001[Music] the district 4 teacher of the year from karen m siegel academy ashley brennan every student is so different and you know a lot of our students are non-verbal so we have to find different ways in order to get them to communicate so i mean here when you give a lesson it's so much more than just teaching the standards obviously that's very very important but that's just the tip of the iceberg we incorporate communication social emotional strategies and also just learning how to handle emotions everything here is about incorporating all of those things so we can get them to be as independent as possible ashley is a tremendous resource for all of our teachers here and for me specifically she's been wonderful because she's somebody that i can go to and i know that when
002i ask her a question she's always going to come back with an answer even if she doesn't have the answer right away that's what i like about her when we first met her i remember interviewing her we just felt that kind to heart that she had from the very beginning and once you put her in the room with the students she immediately just lights up it's not something that you can fake the students know if you're not being authentic with them and that's why they're so drawn to her it brings joy to our classrooms when she comes in she's always happy when we need something she's johnny on the spot right there to bring us what we need or to lend a hand and her enthusiasm is contagious i like she's sweetheart congratulations i love
003you i think it's unfortunate that a lot of our students can sometimes hear that they can't do something just because of their disability but that's so far from the truth if anyone spent any time at all with these students they would know how capable they are so it's very important that special education gets put to the forefront because these students are amazing they can do anything that a gen ed student can we just have to find a way to help them get there you have to own who you are you have to own your feelings and when our feelings situations get the best of us we're not realizing what we're portraying right right because you're deep in that emotion yes right and you're it's very real whatever experience is fueling that and then what what
004experiences that are we creating for our students who are experiencing us acting out like that [Music] working for polk county public schools as a bus driver or bus attendant is just a small yet important part of what we do to serve our students we want to thank all the unsung heroes of our driving force our dedicated trainers assist every day with educating new drivers and bus attendants preparing them to be the best they can be trainers shine and assisting new hires to become safe and efficient drivers and they teach bus attendants the essentials of their daily responsibilities it's more than a job our cpr trainers and instructors teach life-saving skills keeping everyone's certification up to date with continual training trainers help with cdl licensing making sure candidates know the ins and outs of a bus
005preparing 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 dedication that they give to make sure the job is done the training department would not be where we are today if it wasn't for the devotion of our trainers [Music] if you are a dedicated responsible respectful patient person with a positive attitude and a desire to help others succeed then you are exactly who we are looking for in a trainer please contact the training department if you are interested in making a positive difference in someone's life 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
006shoes 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 um the sports is just an extra tool just like the love on them just be a good mentor and instill leadership life lessons something that they could take with them the rest of their life she instills grades first before the actual sport she instills family before the kid you know she tries to get that mentality of like it's not just about you it's about your last name not your first name and i think that's really something that maybe they're not used to hearing they're all about me me me and she's like no step
007step 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 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
008better 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 his mouth when it's time to get serious 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 in one day down the road you will understand and you'll come back and say because of coach tiffany this is why [Music] good afternoon and happy tuesday i would like to call this work session for february 22nd to on t22 to order and i'm going to start by reading the who we are statement we are the polk county leadership governance team if we were
009to pick one phrase to define us it would be student-centered because when we come together to work we lean on our own on our diverse backgrounds and experiences to ensure that our decisions are focused on providing a high quality education for all students the four most important things to our governance team are operating with integrity respecting our students staff families and each other establishing a culture where our stakeholders feel valued supported and have opportunities for personal and professional growth supporting an approach of continuous improvement 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
010for each student and staff member we will not disparage others our students will thrive because we will remain committed to supporting the whole child we hope to engage and empower our students and stakeholders to create a community of lifelong learners and with that i will turn it over to superintendent hyde good morning good afternoon madam chair members of the board members of staff and community thank you for being here today at this time i'd like to bring linda king up she has the first item for today's workshop as it relates to everside health and in bold service licensing agreement thank you mr hyde members of the board i appreciate it good afternoon good to be back in front of you what we're proposing today is we wanted to go through a licensing program we're looking
011at to help improve the quality of the care we're receiving in polk county and at the same time to enrich the services that our employees are receiving when they go for treatment and so i brought dr matthew resnick with me today and he's the chief medical officer with embold and then he was going to go through the presentation in the slide and then we're prepared to address any questions that you have today thanks for i don't know do i have to turn this on or am i no perfect well thank you linda and and thank you all for uh for the opportunity to be here um what i will say you know to to start is you know my my hope is that we can make this truly a working session i think um you
012know i would love to be interrupted you know questions to really dr dive into a rich discussion about what we're doing what our mission is you know how we think this will you know impact polk employees and their health care but also the community more at large so you know it's it's great to be here see if i can get this to uh to work um perfect so you know what i'll start with just to introduce myself um you know i i'm a cancer surgeon by training um you know i did training in urology and then urologic oncology um i spent about a decade at vanderbilt i live in nashville uh where i had a couple of jobs one was to take care of people mostly with prostate bladder cancer but the second you know
013was to do research you know to understand where our health care system over performs and where a healthcare system falls short and you know over the last few years have migrated away from from academic practice really to to embold where you know we see a major opportunity to improve quality for populations and we'll go through with you is really how we do that you know lift up the hood on what quality means you know and really more so what that means for for polk employees and really regular working americans trying to find high quality health care you know the reality is that is that when we all look for doctors you know we're providers none of us really know what we're buying you know i have a hyper curious nine-year-old who asks me no less
014than a thousand questions a day and you know to answer those questions usually i'll take up my phone i'll go to google and i'll google whatever the capital of some country i don't know what the capital is and you know make believe i actually know what i'm talking about and usually that's what we do right you know when we when we look for doctors obstetrician near me and and typically what we'll find is something like this right where you know it'll be google reviews or yelp reviews or facebook or health grades or something like that you know which is representative of you know a patient experience right people submit reviews that are subjective which are really important right did the doctor spend time with me did they answer my questions did they you know was
015the staff friendly you know did i get the time that i felt like i deserved with the provider and these are actually real doctors um you know in florida right two obstetricians both of which look great you know by us news so they both have you know sort of forced to five stars but the reality is when we actually look under the hood at the care that these two doctors are delivering it's markedly different so let me walk you through what this is so each of these little lollipops these bars our performance on different objective measures right measures that sort of characterize the extent to which the doctor's following guidelines right delivering best practice doing things they should do and not things they shouldn't do so the green bars are where the doctor is over
016performing right doing better than peers of the same specialty in the same geographic market okay the red bars on the other hand are areas where the providers underperforming right so relative to other obstetricians where they're doing less well right and the reality is right now in in our country we all don't have access to this information right what we have access to is the things that i just showed you so the goal and this is now high level right is actually to get these data in a usable form in a consumable way into the hands of people that are making decisions about their health care so just to go through this a little bit you know we look at blood transfusion right the doctor on the left really doing well not transfusing women you know
017who had low risk delivery as we get down to the bottom of this graph what we see is that you know the provider on the right is doing episiotomy which is a procedure that was done you know historically in the 1990s and 2000s way more than you know the peers in their market right they haven't their practice hasn't caught up with clinical practice guidelines you know similarly their rate of icu stay after low risk or uncomplicated pregnancy is 7x actually higher than the market right and what does that translate to that translates to unfavorable outcomes for members it also translates to excess cost for the health plan so taking a step back you know when we think about what we're trying to do what we're doing with customers you know in this market and others
