School Board Work Session | May 10, 2022

001[Music] with my classrooms i don't have rules um i have expectations rules are made to be broken and expectations are made to be met okay so you raise the standard for what you want and that's i i don't talk about you broke a rule no you haven't met my expectation and the kids respond to that positively and the parents respond so you contact a parent and go hey um johnny is not meeting my expectations today he won't stay in his seat he won't be quiet he's talking over me he's bothering with their kids those are all things that are expectations not rules and the parent is quick to go oh no oh oh they'll do it tomorrow don't worry no thank you mr crooner for letting me know [Music] my name is amy heiser-myers i

002am the principal of horizons elementary here in davenport florida my number one guiding belief is all children can learn and we as as practitioners and educators it is our responsibility to provide every student with the opportunity to grow not only academically but also social emotionally as well she's a great mentor and she's very supportive of teachers she is great about going into classrooms and she really cares about student learning and making sure that all students receive the education that the best education possible i cannot brag about her enough as far as being supportive when it comes to the safety and security of our kids every idea she listens to she goes above beyond helping us on our suggestions you don't find many people that are willing to go that extra mile and she has never

003hesitated to say yes to those things so it's it's been wonderful i feel very strongly and i have been very open with my with my battle with with breast cancer and i am happy to say that i'm in the clinical term what they call remission but due to powers above i consider myself healed i just am very privileged to not only be a survivor but to be able to share my story and to bring it full circle to how has that made me a better principal what i like the most about ms hasemar is that she is very a great kind leader and she never quitted even though when she was going through her treatments [Music] it's early morning at union academy but that doesn't slow down the bluegrass band as they serenade the gathering

004crowd in the [Music] they cafeteria all here to celebrate this man j.j corbin one of the first black paratroopers in world war ii and long time teacher coach and school board member at polk county public schools in honor of his years of service union academy is naming their media center after mr corbett we have a very unique setting here at union academy and it's only based in our history with mr corp being here today and us naming the media center after mr corbett specifically we're putting his name on the building to represent that history i want to thank all of my friends who are here for this honor and i look back and wonder do i deserve it i hope that i've lived the kind of life that this honor could be in my name

005to find out more about the dedication check out our news story at polkschoolsfl.com news [Music] and without chilling [Music] we will now call this work session for tuesday may 10 2022 to order and i will start by reading our who are we statement we are the polk county leadership governance team if we were to pick one phrase to define us it would be student-centered because when we come together to work we lean on our diverse backgrounds and experiences to ensure that our decisions are focused on providing a high quality education for all students the four most important things to our governance team are operating with integrity respecting our students staff families and each other establishing a culture where our stakeholders feel valued supported and have opportunities for personal and professional growth and supporting an approach

006of 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 hide i'll turn it over to you ma'am good morning madam chair members of the board staff community members it's a pleasure to be here with you this morning the first item excuse me on this morning's agenda for workshop is

007uh two two items excuse me for frost proof middle high school remaining their main office suite after miss claire hatcher bush and kathleen high school naming the freshman building after mr johnny jackson so i would ask at this time that the principal from proof middle high please come forward where you could provide some information regarding the background of the said individual and why the recommendation came through your sac committee for the board good afternoon i'm kyle windham i'm principal frost proof middle senior and it's interesting that i've spoken with each individual here and it's whether it was over coffee or coke or whatever but as an as a group this is impressive just so you know this is this is impressive group so we have the opportunity to name our administrative office suite our front

008office after ms claire bush ms bush started teaching at frost roof high school in 1973 and she was there for 40 years four decades and so as a teacher homeek and for those that remember homek math she was a guidance counselor and then she served as the assistant principal for curriculum twice two different terms there and in between those terms was um the administrator uh assistant principal for administration so everybody in frost roof if you come through frost roof you know miss bush without a doubt she's um she uh you know it's funny she was born in athens georgia she is a huge universal georgia bulldogs fan and then she comes to frostproof to teach which is the bulldogs and so she spends her time there doing that so our sac meaning our sac team

009had a chance to vote um to name this after her i thank mr wilson for his support and his letter that went as well and we're asking for that support for for that any questions ms cunningham just want to say that she is such a she leaves such a legacy there um every graduation that i went to there was miss bush all the kids loving on her hugging her thanking her she has a heart of gold and a true heart for serving students student leadership she's an amazing woman so i'm very excited that you brought this forward to honor her in this most wonderful way for her time dedication and talent to frost proof middle senior high school thank you thank you mr windham if approved if you don't mind what would be the timeline

010for a ribbon cutting or the formal recognition uh more likely in the fall and we would do that in the fall okay we'd wait until we if it's uh approved um then we would have time over the summer to make sure everything was prepared yes sir and then there at the beginning of school we would be able to do the ribbon cutting and perfect ceremony thank you yes seeing no further questions thank you very much sir thank you at this time i'd invite therefore jones principal at kathleen high school please come forward mr hill you're welcome to join him as the regional superintendent the sac chair is also here oh please come forward thank you miss fields good afternoon everyone my name is derek jones i'm the principal at catholic high school and i'm here

011to ask permission to rename our freshman building after mr johnny jackson i made contact with his wife and i think she can speak better to his accolades and why the freshman building should be named after him he was a graduate of kathleen high school but i'll defer now to ms thank you mr jones mr jones did contact me and asked me if i would be willing to come and speak before the board my husband prior to his demise he has always been a fan of kathleen high school he attended kathleen high school that's correct but he is a polk county public school graduate he attended medela elementary then he attended lakeland highlands middle school and then kathleen and after kathleen he did go on to pursue college but he was a kathleen high school graduate

012he came back and worked for the district as he came back and worked for the district he worked across the district down at dundee ridge middle school he worked at bartow high school lakeland high school crystal lake middle school and he ended his career in his dream job as the principal of kathleen high school i know that many of the teachers reached out and staff members reached out prior to going to mr jones and asking them asking would i be okay with the renaming of their freshman academy mr jones i'll pose the same question to you if approved what would be the timeline for the ribbon cutting and public recognition we will go at the same timeline as far this fall okay any questions comments miss fields i don't have any questions but i would

013like to read some of the uh points that i had made in my letter to you mr hines yes ma'am um as uh miss miss odom jackson said mr jackson's dream job was to become the principal of kaplan high school his dream came true in 2018. during his tenure as principal many accomplishments were made under his leadership and just to name a few increased and maintain a school grade of c increased the high school graduation rate from 79.7 percent to 91.5 percent decreased the school's discipline rate significantly implemented the whole school transformational grant kappa lane high school was the only high school in polk county and one of 25 schools statewide to receive the grant kathleen was awarded 4.4 million dollars to implement a school transformation implemented from the grant the partnership with usf for

014kaplan staff to pursue advanced degrees in education this partnership was later replicated in several other schools implemented an additional partnership with usf guaranteed admissions program this program was designed to create a well-educated and skilled diverse student body and recruit from an underserved population mr jackson was a true asset to kaplan high school and is sorely missed by the students staff families in our community it is with much respect and gratefulness that i request that the freshman academy building be named mr johnny jackson freshman academy building thank thank you miss miller i think that we're all very um thankful for what you and mr jackson have provided our students i know my niece lived with us for a while and was um there at kathleen and i think the ninth grade freshman building is a perfect

015building because it faces as people come in it's a great it faces people as they're driving in and so to honor him i'm i'm more than happy that we're doing this for you all today thank you see no further questions or comments thank you all very much thank you madam chair moving on the second item on today's agenda is mclaughlin grade level expansion as the board recalls at the last workshop i provided a recommendation or at least began a narrative with the board about what had taken place previously going back to 2019 when there was discussion about expanding mclaughlin i provided some additional information for the board as it relates to the benefits and why we were still contemplating this at this time as i shared just a quick summary mclaughlin currently is at 38

016to 39 utilization with space to accommodate 735 additional students the projected growth of single-family residences within winterhaven and lake wales communities will require additional seats that cannot be met within our existing structure or the charter school system alone continuity of program for our students is something that you've heard me constantly advocate for whether that's a k-8 environment or 612 environment the longer a student can persist within a school setting the stronger the relationships we can establish with the family and between students and their peers and students and the the professional educators in those buildings and so our student outcomes should improve over time it does as i shared currently have space the existing infrastructure will support multiple academy options those have yet to be determined and should the board agree through consensus that i should

017move forward with additional planning towards implementation today then essentially we would finalize those academies but i'll touch on that here in a few moments i would also add that the cost of a new campus a new high school campus is roughly 100 million dollars if not 110 million dollars compared to should we do a phased renovation at mclaughlin it's about 55 percent of the cost so there's a considerable savings there and as you can see here i provided some enrollment projections i stayed with the status quo of again assuming that the school would retain 70 percent of its current eighth grade class i think that's important i expect that number to grow especially as interest grows if this is approved but again for the consistency sake you can see how the numbers would grow from

0182023 2022 to 23 at 561 total students enrolled and the minimum expectation by the end of 2025-26 when they would have their first or excuse me their second year senior class or let me rephrase that their first year senior class they would be approximately 868 students the school start and stop time would be similar for all levels as we have presently at frost proof and fort meade again i think it's important for us to point out we do have two schools mr wilson rightfully so pointed out a concern or a question as to did we have concerns about the possibility of middle schoolers coming in contact with high schoolers i reminded the board that we have two school settings where this is done successfully every day and actually quite honestly i believe it serves us

019a great deal to have embedded mentors within this within the school setting and to have seniors and juniors serving as effective role models for our students and so we would establish a school start time but the middle and high would begin at the same time the academic focus areas would include defined and performing arts the power utilities program agriscience and a medical program is being strongly recommended given its growth potential an inch high interest in the area athletics and clubs the school would grow into athletics and clubs opportunities over the first four years due to the fact that the school would the recommendation at this time would be to allow the school to grow one grade level per year that becomes it makes it more manageable from a staffing perspective it also gives us a

020more adequate timeline in which to address some of the facilities needs such as a gymnasium track and other needs that we would have to fully support these programs i do have mr talbots here today as well as ms cummings and i have had conversations about how do we best support this school moving forward if it were to become a high school in their first year they would have jv options for students and we would use a combination of current school facilities depending on the sport being played or we would travel as we have historically with other schools to other facilities in in the area you'll see an item for example an item that's on the agenda later for today is denison field could denison field serve as an off-site location for jv football games temporarily

021until this school were fully fully developed and built out the answer is yes there are other options obviously that are in closer proximity but there are solutions for all of these but again it would be a phased implementation over multiple years so the facilities enhancements i did ask ms usher to look at the projected budget of what it would take to make that campus commensurate with a traditional high school or a middle high school campus based off our analysis it would cost us approximately 42 million dollars at this time it would be phased in with prioritization for certain areas there we would prioritize parking and gymnasium and outdoor fields at this time so again with the board's approval through consensus for me to move forward and develop a definitive timeline for staffing and for final

022and final facilities plans we would bring you each one of those they would this would be broken out into four phases minimally and this is based off of miss ushers analysis as well as the analysis conducted by mr pitts and ms jenkins as it relates to our ability to sustain those projects financially within our current resources here's what the floor plan looks like or i should say the plot plan looks like you see the existing school down in the right hand corner you see where we would have practice fields track and field where we would place and ultimately the school would have both a gymnasium and an auditorium and again that would make it commensurate with a traditional high school or middle high in our school district the team even went further and began looking

023at rezoning options and again these are very much draft and so i don't want anyone in the community to overreact or or make any assumptions because but i did want to show the level of detail that has gone into this before and currently as to for planning purposes because it's important for us to move quickly on this matter so possible rezoning option here you can see what that looks like second rezoning option and again this has not been vetted this is just simply what our team was able to pull together based off previous conversations and or current assumptions so there are two rezoning options that we've included within the presentation just to give a general sense of what this might look like it's still as i want to continue to highlight that there's still school

024choice amongst these schools for programs so families don't have to worry necessarily about the boundaries and this has yet to be determined and it's important as well to note that families would be grandfathered in and zoning would take place as we phased in a grade level class each year and so by what i'm trying to explain there is that even with an incoming freshman class if students chose to stay within their current zone school then we would allow that but they'd have to provide their own transportation and so that and that's a that's an important clarification to make because once the school's rezoned if you choose uh or for example if i'm a 10th grader currently and i'm somehow impacted where the rezoning would force me back to mclaughlin we would allow you to continue

025to complete your your school level program until you graduated you would not be forced to return back to your normal zone school my recommendation at the time would not be to eliminate transportation for existing students we would sustain that but that's a conversation again depending on the direction of the board today not through a formal vote tonight but through consensus recommendation during the workshop i would then get in into the conversation with mr davis and others to start planning out potential impact for transportation and other needs items to be addressed again further just to be completely transparent that if the board reaches consensus today and authorizes me to continue moving forward with the planning and implementation of this to bring back as one final presentation for final board approval obviously we need to work on

026the proposed boundaries and attendance zones with the estimated enrollment numbers finalizing the program focus areas including all startup costs even athletics it's not as simple as saying well we'll host jv football that requires a hundred and some odd helmets shoulder pads all the other relevant equipment and you know unfortunately because of covid there are still significant delays with shipping so we mr talbot would need direction very quickly in order to ensure that he could pull together resources for this school to launch this year the staffing allocation adjustment would again would allow for a three-year phase-in i think what i shared here previously and i want to continue to reiterate is the number of students there would would actually not require a significant increase in staffing because they would be serving both middle school and high

027school with the appropriate certifications so the school would not essentially be fully staffed until year three or year four we can actually incrementally add staff so the burden is not on the school to secure the entirety of the staffing allocation model in year one or summer one heading into next school year so that's an important note and that's why phasing in grade levels is a more i feel as a more appropriate process when you're dealing with existing schools expanding grade levels and or changes to existing boundaries a good example of that was we very recently met with several schools out at chain of lakes um to have a conversation about re the rezoning that's taking place out there based off the attendance boundary committee recommendations and providing families with assurances or reassuring families that a

028child who's currently in a school setting may maintain themselves in that school setting they don't have to move into the next year provided a great deal of comfort and it also from an hr perspective provides greater sense of relief to a school that may be seeing declining enrollment so rather than one year we're losing all of these enrolled students we're allowed to gradually phase it in and transfer staff between the schools which is a more i find that to be i hate to use the word humane but a more respectful and a more professional approach to how to transfer staff rather than assuming 300 students are going to be transferred next year let's move you all that level of displacement can create a lot of negative impact on the school's culture and obviously can set

029up a new school with that negativity of individuals coming in so it allows hr a more appropriate timeline in which to address these issues as well yes miss miller are you finished that was quick i am that was we moved to that relatively quickly i just have a couple of questions and this can be addressed when you bring us back all of the information um i do think adding one grade at a time um is probably the best way to do this two things with that we have invested a lot of money in the school previously for different programs i would ask that we respect those academies and the dollars spent from our taxpayers for the programs that were to be implemented there i think you have amazing leadership that will be able to do

030this and more i just know that the taxpayers see more dollars going into a school and they want to see the results the return on their investment um that's one when we're adding sports and this would probably be a dan talbot question i know we're not going to be able to compete with other high schools for the variety that you'll be able to provide so i'm kind of curious on how that will work with the limits of adding jv options for some but not all and the last thing is roosevelt and its unique um setting and classification currently does some collaboration with the school for culinary academy and other things but how is th i would like to know how this will affect that school and what your plans are for roosevelt we're going to

031continue to do collaborations with this school are we going to try to make roosevelt a standing high school like that and that's a hard question you've never dealt with that school with that with the unique position that you're in with that school and i think there's a lot of opportunities there but we need to have the conversation on how this will affect that high school which is now can i guess still uh classified as alternative but it is supposed to be a gen ed setting yeah so very good questions i'll i'll address the the back end of your questions first of all mr talbott makes his way up front to talk about jv because my understanding is we would we would require we're required to provide the jv options for all students so we don't

032end up creating a title ix issue for us in particular so we need to be equitable but as it relates to roosevelt yes the school would continue to provide students with options and i think that's one of the unique features about the mclaughlin relationship with roosevelt is we expect to invest some additional dollars into roosevelt for their culinary program so those students would have the opportunity to travel as they do presently but that's where we got the idea admittedly i got the idea to offer an extension of the similar types of programs to lake wells charter school students that if there are academies that we have within close proximity to that to their schools that they can't afford to replicate but their students have an interest in why not create a model where we can

033have shared resources so i think that's important for us and roosevelt the intention is to move that school away from a center school or its previous model to more of a traditional high school that continues to serve those students with increased capacity um and so yes that would be a focus for us as well i just don't want to turn it into i mean it's not going to be a competing high school are those students at roosevelt going to be able to take part of clubs and things at mclaughlin that are not available to them because if i was a parent where would i place my child the school that has adding all of the phenomenal extracurricular activities or a school that we're still trying to find its purpose yeah there's an interesting option between

034mclaughlin and roosevelt quite frankly that has yet to be explored but i'd like to bring that back at a subsequent meeting if i may thank you um and i think you and community members would be very pleased with what we're talking about ms cunningham yes very exciting um to have read through this a lot of the backup information was stuff that we had already seen years ago um that was put in here for background and information and then of course you know yours is updated the timeline on the previous one uh versus what we've got today um i realized from looking here that you are hoping to start ninth grade this coming fall i thought that was pretty rigorous so am i reading those numbers correctly you are i am that i want to be

035honest that was based off the enthusiasm that the board demonstrated at the last meeting and i'm gonna be honest the leadership the leadership at mclaughlin would like very much to take control and seize the opportunity now um to do this and and so when i saw the response from the board at the last meeting knowing where dr hudson's living on this issue and and the tenacity that that young lady demonstrates on a daily basis to fight for her kids in her community yes um you know we'll get behind her she knows she has if this is approved she understands what's expected of her and it gets back to ms miller's point their current programs will be held up and will be sustained we invest a lot of money there for a fine performing arts program

036and we expect that to continue to grow and flourish there as an opportunity for east side students because i was trying to figure out when we were kind of fake phasing it in and when i looked at your enrollment projections i was like oh my goodness this is this august so yeah she if she retains 70 you're looking at the possibility of five additional staff so it's not a large number because again they'll be able to serve both the middle school and the high school with the appropriate certifications but we're only talking anywhere from 97 to at maximum 132 students you divide that by the fte you're looking at about maximum of six staff and that's not inclusive of support staff and that's a different conversation but that's what i need to bring back to

037you based off the board's direction today okay because reading all the previous stuff it looked like there was a year for the planning basically and then phasing in for the ninth and okay so i just hope that's not too rigorous of a rigorous of a timeline because to me quality is more important than timing if they needed the extra time to do what has to be done renovations on campus whatever so that they're successful that's my my that the kids are successful um then so be it but if she feels like they can do it by this august then more power to them i think it's wonderful i have a strong feeling she'll be here tonight and for up there she is missing yes am i am i speaking out of turn or do you

038feel like you can take please come forward it's a microphone with mr talbot um doctor hudson i wasn't prepared but standing next or sitting next to this great man how can you not be we've been working together to make sure that the vision that was set forth with the previous administration that we were in preparation all in all in hopes that you would be willing to grace us with this opportunity for our students the facilities are already there the only thing that we've asked for is a possibility of an awning so that we can provide outdoor and endorsed um eating for next year besides that the campus can take the kids tomorrow we are using testing labs now that will be turned into classrooms we've already started cleaning those in great anticipation of the possibility

