001[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] 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 it's fun to be a kid it's fun to go to school it's fun to be around your family the sports it's just an extra tool just like the love on them just be a good mentor
002and 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 to 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
003in 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 i want them to remember me as she's tough but is out of love they know behind the smiles when it's time to get serious when i go coach mo p e mode i'm serious because i know
004what it takes and just that just take that is out of love in one day down the road you will understand and you will come back and say because of coach tiffany this is why [Music] i went in thinking you know this is going to be difficult i'm going to be uncomfortable they're going to make me say things or do things that i'm not comfortable doing yet because i don't have the teaching experience when in reality it was laid back but productive because we were still able to have some of these difficult conversations and difficult techniques that might be hard when you're a first year teacher but in a productive manner where it wasn't intimidating at all in fact it was it was rewarding that name speaks for itself all teachers whether you are a
005new teacher whether you are a second career professional whether you are a veteran teacher whether you are a teacher just somewhere in the middle whether you teach athletics whether you teach physics this is where you will get that understanding of how to directly impact student achievement and that is so important and it is so worth your time through extending excellence i was energized with the new strategies and things i was learning with the different programs we were implementing and the catherine one of my mentees showed me different technology she was using in her classroom and i was able to share some of the different strategies i've used over the years that have worked and with that you're building that bridge from one generation of teachers to the next generation of teachers and that's so important
006because we can learn so much from each other because in your first few years of teaching i mean it's super overwhelming sometimes you feel like you're drowning so to have someone that's there for you especially not at your school i really like the idea of being able to collaborate with since polk county is so spread out collaborating with people that have different ideas different backgrounds different demographics at their school to collaborate with and bring to the table just having somebody there to say hey i was there i'm here for you you know anything you need you know i'm not feeling so nervous because sometimes when you go you know going to admin is kind of scary sometimes especially when you're brand new to the school so having somebody that i thought was more on my
007level that i could talk to so i wanted to make sure i was also that for other people the biggest impact for me was to see teachers week by week gain that confidence in their classroom and taking that criticism and just really turning it to something beautiful and then turning it around and taking those risks in their classroom with their students [Music] good morning and we will call this work session of april 26 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
008education for all students the four most important things to our governance team are operating with integrity respecting our students staff family and each other establishing a culture where our stakeholders feel valued supported and have opportunities for personal and professional growth and supporting an approach of continuous improvement to ensure student outcomes collectively we need to work on behalf of the children we serve and find avenues of agreement so that we can govern the district in an effective manner there is no acceptable alternative we will always collaborate in a respectful manner in order to enhance opportunities for each student and staff member we will not disparage others our students will thrive because we will remain committed to supporting the whole child we hope to engage and empower our students and stakeholders to create a community of lifelong
009learners and with that i will turn it over to superintendent hyde good morning madam chair members of the board staff and community members thank you for being here today several items on today's workshop some are are largely informational in a review some will provide me additional context before moving forward and others are in order for us to continue to serve and function in a transparent manner as to the procedures and policies that we enact as a school district first and for first two items up before you are charter school items i will ask ms candiamato to please come to the microphone the first item up today is the berkeley accelerated middle school contract good afternoon um so the berkeley accelerated contract the uh vote at the last meeting was to re or excuse me back
010in the fall was to renew berkeley accelerated middle for a 15-year contract what you have in front of you is after negotiating and working with berkeley accelerated middle the contract that we would then put in place beginning july 1 of 22 and running through the end of june 30th 2037. it is following the standard contract issued by the state with modifications as needed for example we they will now be serving students grades six through 10. they have increased they would like to they are increasing their capacity up to 650 students during the duration of their contract um they will still maintain in their same location we have added the component about the governance where their meetings will be held in polk county and members of the board will be polk county residents and that pretty
011much about sums up their contract it's pretty cut and dry it's pretty simple so that is all we have for you in regards to their contract any questions from the board on the berkeley contract okay not seeing anyone move to item number two try to review the charter review team's recommendation to the superintendent on matter academy davenport middle school so good afternoon again i'd like to bring up miss vicki mace as you know she is our outside consultant who does provide a wealth of knowledge and an outside perspective as we are reviewing and navigating through each of these contracts good afternoon good afternoon it's always nice to be back to polk county so um i'm going to try to go as quickly as possible save some time at the end for questions and um so
012be respectful of your time if you have if you want to slow me down just let me know but try to go through as quickly as we can so today we're going to look at matter 22 matter academy davenport middle school and one of the things that is different about this year right off the bat i'm not normally here in april and so the charter schools now can submit their applications and open at a time that they're determined by the applicant so actually this is a new statute and so it's why i'm greeting you in april instead of during the summer or fall the model charter application for high performing charter schools or charter school system it uses an abbreviated charter application if you might have looked at the application they're not as thick not
013as many sections they're guided by different statutes which we will have to look at today and this school is replicating a high performing charter school which is mata academy middle school it's msid136012 and matter has a lots of schools and so i'm grateful that they give us the msid number so that we can do our due diligence this is a different school than what they applied with last year in the 2021 application last year they had mata academy bay middle school and we denied the application or you did as a board mostly because of misrepresentation of facts that particular school had a deficit fund balance unassigned balance of seventy one thousand nine hundred and sixty dollars i'd like to tell you today that the school that they're bringing forward does have a positive fund balance
014and we'll get to that in a minute just on an interesting note i looked at doing due diligence i went back and looked at that school their fund balance for the year ending june 30 2021 for the school that they submitted last year is now negative 271 440. so that position did not change or improve since our last time together so the new school that they are recommending to replicate is matter academy middle school it does have an unassigned fund balance of three million eight hundred twelve thousand three hundred ninety five dollars it is co-located with two other schools the matter academy high school as well as the matter performing arts and entertainment academy the projected enrollment for year one is grade six with 154 students growing into a six eight school with 594 students
015at year five we're a little bit out of sync on this application process because of the statutory deadlines imposed by the state of florida we met on the charter review team met on april 5th and then the applicant actually presented to you on april 12th that's usually it's backwards what we normally do and today i'm here because of the superintendent's recommendation and on may 10th you will be voting whether to approve or deny this charter application our team is a great team polk county should take a lot of pride in the team they have key district staff community members we have three community members charter schools department a charter school representative and then i serve as the external evaluator or the consultant and it's important to know that each of the charter two team representatives
016they individually review the charter application prior to us meeting we did have one meeting this year on april 5th it was a zoom meeting at that meeting we have group discussions we look at our strengths we look at the concerns the questions members have an opportunity to advocate for that charter school to be approved and then the members of the team vote so the process has changed the same i always enjoy being an external evaluator i like to remind the board and miss lori she smiles every time because i say i don't understand the politics of your district so i can just look at the merits of the application which i think is a good process the review team when they're looking at their recommendations they're looking at the merit of the charter application they're
017looking at the capacity interview they're looking at the applicant's capacity to govern and they're also looking at the due diligence and i think that's also where it's important to have an external evaluator because i really like doing the due diligence i like digging in and finding things that perhaps the your staff doesn't have time to find and that allows your district staff to stay focused on the mission of the organization and so i can do a lot more of the work and find some of the due diligence every time i i apologize for this label um it should say financial solvency but forgot to put that one and i think i forgot to save on the last edit so i apologize for that title slide but i know given a green light to a charter
018school to open it's a weighty decision i know that and the budget plays a key important part because you want to know that the charter school is solvent that it can operate in the first few years of its operation the heart of the budget process it should be something that it's an estimation process we know that it's not perfect science but it should give the district the confidence that the applicant considered all his expenses particularly those described in the application narrative as well as personnel to capably serve the students and so as you move forward it should give you a vote of confidence the charter review team i do have to tell you has reservations about this budget and we'll talk about them more in detail but it's also important to know that this particular
019applicant has the backing of a matter academy inc which is a a reputable organization in the state with many charter schools the capacity interview i think is key particularly this time because the application is so abbreviated we were able to ask lots of questions on the capacity interview with the governing board you should be able to access the applicant's understanding and capacity to implement the program successfully gauge how familiar they are with your community resolve any major questions not answered in the written proposal and i think that was really key this time and provide additional evidence to either support or deny the charter application so one of the things that we couldn't ignore as the charter review team was that a charter replication a high-performing charter school or charter school system it operates under different
020statutes and these statutes came into play i think it was a big decision in the charter review team's recommendation so they're they're guided by different statutes either for a high performing charter school or for a high performing charter school system and in this case the applicant provided letters from the department of def of education stating that it was still um a high performing charter school system and that the school that it was replicating was one that was approved by the department of education so we're going to look at some of the other statutes that we had to pay attention to in the case of a high performing charter school or charter school system you can only deny a charter application of high performing charter school if it does not materially comply with requirements found in
021section 1002.33 6a these are the same that you would find in the other applications the difference here is that only way you could deny for one of those requirements is if the school does not materially comply with that requirement and we'll get into that definition so we're looking still at the guiding principles we're looking at the curriculum plan we're looking at improvements to improving student performance do we have our measurable objectives the reading curriculum do we have differentiated strategies and of course the financial plan anticipated fund balances are they giving us good revenue projections based on their expenses and their revenue so but we cannot ignore the fact that you can only deny if one of these requirements does not materially comply other statutes for the high performing replication is the charter school proposed in
022the application does not materially comply with requirements in statute 1002.33 section 9 a through f a through f we look at that all the time that's are they non-sectarian in its programs are they accountable to the sponsor for a performance they can't charge tuition or fees other than what other basic public schools can charge they must meet all applicable state local health safety and civil rights and they can't be have any anti-discrimination issues so we look at those all the time also the proposed charter schools education program cannot substantia or does not substantially replicate that of an applicant or one of the applicants high-performing charter schools in this case it has replicated in one of its high-performing schools the applicant has made a material misrepresentation or false statement or concealed an essential fact that was
023our issue last year because we felt that they did not reveal that the school being replicated was actually in a negative unassigned fund balance this year we have not found any misrepresentation of facts and the proposed charter schools education program and and that and is a big word financial management practices do not materially comply with the requirements of 1002.33 section 6. the definition of non-material non-compliance it's a tongue twister here a failure to follow requirements of a violation of prohibitions applicable to charter school applications which failure is quantitatively or qualitatively significant either individually or when aggregate aggregated with one other with other non-compliance and so we had to watch that statute as we were doing our evaluation so as we get into our strengths and concerns i just hope that you have some idea that
024it wasn't a regular standard application that these other charter statutes did guide us in making the recommendation strengths we like to talk about strengths but it seems like i bring lots of concerns to you the strengths it's replicating a successful charter school it has a really good on fund balance unassigned fund balance it is supported by a large organization like i told you earlier matter academy inc it's a recipient of a federal replication grant for to open new charter schools it's received 58 million dollars from the united states department of education that is a large grant and the educational program curriculum and instructional design was really one of the better ones that we have seen um it's also i think important to note that at the presentation ms sanchez the principal stated that about 60
025students i think it was from osceola county perhaps would be coming back to polk county that was a strength and also everyone has really enjoyed messengers in enthusiasm that was obvious at the presentation to the board as well as the apple the charter capacity interview and so she's worked really well has had really good communication with the staff it's been very positive so we found that as a positive because that's not always the case as you're opening new charter schools concerns i think there might just been a pet peeve of mine but they didn't make a lot of changes to the charter application and generally when we have those that come back and resubmit they take what the crt team wrote and in the evaluation and they try to correct some of the stated concerns
026there were not a lot of stated concerns corrected here or even explained i think in more detail which is what the cr team was looking for but they did make the demographic changes of the replicated school they did make they'd use the baseline data for the replicated school and the measurement for their goals for student achievement they did change the parent survey administration day they did change how they were going to share a student assessment with the parents instructional materials for the ela there was some new materials there and they did change the history worksheets and so what i do when i we have two evaluations or applications i set them side by side and i literally go word by word to look for changes and so i can tell you that we were a
027little disappointed that some of the major concerns that were voiced last year were not addressed one of the other things that we didn't know how to really evaluate this charter application and the reason i say this is that miss amato asked in the charter capacity interview where are the board minutes where can we find the board minutes that show that this was approved for submission and the applicant said well it was already approved to submit so there's not really minutes reflecting on the approval then a few minutes later ms amato said okay well you know we were really kind of concerned about the fact that some of the changes or concerns were not addressed and then the applet came back and said so we just for the record want to clarify that this is a
028brand new application that was submitted on replicating a different matter academy performing school so in one breath they were saying well it doesn't need to be new approval then on the second breath they're telling us it's a new charter application i was not able to even as late as yesterday find the minutes to show that it was approved as a new application at the um the other thing was why did they submit as a six through eight school and i know that's a question that's always asked they're a k-5 school why don't they just add sixth grade because a high-performing replicated school can just add capacity you just have to let the board know on march 1st that you're adding capacity so we we had a little discussion about that and the applicant said in
029the interview um i know that this is a 6 8 but really that campus will run and operate like is was you know a synergy a center not synergized k-8 school and so we we had some discussions in that usdoe replication grant that the school the matter academy inc received they have a five-year strategic plan and in that five-year strategic plan they have a plan to open four charter schools in polk county six eight is one of those charter schools and as you know they already have 1k 5 approved to open this year and they planned on opening 2k 8 168 and 9 one nine twelve so it is meeting the criteria for the grant for them the other thing too is that it gives them an opportunity to obtain additional grant funding which i
030mean it does help the school with additional current grant funding and we also know that the school is receiving 1.5 million dollars from that replication u.s department of education grant if the elementary school gets 1.5 million by opening a middle school they will also get 1.5 million dollars which is a nice place to be we don't have many applications coming before you receiving those kind of funds to open up the concern that we had though is when you add 154 students in one grade it's really difficult to be solvent it's tough to build a budget for 154 students even schools with 300 population small schools they struggle finding their break-even points and the being solvent the first year of operation so even though we understand why it still is a concern that they're only adding
031154 kids the facility this was a repeated concern the facility is a 1250 student campus um and by year after year three it's not big enough to entertain both the elementary and the middle school with their projected enrollment and the year four total would be 1 318 students in year five 1362 students they didn't give us a lot of information on their backup facility and so that caused a little bit of concern because we do know that right now there could be some potential delay for completing the first phase i do know the applicant said that if someone visited the campus they would be very pleased however it does keep him up at night i mean it's something that you cannot control if they were to have to find a backup facility in davenport i
032understand that that might be problematic to meet the standards that they've created for their school serving ese in ell students unfortunately and i i you know i would hope that maybe this is something that could be changed in the future but the high performing charter application in the high performing charter school and charter school system application does not ask the applicant to address the ese students and i think that that's most unfortunate because that is the heart of the school at least in my personal opinion as a former principal and i think it's important for the district to understand that you know that these students will be treated in a fair and equitable manner so that's unfortunate so what we tried to do is miss amato ask a lot of questions at the capacity interview
033we do know that they're projecting 14.4 percent esc and 4.9.4 ell so if you um look at those numbers for the middle school that would be 22 students for the elementary school would be 60 students with a total of 82 students for the first year of operation we don't still have a good understanding as to what students they're going to serve or how they're going to serve those students during the capacity interview the applicant stated all students that enroll in the school will be serviced if you look at page 42 the 14 of swd will include students eligible for autism spectrum disorder death of death or hard of hearing emotional or behavioral disabilities orthopedic impairment other health impaired specific learning disabilities speech impaired language impaired or visually impaired so we also learned at the crt
034meeting from miss chris newman lake the senior manager for esc that the current elementary school is doing an inclusion model so we're going to make an assumption that the middle school is going to follow suit and also do an inclusion model but unfortunately we were not able to get those answers at the capacity interview and they were not required to present those that information in the application but we do know that we do know that there's an issue with our staffing for elementary the middle school does not budget an esc teacher for the first year of operation the elementary school when looking back at their application had one esc teacher so they will have one esc teacher as far as we know for 82 students and that's problematic um i do believe that at the