018we actually measure three different and complementary sort of aspects dimensions of how providers delivery care one is you know are they delivering appropriate care right you know this has been a topic that people like me have studied for a long time right that we deliver in many ways too much care to people that actually can cause harm right it's not that you know that care is just superfluous there's risk associated with some of the things that are happening to people the second is that the results that that patients get are highly varied right patients get different results depending on the doctors that they choose we know that and we've actually known that for a long time and then the third is cost and when we think about cost i mean i want to differentiate price
019and cost right so price is something that no one really understands in healthcare because there aren't really good clearing houses to understand what a service costs cost is actually you know what's done and how well it's done right so a provider has patients get readmitted to the hospital over and over and over and over and over again after spine surgery or knee replacement you know or colonoscopy or something else the cost of that care to the health plan is actually significant right so our goal is actually take all this information assemble it in a consumable way that members can actually touch right and make more informed decisions around the providers they're selecting so we've built measure sorry i just that started echoing i don't know if that's me or more the av we've built measure
020collections so far on on on eight specialties we have a whole road map you know in the next you know 12 18 months of of specialties we're adding um and they're listed here what i will say is that you know the the goal of the program is actually to be able to influence members choices employees choices really along the continuum of care right so if someone's looking for a primary care provider to under to identify a primary care provider you know who actually is practicing evidence-based medicine to promote the everside clinic you know that's really been influential in the healthcare ecosystem for polk employees and to arm the employees of the clinic with the same information so that they're when they're making referrals to specialists in the community to refer to specialists who are consistently
021delivering high quality care so i want to go through a few kind of data points and examples with you through a relationship with with florida blue um we actually evaluated de-identified claims data from the polk experience and and what we saw over the last year is that you know there's about 17 000 or so relationships between polk members and doctors in this area and not surprisingly about a quarter of them 25 are with low performing providers right that is not an indictment of people that is not an indictment of the system that is not an indictment of anything other than no one has access to anything other than random assortment you know based on the us news and yelp and google and facebook reviews right so to be very clear you know our imperative our
022goal is actually to take that 4643 and make it much lower than that and i would say you know when we'll get to this it's not just enough to steer members employees to higher quality providers but we actually also work with those providers to improve the quality of care that they're delivering in the community right because solving the first problem may actually create a second problem which is access right if there's a problem with access then the higher quality providers start behaving like the lower quality ones so let me let me go through a few examples to make this real and please again you know questions yes please sorry i didn't know if you wanted them no any time so my question is there a cost to the providers to be a part of your
023program there's not so you know the the goal here is is you know again twofold so we the way that we work so we're a physician-led company our ceo is a doc i'm a doc um you know our strong belief is that providers don't wake up every day to do the wrong thing right they wake up to take good care of people and you know part of the challenge is that you know i'm going to call this ignorance that has a stigma it's not ignorance it's just lack of knowledge although i guess that's the same thing um you know it is that uh is that they actually don't know too right so i'll share with you you know i worked at vandy for for 10 years um has one of the most sophisticated biomedical informatics
024departments in the world i would get one piece of information about my performance every month which was how much i collected right so like the the systems here right this is beyond you know this conversation the systems actually aren't designed for feedback about meaningful things that all of us in this room presumably care about and i think some assist some of the systems and help in promoting physicians or their offices are pay for play marketing totally and so to have a system that doesn't rely on that is more legitimate completely right so so part of the part of the you know i mean i'll like take even more of a step up and share with you that our like our mission like as an organization is to actually become the standard in of objectively evaluating
025provider performance the reason for that is that you know you could imagine that the health plans sort of do this but the challenge with the plans is that there's conflict right you know the you all have contracts with florida blue florida blue also has contracts with all of the providers and hospitals and clinics and pharmacies and whatnot in this region so the challenge becomes is that there is whether it is real or whether it is perceived there is a challenge to objectivity so you know for us like we actually don't have the proverbial like dog in the race right like we we don't whether it's lakeland regional whether it's watson clinic whether it's an independent primary care or cardiology group it actually makes no difference like all we want to do is share what we
026perceive to be as close to ground truth as possible so just a random question because i'm hearing that we we have to churn a lot of data points as well i think it's it's vital and i'm curious that like at what scale do we have to get to as far as you know our users in a sense within our system for them to actually comment and and churn those those ratings that then it's beneficial to um to you know as we're looking on the system and we're surveying based on ratings and i'm i guess i'm trying to put in the context of how we use amazon right the rating system yeah on amazon really shapes what we purchase in a sense um and not to say that those are all pure i think my students
027really turned me on to some interesting rating systems within amazon like if you look at the banana slicer product for example on your side uh time and and they've parodied you know the comedy service so you know i guess how is the the ratings how are they protected and how much do we actually have to scale to to be of value really good question and i have i i have not seen the banana slicers so i will look at that will be the first thing i do when i walk out of this room um what i would say is that so i want to make make very clear that you know the the rating system that we're producing is wholly objective right so the work that we do i mean we're a measurement company so
028we take data from florida blue from the blue cross blue shield association from other we've built a kind of an armory of data assets to be able to produce the the data that we have the the the what i would call subjective reviews right the amazon type reviews you know while they're important we do not include those in our objective ratings the goal is to marry them right so you know i mean certainly there is value to subjective reviews the experience that someone has with a provider is hugely important our goal is actually to build upon that to develop like the objectivity where you could say you know resnick may be a fantastic guy but he's a horrendous urologist you'd never want to go see him and then you know the goal would be to
029to both have whoever's looking for the provider say we're going to go to you know linda who's a better provider and also then feedback to me to say hey these are the areas where you could stand to improve that make sense other questions a couple of examples um you know so this is one um the the clinical scenario here is is the use of arthroscopy so i suspect that a handful of us um have had arthroscopy in this room you know it's a it's an orthopedic procedure it's actually the most common orthopedic surgery in this country where uh orthopedic surgeon makes a small incision in someone's knee inserts a video scope uh you know usually debris you know removes some cartilage and then closes the the knee up there's actually really high quality evidence that
030that in very specific populations this intervention doesn't work okay so in in older individuals with common degenerative knee pain osteoarthritis this was really common and then studies like this one in the journal medicine came out that actually randomized people so this is kind of a really strong study design where patients with this problem would go to a doctor the doctor would flip a coin half of the patients would get surgery and half of them got actually what's called sham surgery where they went to the operating room an incision was made in their knee but nothing was done right so it was it's a way to blind the patient to whether they had an intervention or not i don't think this could be done today um just to be clear but it was and and you
031know the result was that there was no difference in pain or performance status functional impairment between these two groups you know suggesting that this procedure in this population is low value and oh by the way it costs about ten thousand dollars per so the the bar on the right is actually each bar is a different orthopedic surgeon in the state of florida okay the height of the bar is the frequent frequency with which they do this low value procedure okay so you can see that there's a tremendous amount of variation between you know the the folks on the right hand side right doing this almost a quarter of the time and the folks on the left-hand side doing this very infrequently the the blue bars are actually orthopedic surgeons that polk members have seen okay
032so what what's the takeaway here you know again back to the sort of sixteen thousand and four thousand you know there's no real pattern here right polk members are seeing folks across the board right so their likelihood of having a non-indicated right low value 10 000 15 000 procedure right is kind of random depending on you know where they end up based on google based on you know having conversations with family and friends and you know we we beat up musculoskeletal care a lot just because it's it's quite honestly easy but you know even in in maternity care right c-sections i mean you know this isn't has been a target of uh of acog the american college of ob gyn and the world health organization for two decades right you know we know that among
033low-risk pregnancies c-section is actually associated with worse outcomes for both mom and baby and we also know that there's a huge amount of variation in the likelihood of having a c-section depending on who you see right same story here right you know i mean the the blue bars here are sprinkled in throughout the reds throughout the greens and everywhere in the middle right the the goal i mean just to again bring this back to i think why we're all here is to leverage a variety of tactics some of which we'll get into to move the the people on the right-hand side of this figure you know towards the left right and in doing so also engage those people on the right the providers to actually bring that whole tale of the distribution down to improve
