population we can see that's actually in the system so the school will make

239their selection in the uh Goldenrod yellowish cells once they make their selection it will total up the cost of their positions and it will show them how much money those positions cost them and then they can move on so they'll move on to the next tab which is their esol tab it'll calculate out their total FTE it will tell them any additional funding so Esau gets a certain percentage extra which will incorporate into their additional ESC fun esol funding it'll project to them approximately how many teaching units they'll need it'll show them their total budget at the bottom it's the same concept you have your positions your recommended units which is based on the Staffing plan again and then their selections and then it will show them the cost this will be their instructional tab

240it'll be the next tab so it tells them at the top left or total FTE at their school on the right hand side it shows them the breakdown of those grade levels we give them a Target number to shoot for at the top left which is the total number of units that they would need to service these students based on class size and then they'll be able to make their selections for you have your core units K through five you've got math science English language arts social studies elementary school art music PE and so on and so forth if uh non-core class is not listed on here that they want to select they can obviously indicate other and then type out whichever subject or class they want to potentially add and then it'll have to

241go through the appropriate approval process obviously if it's adding a new program per se but they have their option to select whichever position they would want to staff next will be Administration obviously a request to have a principal so that's really negotiable and then they'll have their option to pick here's our recommendation at the top and then the number of units that they want it will total the amount and then tell them the budget that they have left over same thing for instructional support so your counselors your media Specialists your testing coordinators your academic interventions and your coaches we give you a recommendation based on the Staffing plan you're able to enter in what you would like and then shows you your remaining budget same thing for your para educators and then you have miscellaneous

242costs so obviously you have a substitute budget you have a custodial budget your utilities your phones an operating budget we have allowed them to adjust our operating budget the intent is really to add to their operating budget but the option is there to adjust that cost and then a suggested holdback so we're going to suggest that the schools hold back a certain amount of funds in the event that they gain FTE and need more teachers or they lose FTE and they have to get rid of some of those funds and return those funds back so I think this I would ask one question on Slide either we put it in instructional support or we could include it in that last tab on slide 23 for the teachers to give them the choice of a sub

243I don't see that listed so if there's a way for us to as we continue to revise and edit these add that full-time sub as an option for them because I what I want to avoid is a school saying well I know I can get a full-time sub that's not listed here so I'm going to squeeze it under you know I'll make it a an academic coach and I'll just use it as a full-time sub no let's let's classify it the right way so we know exactly what they're spending their dollars on so we can have that okay Miss Wyatt thank you and I apologize if I missed this but it when you're submitting the numbers is it it's based on an average for what one unit cost or one teacher cost or is it

244based on who's in your system or the cost of each position it's an equivalency so we use an average of every single teaching position and whatever that equivalence comes out to is what we use as the estimated cost okay same for every other position so what happens when we have a school that has all very you know 30 40 years in the profession that obviously are at the higher end of the pay scale I just want to make sure that we're not penalizing schools for being able to maintain teachers for 20 30 plus years but also that we're not hurting their budget that way either sure go ahead sir so it's still being worked out the intent is that if the school has a higher level teacher then the teacher will come out of that

245budget so the schools are going to have to account for those there are certain trainings that they're going to go through that you know educate them on how to best accommodate those types of situations but it will have to be accounted for in the budget okay most of the accounting accounting for will occur on our end because to your point schools that have veteran staff that may qualify um or schools that have staff it doesn't necessarily be us veteran staff but who have different degree attainment and they're paid commensurately different it typically comes out in the wash because every year we onboard about a thousand new teachers which drops the overall average so a lot of the accounting will happen behind the scenes but by no means will a school levels allocation be impacted based

246off of okay you have too many veteran teachers so you can't we're not going to give you that money they'll get their actual allocation in that regard so this is like he said it's still a template that's being finalized and but for Comfort reasons and for training purposes we didn't want to overly complicate the process but you have our assurance that yes ma'am and we will provide that information to you so you know if there's any overages thank you and I just I mean you look at a lot of our higher performing schools and they have maybe four vacancies a year and it's because somebody turned 80 and retired and somebody went on mature I mean it's just you don't see very many vacancies at those schools so I want to make sure we're not