039but most importantly the students are eager for the opportunity to stay and i think i remember several of the students saying you know if this does come to fruition i'll be able to stay right here at mclaughlin and enter my ninth grade year i can remember a few of the kids the other evenings saying that so i just want to make sure you have adequate time to plan because in reviewing all the older things that said a year you know in planning and we're giving you what four months so what we did is we've been planning as for the possibility all right and so tonight with your approval yes we have a wish list of things that we need and supports to hand over to the administration to mr green ms barnes and superintendent hyde

040that with those supports or directions some of it's not action items we just need who do i go to for this yes we're thoroughly convinced that we can make it happen anything for the kids awesome and athletically we've been planning and preparing i have two district-wide master schedules for junior varsity one with them one without so depending on you know tonight's vote or the direction we can go those won't be released but we have a plan to include those student athletes there will be some challenges as far as the supply chain but the beautiful thing about being in the district that we're in is we have 15 other schools that will come to our aid if needed if there's if we're missing two or three pairs of shoulder pads those things we have the the

041resources right here in our own community to be able to provide the opportunity for kids to participate and make it a great experience and grow as we continue to add grades from years on that's awesome thank you so much miss field's name is forney so if my memory serves me correctly when this campus was modernized back in 2010 maybe 20 i believe dr mckenzie was the superintendent at that time i know that the vision then was to utilize that campus to capacity and i've been to mclaughlin and it is not being utilized to capacity correct a beautiful facility so much potential but again not being utilized to its capacity so i'm excited about this opportunity i know that dr hudson and her staff have been working on this for a while with the hopes that

042the board would be in agreement the only concern that i have not for mclaughlin but as it relates to capital uh improvement is that i would not want to see anything uh jeopardized by us moving forward i want to make sure that whatever we have as it relates to are still going to continue but i am definitely 100 in support of moving this along we do this all the time with our charter schools where they come to us and they want to do at one grade level at a time and so i think it's only fitting for us to make sure that we take care of our our schools as well and the goal would be to bring back one final comprehensive plan with all of that information we'll make sure we include a total

043summary because i again i've met with multiple staff who have assured me we can operate within our current parameters without having to delay other projects but i want to bring bring that back to you to show you that to reassure you thank you absolutely miss fortney i'm just uh cautious about roosevelt and i'm looking forward to whatever plan because that's a unique school that serves a unique students and i'd like to keep it unique as possible it will and i think you you raised miss miller and i have had long conversations about roosevelt and its current trajectory and its history and approaches that have been used to pass some successfully some unsuccessfully and i but i think it's an opportunity that we have in front of us because my concern with its current structure structure

044is that it continues to reinforce an approach to students who in my opinion and that of the federal government and idea deserve to be have access to lre the least restrictive environment with their role alike peers and i think we can we can create that atmosphere while also maintaining the uniqueness of roosevelt but again i'd like to bring that concept back to you um miss hudson's involved in this conversation i mean let's be honest if miss hudson had her way she she would take 18 schools under her wings and call them all mclaughlin the mclaughlin consortium and i'm not giving her any more ideas but i like that idea she has no i don't she she's an amazing leader with a great vision and i it's a pleasure to work with her on a daily

045basis um but i again let please let me bring back a more comprehensive plan because i i would love to talk more about it here but there's a lot of conversations that still need to happen before i do so yes ma'am miss wyatt thank you and i looking at some of the old documents again was kind of a blast from the past and one of the things that i remember saying when we talked about it then was how excited i was for the entrepreneurship to be falling in both the arts and the um in one of the joint categories coming from a theater arts world background having all of them are independent contractors so understanding how do you file your taxes how do you build a budget those types of things is so important so

046i'm hopeful that that will be one of the tracks that you continue so i just wanted to encourage you with that but and just so the board knows as um i think she indicated we do have this on the agenda this evening when um superintendent hyde and i spoke we felt like it was important if we're going to open it in august to at least be able to give them direction as to you can go ahead and start working to get get it done and we can come back in june with more specific things if we need to but to go ahead and give them the green light so that they can start tomorrow on things that they've been waiting for direction on as opposed to needing to wait until the middle of the summer

047thank you for that because there's far more that is done than isn't completed and i think that's important because so much work was done on this in the past and and much to miss to dr hudson's credit she never let the ball drop and she's maintained a tenacity and a focus on this that it really is admirable and and so she's very much prepared and as i shared staffing is always the biggest concern finances we can always work around the financial issues but when you have a leader who's willing to say okay yes if i'm gonna have to hire five or seven more people this summer and i'm willing to take that on and i know what i'm what i'm taking on and why not empower her to do that and i think she has

048shown repeatedly the ability to do so while elevating her school under the toughest of conditions to have exited d.a status the way they did um you know with with the crew that she had and took a great deal of work under the most ridiculous of circumstances and so kudos i respect you a great deal as a leader as an educator so thank you so i'll entrust you if the board entrusts me thank you all right mr talbot you can stay right there sir the next item for discussion is the possibility of the denison stadium renovation um so right now to renovate denison stadium would cost about 1.3 million dollars part of that the most significant portion of that cost would be to turf the field i am a huge proponent for turf for a lot

049of reasons especially as we look and it's funny that we just had the state of the union conversation or state of the county conversation where water management is was it was an issue that was highlighted and so how do we then play a role in this to help reduce the amount of fertilizers pesticides and our water usage for areas like football fields and soccer fields turfing is a viable option for us to explore here in central florida and one that requires an initial investment on the front end but part of the denison field stadium issue is that's that many of you will recall and i've had to learn this history that that was where we held a lot of our our county and regional track meets because it was a rubberized track and it was

050state of the art the problem became as that as that field started to suffer from multiple irrigation issues drainage issues and runoff and those types of things we kept managing the field the best way we could because it's a turf field it's a grass and soil field we kept dumping dirt on it the problem now is as a result of all those years of how we managed it and again it was exactly how we should have managed it at the time considering all the circumstances it crowned and so now the runoff has absolutely impacted the current track itself and so there's a great deal of erosion there's a very large area on one side of the field that we have that's that's very hazardous there's a steep drop off and so what we would have

051to do and that's why the costs are here in the recommendation it would be 1.3 million dollars but that would renovate both the field and the track and it would give us a third option for for a turfed field across the district as i said here the price includes replacing the rubberized synthetic surface for use for county regional aau and florida high school association events many of you will recognize as we should mr talbot has done an absolute amazing job in advocating that polk county be the place for high school sports and collegiate sports to be played and we are very fortunate that multiple sports are now played here as a result of his efforts and our location the cost would be shared costs for we have already set aside um anticipating the ability to

052move forward we've set aside six hundred thousand dollars as our contribution the city of winterhaven would commit up to three hundred and fifty thousand 000 in matching funds depending on what the school can raise and then the high school would be on the hook to raise 350 000 so whatever the school raises the city of winterhaven has agreed to match up again to that 350 thousand dollar mark and i believe we had some representatives here today although i believe they're going to speak later on another topic on cfaa expansion was trying to make it but got caught up and won't be able to but we do have someone here for cfa later from city of winter haven but they're the city is fully supportive of doing it we've had some great conversations with mike herr

053and t michael stavros about you know what some of the mutual benefits are to having a facility there that they could also use with us which is part of why they're looking to to be a part of the cost share so and we do host multiple events there and i think that's what gets lost here is multiple schools utilize that facility it's not just it's it's very uncommon especially for the main field to be used as as frequently as that field is but let me talk about the location of the turf fields here in polk county what we did was we had the team place them on maps so you see where bryant field is you see where mulberry high school is now and you see where denison stadium is obviously it gives us a

054really good centralized location or accessible location for the vast majority of our schools and our functions also i mean obviously this might be something we have to look forward to addressing on the east side of our district as we continue to grow and the needs arise again turfing is a really strong viable option for us and i believe it's a responsible option that we should explore but this does create a third option for us to for utilization and not just for school functions but for county events and for a lot of our pop warner and i think that oftentimes gets overlooked the reason why schools more often than not are reluctant to allow shared usage or shared agreements for football teams lacrosse teams soccer teams and if you think about youth sports you can't drive

055anywhere in polk county on a weekend without driving past a church or school that isn't absolutely swamped with little ones running around playing some sport for us high schools in particular are very guarded with their facilities because of the wear and tear that occurs moving to a turf or a synthetic field virtually eliminates those wear and tear issues there are some issues with rubberized tracks that we have to be cautious of but making sure people aren't spilling food and drinks on them but i've seen that done successfully in a variety of locations the current use of denison field just to provide a little bit more justification as to the extent of its use it is the primary athletic venue for winter haven high school for denison middle school for jewett academy and jewett school of

056the arts from a county-wide perspective as well it's important to point out that multiple community events are held there we also bring in traveling and visiting teams from out of state every winter for example many you all know you hired me from illinois every winter especially for spring break every team from up north high school team is looking for a venue to to go to every spring break to get away from the cold weather and they come to central florida or south florida to participate in various activities and so this again feeds into that very recently our county hosted excuse me college uh college baseball tournaments and it was impressive how many teams and players were here and the impact that that has on our economy but this provides yet another venue for a variety

057of participants and community-based partners to work with us on we do host our district marching band competition there we do hold the elementary track meet there it's called the optimist club of winterhaven sponsors that so again great opportunities for us to invest it does become revenue generating at some point because we can lease these out without concerns for wear and tear on the facility and it takes it takes a lot off of our buildings and grounds crews as well to maintain these facilities and lets them focus on more the common grounds areas in our schools as our our district continues to grow and we look at adding new facilities as i shared the the irrigation issue alone still has to be addressed outside of this issue minimally it will cost us about a hundred thousand

058dollars to address and mitigate the current irrigation issues only to potentially have issues in the near future and i think that's important to point out that fixing it now still potentially creates issues for us in the near future especially when you start talking about water shortages and issues such as that the track to replace the track and bring it back to its pre-existing its pre-state the rubberized synthetic surface is going to cost us about anywhere from 200 to 300 so from an efficiency standpoint it does start to lean towards more cost-efficient solution to go with turfing and to address the track at the same time at this time the partnership as we said with winter haven with city winter haven with the school we would have priority utilization and so essentially what would happen is

059each year mr talbot would work with the high school to ensure that all of their traditional usage are captured on a calendar we would share that with the city and then the city would coordinate and work around those scheduled events and so i think that's important for us to note that again we would maintain our priority utilization and it's important but it's going to require transparency and communication and we do that early on in the summer before the master schedule is finalized and as i said there's expanded revenue opportunities that field could be utilized for far more activities across the district for fundraising activities and events field day activities um for all of our schools across the district so that that summarizes denison um field any questions or comments about that miss fortney then miss

060fields yeah i'm a huge proponent of turf and uh i have talked to board members across the state they actually have a plan where they are pulling up at least one to a year especially the coastal counties the districts it is the uh future um yes i've been on that field for the mpas and stuff it is treacherous and it's a safety concern quite frankly so i'm all for it and the partnership sorry i'm hoping bartow is listening to me i just had kind of one question similar to what miss fortnite just said but i think it's it's a unique and very beneficial that the city of winterhaven as well as the school is actually going to pay half of that so to me that's that's to be commendable for them my question is is

061this a trend that we're going to be going in as it relates to turfing all of our fields i would love to turf all of our fields mr talbot knows that we talked about that when i first arrived the only way that but there's an economy of scale issue there and i think it's i need to point that out turfing fields one at a time is a is a very costly process if we were to move forward in the future and begin so if we build a new high school i will always advocate that we turf always because doing it at that time is is more cost efficient than not if we were to move forward as a district with a commitment to turf two to three fields per year there's an efficiency there because

062they travel as a team they're not always local companies that do this work and so what we dealt with at mulberry was that was a team that actually moves around the state in the region and there's actually it gets cheaper with the more fields that you do because their crews are here and they're working each day so they stagger so much like building a house building one house can be incredibly expensive but if you build multiple homes you can move your trades groups from one house to the next and get more efficiency out of it so um is it something that i'm going to prioritize over renovating our our classrooms and our schools no but if the opportunity presents itself i believe turfing our fields is a responsible thing for us to consider especially again

063maybe it's the biology science teacher in me but the whole water conservation issue in central florida continues to be a main focus for me on this issue i would agree with that uh and if we were to pursue that i would definitely want to hope that we would get the support as it relates to the school as well as the city or wherever the location is their support as well and that's a great point miss fields i think you pointed out and i should bring about that miss wyatt and i were both approached by the city of winterhaven as this was an interest they had we didn't have to necessarily approach them they came to us tonight but to your point yes we would look i think this becomes a model moving forward for how

064do we have shared usage agreements and opportunities that we both can mutually share the cost as well thank you thank you miss wyatt thank you and i just want to make a comment one of the things that they're looking to do as part of their fundraising is naming the field and we've i know miss cunningham has talked about it since i think even before i was elected about you know are there naming rights that we can sell and as we look at putting names on buildings and things like that our athletic facilities are are things that i think that we can sell naming rights to so i would caution us to give too many naming rights for athletic facilities away for free that could bring in a quarter million dollars to be able to do

065things like this for the district so just something to think about as we're moving forward there's a lot of creative ways to offset costs absolutely mr talbot just in the little time that we've been working on this project i was approached by bond clinic about a doctor wanting to get involved with turfing davenport the new school i've been approached by southeastern university wanting to partner and put a new synthetic track out at tenurock the city of bartow has also reached out to us saying basically what about us so that the chance to fund some of these projects that we would love to see happen but partner with our community is an ideal situation not only for our school district but for the communities that we are in and they are actually like mr hyde superintendent

066hyde said they're approaching us i mean southeastern dis called out of nowhere so our growing in our partnership with our community is is is fantastic right now and it's a great opportunity for everyone involved it's not uncommon for colleges to approach school districts nowadays because what they're trying to do is expand their turf options because so many sports have expanded with the inclusion of lacrosse and other types of sports that they need practice fields and so a great example we were doing something similar in my my previous district where a local college came forward and said listen we'll split the cost with you 50 50. but we need we need to be able to play here on these dates can you work your schedule around those and we said absolutely um so that was a

067conversation that was ongoing so there is a great opportunity here moving forward and i'm glad to hear mr talbot's being contacted by others and one exciting note is when the school district bought bryant stadium bartow and ridge were the first two schools to play there when it was purchased by the district not lakeland or anyone else but ridge had an abundance amount of rain so we wanted to save the the field at ridge and we so we moved the game to the turf stadium to save the cost expense on the district of what would cost to repair that field after a heavy rain in a football game so we actually moved that game to bryant stadium so a little tidbit of history the first game that we owned bryant stadium was ridge and bartow that's

068a little trivia if you're out thank you mr towel oh miss fortney did you have anything else i'm sorry um no i was just gonna say that i believe the frost have probably given that much to barto that's all sarah beth thank you thank you mr talbott thank you this time i'll bring mr pitts and miss heather jenkins forward um i'll actually ask mr warren to please join them as well we're starting to get into some of our more complicated topics so the school staffing model again just to kind of refresh the board this year staffing has come in three ways first was this was the the org chart right how did i repurpose or work within the current constraints of the organizational chart you saw where through the elimination of contracts we were able

069to return a considerable amount of money there was another contract that we will seek to terminate that will return almost another half a million dollars back to the school district because it's a contract of service we no longer require so that being said the second phase of this were the job descriptions that had been vetted and any recommendations for changes within departments that they could not fund through existing vacancies or other means for example some departments as you know have access to federal funds so under student services uh dr lutz could could be more flexible with idea and other dollars so that he could actually fund some of these positions a lot of these positions are funded through federal programs uh title one title four title and idea but others are being funded explicitly from

070some of the savings that we were able to return to the district through contracted services so the staffing plan as i shared looks at as tooth factors here just to kind of reiterate this number one looking at departments you received information from mr pitts about department requests and how those are reflected here these are not duplicative so anything that's already in the org chart recommendation is not duplicated here we eliminated those there'd be no confusion between the two because i did not want to give the impression that we were double charging for our positions and showing an increase in our overall cost the third part of this is our staffing plan the staffing plan that i'm referring to is not is not about district level positions it's really where the rubber hits the road it's

071school level positions how are we staffing our schools to to ensure that we can best and more adequately serve the needs of our of our students and our families and so what miss jenkins and the team did was they went out they looked at the staffing allocation models across multiple school districts all large districts because polk county is now the seventh largest school district in the state and as you know growing very quickly i expect us to move up that list in the near future as do you and so based off that how do we staff our schools and and what plan and model should we work towards again i'll preface all of this with the understanding that and i've said this publicly to our staff when this topic comes up as i've gone out

072and done meet and greets at various schools right now i'm touring schools with our pea president to talk about an mou that we have out there now that pays them for additional planning time using some esser dollars however i take the opportunity to talk to staff when they ask questions and it's important for us to note there is no way just to put everyone at ease that we can afford to migrate to a new staffing plan in one year that's not what we're looking to do what i'm doing is i'm bringing to you a recommendation as to what we believe should be the way we staff our schools and then once the board says yes we are in agreement that that's that's what we need to focus on mr hyde we're giving you direction to

073work towards that then we will develop through prioritizing certain roles and responsibilities for example what's more important let me rephrase that what will we prioritize more guidance counselors or additional para educators or where are our priorities in that regard and then it would be a multi-year process so that you see a gradual impact on the general budget and or grant funding and it's not a one-time hit additionally i don't think hr or our principals could actually meet that demand within one year finding guidance counselors for example has proven to be increasingly difficult and there are other items i know we're going to talk about later today as it relates to mental health supports that are increasingly difficult to find certified staff so i just wanted to preface the conversation by reminding everyone less the board

074more the community how this has come forward and why the only positions that are not before you today as far as the staffing plan which is both new requests or or the school level positions are those that require pea negotiations so there are a number of district level positions trsts and other types of roles that are still within the pea org chart as a result of that we have to negotiate any changes to those jobs and that those are not reflected here correct i mean mr warren i'm going to make sure i reiterate that correctly correct those would all be driven by the bargaining structures and the salary structures those are still being addressed through the bargaining process however so i just want to make sure you were aware that there may be someone or

075something that's going to be recommended for an alteration in your future but cannot be reflected here because and not because the team has not done their due diligence it's just a procedural issue that has to be fulfilled and we're trying to address it now as we go through negotiations as well so who wants to be in mr pitts or miss jenkins okay so um first we'll go over the school staffing model plans with you and today in our audience i have mr mike bellows and j.d phelp mike's our senior director or senior manager of staffing and jd is our director of finance so i want to thank them very much for helping prepare this information for you all today so first is our current school staffing model this is where the district prepares the allocations

076based on our ptm the original allocations are formulated and given to the schools in order to begin their staffing process at the eighth day count those are reconciled to align with our current enrollment the schools then have an appeal option where they can request changes to their allocation based on increased enrollment and or extenuating circumstances those appeals are reviewed by the regional superintendent the deputy superintendent the chief of staff myself and mr warren in addition to the staffing model we also set the operating budget so i'm going to show you two examples of those um so this is what our blue sheet looks like a snippet and that's what the school actually receives it shows you how many teachers you get of different varieties your paras your school counselors and this is the initial piece

077that we see we also have a staffing plan that we refer back to that if you have an increase in students additional positions that you can request the next slide is our 2122 allocations for operations and also our 2223 so right now per ptm total membership each student each school receives these dollar amounts for each student which is allocated to their operating budget the next type of model is jenkins i'm sorry i would not ask just because i think it's important for the community to hear some clarification so how do you arrive at sixty four dollars per elementary student what what factors do you take into consideration cost of materials programs that are provided we we increased the allocation several years had gone by in which it had remained steady so based on available budget

