School Board Work Session | May 31, 2022

001[Music] 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 we 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 superintendent hyde i will turn it over to you good morning madam chair members of the board

002staff and community members at this time i'd like to bring miss dodge forward ms dodge is the senior director for legislative affairs and policy during the last board meeting unfortunately because time did not permit we weren't able to cover a summary of all of this most recent legislative session so mr dodge is here to walk us through that this morning hopefully she's had her coffee because there's a lot of slimes is this thing on hello can you guys hear me yes okay so am i in control of the yes ma'am okay thank you um so this is a pretty comprehensive um overview of what happened during the last legislative session which ended in the middle of march this is bills and the budget i'm going to start out with the budget and i'd just like

003to point out to you because you've received a lot of budget information already from finance what i've presented to you here is a is the difference between how the budget looked when it passed last year as compared to how it looked when it passed this year so it is year over year our polk county numbers so first of all you can see in terms of student counts we've grown by almost 7 000 students and our weighted is a growth of almost 8 000 students the bsa has gone up to 4 500 87 and 40 cents and that's an increase of 214 and 4.49 so you're going to see in a little bit why we had such a nice increase this year safe schools we have 1.2 million dollars extra and sai almost a million dollars

004they're not showing a a an increase in the amount of turnaround school supplement we got this year but that will be based on what the number of our schools looks looks like when we actually get that data and then rate reading there was 1.6 million dollar increase ese you can see there was a nice increase for once and transportation is another area where we saw a significant increase and that's again tied to the 15 minimum wage requirement that i'm going to talk to in just a minute instructional materials was a slight increase in this so is the teacher supply allocation this teacher supply allocation is kind of weird because of the number the great increase that we've had in students but we'll see how that ends up shaking out um they did eliminate the digital

005classrooms allocation so that was technology money and the the um thinking was that the districts have received so much technology money from the federal governments and srs or 2 and arp that maybe that wasn't something that the state needed to focus on this year and they could focus their dollars elsewhere and then class size reduction went up by almost a little over 4 million dollars however you're going to see on an upcoming slide that they actually are giving us less per student for class size reduction but there's more students so our total potential funds increase was 91 over 91.6 million dollars year over year in total so um our our funds per student is now almost we you know we were told that was going to be about eight thousand dollar student per student next

006year we're at 7 900. that's an increase of 352.38 but that has mostly to do with our property values and our dcd and then total local funds increase was almost 22 million dollars state 70 million you can see on these next few lines we get over 4 million dollars just from the compression of our .748 mills which is local funding based on our property values the lottery school recognition was funded this year it was funded at 200 million dollars and you'll see some language coming up and that and that will be based on the number of a and b schools and schools that increase their grade by at least one grade level rle for us went up 17 million dollars and that's starting to show the growth that we're seeing in polk county but it's

007not anywhere near the realization that we'll probably see next year teacher salary increase was 9.7 million dollars and mental health allocation was 000 increase funding compression and hold harmless was um a little more than what we received last year that is a that's a line item that we have to fight for every year that brings us towards the average per student but not to the average per student of the state and then our base fefp was increased 56 million dollars so let's talk about the minimum wage in the budget proviso it says in order to qualify for all of the state money which is in those appropriation numbers that you see there we have to guarantee that we're going to pay every school district employee at least 15 dollars per hour by october 1 2022

008and the superintendent has to attest to that under penalty of perjury to the department of education so if an employee by january of next year is not receiving at least 15 an hour they can basically sue us they have a cause for civil action so some of the things that are important in there are in addition to the fact that this is a requirement and we don't qualify to receive money if we don't do it plus we can get sued is the fact that it only applies to school district employees and it only the superintendent has to attest to the fact that he is that we have complied with that doesn't apply to charter schools they still benefit from the increases that we've seen in all those line items but they don't have to meet

009that requirement in order to receive the money and they don't have to attest that they are meeting it the the teacher salary increase allocation um it went up 200 million dollars this year and they changed the allocation so instead of an 80 20 split between putting the money towards the 47.5 for first year teachers and the veteran teachers on the salary schedule it's now half and half so we have to take the first half of our increase in the allocation and put it towards getting everyone on the up to the minimum of 47 five for their salary and then the other 50 percent can be used in accordance with the statute and the statute says that's for your veteran teachers your teachers who aren't considered quote unquote classroom teachers and everyone else on the salary

010on that salary schedule changes to srn arp we've probably already heard some rumblings about that there was a little skirmish last month because the department came back to us and asked us to submit everything we had for our non-enrollment and our learning loss money because that money is going to revert and be reappropriated for the summer learning camps this summer and so even though the budget hasn't been signed the department was preparing for that and requiring the districts to resubmit their plans to make sure that they were in compliance when the budget does get signed all of that money reverts back to the state and then is re-appropriated for the summer learning camps and then for vpk programs you'll see there was a nice increase for the first time in the school year bsa by

0113 a little over 300 and the summer bsa by almost 300 and then there is an additional 100 million dollars that the state put into the vpk program so that any provider or public school is going to attest and confirm that within 30 days of receiving their funding from that allocation all the personnel in the vpk programs are being paid 15 dollars per hour capital outlay you'll see that public schools received 11 million dollars that all went to one school district based on the high growth district capital outlay assistance grant how we didn't qualify that we don't know but we're investigating that because we fully expect to qualify for it next year and then charter schools received 195 million dollars and that's the money they receive from the state so that we do not under

012statute have to share our 1.5 mills capital a millage with the charter schools if the state hadn't funded that we would have to do that school hardening there's 20 million dollars in school hardening grants in the budget for next year and that's for unmet school campus hardening needs and there's a report that's going to be required that we have to outline what our needs are by district and by charter school so now we're into the bills before i start going over all the fun and exciting bills that were passed this year does anybody have any questions about the budget great that means i did an excellent job and i'm very proud of myself so hb1 is the additional homestead exemption for critical public service workers that is going to go to our teachers and other

013folks who during the pandemic were considered critical public service workforce it will go on the ballot in november and the electorate will have to at least 60 percent of the people will have to vote for that for the teachers to get that additional homestead exemption classroom teacher is not defined in the bill so that will be defined if and when it gets passed by in november but that will be on the ballot in november and it's an additional homestead exemption that for us would include teachers and maybe some of our law enforcement officers hb7 is individual freedom this is one of what everybody's referring to the sevens there were three bills that were slightly controversial that passed during the session that all either started or ended in seven so this prohibits instruction on training on

014topics around people being inherently racist sexist or oppressive one race being superior to another discrimination on any of the federal federally protected areas so it also prohibits instruction or training that individuals bear responsibility for the actions of others of the same race or sex and it prohibits a person to be instructed to feel guilt or anguish for actions committed by others in the past by the same race or sex if an employer requires instruction or sworn belief in the barred topics it's defined as an unfair labor practice and we would be able to be sued this is going to be a trend you're going to be hearing throughout the rest of my presentation basically we can be sued for anything nowadays i'm just going to flat out say it the above band topics also cannot

015be a condition of employment or the training thereof and then teaching of topics that are covered by the florida standards of history are specifically noted and can be taught as long as the band concepts aren't included so all these prohibitions are not only impact going to impact our classrooms as to what we can teach in our classrooms they're also going to impact the district in terms of what we can have in our employee training programs hb 173 care of students with epilepsy if a student has a isap which is something you get from a doctor they would bring it to the school district and it would be our responsibility to make sure that we're familiar with that plan and that somebody is responsible at the school to make sure that plan is implemented for the

016student that has already been signed by the governor and so it's effective july 1 2022. children with developmental delays this extends the um the benefits of the program for students until age nine or completion of grade two right now it stops um once when they begin school at the age of five and that has also been signed by the governor already um 1054 financial literacy right now financial literacy is a um is a uh what's the word i'm looking for an elective thank you an elective class that students can take and it will once again become a requirement for students who enter 9th grade in the 23-24 school year it's going to be a half credit and the state is going to have to come up with standards for those for that course and the

017electives have the required electives for to graduate from high school have been reduced from eight to seven and a half again yes ma'am i want to go back to 173 don't we already do that um at least every school i was at that i had kids we did we we probably were but now it is required okay that we do it i think i think we've so somebody has to actually physically sign off that they were trained somebody at the school has to be trained on what's in the student's plan i read it to be every teacher that that child has has to be trained because every employee who comes in regular contact with the student has to have the training so the teacher will have to sign off they've been trained uh yeah i

018mean they're gonna have to be trained and then sign off that's what i mean okay i didn't want to just make it sound and if there's a schedule change that has to be followed up and okay um charter school charters this is kind of based on something that happened last year in another school district but basically it says that the charter statute has been modified so that any a charter can be modified during any term not just the first term to reference it can just be changed instead of just saying the initial term or renewal they can change a charter contract at any time it requires that the modification be approved or denied within 60 days and that the sponsor notify the governing board of any denial within 10 days and the specific reasons and

019then the causes for non-renewal and termination section of the statute were changed so that a governing board has to be notified at least 90 days before the end of the school year and before a board vote of any renewal termination or non-renewal and then an automatic renewal is going to happen if they're not notified at least 90 days before the end of the school year so those are changes in the timeline that impact when we can do our renewals and what happens um you know it's uh what happens if we would like to non-renew or terminate a school that um it says it hasn't been presented but actually since this it was actually signed by the governor last week so that is law now hb 225. h.b 461 is the bright future service requirements that

020allows students to be paid for their volunteer hours to qualify for bright futures and then school concurrency um could have been a lot worse than it ended up it started out as a pretty bad bill but it ended up just being that um current school concurrency is satisfied when the developer gives us a written legally binding commitment to provide proportionate mitigation we have to notify the local government that capacity is available after receiving that within 30 days and that any mitigation paid by our developer has to be set aside and not spent until the appropriate improvement is identified and that also was signed last week sb 758 is a lot these are charter school and some other changes that were made the first thing is they gave members of the legislature in this bill the

021same visitation rights that school board members have so they can just show up to school without notice and visit it creates the charter school review commission to approve to approve applications and they would just notify the school district that someone from your district has applied to the state to be a charter and then we would have um 30-day we would have a certain amount of time in which to provide input on that application and then um it basically says that the state notifies us hey we've approved a charter and you have to contract with them now that is subject to legislative appropriation there was nothing in the budget to fund this charter school review commission however there are some other funds that the state set up including a and what do they call it they

022called it the biden fund but it was actually a inflation fund that they set up that has a billion dollars in it that lets a department such as the department of education apply for additional funds so it's even though it wasn't funded in the budget it might still be able to get going um yes ma'am i have a question about this one but it's to the superintendent have we discussed the process here um because it what will happen if a school is approved that hasn't gone through our vetting process i just want to make sure that we have a process in place to review their budgets and what they're doing like i think we need to keep a closer eye on ones that haven't came through our committee i'm not sure what you're asking we

023do have a process in place where we view their financials is our staff is there anything extra we're going to add to these districts these charter schools that come into our district that we have not vetted is it going to be the same process or is it something more accountability measures through our office well there there's no accountability i'm i want to make sure i'm understanding correctly you're talking about a new charter school that wants to establish itself in polk county they must follow the traditional process in their application they must fully delineate their curriculum their supports their finances how they're going to maintain their finances and so there's a review process there during the renewal process following the initial terms of their contract we do again go back through and verify their financial status

024and everything else but i'm you you use the word accountability and there's there's no accountability for a new charter other than the application process itself so i'm not maybe i'm not understanding the question so there won't be any review until the to the renewal of their budget and a review can actually be triggered at any time but that's triggered based off of known information for example should a school a charter school see a significant decline in their academic performance or should we become aware of a financial issue at a charter school then yes we can request an audit at that time as part of their contract because we have the authority to review and potentially either revoke their contract or have required corrective action but that would be information we would address in real time

025as we became aware of issues thank you and so i also believe that a first-year charter we receive financials monthly whereas a more established charter we're only allowed to ask for that type of information quarterly so for these particular schools because they would be new to us a brand new contract we would still get that information monthly until they were more established and you're going to see on the next bullet here we're not allowed now to ask for any additional reporting requirements from charter school unless they're in a state of financial emergency or deteriorating financial condition which is outlined in statute what that looks like so even if we wanted to do that we are now in this bill which was signed last week prohibited from having any additional requirements for these schools those fields