035capacity interview they they have said that they will have i think an esc coordinator but again that is not in their staffing plan so we don't have a real good picture of how we're going to serve these students the student projections that's a repeated concern there's 154 students in first year there's seven core teachers and a half of us principal allocation that's all eight total employees for the entire school that was a repeated concern last year the narrative didn't change to provide more detail how it was going to be accomplished we learned that it's going to be a collated school located school during the capacity interview it seems to be something that they do it's common for a matter academy inc to do co-co-located schools so sharing the key personnel with the elementary school seems
036to be how they will operate the first year of operation the other thing that probably was a little concerning is that last year i don't know if you recall guidance counselor there was not one allocated in either elementary or the middle and that wasn't addressed in this application either the middle school is not addressing the guidance counselor position there is one elementary guidance counselor that has been identified according to the principal at the capacity interview so basically what they what we learned at the capacity interview was yeah i mean in general the way most of our schools work and will be the same for this school obviously you know our esc our ell guidance administration office support staff someone that's doing hr your registrar food services generally speaking the majority of the staff will be
037shared minus some teachers that will be you know based on certification just allocated you specifically in the middle school so basically what they're trying to do is they're going trying to find teachers with cross certifications um the other thing is that they reminded us is that those were seven fte equivalents which means that they could have someone hiring for four math periods and two pe would would equal one equivalent and so when we did ask the crt team the curriculum folks can they do it with seven folks they said yeah they can it'll be a challenge and they they do have some rpe music and um cte courses for their electives and so it will be a challenge but they said it is possible to do it with a seven fte equivalents other concerns they
038didn't delete the reference to the fcat science 2.0 which was something simple that could have been done as you know it was eliminated in 2016. when they were looking at baseline data they didn't use the most recent data they still use the 2019 data even though you can find polk county data online on the applicant history worksheets they do still have one school that was reported incorrectly and i go through every one of those financial audits and there are a lot of them in matter of gardens academy one of their schools has a deficit on unassigned balance of 30 710 dollars but it was reported in the negative i mean positive on their worksheets so there was still an issue with their worksheets budget concerns um we didn't really know how to evaluate their budget
039as well so we had to to do some exploration there basically the applicant told us they wanted us they purposely didn't include the grant dollars they wanted us to be able to verify that the school could operate just and be sustainable on their current operating dollars they also said we basically just wanted to say um we can be able to be sustainable on the fte dollars that we earned and working with mr pitts and mr fowle um i did a financial analysis which i'll share with you and it is our conclusion is that they cannot be financially solvent just on their earned fte so what we did is we went through and we looked at some positions um because they did state during the capacity interview all the positions they would be sharing and so
040we went through and what i tried to do and again i had jason and jd look at this is we said okay if they're going to share all these positions at least let's look at the proportionate share what will the elementary school have or middle school have to pay and it would be 27.11 so we went through and we looked at the positions the interesting part on the the school administration one of the conditions of the grant the usdoe grant was that a principal was hired a year in advance of opening a school and they did not project this to happen for this particular school so we did ask them if they got permission from their program grant manager and they said they did i was not able to find that in conducting due diligence
041the other thing too is that the administrative assistant was the p hired a year ahead of time as well they did not do that they said they have permission from the grant manager to um present or open the school the way they're going to open with sharing a principle so what we basically did is we went through and looked at all the positions and i'm not going to go through each one of those but we went through and we tried to say what would the proportionate share be some of these might be low some might be high i tried to use the budget the budget narrative what they said at the the interview and we went through and for example the custodial service well we only have that as a proportionate share of five thousand
042dollars it might be higher because we took the 21 000 that was in the elementary budget because the elementary has one custodian allocated the middle school doesn't have any so basically they'll have one custodian for 568 students so as they get into the year if that changes that would impact how this would look so we continued and looked at the different transportation manager there's some of the positions that we didn't know we used the bus drivers your um i think fifteen dollars for nine hundred hours and tried to use maybe some similar numbers so it's our best guest estimates it's certainly not a pure statement so we looked at the proposed budget we said okay what would this look like if we took the personnel expenses we think they're short of over 221 thousand dollars
043if they do the proportionate share in sharing with the elementary school we did learn matter academy assessment charges 150 for every student they have to pay it to the organization it's for shared corporate costs and accreditation costs so we did learn at the capacity interview that that was not included in the budget so it was and fifty dollars times 154 students so possibly there could be almost 250 000 244 000 plus that was not included in that budget so i said okay what could maybe they recoup from the grant what are some monies that we could find to offset that and so these are just some of the examples that come out to if i if i may i just have a question for clarification i'm sorry um why are you operating under the assumption
044it would be a commensurate share if those positions are fully funded under the current structure and it's a co-located school why would it why are we assuming that they must cover a poor proportionate share of those positions during the capacity interview we asked how that would be covered because they have not allocated any expenses for any of those positions and so they told us that they would be charged out as a proportional chair so that was their response thank you is that correct yes okay i want to make sure yes and then that but i think miss amato you might want to jump in for me when we ask would we be able to see that proportionate share now in the proposed budget and the answer was we would not see it at this point
045it just it raises the question if those positions are fully funded now and they're simply going to be tasked with taking on additional students i don't even know why they recommended a proportionate share they've already funded the position there's no additional cost to them for those positions that are currently already in place the the positions were funded at the elementary school and so when you look at their financial audits for all of their matter schools that look co-locate they do proportionately share their lunch expenses their staff expenses all of those kind of things and that's how they keep their money separate so there's no commingling so that you can make sure that when you do your financial audit that it's okay that's how they present they maintain separate books for a co-located school yes with
046one msid number two they do issue two msi thank you so the elementary will have an msid number very good question thank you sir um and the middle school will have an msid number thank you and i apologize if i wasn't very clear no i may have missed it i have a cold um so there are some things that perhaps um that we could recoup some of that money back and so we looked at that we took the reserve the three percent reserve and we also took the carry forward so when you take the carry forward in reserve you just have to know that next year that's going to impact those budgets going forward so we tried to find money back to see if they would be okay so when we we looked at possibly
047expenses not covered we again about 244 possible revenue that we could find 182 166. the difference would be a 62 408 dollar deficit that was not covered in their budget so we were concerned about that and if that was a standard application alone we would say okay probably would not want to recommend approval of this application but we cannot deny the fact that they have already received 1.5 million dollars in grant funding and so that 1.5 million dollars in grant funding will cover any of these deficits or concerns that we are addressing at this time yes um earlier earlier you said it was 58 million from a federal replication grant to open charter schools is that for their umbrella organization and then the 1.5 million is for mater that's our understanding yes that's what they
048explained to us at the um it's about a 58 58 million dollar grant for the umbrella umbrella for all the schools they're going to open yes and then we ask this amato asked the question how much would this school receive and they told us 1.5 million oh this okay mrs sanchez presented uh last work session it was that was the amount that she it's an estimated amount that the school would receive okay so is there do we have verification of that i have reviewed the grant i i i've reviewed the grant it has been awarded and okay yeah okay thank you for your question so here's where we are basically when we go back so we said okay we've got a problem with the budget so we went back and said okay let's look at
049the high performing charter statute again and the heart the performance the proposed charter schools education program and financial management practices do not materially comply well we know that the curriculum section is one of the better curriculum sections that we've seen and so the word and when i address mr bridges we have not come across that issue before but the statute clearly says it must be the curriculum and the finances that do not materially comply and so we had to keep that in mind as well the other thing that is new this year that i think that we need to bring to your attention is that a prevailing party may fall in action with the division of administrative hearings to recover reasonable attorney fees and costs incurred during the denial of an application and appeals so
050at this point the charter application statutes say that if you deny they appeal they the charter applicant wins then it might be possible that you would have to pay for prevailing cost and that's not something that we've had to think about before as a charter review team and also if you fail to uphold the affirmative decision by the court of appeal they can also withhold administrative fees from the school that's something else that's new this year too that you might want to explore bottom line so we looked at it all okay we said okay what do we do here the merit of the charter application we know we had some issues there's no doubt about that i think all three of these factors came into play in the recommendation the high performing charter statutes we
051could not ignore and the prevailing party party recovering fees and costs that one we have not had to look at before but we certainly thought about it so we thought about okay the budget the budget was a main concern but the budget we know we have 1.5 million dollars coming to the school so that should take care of any budget issues that we may have we know the ese concerns are still real but we do know that under operation in the state of florida they would have to provide a free and appropriate education the district can control that to make sure that they are providing those students with the services needed or those that they said that they would receive and then we also know that um many of these concerns that we as i
052can tell you i've learned in the last 20 years the mr bridges can probably say if you do go to appeal they'll say many of these things can be taken care of under a contract and so when we took all these things into consideration the review teams recommendation is to approve 14 and deny three so that is the recommendation by the charter review team and i apologize i went quickly but i'm sure you have some questions did i miss the fte calculation that would have shown how much revenue they would generate based off their anticipated enrollment and why wasn't that used to offset the budget concerns i i just the budget is a concern for me and i want to make sure i understand it completely when i i went back and tried to pull
053out anything that we thought that the grant would cover and would offset the expenses because the other expenses in the fte we fought would be used for operating the school so we felt that we could not pull them out as something that could help support the budget i know that's standard is that how we apply that to all charters or is that we've never had a situation in the eight years that i've been working with polk county where we've had a co-located school that have shared expenses like this particular school because based off their anticipated enrollment they should generate almost 1.2 million dollars in fte all included 7 500 per pupil at 107 154 students so if they hired seven teachers based off the cost that i saw in the summary of roughly forty seven
054thousand dollars per teacher and i think they said they would hire seven teachers that came to 332 500 and then the admin expenses that we had concerns with that needed to be offset were 244 which would bring a total of that they could easily cover from their fte allocation so i just i want to make sure i'm understanding the concern when it comes to the budget so that i don't misspeak in support or against a charter application and absolutely correct that those costs could be covered in the budget it's all the other expenses of a normal school that you would anticipate it will grow into a six eight but they're they are sharing costs with the elementary school and so we were trying to show those costs we're not going to be able to be
055supported by the fte that was generated okay i don't know sorry doctor doctor i i'm sorry i looked back down dr allen i'm sorry i didn't know to recognize someone dr al great thank you superintendent i i was curious you know you mentioned the other schools underneath their umbrella did you happen to look at um and how many did you look at in regards to their fund balance for example i think 21 elementary schools 18 middle schools and eight high schools you know so did you look at that collectively at all of those or did you pinpoint a couple that were in deficit or just curious to give some context around that and and then secondly do you typically see a school work in a deficit um from uh within the first year well is
056her hope that they're able to sustain the first year of operation we know statistically that that's the budget is the biggest concern for new opening charter schools um looking at i looked at every one of their financial audits for all of the matter schools and so there is only a few schools that are operating i don't want to misquote here i think there's one two two one or two schools that are operating in the negative but most of them are in very good position financially okay and they reported them gotcha so the one or two that you mentioned that are operating in a deficit what year are they in operation do you know that i don't know okay i'm curious too your perspective on i think in the materials it says so we know we
057have esser mental health dollars idea funds and all those other things for so we present a budget um and we want it to work without that and we also know that we have the replication grant so this is quote from the materials that we were looking at is it typical that you would prefer not to include federal grants in the mix of the overall budget generally speaking the district wants to look at revenue that is guaranteed and so a lot of times grants are competitive the startup grants are competitive so they don't generally use those but this is um this particular grant is guaranteed income and that's why we felt comfortable being able to utilize that in our evaluation because a 1.5 million dollars not many new schools have that opportunity there as you read
058the grant there's basketball courts stem labs there's all kinds of things that can be purchased with this particular grant that will certainly enhance the school environment but generally when we're looking at a budget and the only reason i we also looked at the budget to see if it could sustain on its own is because that's what they told us that they wanted the budget to do during the capacity interview they said we want to be able to prove that we can be sustainable on the generated fte dollars and they can for their eight employees but when you look at all the other services and they do tell us they're going to share those services and there would be pro-rated costs for those services there's not enough fte generated monies to do that and our evaluation
059okay great thank you ms miller i just have a question i want to preface this so we understand what legislation uh has before us and high performing charters can be renewed but was there any explanation of you mentioned students with disabilities what they were funding and what they described they would be able to serve it was an explanation on how they're going to make up the cost of that how are you going to provide services for students with autism how are you going to provide related supports if you're not budgeting for that um there were the only thing that i recall it was on page 42 when it listed those students but the application narrative itself does not address that when we did ask they said they would provide all those services but we did
060not get into detail during the capacity interview as far as funding how they are going to fund those things it was our opinion that it would be very difficult based on the revenue and the personnel that they presented to be able to fund the services that they listed now if they're going to do a an inclusion model we haven't really had discussion with them with that we only know that because miss chris was able to share that because she's been working with the elementary school so there were no i i do not think there was anything budgeted for those services and i think i did mention i requested it when they were here with us that they make that known to parents because you can describe that you provide those services and those children will
061enroll and then the child's needs might be higher than what they can afford to meet but before we do that and then go through the cycle of sending them back to a typical school that has services like that i hope that we are um making that well known at the beginning because with well intentions if you don't have the funding for it then it's not going to be it's not going to be something that you can do it's unfortunate that we keep seeing fcat science 2.0 fcat anything i taught i taught elementary school when the fcat was given we haven't given the fcat in a long time and i'm hoping that even though high performing charters are automatic pretty much automatically renewed there's not much local say in it that we can at least update
062applications to to represent what we currently service and provide here which is not the fcat thank you fields thank you uh i agree with miss miller i think it's unfortunate that a lot of the areas of concern were not addressed uh because of the fact that at the end of the day for the most part we know that we are in a situation where we pretty much were up against the wall and have to approve the application i wanted clarity on the 1.5 replication grant that is a one-time grant correct me if i'm wrong it is my understanding that it is a one-time grant i don't know the longevity of the grant do you i don't know i don't know how long it is but it is a one-time grant i do have the grant
063with parts of the grant with me let me see if i can see and i guess while you're looking my point is because of the overarching support that they have with their fund balance and if they were to have a challenge it appears to me that they would have the support from the higher a corporation to offset whatever deficit they might have from what i'm looking at i was looking at the article that was in yesterday's paper here locally about an audit finding for us and i was trying to see where it talked about the charter school that was involved with some of the deficiencies and that that was a 360 thousand dollar amount so my question is is if we approve this charter school and if there's some issues with any area ese or
064whatever else it might be in an audit finding it's going to this is a question probably for superintendent hyde it would end up being under our umbrella because of us actually approving the charter schools in our school district do you understand my question yes ma'am so what you're saying is if they default somehow does that become our financial responsibility yes mr bridges i again it's been a minute i don't recall that we would assume that would default back to their parent company i do not believe that is the case under the statute the school district is not liable on the debts of the charter school um i will mention that several years ago the school board denied an application which on its face appeared to not have a budget that would work but it was
065a an application that had been put forward by an organization that had several schools and while their application didn't talk about sharing funds or commingling funds while we were up on the appeal the state board of education found that so long as the as the parent organization had funds indicated that they were willing to share that they saw nothing wrong with that so i think it's likely that if although this application on its face has budget weaknesses i think the the committee and certainly ms motto and ms mace in in reviewing this um took into consideration from whom the application came and the financial status of the parent organization in their other schools thank you and miss fields i believe the grant at least they showed the budget for five-year breakdown for that the usd
066us doe replication grant so for five years five year breakdown so i don't know how long the grant is but um the grant is they do have their budget includes a five-year breakdown and it does list the schools that it will be opening within the grant and there's several of them thank you i don't see any further questions thank you great presentation as always thank you so much thank you very helpful up next is miss heather jenkins ms jenkins as you recall during our most recent board meeting provided along with mr pitts our chief of staff an update on the district budget anticipated budget moving forward at that time there was a lot of conversation and interest regarding the family empowerment scholarship because we were projecting a significant increase in what we were budgeting for
067that and so i i requested of staff that we bring back this topic specifically to provide further clarification and address any other questions that you may have specific to this and or how we arrived at our increased cost calculation so ms jenkins is here with you today and she'll take us through a short presentation and address any questions the board may have good afternoon as mr hyde said we'll be talking about the family empowerment scholarship hopefully oh it's right there here's our presentation um on may 11 2021 governor desantis signed in um house bill 7045 which resulted in a lot of changes to the family empowerment scholarship it explained that it would now include two branches of eligibility for educational options which they refer to as feseo and the family empowerment scholarship for students with