078and increasing costs we try to increase that yearly so that the schools have the dollars to provide the programming they need so to simplify it even further these would be items and goods that schools go through throughout a year and it helps them offset their costs associated with that so toilet paper paper towels cleaning supplies those types of things all come out of this budget correct yes sir thank you the next type of model that we looked at is a site-based model so in this model the district recommends the school staffing allocations based on the enrollment and then the principal has the option to buy or change the allocations by reallocating their personnel budget or their operating budget in this model the principal is pretty much the the ceo in total of their school so

079they're provided with the operating budget as well and within those two two pots they can look at their allocations and if they decide i don't need this regular i don't need one regular core teacher but i need to add an esol teacher they have the option to exchange those positions also if they've saved on operating budget and they'd like to trade part of that in to buy an additional position they have the option to do that as well there's also a a reconciliation of the eighth day count and again in january during the third calculation but in this model it's required that the principal have a contingency line some districts that that do this let the principals know it has to be one percent of your total budget or something like that in other districts

080they allow the principal to decide that amount if they don't withhold a contingency line in those districts then hopefully they would have a vacancy to trade in or they would have to determine how that budget would be returned to the district in this model the budget is also allocated based on fte which is full-time equivalent it's the same way we receive our funding at the district level currently ms jenkins mrs forney had a question yes ma'am on the site-based model just maybe simplify let's say you are allocated a full unit for a media specialist could you split that in half and do a half unit as a para and then another half as a pair somewhere else at your school is that an example of site based yes okay i just want to say that

081out loud all right thanks there are some operating parameters that schools are provided even within the site base there are minimum expectations that are established for certain staffing what it does provide is some flexibility so if a school had a position assigned or allocated to them um i'll give you an example as a as a middle school principal in in when i was a middle school principal i could take let's assume that the cost for a teacher allocation unit was was averaged across the school district at sixty thousand dollars and or let me use an easier number fifty thousand dollars to pay a teacher who would volunteered to teach through their planning period to pick up an extra class let's say it was five thousand dollars so kind of a common sense approach as a

082principal was if i had a lot of young teachers who wanted to increase their earning potential or or even veteran teachers who wanted to increase the earning potential i could actually get 10 teachers 10 sections paid for which is the equivalent of two full-time teachers because i'm not paying for their planning time or i could spend that fifty thousand dollars on one teacher and only get five instructional sections out of it because of the way the planning periods and things work and so i always had the benefit of getting more sections reducing my overall class sizes as a result but also getting well-established knowledgeable skilled teachers who are willing to teach extra sections and so you always rotated that but that's a good example of where site-based would come into play whereas if a principal

083said hey listen i need a little flexibility here we would work with them on that but there are expectations for example you there are certain positions you cannot cash in you cannot cash in the principal's position you cannot fashion special education you cannot cash in el positions um without approval but that would mostly be because of diminishing enrollment not because of you're just trying to move some money around we would not allow that those students still have to be served so there are some protections and some and some buffers that are put in place to prevent certain things from being impacted adversely just to follow up on that um for example a high school on a block scheduling would that be a site-based decision or would that does that have to be a district-wide decision

084or what are your thoughts on that i know it's kind of out of this realm but i know we used to have two planning periods as teachers also well they still do so and i think that's i thought we forget about that because if it's you know a 45-minute plan versus a 90-minute plan every other day it may not feel like two planning but it is still there the amount the number of minutes are there yeah that's my point school schools do have the flex pay to select their block schedule if they choose to do so but that will be a conversation in your future not to erode that flexibility but to create more consistency because what we're finding as a result through negotiations is the disparity in the types of schedules that we've created

085are allowed to create it's actually impacting staff and their planning time and and those types of things because it's very disparate and so there there's a conversation now about how do we deal with these issues and so that's that's a conversation so again not with the intent to erode that but how do we create more consistency so it doesn't adversely impact staff and their working conditions and that that's a primary focus and an issue we're dealing with now through negotiations thank you yes ma'am yes ms miller i have two questions um the blue sheets that you refer to which is the which is kind of how we allocate that who follows up on that to make sure those are are we relying solely on site staff or is there other staff that follow up on

086those blue sheets to make sure they're appropriate and accurate to make sure the schools are staffing according to the blue sheets just to make sure the blue sheets reflect the needs of that school is there a second set of eyes on that or is it just left to the principles um no ma'am we create the blue sheets of the district so what they have staffed do they have input on how that if that changes yes well they have input so what happens is the blue sheets are sent out to the principals right and then the principals review them if they have um discrepancies or or would like to discuss the blue sheet they talk with their regional and then that comes back to us at the district to staffing and then to the same group

087that does the appeals and then we have that discussion with the principals but this becomes a conversation as well and i think miss miller to add to that the regionals are also being empowered and required to review the master schedule and the staffing allocation as well with their building principles because scheduling alone can create the need for additional positions that may or may not be justified for example a block schedule is far more expensive to support and sustain than a traditional six or seven period day schedule it's just the reality of the efficiency and how it works and the amount of staff that you require to support those students throughout the day so from that perspective i know mr greene has had long conversations with the regionals about how to vet and review the master

088schedule to ensure that it's really appropriate how do we maximize our efficiencies trying to get classroom average classroom sizes to to be as close as possible to the threshold without diminishing our ability to deliver instruction or to have beneficial outcomes but at this point again and this is important to point out because the reorg allows and provides the flexibility for the regionals to function in that capacity whereas now they're more often than not in firefighter mode dealing with issues that now the executive director would be taking over and addressing when it comes to constituent concerns hr issues and our operational issues so that regional structure is in place to ensure that and then they're also advocating for their principles they're not there to advocate for the district they're there to sit down i think this

089is where you're going with your question if it's truly justifiable and the best example i can come up with that historically our district has dealt with is really how our academies function one of the reasons why more academies do not make it to the model classification the highest level of certification is because they can't cohort schedule the reason they can't cohort schedule is they don't have the number of sections they need to be able to do that adequately so the regional then can work with that principle to advocate to say in order for me to make that transition i'm going to need three extra sections or two extra sections or meeting staff in order to to satisfy that need so that's part of this process as well is advocating to ensure that schools have the

090resources primarily the staff that they need to fully function and support our students yeah i think that's where i was going with that sometimes on both sides sometimes the principles need support with that and other sides i think there's still a training or opportunity for principals to learn from the regionals on how to best schedule to meet the needs and then when you talk about students with supports and there's federal requirements and unfortunately we have principals who aren't we just they can't i guess it's hard to learn the entire book but we have a lot of principals with well-intentioned who don't understand that there are federal requirements for some of these students and the needs and that comes to my second question with esc allocations the staffing plan will say this many kids gets this

091many whatever but depending on what the students look like coming into that classroom it can be very different so how is that handled before the allocations are given out we do meet with the ese area managers we look at the we get our initial allocation number out of focus then then we prepare the sheets then we meet with each area manager separately as the enrollment changes at the school the area manager can then update staffing to let them know you know we have we have additional students or the needs of this student have changed we need to change this position to meet these needs we also i left out that we do meet with the regionals the esau department esc and all our different groups before those sheets the sheets are ever sent out to

092the principals because we do need the input we can set the basic allocation but as you said we need to know the individual need so what's the time frame just for further reference and i know we're working on this process but if i go to a school and they have 13 in a self-contained unit and desperately in need of support and they're telling me they've asked for support they've been asking for support what is the time frame usually to help change that staffing plan or add additional staffing is that just depending on time of year um it seems like the principles are frustrated sometimes with trying to get supports and i know we can move people around and we can borrow people but to add to a staffing plan does that take a certain amount

093of time or it all depends on the data that comes in it does um but esc is a little bit different because there are federal requirements involved um in general the the next change to the allocations will be at the eighth day count but as i said ese's different so that's something that they would need to let their area manager know their regional know let me know and then we'll make sure that we take a look at that thank you and i think it raises an interesting point and i think it's worth clarifying too there are a lot of times that after the eight day count where a classroom may size may reach a certain threshold where we ordinarily would have triggered a separation or a split in that classroom it may be more conducive

094to the entirety of the class to just put a co-teacher in the classroom because here's and i'm just going to speak candidly here's what happens because the conversations and the concerns come to me we decide we exceeded the threshold for the size of a classroom and so now we've got to split a class the problem is it's december and so half the class gets to stay with the teacher that they knew all along the other half of the class goes and gets assigned to the new teacher the number one complaint i can tell you that i hear is well why did you pick my kid why can't my kids stay with mr hyde why does my kid have to be reassigned to the other teacher and we explain well it was a lottery we just

095randomly drew kids well can you move somebody else back and let my child stay so in that instance i think miss miller this is a really good example that speaks to your point in that classroom it may be more conducive to us to trigger the additional position and allocate it to that classroom without having to split it doesn't create a facilities issue it doesn't create an equity issue doesn't create a hardship issue with families and student relationships but it still serves the need to your question about timeliness we we do need to be more timely in how we identify those classrooms and i think the team does a great job at eight day count it's what happens subsequently after that and concerning the growth that's occurring in polk county we're trying to be as responsive

096as possible to those circumstances in real time but some of these positions are getting incredibly hard to find with the right certifications and that's where mr warren has has the unenviable task of filling every seat with a highly qualified teacher uh not an easy task anymore in today's climate dr alan yeah and i think this is bringing some really interesting questions i do have some prepared questions too on the comparison models towards the end but how many how many of our school sites when we get to that eight day count and then spatially within the county how many are we having to adjust as far as the allocation because it does bring like a sense of disruption to the preparation preparedness the the team dynamics and all those things as far as the ecosystem the

097school and the leadership of the principal now we're bringing in more you know staff allocation in the midst of that change and preparation simulating them into that school system and so forth um how many do you do you think um and where's the hardest area around the county that we're really seeing we're having to make those allocation changes elementary is the most difficult hands down high school becomes difficult because again there are specific issues programmatically that become problematic but as a whole elementary school is the most difficult but i will give ms jenkins while they look up some numbers here if they have any um and her team a lot of credit because what they do is it's not a one it's not we don't just wait for it to count they've already sent out

098notifications to schools saying we're projecting your enrollment at xyz you're either going to gain a unit or you're going to lose units and then that's when we start to hear the petitions coming in and there are positions that we historically have granted to schools as we launched new academies and new programs they're called the tractor units the problem was at some point the expectation was that that program would become self-sustaining because they're generating additional fte in some instances that's simply not been the case it's time to pull the attractor units back or to reimagine that school or that need for that program it's it's a difficult conversation to have but it's a reality because in some of our schools we're overstaffing and so we're creating a void elsewhere because we've over staffed here so much

099to their credit they take into consideration and so it's not a simple process it's not just as simple as counting the number of students it is about the programs that they have to support and what are where our commitments lie but they've already notified schools and so to your point we're already reassigning teachers now to other sites to anticipate those issues so that we don't create unnecessary vacancies after eight days because again that's a crucial period where kids are establishing a rapport in a relationship with their classroom teachers so they've already done a lot of the hard work we will continue to monitor throughout the summer i can assure you that as a school district if a principal saw an increase and it does happen it absolutely happens here just as it happens everywhere where

100their enrollment is spiking we're not waiting to eight day count to give those positions i can assure you that we're triggering those based off the trajectory of the school that we're seeing and then we'll give them a percentage of those those positions and then we'll finalize it after eight day count but it is a progression now what we don't do at the same time that we do wait for it to count is we don't take away staff elsewhere because we want to make sure i mean we're really i i hate using this phrase but it's just how every school district works eight day count we count butts in seats how many kids actually showed up are in the classroom because a lot of times you'll see a roster why do i have 26 kids scheduled

101for my class and then after eight day count they're at 22 because kids move around and families move around so they do an incredible job trying to anticipate a lot of that those changes and needs and then we trigger based off additional new enrollment or mobility across the district depending on our programs they move them after eight day count as well um and so i didn't know mrs jenkins if you had a number that we've had to move around so um when we prepare the allocations we do use a five-year history and then we also again meet with the regionals too who then meet with the principals to see what changes they're noticing but i'm going to ask this is mike bellows and i'm going to ask him to speak to that uh yeah so

102we don't really have a number of you know how many teachers or how many schools actually need to change it varies and you know sometimes we do get the allocations correct sometimes we are a little off so that's why we have the eighth day account the appeal process so you know if we give a projection to a school and they say look i'm going to come in higher than that you know we consider it but it's kind of hard to justify how many you think you're going to have that's why she like she said we use the five year trend and try to project what their enrollment is going to be um so yeah through our appeal process if they do come in or say look you know you projected me at this but i'm

103currently sitting at 100 more students that's when our appeal process comes in so they could they say you know i've got 100 more students i need this extra unit so we go in we pull their enrollment we look at how much they've increased or what they're sitting at as long as they can confirm that they've got their enrollment that high at 10 consecutive days with a staffing model shows then we can go in and we can make that adjustment we'll submit it to the appeals team the appeals team will get all the information the data the enrollment the what that would be on the staffing model and then they'll make their appeals decision miss fortney from my years at schools i i noticed a pattern and i'm hoping we are deviating from that that count

104would let's say a school counselor was no longer justified and then we get the hundred kids back or whatever and now we don't have a school counselor for that position that had one prior now we're searching for something that we can't hire or even like a paris specific for a kid that still is going to be at that school year after year and then the these principals have to appeal for those to come back can you expand on that a little bit let me jump in on the pair of specific student specific peras in collective bargaining follow the kid so they would be reappointed they would be scheduled to return to that school furthermore even when the student changes levels elementary to middle middle high the pair then follows still along with that child so

105i think that addresses that question and then with specificity to you know guidance or other positions in in previous or historic school staffing models there have been thresholds relative to specific student enrollments where you would earn specific positions you know right we talk about this course staffing or shell staffing for elementary middle and high schools and with increased student population you would earn various pieces so we try to be conservative we try to be mindful with the spreadsheets and the projections of of when when when you add those and when you take those away but you are correct those have been there historically right thank you okay go ahead miss chicken okay um we've we mr pitts has something to say i think i just want to make this public i mean make this comment

106publicly here we do not have enough funds to staff schools how they need to be staffed as long as i've been involved with the school district we have staffed our schools more than what the funding has allowed our district staffing plan um we're the second lowest in the state as far as administrative costs we've been that way for about 10 years and if we staff one teacher at every school more than what we're really allocated that's about nine million dollars so that's you know the bulk of our budget is here in the school staffing plan i think pope offers a world-class education system on a polk county budget but when we get up and talk about staffing i don't want to ever minimize what the needs are at the schools but unfortunately the staff i

107mean our funding just doesn't allow us to staff what we need to do thank you thank you mr pitts that's the truth yep that's reality thank you and to add to what mr warren and mr pitts said when we do our allocations there's there they're done um in a way that it would take a it takes a significant number to to pull a guidance counselor out of the school so it's not it wouldn't be you lose two students you lose a guidance counselor there is consideration in that process so back to our budget examples we've included a site-based budget just so that you can see what it looks like and very simply the first column is your district recommendation based on your fte the second column is where the principal can place their school decision

108so as you see in this example they've been given 48 basic teachers in kindergarten through third they believe they only need 46 so they're putting in their request for those 46 positions that would be reviewed by the district however in fourth through fifth they need those two additional teachers so maybe they've lost some k through three students however they've gained fourth through fifth and they want to make that adjustment it's similar as you followed down but you'll also see that their operation budget is included and it's in the bottom line it's the bottom section under total salary so they can use a portion of that operating budget and in this example they have chosen not to and then the very bottom line in green is the contingency in this example the district did not recommend

109what the school should retain but they've chosen to keep back a hundred and ten thousand seven hundred ninety seven dollars in case of fluctuation in fte and then the final model is the hybrid-based model it's an example of both in this example the principal does have control over the positions however the district still maintains and manages the operating budget next slide we've put together a district comparison so it shows you that elementary middle and high we've looked at polk palm beach duvall orange and miami-dade out of these examples orange and my orange and miami-dade used the site-based budget model in all examples orange has the richest plan so what we've done is we've used our equivalency salary our average salaries and plugged them into the models for each of these districts and shown you what

110the cost would be with our salaries in their models so their cost is actually quite different based on how their district is funded and what their salaries are um so you all have an attachment and we've also given you a handout it was a little large to put in the powerpoint but if you want to look this has three sheets and it's elementary middle and high and it breaks it down by administration instructional support and instruction so you can see exactly how we compare and they're a little different so orange has the highest the richest administration plan for instructional support polk is our plan has the most positions allocated for elementary and then for instruction as a whole orange is next they have the richest plan and then polk runs a close second and it's

111you can take a detailed look for middle and also for high and then the final thing i'd like to point out to you guys which goes along with what mr pitts said our um this slide comes directly from the fefp so our funding this is from the conference report and it shows you the number of unweighted fte students that each of these districts we've compared has so miami-dade has over 350 000 duvall 134 orange 214 palm beach 194 thousand and paulk 116 it also shows their total funding and ours as you can see for their fefp funding date is almost 3 billion duvall orange and palm beach are all over a billion orange and palm beach are at about a billion and a half and then polk is a little under at 918 million and

112then the final column is very very interesting so this is the k-12 total funds per unweighted fte so this is your base student funding by district so miami-dade gets and thirty six 8236. per student duvall gets eight thousand twenty dollars orange gets eight thousand one hundred sixteen dollars palm beach gets eight thousand six hundred thirty five dollars and pulp gets seven thousand 7907 so one of the reasons that these districts are able to staff a little higher than polk is because they receive more dollars per student as jason said we're about sixth or seventh in funding and the sixth or seventh largest well i'm sorry we're about 64th in funding and we're the sixth or seventh largest district in the state so it's um it's a challenge also orange has an additional millage duvall is

113going out for an additional millage i believe miami-dade has has one and also palm beach so our funding plays a large part part and role in our staffing plan that's all for schools for now thank you mr pitts do you want to go through the staffing changes or recommendations from the board or any questions from the board so far on this staffing allocation dr alan yeah so just going back to the site-based budgets is there a place for our community to actually go look at individual schools and actually see the site-based budget actually there is the school advisory committee affords that option to all of our parents and it's really one of the more interesting opportunities that sac has because they also get to have some input as to how some of those additional dollars

114can be spent towards students school improvement letter grade money historically has been a great opportunity sai dollar supplemental academic construction dollars those types of things create an opportunity within every sac structure to not only see comprehensively how the school is funded but what additional resources are available and then to have an opportunity provide input as to what types of strategies they'd like to see the school implement to address student needs so i would encourage anyone out there who wants to be involved in how schools are funded and to see how it directly impacts the classroom level to participate in sac nice and and would you say the selection of these particular districts do you see them as peers or do you see them as like we're aspiring towards you you gave the context a little

115bit on that um and i think looking at the individual breakdown of the comparisons i did find it um interesting that um out of all the comparisons majority of their admins were were at a 12-month contract so maybe speak to that the other thing i thought was intriguing was the instructional side we were very high on teacher non-core whereas the other ones had very little or next to zero on that maybe speak to those couple thoughts when mr bellows built these comparisons if you look at the detailed plan there's a a big difference in how we name our positions versus how other districts name theirs and also for orange and miami-dade they allocate at a 12-month but then those principals are able to cash those positions in for a 10 or 11 month for savings