026so what is and what was the purpose of creating the charter school review commission it just doesn't add up to me there were no appropriations allocated so is this an extra tool for them to have it doesn't just doesn't make any sense to me do you have any any uh any thoughts on that any uh views from other folks or are what so many many years ago the charter schools have always wanted an alternate authorizer they don't there are just some including mostly this is a view from the the management company type of charter schools that they're they don't always get fair treatment or fair shake from the school districts and so they have forever wanted an alternate authorizer i'm not sure if you remember it was probably before you were even on a boat

027on the board that's how long i've been around there was actually an alternate authorizer that was passed in law many years ago we put some provisions in there that said if you're a good school district that treats your charter schools right then you're not subject to this author alternate authorizer and for many years polk county was the only district that met those standards and then that alternate authorizer was struck down by the supreme court and it was never appealed and so the the charter segment has wanted an alternate authorizer for a long time they've tried to put it on the ballot they've done a lot of things they believe that and and in all fairness and it's not outrageous or uncommon in other states to have an alternate authorizer you know we all we already

028really have it in florida universities can authorize community colleges can authorize so this is an additional authorizer the what is uncommon about this structure is the fact that the state is going to approve these schools and then hand them off to the school board to be to monitor and watch in any other state where there's an alternate authorizer whoever approves that application is the sponsor and they monitor the financials and the and the accountability of the academic program and those types of things so ms miller this may go back to your question if if if it's aligned if the charter school review commission were to approve a charter we must implement support to charter we then the only accountability measures we would have in place as miss dodge and i shared a few moments ago

029would be whatever required reporting currently exists so that we can continue to monitor the school and its performance even then i have a strong sense that should we move to revoke a charter school due to underperformance or financial insolvency that it would there would be an appeal process that goes back through the charter review commission um this is by and large it largely erodes local control it is what it is and so i know uh miss fields this may get back to your question about what are we hearing the reality of this is it it really is eroding local control and and if this is what's going to happen then why not have the charter school review commission just basically become the owner operator as well in the management group why pass that burden on

030to the school district essentially as a pass-through um for us to assume those responsibilities and yet at the end of the day it readily appears that we have little to no authority any further as as it relates to regulation and or monitoring um so it is frustrating but we're not the only state again my previous state much as ms dodge just shared the charter review commission i believe because we were in a situation locally where we were going to revoke a charter and we knew we knew that they would appeal to the charter school review commission they had a 100 pass rate on all appeals um for multiple years and so we were just going to bypass the charter review commission we were already hiring attorneys to litigate the issue outside of that because that

031was still a viable option for us because we knew the history of the charter review commission and so i think it'll be we'll have to wait and see how this charter review commission operates but it is very much an erosion of local control that that is what this is so well another another thing that it does is the playing field continues to be uneven and unbalanced uh which is unfortunate as miss dodge said they're going to get the benefit of additional weighted funding with that was solely intended to increase the hourly rates of pay for employees and yet they're under no obligation to ensure that that rate of pay is being met so there is a lot of flexibility that they receive that that fortunately or unfortunately if we had the same operating flexibility i

032think we would continue to show that public schools would outperform um so again i'm always happy to bring lots of good news to you guys miss miller i just um i think this was designed for the management companies but we've seen others come in that we've had the review of and they'll pull their application when they see our results from the review because it's just so egregious and so i'm hoping that the state has similar requirements so we're not having to double our work holding schools accountable for minimal compliance issues um some of these schools that have came through i was shocked to read the applications and then our review committee has been so good about sharing the concerns and we haven't had them here so i guess i just to open the door to

033just anyone is concerning but that's all so i'm not saying that this is what happened but in a district like polk where we don't have a lot of management company schools um because of kind of what you've said we have a very careful and thoughtful and well held up review process this would be a way for a management company to come into a district like that if they were go to go to the state instead of the school district and then the other thing i didn't put the entire process in because you're going to see we're like only on the third bullet of this bill which is really long but um there's also a requirement that the state contract with a college or university to help them with their review which is kind of weird

034because that's not where the expertise lies in this state but that's what's going to happen hopefully it will they would do something with a college or university outside of florida that has expertise in this area so continuing on with this lovely bill it voices unenforceable any ordinance that adds extra regulatory burden for a charter school unless it's already allowed somewhere else in law it allows interlocal agreements that we have to be used by a charter school and it automatically grants a five-year renewal to a charter school that has granted has been given a grade of c or less unless it's the third c that they've received because that that triggers some turnaround language and then it automatically grants a 15-year charter to those whose most recent grade was an a or b if they're not

035in a state of financial or emergency or deteriorating financial commission so if you have a school that is a c and you're worried about the trending data there have been times when we would go back and say we're going to give you three years and a three-year contract and just see how you're doing and see if your trend changes we would no longer be allowed to do that so and then it also modifies the qualifications for a termination or non-renewal and put some language in there about how it has to be the grounds have to be expressly found and that's probably a question for john murphy as to what the difference is between grounds and expressly found but that's what they changed it to generally speaking when you have a statute that says expressly that's

036exactly what it means is that it has to be something that you find that's specific and that's you have to track the language in the statute and so you can't infer perhaps or you can't assume or imply other things you have to be express as to how you would view it so it does i would i would suggest to you that that is a higher burden perhaps than what you may currently have thank you and then they also remove um you it used to be that you could not non-renew or terminate for financial academic reasons or other good cost shown such as breaking the law or something like that and they removed the opportunity to do that for other good cause shown it prohibits the charter school from being subject to land use regulations to

037which a traditional public school wouldn't have to follow they can use any facility or land owned by a college university or similar public institution i'm not sure what would be similar but if it's similar they can use it or any facility previously housing a school or a licensed child care facility they require us to share a proportional share of impact fees to be designated to them if it's a development that was built specifically to mitigate impact of an increased dwelling and a charge school is going to serve it it prohibits teachers salary funding from being calculated in their administrative fee and that as you saw that was a big increase this year to 850 million dollars and so that will impact we have to do a lot of work in order to get that teacher

038salary money out to the charter schools but we will not be able to recoup that in our administrative fee it creates the florida charter school institute or excuse me the institute for charter school innovation at miami-dade college for the purpose of improving charter school authorizing practices that was also subject to appropriation and not funded in the budget but we'll see what happens this is probably the biggie right here it requires an aupagas study of the current methodologies for distribution of capital outlay and federal funding to charter schools and opaga is going to make recommendations for equitable distribution of all this funding to charter schools and then it also the last thing is it requires us to distribute the teacher salary allocation money to the charter schools that have submitted their plan to us regardless of

039whether we've received that funding from the state or not based on where our plan is in the process so any other yes ma'am does their plan have to be approved before we sub we give them the money or they just have to submit it to us i believe that they just submit it to us does anybody know any different over there the current process is we have to submit their plan to doe and then doe has to approve it before we're authorized to release the funding based on the changes wendy mentioned we can verify that that's still the process but that's what we've done thus far okay i just want to make sure that they have to be approved before we give them the money that they can't submit us because i know we've had

040issues in the past with a couple of schools not submitting something that aligned to what it legally has to be so yes if we could verify that process i'd appreciate it yes ma'am thank you i think we're probably waiting for guidance from the department on that any other questions before i move on to something more fun like tax referenda okay um 777 is local tax referenda and that says that if we are going to do a millage um it has to be held at a general election that is effective october of this year because there were some other there were some school districts out there that already had plans for putting something on the ballot at the um in august and so in order to accommodate because it takes so much to work to get

041there the legislature move the effective date for that educators certification pathways for veterans let's say veteran get a temporary certificate if they're active duty with at least 48 months honorable discharge or medical separation and at least 60 college credits towards a bachelor's or higher with a 2.5 gpa so a lot of requirements to get it but it's there and they don't have to qualify for a waiver of the gk and um they get their fees waived if they were honorably just discharged for all those tests and that um is effective july 1. educate i don't know why i did that twice but you don't you can ignore the second one mental health of students we have to designate a mental health coordinator now to serve as a primary point of contact for coordination of anything

042regarding a student and if they're if we're going to be doing anything regarding our policies towards mental health charter schools have to comply with the voluntary examination statute which was passed the last two years and it requires doe to share with us their in their data on our data to dcf does that make sense the data that we're reporting on involuntary um examinations has to be reported by the state to dcf and then um when we modify our plans it has to include timelines for student assessment and receipt of services and ensure that notifications to parents is happening and others in the home of services being provided that has not been signed or no i'm sorry that was signed last week 10 48 is student assessments um beginning the next school year we're using the

043progress monitoring three times a year for ela in grades three to ten and for math in grades three to eight it's going to be administered at the beginning middle and end of the school year the results have to be to a teacher within a week and parents within two weeks in an easy to understand report we they delete all the requirements for paper based testing um and then the end-of-year assessment that third assessment of progress monitoring is going to be what we now consider to be the state test for the it's going to replace the fsa and the results for that have to be available no later than may 31st which is today so today next year we were going to have all of our data on testing for students yes ma'am okay um is

044there anything written in here about for lack of a better word vam scores or anything that comes down to actually be punitive for teachers and schools within this bill or are they just going to hold us harmless for a year until they get the baseline data yeah the second thing so okay everything's being held harmless the first year because there's not going to be any student learning gains available because it's the first year of a new test and every time we move from afghan fcat 2.0 they always do that so there's no there's not going to be any grades there's not going to be anything that first year because there's no learning gains and then they will set grades at um 23 24. yeah does that make sense yes okay i just want everybody to

045be ready so by january of each year they have to publish the dates for the next two years and then after the first two years they're going to have a feasibility and validity study and the commissioner will have to make recommendations on is this working out do we need to make some changes it requires school districts to secure parental consent if we're going to exceed the five percent test administration so if we're adding additional um say uh any sort of testing or additional progress monitoring that would exceed that five percent cap we would have to get parental permission we have to provide the students results within a week of administration the 22 23 school year grades will serve as a baseline for determining the cut scores on new percentage and the new assessment and same

046percentage of each grade will be issued and that's because of the no learning gain and then um no one who is in will enter turn around based on that first administration but you can exit so go back there mr dodge if you would okay so a couple issues with this in particular we are we are well within the five percent however we do have some concerns that in the absence of the parent company that the state is migrating their assessment platform to we've reached out to them to ask if they provide a progress monitoring tool similar to what we use now in our elementary schools so that we can provide our teachers with regular ongoing feedback and more importantly be more explicit in how we align interventions and supports and lessons for our students based

047off their individual skill deficiencies the parent company does not do that they however have indicated to me that they have a subsidiary company and we're waiting to hear from them the reason i bring that up is should we find that they don't then we may find ourselves in a position that we continue to test so we could be closed at five percent threshold although uh the the assessment accountability officers assured me we won't reach that threshold but it is important for us to maintain uh our ongoing progress monitoring also in this in particular i want to point out the second bullet from the bottom the fact that the same percentage of grades will be issued that is incredibly troubling the reality of the assessment is that when we we just assume that we're going to

048our best guess as far as how we're going to disperse grades is to say well if there were 30 percent of our schools last year were a's then we're only going to allow 30 of schools this year to be in a i don't under any circumstances can i understand or fathom how they arrived at that decision we advocated very aggressively throughout the process with both bill sponsors to try and get that modified to say that they would assign the same percentage minimally to allow additional schools so so if you imagine let's just imagine the worst case scenario 30 percent of our schools are in a and all those schools score the same number of total points let's just say it's 350 points or and i know it's a double digit score now but let's say

049that there's actually 20 more schools new to the list that had the exact same score that would qualify them for an a last year they won't get in this year because it's just 30 percent of the schools that can be issued in a not necessarily those who earned enough points to bna and that's incredibly troubling because the hope would be that under a new assessment especially an assessment like this we should see a continuum of improvement and we should see more schools move from d's to c's c's to b's b's to a's and to be capped by a percentage seems a little bit ridiculous seems a lot ridiculous to me um it's it's something we fought very aggressively for but i wanted that noted on the record that the number the percentage of gr of

050grades is locked in and they were not allowed to be issued more than those that would qualify and i we specifically asked what are you going to do when you get to the bottom of the list and 15 schools tied with the same score we got no answer as to who would make it into the 30 percentile so it'll be interesting to see how they address that issue this year in particular so miss fields so my questions were similar to your explanation but this is supposed to be implemented this upcoming school year and so my question is when will the tool be released and how will we train and when will the first monitoring be and i think you pretty much answered that we would still use our monitoring tools that we have in place