034the quality in the community i think um you know i wanna i wanna make this sort of point really clear um some of these differences are really profound um you know when we look at spine care so back pain you know again none of these things aren't aren't esoteric i mean this is you know really common stuff when we look at the bottom performing 10 of spine surgeons in florida versus the top 10 you know the differences are pretty market right so the likelihood that you walk out the door with an operation is eight-fold higher the likelihood that you have a complication is more than three-fold higher after surgery the likelihood you get an opioid prescription in patients not undergoing surgery who are opioid naive right so initiating chronic opioid therapy for back pain is
035almost three-fold higher and then the likelihood that you're readmitted to the hospital after surgery is two and a half fold higher right so like this is not we're not talking subtle here i mean these are market differences and and to tie this back i think one of the things that you know that that we want to be really clear about is our goal is to improve quality and our belief is that higher quality care is lower cost and every single one of these things drives cost to the system and by the system i mean the health care budget for poll county so you know the the the intent here is not to you know arbitrage on price you know with discounts for this group or this hospital versus that but instead it's actually to impact
036the things that matter to humans and then take advantage of the potential cost savings that follow please and ultimately you're looking at much better health care in the end i mean this is health health you know like less work absenteeism i mean less challenges with like you know work home stuff related to recovery from treatment i mean i think this is this is this is the difference between you know at least our belief is between you know focusing so much on the nuts and bolts and really taking a step back and trying to improve you know individuals regular americans lives in a way that's meaningful and i think longevity will increase as well as a result of that you don't have to undergo surgery that okay this is i mean this is amazing to be
037honest with you i mean the the the the whole reason that catalyzed my personal interest in this yes is that um you know i had i i would see patients from you know all over the southeast people drive four or five hours to come and and i my hope my hope is that few people in this room know much about prostate cancer interesting disease where actually you know really low risk prostate cancer can be observed safely and the and the risks of treatment are actually significant you know not on the order of one or two percent it's like 40 or 50 and there are things that you don't want you know trouble with urinary function sexual function and what not and and i these men would come see me and i and i'd go into
038the room i'd say listen i have great news i'd say what's that i said i know your your doc at home told you you needed surgery but you don't need surgery and and i'd spend 45 minutes or an hour you know with that man and their family you know convincing them that they didn't need something done to them exclusive for the cost that that was going to make them worse without making them better and you know we started thinking about how many people were doing that right i mean you know why would they if i want to have a conversation about booking someone for surgery would take me 15 minutes oh and by the way like you know i get paid more to do surgery than i do to spend an hour with someone in
039the office so this is this is identifying those people who actually do the hard work you know to do that doc's talk to me all that they say well if i don't do it someone else is going to do it and i say well that first of all isn't a justification for doing something that is not necessary and second of all like my belief our belief is that that's actually your job right like your job is to like explain right is to do lean into that conversation and say look like yeah you could each of these paths is is is possible but let's talk about the math you know risk and benefit right that's actually what you want out of a doctor yes i will tell you just um just when we were looking at
040this um in the 30 years i've been doing employee benefit administration we have been searching for a way to measure quality right because we know there's waste associated not only waste from dollar and cents from the self-insured health plan but the heartache and the complications and the just and then just the bad experiences that happen that affect people sometimes over a lifetime and as a benefit plan administrators it's just been a struggle and until i saw this model i had not seen anything that i thought would work and to be honest what i'm excited about with this is it's not only helping our employees but it's helping the entire healthcare community so it's it's looking at something that would help sustain and we'll talk about a little later on if you want to but i
041know there's one large hospital association that is looking at using is excited about this and is actually approached even separate from knowing our interest and looking at using this process to judge and hire physicians so i take that as something that's credible as far as from the scientific and the medical community too and something like like dr resnick said that it's necessary it's not out there and doctors don't readily have access to this kind of information so i think that's important as well thanks i think i think we covered this i mean i think i think the that our program you know our approach is actually to do two things simultaneously right one is to leverage a variety of touch points you know in a employee in their experience to to nudge them towards higher
042performers and we'll show you kind of some of the technology solutions but you know i would say that one of the things we're really excited about is the opportunity to work with the everside folks um you know is really to embed this data and these analytics in in their hands so that you know as utilization of the health centers increase and there's more and more outbound referrals from the center that it's another way to wrap employees with quality um and then obviously the the the information for the providers um we we've built technology that you know is what we consider to be kind of a modern user experience um you know we've tested a variety of things people like it they come back to it um it's you know to the amazon comment i think
043it's taking you know an experience historically that's been pretty arcane you know in terms of searching for a doctor and making it something that you know folks are more accustomed to you know as they use amazon as you know i mean i made this example in a meeting yesterday that you can go on your phone and buy pet food in two seconds but like it takes mental gymnastics to find a provider that's aligned with what you're looking for i think the goal of this is actually to change that you know we we integrate obviously with blue florida blue to make sure that network status is is clearly visible and updated you know daily actually um you know the the way that we've thought about quality is to make it consumable to people that don't do
044this every day right so we've spent a great deal of time testing a variety of ways to communicate quality to folks who are just you know regular people who don't you know who don't think about this every day but instead want to be steered towards towards higher performing providers so one of the touch points that we we have is this this tool and it can and will you know hopefully be available to poke members i think the other which we alluded to was you know part of that tool is actually to promote the benefits ecosystem that you all have built for you know for polk members right so curatc is is an example we just didn't make a mock-up with crossover but you know if someone's using the tool and they actually type in primary
045care you know what we do is actually surface the everside clinic so that members at the point of care you know can be reminded that there's already a resource that's been you know sort of built for them you know in the benefits ecosystem you know that they can access and then again to wrap that member that employee with quality you know the the everside team is is you know would be trained on how to leverage and bold technology and analytics to make better referrals right again as another touch i have point question and it might be for linda um i would be curious on how this would be rolled out we do a lot of programs that because we're the largest employer and have a lot of employees they're not always you know they are
046not always well received or marketed appropriately can you talk about how it would be rolled out and can you talk about the fees associated with this yeah the um how to be rolled out would be really we were looking at the first year being through the on-site clinic a soft rollout more education as you know your your user access is about a hundred percent over a hundred percent utilization right now with the oversight centers uh between telehealth and the other and actually the clinicians have already seen this process and we're very excited because they also don't know who the best docs are they only get feedback sometimes from members sometimes they don't sometimes it's through friends but they were excited to see this as well and the fees for this would be 250 per member
047in the first year like a soft roll out more or less we do have performance guarantees associated with that so so embold has guaranteed to put 50 up to 50 percent of what we pay at risk if we don't inc if we don't make that savings threshold we talked about you know clinician and cost of claims and really this is where we're looking for that savings to come through with guiding people to better forming positions appropriate care right and lowering that cost and what i'm hopeful for is we already have walmart already is on board this is how i initially heard about this two years ago i was excited when i saw and i thought i got to talk to them about this because this would be an awesome program and that was in 2019
048and then the pandemic hit so it took us a while to get back with them but um walmart is excited that we're looking at this and potentially coming on board because obviously we're the big fish you know in polk county with the number of covered members so they're looking at is just a just a win-win for their associates and we're also looking at some of the other business providers in the county as well too i mean if other people come on board obviously it lowers our cost um you know if we're able to leverage larger groups and that's in the agreement so if that does happen then you know we may see some additional savings but it'll vary because it is per member per month and we run about 18 000 covered lives and i
049think that amount unfortunately it should be 540 on the agenda item not 450. i apologize i guess it got transposed on there it would be correct on the march 8th one that you'll be actually voting on at that point should you be interested in pursuing this so it's kind of a soft cost because it does increase the second year obviously because then they're going to at the same time they're going to be out and beating the bushes and working with the provider groups and the doctors and answering questions and things of that nature so you know i'm hopeful that as we get larger groups on board it will lower our costs so when you say the cost will increase the next year do you have that flat you have that cost what it is it's