068unique abilities which is the fesua eligibility is based on family income and provides the option for k-12 students to attend a participating private school families apply through one of the approved scholarship funding organizations there are two of those they're located on our district website we have a hundred and four private schools in polk county currently polk has 3972 students attending 161 private schools so that what that does mean is you can utilize the scholarship to go to a school in a a different district the family empowerment scholarship also offers families of eligible students the option to receive a 750 dollar scholarship to provide transportation and that can be used for a public school if they choose that option i'll go into all of this in a little bit more detail as we move through the
069presentation effective july 21 july 1st of 2022 this year the mckay scholarship program joined the family empowerment program under the unique abilities category that's designed to offer families with students with disabilities as young as three years of age access to additional educational opportunities families may choose to enroll their student in another choice public school charters are typically not an option for this they're not considered choice or they may receive a personal education savings account so it's similar to a health savings account flexible savings account you have a card that can actually actually be used for expenses they receive a deposit of public funds it can cover things such as private school tuition and fees online learning programs community college costs higher education expenses and yes ma'am i just want to interrupt just for a second
070first of all it's not a card that they're given they're given an expense account where they have to be either do reimbursement or find someone that can that will self-bill into that account um a lot of these are reimbursement um some of these private schools do not bill themselves so that's been an issue with some of our students i just didn't want people to think that those are some kind of debit card it's not it's a um you have an account it's online with one of these nonprofits but you have to submit receipts for services and or tuition to only private schools any public funded school does not count but i was going to ask your number you kept mentioning private schools does this account the students on empowerment scholarships that are homeschooled that it
071includes the homeschools and i have the breakdown further on okay yes and the number of the private schools comes from the doe choice website they have a listing by county and then we also have a listing that comes out of focus that lets us know where the students are enrolled families have to apply annually and re annually for renewing participation in the fesua through one of the approved scholarship funding organizations which are responsible for determining the eligibility house bill 7045 stipulated that students transitioning from the family empowerment scholarship ua from mckay that their scholarship amount will not be less than what their mckay amount was this year siblings of a participating fesua student is are eligible for a scholarship to attend a private school under the educational options branch of the family empowerment scholarship regardless
072of the income level information on those siblings the parents have to submit that during the selection process ms forney so miss jenkins basically we're just a pass-through yes ma'am that's it we're getting to the funding i wanted to give you a little bit of history and thank you miss miller for clarifying that one piece for us the scholarships for students determined eligible rs in the beginning were established for eighteen thousand students that was in nineteen twenty beginning in the twenty twenty one school year the maximum number of students participating shall annually increase by one percent of the state's total public totes student enrollment which is about 7 500 kids 25 000 or 7 500 75 000 thank you sorry i got choked um um yes ma'am miss fortney back to the pass through how much
073time or money do you think you and your office has spent just to do this i'm just curious this about eight hours eighty eight eight total thus far thus far okay like over the context of like how long are you speaking i i wasn't i'm not understanding your question to support any sorry i just want to know how much time and money we have to invest as a pass-through typically once we get into the process doe withholds these funds from our allocation so the time spent has been um we spend it in analyzing how that impacts our funding gotcha that's that was it thank you miss miller we also have staff that have to um we have staff whether it's home school staff or the people that used to run the mckay i don't know
074what we call them now they have to take calls and verify students enrollment before it goes to doe there's a cross-check that they do with doe but a lot of the times the matrixes are not correct or the parents feel that the i'm talking for the efc side now there's a completely different side students with disabilities that were originally with the gardner income was not also income did not matter i don't know if we said that but those students probably receive need more support at the site's level or the district level because we are we have to do an iep even if we've never seen these kids so their staff involvement for creating ieps and their staff involvement for cross-checking um matrix numbers before it goes to the state so i don't know that i
075mean financial office probably but there we do have a commitment to this that i don't know we are reimbursed for um for staff time it's part of what we do it's what we do we also have an fte analyst who's solely responsible for mckay and the family empowerment piece um next couple slides are statute that talk about how the scholarship is calculated i wanted to include in case in case you wanted further detail but i want to go into the i did a couple spreadsheets which i think make it easier than reading that for you but it is here if you'd like to refer back um this our fte which was prepared by our analyst um for the third calculation our 2122 fte third calculation amounts for the scholarship is broken down by k through
0763 4 through 8 9 through 12 ese basic and it gives the number of students we antici we had actually 3972 um kids in the family empowerment scholarship this year so our total poke unweighted fte is a hundred and twelve thousand two hundred sixty seven the fes recipients are about four percent of our current fte that fte includes charter schools virtual virtual school our public schools family empowerment djj for 2223 we're projecting 3916 family empowerment scholarship recipients which will be about five percent i'm sorry i read you all the wrong number um 5887 is what we're projecting out of 116 000. so that's five percent of that allocation we're looking at growth of in our total population and growth of about 1900 in the scholarship estimate amount for reference broward county is has currently 9
077398 scholarship recipients dade has 17 200. duvall has almost 6 000. hillsborough has almost 6 000 as well and orange has about 8 300. so it's not just polk county it's statewide where we're seeing an increase in these scholarship amounts mr jenkins can you explain a little bit about because i still need this and i don't know if wendy because it it's the recent legislation can you talk about how the funding mechanism of this has changed it wasn't always funded this way it was originally funded as a tax credit for businesses and it created a whole nother pot of money so can you i would like to see how it affected us when i changed to funding it now using these dollars yes ma'am and i will apologize we have i have an updated version
078i was still getting information so i'll move forward with that you all should have a copy of that so funding wise they are funded the same way as we are as a school district you're funded per fte and there's something called a florida financial funding formula which goes through how we distribute state dollars so it starts with the fte of students multiplied by something called a program cost factor so depending on what type of student we have whether it's a kindergarten student if it's an ese student if we have an esol student every student has a different weight every group of students so you multiply your fte by that program cost factor and that gives you your weighted fte for your students and then we take our weighted fte times the base student allocation which
079is the same for all of the all of the state of florida times the district cost differential which then gives you your base funding now once you have your base funding we take into account we add in the categorical pieces which are djj sparsity supplement state funded discretionary every piece of that the only thing that the family empowerment scholarship recipients do not receive is the transportation allocation because they've set aside that extra 750 dollars so their funding is calculated exactly the same way ours is based on the conference report we get five calculations each year the conference is the first which is what we presented last time we have the second calculation in july so they set their scholarship rates per the conference report and those range based on the type of scholarship that they
080have so for example kindergarten through third grade for polk for the basic scholarship amount can receive nine thousand they received nine thousand four hundred um this is the esc matrix basic scholarship amount nine thousand four hundred ninety three dollars four through eight receives eight thousand nine hundred fifty nine nine through twelve receives nine thousand two dollars um a level two fifty four receives eighteen thousand twenty dollars and a level two fifty five receives twenty five thousand one eighty four those are the current rates for this year for fiscal year school year twenty one twenty two yes ma'am i just have a question on those rates the 255 matrix the student is allocated the 25 the savings account you're talking about doesn't receive the 25. there's this there's a percentage that's taken there do is any
081of that gone go to the district or does that all serve us through the nonprofit so it's benefiting the nonprofit for their services my understanding that goes through the non-profit the way that it works for the district is our based on the funding formula and the calculation um as we move through the year and our number of students go go up and down that happens throughout the state so we have something called a proration if every district in the state of florida's number of students go up there's one specific pot of money that is used for our fefp allocation so doe will prorate the amount the scholarship amounts the maximum amount remains steady based on the conference report but as you said yes they have to go through a process that process is outside of
082of the district i have one other question on funding if this same amount of students from polk county were using these scholarships before it was funded through fvfp would we have seen would we see a cost difference i'm trying to find out when they dipped when they dipped into the district when it was just a non-profit that collected money for tax exempt for businesses did it affect our budget the same as it would be when they're using fefp and can we tell the difference in those two yes it's um gartner used to be outside of the district so that was a completely separate process right um it was and yes family empowerment was the same way it was similar we always saw the mckay dollars because um mckay we were a pass-through for mckay and
083we do did have the opportunity for students to mckay from one one school to the other with the family empowerment scholarship the families can still elect to have students go from one of our schools to another if they're in the um the e ua unit um but what happens is that fte isn't counted so it shows up as district fte rather than part of the fte we see for the family empowerment so when i was researching those numbers if they choose to stay within our school they are shown in rfte and the only portion of the allocation that is outside of the district would be the transportation piece if they choose that they have to apply for the transportation piece separately that's what i understand yes ma'am um that helps but i it would get
084it would be nice to have numbers if 5 000 students were in it two years ago and what it looks like to 5 000 students today because a lot of this and i'm glad that um there were some changes made to grandfather in some of that mckay but it's going to be reduced after the grandfathering period we're not going to because if you if you did this is all foreign to most people but if you did a straight mckay you would not receive the nine thousand dollar limit if you were the lowest matrix it would be a lot less so they were getting like four grand more just to go to the empowerment scholarship there were changes made if i understand that that's only a grant they're only gonna grandfather those in for the rest
085of this year so it will change and i don't know if that'll change what we get so that's another question but this is sold as dollars following the student so this shouldn't if you're talking to advocacy groups or in tallahassee about this the impact doesn't sound as it does here because these dollars are following the child out so it would be nice to see how it affects multiple categories for us and it's not just that it doesn't sound like the dollar is just attached to the child it looks like we're losing money from other areas as well but it's hard to see that an explanation essentially we're losing it's you could say that we're losing 6 000 students or 6 000 fte and the dollars that we're losing would be the funding that we would
086would keep if those students were remaining here i have one other question and you can answer we can answer these other ones privately because it's too much for people who don't live inside the world of this but you said these students are in focus do we track how many students come back off of these scholarships we do do we have an average of that yes um we have actually none have come from what we can tell none have returned recently and you did ask for a breakdown i have that for you we have 979 in gart gardner which is included in in the current number for family empowerment scholarships we have 1087 mckay students so if we look back we can see that we think they'll be 1900 more fes so a thousand of those
087can be attributed to those students that are currently in mckay homeschool students that are currently on fps there are 307 of those 307 55 are pre-k students that are on the family empowerment scholarship and um those that were new to fes in 2122 this year 3062 are new to the scholarship does that include siblings yes and 298 of those were homeschooled thank you you're welcome um homeschool's a little interesting too because they are enrolled in the fes and they're also enrolled in home school as well their fte is counted as line item in the family empowerment scholarship so it is part of that number um it's uh we also have a breakdown per grade that you all wanted to see so we have pre-k there's 55 students 434 in kindergarten 149 in first it's pretty
088pretty standard around 150 until we get to fourth there's 208 235 and fifth and then it starts to increase again we have 306 312 and 7 35 and 8th and then 300 up through 10th and then in 11th we have 428 and seniors we have 553. so it's higher for kindergarten then it kind of goes down a little in the middle and then rises back up at the end so based on the payment schedule that i was sharing with you all i plugged that back in with the fte and came up with as our current estimate this does include potentially 2.7 million for the transportation allocation there is a caveat i use this year's rates i do know that those will be higher once they set them on the conference report amount because our base
089student allocation has gone up miss fields so my question is when we had this presented last board meeting work session uh thank you for going back superintendent hyde to bring to us more in-depth knowledge my question is the 750 transportation allocation for the students is that budgeted in in our overall budget i don't remember that from last time and i don't have that in front of me no ma'am that's something um that we would be made aware of as it is approved it is it's not budgeted but the the maximum impact would be 2.7 million so within that number i gave you last time the almost 49 million it was included in as an estimate in that piece but we won't i would assume not every student that is eligible would would take that i
090think if i may have misunderstood i or i may have understood miss field's question to be asked differently is that 750 per pupil currently budgeted does that impact our budget or is that a direct draw from the state through another budget so when you when you calculate 2.7 million dollars as a cost for these students if they all chose or if those students chose to take advantage of transportation allocation does that come out of our transportation budget line item or is that something that's built directly to the state through a different funding source that's correct thank you for clarifying that um no it doesn't i don't believe it does originally i understood that it is part of the scholarship amount but we are funded based on the on the fte so no i would say
091no that's not um i was not able to get complete clarification on that piece if you can get that from me please i would appreciate it yes ma'am and the other question that i had the numbers that you gave for the different levels uh for the kids that are not a part of of our school district right now uh is there a list by school where those kids are going and the and the number yes ma'am i can send that to you that would be interesting to to see that to see where the kids are going so based off the board's questions there'll be three things i'll follow up with number one will be the updated slide deck that ms jenkins referenced number two will be the breakdown that will be included in our students
092we'll answer the question of transportation costs and and where that budget comes from and then we'll answer the ques we'll provide the breakdown by school site thank you dr alan yeah i think that's just a follow-up in in regards to the general conversation so the florida empowerment it the funding mechanism is a separate pot right so when we look at the corporate income tax the excise tax on liquor gas oil production tax insurance premium tax that's being collected in a separate pot that's then being distributed and like the right in a in a non-profit way towards students changed it did that did change correct it's now it's now included as part of the fefp florida education finance program so they actually include the fte in the district calculations they have the separate scholarship amounts that
093they set the families have to apply for the scholarship go through that whole process through the two organizations once they are approved the account is set up the district continues to report the fte whenever we are paid that fte is removed from the amount that we're paid so and at this point i'm going to invite ms dodge to come to the microphone as well because there was a lot of work that had to take place because this was not being adequately funded this year and we've gotten some assurances that it will be addressed through the through the recalc later this year but i want i want to invite miss dodge because she can speak to the fact that there seems to be some uncertainty as to future years where this funding will will be derived
094from so ms dodge right thank you good afternoon am i on your own all right it's nice to see everybody i haven't seen you all in a while so thank you um so what happened this year was the legislature set aside a about 464 million pot of money as a student reserve and that was because they knew this was the first year we were funding scholarship students out of the fefp and that it was unclear how many they thought they knew how many students were going to come on board but they weren't based on caps and those types of things that were placed in legislation but they weren't entirely sure and so in january they kind of got an estimate of those numbers and in the third calculation this year they began including those numbers
095in our um our third calc that we received from the state unfortunately there was a miscommunication is how i'm going to characterize it and so the district was only allocated based student funding for the scholarship students but they're supposed to their calculation for how much they receive for their scholarship is not only based in funding but categoricals and so there was a little kerfuffle i'm gonna go with and um we have been assured by house senate uh state staff that that will be corrected in the fourth calculation so right now we're operating in a situation where we didn't receive as much money as was credited for the scholarship students but that will be corrected in any moment now when the fourth calculation comes out does that clarify ms dodge if you would i know if
096if you can clarify what does this mean for future years are we anticipating a similar process or a different process or is that a known still so there will this is the only year where a student reserve allocation where there was funding set aside to cover all that and as i said when the when the fdoe only gave us base student allocation they only used a small portion of that 464 million like 190 million of it and so the rest will transfer over during the fourth calc when they correct that the biggest concern for future years is that this year the legislature greatly increased our teacher salary allocation from 600 million to excuse me 550 million to 800 million dollars that money is money we're required to put on our teacher salary schedules but it
097is also calculated in how much a scholarship student shall receive so while we're it's a it's a little bit of a conundrum we have to put it on the teacher's salary schedule but the scholarship student also receives an amount equal to their pro-rated share of that and that will be deducted from the school district so it's almost as if the state is spending that money twice and so it's a little bit of a of a concern for future years because there's no longer any pot of money to help protect the school districts from deductions such as this and so it's something we're going to have to get worked out thank you miss dodge don't leave oh don't leave miss fortney and now i'm going to bring up the three letters frs how is all this
098tied into frs and what we owe back to the state so frs to my knowledge is not impacted by the scholarship students like the the rates that we pay are set in in statute and they're not any part of a scholarship student's calculation i didn't want another conundrum well there'll always be another conundrum miss miller i wasn't sure dr alan if there was well i just it's this is very difficult for people to understand with the different pots of money um and what mr allen explained is how it worked for for as long as we had that scholarship before they were all combined into one i guess my question is is it costing us more money now that they're using the new funding mechanism than it was before even if it didn't grow is it
099going to cost us more money using it the current the current way they're doing it and not through just the tax benefit pot of money um if i unders i'm not sure who you mean by us but it's like the district okay um it me personally how much is it costing just well i mean it is now publicly funded where before it was funded through corporate tax credits so it's it's costing somebody more money but in terms of what the school we don't we are currently not receiving the same amount of money that is being deducted from us for a scholarship student so in that vein it is costing us some money and i believe that mrs miss jenkins has has put that on her slide you can kind of see where that is miss