051it's unfortunate that we can't use our two and not have to implement the assessment that they have uh put in place yeah so we won't receive data or any additional updates from the state until june we have asked repeatedly superintendents fads has asked repeatedly and we were told that in june more information would be released so right now we're all very much in limbo asking the same questions you just asked because we know the importance of getting the information before our teachers and there's a lot of unanswered questions that even the department shared with us there's been some conversation that should a student pass the first baseline assessment with an acceptable score that would show that they're on grade level there's questions as to whether or not they have to take the other two progress

052monitoring assessments because they've already demonstrated they're at grade level so it's an interesting issue that we're facing right now but there's a lot of uncertainty and all of us are waiting anxiously to get this information so that we can disseminate it to our staff because they're the ones at the end of the day who need to best implement in direct instruction towards ensuring we're meeting those grade level standards so as soon as we get it we'll share that with the board we'll share with our all of our staff especially with our administrators and our teachers but as as of this date i believe mr mcnaughton and others will share at the earliest we're expecting a mid-june update from the state so this will impact our pd for staff when they were coming back significantly also

053one of the reasons and again very appreciative of the board to have approved that for the extra early release days that we added to the calendar for the sole purpose of providing training on our one-to-one deployment and on a new assessment platform and best standards at the elementary school level thank you hb 1421 is school safety it requires us to adopt a plan guiding family reunification when there's a natural or man-made disaster and that is to include not only students but staff it requires the state board of education to adopt a rule setting requirements for emergency drills including the timing and everything so that right now um you know we're following federal standards and there's been a lot of drills and so in order to kind of get a handle on that the state board

054is going to set rules as to how many of each kind of drill that you have to do law enforcement is responsible for responding to schools in the event of emergency law enforcement who are responsible for responding in the event of emergency have to be present when we do those drills it requires the school safety and environment reporting data which is your sessor data to be published in a uniform statewide format that's easy to read and understand i wish them the best of luck on that it requires all safe school officers not just the resource officer to complete the mental health crisis intervention training and the school district and local mobile response teams have to use the same suicide screening tool that has been approved by the department of education it reinforces the oversight and

055sanctioning authority of the commissioner to oversee school safety and security compliance so that's though withholding salaries if we're not complying in that kind of language and it also extends the marjory stoneman douglas safety commission until july 1 of 2026 that was supposed to sunset this year any questions about school safety hb 1467 is an overall education bill most important to you it limits term limits for school board members to years beginning november of this year so anything you've already served doesn't count towards that 12. it's prospective meetings of committees how to rank eliminate or select instructional materials have to be noticed and open to the public and must include parents of district students on such committees just like we did beginning 2023 school librarians media specialists and other personnel have to have doe training in

056order to serve that capacity any book available in the library media center has or part of a reading list has to be selected by a certified media specialist i want to clarify because there's been a lot of language about this it's not that every school has to have a certified media specialist to do the selection but that who that's who has to do the selection so we we can share positions we can work it out however we'd like to but that has to that's the employee that has to make those choices school boards have to adopt procedures for developing library media collections and post them on our website each elementary school has to publish a list of all their library media materials or required reading on the school website in a searchable format we have

057to publish a list of all instructional materials on our website in social format and i think a lot of this we are way ahead of the curve on beginning june of next year we have to submit a list of the commissioner of all materials that have been objected to what we removed or can discontinued and then the state is going to share that with all the other school districts just in case they'd like to do the same thing bless you and then they're going to by july 1 annually each year the superintendent has to certify that all librarians and media specialists have completed that training that's required 1557 the last of the sevens is parental rights the board has to adopt procedures for notifying a student's parents if there's a change in services related to

058mental emotional or physical health or well-being we are prohibited from adopting procedures or student support forms that prohibit personnel from notifying parents about anything about a student's well-being we are discouraged or prohibited wait a minute i'm not saying that right we are discouraged from prohibiting parental notification or involvement in any um decision to they don't want us not notifying parents about anything i don't think i wrote that out right but you know what i mean classroom instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity is prohibited in grades k to three and it must be age-appropriate in other grades at the beginning of the school year we have to notify parents of any health care services offered at that school at each school and then um afford them the opportunity to withhold consent or decline services this

059i think is going to be the the most challenging because we have so many schools that offer so many different things and we don't always know who's coming in until they tell us um we have to provide the parent of students in grades k-3 copies of questionnaires or health screening forms and obtain their permission prior to administering those forms and then if a concern for a parent regarding any of the requirements or procedures above is not resolved they can request the appointment of a special magistrate or they can sue the school district and obtain a declaratory judgment and then it requires the school district to adopt policies to notify parents of all these procedures so expect to see some more policy updates coming this bill was 235 pages i'm sorry ma'am miss fields primarily to

060the superintendent so with all of these new requirements and with all of the work that we currently have before our staff how are we going to ensure that all these things get done are we going to have to hire additional staff to do that are we going to put that extra burden on our current employees so for many for many of these we actually have policies and procedures already in place ms dodge highlighted one in particular when we talk about the fact at the beginning of the school year the school district must notify parents of health care services offered at their child's school and the option to withhold consent or decline any specific service we already do that so even in the case of hazel it's an opt-in not an opt-out and in the case

061of other support services or community-based services for example at our community-based schools all of those things are already well documented for families so that information would go home at the beginning of the school year a lot of this is just communication protocol putting on our website making sure parents are well informed and making sure we're proactive the only place in here where we're going to find ourselves in jeopardy and so specifically to your question no i do not believe that this creates an additional burden for staff because again much of this is already addressed as part of our ongoing policies and procedures here in polk county thankfully the only place where i believe we're going to find ourselves and this was not addressed here in the slide deck is that we are prohibited from establishing

062procedures that would keep information from a parent unless the child's in jeopardy and that's going to be the most difficult aspect of this is how do we best define that for staff so they can make an informed decision as to the health and well-being of that student when he or she or we have an indication that should that child's information be shared that it would create physical abuse or result in homelessness or those types of issues and so that's where we're going to have to be very careful but the law very explicitly says you cannot re you cannot not prevent or excuse me you cannot prohibit the sharing of information with parents but it does go on to say unless that student's going to be in jeopardy and so and i'm paraphrasing it this is

063much more lengthy paragraph that's that's attached so for the other areas for example miss fields to your question as well we summarized and created an excel spreadsheet that captured all the bills regardless of their signature with the understanding that by the end of june all of our policies and procedures will be written and established and ready to go so we've already been working on this staff have been working on this for several months once we were in session because we knew that there would be requirements now some of course don't take effect until 2023-24 such as a financial literacy course but that was something we were already working on anyways we were taught we've been talking about a half credit life skills course that would include financial literacy so there'll be other components that we

064incorporate into that class as well that would serve our students well so a lot of this work has already begun the media specialists and staff the requirements placed upon them are requirements they already have they are currently responsible for the selection of inc of those material material and purchases for their libraries well the only place in here that i found interesting was that they are now required to also approve reading lists and we have to get some further clarification from the department are those reading lists that they're producing from the school library are those reading lists that our ela or social studies teachers are developing to supplement their class i don't know that that's the role of the media specialist but we'll get some clarification on that and what about the uh the f the

065flooded doe training for the media specialist anybody have any idea on what that's going to entail no ma'am we have we have heard little to nothing about that other than it's coming because they know they have an obligation and a deadline to hit themselves but that training which is i i would be surprised if it's anything but virtual at this time concerning the number of individuals they have to roll this out to in the manner in which they'll support school districts and so what we would have to do is find some time during uh teacher in-service pre-planning before students return we'll have to work with our building leaders and and pea and others to carve out some time for them to complete that training prior to the start of the school year well that's in

0662023 so there's time for that so the next bill was 2524 this was an education conforming bill it was 235 pages and i'm going to be very honest with you this is a up in the clouds not every detail of the bill summary because it was really long and it hit a lot of areas so um k-12 virtual it requires all full virtual full-time students to be funded in the fefp in the same manner as any other student out of district virtual fte students are funded with fefp only and not local dollars and are limited to 50 um if you if if we're taking in students from outside of the district we can't have more than 50 percent of our current fte for virtual students in the district and then dua has to develop a

067standard virtual charter school contract it requires us to post our controlled open enrollment process on our website which we already do maintain a waitlist which we already do and maintain capacity by grade level and update it every two weeks which we don't already do so that's the change for us increasing the amount of transportation scholarship for public schools based on what they spend so right now the transportation scholarship in statute is 750 dollars and so if you if we as a district spend more than 750 dollars per student transporting student which rob has told me that's about what we spend right now it would increase the value of the transportation scholarship for a student it changes student literacy they establish a micro credential for reading that enables teachers to provide evidence-based reading interventions they allow

068there are financial intercept incentives for teachers to earn this and then um we're allowed to spend our reading allocation money um on those expenditures so um we so under the turnaround language it allows us to contract with additional entities and then in reviewing the school grading scale they put language in there that said if there's any grade band such as elementary middle school high school k to eight that has more than 70 percent of the schools in that grade band receiving a's and b's then they are going that's going to trigger an automatic increase to the school grading scale very popular um do you always going to answer sorry just so i'm on the record that's been that's been policy forever though ever since letter grades were implemented there was there was the knowledge that

069should a percentile exceed an acceptable bandwidth that they would ratchet up the expectation and change the scale score cut off to ensure that not too many schools were scoring within certain areas so current statute actually only applies to high schools which is why they extended it to all great bands under this and then does gonna annually collect until 2025 data on the amount of instructional time spent on assessments and report those findings to the governor and legislature the decision to withhold information from a parent related to his or her child's well-being has to be documented and redetermined annually teacher evaluation procedures are not subject to collective bargaining specifically in this bill personnel not on the performance salary schedule have to receive raises higher than those that are educational entities to use have to use the

070akka background screening clearinghouse now to conduct all background screenings and that requirement starts january 1st of 2024 or when aka is prepared because every entity not just us but child care providers everyone in the state now has to do all their background screening through that clearinghouse it establishes a criminal penalty for anyone who knowingly fails to report sexual misconduct by a school authority figure it provides flexibility with the reading allocation by saying we no longer have to have that additional hour of reading at the lowest 300 schools in reading and then it expands the ability for us to use vehicles other than buses to transport students and creates a driving choice grant program which is a 15 million dollar program that school districts and other entities can apply for if they would like to get

071vehicles or other opportunities for transporting students to choice programs and then the unique ability florida empowerment scholarship is going to grow by 26 500 students and then the growth rate was supposed to be a one percent per year annual growth rate and that has been moved to 23-24 school year so there was a lot more stuff in that bill but if you've heard about anything that you have questions about please feel free to contact me but it was rather lengthy and as you can see all over the place in terms of subjects 7071 is a tax bill it establishes a two-week back-to-school sales tax holiday for clothing school supplies learning aids computers and that's going to be from july 25th to august 7th that's longer than we usually have for back-to-school tax holiday we are

072currently in the middle of a three-month sales tax exemption for children's books yes ma'am i'm sorry you can finish but at the end of this i have a question okay children's books um sales tax holiday goes from may 14 to august 14th capital outlay surtax can be used to purchase lease or lease purchase school buses if it was originally included in the referendum and then it allows an additional 25 dollars per student to be transferred from our 1.5 mills to pay for vehicles and increase insurance costs that's the legislature acknowledging that our property insurance costs have also increased and allowing us to transfer additional funds into operating to pay for it that was already signed by the governor mrs white i just there's several tax holidays that were added this year have we done any

073type of assessment as to how that's going to affect our half cent sales tax i just i figure a month of nobody paying tax on gas for that will hit us a little bit yeah i'm not sure do we have the ability anyone to okay yeah so they don't even put any estimates in the staff analysis for us okay um so there's just no like on the frs bills they at least tell you you know this is what it's this is how it's going to impact you they just they just don't even certainly track it for the month and then use that and compare it back again to prior years tax base tax revenue and then allow miss dodge to use that for advocacy moving forward that please understand the impact that this has i