050350 i believe is the second year and that's what i read here but that's not going to increase beyond that no correct that is set and there's also performance guarantee with that year as well i think the only thing i would add is that you know for us the the the more i'm gonna call it market share right the more you know um members that have access to this in a community the more impactful it is right so you know for us i think you know we could go sort of scatter shot across the u.s we already you know walmart is already doing this um you know in this market tampa through orlando um and you know i think the the intention is to add more and more and more in florida um not because
051it's it's you know there's anything magical about it but because if we can grow the number of members and communities who have access to this information then it actually creates leverage on the providers to actually change right so so i i will say that this kind of i4 corridor um you know between tampon orlando is an area where there's quite a number of lives that are already kind of active in this program yeah so we um i can well yeah yes please just to reiterate what mrs miller said uh so the rollout would be just through our health clinics at first or will you attempt to get the other well we can certainly we can certainly advertise the provider guide and make it available and encourage employees but as you know anything large like that
052does take some time to take hold and get out so the idea was to start it through the health center and then part of the second year strategy to be honest subject to bargaining is looking at lowering the co-pay for the um for the performing providers in other words to lower the co-pay instead of 50 you know say make it 30 or 35 or something to encourage and drive participation but we need to be careful too at the same time that we're not we're not affecting access to care as well so that was more of a second year strategy yes ma'am and uh how does this roll out with like uh we have to use certain labs for lab work and stuff like that i'm curious about that an angle and health checks uh just
053in general do you provide the data for that and then i just know i hear folks talk about it's hard to get a primary care physician appointment in general and then if we i don't want to use the word label but if we label somebody that they don't want to go to even though they might have needed to see somebody do you follow my train of thought and that was it well the lab let me explain the lab situation because what we have through blue cross blue shield of florida is unique we have what we call a capitated arrangement so we pay we pay per head for that every month and what that covers is all of the basic lab work so by using quest laboratory the employees are not quote balance build so other
054words we're paying upfront for that service and actually it's not even offered program anymore so at some point you know they've been phasing it out because it is extremely affordable that alone just with the labs done through our center i think saves us over a million dollars in lab costs it's just enormous and that's your basic sugar you know all your basic tests so it is advantageous for our employees to use quest and to request that when they're going to their providers and last year i had actually initiated a new card with quest on it because we found we had not communicated unfortunately this year with the no surprises act the federal government made me re-label all of the cards to change you know rules that came about as a part of that federal legislation
055so then it had to come off right because i had a question about remember you answered for me yes a couple weeks ago because the employee had no idea they needed to go to a certain lab yeah and and you know it's been a part of every communication we have on there that we direct a quest but you know i i can't you know in the past everybody had to read their material and dig for it and now it's at least in a platform that they can access and go to and look at but um that's why i had to relabel the card that year i was hoping that i would be able to leave that on there to help guide people to to that certain lab i think the other thing i would say
056is that all the you know the text i mean obviously we will have lab in the in the tool and all that text is customizable right so if there is messaging that would be helpful and impactful for members you know bolded you know zero out of pocket cost for labs here at quest um you know we could certainly include that as another sort of like communication point to the member and i think you know one of the things that we we we do with our with our customers is we we will partner with you know linda and her team you know if desired to help with communication um you know we have some some kind of you know some some campaigns that we've developed to really get people thinking about this topic um in a
057way that that is kind of neat and a little bit funny um so i think it that's another thing that we we will offer if that's if that's you know if that's desired sure i think the more places we can put it as you all know everybody accesses information differently so i think the more we can do on that topic would be helpful yes ma'am one last question on pharmaceuticals does this affect those choices for staff no i mean again similar lab we will have we can have pharmacy in the tool you know with with network tier you know and language around it but not formulary right so not the specific drugs that are dispensed as part of the formulary associated with pbm but you will have the different um you know provider like walgreens
058and publix and different providers on that okay yeah i think someone asked i i i thought i heard um is it working but i don't know if it was just to call attention so i i will i will address that question anyway um this is data from our first hundred thousand lives that were enrolled in the program um to hit on some of the high points so uh a lot of people are using the tool um you know to the point where we were actually surprised with the utilization of the tool particularly you know among people that are looking for care right not everyone's going to use the tool every day if you're not looking for a provider interestingly provide members leaving the tool were almost leaving uniformly with providers in the top third of
059performance what we saw and this is now in the claims data you know for the latter half of 2021 last year is that there's about a 40 reduction in the use of underperforming providers right um to the to the financial conversation that came up a minute ago the the break even is about eight percent right so you know i mean if you move eight percent of the people seeing underperforming providers to not even the top just to above the the 26th percentile or above right the program is it pays for itself um so we've seen multi-fold in excess of that and then you know what we've also seen is that the average provider that members are seeing is better quality and and you know overall it's seven percent interestingly um when we look at specialty
060care right so if we take out pediatrics and primary care um just because as i mean as you mentioned it's hard to find primary care providers and people like their primary care docs i mean it's it's you know it's harder to it's harder to disrupt those relationships and i'm not i'm not actually i'm not sure it's it's justified so when we look at specialty care it's actually higher it's somewhere between 12 and 13 improvement in quality right and the reason for that is that by and large specialty care is episodic right at least a large part of it is right i mean despite many of us may have orthopedic problems we don't have a orthopedic surgeon on retainer you know so it's an opportunity for intervention to sort of steer those those new relationships or
061relationships that are a little bit more movable to higher performing docs and then and then you know these are these are a couple of screenshots of some of the work we do with with providers um you know any provider is able to contact us and get data and then you know we will meet with them to review those data we've built a whole toolkit for information content that we wrap around the data you know what we sort of were very naive when we started this few years ago that that data was enough for people to just like snap to and change behavior i think you know you all probably are saying we could have told you that wasn't enough but um we alas we we built a whole set of of tools that wrap around
062these data to sort of give providers the ability to take kind of concrete small steps to improvement if they just so desire and then and then as linda mentioned one of the big systems in the area we've met with a bunch of times and has expressed interest in in really kind of building a more deep relationship to better understand you know their providers both employed and affiliated and how they could leverage some of these analytics to build a higher quality ecosystem of care in the community i think you know in many ways we've talked about this this is kind of a higher order road map of of you know how linda and we have thought about you know what this might look like i think you know 2022 being you know largely tailored to the
063the clinics making the you know the digital tool available um and then targeted engagement with some of the larger organizations in in polk county i think um you know the the question around around 2023 with one of the things that that some of our customers have done is linda mentioned an incentive others have done disincentive i don't think that that is something that we've discussed but you know sort of leveraging benefit design as a stronger level lever for people to change behavior um you know towards the positive um and then and then really thinking about you know predictive outreach right so trying to understand who the who the members are that are likely to need specialty care and then engaging with them even before they do that to sort of intervene upstream of when they've
064made an appointment or when they have been told by their primary care provider or a family or friend that they should see someone or someone else so miss king i don't i don't want to make this an unfair question because i know we don't like those here but uh i'm just curious what is your thought on the estimated savings to our health care plan like overall in the future slash overall to be honest i look at this as a win-win for the entire community no matter who the provider is i think that as i've seen this and as i've talked to colleagues i think this is going to become kind of the gold standard we've been searching for something for a number of years as i mentioned to try to improve quality that's what i'm
065excited about so it's not just helping the employee understand how to find a doctor and how what makes sense but also coming alongside and helping the provider community improve because as you said we have a shortage of physicians in polk county i mean we're dealing with this nationwide it's no surprise but the same time what i'm concerned about is the compromising inequality right and it breaks my heart when i talk to an employee and i talk to people you know and very intelligent people but nobody knows where to go for care and they're going based on word of mouth and and then sometimes when i hear these stories and everybody has a story if you ask them enough about a poor situation where they ended up and sometimes they knew right away they landed with