100miller i'd like to add i think it's more the perception so whenever you see the amount that the fefp has increased it it shows 74 million dollars which seems like a large amount of money but then once you start breaking it down and you look at where different pot you know where what what those pots are and where that those dollars have to go it's more of of a perception because those students are no longer here and even though they're included in what you see is our funding it will eventually be taken off the top so it's more to try and clarify to help everyone understand that that will go away okay and mistake i had one more question is there a discussion if you use these scholarships you realize especially from the um former
101gardner side how difficult they are for people who have to be reimbursed and the computer system itself has failed multiple times reimbursements can take 90 120 days so if you can't find a school that's taking direct or direct billing for you you have to be someone who has resources to pay for things ahead of time i i've been told they are working to fix this but have they said anything about trying to and these nonprofits are making a lot of money um they they're now i know they're non-profits but that that word is hard for me because they are very profitable non-profits but the mechanisms they're using for the additional students that are being added are not working across the state um people are i mean it's not it's very public how difficult that is
102have they talked about trying to manage that system at all are we just going to keep adding to that in in i am scheduled to bring a legislative update to you at the may workstation work sessions so some of the end of session summaries that you received will be flushed out a little more at that time but in the education conforming bill this year they did put language in there that streamlines more how the scholarship students receive they no longer have to be verified before they can start getting going on their scholarship by the department they eventually will be verified but they're not waiting anymore to verify the student has exited the school district before they start funding their scholarships and then you know if there's something comes down the line they'll correct it at
103that time but that was part of the issue was that they were there was um such a backlog so many students came on the sign there was a backlog of the verification progress process throughout the state of florida not in any particular district and so that was holding up students being funded in their account and then being able to get reimbursed for expenses that they'd already incurred since the beginning of the school year i mean the system itself shuts down almost every day so i'm i'm hoping they invest if they're going to take on these students they're going to have to invest in infrastructure to maintain i know it's a district we could not operate not being able to upload documents on a daily basis so i'm hoping someone is looking at that as you're
104in tallahassee in the halls if we're gonna do this and offer this to families a lot of these families can afford you know 80 therapies to rack up for months before they get reimbursed so we've got they've got to figure out a system that will help you know streamline those reimbursements and i will double check the language but i believe they also um changed for the scholarship funding organizations some of the allowable expenses for them so that they could update some systems and use some of their funding to do that but i'll double check that and i'll send it to you thanks dr alan yeah and this is probably more so for miss jenkins going off of miss fields some of her inquiry uh maybe demographic information i know we're speaking in numbers sometimes i'm
105trying to understand um who the individuals are that would be taking the scholarship you noted in your first point that it's based on family income my understanding is the threshold that and a priority is actually going to probably the lowest income families within our community and i i would like to know if that's if i can hold to that position or not by looking at some of the demographic information i don't know if that's even accessible but the priority does go to the lowest income family correct i believe so um i don't know if we have the demographic info available but i will check and the question is you know i would like to know if it's reflective of the breakdown within our community i i looked at the general florida data and it does
106i think pretty much match the demographic breakdown of polk county um and but that's statewide so i think what i'm curious about is the scholarships of the 50 you know 5 000 something students does it reflect our demographic breakdown miss jenkins and to my colleague mr allen the 2000 students the mckay and slash gardner have no income requirements so you would we would just be looking at and the hope scholarships have no income requirements there's very it's only one subset that is has an income requirement yes the standard that you specifically the eo yeah thank you both at this point it's 157 i'm going to ask that we take a short break we will come back at 2 10 promptly please that's 13 minutes so we can get started we have several topics still ahead
107of us including a lengthy policy update um so thank you all very much we again we will adjourn for about 13 minutes and come back at 2 10. thank you i'm sorry madam chair if that's acceptable [Music] when you build a culture where we're always assessing what you know i want to know what do you know i care about what you know right kids are starting to build a culture where they'll walk up to you let me tell you what i know yeah you know and where did you learn that oh i learned that in third period today so they're able to recall because we're always questioning what they learned but the core of that comes from common claims [Music] working for polk county public schools as a bus driver or bus attendant is just
108a 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 trainers shine in 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 thanks everyone for their hard work and the
109dedication 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 the district 5 school-related employee of the year from rochelle school of the arts tiffany barion my motto is student first athlete second cause 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 it's fun to be a kid it's fun to
110go to school it's fun to be around your family 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 can take within 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 to accomplish coach tiffany is a really great part of our
111school 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 i want them to remember me as she's tough but is
112out of love they know behind the smiles 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] so in the very beginning i wouldn't necessarily start with sharing out like deep emotional things we would kind of be like um do you prefer chocolate ice cream or vanilla ice cream like it would just be kind of getting comfortable with the routine of talking to your peers but it definitely helps them chat with each other in a way that builds relationships i think the kids get to see who is like them and
113who's not like them but we're kind of building the ones they're not like you are still part of the class family how can we get them involved so they get to really interact with each other and see how they can build a bridge [Music] when you build a culture where we're always assessing what you know i want to know what do you know i care about what you know kids are starting to build a culture where they'll walk up to you let me tell you what i know yeah you know and where did you learn that oh i learned that in third period today so they're able to recall because we're always questioning what they learned but that's the core of that comes from common claims [Music] this event is really unique because it's a
114really special time for us to celebrate new teachers we throw them this party to celebrate them actually making the decision to not only be a teacher but to be a teacher here in polk county public schools we get all dressed up we have a sparkling cider toast at the end we're hearing from our superintendent and it's just really great time for teachers to network with each other and then get to experience some local restaurants as well i am incredibly excited about the fact that new teachers get an opportunity and just really feel like they're celebrated i think often times we get into the initial start of school and things are overwhelming and they don't really have that opportunity to say hey i'm here i'm officially hired with polk county public schools and i'm a part
115of the family and so to be able to have that feeling and to be joined by a lot of different individuals in the district it kind of really feels like the support is surrounding them physically and literally so i'm really excited for them just to feel celebrated supported and valued before the start of the year what's really powerful about them getting to make these connections early on is that we know that teachers feel isolated especially new teachers so for them to get the opportunity not only to be able to meet other new teachers but to be able to meet district staff that they are getting to put a face to a name it really just makes it all come together for them and let them know you're not in here alone we're here to support
116you and celebrate you [Music] those that's it welcome back and superintendent hide i will turn it back over to you yes ma'am good afternoon madam chair members of the board thank you for the break at this time i'd like to bring wendy dodge senior director of legislative affairs and policy back up to the podium or at the table where she will provide some policy updates good afternoon again thank you for your patience with wendy 2.0 this afternoon so there are four policies that are being brought before you they were all recommended by neola the first two one is a brand new policy parents bill of rights and that is required by the legislation that was passed last year and then the second one 5780 student appearance rights are updated based on the language in that
117bill and then subsequent fdoe rule changes construction contracting is a policy that we are were several updates behind on and angela usher and her staff were kind enough to help me to just update that to make sure that we were included some new statutory language that had been passed over the past few years and that it matched our way of work that we do in polk county and the same is true with the school nutrition policy there were several updates that had we had missed we hadn't gotten to we were kind of haggling over language and so that staff also helped me get that updated so that it's compliant with today's rules and statutes and and that one also has federal regulatory changes in it so are there any questions about any of the language
118miss fortney this actually has to do with school nutrition uh is and i this is not your lane but i it occurred to me that we have staff that you know um might benefit from free breakfast and lunch is there any kind of grant or program we can offer to feed our staff for free like we do our kids that anybody knows of not that i'm aware of but wouldn't that be nice wouldn't that be nice yeah i would be happy to reach out and see if that's something we could explore or if it's something that we could um uh try to go for at the federal level right uh and then on 5780 there's a part there that i really love parents are responsible to ready their children for school i i like that
119part and make sure everybody knows they can opt out of health education all right that was it see no further questions oh dr allen actually yeah so looking at and i'm are there going to be more policies as it relates to hb 241 or is that the extent of it no there were two other policies and they're safety related and they're going to be coming to you hopefully at the next awesome they're still being reviewed by staff okay in that policy 5780.01 [Music] i think it does a good job of defining a parent there was some language in the original hb 241 that i don't know if there's an opportunity to include some of that language um but it it's basically said the legislator finds that it is a fundamental right of parents to the
120to direct the upbringing education and care of their minor children um would i don't know i saw value in that um you know the policy it just says parent this is who a parent is and then it works through that list of items um but i don't know just a as a point of discussion um would recommend possibly that language like that um in defining the role is important too okay when um when i bring that to you for final we can certainly include that language in there cool thank you seeing no further questions or discussion thank you ms dodge so the next item up for the board is a presentation on mclaughlin middle school this has been an ongoing topic of conversation upon my arrival the board as i shared with you previously addressed
121and workshopped a discussion about mclaughlin middle school and its possible expansion to include high school that occurred if i recall correctly in february of upon a performing some additional research i now i could not find any additional reference to mclaughlin's expansion or what may have ceased the conversation at that time i'm assuming that that was largely related to covet and other events that were taking place at the time and so because i have continued to hear questions about the mclaughlin from community stakeholders and from the school itself and from others and given the fact that that community is growing both winter haven and the lake wales area are slated for additional large numbers of additional residential units it would be it would behoove us to have a conversation about mclaughlin middle school and its potential
122of expanding its grade level again as i shared in february 26 of 2019 there was a workshop related to this i could not find any evidence of a of an actual vote or discussion or nor could i find any additional direction that was provided to the superintendent at the time and or the district as far as follow-up and that's why i'm bringing the topic back up here today there is a renewed interest as i shared the school in the school's leader and one of the things i was told as a possible reason outside of covid that the school did not move forward or we did not move forward with this was because of the school's current grade the school at the time was a d and needed to exit d.a before any additional conversations needed
123to take place as it related to potentially mclaughlin growing and expanding its grade level there is physical space because of the school's current enrollment there is plenty of addition of physical space there but the school has really done an amazing job and i should say i should not say the school but i really should give tremendous credit to deborah and the principal out there and she does an amazing job not only has she moved the school academically she's created a culture within her school where those students really thrive but additionally she's created a network of supports within the community and i see her sitting all the way in the back like like a good student would all the way in the back of the room but she's really established some strong rapport and relationships within
124her community the school benefits because of her due diligence and if you have not had the pleasure of interacting with deborah she is tenacious that woman does not take no for an answer and she always looks to find a yes within to address her problems and her concerns i think we saw that in the manner in which she provided wrap-around services and supports for her international teachers and the way she has truly embedded them within the school's culture but of late we're hearing more and more there's an interest of many of our community-based partners to invest in that campus to see it continue to flourish to see it continue to grow for example duke energy would love nothing more than to put a power academy on that campus and there is adequate space and we've
125had some conversations initially about what that might look like what i like about the proposal from duke is they're not just looking for traditional lines people they are looking for sales they're looking for customer support they're looking for those types of roles and they actually have an interest in creating an actual call center on the campus where students would be employed part-time working directly with duke certified adults to be in that industry so there are multiple pathways within the power industry outside of just i should not say just because it's an incredible field beyond being a lines person there are as you know opportunities in every industry to be involved in management to be involved in customer service to be involved into i.t and network so there there's i i was appreciative i know mr
126green and i went out and met with the team there and with duke energy to kind of hear a sense of their proposal they've already committed twenty five thousand dollars uh minimally to support the program as well as providing the manpower um to explore placing a call center on that campus to employ our students and what a great opportunity for our students to to get not only some some some is considered a paid internship um but also to get that experience to become a feeder into that industry and so it's it's an exciting time and mclaughlin again under ms hudson's direction has done an incredible job the benefits again as we talk about mclaughlin the school is only at 38 to 39 of its utilization and so the school will have to either undergo or
127be part of the comprehensive rezoning or we can continue to explore options for that school they have space for an additional 735 students based off their current utilization number of classroom spaces that they have readily available so potential growth and expansion of the grade levels at that school is a viable option projected growth as i shared in winterhaven and lake wales you are all very much familiar i know miss cunningham is very familiar as is miss wyatt and and mr wilson are very familiar with those communities and the growth that's taking place there not to say that everyone else is not but i've had conversations with you individually about the growth and the needs that are going to happen there as you know winter haven's very large high school and so we're going to need
128some solutions before we find ourselves in a similar situation as we currently have at ridge and or haines city so a viable option for this to address that growth and future needs is to allow the school to grow into a high school obviously you've heard me say this i am a huge proponent for continuity of program anytime we can remove a transition between school levels for students the students benefit the school benefits the staff benefits because those students become a known commodity the relationships have been established not only with students but with with their peer group and also with the families and so again the longer a student can remain in an academic setting the better off they are and the better off we are in our ability to best serve them as i shared
129currently there's more than enough space and existing infrastructure to support academy options it is a very large campus they have agricultural facilities with a relatively new if not a new greenhouse there's plenty of open space there's actually a preschool setting that that shares their campus i don't know how many of you may or may not be aware of that it's a relatively new building but that program was shuttered it is cert at this point it is only serving to store furniture that is where duke would like to place the call center because it's in close proximity to the school and it would be somewhat off site allow parking for adults and others but it's an easy commute between the school and that smaller campus ms cunningham yes sir um i uh to answer your question
1302019 seems like a hundred years ago let me be so honest so much has changed at mclaughlin through the past three years and my comment is we need to go for it i think it's awesome i think miss hudson is doing everything in her power to take that school in the new direction it's obvious with the changes that have been made on site the community as you've said is very excited about what's being done at mclaughlin and sometimes it's just the right time to do things so i would say we really don't need to look back i think we need to look forward and i 100 support this moving forward with the leadership changes with the community with the growth for all the reasons you've given the opportunity for a power academy with duke energy
131i mean sitting right there in lake wales i think this would be a great great enhancement to the greater lake wales area so i support it and kudos to ms hudson for all that she's done thank you miss forney yes i'd like to reiterate that uh she has the right dna i know that if you get my drift um i i just know that while we have her as a dynamic leader in the community support i would like to ask the board if we could not we're not voting on this tonight correct no ma'am i i was seeking input from the board and clarification on what other information the board would want before i would make a formal recommendation so that was the intent of today there is no vote scheduled for this evening at
132this time well i would like to suggest that could we move it to the evening agenda and and make a vote we have had this plan and for a while and uh you know i i i know she needs time i mean she is a miracle worker but time would be valuable for her right about now at the end of school so she can plan and get her team together fellow board members mr wilson i'm not going to vote on that this evening i and i would not be in favor of that miss fields okay so mr hart you are correct i think the delay came with covet and i think if covert had not come we probably would have pursued it further i think that it is a no-brainer we have charter schools coming
133before us almost every meeting wanting to expand from six to eight going into ninth tenth eleven so if we're approving their applications why not do our own i think it's way past due the facility is beautiful and it is a shame that it is empty in a lot of the areas and the growth is there and it needs to be addressed i think that when superintendent byrd was sitting in your seat that was a lot of discussion with the community with the staff i know that she personally went down and spoke to the staff and they came up with the idea what they wanted to see and then miss chipman was very instrumental working alongside with miss dr hudson as well so i think that they've done the work the d has been elevated to
134a c and who knows what this year would bring so i am 100 in support of it i don't think we need to do it tonight i think that we need to allow uh citizens to come to the next meeting to have their comments before we vote on it but i definitely think that we need to go forth with it thank you miss miller i have two things first of all i don't i don't think anybody up here is not going to sing the praises of dr hudson or her dna um and i'm appreciative of what she's doing out there i've been out there i've seen what they've done in just agricultural and what they've added for those students i have two questions one i do think we need to hear like you were that
135miss fields mentioned from the community because i don't know i don't remember this it might have been before our time some of us on the board or it could have been right as we entered before covid but um i do have a question about that building that building was built with ida funds it was a transition unit before it was a pre-k unit it is a phenomenal facility i don't know that ida works as title one i don't know if we have to continue to use it as what it was paid for and i think we could easily do that in incorporating students with disabilities in that program if we have to i just didn't know i know title one funds you must use whatever they're spend on for students title one students so i
136just want to make sure that you i didn't know if you knew the history of that it was a um it was built with ida funds it was supposed to be a transition unit i think it ended up with a transition class of three or four and they actually supported the pre-k unit that was put there um i'd hate to lose that component because we have such uh minimal if no transition in the east area of the county um that's meaningful and engaging and i think duke energy may bring that aspect um but i just wanted to make you aware that that building was built with ida funds thank you and i can verify all of this with ms usher i was not anticipating the board uh preempting my conversation and and wanting this but