116so these are the the broadest categories in order to make the most alignment to show you a comparison to provide some level of comparison and to your question about do we see them as peers again i asked for us to compare to all six because we're in it we're seventh largest i don't believe it's appropriate to try and compare ourselves elsewhere i mean let's look at how large districts are attempting to address the needs of their students the problem that the team has run into that i ran into as well the staffing allocation plans are not easily accessible anymore you used to be able to google search those and you'd find them instantaneously most of this is information that we had to reach out personally to try and get because it's not necessarily directly published

117any longer and that could be for a number of reasons again covid recession all kinds of factors come into play what we're really looking for is an opportunity to reflect on our current staffing allocation compare it to others how do we ensure that we're what we're staff what we're what we're spending our money on has a direct correlation and impact on the classroom and student outcomes and part of that is how do we adequately ensure that we have a staffing model that where in instances where and poke's a great example of that where we may not have been able to provide competitive salaries but salary alone is not one of the top three indicators for job satisfaction however workload is and so if we're able to address these issues simultaneously where we can show incremental

118raises over time at the same time that we bring additional staff to lower the threshold the burden on our current staff and i keep going back to counselors we are nowhere even close to the national recommendation of counselors to student ratio we're not even in the ballpark and as we look around and we see the needs of our students increasing that's an important conversation for us to have and this becomes a conversation as a school district regardless of our fte allocation i personally believe that we need to be reflective and say if this if our values are here and this is why we're going through strategic planning and looking at portrait of a graduate we're looking at and why we're looking at allocation models if our commitment is as a school district we believe that

119it's best it's in the best interest of our students and i'll just keep using counselors as an example that we want to have a student-council ratio of one to three hundred which still isn't the national recommendation then that's something for us to strive towards and if fte is is a limiting factor then we need to go back internally and say where are we spending our money so that if this is our priority what are we willing to let go of to ensure that we can backfill and fulfill that obligation and that priority and that's the task i've given to the team and you heard mr pitts say and there at some point there's an acknowledgment there's only so much money in the bank and you know for us in particular we're going to need to

120look at options including what are we currently spending our money on what do we value how do we prioritize those and then what other revenue options are out there for us to explore grant writing and competitive opportunities um being more innovative and how in our hiring practices you know right now we largely rely upon a full-time employee are there options for us to be more flexible to fill some of our vacancies if we could hire a 0.5 employee creating an opportunity like i shared where principals could have a little bit more flexibility in their budget and their allocation model again within operating parameters so and i hate to keep using the example that i gave you about i could get 10 sections taught versus hiring one teacher that would give me five sections and you

121have to be careful there you want to burn out your staff you don't want to create other hardships but it's something that all of us are receptive to and we already have policies in place to allow that so how do we get more innovative and creative in our schedules in our approach to staffing in ensuring that if positions have been granted in the past and the expectation was a program had to grow in order to justify that program and and then we have programs that receive nothing so we we gave programs i i'll go back to cambridge cambridge received no additional allocations but other schools got these accelerator or their tractor units so how do we create equity how do we have an elementary school that has 800 plus students enrolled but they don't get

122the same support staff deans secretarial staff custodial staff as a middle school that's the same exact size there's still 800 kids in that building so how do we create equity there so that we're ensuring that schools have the resources they need to directly impact student outcomes so that's really where we're starting from and i think that's important to be reflective and say and acknowledge publicly where we know we may not have those dollars and then what solutions can we create and opportunities can we create to to be more competitive in that regard so to help address those deficiencies but again the goal is to ask you to give me input where are our priorities and i can i can absolutely provide those i mean not clearly you've heard me say guidance counselors guidance counseling guidance

123counselors but there are more opportunities they're interventionist teachers for remediation coaches fully released coaches but i don't want to keep pulling people out of the classroom who are our best teachers to become coaches who may or may not have a direct impact on student outcome and learning so it's it's the war it's this cold war that we're in right now with staffing but we want to make sure we're prioritizing certain areas moving forward and i think that's our obligation as a as a board and as a superintendent that's where my commitments are so miss fortney that is like music to my ears honest to god it is um and i did notice uh something jason you sent nine more social workers yes that that was a an addition to the district staffing plan based on

124some additional funds that you receive from the behavior of mental health still yes thank you miss white thank you and i have a few questions so for the current staffing model you mentioned that we use the current enrollment number numbers compared to a five-year enrollment history how do we compare it and is there a formula that predicts the number i've just had several schools in the past that you know i've had a thousand students for the past three years but they're still my blue sheet says i'm only going to have 950 that we know we're increasing there's 16 000 more students since when i started on the board six years ago so how does that come about is it a formula is it where does that come from so it's not so much a formula

125when we when we look at the blue sheets and try to determine ptm we use the five year trends from the 60-day enrollment account so every year we record what it is what their enrollment is at every school at 60 days and then we we put that into an excel spreadsheet and it kind of tracks the day we updated it each year and then from there we look at essentially going from kindergarten first grade first grade second grade second third how many you've potentially lost or gained and we we do our best to not formulate driven but by hand each school each grade determine what an appropriate adjustment might potentially be to the ptm uh that way we also pull the enrollment for each particular school um when we're building the blue sheets to ptms

126which is towards the end of the year to try and better get an idea of where they might be sitting at where they came from the beginning of the year to where they're at now and then just trying to look at the trends more than looking at formulas okay i guess my question then would be how can it end up that a school's been they've hit that thousand in 20 050 students three years in a row but they're being estimated to have 900 or 950 moving forward your best your your guess is as good as mine um however there are certain factors consider if we're talking about elementary schools uh we don't consider pre-k numbers in the enrollment so that might be a factor you know if the school we get it all the time

127and we kind of have to remind them you know they say that their enrollment's at 800 in an elementary school so they're wanting another unit but we don't consider pre-k numbers when we're looking at certain units so if a school has you know 30 40 pre-k students then we're going to essentially take that number from your 800 and you're you're back down to you know 760 740. so elementary school is that's specifically how it could happen as far as high school and middle school i i'm not sure why it would be consistently lower than what they currently have okay that's something i'd like us to look into because that middle in high school is where i get calls about it and questions about it if you have specific schools that are examples i'd really like

128to take a look at them yeah one of the things to point out that the team did so when i transitioned in um initially we identified a number of schools that had seen significant declines in their enrollment but considering we were coming out of covent we knew students would gradually begin returning we maintained those those positions now some have been justified and and we've seen the growth return but at others we will be going back after those positions this year because those positions can be reallocated elsewhere again no one's losing their job those positions are being reassigned to schools have seen increasing increased enrollment versus a school that's seeing declining enrollment and that's important to note because we held everyone harmless last summer okay i have a few more um so is your recommendation for

129us to maintain the current stat school staffing model which which one is your recommendation right now the recommendation would be to go with oranges something similar to that which would allow us to increase the ratio of our allocation first especially for support positions for counselors for social workers for psychologists for secretarial staff um the best example i can provide you is that a middle school or a high school and please correct me if i'm wrong michael or the team that um a middle school or a high school has a bookkeeper a registrar and a front office secretary elementary schools the principal secretary is largely the registrar the bookkeeper and the front office secretary and so there are opportunities there for us to address that now and i don't want to diminish secretary of services because

130they actually are a big part of how we do our business but we do need to prioritize our classroom positions and or those support positions i think that's really instrumental but so we're looking at a comprehensive review and then we would prioritize certain positions to begin to gradually implement them so the task i would have with mr pitts and miss jenkins and the team would be to go back within the budget prioritize positions that we would begin incrementally adding over the next three to five years and throughout that process be able to continue to show the board how we're offsetting those additions i think that's important we don't want to go into debt and we're going to maintain a an honorable and respectful reserve balance but i think it's important for us to go back

131within the budget and find the means and if we don't have the means come up with other solutions and recommendations that we may have to look at that would allow us to staff our schools more adequately thank you so and can you remind me which one orange is are they the site based or the hybrid so i'd have to basically site-based okay thank you and then so for what are you looking for something from us today on this direction so two things um mr pitts provided you with the recommendations for other salary revisions looking for feedback on that and then i'm looking for your feedback to move forward and be able to begin adjusting our staffing allocation model developing a multi-year implementation plan with the understanding that it has to be cost neutral and or

132i can justify where additional revenue would come from okay so when will we see the staffing plan i could bring that to you as early as end of may okay i just my concern is that if we don't see it until our june meeting and then we have to wait to vote on it that we'll be voting on it two weeks before school starts which is not fair to any of our schools um is there an opportunity for us to i know we had talked last time about having a work session specifically on staffing plans there are enough important topics before us right now that i would recommend a meeting in may an additional meeting in may if at all possible and i know timeliness is essential but there are a lot of timeline issues

133because of other topics and things that have come before us and i needed a team to have adequate time this is new for us we've we've never reviewed it this way comprehensively and so there were a lot of iterations of this presentation that went back and forth because i wanted to bring it to you in the most concise way um and be able to explain it so i think the team did a good job but i would like to ask that we could if we could add a meeting in may a workshop and then a quick meeting to immediately follow that would be the preference potentially one of the dates i know that we've talked about i've talked about with miss winchester was the day following memorial day if at all possible okay how does

134everybody's calendars look on the 31st and i know i saw questions still from miss cunningham in miss fields but that's okay okay i would feel a lot better if we could listen to it and it's miss cunningham are you okay if we were to have it and it's recorded so you could go back and listen to the presentation before we vote in june but that way we can get it approved by mid-june what time i i would ask for either an early morning depending on what works best for the board um either a 9 a.m two-hour workshop and then a board meeting immediately to follow so we could conclude by by noon or because we would limit the topics i would not add anything else outside of this and one other topic for mclaughlin and

135then or we could do a noon to four noon to two with the board meaning to immediately follow i know that dr allen and mr wilson have expressed as has missed fields has expressed that mornings seem to work better for them um in their schedules and miss cunningham i don't know how busy if you're going into the busy season right now or not no i'm just wondering if it could be on a different day than right after memorial day others may be taking off i don't know is there a possibility for a different date or do you need that time to be able to get it done if you do it's fine i can see the recording as she indicated but if possible it'd be nice to be here the 27th or the 31st would

136be the most 27th is perfect for me yes that's the last day of school for students correct and we've got graduations i think will all be completed at least on my calendar so i would have 27 if we do the 27th if we could do a morning sure be seems like there's consensus for morning dr allen morning's great um 27th i would not be available i could do the 31st oh you can't do it twice no i can't sorry all going away can we maybe have a show or handle who can do the 27th and who can do the 31st madam chair sure so i i can do the 27th i'll have to move some things but i can make it work for either date we could do a show of hands for those who

137are available on the 27th i'd make myself available morning yes dr allen there's no way you could make the 27th work already committed sorry all right 31st you can make it work it's the same it's okay all right i'll throw out one more date how about the first june 1st that's a wednesday morning how about the 26th backing it up a day thursday the 26th i can't do the 26th so we leave on the 26th come back on the 30th okay so you can do the 31st i mean i can do the first i could pull the board through miss vega and miss winchester and then whatever we see the majority of consensus going around will will accommodate dr allen if it falls or any board member falls on a day where you can't be

138available obviously there's an opportunity for you to provide any commentary or written statements leading up to the meeting or at the meeting we could share publicly on your behalf so but i'm sure there'll be plenty of conversation between i and members of the board leading up to a meeting bridges i see you reaching for your microphone i was just going to ask that whenever that decision is made if someone would please let me know the the final date and time so we can do public notice absolutely sir miss fortney i just had a quick question um why don't we count pre-k kids in elementary school so the only position that we do count again based on our staffing plan our secretarial positions the 10-month secretary position when we're looking at increases in enrollment throughout the

139year so what's the purpose of not counting pre-k kids i i'm missing the vote is that a federal or state or because of their funding partially the kids are still there right for some some it's a half day program so it's a full day program some are driven specifically there are so many different uh vpk programs that i think at times it becomes difficult to and to assume now i will tell you there's a huge demand right now because i'm being inundated with emails asking for more vpk slots and that's something we're exploring but um but right now i think part of it's the inconsistency in how we're being funded and or the attendance as well i was just curious yes ma'am ms cunningham sorry thank you um going back to the last slide titled

140district funding and fte 2022 2023 fefp conference calculation that you that you did there at the end before we got kind of off track um with polk being at 79 07 888 is our unweighted funding and looking at ms dodge's upcoming report it appears that we've gone up 352.88 we're still low but we did at least increase and my question is is this a legislative delegation issue because of the way they voted to allocate funding to polk it used to be in the past that's why i'm asking because i'm not certain why are we so far below the others um part of this is going to be my personal opinion that's great that's what i'm looking for when the fefp was designed back in 1973 yes there was only about six or seven hundred dollars

141between the different districts yes you know it was designed to kind of equalize in a way yes but also give districts that have their type of demands some extra funds right now there's uh three thousand dollars difference between the lowest funded district in the highest funded district part of that is the dcd the district cost differential for the first time going down we went in a tiny bit for the first yeah just a tiny bit but there's other factors inside that fvfp um and and miss dodge can correct me here but um three or four years ago there was a there was supposed to be a study done to re evaluate that fvfp funding formula and i do not believe that has been done by our legislature yet okay so maybe that's something we need

142to encourage because then at one time when jd alexander was sitting in the appropriations chair seat he was able to get that dcd up for polk county for a number of years and we actually had you know wasn't 100 percent obviously but it was .9 whatever it was seven eight eight seven it was way up there and again you can correct me if i'm wrong but it just seems like we keep going down and down we're going up incrementally but i think based on the formula we're going down as a district because we we shouldn't be this far behind those other districts that you've indicated on this so that's what it kind of raised a flag and i thought what's going on is our delegation not fighting for us for those numbers to continue to

143at least maintain or go up is our dcd continually decreasing is really the question it had been continually decreasing and it's based on a three-year average and sort of once you're headed in a direction it's hard to change directions okay um on the dcd okay but i will send all the board members later today a spreadsheet i put together that looks at the fvp funding back to 2000 the year 2000. back in the year 2000 we were in the mid 40s as far as funding comparisons between the 67 and sure we've just sure and it's also important to know this is based off current funding allocations not the proposed funding because the budget has not been finalized yet and so we can absolutely update this if the governor signs off on the budget and reflect

144new numbers but it was intended to show where we're at currently sure and what as we compare to others and i think an important part that mr pitts pointed out as uncomfortable as is there several of these counties have passed millage rate increases as well to offset their costs and we've talked about that in the past and we will see addition duvall is going to go out very soon um i know other several other districts will be going out for a millage rate increase as well so it's just a topic of conversation in the near future potentially thank you sir yes ma'am miss miller i would like for you to have that conversation with our delegation um with wendy about this is where we are you know this is where we are in funding these

145are all our students and all of our schools is there an initiative for them um which i think there would be we have watched it over the years and miss cuddy name was exactly right but if not if they think it's not going to happen then that's what we need to do the millage rate will be next i mean not that we're going to put it on them but i think they need to have input these are their schools as well well and i want to i want to be a little cautious here too i think we have an obligation to show that we're being efficient and that we're being effective with our current allocations and so i i believe you always start there and before you ever go out and ask somebody for more

146you have an obligation to show that we're maximizing our efficiencies the efficiency audit we've talked about that will be launching soon i mean all of these things build towards how do we provide a high level of assurance to our local taxpayers that we're maximizing our potential and i think again that's where our obligation begins before we ever stick hold our hand out and ask for anything else so and as we've shown i think we've shown through this budgeting process two contracts alone have returned a significant portion of money back to the budget and and that's really interesting and how many other we've talked about this how many other contracts are out there that might be duplicative that might be and i know we're gonna have a conversation tonight about contracted services and the fact that

147you get such a huge up charge you know if you were to hire employees versus contracting you know there's about a 35 or 45 percent up charge with contracted service but that's the situation we find ourselves in for difficult or hard to hire positions where the number of people across the state with the appropriate certification are almost non-existent but i know we're talking about that later tonight so i i like to start from the position of proving that we're efficient we're effective and in areas where we're not what are we going to do to change that before we before we start seeking other options so ms miller and ms fields just on that because we've talked about that for a long time and i know i i've said publicly i would not support the millage

148if we haven't done an efficiency review i would encourage you and i know you're going to explain more about it when it comes up but i think we need to look outside of our district for that review and a previous dr stewart that was here went on to work for pinellas county and was successful with something similar so i would like to see when it's available our plans for that i think it's definitely going to be somebody from outside of our district but needs to be familiar with the educational process um to do the efficiency review for our staff and our operations those fields i would just want to make sure that it's understood that those contracts that we had were not continued because we were able to excel academically and remove ourselves from the

149status i want to make sure that it's understood at the time those contracts were needed very good point absolutely thank you yes pam thanks everyone madam chair would you like to take a short recess can we do aerospace real quick absolutely here and then do the recess i'm sorry um so i'll ask mr warren and others to please come forward for cfaa conversation so as you know we have had conversations about the possibility of expanding programs high interest high need programs especially those that based off their current location become incredibly difficult for students to access cfaa has been an example that i've held up multiple times upon my arrival and i had great opportunities to go out and see the new facility that was opened adjacent to cfaa got to meet many of the partners

150and they started to express an interest in expansion auburndale and winterhaven high schools both have strong developing emerging programs and interest in aviation and so that furthered a conversation there to start talking about what's the possibilities what's the potential to expand cfa campus more you know east or create a cfa academy linked to winterhaven high school because it would be the school of proximity we started to explore those opportunities you know especially when it comes to space or facilities that's a primary concern at this time i believe we've resolved that there's an opportunity to place four portables on that field and then there will be access to a hangar location as well for students to get the same experiences i know that in conversations with a few of the board members there were a lot

151of concerns primarily about what does this do potentially would it erode the program at kathleen there are less than uh 20 students enrolled at cfaa from these schools that would feed so there is no detrimental impact those students obviously would continue through their program at their current location but new students would have an opportunity to move closer and i think we would see additional students coming in from i'll use mclaughlin as a good example mclaughlin could become a feeder into this program auburndale high school feed her into this program winter haven feeder program frost proof now becomes a true viable option for students because we've reduced the travel distances same thing for ridge and haines city not ideal for all of them but far better than where they're at now as far as their options

152and so i'll pull those numbers up but i'll go ahead and turn it over to the team let them share a little bit of the conversation about where we're at or where we started where we're at now and the concepts before you but then i'll share the enrollment numbers with you because again i want to provide an assurance that we're not going to create a program or duplicate a program that's going to erode the base of a current program and adversely impact it at all that's not our interest but our interest is increasing and regionalizing high interest high yield high demand programs and by virtue of that eliminating the distances that serve off more often than not as a true barrier to student participation so gentlemen please it's a pleasure to be here this is

153um alex facia he is the director of the winter haven airport for the city of winter haven we have been very very blessed to have a great partnership with the city i think you've seen that previously today with the denison stadium project but working on this for the past what about year and a half we've really come a long way with it the need came from meeting with gina williams the principal at winterhaven high school along with brian hughes the instructor for the program at winterhaven to really find a place for the students who are moving into level three and four to be able to work at the airport right next i would say 200 yards from where they have their flying club so there is a hangar out there there's a private flying club