066the wrong provider and sometimes it took them several months this happened to me many years ago i was sharing um a story with with embold about an orthopedic in another area where it took me like four months to realize i was in the wrong place and i do this for a living and i still couldn't judge that and that's the heartbreak and how much money my employer and my health plan paid during all that time and the worst thing was you know what i still wasn't feeling good so it was impacting my life it was impacting my work it was impacting all of these things and sometimes some of these things are life and death decisions let's let's face it you know where you're looking at that going down the right quality of care now
067from a cost standpoint i i see us you know obviously in bold's put money on the table to guarantee that we're gonna we're gonna save at least 50 percent uh and if we don't have that savings then they're going to give that back to us and so that made me feel better i always come up with something new and like to say okay let's put some money on the table to guarantee this because as you know cost is a concern for the health plan and i'll be back here next meeting to talk to you more about what's going on with that but um and unfortunately it's it's not good news but at some point we have to address these root causes of of the cost of what we're doing because this is our health plan
068this is not based on a carrier i mean the carrier pays the bills and yes they negotiate the discounts and all of those things and those things are important to look at and make sure we're getting the best deal but at the same time this is our employees and this is our plan so we have to introduce things that we think are going to make a difference for our people because we keep them their entire career right we're hoping we do so it's important that we're able to provide a quality experience but also be able to look at that cost factor and we have to because i just see i just see and i hear the stories and that's what bothers me when i hear the stories because i know we can do better and
069i want to do better but until now i really haven't had a tool to be able to do that so miss fields well i think that improving health quality health care is very critical i hear often people really don't know where to go and yes and and how to access uh what they need uh my question is uh similar to what some of the other board members uh asks is it's good to have this in our toolbox but how we're gonna make sure that our employees know that the tools are there i think that's going to be very critical i understand the need to do a soft roll out but i also understand the importance of getting this in the hand of the employees as quickly as we can and then my other question is
070are you doing anything similar in other school districts you are no oh so we can go we'll go backwards uh we are not um this would be the first school district that we're doing this with um which you know again i think is speaks to i think the district's enthusiasm for quality and i think you know what linda sees is the big opportunity here what what i'll tell you is my hope is that um this is the first of many right i think for a variety of reasons many of which we've touched on in this meeting i think there's a huge gap and it's an opportunity to you know what i would call democratize some of these information and get them in the hands of people who need them i think one of the things
071i would say and then i'll pass it to linda around the engagement again is um one of the things we do do um is actually like we'll feed back to you what usage is right of the tool we have the ability to to look at the claims to understand where the movement is and where it isn't um so that when there are things that aren't going as well as we want we have the ability to correspond right i mean that that is that is our commitment um you know we're do we want this to be perfect you know six months in and be looking at the utilization be looking at the claims and say yeah everything's going great of course are there times where you know where where we need to make adjustments to how
072we're communicating of course right so the intention is not to then look back at years later and say we should have done it's actually in real time to be able to take some of that use data in the analytics in and and understand how are we performing and feed that data back to linda and to all of you and then make adjustments based on what we see and and i think to address your questions fields it's a perfectly good one because it is it is a difficulty communicating across across the system and getting the word out but i think um obviously embold has staff that can assist with that and provide some additional resources and things i mean we could do a video and put that out there we can do various things to try
073to push out the information my my hope is by starting at the center with those folks that it starts getting out about word of mouth and about the provider guide and and you know that that starts that discussion about oh did you realize you can go here for this doctor i went to this doctor and and i'm hoping just by employees talking to one another and our retirees as well under 65 that you know that'll get out and i'm hoping that that will especially good news right we'll get out about there is some additional resources available to our members thank you very much okay thank you thank you all so now board members this will be the candia motto show as the next three items are hers under charter schools so i will bring her
074up to the miller podium this is wyatt we're going to lead us in a dance okay well miss miller is leading on her own but i will help participate we are going to be way too easy to dance so um so um mr acosta is outside let me grab him real quick so good afternoon welcome we have had two charter applications submitted one has been withdrawn so we did send out notification you did get a new one that was just submitted last week so you should have that mrs fortney i have a flash drive for you and so in the meantime i'm going to turn it over to mr robert acosta who is going to present on his plan for his proposed charter school for polk county good afternoon mike ross says one of my
075board members as well thank you so much for having us superintendent members of the board appreciate having the opportunity to present here today i want to get started and our proposed charter school for folks county it's called davenport lyceum college preparatory it is proposed to be a dual language school and we decided to propose this school essentially because there's a large english learner population in polk county schools and even though even though you've seen that many of the schools within the district are doing a good job supporting our kids you have some level ones on level two english learners who are either immigrants or people who move to the area who are still struggling with the second language acquisition processes and this is something that i specialize as a school administrator over the years with
076great success in the past and wanted to establish a school for this specific purpose in pog knowing that the population that has the need is there the fact that many years in central florida and i think that this is a district that is very aligned with our philosophy within our school and the values that we want to also implement as part of our school program our school model for our kids and in researching polk as well let me say i was very um impressed by the composition of the board itself the fact that i've built as an administrator with many boards before and paul canny has a very sophisticated board of people who are very impressive to us and we want to work with the board as professional we want to work with a board
077that has the right values and has the right technical uh skills to be able to collaborate or wait on such a project as well so having said that there's been huge growth in the u.s 27 davenport area population has grown 30 to 36 percent the last couple of years and we've identified schools like citrus ridge where that english learner population is huge and again many of them are doing well within the school but there's still a subgroup a sub-segment of students who need the kind of support that the ico model provides in dual language essentially what you do is you work with students who are learning the second language you're learning english and you provide instruction course instruction for reading and literacy and mathematics in both languages and what does this do if you have
078kids coming from puerto rico or venezuela colombia or even brazil oftentimes you have students coming in with the content knowledge but their gap is a language gap and when they end up in a regular school if they don't have a dual language program essentially they're trying to acquire english but they're losing concept they're losing standards mastery along the way and a gap ensues over the years they're learning the language but if they came in being strong like in mathematics in sixth grade by the time they acquire the english skills in eight or nine they're already lagging a couple years and they're struggling and and we approach that gap by making sure that the spanish class will maintain the level of the concept mastery so let's say a kid comes from venezuela they're doing great with
079math standards in sixth grade you're getting the the concepts in spanish and then in the english class for mathematics you're introducing the academic english language instruction that they need to be able to transfer the knowledge from one language to the next and this way you ensure that there's no gap and you're addressing the second language acquisition processes as well it is a model that we use before in other schools over time not as a board this is my first opportunity to actually have a board that it's totally run by educators and i think that it is critical that um that i think that teachers and administrators get to run charter schools i think that charter schools oftentimes become like a business model right and i think the law intended for educators to be the false
080or running things in such a scenario so we're really excited about the opportunity of being able to do so with a small school here in polk now our model beyond dual language what else do we do we do something that's called plps with steams and the idea is that we take every single student who's coming in with special ed type caps we're also english learners or english learners or level ones and twos and we really dig very deep into their levels of performance business standards mastery we identify where they add and we have a schedule where yes you're hitting the hungry level standards as you should but you're also looking at the closing of the gaps via strong rti mtss process as well so you're doing both you're doing exposure of the hungry level content
081which they need to acquire but you're also closing the gaps with the rti mtss in a full-fledged class and they're going to be bilingual types to put in that class as well for kids to be able to to access the content and not let the linguistic barriers uh become an issue i want to stress one piece of the equation which is very critical as well and it has to do with special education you have a lot of students who are spanish speakers or portuguese speakers who get placed in special education programs and they may be labeled as communication disabilities and for many of these students you really have to be very cognizant on how to evaluate and assess their true levels of mastery to determine if it's a linguistic barrier or if it's a communication