137i here's what i would be more comfortable with i would very much like to bring this topic back in may it's very clear that the board has a legitimate and sincere interest in moving the topic forward but i do feel ill equipped to summarize costs and next steps any recommendation that would come from me for mclaughlin would be adding similar to what we're doing at bellisita we would add a grade level each year i did include this slide based on my conversations with dr hudson that she anticipates she will retain 70 to 80 percent of her enrollment and i don't know why this slide was not updated because it was we submitted a new presentation yesterday because it's not supposed to be four columns of fifty percent it was fifty percent sixty percent seventy percent
138eighty percent um fifty sixty seventy 80. so miss hudson is is very confident that she could retain 70 percent of her eight current 87 or more of her current eighth grade cohort which would go a long way to benefit the school over well overall because of the structure of the school in its current capacity the costs for adding staff will not be the same as if because of the number of students that would be retained the cost would be different because some staff could be shared so long as they have the appropriate certifications between the middle and the high school because there may not be enough sections fully to so you wouldn't have the same cost there i'd like to bring some facilities recommendations as well this the campus as i shared has the appropriate
139current facilities what they have what they would request is a gymnasium to be commensurate with a high school and an auditorium so those would be some some fiscal enhancements that i would want to make but i'd like to bring that information back to you with miss usher at the next meeting because again i want you to hear all the details and we make an informed presentation and decision um and i know that you workshopped this previously which is why i attached the very comprehensive plan that was submitted previously and i read through it and there's a very extensive file in my office that miss that my predecessor left miss bird left me in a very good place that no one could ever say miss byrd did not leave me appropriate documentation of everything that was
140going on in polk county prior to my arrival but there's a very thick file that i was able to read through and i and i read through the minutes and i wanted to make sure i was addressing board members questions so i would feel better i think it's a more appropriate timeline to allow staff and others to come forward community members to come forward one of the things i don't want to miss in this and i know mr wilson you had your hand up i want to be very clear and explicit that this is not a competition issue because if you read through the presentation one of the things i talked about in especially in the academies area is does it not become an opportunity for lake wales charter and i will initiate this conversation
141with them now that they have a new superintendent to have shared services there are academy programs we can support that they currently cannot just as you've heard me say zip code should not preclude a student from having gaining access to a high performing or an academy model program why not do a similar model where they could share the campus but we would charge the fte for it similar to what florida virtual does so a student can come over attend we can we can structure the schedule in a way that they could attend either am or pm this is not an uncommon practice in other areas and they could benefit from having their students having access to the programs as well but we would get reimbursed for that portion of the day in which students were
142participating and we're picking up the staff so it's a good partnership moving forward in my in my mind and i think it extends and it helps us regain some traction some momentum in our relationship but there were some academies that had been discussed in addition to the fine and performing arts that is an area we need to enhance significantly and it does provide a viable option on the east side of our school district as a potential feeder to harrison and i want to make sure i reiterate that this is not to be in competition with davenport or with others but some of our students may not be able to afford private instruction and more often than not when they go and they audition for programs that might be the component that's missing that precludes their
143participation and ultimate enrollment and inclusion in harrison so we can have both options we can have it go through high school and others but again i think there's a lot of pluses to this but i'd like to comprehensively bring a plan to you at the main meeting so thank you miss fields for for supporting that as well miss miller and then ms cunningham dennis fields i'm sorry mr wilson i'm sorry mr wilson we'll come back to you you see i didn't give that to you sorry um i just don't and i don't know that you've been here long enough to understand what you just said um we'll move mountains in this district we've been trying to do this i've been trying to do it as a community member we've been trying to do this as
144a board for a very long time and i think this is the right opportunity with um lake wells undergoing some changes that we can work um in collaboration with each other i can tell you as of recently and i i think i've shared this with you and mr greene there was a phenomenal opportunity brought to us that we've never done before and so it was it wasn't given a lot of attention and i think we've missed on a lot of those opportunities and like you said it's done in other areas i wasn't sure of that the relationship that we've had with lake wales when i got here as a community advocate but i can tell you what you just said is light years away from what we were operating as not just it's not recent
145administration it's just been decades of that and so i'm looking for i'm looking forward to those collaborations and i think it will be well received in that area of the county thank you miss cunningham thank you and i just want to applaud you once again for your vision and foresight in working with the lake wales community we have needed this for many many years number one to offer any type of academies that kids can go to once again it's about the kids not about the zip code and not about my address it's about a human being who has an opportunity for an experience that otherwise they may not be able to get secondly any time that we can work together as a community we build the entire community not one school or a second school
146so i think your vision is spot on additionally it makes no sense to have a facility in a community the size of ours that is underutilized so if we can look to ways to be able to offer you know as you've said to start with ninth and then move to 10th however that rolls out i think we'll be very welcomed and i'm just really excited i i applaud you for that and i know that um i have met dr rodolfice the new superintendent for lake wales charter and he's a wonderful human being and he truly has a heart for children just like you and i feel with you know you being our new superintendent and mr rodolfice being um the lake wales charter the two of you get together you're gonna as miss miller said
147you're gonna move mountains and our community has really needed that for a long time and don't forget frost proof is just right you know babson park frost proof there's a lot of greater lake wales area communities where those children can have opportunities and i'm really excited for that because once again it's all about the kids not about the boundaries so thank you for your vision and i too agree i would not like to do vote on it this evening i really feel that the community has needs to have an opportunity to come and speak before us i would imagine it would be all positive but they still need to come tell us how they feel before we take that vote so i would look forward to your presentation on finances facilities you know what you're
148going to do with the black box all those things for arts and an art center whatever you're thinking and two don't forget lake wales is one of the few littler communities that has an art center so if you build a performing arts theater or whatever you just said there that could work together with the lake wales art center oh my goodness smell what a blessing so thank you sir thank you i appreciate the feedback but i'd be remiss if i didn't say dr hudson has i say shared tenacious is putting it mildly um she has had a vision for this as well and got a taste for it and the team has really pushed for this so it makes it easy quite frankly um so thank you miss fields we can go back to mr
149wilson okay all right thank you i i think the only thing that i would would add is that when you bring the information back to us if you can show us the cost of how we're going to fund it and make sure that it doesn't interfere with another project absolutely that would be my intention yes ma'am thank you thank you mr wilson thank you superintendent i i apologize because i'm not up to speed on this matter but are we talking about mixing high school students with middle school students in the mclaughlin building in our current campus yes sir it seems like a small building to do that i remember a time when we moved freshmen ninth graders out of the high schools because we didn't we had concerns about younger students and older students being
150you know especially in smaller buildings i would have some concerns about that yeah we would mirror again i think we would approach it the same way we approached bellacita and we have some lessons learned from frost proof and from fort meade as well where the similar populations and similar structures occur so in belliseda what we did was we created a separate separate area for for the middle schoolers and we have a separate area for elementary schoolers but there are still some common areas where they'll come in contact with each other in the same regard this can happen there there are there are wings of the current building that could be utilized as the freshman ninth grade campus next year and we could add high school to certain areas of the school and i think that's
151why again i need to i did not anticipate the initial response from the board so i need some time with ms usher to bring those proposals back before the board but it's a very legitimate concern and it has one it's one that's come up anytime we've talked about consolidating school levels it was a concern it was a very big concern at bellicita because of what took place at citrus ridge that they weren't able to separate those students other than by floor and so we're able to create those safe spaces but with an understanding that we will intentionally bring students together there are some great opportunities that we miss out on if we don't bring for example upper level juniors and seniors down into sixth and seventh grade classrooms to serve as mentors to those students
152in a formalized structured manner and i think we'll we we can create that those systems again but we learn from the lessons of frost proof and fort meade where we've been able to be successful in that regard any other questions that i have my that i have my direction and we will bring this this item will be brought back to back at the upcoming meeting in may but please feel free if you have any other questions or comments or concerns please as always contact me and i'd be more than happy to to address those and or to include those in the presentation the next item as you know i wanted to provide you with an update there'll be a final update on may 10th as well as the status of the books that were currently
153under review so there were 18 committee members for each committee i provided you with a breakdown here just as a reminder the committee structure mirrored the existing process that polk county public schools has had in place and has relied upon for for any number of years it is primarily constructed of the school's media center staff of english language arts teachers reading teachers and of parents we went beyond that to be more inclusive and i think it's important because when we start talking about community standards we want to be inclusive of more people to ensure that that voice was there additionally we included as you recall some experts in childhood development because we felt that that was necessary to have that voice be part of the conversation because if the if the initial concern as it
154was as it was stated was that somehow these books are unduly influencing or impacting our students then we wanted to ensure that we had addressed that process formally so we created our committees the book review committee results are here there are two different tables included in my summary there's one based off the committee's recommendations and the committee's votes and findings and then there's my recommendations and i'll explain why in some areas they are different the committees did an amazing job quite frankly the conversations if you if you were not privy to those i would encourage you and i know many of you have watched the videos of those of those conversations very in-depth conversations very good very professional very collegial they were able to discuss topics in great detail i would tell you i am
155incredibly proud of the student representatives that we had their ability to bring their thoughts to the table to capture where they believe the students are living on these issues they were incredibly bright and even several of the committee members commented recently on our students and said that they were very impressed by them and i believe the comment was they were hopeful that they were representative of the majority of our students so the committee results are here listed for you i'm sorry that's a little difficult for me to see but the kite runner for example you can see there are 11 votes to retain it at middle and high school level and in four votes to retain it at high school only so recommendations just for clarity were based on where we saw the weighting of
156the votes right and that's where the committee's recommendations come from so for example that book the recommendation was retain it at the kite runner for middle and high school libraries again going on the vincent boys the recommendation was to retain the ability of the vinson boys at high school libraries only beloved the recommendation was to retain availability beloved for high school libraries that was a vote of 15 to one with 15 recommending the high school only one being to retain it at middle school you do see there are some people who requested and voted to have the book removed in its entirety but again we looked at the totality of the votes and the feedback that we received and then 13 reasons why the recommendation was to retain retained at middle in high school the
157real life boyfriends the recommendation was retained a real live boyfriend's for middle in high school again and tricks the recommendation was to retain availability for high school only drama the recommendation was to change the availability of drama from elementary middle and high to school libraries at middle and high school only so there were some recommendations that came out of the committee to move books from one level to another based off their discussion i think part of it too is based off the grade level recommendations of the publishers for george the recommendation was to change the availability from middle and high school libraries to elementary middle and high so there was a change that broadened the recommendation there 19 minutes the recommendation was to change the availability from middle and high school to high school only
158and it's perfectly normal was the recommendation was to move it excuse me to remove from high school libraries to include it at middle and high school together so they expanded the inclusion there entirely um entirely loud and incredibly close the recommendation was to change availability from from high school libraries to middle and high school libraries and then the bluest eyes by tony morrison the recommendation was to change availability from middle and high school libraries to high school libraries so the results you see them summarized here it probably would have been a lot better if i'd have forwarded to this slide it would have been easier for me to see you see the recommendations there again we operated with two different distinct committees by and large all books were retained but there were some changes recommended
159by those committee members as to their placement in some instances you saw they they asked to expand it into lower grade levels in others they moved it simply to higher grade levels there were several titles still remaining at the time two boys kissing and almost perfect and i am jazz and these will be finalized by thursday may 5th the last one more happy than not will be addressed so at the time of our may meeting i will bring the remaining books and summaries to you and recommendations what is different are my final recommendations and with no offense to the committee for the work that they've done but i did take into consideration several factors and i want to clarify those here it's not that i did not honor and respect the recommendations of the committee
160however i also looked at the current placement of the books so when we say a school a book was at middle school in high school if it if it's living in 12 high schools and one middle school it's really not comprehensively at middle schools across the district so i did look at where the books were living and how many of our schools have them for example there is a book on here that is only in one school in the entire school district and that the committee has had reviewed and so it's important for me to look at not only that where is the book currently so that we're not looking to expand its presence in other schools without reason or justification additionally i looked at the recommendations for their grade level placement by the publishers
161and by the author or by the publishers because i think that's important as well because when we start talking about book placement many school districts have not get done this level of review for challenged materials that we have many of them have simply said what's the grade level band if it falls within that grade level band we're retaining it or removing it i believe that we did a far more comprehensive review and took into consideration all the concerns that were expressed to us ultimately what i did was i looked at all those factors the grade level recommendation from the publisher i did take into consideration a recommendation from the committee i very much specifically looked at the current placement of all of those books so that i would not make a recommendation to the board
162or for the school district as in its entirety to either retain a book or expand its presence unnecessarily so for the kite runner the recommendation is to retain it at middle school and high school level for drama my recommendation is to retain it at middle and high school levels for george it's to retain at all school levels for the vincent boys it's to retain it at high school level only for beloved it's to retain at high school level only and then for 19 minutes retained at high school level only it's perfectly normal retained at high school level only extremely loud and incredibly close retained at high school level 13 reasons why retain it at middle and high school level real live boyfriends retained at high school level the bluest eye retained at high school level
163and tricks retained at high school level so all of the books right now that have been reviewed the recommendations retained them there were some changes to grade level recommendations this is my recommendation to the board at this time again i'll bring a comprehensive summary and i will actually make sure that we put it over multiple slides so it's easier to see for everyone reviewing i i yes ma'am miss fortney 19 minutes recommendation by you please 19 minutes is to retain it high school level only okay thank you yes ma'am so in summary then in looking at what the committee recommended and what you're recommending i only see your recommendations changing for three of the books is that correct at this time at this time it's perfectly normal to take it out of middle extremely loud
164and incredibly close i should say high school only excuse me and then real live boyfriends high school only and drama we retained at middle and high school only based off my recommendation yeah but that's was theirs too middle and high school is what they recommended yes ma'am okay just trying to make sure um and then my question is i'm still in the process of doing my due diligence on these books so um so are we going to have this brought again then at the work session for us to discuss because we'll be voting on may the 10th am i correct so in speaking of mr bridges there is no requirement for the board to vote on this item the board buys a matter of policy does not approve the adoption of materials at the school
165level in its media centers the board retains the right to make a motion so if the board would like to officially vote on this matter then obviously someone can make a motion if if their colleague three at least three other colleagues agree then they could make a motion to add it to the agenda for the 10th for an actual vote from the board but looking at policy we did not want to deviate from existing policy and reta and create an issue when we didn't have to i'm just trying to understand the process yes ma'am so are you i will bring the final list with all final recommendations of all 16 books on the may the 10th on may the 10th session yes ma'am so that we can talk about it absolutely okay thank you so
166i appreciate it all right miss miller can you please review the current process of the proposed process for parents who want to limit access to any books in our in our schools actually i think what we've come up with is a very thorough process that is very similar to what we're doing with our human growth and development as far as our transparency and empowering parents which which is very clearly an interest in the state of florida and legislature so what we will allow is there will be an electronic login where parents can go in they'll be able to log into their child's school and they'll be able to see every book within the current library parents then can make an informed decision and opt their child out of certain books by clicking checking the boxes
167next to them once they do that it's important though that we set some expectations for this just as we do for human growth development and this would be part of the back to school process all the forums and documents that will go home to parents will very clearly and articulately explain this to families in multiple languages they'll have multiple options to do this but starting with the 22-23 school year that electronic form will be provided to all families but it must be completed no later than august 1st or no later than 15 days after a new student is enrolled because there's there's always the possibility as we know our enrollment is very fluid a student could enroll on december's first at the end of the day we need to set an expectation for when the
168parent needs to needs to provide us with informed consent as it relates to these materials and so they have 15 days past the registration enrollment date in which to do so this would be required to be completed every year the reason for that is we we want to make sure that especially in those situations where students are transitioning between certain grade levels for example second and third or specific school levels elementary to middle middle to high that we're capturing this information in real time and it reflects the family's most current interests if a family does not complete the form just as with other things essentially it will default to full access and so that's the process that we currently have put in place so there'll be plenty of opportunities to communicate this to families provide