074was just curious as far you know it's how it would affect us because it just seems to be a lot more this year than previously it may be something mr pitts has to work with the county on to kind of get a sense of how much fuel was sold and how the sales tax revenue impacted overall revenue but we yeah i just want to make sure we know how to prepare for it yes ma'am um hb 5007 was the frs bill it increases allocation to investment plan members by three percent for each member and then modifies drops so that special risk class who are law enforcement opera officers can participate and drop for 36 extra months or three extra years and then there's a 156.3 statewide increase in the rates for school districts so when

075you consider we're about four percent of the student population that's four percent about four and i think heather has already given you much better numbers than that but but um that's about the impact of our school district and that is effective july 1st 2022. the implementing bill is where that school recognition language that i talked about earlier during the budget there's 200 million dollars for school recognition it goes to school districts who put parents first and complied with the emergency rules regarding face coverings that were in place at the beginning of the school year all public schools that received a school grade and were not found in violation of the rule can participate in that program um it extends for and and so we're unsure um how that's going to be implemented because it was

076school boards that actually were in violation of the rules and not schools but the language specifically says schools who were not found in violation and so um that's going to be interesting to see how it's implemented another interesting thing about that is that the last time we had school recognition funding was the last year we received school grades but it was only about 124 million dollars and so this year it's 200 million dollars and 13 of the biggest school districts in florida may not be able to participate so the amount that will be available to the schools that do qualify and again that's if you if your school gets an arb grade or jumped up at least one grade there may be a significant amount of money available to those schools for bonuses etc it

077extends for one year the authorization to provide a funding the funding compression that we greatly benefit from it provides that the this year the state is going to fund all of the capital outlay for the charter schools and then it revises the virtual instruction programs so that they are valid for two years if they're approved by the state instead of one and then legal notices um just in general allows us to publish once in the year in the newspaper that we're going to publish all of our legal notices on our website and that actually i believe has been signed by the governor since this presentation was put together oh i'm going backwards that's why okay so that was a general overview of all the big bills that passed this year there were some other things

078that passed hb3 law enforcement allows law enforcement's children to participate in the school choice programs and also allows for some additional bonuses for them education opportunities for disabled veteran veterans allows fee waivers restraint of students with disabilities last year they passed no restraints and this year they said no mechanical restraints and then i think there's a few residential picketing might be of interest because it prohibits anyone from picking in front of your house and then cyber security makes a public records exemption for all any of our cyber security information so were there any other bills that you heard about or any other questions that you had about the budget or anything you've been excellent students today thank you very much for letting me do this mr jenkins mr pitts if you'll please come forward so

079the next item is a summary update for the school staffing allocation model as the board as we discussed at our most recent meeting there was a recommendation that we modify our school allocation model to address certain certain areas first and foremost is to address the disparity that exists between school levels that have similar enrollment the second part of that and i'll talk through the tiering oh the whole team's coming up okay fantastic the second part of that is also addressing the staff to student ratio for critical service areas such as counselors psychologists social workers and other positions that are needed on our campuses that right now our staff to student ratios are more than triple that of the national recommendation or the national average and so especially as we're seeing more students returning to schools

080there's there's a national conversation happening about students struggling with a variety of issues coming out of kovid that need to be addressed and we're hearing a lot of concerns from classroom teachers about supports for students as well so there's a priority prioritization there and then beyond that modifying our school allocation model to address other types of support positions for example front office staff and others that may be needed one of the issues we find very frequently with payroll is that there are a lot of payroll mistakes because we don't necessarily have a dedicated finance person or bookkeeper at all of our elementary schools it's a function of correct me if i'm wrong mr jenkins mr pitts it's a function of the school principal secretary and that's not the case traditionally at our secondary schools and

081by virtue of that some things get missed and we overpay employees or we underpay employees and then we have to remediate those issues and so it is important for us to work to address those so i'll turn it over to team there are a number of slides in here just so i can give my team some guidance a lot of these are just exemplary exemplars for you to review but we'll go ahead and get started and then there's a summary slide at the end so please ms jenkins mr pitts it's all yours the first couple of slides we talked about in our last work session so it's just a recap it shows how we do our current staffing so we provide a staffing allocation to the schools then at the eighth day count we we

082true up based on enrollment they do have an appeal option those appeals are reviewed by an appeals committee we look at their scheduling their enrollment how how the school is staffed and what their reasoning for that appeal is we also do an operating expense budget which is calculated off of a formula i brought up mr bellows and mr fout today because they both did a lot of research looking at how other school districts do their allocations so that's what we've based the upcoming example on this next slide we presented last time it's an example of how we currently allocated our schools we'll kind of go through there that's our operating budget formula that we use so here we start with our new proposed allocation model so mr hyde challenged us to look at a model

083that would not differentiate between school levels so in the beginning every school would get one principal one ap one principal secretary one registrar one finance secretary which speaks to what he just told you about two basic pairs a network manager a clinic lpn one media specialist and a school counselor in this initial view of the staffing allocation we did not take into consideration special programs we have ib cambridge learning centers that we need to take a deeper look at and also our magnet schools we currently have a little bit of a different allocation for those it also doesn't reflect a change in teaching allocations because we do staff according to class size and the plan utilizes the same ese allocation model that we currently follow this next slide shows you at what point a school

084would be able to appeal or would be given a new allocation so we haven't broken into school counselors assistant principals deans 10 months secretaries and then discretionary units and also an art music pe teacher and a pe para keeping in mind with art and music and pe once they obtain two pairs they can trade those positions in for one teacher if they prefer we also do that with our es esol model so we'll just look at counselors for example when a school has an enrollment of 400 they could get an additional counselor at eight at 12 at 16 2000 and 2400 so that would be that's how you read the the graph ms jenkins just so i can clarify if i may so that's using your example of the school counselor at 400 that's the

085second counselor so the student to staff ratio be one to two hundred correct yes sir and presently we're at closer to one to six hundred or one to seven fifty depending on the school level yes sir okay thank you um so what mr bellows and mr felt did is they put together several examples of what our current allocation looks like with how it would look based on the new allocation so we'll look at one of each for this elementary school everything they would have one principle um one ap the difference there's every position would be at 12 months so we'd go the initial allocation so we'd go from one ap 11 month to one ap 12 month they would still maintain a principal secretary but rather than one school secretary that could be used for

086any purpose they would have a registrar and a finance secretary we've started up monthly training with our school secretaries and one thing that we discovered is is they do different things at different schools so in order to provide good support to them and ensure that they they know their positions and are able to do them we feel it's better to delineate into specific functions the next grouping we have oh that's okay everything remains the same for this example [Music] as you follow down so the variance for a school with an enrollment of 316 would be an additional 86 thousand dollars almost 87. and we'll flip through as you can see why we included different examples for this elementary school the allocations are a little bit different they're up to 724 so we look at that

087first chart that we showed you and it changes some of these positions again in this example we are adding a dean we're adding the discretionary unit remains the same we're also adding the finance secretary and the school secretary and changing the delineation in time frames for the secretarial positions and if you guys want to want to go through and look based on enrollment this one shows 1500 and the changes in regards to the plan we included a k-8 since we have some of those in the k-8 you can see that we in our current plan start out with a principal a 12-month ap an 11-month two to 11-month aps but they're differentiated into ap1 and ap2 and then also a 10 month ap in the new plan we streamline a bit we have a principal

088one ap 12 month and then three ap 11 months to provide a little bit more support and consistency they both have the principal secretary and then you see currently we have one school secretary 12 month 111 month and three ten month in the new plan we break it out again to the registrar the finance secretary and then they would have four 10 months the reason why we give 10 month with enrollment is because they're just there to provide additional support while the students are there and the other functions are static in the times that school is out we have um no that's cool we have a middle school next so this one has an enrollment of 608 again we have the secretarial changes you see immediate they have one basic pair with our current model

089they'd start with two they have a dean in per our allocation but based on the new allocation they would not have a dean um because everything is is based on enrollment and consistency throughout all groups so for this one there's actually a savings some schools that would increase positions some schools it would decrease positions why did they lose the dean based on their enrollment because there's in this model there's only 608 students there's a principal and two assistant principals there's more than enough staff to address that issue so this model addresses consistency throughout all schools and equity um you'll see uh again for seven 750 enrollment there are similar changes however in this model they do maintain their dean position due to the level of enrollment more kids the last example shows a thousand fifty

090enrollment here we do have an increase we have an additional basic para we have an additional counselor and we maintain the dean and then you'll see where we have a teacher testing coordinator now that becomes a discretionary unit that they can use as they they see fit to best suit their needs and going back this fortnite to your question so yes at some point it no longer makes sense to have the assistant principal it makes sense to have a dean um and deans remain within the instructional bargaining unit and are not because the the number of staff are not increasing the number of administrators goes up typically for two reasons number one academic program needs a student enrollment and the supervision of other staff and so for a small school for example to go to

091750 another 150 students would not generate enough staff that would be it would make sense to hire another administrator for evaluation purposes it makes more sense to supplement that with somebody who could supervise discipline um not having uh removing a dean and and adding an ap i would imagine that position would primarily deal with discipline and other uh related concerns is that a a true assumption on my part so in in the first case of this of the middle school model with the 608 students they would essentially lose the dean to again to create equity across all of our schools however in this case you still have two other assistant principals who are there one's an 11 month one's a 12 month who would then perform the functions of supervision and disciplining students it's not

092uncommon for assistant principals to do that but again the staff number here is so low that where they would be spending more of their time on staff evaluations and classroom observations should not be adversely impacted however this could also be addressed if we found that there was a school that had some concerns or issues as we have in the past as we have this year if it come if it came through my office for example either through regional feedback to mr greene or through mr butler to mr green and ultimately to me we could then assign some additional administrative support in the role of a dean but that would be based off need this creates uniformity across all the schools then we can take other factors into consideration from there yeah i understand that uh

093thank you for clarifying that and one of the principles would be a apc correct at the middle school yes well they would api or apc yes ma'am system principle of instruction or assistant principal curriculum and any other one would serve as an apo assistant principal of operations i think my concern is making sure that if there is a school that uh is dealing with an unusual amount of behavior problems or whatever it may be and we remove that dean position that if they need support that we are able to get some support there immediately yes ma'am and and not let the situation get out of hand so that would be a my concern making sure that that would be a commitment that we would have in place from the very beginning absolutely the final example

094for middle school is 1447. so in this example you see again the differences we've streamlined the ap's principal secretary finance secretary added a para they have four school counselors versus three and also they have two deans and two discretionary units versus one dean and one testing coordinator and middle senior mrs miller sorry the school counselors which i think are much needed will they will their job and duties be different per school because most of our counselors spend a lot of time data collection and meetings and i think miss fortney's always been a fan of and many people of more counseling and more guidance so are they going to be the same or just depends on the need of the school it is it's going to vary somewhat based off the needs of the school and

095what types of programs and supports are needed at that at that campus in particular but by adding additional counselors largely you offset that burden on one or two individuals and it's shared amongst the team counselors are always required to attend iep meetings in 504s because they can speak best to the students needs as are some of their classroom teachers and others so that is a that is a core responsibility for them to attend that and maintaining records on students is part of their core responsibilities as well but i would see them spending less time in that because there'd be more staff to share the burden because right now it's very disproportionate for example you have an elementary school almost 1200 kids that has one school counselor so they're going to spend all of their day

096every day doing paperwork and not necessarily providing counseling services as they normally would i have a question i don't know if this is appropriate time but some of our high schools our lease leads on a teacher's schedule so it's the same i guess no matter where you go but some of these high schools are the one person is responsible for 300 300 i mean hundreds of ieps different than an elementary school however i don't know in your experience in other districts has there ever been anything done to either supplement pay for what they're doing or add support for those people and i don't know how we would do it if they're all in the same salary schedule i just know that our high schools are much larger and i'm i'm pleasantly surprised that they can

097even take that amount of work on i haven't seen leas in schools in seven years until i came back here quite honestly when schools are staffed properly between counselors school sites social workers then that burden is evenly shared amongst all of them um it is not the sole responsibility one individual should not be the sole responsibility of a particular individual especially one who may not be full-time on a campus and so leas are a con it's an ongoing conversation in a programmatic area that we're going to focus on right now i think that's i think a shared responsibility is a great concept i know that will be shifting the mindset and culture of the district so i know all the lease will be glad to hear that but i don't you know that would be