247penalizing them either so the last tab that they'll have is just a summary View and overview we selected in the sample just exactly what the recommendation would be so there is no change to the costs so if everything balances out but if there was a cost a different cost if they decided they wanted to purchase an 11 month AP as opposed to a 12-month AP then you would see a savings on that line and then a cost on the other line and then it would show you the ultimate cost or savings on the subtotal for the administrative lines so that's the thought process behind this summary page and then it's also at the top of that page it gives you a summary of the summary of each subtotal and how it accounts for your total

248budget for the school that's it when they cash in a position is using that to pay for additional duty supplements an extra period supplement I should say not the additional duty supplement so there are a lot of teachers who are willing to Forfeit their planning period to pick up an extra class section that is far cheaper in the overall scheme you get you can buy more sections or units or sections of class Time by breaking out a salary versus paying an individual because of the way their planning periods and everything else works out monetarily it works out very different so that's the way we'll work with our administrators to make sure we're maximizing our efficiencies that way and I think you'll be very pleased with the end result okay I just feels to saw your

249hand go up let me turn your mic on I apologize ma'am go ahead Miss Phil thank you I just want to make a comment this is a big shift and it's going to take a lot of work and adjustment on everybody's part and I just want to make sure that it's done with Fidelity and with Grace and I really want to emphasize Grace because again it's a shift and we're going to have some things that work well and some things that don't and at the end of the day we want to make sure that we are doing it to the best of our ability which I'm sure that we will and again keeping these uh the leadership in mind that is it's going to be an adjustment for them and adjustment even for their team

250so I just want to make sure that that that is uh is stated well taken and I think that's one of the reasons we started with a pilot group they then will become mentors to others and so each year and subsequently you see more and more individuals coming on board I think that'll be a really good process for us that will ensure just that we will be there as a safety net not a critical partner but as a safety net to make sure mistakes are not made that otherwise would impair our ability to appropriately serve our students and our schools so I think to your point yes ma'am I hear you loud and clear and we will be sure to adequately support our staff and make them feel good about the process that we're doing

251because this is really about them this is about empowering our about empowering our school-based administrators and I think many of them have expressed sincere gratitude for this it's been a long time coming thank you yes ma'am thank you sir I don't see any other questions you're out of the hot seat unless Dr Allen I heard you home okay all right I thought I heard it next is Brian Warren who's going to be discussing um the request for specialized student services and Staffing update this is for a requests for a new secretary too for 12 months for ESP EC clearly he's being joined by Mr Brett Butler Mr Brett Butler will be joining me this was a piece we want to bring forward to you as a carryover relative to a piece that we'd previously brought

252to you to make sure you're aware of a position that Mr Butler needs in his office relative to some other new staff that was brought on in a previous approval and so I'm going to let him explain it's its position its use and how it's how it will benefit his staff good afternoon how are you all today the position is a secretary to position for our community Liaisons for working on our truancy I believe you all received an update from Mr Hyde last Friday with some of the numbers some exciting numbers I think that we're accomplishing and the outgoing volume is there well what isn't being shown is the incoming volume from parents calling saying please uh my child has come to come to school can you please tell them not to come by tomorrow

253we're going to come to school so that other side of the house they're calling our office that volume is continuing to go up the paperwork the letters that are going home the assisting the schools in the letters is all part of that Duty any questions and this is all coming out of Grant funds from last year we just were waiting on the state to finally give us the green light for approval Mr Butler I do not see any questions at this time however for the board member contacts me or you afterwards please make sure you respond absolutely thank you sir thank you Mr Warren and last but certainly not least as far as presentations today we will bring up Carol Matthews for her second tour today and she will be providing an update on uh