169them with access the current process for parents to actually get this information is quite laborious we're going to have to create a system outside of the current destiny system that's going to better facilitate this and then that information will be conveyed back to the schools and lo and it'll have to be uploaded but again parents would have until august 1st to complete it or 15 days post their child's enrollment it has to be done annually and if you do not complete the form it defaults to access to full access that would that is currently the proposal that in my recommendation ms miller i have two questions um are they gonna have if parents go into that catalog can they select by um recommendated recommendations on genre or is it just by title they're gonna have
170to go through a litany title and theme and theme there are themes and i'm a little concerned with the august first date only because we don't start then correct but i need enough time for my staff to take the information and ensure it transfers over so we don't find ourselves in a situation where the where it's not properly documented and uploaded and a student gets access to a book that they should not have gotten access to so i understand the burden is it's real but it's real for all of us okay i i might have further i'm just that will i will process that thank you this ma'am yes ma'am miss fields my question is i know that there's new legislation in tallahassee and i know that that doesn't become effective until july 1. is
171there any any chance of the decisions that you would be making being reversed based on the new legislation based off current legislation that's proposed to be enacted as of july 1st there is nothing that would interfere with the recommendations or the process that we followed to date and the other comment that i was going to make is what you said is that i didn't think that we were required to vote on the books that would be a decision for you so you clarified that yes ma'am thank you yes ma'am mr wilson so i have a prepared statement i'd like to read and then i also have some comments i'd like to share first of all i you know we were all presented with passages from these books from certain of these books and i never
172tied those passages to any particular books because i didn't want to be accused of making a decision based on themes or genres although i still have been and so my focus was always on the passages and let me say i respect the work of the committee i know they work very hard and very diligently at this but still i have some concerns and and so i'll read this prepared statement i submit that the book banning in polk county schools was never about banning books it was always about age appropriateness none of the books reviewed well that's not true apparently there are some at this time the books reviewed had not been recommended for all grades i guess there is one that has been the review committee comprised of a diverse group of polk county citizens
173has recommended specific grade levels for all the books reviewed accordingly the review committee has effectively suggested banning books in those certain grade levels i find it interesting that when the concerns about these books were brought forward the initiative was labeled as book banning however now that a diverse committee has reviewed the books it's quite acceptable to disallow access to the books for certain students nevertheless they will be booked they will be banned in some schools due to age appropriateness which by the way was always the issue it was never about banning books it was always about age appropriateness many concerned constituents have reached out to me about banning books in polk county in every case they were focused on the individuals that brought the complaint forward and not on the issue itself some agree that
174there was an age-appropriateness issue but most remain completely immersed in their book banning perspective i trust that the books under review have literary value i don't question that still some of the passengers passages are so vile so callous and so dehumanizing that we cannot read them all out in a room of adults these are passages of sexual violence and vile and offensive profanity however we somehow find that those same passages are appropriate for our students it occurs to me that this matter should have been labeled age-appropriateness from the outset so that we could have had the appropriate discussion about it as a community um i think that labeling this book banning is has been done by certainly the press and many folks in our community has created an environment or a climate that makes finding
175an appropriate solution incredibly difficult we have a movie rating system in our country and movies that depict violent sexual acts movies that include vile and offensive profanity get a rating and i believe that many of the passages that i've read if those books were turned into movies they would be rated r meaning that students under the age of 17 wouldn't be able to go to those movies without parental permission yet we're saying it's okay for those same students to read the books there's something logically wrong about that we can't read those passages in a room of adults they're that vile yet we say it's okay for our students to read them there's just something fundamentally wrong about that from my perspective we ask the committee to re review those books based on context but yet
176i can't find anyone who can define that for me what does that mean what does context mean should they review them based on genre should they review them based on themes should they review them based on the time in history that they occurred what does context mean i mean typically context means that that typically context clarifies something that was said right well look profanity always clarifies someone's state of mind so how what does that mean when we talk about context is somebody's context okay and somebody else's context is not okay i think that's a more slippery slope than the term book banning and and by the way this is nothing this this is not even the same universe as book banning that occurred in nazi germany where books were removed from society this doesn't even
177it's not even close i think it it denigrates what we're doing here and i think it diminishes the seriousness of what happened in nazi germany because this is not the same thing this is about age appropriateness for our students um you know i've talked to a lot of folks i said help me understand i'm desperately trying to understand the other side of this argument because the reality is and this is what i hear across the board it really is about genres and themes because those same passages in some context would not be allowed but we feel like these certain genres and and themes are so important in society today that that these passages of uh sexual violence and and vile profanity that wouldn't be acceptable in some circumstances are now somehow acceptable and i think
178that's just going down the wrong road so i i still have some concerns about what's happened i appreciate the work the committee has done i appreciate the work you've done i still have like ms cunningham some work to do myself but i you know i can't it's stunning to me that our community hasn't read these passages and said wait a minute you know it's it's not about banning books we're not talking about taking these books out of society we're not talking about talking about taking them out of our local libraries we're just saying here we want parents to have choices and you know if somebody doesn't want their children to have access to that kind of profanity and that kind of uh sexual violence then i think they shouldn't and honestly i i don't care
179about the genres or the themes i have no issue with that but i wouldn't want my children reading some of those passages when they were in school here in polk county so um i want to share that because i think we got started down the wrong road with this and so i don't think we've really had the appropriate conversation yet and probably won't but uh you know those those are just my thoughts there's seven of us there's a reason for that and those are just my thoughts so thank you for indulging me thank you sir miss miller i just um it would be a great time for wes to um not share the history of this but from his perspective as a board member i have a lot of questions i appreciate as a parent
180that i have the responsibility for my own child and what she will see or what he will see and i can go through and see the precedent set for some of these that have had the same conversations some of the older ones who've been under consideration and removed or not removed since the 70s especially for a couple of these that are older but i need wes as the legal counsel for this board to talk about the background and or liability of these issues thank you so much i'm so sorry to give you that yeah um ladies and gentlemen these are globally these are not new issues the themes change but but the issues have stayed the same i guess since books were invented and they're throughout history the books are the history books are replete
181with examples of times when when uh people or groups of people would take issue with with books that were then in circulation and would attempt to to keep them out of the hands of people for for whatever reason uh some of those more meritorious than others um yeah i think most of the people at the table are of advantage they can remember things that when when went down back in the 70s and 80s and the books that were challenged then these are a different set of books now uh some of the issues are or the themes are new but but the the concern remains the same you have you have groups of people in the community who for whatever reason do not do not like do not hold with the content of certain books and
182would like those to not be available um recently there's been a good deal of confusion in social media all sorts of things have flown around about districts banning books and whatnot my my my outreach to my colleagues and the school board attorneys association suggests that at this point there's not much in florida that has gone down in terms of banning books there have been books that have been removed from the shelves during the review period but they're i've seen lists flying around of dozens of books that people said districts have have now banned these books my understanding is that universally those books have been removed from circulation while they are reviewed using the policies and the practices of those various districts i'm sure you're all familiar with the school board policy on this which is
1839130 9130 and it's actually in the community relations section has to do with public complaints regarding a variety of different topics one of which happens to be instructional materials and library books and the one thing that that immediately strikes me when we when we started the conversation is in at least 25 years i don't believe that i've ever seen the school board of polk county address the issue of whether particular materials should be removed now we've had a similar process for all those years to the ones in this in the current policy but the the reviews have been conducted at the school level uh with recommendations to the superintendent then the superintendent has advised the school board of the action taken and i think that um because of the the the outcry in the in
184the current situation and the and the sheer number the the number of materials uh that have been that have been challenged the superintendent has has tried to create a or has created a a more centralized function to do essentially the same task that has previously been done in that in that context i'm going to go through this very quickly the policy says that the school board is responsible for the content of instructional materials and other materials used in classrooms made available in school libraries or included on reading lists and it talks about the availability of that material upon written request an individual will be provided access to material books specified in the written request that they can look at it and people who could object to materials are the parents of students in the district
185and residents of the county and it talks about how the challenges should be brought if there's a complaint to be addressed by the principal it should be addressed to the principal in writing and includes the author the title the publisher the complainant's familiarity with the material challenged the sections challenged by name by page and item so that folks who are reviewing it can go to the material that is concerned and a the complaint needs to articulate whether the challenge material contains content that is pornographic prohibited under florida law which is far statute 847 that is not suited to student needs and their ability to comprehend the material presented or is inappropriate for the grade level and age group for which the material is used so all of this sounds familiar at this point right and
186further when the information comes in the principal is is required to advise the regional assistant superintendent chief learning officer of the complaint appoint a review committee which may consist of one or more instructional staff members including an appropriate content area teacher once again this has been elevated to a centralized function so that it can address the the volume of works that are that are being rep referenced and then the committee when it does its review is supposed to look at the appropriateness of the material to for the age and maturity level of the students with whom it is being used the accuracy of the material the objectivity of the material the use being made of the material and the committee then makes recommendation to the superintendent in writing and superintendent advises the complainant in writing
187of the committee's recommendation and advises the school board of the action that's taken or recommended if the complainant is not satisfied with the result there is a provision in the policy that allows them within 30 days to appeal to the board in writing through written request of the superintendent who refer forwards the request and all the materials relating to it to the school board and the school board reviews the case and buys the complaint and then writing of a decision so there is a circumstance under which this can come to the board so if there is a if the recommendation is is challenged the superintendent will will present it to you and you will have the opportunity to to review that and the the standard is that the board shall discontinue use of any material
188that's challenged under the policy if it contains content that is a pornographic or be prohibited under florida statute 847012 that's the harmful minor statute that is that has been referenced several times whether it's or it is not suited to student needs and their ability to comprehend the material presented or is inappropriate to the grade level an age group which the material is used so that is that is how it is laid out in in policy and once again uh for for later for at least the last 25 years this is a policy that's been essentially carried out at the school level and and here if there is a challenge it may there are circumstances under which that it may come to the school board and you may be asked to take an action but that
189is sort of the history where we are how we got here um it it's a little confusing in if you if you try to look at it in the um in a global sense this policy is generally aimed at allowing the school board or the school district to review materials you'll recall the the initial complaint here is something that has been brought with the suggestion of criminal prosecution uh for for for employees because these books remain on the shelves in libraries where many of them have been for many years and i'm i'm advised where many of them has have never been circulated if at all and that is a different analysis you know this the process we have here is an administrative process that allows district personnel to review these materials and make make these
190determinations it goes without saying that no matter what the decision or the recommendation of the committee is or what the recommendation superintendent might be it's likely that there are going to be people who are unhappy with that result and if in fact we have reached a time and stage uh in in our political discourse where where folks are inclined to go and and challenge these things in the court they have the opportunity to do that and there's not much that that the school district as a defendant could do to stop that from happening other than decide who who whose request you're going to grant and but basically what that means is that if you if people come in and challenge the books and then the superintendent recommends removing them and the board acts on that
191recommendation then there are there are folks who may object to that and may complain loudly and may and may wish to litigate likewise if if the recommendation is not to exceed to those requests there are folks who might not like that result and might seek to litigate there are uh right now if you if if you follow the news you'll see there are folks out there who who are who appear to be looking for opportunities to challenge the status quo whatever the status quo may be and sometimes you have to sit back and decide for yourself which lawsuit would i rather defend so i i you know i think that it is it's anybody's guess what uh what the legal landscape on this will look like five years from now 10 years from now but
192historically up until now materials and libraries have have been the first amendment has has been widely you viewed as protecting decisions as to what goes into libraries especially as you as you contrast that to instructional materials that are required uh things on the shelves in library that are not required reading are are there at the option of the student and and and the the the history on that and the in the court cases that have wound their way up up to including the supreme court of the united states i have protected the discretion of folks who have decided what to put in libraries it's my understanding that in many cases individual books are not selected and purchased and placed on those shelves that that there are there are large purchases that include collections of works
193that have been curated by by outside vendors and school districts come in and buy a package that includes many books and the state has generally not been in the in the business of going down and and reviewing those lists and determining whether or not uh there are those books there that that should not be there but but one once again the um you know the the language here that that that that rings in my ear in your policy is that no challenge material may be removed from the curriculum which is instructional materials or from a collection of resource materials library materials except by action support and no challenge material may be removed solely because it presents ideas that may be unpopular or offensive to some any board action to remove material will be accompanied by
194the board's statement of its reasons for the removal so that that captures in a nutshell the issues that may be before you if once again if there's a challenge to the recommendation and the advice that the superintendent brings to the board if individuals choose to challenge under this policy that will be the standard of your review and we'll talk about it and advise you more thoroughly at that time yes ma'am so the way i'm looking at this we are looking at an opportunity to look at this group of books as far as them being placed in libraries and what is age appropriate so i think it's very important to keep in mind that a lot of people who have contacted me thus far again i'm not done with my due diligence want the opportunity to
195be able to select what their child can read because some of these books are used as curriculum let me be clear my daughter graduated from here two years ago we had a two hour conversation about these books last night because to me it's very important that the children as you've indicated that served as well as those who have had the opportunity some of these books are really awesome and they provide opportunities for children young adults yas as they call themselves young adults to learn about things that are going on in the world and have a discussion through curriculum in their classrooms and i think that's very important that we keep that so i think as we talk curriculum is one thing versus a child walking into a library and deciding oh i'm just going to
196grab this book off the shelf and i'm going to read it so what i'm hearing from some parents curriculum needs to remain as it remains but the access to the book on a library without the ability to have a class discussion about it and talk about the implications of that book that's where a parent wants the right to be able to say i do or don't want my child walking into library x y or z on a polk county school board campus and accessing a book regarding this topic so i think as we all you know go home and think about it and talk to your people and and the folks in your you know group of influence keep that in mind because we don't want to take away the opportunity for literary novels to
197be expressed in our schools because our students learn from that because there's an engaging conversation that happens in a classroom and we have some awesome awesome english teachers and literature teachers across this district so i just want to leave you that's my perspective so far on this topic so i will be very interested to see your recommendation and i know we're not voting but your recommendation next time as to how parents you know regardless of what date you choose how do i as a parent if i don't want my middle school child going and reading book x as we start school in august how does that piece work because i want to ensure that what we do enables a parent to make that decision for a child walking into a library versus what a child
198has is going to be focusing on as reading curriculum for their academic english class and i think it's two very two different things and i think that's kind of where we're at so i'll be looking forward to how we can enact that and i think a lot of the issues that i'm hearing from parents that's what they want to know how can i make sure that my kid doesn't have access to this particular book genre scene whatever words you want to use and give them that option and i know that's a it's a it's that's a that's a huge feat i don't know how we're going to do that but i think we're going to hopefully solve a lot of these issues because we we are not in the book banning business thank you miss
199fortney and ms miller yeah i am all for a parent being able to monitor and teach and learn with their child and i believe this plan with the opt out and i agree with you miss cunningham 110 percent i would love to see parents sit down with their child and be open and honest and discuss and i think that's every parent's right uh to do that um and i just hope that it is a seamless like you said and it's easy access so that we know i spent 33 and a half years begging parents to come in my classroom and i think that is probably the most positive thing that might come out of this whole thing is that developing that community relationship to get rid of the distrust so thank you miss cunningham for
200those comments miss miller when you return in may i would also be interested you know we have a lot of things happening in this district and we we have gone over and beyond what most districts have done with these book reviews and there'll be other books that'll be challenged or have interest and you just shared which i may have had that before but it reminded me that one of these books was in one library and we have we have used district staff and time and you know i don't know that to be clear i i i feel the need to say this five have not been checked out in over three years right so when the next book comes along and some of these books have been challenged since the 70s i was shocked to
201see how many counties that the bluest eye has been through in like 14 counties over since it was released so i'm in i'm interested in the history of this but i'm more interested in procedure so as we move forward as the kids wait for us to discuss other things that are very pertinent to families and um and parental choice that we may we have something that we can we can provide to the public so if this comes up they can go to their school because if one book is in one school i'm not sure we need to be conducting county-wide meetings over that i think the school family the learning community the sac committee they should be talking about what's good for their school and their students um one this isn't you know i think