098changing direction from the principles that it's a shared responsibility this morning i can kind of speak to what miss miller is saying because as the teacher of the gifted i had to do transitions from fifth grade to sixth grade from eighth grade to ninth grade and it took up my entire spring break that's when i did that work so there is a need i believe for the lea but it would have been nice that i had a little help as a classroom teacher especially changing programs not knowing you know just something to be aware of so and i'll share similarly i was in the same position you were in as a classroom teacher and i had to do the gifted transitions and all those notes however my school was able to structure my schedule in

099a way that did not interfere with my off-duty time so respectfully that's that's a scheduling issue not a staffing issue and the school should have been better prepared to provide you flexibility with that time and to provide relief through substitutes and others so that you would have those paperwork days in order to catch up and there were times where my administration would provide the entire team with certain days so that we could work together to get all that documentation done during a traditional school day so i don't know that that's but i'm just trying to put that out there sure that's a shared experience but my experience was vastly different than yours and what that speaks to though is better leadership better organization better supports better scheduling um it is it's not a reflection on

100the current staffing model um but go ahead there's a lot of work that's the bottom line yes ma'am yes ma'am there is um we have a middle senior example uh you see that it loses the virtual education facilitator which was a para but that's replaced by two basic pairs one which could serve in that function we have the same changes up top in administration that we've had previously and in this example due to enrollment they have one dean versus two and also a discretionary unit rather than a testing coordinator our second middle senior example has an enrollment of a thousand seventy eight so as you can see with the increased enrollment they have an additional assistant principal which accounts for the cost increase it is offset by one dean rather than two our first high

101school example is an enrollment of a thousand forty two we have the same structure above they have an additional assistant principal 11 month they do have the registrar finance secretary and two additional 10 month secretaries due to enrollment two basic pairs versus one virtual education facilitator the number of counselors is the same three and then there's one dean versus two and a discretionary unit rather than the testing coordinator who's 40. i'm sorry are we calling the registrar secretary is that basically the terminal operator yes ma'am thank you same thing we are transitioning that title there's there's that the title terminal operator is not reflective of their practices and so they are transitioning formally to registrars gotcha more importantly student registrars right and then my other question is have we discussed or has it been thrown

102around you and your team about giving school counselors the option of going to a longer like an 11 month 12 month no no what has been discussed in this this process has actually served me very well is providing a scheduled number of additional days based off the total number of counselors and in our case right now but until we get to that place based off the total number of students and so essentially what you'd come up with is a ratio of additional day supplemental days that we could pay staff and so let me give you an example if there were five counselors who work at a high school we would essentially give them potentially 50 extra days that means every counselor could work an additional 10 days or two counselors could each volunteer to work

10325 days but that would come with a work plan that must be approved by the building administrator and there must be outcomes and deliverables that are shared and so that and that time could be used either in the summer or over breaks it could be used during spring break because of winter break it could be used any time the school's open and they could provide a function to those students and so that's the approach we've been at the table with with pea having a conversation about is how do we extend that time because not everybody wants it and not everybody feels that they need it right but for us it's important because just to assume to move everyone to 11 months without really getting a concrete plan as to what they would work on during

104that time doesn't make much sense to me i think it makes more sense to provide flexibility for each individual to make a determination as to whether or not they need that to then justify the work to be done and then that's how we pay them beyond their traditional contract so that's the approach we're taking right now thank you you're welcome we move on to 1421 enrollment at a high school with with that increased enrollment they get an additional 10-month secretary they do have the two basic pairs an additional school counselor and an additional discretionary unit and some of this i because i know the questions will come up here in a few moments because as we start to look at the history in particular in high school with our specialized programs and how programs were

105were staffed previously and then so for example we had we have a high school that has a strong ib program right and at some point that program essentially operated as a school within the school it had his own administration it had a counselor it had a secretary unit and it received a 0.5 ap when that school was reabsorbed back into its into its sister high school it's original high school it maintained those positions which the problem with that as we've been fighting to address throughout this year is it leads to perception issues where other campuses now look at their fte allocation and start to question well why is it they get those positions and we don't get those positions and there's a belief that some schools are overstaffed and they are correct when we launch

106programs initially um we we provide what the phrase that's been shared with me are attractor units and so in order for a fledgling program to be successful we need to make sure we have the right staff in the school and then we guarantee the school over a specified number of years we're gonna we're gonna support these staff outside of your budget outside of your fte units because we want you to grow the program i think quite honestly we made very good steps this month or this year by moving several aps to 12-month assistant principals essentially head of school or head of program but very much like we talked about with the counselors there's a new level of scrutiny and accountability that comes with that you can't continue to have a program with 100 students in

107it and it's not growing they are now required as we talked about they have to have an academic improvement plan or program improvement plan a pip they also have to document all of their meetings that they must have at least four meetings a year with their own program advisory committees they must be documented they must have a quorum at those meetings there's no longer an except we're not allowing those meetings to go unresolved where they just simply don't happen or just a handful of people meet but more importantly they're setting expectations they're reviewing their their recruitment policies they must increase the number of students participating in their programs by aggressively going out to feeder schools and start driving you know drawing more students and families to their programs they also have to retain more students

108they have to look at the demographics of their program and target their recruitment based off those needs and areas as well and so all of that's now coming into the fold by by elevating them there's an expectation and they're being held more accountable this will all be part of their annual evaluation as we also look forward part of the issue that we have with those attractor units has been that they have persisted for long periods of time without any new enrollment and so essentially we continue to support additional positions at a school that is largely unjustified because the number of students attending the school are not there and then that in turn has led to a belief well we deserve that because our smallest we have small classroom sizes as a result that's why our

109kids are more successful so we're putting our best and brightest kids in the smallest classrooms when we have other kids that are desperately in need of intervention and supports and they're at class size cap classrooms so we are working to address that are those those units will start to be phased out additionally we had always intended to charge schools back ms jenkins if you would take a moment or mr pitts to explain that that at some point these programs are supposed to become self-sufficient either through fte or other means and so for the first time starting this next school year we are starting to charge some of those positions against their fund balance on their campus as we should have been doing all along so this is how do you create equity you have to

110put the procedures and policies in place and you have to hold programs accountable and we are continuing to work through individual issues at each school and program area as we can but this starts to rectify a lot of those long-standing inequities especially when you compare school level to school level and school to school it's going to take us a while again it's not going to be a one-year fix but it may take us a while could you explain how they recharging back either one of you and then ms miller it's your it's yours so the ib funds and uh ace funds they're a restricted categorical um but we've just been charging the teachers and staff out of the regular general fund and those programs have built up a good fund balance of somewhere in the

111neighborhood of one and a half two million dollars but we need to start charging those programs i mean the salaries to those programs since they're picking up the additional fte funding for those programs it was ms miller and ms fields i just have a question and this is it's not directly it is indirectly related because it's another program and jason and i have talked about this in the past our transition programs when when done at the full potential they have some of them now bring in money that wble money that was returning instead of back into the transition side it was returning to the general fund and i think that we need to focus on growing those transition programs creating more of those wble opportunities and then returning those funds back to those units so

112they can so they can grow because they're because right now i'm not we talked about it at one point two years ago but i'm not sure where that fund and it's nowhere near what you're collecting for these other programs but it is funding that could be used to help grow those programs is it back is it still going to general fun do we know i'm not aware of that fun doctor let's it comes back to esc because of this but it goes back into esc not back to the direct unit that created the dollars and i think it needs to go back to the just like you're doing with these other programs to grow the you the actual programs that are creating the dollars we can we can definitely explore that yes ma'am thank you

113miss fields i understand the value of of making sure that if there's surplus dollars in fund balance for the various schools that we need to even the playing field however we have supported schools that sometimes did not have the fte did not have the the resources to to make ends meet if i would say it like that and so when we start having conversations like this i am sure that staff will look in depth and make sure that whatever we do that it is a gradual step and that it will not jeopardize the ultimate goal of putting the students first i hope that makes sense because i want to make sure actually i think it's a very valid point and i appreciate you raising the concern and let me reassure you and everyone else including

114community to anybody else watching this that that is exactly what we're trying to do here that by transitioning slowly and i said that we'd start charging positions against those fund balances that's what those funds were always intended to be used for we made that known at the time we just never did it and so at this point we are starting to do that but it is a slow trickle although additionally for programs they'll be placed much like a school improvement plan on a three-year trajectory so nothing will adversely impact them in years one or two so long as they're making steady improvements towards an ultimate goal and not their their plan so it is important and i think your clarification is accurate that for programs that are new for programs that don't necessarily have the

115beneficial enrollment either because of their geographic location or other factors yes ma'am those fact those things will be taken into consideration so that no program would be harmed but we have to keep pushing to grow those programs in so that we can best respond in a strong fiduciary manner because one of our high schools for example is overstaffed by about seven and a half positions which quite honestly that's a considerable amount of money that could easily go back into other classroom positions or support positions and so what we've been trying to do throughout this year um we've implemented curriculum audits and scheduling audits we haven't had those in a number of years so we're actually looking at class sizes we're looking at the number of classrooms we're looking at all of those things and you

116know making sure that we we kind of tighten it we can't create new positions and new opportunities and give raises if we don't first reflect on our current practices and make sure we're being as most of the most efficient we can however in the same regard we have to also make sure that we are honoring our commitment to our students and our families so you have my assurance and the team's assurance that that's exactly what we're doing thank you when this gets drilled down at the individual school level for you um i'll provide that information for you so you'll see how that works yes ma'am i was going to ask that so thank you for that miss wyatt that was one of the things i had to ask so i appreciate that um as far

117as teaching units this is extremely helpful and exactly what i was asking for when we talked on the phone the other day so i appreciate it but as far as teaching units will we see a breakdown of how many units for how many students it will not be the same at elementary through high school it'll be the same based off their fte and or specific programmatic needs so for example a school that has self-contained units or itinerary units may be slightly staffed differently simply because the needs and the how those needs of those students can best be met you will see a breakdown at high school it gets a little bit more complicated because it then becomes how do we provide a breakdown programmatically and i can talk with the team about how we can

118best reflect that if we can we have a lot of teachers as you know who teach across they teach as part of the core for the for the regular high school and then they teach one or two sections for um for for the specialized program so we'd have to i'd have to work with the team a bit i know we talked briefly on friday i grabbed the team one last time before they were walking out the door especially about the attractor units but you'll see less we'll be able to show disparities where they exist and how we're going to address that over time awesome thank you that's i that's the biggest question i think is just being able to see it's you know we see our staffing plan every year how it's traditionally come but

119being able to see where the inequities are is difficult sometimes on paper especially when we only see pieces of it so i think that would be very well we will do our best to explain them so i think this gets back to mrs field's point if if i make the conscious decision with the team to overstaff a school based off a need whether it's we've seen a spike in discipline or we've seen this program's really not doing as well they have declining enrollment and their enrollment may not necessarily justify a full-time fte but we feel it's beneficial for the students to have more stability with a full-time fte person there then you'll have that justification as to why we made those decisions to staff the school that way and i think that that addresses in

120part your both your question ms field's earlier question about how do we make sure that while we're trying to make everything equal across the board that we're also making it equitable um for our programs and our students and our communities i think that's the way we'll have to address that awesome and just one last question so you have obviously looking at just some of these schools some are additional funds some would be less funds is this your proposal for next school year to go straight to this and can we afford that and that i love the head shaking over here um so the proposal right now would be this would become part of the tiered layered so if we i don't know what slide we're on jason if you would go to summary next steps

121thank you so the district team at this point will begin to transition with the board's approval the first thing would be to start to adjust current staffing to create equity across school levels and enroll based off enrollment and greater equity across those so this ensures that schools with the same enrollment will have the same staffing options we believe it's going to take us at least two years to fully accomplish that because again the total cost just to make these adjustments right now if we were to try to implement all of these for the summer came to 17 million if i recall yeah okay i want to make sure i didn't guess the right wrong number about 17 million dollars um so it's going to take us some time to transition and then in tier two

122we'll begin to enhance other school allocations um to create improved student-to-staff ratios for counselors social workers and school psych so tier one adjustments you might see a handful of those begin this summer um a dean um a secretary those types of things and then others will occur through attrition so if a principal secretary or let me rephrase that if if we're looking at elementary model and one of those secretary units were to retire that might be the opportune time for us to make the adjustment to the new positions of a true finance person and a registrar so we'll look at those and create a timeline for those as well and then tier three focuses on other positions such as dean so deans were not a high priority for us unless it was an equity issue