082cognitive issue and we've discovered some of the work that we've done in massachusetts that 30 to 40 percent of students who are diagnosed with special ads especially communications when you dig deep actually they have issues perhaps with decoding skills which impacts comprehension and when you address the decoding pieces then the students voila they do great and they catch up pretty quickly as well our third element design element has to do with college prep rigorous curriculum you know we do want to make sure that students are exposed in spite of the language barriers and special education program assignments that they get access to curriculum that is rigorous and often times a lot of our students who are second language acquisition students or students in special education program do not have access to curriculum that is rigorous
083because they don't have the literacy skills oftentimes in conversation with many of these students you provide either the scaffolding or the accommodations or the modifications necessary and you kind of work with that eight-grade level hunger games with them you do present some of the content verbally and if that's a way that they can access the content then you do so if they cannot read you still need to be sent a rigorous curriculum to students and that's a strategy that we implement we're really um well versus data driven instruction we like monitoring data on a week-to-week basis at a minimum to track progress underlying curriculum to student support and then design element number four the character education piece which is so critical as well uh we do a lot of work around athletics programs steam type
084programs and we emphasize the values components you know we have this firm belief that you may have the best instruction in the world and the best techniques but if you're not emphasizing the values element the values of pieces you're building an academically proficient student perhaps but not a the whole individual that needs to be able to succeed with those values and character elements that are so critical it's not just about knowledge you can be the most knowledgeable person there is but if you don't have character like you're not going to really go far in life now track record for me as an administrator i've been doing this work with dual language now for close to nine years i initiated myself as a teacher with the dallas independence school district um i signed up as a
085special not i'm sorry a bilingual education teacher i work in the town of seagave texas spent about five years in the region also did work in austin texas with idea public schools where i founded allen academy and achieved a 75 pass rate start test which is the equivalent of the fsa test taking it back to jail along at dallas isd with dual language we're able to achieve 100 pass rate in the star mat exam for six seven and eight and the algebra exam as well which proves that every student with the right level support they can achieve came here back to orlando which is where i essentially uh established my family going all the way back to the year 2000 my kids attended schools here in central florida mainly orange county i headed up orange
086county's uh renaissance at hunters creek it was a 700 student school when i took over it it was a c rated school to get to an a level 90 um easol a lot of immigrant students had kids from colombia puerto rico hurricane maria syria you name it we had it we became in orange county kind of like the school where any kid who had struggles with the language barriers were sent to and running the school over the course of three and a half years we became an a-rated campus and we achieved great success with students in middle school 40 of our middle school kids were taking algebra geometry biology and this is part of the public record in florida 100 pass rate it can be done you know if we were not um 100 school
087throughout the entirety of my tenure there had to do more the fact that every year was getting hundreds of kids who are new to the region who didn't speak the language but our track uh record in terms of the data any kid who had been with us at hunter creek for two years we had a 95 pass rate in the fsa exam so again you know you can do both you can do language you can do standards mastery you can do character and values development as well it takes a staff of individuals who are really committed to the model who are really committed to the work we're here to get for kids the things that they actually need in a school which is a very supportive environment and from there that was a springboard to
088do the work that i've been doing in massachusetts the last three years now i became part of a fellowship called building excellent schools out of boston with ms linda brown and what you do in that fellowship is you get trained on how to design schools and charter school systems and they'll work there eventually with chris gabrielli who has an operation in springfield massachusetts and took over what's called a first percentile school meaning that we've been working there in a partnership where i don't run the board per se i'm the school designer and we're working with students who are in the first percentile nationally tough school during the first year the pandemic out of the 15 schools in springfield our middle school was the top growth school within a year's time in remote now granted i
089mean we have a ways to go when it comes to academic achievement but it proves that dual language model does work and it's something that we want to bring back home we want to bring it to polk knowing the need that we have here and knowing that there's going to be great synergies if we're allowed to do so with polk county in terms of the work that we can do with the district to support our level ones and twos um students who need second language acquisition supports as well as special ed students who are special education program students i should say who need um language acquisition as well i'm the founder at the head of school this is a dream for me i work as an administrator and a teacher over the years and often
090times we work for other individuals who are running charters i think that um we're the best interest students at heart i know what can be done through the charter school law i worked for a for-profit company for three and a half years and saw the the abilities that you have with that system to do for kids thinking that coming from an educator background there's even more that can be done for our kids as well i am a licensed administrator in texas massachusetts in florida which is in renewal i've been a bilingual education educator special ed as one in massachusetts attended smu in dallas texas university of texas as well that's where my background as a master's in education administration comes from and uh the many fellowships teaching trust smu bush foundation aral and now i'm
091in the process of joining florida southern college to work at my doctorate i had opportunities in massachusetts boston to do it uh through harvard there was a little bit of misalignment there and i felt you know what i'm going back to my roots i'm going back to florida i'm getting this done in florida so in college instead so i had a great uh conversation there with miss linda um walker wolverton and i think that that's the place where i will complete my dissertation instead so my other team members of dr debbie stefano comes from missouri and she's working my project in springfield and she will be our curriculum director debbie is very well versed in second language acquisition and spanish literature my proposed principle for the school is mr jose torres who's been an amazing
092educator in texas and massachusetts bilingual ed he comes from puerto rico on the operations side we have haley boudreau also an educator who will be heading that for us knowing that operations is really a big big deal for charter schools and having run charter schools before i know how how critical that person is for the success of the school as well dylan ward has also proposed dean of instruction for us dylan's work in massachusetts as well and thank you for the opportunity of being able to present here today at this time i will entertain any and every question that you folks may have pertaining to our proposed school for for davenport and for polk as well thank you very much thank you yes did i miss is this k through eight well no it's it's
093a middle school model so it's six through eight six through eight yeah because i know i looked up your other schools and it was uh the one in orlando is kth rate right it was k through eight yeah that was a 1400 student operation we want to start small we want to like really get our feet under us uh and perhaps stay small for the first two or three years i think many charter schools like they open and they want to grow grow grow and scale i think it does take some time to really get your footing especially their relationship with the district because we will need to have very tight relationship especially around the special ed elements i do know that we operate as an lea as well but i think we want to
094have a partnership where a lot of the action research that we do we collaborate with a lot of the schools where let's say that that citrus rich for example has like five kids just arrived from puerto rico no english at all we want to have the partnership where we can step in and do assessments and say hey these are students who may be best served by our programs or these are students who just have gaps that are academic and and be able to establish that collaboration i think the collaboration piece is critical because we see ourselves not as a standalone charter i think we're we're coming in as a niche provider of sorts where we are partnering the district and we're we're closing the gap in that service need so we're not thinking overkip or
095charter school usa to build all these schools we're thinking we're here to help kids and be partners with the district so that the kids that you can add support then we'll work with those kids as well with our school model yes cunningham and miller where are you looking to locate up in the davenport area we're looking at us 27 davenport i think the radius of five miles off of citrus ridge is where we've seen the the largest growth so you're talking at the very north end the very north end okay even though we're open i mean poke is quite large so i think we could draw from different areas it's just that the data where we saw the highest need was citrus rich i think that citrus ridge is a campus where if we were
096addressing the dual language level ones and two's needs that's one campus that then can focus on the other levels and get to higher heights we did notice all the other schools in the area are doing okay you know with the numbers and the data but citrus is like where that biggest need seems to be at and i think that we could serve a lot of those kids in that area uh miss miller yes i have a question about being just a middle school model and coming in as college preparatory i would like to learn more about what you're doing if you're catching those kids at sixth grade who may have been labeled as language impairment when it wasn't a true language impairment but a cognitive impairment how are you going to help because that's where