202we're here to help students you know the pr like mr wilson mentioned you know the press releases and the and the coverage um making it something that it's not bigger than it is bigger than it should be i don't think is the focus of anybody and we need to take it back to where these books are where these the school issues are if you're driving from another county or two cities away to talk about a book that may be in one school i don't i don't want to use our resources in that manner because we're so limited so when you come back in may i would like to see a procedure so we can offer that to others because this will this isn't the first group of books that will be have concerns i am
203concerned that as a parent i'm gonna have to go through a litany of books and or genres um are the parents that made aware of what's checked out or is it only to you only can check what so you're gonna say no to these genres or yes and not check the box and then the child is going to check the book out and as a concerned parent i'm going to look at the book that comes home from the library there's there are some legal issues that we have to work through as it relates to disclosing some books that's one of the reasons why destiny fallet retracted their their willingness to assist us this is why we're having to develop our own process and our own our own database in which to do this so uh
204fallet as you recall when we initially had conversation that we were excited because they had agreed to provide and work with us and their programmers to develop better internal systems to better facilitate parents knowledge of what my child's checking out and how do i flag certain items whether it's by genre or by title that i don't want my child having access to destiny then almost two weeks later had a full reversal in their decision and said they would not support the development of any of those utilities and so quite respectfully we are actually in the market right now to see what other companies are available but there are some legal issues that we're going that we are currently exploring as it relates to making sure that parents have access to that content as far as
205what their child's checked out and so i will hopefully we'll have an answer to you for you in may one of your colleagues also i'll bring up conversation i had with with dr alan um you know he's brought up concerns with book challenges um and what does that mean if somebody wants to challenge that same book five years from now or at the individual school level traditionally our policy has said once a book is challenged the decision is it's moot it's done but he did bring up an interesting scenario which is what if there's a new iteration of that book what if there's a new publication what if it's a textbook so for example one of the books in the 16 can be classified as a text even though it only resides in our media
206center as a textbook what if that's been updated does that then reopen the opportunity so policy will have to be reviewed and revised as it relates to this process um i i fully agree um you know and i think we've learned a lot of valuable lessons throughout the process and we've done more than our due diligence with all due respect and it's it's a difficult process but i i commend everyone who dedicated their time miss everett deserves ev and her team deserve every accolade i could i could expose on them and share here publicly she managed the process like a champion the two of them i'm sorry managed the process like two champions maintained their professionalism maintain the integrity always brought the question back and helped our our stakeholders focus but she's done an amazing
207job maneuvering this and it's a difficult conversation for many you know miss everett i'm not going to put her out there and say that i can speak for her she and i have quite honestly not had a conversation about her personal opinions but i will tell you by and large your media specialists and those who are in the business of teaching literacy have been very much offended by the process because they feel like they have to defend that right and access and i would say she's never imparted her personal views and values throughout the process and i think that's important to note but again from joe mcnaughton and everett to team everybody else involved what an amazing job they've done and i think quite honestly i'll keep holding up our process say what you will
208about the outcome and and i think mr wilson said it very well there's always going to continue to be public debate about whether or not the ultimate decision or recommendation is the right decision i think what we've done is acted in good faith to honor grade level expectations empowering parents to make informed decisions and to place additional restrictions as they see fit as a family and i think that's that's an incredible opportunity for us but i would hold our process up against anyone's as far as the transparency we taped all of our meetings we posted them online anybody can see them and watch the meetings in their entirety um and so again i would be remiss if i didn't say thank you to the team for being here late most evenings and to the video
209team mr geary and all of everybody else behind the scenes who have to also be here i did get to leave one meeting recently i think about 20 minutes earlier they told me to go home because i was coughing so loud in the back of the room i think i was disrupting um the activity so mr gary politely said you need to go home um and i appreciate that but and miss winchester and and and elizabeth warren you know who have tag teamed being here to take notes and it's it's a it's a true effort and again i think mr wilson much to your credit it's not about book manning it's about ensuring that the content materials we provide access to our age and developmentally appropriate but that we're honoring the core values of public
210education as well and then finally honoring parent choice and i think we're going to be able to do that in a very respectful way and i think quite honestly if there's going to be the best response that we're going to get the best feedback we will get about this process will not be those who are displeased with the current process or the outcome or the what happens on may 10th it will be how many parents take the initiative to fill out the form if the overwhelming majority of our families do not fill out the form there's your community standard it's been established because we're providing the opportunity for them to be informed and partners you've heard me say this we've got to move our parents and students from being passengers in education to truly being
211partners in our education system and the only way to do that is by being informed and empowered to play a role in this and so i'm going you will see very aggressive messaging coming out from us and miss miller if we have to change the august first date that's fine but it has to be at least two weeks before the start of school respectfully if we could because we give me enough time to make sure we can transfer the data but again i think that's going to be a strong response what better survey than us messaging this consistently this will be covered in the media this will not just be something that goes out in a district email that gets ignored or on social media posting this will be everywhere for parents to be informed
212as to their rights and the process that they can follow and and i'll be interested to see how many parents take advantage of it not as a not as a measure of evaluating their personal beliefs but where was this general pulse of our community as a whole as it relates to this topic and i think that's going to be a very informal piece of survey data we will get we can make all kinds of assumptions about it it's not the best survey but it will be informative um and we'll see where it goes but i'm i'm very pleased with the process we've done to date and you know again i've had to make some recommendations that i feel are in the best interest of our students moving forward um and again looking holistically at where
213the books are at what their purpose and intent are but you're absolutely right beloved was a was a book that was brought up quite frequently because it is part of what students are tested on in the ap exam the accelerated placement exam and so it's it's an interesting conversation do you eliminate a text that's going to subject students to potentially scoring worse on their ap exams i i but i think you said miss cunningham as well i mean every board member really brings a lot to the table into conversation and narrative but when you said you know that guided instruction is really important very recently we had a parent as recently as last week ms miller knows the context behind this who was very upset about a passage that was that was included in the
214ela classroom and felt that it was inappropriate and initially the the conversation was that that was a district approved material it was not it is part of the state adopted support materials for best standards and so even the state of florida has controversial text that some may find offensive that's included in the curriculum recommendations that we receive and i think quite honestly and i'm going to provide that passage to you all because i think when you read that it really is i think you know mr wilson has spoken frequently about he's personally read some of those passages and i i've read that one and in all honesty have found that to be more offensive than i have some of the other passages and books we've been reading and reviewing so it is very interesting and
215it's very much in the aisle beholder but i would say thank you to the board for supporting this process um we know that the conversation will evolve from here and we'll see where it goes but i think we've done the best we can at this point so mr wilson um you know i mentioned that i don't think it's helpful when the press uses terms like book banning and and i want to commend kimberly moore she's really done a remarkable job of representing the situation fairly and and uh honestly and and you know it's difficult for the press in general they they have limited resources and so they're trying to report on things as best they can but i don't i don't think they have the resources to really delve into a situation understand what's happening
216and understand that it makes it difficult for communities to find solutions when when things are maybe not intentionally sensationalized but they're sensationalized and then we have to overcome those hurdles and it really makes it tough whether it's a school board or uh um you know a city or town or whatever so you know i want to i want to make it clear that i appreciate her reporting on this because i think she's done a remarkable job of representing this as fairly as possible dr alan yeah a very thorough process indeed going back in just the context of the committee work and we discussed our students involved in that process was was their outcome and their vote uh reflective in the final numbers as well oh yes sir student votes counted in the that's great and
217board members you received the tallies as well so you'll know we we captured all of that i know that's been foyed in the past so you know every board member because they had to sign it it's it's a signed vote so we yes sir it's reflected in there so you know in this conversation um if we throw out a question of what is media a lot of times we we say television internet and yada yada and really in essence book is a medium as well so as we move to a very technological saturated school district with our one-to-one devices i think these conversations are going to continue as well and i think this really demonstrates our thoroughness and you know consideration of what students are being exposed to so just as we put so much
218infrastructure around filtering software and so forth you know i mean obviously books are um way different but they are a medium that requires the same thing so i i appreciate the process it's been very thorough so thank you okay district organizational chart is the last item under the superintendent's report today board members were provided that subsequently board members asked for an additional copy you were provided that um so you have both the regular org chart and the org chart with names i'll ask mr pitts mr warren and mr green where where appropriate to please come forward and make comments or address any questions from the board a quick point of clarification the org chart is reflective of any position changes or recommendations that the board had previously approved but includes only those positions in their
219current form the only changes within the org chart were if a department could had a vacancy or was going to consolidate positions so there are no new requests within the board within the org chart that's different the board will see a staffing plan staffing recommendation or request in may so the two are very different the org chart is reflective of current staff at the district office and within respective departments that had to be cost neutral so any changes as you saw there's a considerable savings that will return back to the budget after all of this i'm very proud of that as i promised you and i think we've done a great job in managing that process but if you recall several months ago we began the process of reviewing every single job description what we
220have found is there will be some jobs that we need to comprehensively bring forward to alter that doesn't necessarily adversely impact the org chart those are just positional changes the problem was when you conflate the two for an example the board i believe in your packet sees an overall savings of roughly six hundred thousand dollars maybe seven hundred thousand dollars when everything is said and done in the current org chart however as we went through departments and departments were requesting additional positions and or enhancements to current positions some were justified by job duties and responsibility review some were not some were simple requests that came to little over two million dollars in additional requests if i'm correct and so we separated those because as i promised you our commitment is to go back and look
221at how we are staffing our schools and to address the disparities within our current structures our priority will always be schools and classrooms while taking care of our staff as well so you will see that summary before you in may i can assure the board there is no way the board is going to approve holistically any aspect of the staffing plan the board will have an opportunity to say we like this plan because bo all the staffing plan options i will bring before you will be multiple year implementation so for example if we were to say that we want we're going to change the way we staff schools for guidance counselors for custodians and for secretarial staff or deans and administrators you will see that reflected change so for example right now at an elementary
222school they get an assistant principal once they hit a specific or they automatically get an assistant principal they qualify for a second admit assistant principal once they exceed a certain student enrollment threshold what's interesting and i'll use willow oak as a great example of why we need to address this and miss fortney is very familiar with this example but who better than michelle towsley to articulate the need it's interesting that the elementary school staffing when it comes to administrative and support staff is vastly different had she been in middle school with the same student enrollment so we have these disparities in enrollment so that's why i'm sharing all this background information with you because as we look to the future we're trying to balance re elevating current salaries and respecting our employees and making them
223feel valued at the same time while we're adjusting what we have to do to better serve our students directly in the classrooms so there's going to have to be a balance between there financially we cannot overcome we cannot jump that hurdle in one year it's simply not attainable so what you will see in the in the staffing plan are multiple year phases and implementations as to how we're prioritizing positions so that we can accomplish this slowly but we can also be transparent with everybody in our organization to say this is how the district is proceeding so i think that's important to denote that the two things are very different the org chart again reflects current staff and any changes we could accomplish without an increased cost to the district the second group are there going
224to be those additional new positions and or changes to current job descriptions one example uh for example comes out of out of operations or more importantly out of rob davis's shop where he has supervisors who are making less money than the people they supervise however there's a different fix for that it doesn't have to be salary what it could simply be is that we qualify and allow supervisors and what we're talking about is that the employees because they are eligible for so frequently for overtime they're earning more money so they're earning more than their supervisors simple fixes allow supervisors to dish to work for overtime as well eliminate that barrier and give them equal access to those those dollars i know it sounds like a simple fix and jason always cringes when i make these
225examples because he's always like he always pulls me aside says fred it's never that simple and i just tell him make it that simple but that's what we're dealing with so i wanted to provide a little bit of background and clarification because i've spoken to several of you about the org chart and you've had questions about it and i think that's important the other thing i'd like to note that i was not able to address this year in the org chart but i will bring back next year is the regional structure so what we were able to do here um in the org chart was add additional senior executive directors why when i arrived here and and let's be honest when the board had to go outside the school district a lot of you very
226much commented to me mr hyde we need more succession leadership and we need more opportunities i interviewed every single senior director and cabinet level position when i first arrived i met with every single one of them i talked to talk to them about their departments to talk to them about their needs what they thought we did well where they think we could improve and another question i asked them was who's your number two that you're training to take your place and i mean this in all honesty we did not have a single department that could point to a number two not one and so you did well it's important for me to found that out as well and verify validate right trust but validate but at the end of the day what we've done here
227with the senior director role is we've created a pathway to a regional we've created and started to take the steps to how do you take somebody from a school level position from a principal's perspective i would tell you that if we were to interview our regional our current regional assistant superintendents they would i was looking to see if anybody was here they would all acknowledge that when you make that initial transition without any additional assistance and or guidance or experience your tendency is to try and get everybody else to lead their buildings the way you ledge yours that is not how a regional should function the regional needs to function to groom and mentor and allow young administrators to grow within the specificity of needs that they have at their building and work with them
228to find effective strategies to do it but not to make to approach it as a cookie cutter and then as regionals get experienced they realize that's not the model that's going to work i have to coach i have to mentor i have to model the problem for our current regionals is the number of the volume of schools they're supporting and the amount of needs that they're having to address on a daily basis whether it's a constituent complaint whether it's a facilities issue whether it's an hr issue or an operational issue they're not getting the time to address the instructional and coaching and mentorship that needs to take place i've had conversations with you about our inability at times to have had signed formal mentors to young aspiring administrators to ensure that they're successful we're doing
229more of that now and so what this is allowing us to do is start to set the stage as we have regionals who are retiring as we have regionals and we do it's important for us to create opportunities for us to groom and mentor those administrators outside of their schools so what the senior directors will do i'm using this as an example is they will take over all the hr operationals and contingent and constituent issues they're going to and there's not one per region there's three recommended in the org chart and that way they'll support all five regions it's very important we create that opportunity for them to grow outside of their current roles and then eventually when a regional director becomes avail or a regional assistant superintendent position becomes available that's then our bench
230to recruit from i think that's important for us to look at additionally in the org chart for the regionals we currently still have five regionals my recommendation next year and i'm setting the stage for this is that we have five regionals plus a turnaround office right now when miss barnes now use her because she's over the school improvement schools the fact that miss barnes has schools permanently assigned to her or schools that move between her back to a regional creates a breakdown if pat barnes and her team are directly instrumental in helping a school improve and exit d.a status or prevent their ever entering ea status because we've identified more schools that we feel are underperforming and could be doing better and we're providing supports to them beyond just the d.a designation then what what's
231missing right now at times is the connection back to the regionals when that school exits and goes back to the regional if the regional was not directly involved in all that work then we've dropped the ball i hate to use the sports analogy but we're fumbling and that person cannot speak to the work they can't support the work it's not because they're incompetent they just weren't directly involved in it and so what needs to happen is the school turnaround office eventually needs to be completely removed from the regional structure meaning having assigned schools to them they will act in a support role to support the regionals and the schools under them and as we're adding schools i think there's very much a strong justification to look to add a fifth true regional assistant superintendent in
232the upcoming year supported by the three senior executive directors or um i think senior executive directors i use the right terminology so i want to use as an example of what you do see here but where we may be going in a year and i don't want to conflate the issue and i know that probably is going to confuse you more but we did not make that change this year we did not feel comfortable making that recommendation at this time ms cunningham just a quick question so um obviously you're looking you know down the road because you have to plan for these things and we appreciate that you are so my question would be i understand we're looking at current org charts and you just explained um the path in which you're looking to proceed
233you know for next year so could you say that you're on a three-year four-year fight what kind of track are you on to accomplish all this well for the org chart yes by next year it will be done done it will be solidified and we'll be very confident where we are okay but that's the last change i would bring for the board organizationally yes sir um from the finance now could there be additional position requests so for example we have within new york chart request um again funded through some federal dollars so there's no cost to the general fund although i guess all revenue comes in this is where jason and i get in trouble with jason and heather all money for in their opinion all money goes into the general fund and it gets