123so if there's an elementary school that has 800 kids and a middle school has 800 kids the goal for us right now is to try and get the two of them as closely aligned as possible but deans are outside of that their instructional unit secretarial staff bookkeepers and anybody else who's not addressed in tier one will be addressed at the end but again a lot of that's because i believe we can address that through attrition higher salaries while we always base our numbers off the average salary with benefits some schools for example you get a 30-year veteran or 35-year veteran you're cashing a significantly higher salary at that point so there are some savings that we that we inherently occur or derive at that point as well um so starting this summer if you give

124me coming back in june 14th i can provide a comprehensive summary of what adjustments we're making now for 2022-23 and then which adjustments we would anticipate to make for 23.24 and then we continue to drill down from there thanks and can we get the updated um presentation with that slide absolutely okay absolutely and then i promise this is the last question for real go right ahead um but so with going to moving having someone just over finance or just over registrar will we be cross-training other secretaries to understand those functions so if somebody's out for a significant period of time with surgery or whatever it is that there's not just nobody that knows how to do it in the school absolutely absolutely miss jenkins is already working on that as she said you know we're

125starting to pull secretarial staff from their campuses to provide better more robust training part of that is errors are happening but with respect it's really not their fault they haven't had the support and training it's been a couple years with covey and a lot of disruptions staff turnover so it's time for us to get back to that and make sure that they'll have all the basic information they need each one of these positions will have a core number of trainings that are respective to their roles and responsibilities we call it a passport to success for each individual and then beyond that there'll be cross-training opportunities because the benefit of cross-training is not just to fill in a void if someone were absent but it's to create an opportunity for advancement as well we don't want

126somebody being so pigeonholed in what they do that they're not a viable candidate for something else but we also don't want to assume that time and seat equates to so i've been a registrar for 20 years i now want to be a principal secretary and i mean no disrespect to anybody who's made this type of transition in the fut recently but are they really ready do they have this skill set are we just assuming well they've been in the organization that long they should know and so i'm a big believer in the micro credentialing and the certification process so that we know for a fact we're training people to make that next step and to be successful more importantly if they make that transition so yes they'll all be cross-trained and supported in that regard

127thank you you're welcome the summary of next steps yes it was not included i finished i added that late last evening but i will send out the updated powerpoint presentation to the board thank you the last one is the um book options for parents and guardians so i'm not going to spend a lot of time on the first option but the opt out so beginning with the 2022-23 school year we're going to provide an electronic form for parents and guardians where they can choose to opt their child out of specific titles the opt out even in with the inclusion of an opt-in is still required as you know 16 books were challenged of the 16 all six teams were retained there were some adjustments even two of the books were not fully challenged with everyone

128opting to retain those books so there's 14 out of 16 that we're talking about with the opt-in however with the opt-out there may be specific titles and or themes outside of that list that parents or guardians may have concerns with that they don't want their child to have access to so the opt out is important this maintains the same roughly the same timeline miss miller i know you had some concerns with august 1st we moved it to august 15th based off some assurances that the team was able to provide me or again they must complete it no later than 15 days following the student's enrollment registration with respect to anyone who fails this will automatically default to their child having full access to all content at this time so there's still a protection in place

129for families who may have an objection to certain materials however we do need to establish some rigorous timelines in order to ensure that we're protecting our staff and that we're doing we can do our due diligence to make sure all the information has been captured and it's in it's in its in the right hands of our staff so this is exactly what we've talked about for three or four meetings what the opt-out would look like now we can talk about the opt-in so based off conversation at our most recent meeting request was to look for an option for an opt-in so it would it's the same electronic process it would be on the same form so they would have the opt-out section and they'd have the opt-in section in this case they would be able

130to provide their child with explicit access to any of the books that were challenged saying yes my child may have access to beloved my child may have access to drama these books would not be necessarily located with all the other instructional materials that they may not be located immediately behind the counter the media specialist and principal will determine where to maintain the collection of those books please keep in mind that these books were very limited in their distribution these are not county-wide books in certain instances there's only one copy of the book and it's contained at one high school so this is we're not talking about having to shelve multiple copies across our campuses so again very limited in their disbursement but at this time they would be kept behind in an alternate location and

131only students who have parental permission would be allowed to access the materials in the school library books that have instructional relevance will also be addressed via permission slip in keeping so this is the third phase of this in keeping with board policy when it talks about controversial materials and other items there is a permission slip so at the secondary level in middle school and high school parents will receive as they do every year the reading list for classes where the teacher will be supplementing the adopted curriculum with other library media or other literary resources in keeping with our existing practice because we do have existing policies and procedures as it relates to this not because of the challenge of books but we've always allowed parents and students to request an alternate reading assignment for their

132child and so they could have an alternate reading assignment it's important to note though that the alternative reading assignment that they're issued will still likely result in the same themes the same type of topics and issues or conflicts that were see that the teacher was seeking to address in the core curriculum or excuse me in the supplemental curriculum so there might be again i'll use beloved which is part of the ap recommended reading list if a family were to object to beloved they'd get a permission slip they could they would they could opt their child out of that as well but they could request an alternate assignment it is ultimately the parent's responsibility to request a student's responsibility to request an alternative assignment is not the burden does not default to our staff so when

133we send this home it will be sent home electronically it will also be provided at open house and orientation when they when all the students show up to get to meet their teachers and that way this information will be readily available so if the parent wants to request an alternate assignment they may but again the ultimate responsibility falls on the parent and or guardian to do so it is not the responsibility of this teacher to initiate that so as we said 6 to 12 english language arts syllabus will include a list of books to be incorporated and outline the parents guardians opportunities to review each title and subsequently request an alternate assignment the syllabus will also outline the process to request an alternate assignment parents will be informed of these titles no later than the

134school scheduled back to school night titles may be posted online for the school's website for families that cannot or will not attend a back to school orientation or the teacher can share them via email with their chat with the parents of their students in their class so that that again three options that were that we'll have in place if the board is okay with these opt out opt in and then again continuing with our current practice of a permission slip as it relates to the assigned reading for a classroom ms fordy i am not for an opt-in at all i think that puts an unnecessary burden on kids that might need access for that [Music] you know it's hard enough to get some parents involved if they don't want kids to read books and have

135them do the opt out we already have policy in place for that why are we putting more restrictions on um a parent and a kid's right to check out a book i don't i don't get it ms fields i think what my concern is uh is the assumption that the parents have access to online availability and that if they don't do anything that it automatically forfeits to to whatever it is that we have in place and understanding that a lot of families a lot of parents might not come to meetings or they might not come to the orientation because they could be working there might be other reasons why so how do we make sure that those parents are getting what they need to get i know it's not our responsibility 100 percent but i

136think we need to do the best that we can to communicate to the parents so that they will know what their options are yeah i think you raise a valid point and part of that is again beginning now in june and july or more importantly in july excuse me we will ramp up our communication to families via phone messages emails other communications mail home materials if need be to inform families of this issue and to inform families of what options they have if they don't have access to a computer at home they can do so through a public library or other areas it's it's incredibly um rare that someone can't access the internet from their phone my understanding is all of the content in the in the application that's being developed would be readily accessible

137from a phone in order for them to submit that documentation to us if they needed to come to school we our schools are open five days a week as you know for during normal hours for families to come in if they need be to provide that assistance as well but i think it's incumbent upon us to communicate to parents and convey to them the importance of this topic and what their options are and unfortunately and i could explore with the team what a paper-based option would be the problem with the paper-based option especially as relates to the opt-in that's easier to do than the opt-out if a parent were to say i want to opt out there's just no way for me to send home a comprehensive list of all the books in their child's

138campus that i mean it'd be huge packets we'd have to mail home to families to give them that access um and have them then check the box and have it would then become incumbent component of our staff to enter all that data by hand um so i do believe that if we can communicate this and over communicate this to families uh again make them aware of the importance of this option for them um and then at the end of the day it's it's their responsibility i understand that and and and i respect that but i i still have concerns about that yes ma'am and the i looked and that attachment is not on the agenda it was not so if you can make sure that we yes ma'am that we get that i would really

139appreciate it because i want to look at it a little bit more in depth yes ma'am mr wilson you know since the inception of this issue the folks who have indicated that they want full access all the time have done so based on the premise that this is limiting students access to certain themes in certain genres that has never been the case and i know i can say that and folks won't believe it if they don't want to but the folks that approached me said from the beginning this is not about themes and genres this is about content that young people shouldn't have access to content that they wouldn't have access to if they went to the movies for example parents would have the ability to restrict their access to the content it's about sodomy

140it's about bestiality it's about rape and it's about verbage that is inappropriate for certain age groups and and so i think that's why it's so important to have an opt-in so that parent in the same way that they can restrict their access to their children from seeing that kind of explicit content having nothing to do with themes or genres um whatsoever then then we give this we extend that same option for books and it really how is there a difference between books and a movie there really isn't it's it's it it is the same issue so i think that's why it's important to have an opt-in miss miller i just have a couple of questions um first as a board member i'd like to return to policy because this could i mean we still have

141books coming in that people may have issues with so we need to go back to the policy that we've already written that these will be handled at the site based because like you said some of these books are not available so how will a parent know because it we need to put this back to the parents and their responsibility if they don't know what books are there that are going to be need to be requested how we alert them your there are 16 books that have been questioned district-wide your school has two of them like are they going to know which ones are in court or in um special settings are they going to i mean for their school site yes so their selection form would only have titles related to their particular school okay

142and i'd like to know more about how that what we're requiring of the librarians or the people running the library um i want to avoid the you know vhs video store behind the curtain i just think that's a bad look i don't know how we're planning to do it it's just going to call attention to books that haven't really been given much attention so i'd like to hear about that i would like for us to return this back to the schools for their own learning communities to decide if further books like i don't want to continue this process i already have people saying well if you're going to do this you need to look at this um you know the kids are waiting for us to determine some really significant issues and books that are

143never checked out um are difficult for me to to um keep spending time on and the list will keep growing depending on what your preferences are so i want to make sure the parents are included and it's their responsibility to find out how that will how that process will work and then um how our policy will move forward with questioning content of libraries there's been no change to policy the only reason we crafted a different approach to this was the the actual nature of the complaint that was it there's a difference when the board policy and practice was first adopted there was never an assumption that there would be an allegation that we were in violation of statute let alone three that is not the premise of how the board developed a policy in the

144past or the district developed this policy the board allowed for books to be challenged based off specific titles it was never related to themes it was never related to anything else it was specific to a particular book i shared the 30-year history with the board of the books that have been challenged some have been removed some have not but again they were individual titles by individual polk county residents or family members or even employees there was an employee who challenged one of our books one of our librarians challenged a book a number of years ago and that book was successfully removed from the library at that time so this was a reaction and we developed a in our process with all due respect not only mirrored our existing district policy but i would say was

145actually better than our existing district policy in how we included members of the community so that an argument could not be made that the books in their review and whatever decisions were made positive or negative to as far as retention and or removal did not reflect the community standard i think quite honestly our committees very much so did just that and so the district process was based off the assumption that there were potentially violations of three statutes that could result in felony charges against employees for issuing books we had a great deal of uncertainty and so at the time we agreed to address those books in their totality but the board policy remains in place additional book challenges if there are any and there will always be a challenge at some point will be addressed

146at the individual school level i think we've proven and there's been enough case case studies across the state that there is no criminality here multiple school districts have addressed this this issue has been challenged in multiple school districts only to have law enforcement conduct a long and in-depth review of the criminality behind these only to find that there was none or is none and that this is a school district issue and so quite honestly that's where we are so as far as the overall policy the policy hasn't changed people can always petition and request a book to be challenged based off its content or its premise that's been our history we return to that as it relates to staff staff will just do two things as they do now they will check to see if

147one list they would basically default um to the database that shows what the parents have filled out either the opt-in or opt-out and then they would then use that information to check out the book to the student in destiny as you know we talked with destiny fallet extensively initially we were very happy with the fact that they were going to allow us and work with us to incorporate this within their own system they then subsequently retreated from that position and so it does create an additional burden on my staff but not on school staff because my staff are the ones that have to develop the process have to make sure it communicates well with schools but the burden as far as the librarian or media specialist or media pera when they're checking out books is