154that all of our students go out and build aircraft very very similar to what happens at cfa in lakeland to have that synergy so we can have students out on the airport to really understand the full impact of the industry itself so the discussion began on could we find a space at the airport our discussion started with alex and t michael stavros the deputy superintendent so we've worked through a lot of things there have been a lot of partners on the outside from the aerospace club the aopa which is the alex i have to help me with this the airline pilots association aircraft owners and pilots association there we go what alex said yeah but they have the curriculum for that so jamie beckett has been a big part of that a few other folks

155with the consortium cfa consortium with eric from polk state college so we've we've worked our way up to that so we found a space on the airport that we could put some classrooms um working with angela and her team to find out some portables we can move from maybe another high school that needed to be moved for the the new high school that they created um so there there were some visions of how do we bust the students out there what do we do if there are um inclement weather that arises where can we move our students to so we have thought through all of those different types of things there have been meetings with gina and her team on what do we do for food service transportation those types of services that the students

156would need out at the airport um so working with alex and his team the big thing was this space where's the space what's the infrastructure look like can we get water sewage can we get um power there so we've also worked with tico quite a bit to move some power a little bit closer but i really like for alex to kind of talk about the the idea not of just the academy itself being there but the overall how this fits into the overall projection of winterhaven airport and that really being a region for pilot instruction mechanics those types of things good afternoon thank you very much for the opportunity to speak on this exciting item as dr warner mentioned we've been working collaboratively for many many months now towards this idea becoming a reality out

157at the winter haven airport and the most exciting part is as dr warner mentioned is extending the classroom education to a really enhanced airport experience and watching airplanes take off and land while you're learning about aerospace math science physics all the things that it takes to make an airplane take off and land what an experience for the students and we've seen the success in lakeland and i can speak on behalf of our city manager mike herrer our deputy city manager team michael our city commissioners at last night's city commission meeting received an update about the school development and all very excited very supportive and our airport advisory committee that serves the airport an advisory capacity to guide us and direct the airport you know towards prosperity and growth to this to this project for the

158airport itself having students learning about aerospace and likely leading themselves into the aerospace industry is really important we know the state of florida is a very very big aviation industry aerospace with schools like amber riddle florida technology polk state college aerospace we have wonderful flying weather it's a great opportunity for students to start to learn about the industry where it's not just all about pilots there are maintenance mechanics that have to be involved luggage handlers staff positions at all the major airports and general aviation airports such as ours so there's a lot of opportunity for employment and well-high-paying established jobs in this industry and so i think from all of us at the city of winterhaven we're very excited for this opportunity to move forward and for the airport how this fits in the school

159is going to play an important role for all of the business that is businesses that are existing on the airport we currently have a flight school we currently have maintenance facilities avionics facilities paint facilities all of the businesses and the owners that i've spoken with are excited to have new fresh ideas learners out at the airport to help feed and grow and and watch them become a part of what we have at the winter haven regional airport so as i mentioned basically everyone that is a part of this so far the collaboration between the school uh district and the city of winter event has been has been great and we're really looking forward to this hopefully moving forward tonight can we talk a little bit about the infrastructure that had to to go in place

160and the investment from the city of winterhaven to develop the site so we can actually get the the portables moved on site absolutely that has been the major undertaking over the last several months is trying to take a a parcel of land which was flat and vacant uh and available at the airport and making it uh able to support a school so there was a lot of considerations taken to take into place parking was one of the first major uh responsibilities to figure out is and that you know through the city's departments we all collaborated together the city's planning utilities finance all of us came together to support this project and so we we have identified 55 parking spaces that will be constructed uh painted and paved striped parking lots there's there will be storm

161water pond improvements a bus lane drop-off lane for school buses to drop off and improvements made to the roadway and sidewalks around the school all of those enhancements are will be financed by the city of winterhaven to help support this project and invest in the infrastructure at the airport the the improvements made to the school on the inside of it of the actual school will be the fencing the portables being placed and sidewalks on the inside of school that that is the responsibility of the school district but other than that the utilities uh being on site and all of the additional infrastructure will will be the responsibility of the city of winterhaven ms wyatt thank you and i just want to reiterate i was at their commission meeting last night and their commission is super

162excited for this opportunity they gave direction last night even though they don't meet again until may 23rd that as soon as this is voted on tonight so it's k5 if you want to look at any of the pictures but as soon as this is voted on tonight that they can actually start doing some of the sidewalks and things like that as soon as tomorrow as soon as they get they get confirmation that it's been signed even before they officially vote on it in two weeks so they are ready to hit the ground running and have it ready for august so board members i did share with you the enrollment numbers based off out of zone enrollment so you have that in your email lakeland high school sends 18 students to cfaa winterhaven high school sends

163four fort meade middle high sends one auburndale sends seven bartow high school sends eight ridge community high school sends one tennerock high school sends seven mulberry high school sends 23 lake gibson high school sends 16. haynes city high school sends four frost proof middle high sends two george jenkins sends 46 students lake region high school sends four and then they're 18 out of county students and so essentially i think what you see there is a pattern that those who are primarily on the east side of the school district have very low enrollment participation numbers so i believe that that would offset um and i know the interest that we currently have at both auburndale and winter haven as far as the number of students who are currently and presently enrolled has been climbing steadily so

164i do not believe that there would be any adverse impact to the enrollment over at cfaa in fact it gives us more marketing ability what we what the school district and you should all be you know lauded for for that program i mean i i cannot tell you somebody again who grew up with with a family in the aviation industry just how impressive that really is i think we you sometimes you don't see the forest for the trees but what you accomplish there and what you've created there is incredible and to have the opportunity to replicate it and get more students involved is an incredible opportunity for our school district and so but again i want to provide every assurance that we would not allow the program to become eroded so everybody's grandfathered in where

165they presently are but new enrollment would come primarily from the east side of the school district and feed into this program and i believe there's more than enough interest to sustain the program and because of the way the facility is being structured there isn't a heavy investment on the facility side and you heard that the city of winterhaven is committing resources in their efforts to make sure that this happens and i think that's again another example of the partnerships we have to have to expand these program opportunities for our students so ms miller as winter haven grows um to kind of meet the same facilities that the lakeland campus has will students have a choice between the campuses because if we're going to start with portables kind of like lakeland did but lakeland's offering a

166building and all these things they have of the hanger and all the other amenities will people be able to choose or will be what's closest to you how does that work right now that has yet to be determined it would be more likely based off the proximity because again a lot of the barriers to students has been their proximity at this time so with only as i shared four students attending from winterhaven i believe that they would prefer to attend their local school i would be surprised and i can't speak for anyone else if there isn't already a lot of movement behind the scenes to try and replicate cfaa to the greatest extent possible with us with a hardened facility i think we're beginning where we can with portables i expressed my aversion to portables

167very early on and they provided me every assurance that they are safe you know i always worry about tornadoes and things of that nature and fob which is a foreign object that can get blown around on an airport run tarmac and runway i didn't want to contribute to that so we were looking at examples of existing hangars we've explored every option we possibly can and this was the best solution to at least launch the program with the understanding that i believe i think everyone involved is committing to see the the best possible replication of the cfaa facility we currently have yeah just to talk a little bit about the interest that's currently at winter haven high school so they're in their third year of their program for aerospace so when brian started that program they

168started very very small so next year they'll have their seniors are level four i think he's projected to have anywhere between 10 and 15 and level four and then it increases when he drops to level three and level two so they expect to have about 75 to 100 students on this site at the airport those are level two threes and fours and the way that the open enrollment has been going for students that are applying there and i think this has a lot to do with the cambridge school being at winterhaven because you're looking at stem you're looking at those folks at one engineering they're projecting anywhere from 125 to 150 students as level ones next year coming into this program so as as mr hyde is saying it's not eroding from cfa lakeland it's

169really building i think a foundation and a base that you could begin to pull folks or students from the east side back into this this area and move forward and with that said as we're looking at the future um alex is very forward-thinking he's like i said he's a phenomenal person to work with and he's already looking to the future as far as a site for a permanent school and i think you may want to talk to that a little bit yes thank you very much and you did mention a great point and this part of the major success of lakeland cfaa is that the lakeland aero club is right next door to central florida aerospace academy so we have modeled that exact replica already we have the aspiring aviators aero club which will be

170located right next to where this temporary school would be constructed so they're within walking distance we're following that same model and for those that know the aero club is basically a way to get right up to airplanes be able to build airplane projects and be a part of it that's not requirement of the school but it is an opportunity if students select to do that so yes as dr warner mentioned the future of this school at winterhaven airport is bright we have worked with our engineering consultants to design a development plan for where this future full full-scale school could be built on the airport property so we have that ironed out already where we'd like to see it and we're sort of from a development standpoint building an education part of the airport so we

171would like to see central florida aerospace academy next to a full new developed aero club hangar which would be a great addition to our current lease with the seaplane pilots association headquarters all right within walking distance to each other ms fields you had your hand up i had a i had a couple of questions um the portables and it might have been answered and maybe i missed it when the weather is is very severe what are the plans i know you said something about a hangar is there a hangar in place now or so the safety plan in ms usher and everyone else is involved obviously we would preempt students from attending there um so we wouldn't bust students over to the campus if we knew that there was potential for inclement weather that would

172potentially a tornado watch or hurricane watch obviou for obvious reasons but if the students were there it's my understanding that there is a hardened shelter immediately well in close proximity that the students could evacuate to and be safe a couple hundred yards or how far would you say it uh we plan to use our airport main terminal building and so um less than a court as long as it takes to drive around the airport property itself so maybe two minutes of by bus to get around well that's good i just wanted to kind of understand that and then the staffing uh your instructors how do you envision getting your staffing in place because you talked about the different areas of interest that the students would have yeah so that that falls directly on the principal

173gina williams but they have the staffing plan there so brian hughes who is the current instructor will be on site at the airport and then the um your core academic teachers would move in and out of that area whether it's english math the sciences and then there because that is growing so fast they project a new unit that will go in at winter haven high school that then will teach the 100 or so students that are back at the main campus that are getting the foundations and fundamentals um so if we need some more detail on that i think gina could probably provide that for us okay and then um mr hyde and thank you for the enrollment information yes but in looking at that there are some cities that would be very close to

174winter haven and so my question to you is will the students that are currently at the aviation academy in lakeland kaplan high school will uh would they be allowed and it seems to me like you said they would be able to move next school year or whenever this is actually started and so it might it might not be a lot of students but it would just be more than winter haven correct me if i'm wrong correct so what we would do is zone the schools specifically because i think you raise a valuable a valid point that some of these schools arguably might fall along the midline and so in order to ensure not only that we don't erode current capacity and supports at cfaa and adversely in fact their staffing allocation model and their program

175we would lock those students in for the duration of the remainder of the program and allow the other students to transition over to the new campus if they so choose however you know the preference more than likely for those students is they're going to want to maintain their current enrollment at their current site this would primarily focus on whatever schools we zone for the new location and new enrollment coming in that would be the the process i would suggest at this time but i do know the greatest number of the largest number of student interest is coming directly out of winter haven um and then we would have to grow and market the programs accordingly for the others but you see ridge in particular haines city is a great example and frost proof is a

176great example i think we would see i i would project that we would see significant increases in student participation and interest if it were if it were closer in proximity to their home school right as well as lake region correct uh the out of county students do we know exactly what counties i have that in an excel file i'd have to go through and analyze that but i if you would allow me i can send that to you as well that's fine and then my last question is that unless i'm overlooking it i don't see this on the agenda for tonight is it on the agenda k5 excuse me it's k-5 on facilities it's the lease agreement between the city of winterhaven and the school board for 5.95 facilities agreement not necessarily the programmatic agreement

177but it's in order for us to move forward and ensure that ms usher has a timeline to install i didn't think it was i just wanted to make sure i was understanding why i wanted to clarify the two um thank you yes ma'am there is already a program for aerospace at winter haven high school they just haven't they don't have the airport facility right now correct um i just when you mention drawing the lines for which school they'll be zoned to my hope is that we'll map out distances to each of those schools like we did with the winter haven tender rock for cambridge and not just no that's exactly how it should be done so it may be a jagged line through the district but it would be based off closest proximity because that's

178the whole thing we're trying to address here with travel time around all of the lakes that is correct thank you now we can take a break if you'd like seeing no further questions or comments mr wilson good to see you sir we're gonna we're gonna take a 10 minute recess sir i know you were racing to get here so at this time madam chair i would recommend a 10-minute recess we'll return back here at 257 please [Music] the pain is there because you're leaving home which is philippines but you don't know what's ahead of you which is already the opportunities that you have like i did not see that these people here are so welcoming like really i was really like flabbergasted with all what happened [Music] working for polk county public schools as a

179bus driver or bus attendant is just a small yet important part of what we do to serve our students we want to thank all the unsung heroes of our driving force our dedicated trainers assist every day with educating new drivers and bus attendants preparing them to be the best they can be trained to shine and assisting new hires to become safe and efficient drivers and they teach bus attendants the essentials of their daily responsibilities it's more than a job our cpr trainers and instructors teach life-saving skills keeping everyone's certification up to date with continual training trainers help with cdl licensing making sure candidates know the ins and outs of a bus preparing them to take and pass the commercial driver's license test putting our students safety first is always our top priority the transportation team

180thanks everyone for their hard work and the dedication that they give to make sure the job is done the training department would not be where we are today if it wasn't for the devotion of our trainers [Music] if you are a dedicated responsible respectful patient person with a positive attitude and a desire to help others succeed then you are exactly who we are looking for in a trainer please contact the training department if you are interested in making a positive difference in someone's life [Music] the district five school-related employee of the year from rochelle school of the arts tiffany barion my motto is student first athlete second because i've been in these shoes before and i know what it takes now that i'm older and mature so i just try to instill in them that

181it's fun to be a kid it's fun to go to school it's fun to be around your family um the sports is just an extra tool just like the love on them just be a good mentor and instill leadership life lessons something that they could take with them the rest of their life she instills grades first before the actual sport she instills family before the kid you know she tries to get that mentality of like it's not just about you it's about your last name not your first name and i think that's really something that maybe they're not used to hearing they're all about me me me and she's like no step step back it's about your family it's about your grades and then it's about what you want to do and what you want

182to accomplish coach tiffany is a really great part of our school she is a tremendous asset at our pe department in our library in our cafeteria she just gets all over the campus and she helps us in so many places she always does it with a smile on her face and she's always willing to help out and if she has to step into a classroom to assist she is welcomed by the kids and everybody's always so glad to see her she's a good person overall and she makes me feel good about myself she makes me want to try harder stuff like that she really encourages me to do my best and do better at things she's a really good person and i love her personally i really do she's a very important person to me

183i want them to remember me as she's tough but is out of love they know behind his mouth when it's time to get serious when i go coach mode p.e mode i'm serious because i know what it takes and just that just take that is out of love and one day down the road you will understand and you'll come back and say because of coach tiffany this is why [Music] ready we will now reconvene this work session superintendent hyde thank you madam chair members of the board members of community staff thank you at this time we're going to transition here briefly this was part of the reorg but there was there were questions about the in particular truancy officers and there were requests for additional data to support um some of the narrative behind why

184we were making that recommendation i don't believe we're calling them truancy officers any longer we've re-titled them as oh okay all right so brett go ahead it's yours good afternoon ladies and gentlemen um we're just going to go over some data that you all requested to look at our overall attendance but first let me say a couple things there is a direct correlation between student attendance and academic outcomes and then it also plays into the two previous things we just talked about having attractors to get students to want to come to school and having students in the seat when we're doing fte counts so that way we have the appropriate funding for our district the data that's going to follow excludes any covet-related absences due to the extent that we know this includes any quarantining

185any covet positives with parent just keeping them home that all has been excluded from this data and the data that we've analyzed is only for the current school year currently that we're in 2122. 51 036 students missed 10 days or more so far this year let me say that one more time fifty-one thousand zero three six that's almost half of our student population and we all know that there's 180 days in each school year so if i miss two percent of the days that's only three to four days if i miss five percent of the days that's nine days if i miss 10 that's 18 days absent from school that's 45 days per quarter we have 36 weeks in a school year that's absent one day every other week we have twenty eight thousand four

186hundred and fifty eight students that miss nineteen or more days we have fifty thousand five hundred and ninety four that miss between five and eighteen combine those two together and eighty seven percent of our students have missed five or more days in a school year we have 425 students that have attended less than 90 school days half a year out of that 425 students attended less than 72 days less than 54 days and we have 27 students who have attended 36 days or less one day for each week of school out of that 425 i've broken it down with help of aane thank you very much by grade level and you'll notice that our highest grades are 8th 9th and 10th we went a step further and broke it down by demographic 114 for black

187152 for hispanic 140 for white and 19 other these are your percentage rates by your regionals 90 percent from ms barnes 92 percent from miss collins 91 percent for mr duncan 91 from dr henry and 90 for mr hill this is an example of an elementary school the name has not been disclosed on the screen but they have an attendance rate of 88 that means 22 days missed on average per student at that school we also have 17 other elementary schools that are below the 90 mark currently this year you have a middle school example 23 days missed with an 87 percent attendance rate six of our middle schools have less than 90 percent that's a little bit over a third your high school 22 days missed like your elementary school 88 percent attendance seven

188also fall below 90 percent hence comes the community outreach facilitator and the expectations that they will have we will have seven of them each facilitator will conduct between 25 to 30 in-person visits per week that's either going and checking up on them at the school if they're not at school going up and checking on them at home that equates to 6 300 visits in person to students on tier 3 level about coming to school 6 300 visits that's a lot but it's also doable when this person's only job is attendance they will be checking on attendance daily they will also conduct 15 to 20 phone calls per day that's 94 500 phone calls in a year they will act once they find out the information and go to that house or get on the phone

189they will act as that liaison between the school and the families to address any of the reasons whether it's getting them involved with the social worker getting them involved with hospital not hospital home pound or a hearth project any of those services that we offer within our district or within our community those liaisons would be basically pairing them up and then continuing to check up on them to seeing if those needs are met they'll also be collaborating with student services along with our social workers psychologists and mental health people and the work will be done begin this summer they will be very proactive starting the first chance we get july 1 probably we've already goes to my next slide aaa has already created us a dashboard it is in the sandbox phase right now it

190is it will be ready for production probably june 1st this data projects the 2223 student enrollment based on this year's data so it's already extrapolated i'm just going to make it up as i go jessie keane's fifth grade class it knows that jesse keene feeds into lakeland highland southwest kathleen and sleepy hill it puts those students all into their classes in sixth grade to let us know what the sixth grade attendance is going to look like at sleepy hill southwest lakeland highlands and so forth so we will already know what schools will have higher attendance rates or lower attendance rates and it will drill down by region by camp by the actual school by the grade and by the student any questions so far more accountability and tracking and intentionality than we've ever had before

191it gets back to a staffing issue where the social worker and counselors cannot address these attendance issues at the level with the level of intensity and follow-through that it requires so miss miller can you just talk about how we have 20 something social workers working on this we have seven of these people how they'll work together and has that been reviewed with the social work team we have started conversations with miss scott and dr lutz already um you have 20 social workers working on it but they're also working on 15 other things and that's why i made sure that when i was talking about this the only job this person will have is checking up on attendance they will also then pair it with the social worker or the appropriate entity that can help serve

192that student so instead of the social worker having to spend six hours in a car riding around or six hours on the phone we're kind of weeding through the ones that we can get to come to school just by phone because i do remember mrs fortney said something about back in the day people coming to this house knocking on the door well when they knew people were coming and knocking on the door well i might as well get up because they're going to wake me up anyway and i'm going to go on to school so that's part of that difference ms cunningham the way i look at this is they may not be able to reach every single child every single day but if we are able to reach even a quarter to a half