234spent from there i always try and separate the the lots of money there are seven truancy officers truancy is a big issue for us and right now the problem is the burden is heaped upon just the social workers in the schools the truancy officer will serve as a liaison so when the school triggers a red flag for a student who's not showing up who's frequently tardy frequently absent then the truancy officer will become involved make a connection with the family establish in partnership with the school and the family a plan to help improve that student's outcomes and daily attendance and then they'll stay in contact with the school the social worker still maintains that at the school level because they're there on a daily basis but the truancy officer serves in that capacity to help
235us start to address and chip away at those students who are frequently absent because we have to we have to identify the root cause why are students missing school and then how do we address and create a plan to help them be successful and so you see that in there as well but i bring that up because if that's successful and we see that there's a demonstration that maybe there weren't enough of them sure there might be a request to add i understand i understand yeah okay so basically within the year by this time next year your organization your chart will be where you would like it to be that was my question thank you sir miss miller i think transparency is really important here um because people are waiting and i know i i
236know they're already reporting salaries and you're looking at that but we have multiple areas where people are serving in a capacity that's probably not equitable if they're supervising you know a lot of people and someone in a similar role isn't i mean there's all of those questions that's gone on now for decades to where it's just piled into this so i'm glad that we're looking at this and if we can show them a plan of we're trying to get you out of that i think we'll retain more employees because when they don't know and we keep approving new positions and they see the salaries of new people coming in and they're just been sitting there we've given them no succession planning opportunities we've given them no transparency and when you know their income will change
237i mean we just lose them quickly so i'm hoping that will help um you mentioned the truancy officers even with that and we can talk about that at a different time but you know we have 20 something social workers taking this on and now we have seven truancy officers and how that will work together being transparent and also just me thinking um we need to start advertising that we have hired these people so we can hopefully maybe have parents start self-correcting this absentee problem we have before we have to start prosecuting parents but we have to start doing something absolutely i think that's a valid point i think the only the only caveat i would add and i've said this now a couple times when the topics come up and i know the board is
238very receptive to staff and you do hear from staff especially those who feel like they're justified in requesting an elevation in their pay grade feeling that way and being justified in that are two very different things and i think we have to be very careful and that's why we've gone through the comprehensive process of reviewing the job descriptions to ensure that any recommendation we bring to you for those types of level changes are are valid and and are and should be done but again i shared this at a previous meeting but belief that it should happen and it being necessitated by reality of what they actually do are two different things and and sometimes people are not that reflective of their own circumstance they just assume well i've been here in polk county for 20
239years i i should be next to be taken care of and that's that is part of the pope culture i'm going to put it out there um we we want to take care of our people and there's nothing wrong with being respectful and honoring and being loyal to those who've been loyal to the organization i do not disagree at all but it needs to be earned and justified and that's something we have to be very careful of um because and miss fields i believe brought this issue up very early on when i started making recommendations for for people's changes and i tried to do them as quickly as i could get to them because i didn't want people to feel like we were pushing them off pushing them off pushing off and i felt that
240that would serve as a signal miss fields was very adamant early on mr hyde i'm worried that this may cause more issues than not and and that's what it's built into for some is that you know now they're reaching out saying well what about me what about me it's my turn and and i think that's why i'm trying to bring a comprehensive plan to you in may that we can and that and that will serve to your to your point miss miller that will serve as that level of transparency to say here's how we're planning to address these over the next 18 to 24 months so miss fields i i'm miss fortney miss feels i know so i'm miss courtney uh i'd like to uh go back to what miss miller said about the social
241workers and the truancy officers can you tell us exactly how that's going to roll out because our social workers already do intervention right so the truancy officers are going to be more investigative slash enforcement to hold parents accountable how does that roll back on our social workers all 27 of them so actually what it does is becomes a resource to social work and i think you bring up a valid point the limited number of current social workers cannot manage this plus everything else they're trying to manage and so what the truancy officers do is they fill that void because let's be honest in the grand scheme of things a social worker is focusing primarily on social emotional well-being of their students and students who are currently in crisis that attendance and absenteeism i'm not saying
242this is true for all of them that becomes a second a second thought that's not a priority because if i'm overwhelmed and trying to support my students i'm going to have to prioritize as we do everything else in this in this world where am i going to pay my spend my spend my time where i'm going to have the most beneficial impact on my students and where can i spend my energy because there are so few of them but that's part of the staffing plan that needs to be addressed in in the near future so what the what the truancy officers will deal with is we will pre-identify mr butler and others will identify students who have had frequent and chronic absenteeism patterns of absenteeism patterns of of of tardiness and then they in turn
243will work in tandem with the school and can make serve as a liaison in contact to the family and the student to create that plan and they will monitor along with the social workers whether or not they're fulfilling that plan and then to ms miller's point that's when it becomes an escalation strategy our goal is not even though we have the legal right and i don't think that's changed since i left and came back to florida parents can actually face fines for their students not attending school our goal is for us not to be punitive towards families but we've got to get families to understand it's incredibly important for their child to attend school regularly and if you're missing 30 40 50 days a year you share some responsibility in that and we have especially
244in the primary grades unfortunately we have families who keep children home not because they're ill not for any other reason other than it's a comfort thing and we need to this so this role is not just the enforcement aspect it's the partnership it's establishing expectations and monitoring and then making sure that we're escalating issues where needs are but also working in tandem with the social worker because that family may need additional wrap around service supports through the community agencies so they can serve as liaison there as well because don't our social workers actually do the identification and chase down these families i mean we have families that are living in a room one day i don't think people realize the stress some of our families are under correct you know they're living in a room
245one day and then go to a different house another day and live in the room that night and yeah it's a heavy lift and the other thing can you compare the new truancy officers to the one back in the day that actually rounded the kid up and brought him into school so it's interesting i see miss barnes smiling because she knows exactly what i mean i didn't grow up in that i've heard of that that myth of this truancy officer will come get you i think i saw it on little rascals maybe back in the day and now i've aged myself oh wow little rascals it did happen and i'm sure it did but this that's i think there's an aspect of this and and i can tell you that as a building principle and
246i'll i'll always give credit where credit's due i learned this from the best it was not uncommon to go knock on a door oh say let's go we're going to school today get out of bed get dressed we're coming to get you and and i think we need that level of involvement with our families again i think the truancy officers will help us um in that regard so i could name the ones i wouldn't drag and where they live still yeah there are nowadays there are a little bit more concerns with making sure you're not traveling and transporting a student you know especially if it's a female student and a male truly obviously you want to be there there are some safeguards we'll put in place there but the emphasis is on improving attendance and
247as a direct result improving outcomes so gotcha misfields i think today's agenda was very full and heavy i think that we need to have more time to talk about the organizational chart as well as the staffing plan yes ma'am i would like to request that we look at having even if it means that just a work session with nothing but this on the agenda i think that the items here are so important until we have to have enough time to have good discussion i'd also like to have data to uh to understand i know there's a need for truancy officers i understand that but the data uh what what what brought us to this point and then the seven and uh how how are they going to be distributed throughout the county as well i
248know we've had a hearing officer before and i would imagine maybe that person disappeared because of funding i don't know i don't remember why we discontinued having a hearing officer i know that mr butler basically has been a one-man person office for a while and adding so i know that there's a need i'm not saying that it's not i just want to understand that seven absolutely be more than happy to provide that for you i can bring that back for for the may 10th meeting but additionally i can speak with miss wyatt we can pull the board and see if a special workshop is required be more than happy to conduct a workshop or to address any individual questions or concerns that you have i've been spending a lot of time with many of you
249on the phone talking about org chart questions and other questions and i know i still owe you a call about another topic you've been very gracious knowing that i was getting over a cold so thank you um but we could definitely bring this back for further discussion the org chart is not something that should be adopted and just you know i don't want it rubber stamped i think we everyone's prepared to justify what's in there at this moment because we feel in in our students best interest and and the last thing i'll say um and i stole this from mr green one of his conversations we had very recently was nothing in our org chart is anything but reflective of our commitment to ensuring that it directly impacts student outcomes there's no fluff in the
250org chart it's all about ensuring that it's focused on our kids every day and so i'm more than happy to provide the data to justify why we believe this is the right structure moving forward and and i think i address like the regional structure it's so imperative we've got some amazing building leaders but i've got to give them the opportunities to keep growing and by charging many of them who have been successful at turning around schools and and strong academics you know we're going to be empowering them to serve as mentors to others formal mentors with an entire process we'll be revamping our leadership development process this summer there's a lot going on that i would be more than happy to discuss at length further with the board and publicly so thank you miss wyatt
251thank you and i know we're running short on time but i just want to make sure that any changes that are we think are coming for the staffing plan this year are are schools going to have the time to hire for those positions if we wait until june for i mean i don't know what you're thinking as far as guidance counselors or those types of things but and we will be voting on it in june it won't get pushed back any later than that no it won't okay but i think again part of this will be a conversation with the board and once we've prioritized those i'm not too concerned about because we're going to have to chip away at it it will not be a one and done so i think there's enough bandwidth
252for us to address that even if it's just rectifying similar scenarios like i used with the miss townsley school you know willow compared to a middle school and that's that example while i used it here there are countless examples examples similar to that that we could address in year one that directly impact student outcomes okay i just want to make sure that our schools have the appropriate amount of time to hire for those positions absolutely finding people is not always i am easy right now yes ma'am i agree thank you miss miller real quick i agree with miss fields i'd like to see a work session on this or at least time devoted to it i'm not opposed to a secondary meeting neither is jason he'll be back thank you well mr pitts and mr
253warren spent a lot of time developing this and there was a lot of back and forth um so i'm deeply appreciative it's not the format that i was recently accustomed to so i i told them you don't you know i'll come to you you don't have to come to me and that's fine and that's what that's what's reflected here because i wanted the board to be comfortable with the manner in which this was presented as being something you've seen in the past as well so hopefully you found that to be true um moving on then i'll bring this item miss wyatt you and i will have some conversation information items there are four information items on there for your reference a donation report head start services report a quarterly report for the months of january
2541st through march 31st and a financial statement for the peering ending february 28th if there are any questions about those information items i can bring staff forward seeing none um miss wyatt board agenda review right thank you gentlemen all right is everyone in the board agenda for this evening all right opening items one through three dr bruce saban will be doing the invocation before we start pledge of allegiance we will have marcus walker from it does not say where he is he's from fifth grade we will find out um section b special recognitions any questions section c is public comments on agenda items section d in the minutes any questions on minutes e is the consent can we go back to the special recognition please yes ma'am okay so i was given the proclamation to
255read today and also i was asked to present it to whoever is going to be receiving it so is it possible that maybe miss miss fortney can do the presentation while i read the proclamation is i just want to double check that's because i thought we had somebody stepping forward but okay gotcha so she's like okay sure miss fortney would you be okay reading that one no she can read it i can read it excuse me if you can present it that's fine okay thank you okay thank you so let me ask i was asked to do the to step down for the recognitions would you like to just go ahead and do it then tonight seems ridiculous to have two people miss fortney would you like to do that i'm sorry i wasn't listening
256i'm kind of caught up would you like to go ahead and step down for all the recognitions that's fine miss cunningham i don't uh i'll do whatever the board wants me to do you all know that well if you're gonna step down for one i was asked to do that tonight and i'm saying if you're already going to step down we can go the opposite way yeah there's actually several so even dr allen is asked to step down or retail proclamation excuse me um so if the board would like just one representative we could do that it's fine okay so miss fortney will do it that'd be great she's been volunteered that'd be great awesome yay thank you all right looking at the consent agenda sections f through h madam chair if i may there
257were three revisions thank you item l3 administrative and instructional personnel actions there was an updated attachment item q4 name albarto high school football field or excuse me bartow high school field to john and terry frost family field at bartow memorial stadium there was an added attachment if you recall we asked for a summary of of why that nomination and request was being made and then item r1 public review for mathematics instructional materials there was an item added i know respectfully i'd like to comment on the mathematics instruction materials that is just a notice of public review however mr wilson inquired and it's important for transparency that this is the materials that will be up for review will be those that are approved by the state of florida several of our math adopted or recommendations for
258adopted materials did not pass the initial review by the state of florida however and i i know mr wilson will probably ask this question for clarity during the meeting as well later each one of the publishers just recently received feedback on why the state of florida denied their their materials and their begin they're being given an opportunity to amend those and resubmit for approval so we are waiting for that process to take place and so again the only materials that will be available for public review at this time will be those that are were approved by the state of florida all others will remain vacant until such time as either meet the criteria or we select and make a recommendation for an alternative to replace them thank you and superintendent had you and i had
259discussed on f new administrators is it are we not adding the laterals we again historically mr warren had indicated to me we did not if it's your preference i we can add that lateral i would appreciate that we do any time we're approving any even if they're already a director senior director i think that that name needs to come before the board just so that we know that they're okay moving we can work to make that adjustment thank you thank you and then consent agenda i through k consent agenda l through n i have miss miller i just it can stay on the consent agenda but we're adding money for ots and pts um and i think i talked to the superintendent about this i just want to make it a public statement again we're
260in desperate need of these we're currently trying to provide speech therapy via ipad small group inside a kindergarten classroom and that's not very effective and so instead of having people change their ieps to say one on one or adult to child i'm hoping we can use these services to increase not virtual therapy because that's very difficult for kindergarten one and two especially if you're trying to do small group and i know we're in a shortage so i'm not against spending dollars on this is if we're if we're going to spend them for the supports needed which are personal in-person supports thank you thank you miss miller any other on l through n consent agenda o and there's nothing in p all right section q action agenda and section r public hearings superintendents report fred i'm
261assuming you have a report for us i will yes ma'am and then wes do you have a report for us okay and miss matthews do you have a report for us okay and then we'll go to board member reports and then the public comments on agenda items any questions um it's not a question i wanted to apologize to the board for not being here i got bit by a dog yeah so uh i apologize i don't mean to laugh i it was not funny trust me were you trying to hand in your homework or something what i was trying to be nice but i just wanted to before we did the rest of it oh are glad that it wasn't more serious than it was and that you were with us today so thank you
262all right and we'll go back to the work session so new business one thing superintendent hyde would like and i would like to bring up is that looking at the meeting calendar for this fall we have a meeting currently scheduled on november 8th which is election day um historically we have not met on election day at least for the past several cycles um so we are would like to move that meeting to the following week which i believe is november 15th so we'll schedule that for the week following not to interfere with elections okay um and then beyond that uh superintendent haydn has sent out a few different scheduling things um if you have any questions about scheduling things that our secretary send out after superintendent hyde and i speak with them my understanding under
263sunshine is you are allowed to contact me about something that's a scheduling question and you also can contact superintendent hyde so if you have any questions about any of the scheduling things please contact one of us we appreciate it i think that's all i have anything else from you superintendent no ma'am i'll address some other things in the superintendent's report this evening we've got some great things to recognize and we've got some upcoming events that we want to make sure everybody's aware of thank you and then quickly we'll go around any board updates from either committee meetings or different events that you've been to everyone is so quiet today all right i didn't wanna just as um opportunity you know going back to our earlier conversation on the book evaluation process i don't know if
264it's proper in the context of this and our comment um you know it was quoted earlier in some some press about the ease for parents to determine access you know to certain materials through that destiny system clearly that's not the case i would be interested superintendent hyde if i can get the contract um of the destiny system and um and and then we as we implement our system are we planning to demo that for parents moving forward before we implement it yes sir it's a conversation as silly as it sounds there's a first amendment issue at hand that i need to address with mr bridges and so long as we that's not that doesn't become a conflict absolutely that will be incorporated okay because we intend on doing the same thing with one-to-one devices so
265i don't see why we could not but i just want to make sure we cover all our bases awesome thank you and then i was thinking about the open enrollment um you know traditionally it would close out you know at the end of this month and we made some big strides as a board so maybe an update on how that first cycle went the controlled open enrollment cycle as it closes out and then moving forward what that's going to look like just to keep that forward in front of the board so we can be informed on that miss fortney thank you dr alan it reminded me i wanted to ask uh for an update when you have a chance and staff on hazel health okay we are averaging 800 visits a month at this point
266been incredibly successful mental health or i will provide you with the breakdown it's about it's right now it's about 60 40. however of the 60 which are physical health visits they're finding there's a percentage within there that are not physical health referrals they are actually mental health referrals so the data is a little skewed but i'll provide that breakdown for you every school i go to i ask and they love it i continue to get emails from staff who were not easy initial implementers and um but i know dr allen has asked me to ensure that we're going to provide an update that we're getting our money's worth out of that and i'm very pleased with our current utilization awesome anyone else have anything for the good of the order all right with no further
267business we will adjourn this meeting and if we can clear the room we have discipline [Music] you