254revised internal audit for Charter good afternoon this is just a clerical or administrative task for the internal audit Charter to be updated to reflect current changes in statute so that is what we have here and then actually I have it here for information and then was going to bring it back at the February 28th board meeting for you to actually approve so I don't know if there's any questions I am looking I do not see any as of yet any questions concerns or comments not seeing any fantastic presentation thank you very much thank you this afternoon thank you board members thank you madam chair a lengthy day today great conversations um I appreciate your time today and I will turn it over to our chair thank you superintendent Hyde I will now open the floor

255for any board member comments liaison updates for your committees I think sharpless did you click this for okay that was for me all right Mr sharpless okay um I just want to say I've enjoyed uh being on the pokevision operating board so far I'm in the infrastructure working group so if anyone has any ideas or anything related to the infrastructure of our County make sure to let me know um also I so when I first signed up to do the attack uh the value adjustment board I was under the assumption that that was because in the previous it was a morning meeting and now it's been moved to a lunchtime meeting and that changes my availability so I believe the correct thing to do is to bring that back and for you guys to appoint

256someone different than me um and just because I'm not going to be available and I don't think it's fair um but that was my understanding at the time so I do have something else but I would like to just request on the record if we could have a workshop at some point on our interlocal agreement because I don't I don't fully understand it um I'm trying I'm reading it but I think having our staff come forward and actually explain what the interlocal agreement is that would help because I'm getting some comments from citizens just asking us if if we're following that and it and again I I don't have expertise in that so I don't feel comfortable answering that so um if we could have just a workshop on our local agreement which in our

257local agreement the concurrency one so miss Wyatt has requested that we bring somebody in to speak to you as it relates to concurrency there'll be a presentation regarding concurrency in the near future um that would be great yes we are compliant um but and we have been answering questions from those stakeholders consistently as they're submitted but we'll try and bring in the Department of Education used to have someone and they used to have a department that would support this that no longer exists so we're having to go out to other school districts and really having to rely more heavily on their staff Mr West Mr Bridges excuse me is assisting with us trying to find attorneys who might be able to speak to us but we're also reaching out to facilities directors who have been

258in their positions for a larger longer period of time there are some who are inhaled in very high regard across the state who might be willing to come over and speak to the board and hold host a workshop it would be a special workshop on that topic it's in and of itself thank you I just I I would like just for the public to be more educated on it and and me myself as a board member I feel like I should be more educated on it so thank you thank you Mr sharpless and my request with that too was that we have someone that can explain not just what we're doing but what the statute allows because I think there may be some things in statute that we could look at doing as well as

259my understanding as far as the value adjustment board that actually is on my list Mr sharpless is unable to attend and I believe Miss Cunningham was the alternate and is also unable to attend I went ahead and put it on my calendar just so we would know somebody is available but it is there are two meetings the first one is at 11 30 on March 31st which is a Friday that is an appointment that we have to vote on so we'll need to bring it back to the February 28th meeting but if anyone is interested in just jump in to serve on that committee I'm happy to to nominate you for appointment if anyone's interested because we'll need both a nominee and an alternate I believe [Music] okay you're on now come on okay so

260I have the same issue as Mr sharpless um I cannot do a Friday luncheon meeting when I was on it years ago it was always at nine in the morning didn't matter really which day for me so I just can't do that with my work and my lifestyle so I need to give up my alternate I had no idea when I signed up for it and then he and I chatted and I was like we need to bring it up because that's not fair to the group so I had asked them to contact Yvette you know and see if someone could attend the meeting because they called me like Thursday and the meeting was the next day and I said I'm sorry I can't help you so I'm hoping we can get uh I don't

261I don't think we've missed it meetings when I talked to them the first meeting is March 31st no no the first one was uh like what was it two weeks ago he said he couldn't make it they called me I said I couldn't come the next day and I gave them a vet's phone number and asked him to follow up with her did you I don't know if she okay yeah they've already had the first one yes ma'am they did have the first one I bet because when which is March 31st is the first one so the first one's not for a while she told me it was that Friday I don't know I'll I'll follow up again but we're going to talk to her she said the first one was March 31st okay um