148simply looking up in the system does the student have any flagged materials if yes i can't check that out to that student without parental consent so i just i just want to mention that there's been a lot of disinformation um about this process and the fact that there was alleged we were you know allegedly violating statute and i think from the beginning we knew we weren't that i don't want that that's not something that a board should chase allegations of violating statute so i want to be clear on that and with the parents being in control of this with the com there's i think you said two books that the committee um unanimously said you're not an issue are they gonna be returned are we keeping all of them in some seclusion they would right

149now they would be returned because there was no challenge to them so it'll be 14 books that you would have to request correct and the parents will have notification i just needed to hear a little bit more about the process of my i have a parent call and say my child's allowed to access your library books how do they do that if it's a topic one of the 14 one of the 14. the parent will indicate their preference parent can always change their preference so they would go into the library and say i want to see beloved and there's a checklist somewhere of that child able to look at to view that book like the process of the student checking this book out that is not going to be on the shelf i just want

150to i just want to know how that will happen correct okay it's not on the shelf it'll be retained in the library behind the desk or in an office or in a storage room wherever they choose to retain that that book um i think it's important that you as you pointed out there are a lot of false assumptions there is a very much a false narrative that children are flocking to our libraries um number one our libraries are not heavily utilized um there there should be no mistake there i wish that they were but that students are going there and pulling these books off the shelves and reading them while they're in the media center it's a fallacy it's not happening the checkout history for these books alone shows these books are not at high

151interest and are in high demand the issue at hand right now is how do we provide opportunities for parents and and i do believe that parents should have a choice i believe that parents should be well informed and i think by placing this burden on families it engages them differently good bad or indifferent it forces parents to be part of the narrative and many have not and you've heard me say this and i use this phrase all the time and it's not just a catch phrase but how do you move people from being passengers in education being partners in education some of it's an ask some of it's it's a requirement you can't you can't simply default to responsibility all the time and just assume you have to have a voice in your child's education

152and so whether it's taking the extra step to allow your child to have access to that book and let's be very clear every child in our school system has access these materials through any public library through any there are no restrictions on what they can check out at that public library and so there are no issues there with students lacking access and they have far more access on their phones to content than ever before so again we chased the issue initially and while i don't like that phrase the board we were in agreement as to how to address this i brought proposals forward so this was not just a knee-jerk reaction there were a lot of uncertain there was a lot of uncertainty a lot of unknowns and at the end of the day the

153question became do we spend a million dollars in litigation or do we try to address this in a fair and consistent manner i believe the path we chose was was was the best path in fact i believe so strongly in that and i think it's been affirmed because the team can attest to how many calls we get from other school districts in the state of florida asking to now replicate our process because they liked how we did it and you know i without without that without that uncertainty it's not my job to expose the district more importantly our employees to litigation and or fear of criminality and so i believe we did it the best way possible but again it reverts back to its traditional course of action parents have options now they can opt

154out if they don't opt out of content then it automatically defaults to them having access to the complete library with the exception of the opt-in books again not books that were in high demand ever look at their checkout history what i wanted to protect by making sure we clarified here through the permission slip is that some of those books are used instructionally this gets back to a comment that miss cunningham made several meetings ago that there is instructional relevance for several of those books and parents need to understand that even in the absence so let me give you a case scenario let's say that i as a parent do not opt my child in and allow my child to read beloved in in the media center however it comes home as part of the assigned

155reading list if i grant permission for the assigned reading list that supersedes the library because my child's not getting that copy of the book through the library anyways he's getting it through a class so at the end of the day you can still the permission slip addresses the instructional the materials that provide instructional value and or relevance however if i choose to opt out then my child can get an alternate assignment along the same themes so parents need to understand the theme itself will not go away the the the verbiage the manner in which the author expresses himself or herself will change the narrative slightly changes obviously the storyline changes but the core theme and it's in the conflict contained within the novel are all the same and because that's what we're trying to challenge

156students with is it make them force go through the process of thinking uh that metacognitive approach thinking about their thinking being reflective readers being are they building that comprehension strategy because really that's what we're preparing them for for the ap exam and other exams so hopefully i answered all your questions well that's one thing i want to make sure people understand if the book's going to be in the classroom your child's in an ap class and we're not policing what's in that we're not going to police what's in a book bag of your of your peer and second of all when another group comes because i'm afraid this may set precedence that even when we get you know possible allegations of statute these will all now be handled at the site level if you bring

157a list of 500 books you will go to your school if they have the 500 books which i'm sure they won't that handle we handle that in the learning community at the site and another question i'm glad you mentioned we have other board members who may have opinions on this were they not able to zoom in today they were not thank you they were not ms field's name is fortney i think it's going to be very confusing for parents trying to determine what opting out versus opting in means uh so so i think that we're going to really really have to do an in-depth campaign to ensure that they know exactly what that entails uh i i would say that i'm a little bit concerned about having the two options because i just think the

158parents and i keep going back to the parents because i know in in my work outside of school the school district that some parents feel comfortable with whatever they have before them and some just don't feel comfortable and they need guidance and they need to have a sense of direction in order to make a good decision because they love their kids they might not have the knowledge to do what is ultimately best for them but at the end of the day they want what is best for them uh so i don't know how how that looked and i don't know how we achieve it but i think it's very uh important yes ma'am that there may be an opportunity for us to partner with local libraries there may be an opportunity for us to put

159together a video series um to help explain it to families and walk them through the process i mean those are all things that we can explore because again the goal is to have a high participation rate i do believe i still believe that with just an opt out option we'll see very little participation and i think and i said it before and i stand behind this i actually think that to a certain extent that's a reflection on how many people were actually concerned with this issue altogether but there are others who don't accept that as as being a possibility or being real so but let me explore with the team how we can best support our parents to make sure they feel comfortable making a decision and why they should make a decision if any

160decision needs to be made our goal is not to lead them to a decision our goal is to support them in their ability to do so i hear you um so let me explore options with the team and i'd be more than happy to share an update at the june meeting as well okay yes ma'am miss wyatt miss fortney i think was first okay miss forney you know it's going to be 16 more books next time they'll go behind 30 more the next time they'll go behind the counter i opted in now i want to opt out i just see a big can of worms and policy says opt out only correct i don't understand why we are even providing an opt-in for i just don't i don't get it um if they can go

161to a public library they don't have to do it why are we adding more burden more paper trails more everything when they have the power for their child not my child not sarah best child not miss fields child but for their child to opt out that's all that's why they don't even have to go outside of their library they can actually have a public library book delivered to their library to then check out but i will not support anything that has opt-in i'm in favor of having the opt-out option where parents can select what books they don't want their child to read but i will not support anything with an opt-in option i do however think that any books that we're requiring at the high school level for students to read in class as part

162of an assignment that there should be a permission slip just to make sure parents know what they're reading if we're requiring it but for library books that they can choose on their own to check out i will not support opt-in so and it sounds like there's some support for that on the board so i don't know if we need to get a consensus that we don't want to explore that anymore but mr wilson stepped out so we'll have to wait for mr wilson to return but i'd like to ask for consensus amongst the board as to your position on on inclusion again i included the opt-in based off a request at the last meeting and my conversation with several board members leading up to that meeting so if if the board believes that he opt

163out and inclusion of the permission slip is sufficient i am more than happy to move forward with those two yes ma'am students can request books out of our public libraries to be delivered to us in our libraries yes ma'am if there's not an electronic version available they may request materials through the public library we have an intergovernmental agreement with public libraries unless the parent opts out from that agreement so you're avoiding an opt-in if they're requesting it from a library correct if students request it through the public library that's outside of our our control there is a distinction legally as between what is a public library and a media center maintained at the school so and i'm sure the superintendent he has done a very good a very very good explanation of a very difficult

164subject that is wrought with potential nuances and things that frankly i i applaud you and your staff for coming up with something that i think is threads the needle if you will and i hate to put it that way um but i believe that under the circumstances that we face of course board members can decide their consensus or their viewpoints however they determine is appropriate but i'm not certain that it is something that is a board level i mean we're not we're not talking about policy changes i don't believe well if we're adding often no the the change would it would be in that regard so that's why i did bring it back to the board for discussion so the board does not have a role in selection and adoption of materials at the school

165level they do for core curriculum and that's ultimately where responsibility is even though recent legislation starts to bleed over into library materials um which i strongly continue to support our instructional supports and not instructional core valued materials however given the nature of this and and i want to be respectful of the board because the opt-in was brought up by the board and again in conversation with board members that this would be a change in policy i see well at some at any point when the appropriate dialogue would occur for that public meeting or that public action correct then i guess we can have further conversation what yes miss fields if if the policy says opt out and we're talking about uh adding an opt-in piece then that has to be uh presented for the board

166to vote on at a public hearing yeah i should i should be more specific too the opt out policy that currently exists allows parents to opt out of assigned materials not necessarily instructional materials or but we've had a long-standing unwritten policy that allows parents to go into the media center materials and select certain topics and or themes that they did not want their child have access to that is not in board policy that is just an internal practice that we've had so there is some board policy interwoven in here however there are other board policies like i shared there's and i remiss i should have included that in the presentation i'll go back and add it if need be but there's controversial materials that the board has explicit expectations set up that how do we

167communicate that to parents and then you know how to and we do provide i believe there is some reference to board policy to alternative assignments as well um as there should be and there i would be surprised if there isn't because even in the in the curriculum area of human growth and development we always provide an opt-out and an alternative assignment for students and that's required in statute as well so there is there are multiple references to opting out within board policy although albeit not explicitly stated here for media materials it's more aligned to materials that are assigned to students for reading and that's where the permission slip would come in for several of these books but i think there's enough of a connection and reiterates of that phrase and terminology that's understood and it's

168been part of our practice for a number of years that it's just something i believe needs to come back to the board for a policy decision in june yes ma'am miss miller that was my question when something's inferred it would to change policy we would have to have we couldn't do that right you couldn't do that today no there's no vote on this today it's just i the board asked me to come back with what an opt-in would look like and so that's what i've crafted for you here i would have to work with miss dodge to revise the current board policy and show what the opt-out opt-in would be because they're you know we'd want to be explicit in the whole process so you can move forward with an opt-out you can move forward

169to get ready for august with an opt-out correct okay and i think just to put a further point on the matter i think that assuming that there is a policy move afoot that it would probably not come to fruition on june 14th because you'd have to advertise you have to ask for permission to advertise which is normal and so this would be something further down the the the the skit the summer perhaps june discussion july approval yeah but not implementation but but i think i don't want to say anything more yeah i think i understand what you're saying superintendent and that is that the practice that your staff president is going to employ and utilize is thus and such and you're letting the board know correct now whether or not that requires official board action

170is perhaps a more further discussion may need to be had on that particular issue because i think i think we agree that the board policy that's in effect today is the board policy and is working correct or is implemented but there may be a practice there is a practice and again as i shared there's multiple references to opt out and opt out procedures and policies and board policies at least two board policies as i recall from my research over the last few weeks so i'll cite those for the board and allow them to reference and i'll work with miss dodge to see develop a timeline should we bring language for revision to existing policy and practice thank you sir for the support yeah so if i may ask for a consensus amongst the board uh

171miss white i don't know if you want to call the question or if we need to have the attorney call the question this is a workshop a work session meeting where you don't take any action so consensus would be simply a verbal which you're not bound by necessarily um in terms of you know position official i just think we want to make sure we can give you direction and i don't want you exploring the opt-in policy when it sounds like there's not at least four votes to support that so at this point i get the distinct impression there are not four votes to support the opt-in um so if we can just each go through and say whether or not we would support the opt-in for library books i guess so why don't we go

172through all three so if we could we just go i don't know i'm trying to recall ms wyatt last time when we did a consensus i think there's three questions the permission slipped the opt-out and the opt-in and so i would ask each board member to tell me of the three which do they support so can you put that back up please yes ma'am can you also send that to us when you have absolutely i'm a visual learner yes ma'am um so i would not support the opt-in however i will support the opt-out and a permission slip for any books used in classrooms ms miller or ms fortney sorry opt-out and permission slip only miss miller i've learned new information today that i don't think i knew ahead of time about access that we that