193of these students and help them to make positive decisions whether it's student or parent depending on the age oh my goodness how much we will have gained having a child in the classroom to be able to learn versus being at home so i applaud it tremendously i'm not looking for your total number there i think any strides that we continue to make to encourage kids and parents to have children in seats and classrooms we're miles ahead so i applaud you for the program and support it thoroughly so thank you sounds wonderful sorry miss graham miss fortney who is going to be in charge of the paperwork trail slash input of data when these children are contacted or the parent can you explain that process a little more and i did not fully understand the job

194description how is a for lack of a better word would you call them a outreach facilitator yes what the qualifications for them to know that i need to go see a mental health professional or a social worker or this and then i have one more after those two okay let me answer the one you just asked because that's the one i remember okay working with ms gillespie and others we're making a crosswalk for when they give the reasons that they're not attending school which area that they should be contacting to for instance if they're having an issue where they're moving from hotel to hotel then they would contact our hearth program although that training will go through through those seven people which makes me remember your second part of your question those attendance facilitators or

195outreach facilitators will be doing the documentation work they will be going through we're actually looking at maybe using this dashboard that they have but then there are other ways that we've also looked at either on the one drive or something else to be able to notify when they've had a home visit when they had a phone call because it is my expectation that these numbers are met i understand that things happen and we may only get three visits in the day because of the fact that it was deeper than what i needed what i thought it was going to be but at the same time there's going to be days where you may get 25 phone calls in because that is going to be my key in checking to make sure that i have the

196right staff doing the right things each day and i'm for those of you that don't know me i am one of the kings of documentation and i believe very much in so so they will be required to do all that documentation and then as attendants may not improve then we will work with them with the captain seymour's office on the attendance being required by law that is not our intent here our intent is not to one two three four five letter one two three four five meeting one two three four five which is what we do now basically correct we want to be able as ms cunningham was saying we want to be able to create relationships with students by creating those relationships and you have the same person showing up at your house or

197the same person calling you or calling your mom or dad that to me has a bigger impact than sending a letter home and if we can do that and and i know miss miller said 20 to 7 i'll be honest with you i don't know if 7 is going to be enough but i'll come back and let you know but we've got to start somewhere and i think that seven's a good number based on the numbers that i'm looking at in our attendance rates follow it forward third yeah um so you basically will be monitoring all this data there will be i will be monitoring an assistant director will be monitoring it also okay and then i know some schools are very proud of their attendance rate and and it reflects in their i hate

198to use school grade but school grade those programs are those schools i'm sure we have a way to share best practices or would it be totally socio-economic as an issue do you see what i'm getting at i think it's a cultured thing right at your school you have to establish a culture and a positive culture at your school correct and it will i think we see that that was kind of when i look at elementary you know having taught middle school junior high you know kids are staying up all night on video games and you know what i mean yes ma'am i mean it not in elementary school there they're there right you can see it in the data right the only thing that shocked me when i saw this data was kindergarten yeah when

199i saw 29 yeah that really took me back um well they're sick i mean but then i've been a middle school principal so i realized that eighth grade you know so but our regions have this and i think there's ways that we can encourage the schools that do have high attendance rates we see our community liaisons out there in our community recognizing our schools and i think that there are people out there that would be more than willing to support recognitions for our schools that have high attendance you know i used to think we used to get a money right and my thought was always to give it back to the parent as an incentive you know go to walmart and buy a hundred fifty dollar gift cards and if your kid didn't miss a

200day there's a drawing right that kind of thing you know to incent make kids want to come to school the parents want to bring them etc i mean i know there's a lot in that and i appreciate this 110 percent i just want to make sure everybody works together and nothing is added to somebody already trying to do that work if that makes sense i'm going to point out too this is another place where sometimes the data is very misleading you know when you look at this slide in particular where we show the overall percentage of daily attendance across the regions you know we put the regional assistant soups on here but most school districts would be very happy with a 90 to 94 daily attendance rate except 51 000 kids have missed 10 or

201more days of school and so this i i don't believe it's socioeconomic i don't believe it has anything to do it's i mean ultimately it does impact the school that are great because if students aren't in attendance they can't learn that's it there's no there's no questioning whether or not that's factual i think at the end the greater issue right now is what are the issues that are preventing students from attending school and what can we best do to address them and right now as we're seeing more and more students struggling with mental health and anxiety and and those things i mean it's just i don't there's you can blame it on cove you can blame it on other issues but at the end of the day our current structure cannot adequately address this issue

202and i'm gonna keep saying it comes back to a staffing issue because social workers and school counselors are overwhelmed with the volume of work that they're doing and so at some point something has to give and it and at some point truancy becomes the give because this requires an in-person conversation and this will start this summer we are not waiting for the first day of school for kids to start missing school they will start to identify our high flyers in that tier three and i love that we use the mtss pyramid to explain this but the kids who need the most support because they're missing the most number of days going back to this one right here you know these kids who have attended 50 or less of school attendance these are the targeted kids

203that we need to start doing home visits starting july 1st once these people are in place they need to start making a connection with the household to say your kid has to be in school here's their grades here's discipline here's all these other things how do we help you what are the issues some of these kids i'm going to be honest with you are staying home because there's no one else at home to take care of a sick smaller child and so the older child becomes the option for a family to take care of that so the parent can go back to work so we have to create opportunities there and start to identify what are the leading causes that are creating opportunities for kids not to attend school and then how do we best

204address those and i think this gets back to ms miller's question and we've i think we've answered this last time too when we talked about the facilitators and i don't want there to be a mistake this is not the only person who's going to be responsible for documentation so if anyone out there believes that well now we have this person i'm absolved of my responsibility here absolutely not this person is going to be the boots on the ground doing the home visits and following up but school-based staff are still going to have to track and monitor to report back to these these staff in particular what's being successful and or more importantly who's being successful and who's not so they can start to shift their efforts so this is a continuum of support but this

205creates an additional layer of supports meaning personnel who will facilitate and serve to assist school psychs and social workers and counselors but i'm going to be very clear this is not supplanting their responsibility for this in any way so i know ms miller's had her hand up a couple times i just want to follow up real quick because these are the same kids that end up getting the packets to pass at the end of the year you know and then you you talk about what the diploma looks like you know did was it earned that that's a different conversation yeah too because we we don't always categorize them no yeah but you raise a valid point so but there's a part to that conversation that we need to take greater ownership of and i know

206several board members have brought this up we don't allow competency-based instruction we still operate under a carnegie unit an antiquated methodology or belief that somehow 180 days of sitting in a classroom means that you learned everything there are some kids even these kids who are struggling over age and credit deficient that if they were put in an environment where they could actually demonstrate that they have that they've attained the learning without having to jump through the hoops you'd be surprised at how quickly these students will re-engage in school because their problem is i'm 18 and i have three credits there's not a chance that i'm going to graduate why do i go to school because we expect them to attend a class for 180 days to earn a full credit that's not the point the

207point is not how much time you sit there the point is whether or not you've mastered the content and so there's a lot more to this conversation that will unfold over in the near future because it's directly related to this about how do we truly engage kids and then how do we create opportunities for every learner within our system and stop you know arguing every kid's going to college every kid's going to you know those we've had conversations amongst the board about trades how do we accelerate a process for students enter into the trade group um with some workarounds there so miss miller i just want to you addressed age you said 18. there's an issue with 16 year olds can you talk about you said you know i'm 18 do i still need to

208go can you talk about because i hear that i hear they're 16. to clarify i said 18 overage and credit deficient so if i'm 18 i only have three credits why should i go not why do i need to go there are still compulsory attendance for all students under the age of 18. can you talk about that because i've heard at 16 you know where they can technically quit that there's less involvement with them at that age which i think would be the most involvement because they're about to be adults can you talk about what the age 16 means to this in this well by statute of course they have the right to withdraw their parents can withdraw them and don't have to come that's an important clarification there the parent has to withdraw the

209student the student cannot initiate that process independent of their parent and we're no way encouraging that at this point no and what we would be doing is going to them and talking to them about some of our say fresh start or some of those others to where they can gain their diploma we are not going to be encouraging oh because they're 16 or 17 leave them off the list to go back to miss fortney our tier three has already been identified you have this year's data those 425 students whether they are unless they are graduating which i don't know if the ones that miss this many may be graduating but these are our students we will be targeting july 1st going back again to miss fortney the school will still have their attendance person the

210school will be doing if the kids miss five days they should be sending a letter where the facilitators are going to becoming involved is we've already got a list we'll already be targeting a list of tier one tier two but if a school sees something that's coming up that maybe the numbers haven't given us and we have a kid that starts being absent they have an attendance person coming by hey you got anybody else that's popped up on your radar that's what these people are they're the boots on the ground that go out to the schools they will be documenting their visits they will be documenting their phone calls they will be end up processing paperwork at the end if nothing happens on the that we don't get the situation rectified and help they may

211need but at the same time the 425 have already been identified and those are our targeted students and just so you know too this is this year's data i've had them go back five years so we can look at a trend has a student been improving their attendance but yet they're still on one of our tiers or are they decreasing or was there just one year that threw everything off you know last year they could have you know been out for multiple reasons every other year they had 97 attendance so that's what the data is going to be showing us but you all know just as well as i do data you can read almost any way you want so i'm counting on the schools to also point out students who are in need and

212let us go check those out for them thank you sir so transitioning now to the organizational chart um item number eight dude for sake of time um items six and seven six and seven will either be moved to that may 31st date or to the june date it's unfortunate but we've just had lengthy topics and conversations say and that's important i think it shows we're doing performing our due diligence so as it relates to the district organizational charts i brought the item back to see what additional questions or clarification we can provide i i think we've summarized it multiple times i've had individual conversations with board members about questions so if there's something else i can address for you here great opportunity to discuss the organizational charts miss fields i need a better understanding on

213the recommendation for the internal audit department i know that's not your area i looked at the information that was given as it relates to other counties and i'm trying to understand the increase in pay and wanted to know does the increase in pay for the internal auditor position align with our salary schedule for promotions because this is a promotion correct me if i'm wrong i'm mr jason is that correct that would be considered a promotion okay so is the increase in pay in alignment with our salary schedule guidelines for promotions because from what i'm reading is typically five percent a promotion typically will result in at least five percent okay and we typically under our administrative guide uh those positions when they're promoted start out near the bottom of that of that particular pay grade

214that they're moving to okay so what is the percentage of increase that's being recommended i can calculate it quickly okay uh for the first position that's listed on your spreadsheet it would be a 22 increase and that position is the uh director the senior director of internal audit okay so i guess my question would be why is it being recommended at a 22 increase and in reading the salary guidelines it looked to me like the most would be 10 percent that's what i read and maybe i'm not understanding it and then i looked at what other school districts are paying if this is the current amount it might not be but i looked at in comparison to these total employees the student population that going from 94 357 to 115 thousand five nine or seven

215correct me from wrong that is a substantial and you were saying 22 so based on what's on our salary schedule guidelines we are not in alignment is that correct or is that incorrect that is correct okay well i don't know about any other board member but at board members but i received quite a few calls from staff concern that we would be promoting at a 22 percent increase and [Music] i can't support that i would support within a 10 but not within a 22 percent um i think that everything should be done in decency and in order and in fairness and in fairness um i don't see that this is what's being uh suggested so i will speak on behalf of staff this is not this is a board employee i understand but i think

216it's important to clarify because and this gets back to the issue of people who want to run tell that the reality of it is no one has approached me to date to speak about salary disparities and the culture here where people will circumvent my office or mr pitz's office or mr green's office to have these conversations is increasingly frustrating with respect to the culture or the history that may have preceded me the argument or the belief that some have that anybody who complained in the past was retaliated against with respect to that i'm going to comment publicly on this and it's this is not a commentary about schuma's field because i know you're looking out for the best interest of our employees my entire senior administrative team is new there isn't a single example that

217someone can hold up where a member of my cabinet has retaliated senior cabinet have retaliated against an employee for speaking out or speaking about a concern and where we have been able to and this is why the process began the way it did as we became aware of disparities in salaries we began to address them but as it relates in particular to this this topic was brought forward by my predecessor miss bird to address the salary and it was tabled then and i i think the reality of this is is that while yes you are correct that there is a typically a cap we don't necessarily approach we let me rephrase this we have a very disingenuous approach sometimes to how we hire and because we advertise we advertise a salary range and then we

218turn around and tell individuals yes we advertise that this salary i'll just make up a number can range anywhere from a hundred thousand dollars to 150 000 and you have 20 years of experience but our process internally has been what the most we're ever going to give you is five years of experience because we give you two for one credit up to five years then with all due respect why do we advertise a salary range we have no business advertising a salary range and i think this is a classic example of a position much like many others that has been underfunded for a number of years and simply what we tried to do as directed as requested was to provide the comparative salaries as to what this same position gets paid in other districts and

219so that's where we're at i saw it miss fields this is not a commentary about anything you've said i just want to clarify that this is a board position not a district position so the recommendation is not coming from my office we're simply supporting the request for information as to why and and to provide justification as to why the elevation is necessary but that's it as it relates to me and my staff but again it gave me an opportunity to speak to culture because again people are circumventing my office well and i won't comment as to their intentions because i can't speak to their intentions because i've never had a conversation with them so i don't know if it's frustration over years of concerns i don't know if it's reluctance i don't know if it's

220fear i don't know if it's intimidation i think quite honestly you i could hold up countless examples where people have come to me and i think we've worked to address those issues and disparities as quickly as possible but to your point and we talked about this last time in fairness for some it's created this illusion well they're getting theirs why am i not getting mine and i'm going to say the last thing i'll say on this quite honestly is not everyone's going to get a raise not everyone's going to get a pay differential because there's a lot of people out there who believe they're entitled to it well i've been here 30 years and i'm next it's just simply not how it works and it's unfortunate and i'm trying the best i can to address

221salary disparities and pay increases while also trying to balance growth within our school district and that's not an easy task couple that with everything else we're dealing with it's considerable so this again not a commentary about anything you've said this feels you've been you've been very adamant from day one about expectations about equity and fairness and i've tried we're trying as hard as we can to attain that and i would just simply and i guess the last thing as it relates to this is if there are individuals who continue to come to you to circumvent our office to talk about salaries or other issues respectfully you need to start directing them back to us well mr hyde if i can respond first of all when before i even presented my question i said this is

222a board position correct so it was not directed to you and mr um mr warren and mr jason and mr pitt are calling mr jason mr pitts would have the information concerning the salary schedule that's why i pose that to them yes ma'am i am very much aware that they have nothing to do so if it appeared as if i was coming at them believe me i was not no i was clarifying for anybody who may be watching or listening okay [Music] when when staff or anyone come to me i am always saying your best advocate is yourself you need to advocate for yourself that's all i can do is tell them that they need to advocate for themselves and i believe that wholeheartedly i i want to make sure that it is publicly stated

223i don't remember ever the superintendent before you promoting anything related to promotions for the internal audit department i don't remember that maybe another board member might remember that but i don't because at the end of the day you're very much correct it is the school board members that should be doing that not the superintendent of schools correct i understand the the guidelines i know that you can go above the level whatever that might be in looking at what other counties are paying even if you go above that i think that we still are high compared to what some of the others that have the same again a number of employees and number of students but i appreciate your comments but i want to make sure that it's understood yes i'm not attacking you i'm not

224attacking uh these i did not mean to give that impression i i just think it's an opportunity for me to again reiterate i i would just ask that people keep redirecting comments or staff back to us because we'll never bridge that gap and address the cultural issues here if i'm never even given afforded the opportunity to address the conversation head-on with an employee so i i i it's a fine line you walk i'm going to be honest miss fields and you we all know this i try not to interject myself you need to have a comfort with employees and others where they can come to you with issues but more often than not if if we're completely excluded from the narrative it's it's just it becomes problematic and so what i hope to create as

225a culture where employees feel confident and secure they may not get the answer they want but we're always going to listen and we're always going to respond and i think that's the role i have to play but i do want the chance to fix the culture or the or the impression here that somehow if you complain or you come to management you're gonna you're gonna be retaliated against i mean i i need the opportunity to readdress that and prove people wrong to have a reset and so that's the only commentary there this is not about i shared multiple times this is not about what you said there's a lot of value in what you say miss fields and i appreciate you a great deal as you know so i think this was my opportunity to

226kind of set the stage for moving forward how do we best address these issues because not everyone in the system is going to be happy with all of the final changes we're making with and i've i had to preempt this morning by saying even the pea positions still have yet to be brought forward because we're still negotiating those so this this creates the opportunity for me and i received several emails after our last meeting saying thank you for explaining and and i was very appreciative of that because it told me that people were actually listening so it was not about anything you said i didn't have a perception it just afforded me the opportunity to address a larger issue that i wanted to address miss wyatt and then miss miller thank you and i just

227i've went through the list and kind of calculated some of the quickly some of the ones that are also on here for recommendations for upgrades and several of them are 20 25 30 that's where we are right now and trying to make sure that as we're changing positions changing kind of some of the structures that that's where we are um matthew's position has not been brought forward in several years it was brought forward in 2020 just before covid but it or just as coveted was hitting and of course we held neutral on everything just to make sure that we didn't get ourselves into a situation that we didn't have the funds to continue um but i do think that it's appropriate seeing that many of the positions throughout the district that are equitable to ms

228matthews have been raised several times over as people retire as people um those positions have been changed several times over the past years hers has not which is why it's it's being brought forward miss miller um i thought we had kind of discussed this already um because we had looked at the different positions throughout the state and i thought we were looking at a salary and not levels because that was our intent that was our goal and i think you and i have talked before about some other positions on this where i was a little concerned at the raises themselves but we also determined that this is about positions and not people and i think that's been difficult um as a district and you are changing the culture because at one time staff could not

229contact us at all and so now people feel they can contact us and we need to make them more comfortable with contacting your office which is another step in airing their grievances or concerns and i appreciate you being open to that but i know miss matthew's office is not staffed like similar offices um in districts our size and so i support this change i just wanted to say that i this had been discussed and i didn't i did not understand that it was a level increase i thought that we were just changing the salary as we are in several of these positions thank you ms cunningham thank you sir and for some history very quickly because we did already talk all about this at a previous meeting but let me say that back during my

230tenure as chair i brought forward to the board salary increases for both carol and wes and at the time due to the fact that we were in the middle of covid we weren't giving raises to a lot of our folks system-wide both of them retracted their request to receive compensation at that time and i think that speaks volumes to both individuals and the only reason i'm bringing them together i know we're talking about miss matthews but we have two very incredibly talented and loyal employees and miss matthews even took the time to do comparative study with other school districts around the state to say hey here's what others you know in my similar position with whatever and and did all that and um we still said okay let's just go ahead and hold off and

231wait and i appreciated her being so kind and saying let's just wait until the time is right well now that we're structuring things and looking at this plan i really feel the time is right she's worked very diligently never complained about it when she could have through the years at least not to me um working with her as chair for two years never once said wow i sure wish i made more money i just wish i never never a disparaging comment and that takes a woman of integrity um in my opinion to do that so i will be supporting this increase wholeheartedly because while it's a one-time [Music] large increase if you look at the number of years that there wasn't any it would be very she would already be at this level if not