097it gets very expensive very honest with adding supports so throughout the process and with your application i would be interested in learning how you're going to make up that gap and then is there an exit are you going to serve all of those students or are you going to have a threshold where there's a student that you will not be able to serve and how are you going to communicate that to the community so a couple things right the first one there's this premise that you take a student in sixth grade and they may come in with gaps that go all the way back to kindergarten and in my experience what we've identified is the students coming into six with apparent five or six years worth of gaps conversationally speaking and cognitively speaking which aligns
098with comprehension are not necessarily five or six years behind they cannot read for the life of them on a first grade level but cognitively they're there and when you have that piece the missing piece is a decoding piece and in rti and mtss when you start closing the decoding gaps and you're getting the kid to a first grade level because now they can read and decode first or second or third grade you feel that you have to address the standard basic gaps align with comprehension skills because now they're on the third grade level so now we can give them a third grade level book comprehension question and what you're going to realize quickly is that once you get the decoding and they can read faster their ears will tune in and their cognitive abilities will
099kick in and that kid who was unable to read a first grade level book can now read a third but it can actually start grasping questions that are fourth grade or fifth grade so you can do you can do a three year closing of gaps in six or three years closing in six and essentially in the middle school model six seven and eight you can close at least two years and six two years and seven and two years and eight sometimes you have to retain one extra year and eight to be ready for high school so they can do the algebra or the biologies or the geometries and that eighth grade so they're ready for high school but we discovered that in that three to four year range even if you come in with a
100kindergarten level a reading level that is and your issues happen to be linguistic language acquisition we can close the gap within that time in terms of who can we serve and who can we not serve you know as long as congressman speak and you're not severely impaired or handicapped we can work with any student because this is just basic literacy it's just basic literacy on steroids leveraging the cognitive abilities and social skills that students have because they develop those over time i believe that students by osmosis pick up the english language the social language that is right it's the academic language they struggle with but socially you may see a kid from puerto rico speaking to their friends in one or two years and teachers would say well they speak english very well but they
101struggle crazily in science class or algebra class and and we know for a fact that even though the data sets their first grade reading level like their brain is ahead of that we just have to attack the decoding and once we get decoding we can jump them up the standard um continuum uh process now how do we communicate whether we can serve students or not let's say for instance that we find out that the need is huge and here one we're having great success then we have the ability to scale up pretty quickly um if we had to obviously there's the baseline fte allocations that you do get but we have a business model where we provide a lot of after-school services like after care and athletics programs and club sports where we can generate
102sufficient income to leverage that to be able to absorb and of course you've got title 1 and other you know there's i think that in this system in florida the finance the fte system in florida is is robust many people criticize the state of florida because they claim like all the money you spend in education is so low compared with massachusetts i'll give you the perfect example i'm working in massachusetts now the thing is is how the charter schools have the ability to work with whatever ft they're getting in florida to do what needs to be done and we're in massachusetts you're working with all these other elements that suck up a lot of your resources so essentially i discovered that i was better off with my florida budget serving kids when i was here
103that i'm in massachusetts with the structure that they have so in the numbers at a face value it may seem like you're getting much more money but in the execution you're actually doing better in florida just um my input in that is there is an audience that there is a target audience that you are that you will serve um it will not be students with intellectual delays or students significantly impaired which costs more and that's where the fte doesn't stretch nearly enough and so you will be you would be better fiscally to serve students who don't have those high needs there's still a community that needs that support i would encourage all of our charter schools to look at how they can expand services to meet the needs so you have families that may have
104more than one child and will have to split schools because your school will not be able to serve the child who's intellectually delayed um that's the community i represent and we still see them very underserved not that this community you're speaking of is the growth is exponential in that area we there's no way to keep up with it so i'm sure the students coming into the country and the students the english as a second language you will have plenty of applications for but i don't want the community to be confused with a lot of times they don't understand the structure of charter in public schools and they will take their entire family to enroll not realizing they might have a child that not me that doesn't meet your model um so i just wanted to
105clarify that thank you thank you so much miss mayor yes ms cunningham and um are you going to have a local representation here on your board yes we will you know from having worked in florida before for many years i have a number of teachers will be part of the board as well so we have yeah we have a lot of local folks who are going to be a part of the operation as well okay because it'll be interesting to when the time comes to see your your governing board and how many of those are local in polk county and from around the state or if you do out of state as well it would just be interesting to note and is this gentleman going to be able to speak at some point so that
106we can learn a little bit about him yeah he can introduce himself this is mike rosas mike is my finance guy and as you all know in an education you can run education and you can know instruction but if you don't have especially in the charter world someone who can structure the finest financial arrangements pertaining especially to facilities because i think that working with fte and budget and what have you like as a principal you understand that pretty well the key component for us once we get a charter is you know getting that building in place and i do not intend to come to polk and and put kids in in trailers like they got to be in a decent facility where everything is safe and i know that for many charter school founders they
107get a chart and they just try to put kids wherever to get started but i think that they deserve to be in facilities that are decent and worthwhile and safe as well so i'm going to turn over to mike over to mike well hello i'm sorry hello i hope you can hear me clearly there so miss cunningham you had a question we had a question for me yes i wanted to hear a little bit about you you he introduced you as the the finance guru and a member of the board so i wanted to learn a little bit about you i hear you i hear you uh well yeah actually my background is um well initially it was sciences but uh my business background is actually has to do with chicago public schools we've serviced
108as a vendor for them for for chicago student transportation i worked there for about 13 years 14 give or take and we had a great working relationship with the well yeah basically with the board there have a good understanding of how to work with local government and really what challenges are with that exists when you're working from a private sector with the public sector or if you're doing semi-public to full public and really understanding what the expectations are meeting each other and understanding what it is what's going to happen versus what's planned to happen and also being able to make sure that the structure of what you have financially can actually sustain that and it can be done over a course of several years not as you'll see sometimes some people just do it over
109the course of one and one administration or uh for one rfp you know so this is more of an idea of trying to make sure that we have something that could sustain for decades not for you know at maybe a four-year term thank you miss fields yes ms fields so really i haven't had time to look at your information but i will but i did have a question about marketing how do you envision getting uh your students i know you said that you're going to locate on the in the area of highway 27 but specifically what neighborhoods are you guys going to uh target or have you all decided yet yeah a lot of a lot of it is the networking with the families and people that we know there's a lot of people that
110we know in the area a lot of the teachers that we work with many of them were from polk county as well so you have that element of the community uh churches of social organizations going to some of the schools and working with administrators there as well right identify families who might benefit from the needs you know this is not just a student service need a model it's also a family service model and you have many parents who who don't speak english very well who need stronger supports as well to walk into the process of getting their kids acclimated to to the country and our system of things as well so we're gonna do a collaboration with the schools sit down with them partner with them um you know churches organizations knock on doors like
111we have very specific numbers for our budget that we want to target so once we get the charter approved like we're going to hit the payment and and find our numbers because this is the only way it's going to work uh we cannot afford like you know want to have a budget for 360 students and end up with 80. you know i've seen too many charters just die at the sword of lack of attendance right and lack of the registration and the student population you need a very basic baseline budget number for enrollment to be able to sustain the operation and your um and there's very little room right you cannot afford to have more than five to eight percent variance and then you have attendance and when you have such low numbers in order
112to sustain the operation you have to be very precise so this is where the supplementary programs come in as well like the after care and so forth but the baseline of the marketing uh of the number of kids that we need needs to be where it needs to be at it's going to require for us to just hit the payment and visit families and and get people to sign up thank you superintendent when will this come before us the somato would just come at the next meeting end of april thank you miss miller what's your proposed population for this school 360. that's what i thought you said and can you talk a little bit about behavior supports for students especially students coming in from out of the area unfamiliar with your school other behavior contracts