173students can act which is statute which is different that you can access library books through the libraries to our schools um i just think that chain we have a policy changing policy that will be voided if students chose to do that i don't know other than making policy for public pleasure i don't know that it's i want to if we make policy i want to make sure that it's valid and can be um and can be held up when the staff understands it and it can happen but if i'm a librarian and there's books behind my desk that i've have kids have to opt in for but the library sends a book over and says it goes to the student you've just voided the entire process so i'm not sure i need to create a

174third process um i need time on this mr hyde okay and that was basically why i had said that i wanted to get the document i have mixed feelings and i think that having two options would be very confusing for parents again always looking for parents because they're the ones that's going to have to make that decision so if i had to give a sense of direction today it would be the opt out with the permission slip okay if uh but again uh i i really i'm like miss miller i think that i need a little bit more information uh what you have there oh to review and chew on it and make sure that i'm understanding i'll also provide the board with an update on the policies that i've referenced today correct um so

175that you can reflect on those and i'll work with miss dodge uh mr mcnaughton if you would um find out when the iga was signed with the library uh public libraries so that would have come before the board for approval just in reference it's an intergovernmental agreement um it is not uncommon i don't believe i've ever been in a school district where that's not been allowed part of that was to eliminate barriers for students to gain access to instruction materials school districts readily embraced that simply because it more than tripled our the number of books and titles that were available to our students but they do operate under a very different legal standard than public schools do and parents have to opt in there is there is a requirement there for parents participation so they're

176already acknowledging that their child may have access and that we can't in any way filter that content um so it's just something to be aware of and we've probably been doing that for a long time this is a little bit of a hybrid sort of the book is reposed in a public library that gets brought over to the media center through some intergovernmental agreement that then changes i mean in transit it then becomes a different kind of book in a legal sense correct so i think that's where we're having where i'm not certain legally there's any difference once it is reposed in our media center even though it may be borrowed from a public library right and may be requested it still has to get disseminated from our media center to that child correct correct

177so in other words the child doesn't go over to the public library and take the book out the child takes the book out while they're in our school if it's a physical copy yes it's a physical copy but a lot largely they're now digital copies which complicates the conversation so i mean yeah so i believe it was implemented 2019-2020 school years when they first started doing it and the students have access that they can actually have it delivered to their house um but part of it was that they could have it delivered to the school as well so i don't know that they're necessarily because they don't have to pick it up in the library i don't think i'm not 100 sure so i don't have information but it was implemented just before miss miller

178and then mr wilson i just want to make sure day one of school or by day 15 parents have the right to go in and opt out of genres and this isn't including the 14 books you can opt out of hundreds of books by genre title title title we will not guarantee genre at this time okay so they can if parents are very very concerned that within 15 days they're high schooler because there's disinformation that these schools are in elementary schools i've had to deal with that so as a high schooler if i do not want my child to see this book within the first 15 days of school i must select the opt out i'm opting him out of these 14 titles no okay explain how that'll work because it's only the titles that

179were there at your child's school so for example um it's perfectly normal okay the book that we saw on a trifold with the photos right cartoonish kind of in nature exists at one school in the entire school district it exists at haines city high school hasn't been checked now you've told all the students at hayden city high school to go get the book actually i haven't but um so that book would be reflected on that list for that school so if the book is not in circulation at a current school okay there's no reason to include it okay so that's important for parents because i'm trying to what you said and this is what we need to do as a parent i want the choice i want to give parents the choice as ms fields

180has mentioned listen i want every child every parent to be 100 involved in their kids education and we struggle with that so i need for parents to have a clear message that if i'm at hayne city high school parent within the first 15 days of school i can go in and choose the title so my child will not be able to see that at school um so we're still giving the parent the option and putting it back in the parents hands to be responsible for what their child is selecting to check out and i think that was the that was the interest from the very beginning parent responsibility and that's what i want to provide them i think what's been convoluted is we have policy that would have to be changed to do things differently

181and now that the public library access i can i want to see that same book but i'm at winter haven high school i can download it on my phone from the public library so that i mean i think we need to make sure we're putting out the right information because as of this past weekend we have people believing that schools that books available in elementary schools correct but we've addressed that numerous times and the book list has been followed numerous times where's public relations no i don't i don't know how you fix that other than just keep telling the truth and to help disseminate correct information mr wilson i saw your hand up well i i i hear miss fortney and i feel the same way on the opposite side of the spectrum i can't

182understand it on any level i mean we heard somebody read one of those passages here we all heard it we know what it says and we're okay with a middle school child reading that or even a freshman in high school it makes no sense i i don't understand it on any level i don't know it you know it just doesn't make sense to me and that's what i'm talking about passages specific passages i mean if the authors rewrote those passages they're not going to but if they did i have no problem with the books it's those passages that are so vile so we have those books segregated in our public libraries nobody's ever said we should ban them no one's ever said we should take them out of our society we're out of our public

183libraries so they're segregated in our public libraries and if a parent wants their child to have access to it they give them permission that's what the opt-in is and i think that's spot on that's the way it should be they're not in our library so they can go pick one up and read it during lunch or any other time and even if only a few kids do it and they're impacted by that why why would we be okay with that on any level so that's that is opt-in that's what opt-in is the parent says okay you can have access to it that's fine they've granted their child access to it i'm saying we should do that in our libraries actually i'm saying we should send those books over to the public library and let them

184get them from the public library i don't i don't think it should be in our libraries frankly but they're there so that's why i believe in an opt-in and if it's easier for you superintendent high to you use the permission slip than the opt-out then i'm fine with that too whatever whatever you suggest but i'm still in favor of the opt-in for that reason and i think saying that they're in our public libraries makes my case frankly and that they can be ordered over by the parent i'll reach out to our remaining two board member colleagues and have conversations with them and i'll obviously i'll have conversations with any other board member who has questions or follow-up to this and i will bring something back in june you'll have something from me well before the

185meeting i'll say that miss fields i have something completely different yes ma'am at our last board meeting we spent a lot of time at the beginning of the work session talking about the district's staffing organizational chart and a day or so before we got some additional names of upgrades and promotions okay and i was other under the impression that that additional list was going to come before us for the board meeting today and it's not on the agenda so my question is uh when are we going to see that and have discussion on it and then if it's not today why are we having a board meeting with just minutes two sets of minutes and naming of a building for someone now you understanding my question i am so the board already approved the stat

186the reorg the board voted and approved that there were three phases as we discussed there were existing positions that were modified existing position or and then restructuring reorganization um regionals and other positions that we we added the truancy officers we had good discussions through most of those and so then the board took action at the last meeting so the only remaining thing before the board today is to allow me to take action on school allocation models and so that's that was the intent behind today was to ensure that the board was able to give me that information so that i could start working with hr to start transitioning to that new plan and i think that for me i can't speak with other board members i i think that for me the focus was on

187the board position and that's why i voted against the district staffing plan and it's not noted in a minute as to why i said nay but that's the reason why and i actually would like to have that in the minutes to show why i voted against that district staffing plan yes ma'am if i recall correctly i'll have to check yes ma'am we can actually it's not i was trying i was making reference i apologize as to whether or not you voiced your opposition to the entire entirety of the staffing plan which is not my recollection i didn't because i didn't voice concerns with one particular position right within there and i i'll make sure we note that so that you weren't necessarily averse to the entire staffing plan or the the reorg plan um but

188you were you had a concern in particular as to one particular position right and i even had tried to see if i could uh pull that one uh position out to vote on the entire plan and was told that that could not happen so i i just wanted to be understood that i did not realize that that last piece was a part of the plan that was voted on and approved by the majority of the board because i don't remember it being at the top of the list it must have been at the end of the list okay is what i'm saying so now i know so my question is now and i don't know that it even matters if we only have minutes and one other item why are we having a meeting today

189because there were some other items that we had and we felt the need to have a meeting at the end if there's no need for a meeting we wanted to get the two name naming conventions or excuse me building renaming done you and i spoke in particular about one we realized there was a conflict for the family involved because say is officially a last day for employees so sybil was not able to be here today she was going to try and get here by 10 or 10 30 to be here for the naming but we agreed to move it to june 14th we did pull the allocation model the school allocation model off of the agenda for today because that was initially what was on there for approval but i wasn't sure where we were

190going to be at with this level of specificity and it seems like today we were able to address those issues for the board and so if there's a comfort amongst the board we can make a motion to amend the agenda if that's still allowed and we could still have that so the goal for today was to keep getting this information out before the board continue to address your questions but also get some movement ms wyatt and others expressed concern that if we were changing the school allocation model we needed to do so in a timeline that would allow hr to begin posting those positions and let us start hiring those people almost as quickly as possible so that was the intent behind today's meeting well thank you because i was a little bit confused on

191the last thing i want to do is waste anybody's time i agree okay madam chair that concludes the superintendent's report for today in workshop thank you and we will go through the agenda which i think we pretty much already have so we have the two sets of minutes i apologize the wrong one there is one amendment if it's not already reflected on here the naming of the freshman building at kathleen high school will be moved back to june 14th to ensure that the family is present when we do that thank you it appears that is called the work session meeting closed and then open a regular board meeting not yet because we're going through the we just go through the agenda first to make sure there's no questions do we want to take a vote

192on approving the direction for the staffing plan so you can start posting those decisions i would very much appreciate that what so would that motion be to approve the staffing plan as presented during work session yes ma'am and that will be an action agenda item correct correct and on june 14th i'll bring the formal multi-year focus with costs associated so that you see how we're doing that okay thank you and then board member comments i would like to have it reflected on why my vote was made for the district staffing plan and that's not in the minutes okay i don't typically that's not put in the minutes under robert's rules of orders so i don't know if it's not going to be in a minute it needs to be in the work session i demand

193it we can okay so how can you do that between meetings okay and i'd like to have comments i think that as a board member i have a right to ask whatever i want to ask and i should be respected to have that like everybody else in the past we've always had detailed minutes and we've drifted from that for whatever the reasons may be robert rules of order whatever and the only way that one can know what actually occurs in our meetings now is by going to the the meeting of video footage to see it that's the only way we can know what our the public can know and so we spend a lot of time talking about different things but when we look at the minutes it's like we didn't really spend any time

194so i i respect the the fact that sometimes we might not agree but i also respect the fact that we can agree to disagree um and i when i was when i make a request i would just really appreciate being respected enough to have my requests honored and it's nothing to me difficult about having a statement added to minutes saying why my comments why my vote was an a thank you my question was just to staff to make sure that was possible because board docs has changed how the minutes are done so that was i just wasn't sure if it was a well you weren't so i didn't know what that was all about well it's that's because that follows how robbers folds is done so i just wanted to make sure that we have

195the ability to do that easily between meetings all right any other comments for the work session mr wilson had his hand up a minute ago but well i mean i'm a little confused by this conversation i mean regardless of what board docs does or doesn't if someone wants something in the minutes it goes in the minutes it's just that simple and that's that is robert's rules water so i i uh i'm a little confused about why we would be hesitant to include that um and we've had this discussion before when it comes to minutes and there has been some hesitation in the past about including certain things in minutes but i mean if someone wishes to have something added it should be my question was just to see if it could be done in five

196minutes before the next meeting or if we needed to wait you know it's an amendment to the minutes and it doesn't have to actually go on there just now it can go on there later i was here when we i remember when we kind of changed that and i know that my comments weren't being reflected the most accurately when we were doing details and details but yes if anyone was to ask i hope that we could put an asterisk or you know add that but overall the way that we're doing minutes is because that is usually how they're done in these size meetings and multiple occasions i went back when we were doing very detailed she said this and he said this and it wasn't it just wasn't accurate because there's no way anybody could

197unless we had a stenographer there would be no way to do that so um thank you for adding when we can because i think that's very important for board members to do but um detailed minutes weren't accurate and i think they need to be so i appreciate that thank you miss miller mr wilson and i agree with ms miller that that was something of a challenge in the past so i think at a higher level is is more relevant but um certainly if someone requests to have something added i think that should be as well thank you mr wilson miss fields i'll say one other thing i agree and i think with comments from board members with it being so much it could be convoluted and could be misunderstood but but simple motions and stuff

198i didn't really see that as being a problem in the past those comments were primarily correct and accurate thank you miss fields any further comments for work session all right and we will take a 10 minute recess while they reset the videos or sorry not a recess we're adjourning this meeting we'll reconvene [Music] you