232greater had we been doing this all along but here we are so thank you miss matthews for all your time and effort um and the job that you do for our district so we appreciate you thank you sir dr alan sure just uh really appreciate all the context around the conversation it's helpful to me as well i was curious maybe give a little thought well first of all we're looking at a 500 000 net even in the midst of this right so um and i appreciate that as well as a positive on this i'm curious when we noted workload a little bit earlier in our conversation today when we struck out the educational directions would love to hear a little bit of logic on that which i'm in favor of by the way and again

233we're bringing a 500 000 net savings to the district which is a great thing in the midst of this to honor our employees and i appreciate your transparency as well in the pursuit of transparency that's a great thing we don't want to live under a culture of fear it's not healthy at all so when when we look at that contract with that vendor you know what what would the workload distribution look like as we strike that contract in a sense and i'm sure there's a lot of discussion around that so this gets back to the school turnaround or school transformation office and the restructuring of the regions because presently we have contracted even beyond the scope of necessity with some of these vendors and there are multiple vendors that we have contracted with and so

234even when the school exited we sustained them with a support contract in some instances where we were being charged over two thousand dollars an hour for support and and quite frankly um i believe that the school district has charged me with succession leadership and the ability for our district to look internally identify strong talent and develop talent you cannot do that if you have an over-reliance on contracted services and so at the end of the day that's exactly what we're doing and so we have enough knowledgeable individuals in our school district right now who have either been directly involved in differentiated accountability schools have been transformational leaders are in senior leadership myself having worked for the bureau of school improvement leading d.a for over three years mr green and his efforts our track records are

235impeccable when it comes to school improvement i believe ms barnes and yemeni and others have demonstrated their overall capacity and so i think as our school district moves forward and looks to the future part of this is how are we honoring and respecting those within our organization who have the skill set how do we incentivize them further which you saw in the street in the overall plan for the school turnaround office how are we incentivizing them to serve in that same capacity and quite frankly increase their earning potential maximize their knowledge and expertise build a cadre of leaders and and embedded mentors across the school district that become then the feeder for the next level you know we created a tiering mechanism of succession leadership now in the regional structure freeing up ms barnes and

236her team from being treated as a regional because schools should never be assigned to her in my in my strong opinion her and her entire team should have the ultimate flexibility to maneuver amongst our schools whether they've been identified by the state or we have identified them in need internally of needing requiring assistance because we see a decline in their data or we see a trend that we're not comfortable with in order to be more preemptive that's the solution um so part of this was to miss you know miss fields commented on earlier she's right she's absolutely correct uh griffin's a great example griffin elementary school as i will be traveling tomorrow to a state board of education meeting with miss wyatt and miss barnes to defend our turnaround option griffin either exits or they

237close period end of story there's no debate there's no reason to debate um it's the right thing to do it's been our plan it's been in place i appreciated miss the plan that that superintendent bird left behind it was very thoroughly thought out and it made a great deal of sense we're going to honor that because it's the same thing i would do but in that regard i think we have to that's the only contract we had with that company that was required by the state so at the end of the year that's expiring all these other support contracts were not required and so part of that is because we either had a belief that we didn't have the internal capacity or we got comfortable and it was easier or there was too much workload

238or there's in covet hit and there's a lot of justification behind why we did what we did this this is not a criticism i'm just a believer that if i'm going to be empowered to fulfill the board's expectation that i develop competent future leaders and continue to grow and give them ex growth opportunities to expand their knowledge and skill set this is the mechanism and process we need to follow and at the same time return those that funding back in totality 1.7 million dollars in contracted service with one turnaround entity almost six hundred thousand dollars with another i could add 50 staff and still return over a million and a half dollars back to the school district so i think that's what we're leaning towards is how do we then look at these contracts identify

239if they're needed we're going to maintain them if they're not let's move on and let's maximize our efficiencies and i think this is a good opportunity and it's the right time again i've commented multiple times i came into polk at a very unique time where i have the luxury of being able to make some of these decisions or recommendations to the board because the timing's just perfect um for me and so at the end of the day it's the right thing to do i think it's the right trigger to pull and if we're wrong the board will hold me accountable but i can assure you that our schools are steadily improving and we have the right systems in place you know principals are excited teams are excited pea is excited at our future so i

240think it's the right thing to do so hopefully i was able to address your your question fully put you in that position yes extremely thankful for you and your leadership on this thank you any other questions about the org chart miss fields so i have questions about looking at the overall recommendation and looking at the upgrades in various departments looking at the monies that's been saved because of the contracts that you just referenced are you feeling and i'm sure the answer is yes but i still want to publicly ask you are you feeling good about what you're proposing understanding that we don't know what year from year would bring and what happens if the resources are not there and we've elevated all these people not that they are not worthy to be elevated what what

241will the game plan be you you reference that we needed to as a board look at what we see as priorities and what programs we want to keep and what we might want to do something differently uh is that the conversation we would have at that time yes pam so there are several things and in our district has done this historically so during the last uh following the last recession when we saw our overall allocation of school funding get impacted significantly for multiple years we were not fully funded following that recession cycle as mr pitts and others had well documented the district did what every school district does they start to look internally and so it's through a process of combination or elimination of positions that you start to weed through that um historically there

242are multiple positions that were downgraded so if someone was retiring we would downgrade the position to have incur cost savings and then we could always revert back to a higher level position we've had multiple positions like that come forward this year chandra hall is a great example of a position that was downgraded previously and i think a lot of that was to initiate cost savings so there are options within our organization and that's why i did the best i could not just to remain cost neutral but to return money to the overall budget so i think that's important for us to show our financial responsibility and fiduciary responsibility a lot of positions are actually funded from grants idea we've seen a steady increase in our allocations i anticipate through the federal release this year that

243we'll continue to see that however if we find ourselves in a difficult position in the near future again we'll have to revisit and make some tough decisions within each one of those budgets it does not mean that those staff would see a reduction in their salary it just means as we see retirements come through we would make adjustments accordingly there or based off vacancies we could eliminate positions as needed um and do something similar we did this year so if there were three vacancies within a department or or three positions in a department one became a vacancy if the two others were willing to take on additional workload we could give them each a slight moderate increase but then still return over 60 percent of that funded position balance back to the bottom line so

244there is a lot of financial strategies that we could utilize and i think quite frankly and i know we have yet to bring the number forward but i believe our overall fund balance at the end of the year will show that we've done an incredible job balancing federal dollars and our current general allocation to create a fund balance that will allow us to sustain programs and positions over time so i i try to approach it two different ways number one not over extending ourselves so that we end up having to rif individuals or impact those positions in the near future because that's the last thing we want to do and then number two you know doing the best we can with our current allocation to sustain those inevitably through the near future so hopefully i

245addressed your question you did thank you thank you gentlemen next topic my understanding is we must do the policy review so i'm going to bring this dodge up good afternoon good afternoon thank you for allowing um time for this item just because we have hearing deadlines and notice deadlines and stuff like that so i very much appreciate it there are five policies that are being brought forward three are smoking and tobacco-free environment related the i've brought forward the instructional policy but the changes will be replicated in the support staff and the administrative staff policy and then the other two are a student section policy and then just a policy a facility section policy that impacts the general public and and the fact that we are keeping a smoking smoke-free environment um the other two are

246safety and security changes that were made as part of legislation that was passed last year and so um those those changes um captain seymour and her staff have reviewed those changes and brought them forward and we would ask that you move them forward or ask any questions if you have any thank you well i would like to thank you for your time this afternoon thank you miss dodge thank you versace last item uh for a workshop today madam chair from from the superintendent's chair will be the final summary of recommendations and information as it pertains to the book review so just again to reiterate the process used we mirrored our district review process that we're currently using after the existing policy for school level reviews with the following exceptions the committee was expanded to include

247more community-based members the previous process allowed for the media specialist the building principal an ela or reading teacher and the media specialist to con to and a couple parents to be the entirety of the school level review committee we expanded that well beyond to include students more parents and other staff in addition to which we brought in experts as it related to child child development and others from the college university level to ensure that we had a full comprehensive understanding of how these books may or may not be impacting our students additionally the committee allowed for the inclusion of the petitioner our current process does not and never has allowed the petitioner to have a voice in the process they could attend meetings and they would receive a summary after the conclusion of the recommendations

248were being made but they've never been allowed to be a part of the process the reviews were done publicly and they were recorded to allow any polk county residents to watch the discussions the committee structure and i felt it was important to include this because there seems to be a misconception that we stacked the committee with staff over 60 percent of the committee are community based members they are not staff 38 percent of the committee or seven total people for each committee there are 18 people on each committee one representative from the district from the ela department english language arts two district librarians two english language arts teachers and two representatives from our student support services department those who specialize again in childhood development community members consisted of 11 individuals three parents one board member

249from the florida association for media and education one professional practicing child psychologist one post-secondary english literature professor one representative from the national association for the advancement of colored people one representative from this county citizens defending freedom the petitioner one representative from equality florida one representative from concerned citizens of polk and one student minimally at each community meeting the book review committees as you know are included in your powerpoint i'm not going to go through them all because many of them were updated at the last meeting the last one i will address will be the last books that were addressed i am jazz and almost perfect so let's start with almost perfect there were three votes to remove from all libraries seven votes to retain at middle and high school and eight votes to retain at

250high school only the final recommendation from the committee was to retain availability of almost perfect for high school libraries only for i am jazz there were two votes to remove the book 15 votes to retain at all library levels all school levels one vote to retain at middle and high it's interesting there's an asterisk there it's my understanding that book does not exist at the middle and high school level outside of k-8 structures so the final recommendation from the committee was to retain the availability of imdraz at all levels although again it is only within a i believe if i recall correctly three of our elementary settings additionally so we had additional reviews on 428 two boys kissing zero votes to remove the book one vote to retain in all libraries 16 votes to retain

251in middle high one vote to retain in high school the final recommendation from the committee was to change the availability of two boys kissing from high school libraries to include middle and high school libraries and on may 5th more happy than not there was one vote to remove one vote to retain at all levels eight votes to retain at middle high and eight votes to retain in high school only the final recommendation was to change the availability of more happy than not from high school libraries to be inclusive of middle and high so here are the results again as i shared with you so again we go into so where does the superintendent's recommendations come into play um mr wilson i'll let you finish and you should have some comments thank you um so superintendent's

252recommendations in certain instances as i explained previously i actually was potentially more restrictive with the books and that was based primarily not to be disrespectful or disingenuous to the committee but i looked at exactly where the books currently reside and not to provide an opportunity to expand those books necessarily so my recommendations were based off that information plus where the majority of the votes remained as related to what the committees were recommending so for two boys kissing my recommendation was retained at middle in high school where the overwhelming number of votes again no votes to remove that book at all so we retained it at middle and high was my recommendation the bluest eye retained at high school level almost perfect retain at high school level i am jazz retain at the elementary level more

253happy than not retain at middle and high school levels and tricks retained at the high school level options for parents and guardians we've reviewed this but i i went put a little bit more detail in here so it's a little bit more clear so parents are currently able to review the media collection at their child's school through the existing destiny philette system it is a very complicated tedious process as we shared we had discussed the possibility of creating a video series to help parents walk it through but in conversations with the team it became easier for us to identify an internal mechanism to allow parents to actually see that content in a different way by uploading or downloading the totality of the their child's library so they could see all of the titles there extending

254beyond that the recommendation moving forward from my office has consistently been that we would allow parents to opt out of certain books that they essentially they would log into a system it would be linked to our current focus system parents could log in look at their child look at their child's school there'll be a comprehensive list of all the titles there parents could then check off which book titles they did not want their child have access to if they knew them by title or they could do it by theme and the theme issue is one that we continue to explore and it could be the most problematic simply because we want to make sure that there are no mistakes about themes related to books we're over we are reliant there on the publishers to ensure

255that all the themes are accurately listed and that's a process we're working through now but parents would have the option to opt out of those materials we would require them to be completed by august 1st i had a meeting today to get an update from the team as to the process being made on this online pro on this online uh development um that there are product that they're developing and i was told that based off this and the way it's going to communicate with destiny we may be able to have a little bit more wiggle room on that august first date because we're not necessarily going to migrate the data over there'll be a flag in focus that basically says this child's parent has indicated a restriction on materials and that then becomes the opportunity

256for them to double check it in destiny so to miss miller's earlier concern right now it still says august first because at the time i attached this presentation it was earlier in the week or excuse me early last week but as a meeting today prior to the workshop we were able to identify that there might be some more flexibility there with that august first date we would ask parents to complete the form and renew it each year it's especially important that the forms are renewed when they're transitioning from one school level to the next or changing schools that is something else we wanted to identify is that if your child changed schools the collections vary greatly as you saw many of these books are isolated to one or two specific schools and they're not available

257everywhere so again it just means the collection will vary across our school district so these are the current options that we've outlined for parents and that's the conclusion of the summary of book reviews have been concluded today mr wilson thank you superintendent hyde i i've spoken about this at great length and i know everyone knows where i stand on the on this matter at the last so i'll be brief this afternoon at the last school board meeting there were some individuals who read some of the passages and as i understand i haven't looked at our our youtube videos that from those meetings but as i understand it those passages had to be bleeped out or removed and it's rather stunning to me that we can't allow those passages to be read to the public but

258we're okay with our school-aged children reading them in books it's illogical it's stunning to me that many of these books if they were turned into movies would be r-rated movies meaning that students wouldn't be able to see them if they're under the age of 17 without parental permission yet we're okay with our students reading them it's illogical and what i've been told one folks said to me was you can't take those passages out of context well here's what that means it means that if the context is has some sort of social value in somebody's eyes then we can say anything we want we can use any verbage we want we can use any we can use um you know any type of pictures no matter how offensive because it has some sort of redeeming value

259to someone and my question then is what context doesn't have redeeming value to someone that means that every book would be open to be in to come into our libraries and that is an appropriate approach for society in general and for adults but not for schools and it's and this has been rather stunning to me i don't understand it on any level so i i don't think this is going to come before the board in the form of a vote so i have talked to the superintendent about another recommendation that i have we've talked about another possible option i believe in parental choice and currently we have an opt-out system but that's not a very good option for parents who don't want their children have access to these books because they can still go into

260the libraries and get the books they can't check them out but they can still get those books they still have access to them what i would propose is an opt-in system wherein the books in the libraries are segregated so that students don't have access to them unless they have parental permission so if their parents out there and it's only fair enough if their parents out there who want their children have access to these books they can opt in and and the books would be made available to them but it would preclude for all those parents and by the way i ran into an individual who told me they were a grandparent and they said i don't want my kids reading these books but i also don't think they should be banned it's a dilemma right

261so you know for those parents who don't want their children have access to that book to these books i think we have to honor that and i think we can do that by having an opt-in system again where the books are segregated from the other book so students can't get them without permission from their parents so that's what i'm proposing and i know you and i talked about this and i'd like you to comment on that if you don't mind i'd actually like to open it up first to the board because i had a similar conversation with several of your colleagues who proposed the exact same i will address if i may mr wilson the reason why we had to edit the video is not because the district chose to edit the video there are

262fcc policies in place that makes it so cool i understand but i wanted to explain that it wasn't that the district felt it was obscene it's there's a there's regulations as it relates to that and because we were unable to notify it now somebody chose to do that willingly then quite frankly we could have posted the video in its entirety and they would be sanctioned by the fcc however even though everyone knows we record and broadcast our board meetings we don't provide a disclaimer and so we felt the need to go ahead and edit anything where we felt it was appropriate to ensure that there would be no fcc complaints filed against the school district as the party mr bridges there is no no requirement in the law that that any school board meeting be

263broadcast correct that is something that we do voluntarily and that there was no speech that was censored at the time when it was made publicly so so i think that needed to be clarified yes sir and let me be clear i'm not talking about censorship i'm saying that as a society we find this language so offensive that we don't want the general public to see as a society not the polk county public school system but yet we're okay with it being in our schools that is the problem and i'm not suggesting we ban these books i mean i don't i'm not saying we should ban them from society i'm just saying there's an age-appropriateness issue as i've always said and so that's those are my concerns but thank you for that for that clarification thank

264you miss miller i just have a question i appreciate the information you're giving because there's been a lot of disinformation about what's happening here everything from the committees to the fact that we somehow legally have to um record meetings which we do not um but i'm questioning more on policy and you know parent parent choice is something i'm very um concerned with with a lot of things we need to be very um aware of not only legally what's responsible for but just individually and giving those parents options so i have two questions one if you want to bring back another option be tied to opt out i would like to hear that but how is that going to work if it's just including these books because here we're at now we have a lot of

265people emailing they're offended by books we have other people emailing you know we're not we don't want you banning books and by the way have you looked at these books so now everything from judy bloom um to the bible has been referenced in my emails that people want them looked at so i think we need to go back to how we set policy years ago to handle this and how we've done it in the past where it's done at the site level many of these books aren't available in unless just one school and some are more offensive than others um i think it's important that our school sites make these decisions what's best for the learning community um and that's why the policy was created so i want to know more about how we're going

266to return to how policy was written for our school communities because if books are added and we're opting in are we just going to keep updating an opt-in list how would parents know about it so i think the infrastructure of how that would work is where i'm interested in learning yes actually i can i can answer that um we had long conversations about just that issue there's a new law as you know that requires us the state of florida will provide training to all media specialists or media pair educators that will train them on the selection of appropriate materials and while it does not require there's a review process any further the initial language did but the thought that the final language did not what we had we propose to do is do exactly what

267we do when we do a curriculum adoption and provide an opportunity for parents to review the materials at the school um so at the end of each school year when we typically go through the procurement review process we could we could put out a notification to that specific community of learners that says parents were adding the following books to the media center and it's open to review so if they wanted to petition or request a change they could at that time challenge the book i believe though that the the combination of an opt-out and an opt-in virtually eliminates the issue altogether quite frankly um because it empowers parents that if i don't want my child to have access so let's let's go with the opt out first process first the opt-out allows the parents to

268see the collection at their child's school in its entirety and so there are books that were not challenged as part of this process um that they could still find objectionable for whatever reason no questions asked they don't want their child to have access to and we'll honor that the opt in however explicitly addresses the books that were reviewed now as it relates to that there are several books that we need to be somewhat we may have to approach somewhat differently beloved and the kite runner are two two examples because they are currently part of the recommended ap reading curriculum now as we advertise that every school year we do tell parents and students that their alternative selections that they can read so what we would have to do is ensure that for any of those

269courses and we do currently i know my own son came home with one at the beginning of this school year from a zla teacher that listed all of the books they were going to be reading and if we had an objection to let the teacher know so there needs to be essentially a permission slip that goes home at the beginning of the school year it's standard practice from that child's t from the teacher to the parent saying these are the books we're going to read and if you find any of the materials objectionable please let us know and we'll provide an alternate assignment this is the if you go with an opt-out an opt-in i don't see them in conflict with each other i think i think it becomes quite honestly it's it's a solution

270we have to be a little bit creative in ensuring that we maintain the integrity of our curriculum and those resources that are used explicitly i think miss cunningham did an amazing job explaining the difference between just materials that are available in a library but those materials that are referenced and utilized frequently for the purpose of instruction where the teacher is there to guide students challenge their assumptions challenge their thinking make them think creatively not to indoctrinate students because that's where everybody's going to go with that comment i just made but at the end of the day that's what teachers do we challenge existing assumptions and our knowledge of the world around us so that we're better learners it either affirms our position or it may change our position they're not challenging them on the on