262but so it's just a 30-minute meeting essentially they appoint those who will be serving as the those who are adjusting the values um and then the the second meeting is to approve all of those values that of the work that those appointees have done anybody dying to be nominated doesn't sound like oh sorry Miss fields uh I have been given the calendar committee and I have chosen not to serve on that committee and you know that and so I would be willing to do the value adjustment if it's only for a window of 30 minutes to an hour on a Friday I can do that okay yes ma'am so we'll bring back on um at our February 28th meeting to appoint Ms Fields as the value adjustment board Committee Member and then I'm happy to

263serve as the alternate if nobody else is jumping to do it Miss Miller's just smiling at me so I think that means yes um and then the the second question I have is um is anyone interested in serving on the calendar committee for this cycle so I I might be I just need to know when they meet once again they are idea we will issue uh two new dates because again the goal is to provide at least one more calendar so I'll work with Mr Warren and get those dates for you sure I'll give them to the board and then if it's if it's convenient then you can join I'd love to do that thank you okay so Miss Cunningham will be the member and Miss Miller is the backup if needed and that one

264we don't have to vote on that one's just an appointment so I appreciate you all stepping up all right Mr sharpless did you have anything else that's it thank you Mr Nolte I've had some teachers in Paris and things people come up to me what is our definition of in other words uh who are the community stakeholders who and what are they I was having a hard time to defining exactly because they said yeah we see it in different articles Community stakeholders what do I tell them everyone in the community has a vested interest in public education I did answer it pretty closely correctly and the second question I've heard from several parents and teachers and Paras many of them have heard that when ordering the new books for our schools anything printed prior to

2652014 would not be looked at is that clear or is that true I'm sorry anything written before 2014. would not be coming into the library that's not correct is it my goodness we've got so many Classics out there no it speaks to that right is entirely possible if not probable that that a there's a great body of literature written before 2014 that would be inappropriate in our schools right absolutely there's nothing in the state but to your point there's also a plethora of amazing books and novels and poetry that's absolutely that would be more than appropriate for our schools so I don't know where that's coming from but that's absolutely false thank you Miss Fields was yours just about calendar committee or did you have something else I did I had something else I wanted

266to share that I was late coming to the work session this morning because I had an opportunity to go out to Kathleen High School in the Aviation Academy to celebrate Valentine's Day with all the staff so we were able to go to Every individual room and give them a little goodie to let them know how much we love them and how much we appreciate them so it was a great uh a great day and Mr Hyde I think that is something that could benefit almost every school because they were very appreciative of just that gesture so yes just a thought absolutely thank you and I want to commend Mr Jones for being the person who spearheaded that idea along with the support of his staff thank you Miss fields that means you can't schedule any

267more Valentine's Day meetings Mr Hyde feels Miss swish Dr Allen sure as we're we're talking about our committee assignments and so forth I I was reading uh January's minutes from the central Florida Public School Board coalition and yes indeed so they were noting their attendance by law and we're expressing that there were certain school districts that were not in a regular attendance so who is our um yeah board member that's supposed to be attending those meetings going to call out names are we well no no not not now just but you can obviously send that communication out and I just wanted to make sure that we are meeting that responsibility in accordance to their bylaws I'll double which I believe Miss Ed before prior and they had moved that to being a zoom meeting right

268and there was discussion that would go back to meeting face to face if I remember I don't know I'll be sure to follow up on that and make sure the vet looks I wasn't sure if anybody had reached out to us because they they said that in the meet uh in the minutes that they were reaching out to the different districts and okay was that yesterday's meeting though no that was in January's meeting because I was on that meeting yesterday if I recall correctly it also maybe that they don't have a they don't have our updated names of who it is so we'll double check on that and make sure that they know thank you so much thank you Dr Allen anyone else have any comments questions go to the orders all right seeing none

269this work session is adjourned