271the content of the literacy they're challenging students in how they reflect on what they read and how it impacts them and what the author's intense intentions were so it's not about the content as much as about the process so i think we can do both processes without being in conflict but also creating some opportunities to ensure that materials that are explicitly linked back and we i have to keep going back to ap testing so many of our kids take those courses they're going to take that test we don't want to put them in a difficult position where they won't be successful so if that's the case and the parents opt out of those materials they need to have we need a mechanism to to trigger that response from families that otherwise may not respond to

272the media request at the beginning of the school year i just have two other follow-up um and it's part of that disinformation that gets out we're gonna we're gonna alert them during a curriculum adoption but this is not curriculum this is support material so we need to be very careful with the wording of that right because people will perceive it as curriculum that it's being taught and second with the ap and the only two books i've ever read on that list were the two connected to the ap testing i wasn't reading them from ap testing but it would just happen to be though that time in my life so my question is these are florida department of education ap exams connected to these books are they giving alternate scoring is it going to affect student

273scores from the department of education if we change the books no i'll bring dr mcnaught or mr mcnaughton up but let me clarify ap is not florida it's college board right right so florida support says do all other states ap testing because students can earn college credits as a result and it's a great process for to for to engage kids in academic rigor no what the assessment would do it doesn't necessarily focus on if i if my memory serves it doesn't focus on and i'll just pick a book beloved it doesn't focus on the content of beloved in as much as the themes and things that were addressed and beloved and how do students process through those topics and how are they deciphering information or using context clues to provide a response and be able

274to critically cite and evaluate um a passage so i mean that's my recollection mr mcnaughton i don't think they explicitly ask a question about that book i mean maybe i could be wrong it's a passage from from the book of the book itself so if you read the whole book you have a better understanding great so a substitute past a substitute book they would not have been exposed to the passage no they would not have been exposed to that passage but you're hoping they're exposed to that theme or that theme of it thank you that was my question i didn't and i understood ap what i'm saying is this is widely used for student college um entrants and i didn't i wanted to know how we would work around jeopardizing without jeopardizing that thank you

275but i think again that would be served through a permission slip at the beginning of the school year acknowledging the parents what the reading expectations would be thank you thank you and i would not be supportive of an opt in from the library books if as far as having a permission slip for the classes i think anything that you're being required to read in class we should have a permission slip for but if it's something that is a library book that they're able to get off the shelf i think that we need to have an opt-in for the library books or yeah sorry and opt out for the library books not an opt-in um i would i could see putting an asterisk or something by the books that have currently been reviewed just so that

276parents know these are the ones or having a list that indicates which ones they were that had been reviewed but i would not want to see us have only an opt-in option ms forney reynolds wyatt i think an asterisk would suffice if somebody cares enough to uh you know opt their kid out then uh let them know easily that the 16 and and then when the next 16 show up we can add an asterisk okay fields and ms white again i agree as well but uh my question is i'm sure that you thought this out if you haven't you will how are you going to roll this out to make sure that everyone knows what is expected and that we have the parents engaged and ready to respond because that's going to be very critical

277so it would go out as part of the back to school packet of information there will be videos attached to it that explain why how we arrived at this process why the how they could complete the process what assurances we're providing in multiple languages and we would do a marketing campaign as we shared before this this topic has garnered a lot of attention we would rely on traditional media outlets because they'll message to parents hey listen the polk county has adopted the following we would advertise it aggressively through our social media campaigns but also direct messaging to our families and that provides the best assurance and it would be part of the back to school packet of information that parents get as well so there'll be a flyer in there that walks parents through it

278um just a point of clarification with the asterisk it's it's important to note that only some books would be captured in some lists for example an elementary book is not going to be included in the middle or high school list so it would if i it's good feedback because the team could front load those books by school level as needed but it would also only be listed if it's if it's within that school so i think that's an important clarification as well is that if there are only three schools in the entirety of polk county that have the book titled i am jazz elementary schools why would we include that title in every other school if they're not adopting that text so it would become a requirement if they were to procure that but i

279don't anticipate that being an issue at this time so ms wyatt thank you i do just want to put on your radar i know that we often times get new library books in the middle of the school year things like that well we have a process for when new library books are if they're added in january alerting parents that these books are coming to your library yes ma'am because we're actually going to streamline that process our conversation this morning is we're going to move to one dedicated timeline towards the end of the school year with it will allow us to advertise to parents we're adopting the following please come review and i think you know as we shared and ms miller pointed out it's different because this is a school level adopted material not a

280district adopted curriculum material it's a supplement so we would we would streamline it however if we found that our timelines could not be aligned for next school year we would advertise that every time a book before a book ever goes to shelf let's say they get two or three shipments over a two week period of time we would ask them to wait until the entirety of the collection's available and then do the advertisement for 30 days and then they could shelve the materials as needed thank you madam chair yes as as was earlier mentioned there is a new process in place under the law for reviewing library books and other other materials that are coming in and i would just point out to the to the school board and to the audience that the it's

281it's a whole lot easier to decide up front not to place a book or a work on the shelf than it is to subsequently remove one remove removing materials is where is where uh school boards get into deep water as as discussed by the supreme court in the pico case that we talked about last time but it's a whole lot a whole lot easier to keep a book from going onto the shelf in the first place than it is to take it off the shelf once it's there thank you and wes i know we spoke earlier would you i know you sent us some information this morning but just in discussing some other districts that are have been looking at similar things right we were advised last week that the sheriff in indian river county

282had completed their his investigation a similar list of books i think had been presented to him with a complaint that they might run afoul of florida law on materials that are harmful to minors and the sheriff had completed his investigation and determined that no laws were violated but he did opine that that he thought that there were some materials there he would not like for his children to read and that he suggested the school board scrutinize their their policies for for the adoption and accession of library books which i am sure that they will do thank you i'm it's also my understanding that there's something similar has happened in flagler county i have not yet received any documentation from flagler county thank you correct miss cunningham thank you um i think i pretty much stated

283how i felt at the last meeting i have done my due diligence i've talked with graduates who've left our system and and moved on i've talked with english teachers i've talked with our sheriff and just community members because this is a huge issue so i kind of stand by what i said last time my view has not changed i believe we need to move forward with this but i really do think that the responsibility lies with that of the parent that is the first amendment right for free speech you have a right to walk into a school that your child is going to and as we said opt out of those books and that's pretty much where i think it needs to be and that's pretty much what you're recommending here you know i support

284your recommendations essentially across the board but i want to be sure as mr wilson pointed out that for those parents who do not want their child to be able to walk in and grab that book off of a shelf that perhaps these are located i don't know if this is the right word but behind the counter or someplace where i would have to have permission to be able to check out that particular book because that is what my family has indicated is correct for me as a student at a particular school so i don't know that we've actually talked about the physical you know location of the book or books um but yes and i i definitely feel as i did last time having my child go through our polk county school system and having

285read several of these books as part of the ap curriculum and the discussions that were held between this teacher and the students was was very important so i don't ever want to compromise that what i'm saying is if i decide i want to go because there's been all this hoopla about these books and i'm in you know middle school or high school i'm like hey i want to go check that out that that person is allowed to do so because their family has indicated that that's okay and i don't is that kind of what you were saying with all of this i know you said retained in high school middle school elementary but i'm saying i want to make sure that the child is protected if it's not age appropriate as deemed by that parent

286so that's where both the opt-in and opt-out can run simultaneously okay um i know miss wyatt's on record objecting miss fortney and miss fields however i i would like time to develop what that process might look like and bring the recommendation back because i think again it does exactly what the state of florida is asking us to do which is empower parents correct to make informed decisions about materials correct i i cannot i cannot preclude a student from walking into a library and pulling any book off the shelf but i also think we need to acknowledge the fact that in this age of digital access i know with all due respect yes there's nothing we do right that's going to preclude a student from getting that book easily accessible on their own personal device absolutely

287um and that's something that needs to again this is an issue where we've got to make sure that we're doing a good job educating our students and our parents on digital footprints and what they're accessing through their own media because even as students bring devices on our campus we cannot block their devices doing so would completely disrupt our ability to safely maintain order on our campus and and be able to respond if there were a real crisis on our campus or an emergency so i know people have said well why don't you just block cell phones and oh no prohibit cell phones well i i think my administrators have a lot more things to focus on than policing cell phones yes and can i just make an official request that we not do that no

288and i did not say that let me no no no no i just i'm trying to went off on that i'm trying to explain all of the different options that have been presented oh no you know even even the topic but however i do know um mr wilson and dr alan both because of their college experience there are reserve sections in libraries um so there's options there i'd like to explore and come back to you with that i think would largely address the entirety of this issue okay so miss miller just in trying to resolve this because we do the children are waiting mr hyde the children are waiting we have we have lots of crisis here um but when you bring those solutions back i want to make sure it's like being a parent

289advocate for years in this county on my soapbox of disability if we implemented something i wanted to make sure if you're going to implement this we it's a it's um you know documented where it's going to continue i don't want anybody to have a false sense of this is what we're going to do we're going to do it for a week and then we're not going to do anymore it might last a year because the issue you're going to have is 16 books have been reviewed at the county level there are other books that you know there are there are all kinds of so i need when you come back which is a big lift i'm going to need an explanation of how we're going to maintain it and who's responsible for it and how

290the parent will use their own um whatever its device or what how they'll be able to access for themselves and their children whatever that solution is i just want to make sure if we put something in place it's not for you know just to get this off the counter it's really something that we're going to be able to implement because we know day one someone's going to walk in that media center and try and access a book right right and so if it happens then we're gonna hear about it so i think you to your point whatever we do needs to be fully vetted and and implemented accordingly and i think we're prepared to do so so dr alan thanks mr mcnaughton i think we're good i really appreciate all the conversation and you know

291following up with miss miller what she's saying i what i'm hearing from her is and you can correct me if i'm wrong but really making sure that we have those policy guard rails in place and i think that was the intent of my email that i sent to you in regards to you know our process is it following under this policy that we have or this policy that we have because and and your response was it was 9130 well in 9130 um the policy as it stands um basically um advises us to take the recommendation and then the complainant and i think you read the policy last time mr bridges but the complaint and then can come back to um appeal issue yes so i that's what i was wanting to know is is this

292where your recommendation comes to us is that it right because according to the 9130 there's still a couple more steps left in that policy and i feel like we haven't really addressed that yet and and i think when i look at you know the recommendations the recommendation language that you use says to retain now does that mean that we're retaining the individual books that are actually at the individual library so like for example you know that we've got you know one book that's only at one school across the whole district well next year maybe we'll have 10 schools that have that one book so then would the policy then re-be you know go through the implementation process as well good so good question and so yeah and i i think that's where i've been confused

293all along because i said this isn't the end-all conversation to these conversations but there's no it's a good point of clarification going back to the beginning there's a significant difference between someone who objects to an individual title at their child's school and someone who alleges that we have multiple titles that are in violation of a state statute or multiple potentially multiple statutes so we adopted a process to address that because if you recall our initial response was challenge the books at the individual school level adhere to our process but they elevated the situation made an allegation we were a violation of multiple state statutes as i shared i'm not going to expose my employees that way and i felt that this was the fairest and most transparent way to address this issue moving forward moving

294forward any other challenges should happen at the school level at this point i think we've demonstrated the sincerity in our process and by creating definitely an opt-in or excuse me an opt-out potentially an opt-in there's no other solution you are completely empowered to limit your child to the extent that you want to or empower your child to give them free access to any material you free you feel is valid and reliable so there really isn't an issue then at that point just the mere existence of a book does not create an issue for that individual or should not pose an issue for that individual so i think quite honestly what we've discussed today helps us address that future challenges can go at the school level um that in and of itself could create we could

295have two schools that are in conflict with each other and that allows it to elevate the only challenge beyond today is a legal challenge um and we've known that from from day one and we've discussed that at length um so that's where we are good and i think that's been a part of our conversation too is when we look at the committee work and again that i'm very appreciative of the committee work um i i thought it was very intellectually stimulating um and whether i agree with the you know the value element that came out of the analysis of the text that's a different story but i think you know at this point we're we're discussing the educational suitability of the text but we haven't really addressed it from the legality standpoint so i think

296as as a board it'd be nice to actually hear what our stance is at on that from the legal standpoint because that was really at the beginning of why we formed the committees and i recognized that the committees weren't there to interpret the law so it'd be nice if we had that perspective and yes i appreciate the the materials we got from indian river and there were some really good findings and solutions presented in that material but i think for us as you know board members we haven't really heard that perspective that's all i had thank you madam chair that concludes my presentations for the workshop today thank you and we will now go through the agenda for this evening so special recognitions will have four special recognitions this evening we'll then go to public

297comments on agenda items to to be voted upon approval of the minutes any questions approval of the minute section d f through i sections j through k miss fortney sir um serious wyatt um i had requested did you get that request to remove the three invo uh contracts i believe those are further down okay and they were and there yes okay thank you yeah so l through p and then action agenda is q any questions on cue miss miller madam chair this evening i'm going to request that we table at least two of the invo contracts that concern behavior we're spending three million plus um on behavior supports and i think that we need to take a look at we have positions now that invo's not been able to fill i think that we can

298train staff i just i've been in this long enough to know before invo and before there was such thing as a behavior certified specialist that cost seventy seven dollars an hour and i think we need to we need to have a work session on what we can do to meet the needs of not only our center schools but these units these intense behavior units that if you cost out per student is a lot of money and the results of those along with the supports that are going into our schools i'm not sure i think our staff's done an excellent job trying to find resources and i know they're not a lot out there but i think we need to have a deep discussion before we continue with millions of dollars with invo but that i

299can do at the board meeting superintendent height is there a time sensitivity on this no ma'am only to the extent that some of the contract does have as ms miller pointed out they may have some existing vacancies that they would like to advertise and provide assurances to current staff before those staff indicate they'd rather move to a different contract so but as far as bringing this item in june no there shouldn't be any significant alterations but there there is a lot to discuss here um as i've discussed with miss miller and others but if staff existed to fulfill these needs we would hire them they don't exist and so there isn't we do not have the ability to train staff but we can discuss that later so i guess my question is do we want

300to discuss that at the board meeting or do we want to if we're going to table it i think we should pull it off the agenda now and table it for i would like us to go around the room to make sure everybody does want to play because i personally don't i feel like you voted up or down depending on how you feel this is huge for the departments to get this moving i mean staff does not bring us these contracts if they have if we have people in-house that can handle this this is here at the end of the year getting ready for next year and i don't feel that this is appropriate if this was a situation that folks felt like we needed more info it should have been done prior to today

301um i think we i personally feel we need to move forward and you voted up or down miss fields i wanted to hear from superintendent yeah it's open for discussion this evening correct if it remains on here if it's yes it's an action so we can discuss it i think we can have an in-depth conversation and for the sake of transitioning from workshop to the to the regular meeting um there is there was one item that should and that we are we are receptive as well to tabling at this time um item q4 if there was a decision to table that for further discussion later in speaking with dr lutz and with the principals who are directly involved with that proposal i don't see any issue with tabling that one at this time you okay

302did you say we're just going to discuss it at the meeting yes ma'am i mean we could we could remove that item q4 if there's no objections but the other two i think it's important to talk through item q2 i'm not in disagreement with miss miller um as to what we need to do a little bit more have a little bit more conversation there about the impact there i'm a huge proponent for this program and i'll share later why but i believe that there are definitely some opportunities to improve our outcomes and our focus in that area so it's worth the conversation later so i can get direction from the board okay so we can go ahead and pull q4 and then i would recommend we pull item q4 at this time i would ask

303that you that yes mr wilson sends it to the board because it's on the agenda and you need to con board consensus to do that would we like to pull q4 no no i'm not in favor of it yes miss fortney wood i'm i'm trying to understand why did you say we could pull it superintendent so there were questions and concerns this this program was initially brought forward based off conversations with our center school principals with the belief that we could better provide supports and services for them it has within the last 24 to 48 hours come to my attention in speaking with two of the principals in particular that this is they don't believe that this is the best mechanism in which to address it in considering the cost associated with it they ask

304that we have i anticipated having this conversation during the work board workshop or excuse me during the board session so at this time because there needs to be further dialogue to ensure that there's a complete understanding of what services this would provide at those schools in particular it would make sense to table that item at this time potentially but if not we can discuss it later well to me if we're going to table it we need to do it now rather than at the board meeting it can be done as an amendment to the agenda for cause at the beginning of the board meeting correct would you like to table at miss fields for q4 probably because of the superintendent's comments that's my my recommend my personal opinion would be that if the superintendent doesn't

305feel 100 comfortable that's voting on it tonight then i think we should wait until june to vote on that one i'd like to have further conversations with staff okay and that's fine but in the future why bring it to this point if you felt that way it could have been taken off the agenda prior to today is all i'm saying yes it's like 11th hour here and now we're saying oh nope let's reevaluate and go back so which is fine i get it yes but i i think that's and admittedly i became aware of concerns late yesterday and spent the evening on the phone with many individuals trying to address this issue even though it was vetted in cabinet okay there was a lot of background information i was not privy to until eight o'clock

306nine o'clock last night and so i wanted to have the conversation here okay so we're saying tabling number q4 is that correct okay i will support that then if you want to table it now yeah i think i think the uh the motion will be to amend the agenda at the beginning of the meeting right if you put if you lay something on the table then it has to be taken taken off the door at the next meeting this way yes it's the agenda simply being amended to remove that item okay miss winchester do you have that in the amendments thank you ma'am chair ms miller superintendent can you clarify q2 3 334 if that's approved tonight for those impact units is that a guarantee to that company or can that be reversed with with

307if leadership changes changes direction with those impact units that is a specific contract with that entity but it's if you're fulfilling the contract there's no it is a not to exceed amount but it's billable for three million dollars to that company the day the day we approve based off the commitments that they've made for that contract that's why it's not generic and in the board meeting i'd like you to talk a little bit about those impact units and what they were designed to do because that's that's not what they're doing thank you yes ma'am and i apologize any other questions on action item misfields number five for the internal audit position the senior director position when was that salary comparison done because it's not what's the date on that it doesn't have initially it was

308done two years ago and we updated it when the request was made to my office this year um so it's current it is current okay thank you any other questions on action items all right and superintendent hyde you'll have a report very briefly yes ma'am and then no attorneys report no auditor's report and then we will have board reports and then public comments not on agenda items right and that will unless anyone has anything else be miss fortney uh i met with uh i remember i'm the central florida school board right uh senator monford was on and andrea messina the executive director of fsba and they spoke about the new uh commissioner of education also about the june uh conference and some of the stuff that's going on i would encourage you all to look

309into that agenda it looks very helpful uh you did send me to the fsba finance 2.0 and i want to give a huge shout out to heather jenkins jason pitts and their team the whole time i was there they kept referencing polk county and what a good job we do and the heavy lift that department does is amazing and that was not the comments we got when we went to finance a few years ago that was not the comments we got four or five years ago so thank you all i can tell you they were they all are like they're they're this little group of clique that click in the state of florida and they they talk their own language but the uh the family empowerment act is gonna you know severely damage us that

310was the main theme i wanted to report on thank you chair thank you any other comments miss cunningham yes i would like to respectfully request that we reconvene or convene our board meeting at 5 15 to give us a chance to get a quick break and a bite to eat if possible yes ma'am thank you all right we will adjourn the work session and i will see you all back at 5 15. [Music] you