113what is your behavior supports yeah there's a couple of approaches to behaviors right and we take the a positive angle so it all starts with before the student enrolls and we have a conversation with parents around plps personalized learning plans we identify of course number one the student's academics and social emotional needs that's the first one during that interview with the families who identify kids passions and dreams what are the things that the student likes and in the plp model they will get inventor assigned in the building and they be get assigned specials classes or electives that align with their passions and dreams and i'll give you a perfect example you know we have like a music production class and we have students who may be interested in that field and that person would be
114assigned a mentor a teacher technology teacher to work with them to develop those aspirations they have in that area so we start building a relationship even before the first day of school so we know that jimmy's coming in because he'll work with mr garcia on cutting his first demo tape and you're getting some investment from kids from day one so yes we are heavy on the remediation pieces to address the academic gaps and the linguistic barriers but we also want to work with kids in developing their aspirations and dreams and i think that oftentimes in rt and mts you want to close the the achievement gaps but you're not listening to what the kid wants to do with their life you're not listening to what the kids dreams are like and when you're lineball it's
115a quid pro quo like hey jimmy i need you to partake in rti and work with teacher x to win these things but we'll make sure that mr garcia will work with you on cutting that tape and you know your lyrics have to work right so your writing has to be on point and so on and so forth so you establish that during the plp process so they're excited when they come to the building on day one they're coming with a purpose and a reason and this is where you address the attendance issues and the behavior issues so there's a whole system of things for lyceum where on the up front you're working that positive relationship and when you do this like eventually you don't have any behavior issues now having said that we have
116an rti process for behavior as well where we treat any tier one behavior as a tier two essentially if we have a kid who's having an issue interrupting class every day we don't see this at tier one where the teacher is frustrated just telling jimmy to be quiet please is rather why is jimmy acting the way that he's acting and we trash the situation we dig deeper and we do home business and we try to figure out why is jimmy not on board with our plans and we do a very proactive job of doing that because without the proper culture and behavior and the value system everything else you do would be lost and this is where you see a lot of schools struggling with the behavior issues in middle school i think middle schools
117are a very um tight science that you really have to spend a lot of time working on every individual kid's plans and you gotta have those conversations with the parents and the families to re-establish their relationship pieces as well so when you're working on behavior with parents it's not from a deficit angle it's more proactive i see that jimmy's behavior in class is getting his way of attending ucf or full sail for music production what can we do and then incentivize the positive behavior as well but we don't like approaching behavior from the negative angle where kid misbehave now we're engaging and it's like us versus them thing it's more teaching kids self-agency and self-reliance and self-control which is not hard as long as you're able to establish the relationship from the get-go with them
118thank you you're welcome dr alan yeah just a simple question i was looking at your track record and then i'm connected to the lyceum in regards to the brand and i know you focused a lot on massachusetts texas dallas uh and orlando as well but you know thinking about the lyceum movement you know starting with the lincoln douglas debates there in illinois and so forth but you do have a is there a similar school um lyceum school that you have in illinois because i think it's it's the same yes oh that's in massachusetts not in illinois not in illinois no in massachusetts what i did the fellowship with building excellent schools and building excellent schools is supporting the springfield empowerment zone in the springfield area of massachusetts and i designed a lyceum school specifically with
119the elements that i'm sharing here with you guys based on my experiences in dallas austin and orlando and then the training in boston so the idea that i'm promoting and at this point in time i'm promoting a consultancy in massachusetts to expand that model to be utilized in other schools as well because the results that we had so we're in that process negotiating now where essentially we're providing them with the standard operating procedures manuals and how to run the program i'll do the professional development for that but with my intent in polkas i still need to run a building and i want to run a building where i can keep on working on the action research that's going to improve the model over time and we can keep providing support with massachusetts is very unique
120because they only started doing dual language again three years ago with the look act the looked act is a governor baker's effort to make sure that students who need second language acquisition supports get the support they need but what we've experienced is that many districts do not have the know-how on how to do dual language and we're doing consultancies for support especially with springfield now to make sure that they can meet the students needs because there's going to be a compliance uh loop coming up for a lot of the districts and they're still not providing students a lot of supports that they need and dual language and that's something that we're committed to and i see them it's kind of like that brand like we want to be able to say you want to support
121dual language students this is the way you do it it includes the components i was mentioning to ms miller which is not just dual language it's not just a second language acquisition you have to work with kids at a level of respect and with families where if they speak portuguese or spanish you're coming in and it's like in your native language and we understand what you're saying and we hear you because it's not again on the theory side there's many things you can do technically well but the human component the values component the relationship components are part of what i see them is it's not just a dual language it's how you treat people and how you collaborate with people miss miller i just have one last thing and i know this is coming back
122and you'll give us more information i just want to be very cautious a lot of the charters that come through with well intent um their budget doesn't support all of their intent so i need to see the net we need to see the numbers because what happens we promise students and communities schools that end up closing and we don't want to do that to our families and we don't want to do that to you who are passionate about this population so we need to see that the budget fits all of these support programs that you're that you're speaking of and i look forward to looking through that yeah that is uber critical because when you look at fte for students it's very much like break even type you know when you start adjusting for different
123cost factors the margin is so small right and this is where oftentimes when people come for a charter especially their education background they look at that ft like oh i'm going to do wonders with the state funding and the federal funding and guess what when you have specialized programs that's not going to be enough right and and you can have those margins so this is where the after care program comes in and the budget that we created uh we're projecting about half of our students needing after scare program just knowing that with i-4 the parents working in the orange county area coming down i-4 in the afternoons is a nightmare so parents will be conformed by the fact that if a kidneys who say what is until six or seven that we don't have like
124nine staff members assigned to staying with kids until parents can pick up and that's going to generate revenues and it's something that i've done before as well you can generate five to six hundred dollars per kid so rather than paying a bus that would pick them up and take them somewhere we keep them in school we do sports we do remediation as well and that additional five to six hundred per kid becomes a significant amount over time you're bumping up your budget by two or three percent gives you a bigger buffer and then you look at club sports as well oftentimes parents want kids to do volleyball or do basketball and coaches that i work with in orange county we won like orange county championships as a charter school as well and parents really go
125for that as well so we have in our business model um ways of addressing the gaps because i i was working numbers and then i think i was in communication with miss diamato at first where it took me a couple more days because when i kept looking at the ft i'm like man this is like this is way too tight like this is you sneeze and you're out of business essentially and when you have the commitments with the contracts with the leases and the powers and the teachers like you don't want to not be able to pay a teacher a paycheck right when the payday comes around so this is where from the day one of the opening of the school we're generating revenues and incomes from these programs from the get-go so we have
126some kind of a buffer and i think that our our first month is one month where we have the whole fiscal tightness but once we start generating the income and the revenues from these programs month number two whatever happens and we know how disbursement works in florida then we have a buffer of some sort but like uh mike was saying earlier like our plan is to be very sustainable we've learned from the successful charter schools having to work with idea in texas and csusa here in florida we know what the business model looks like and how important the financial pieces are to the success and this is why you want to start with a baseline 360 and a budget that um yeah that will be able to support the model as well having said that
127i had a couple of my folks from the board work instruction were saying like but we need more staff or we need more this i'm like listen the people that we have to be the right people because in massachusetts oftentimes you can add more staff but just because you add more staff doesn't mean you're getting better results you just find the right folks with experience and you can get it done as well and that's why we have to do a better job of what we hire as well not just a warm body so i actually have a couple questions for you mr acosta um are you going to as head of school are you going to be remain here in central florida yes the first two years for the program i need to be here
128training my administrators because the likes you model even though it's in paper in my experience it takes administrator time with someone who's coaching and developing them to really understand it the team you have listed here in your presentation are these all going to be located here physically located here yes okay could we i don't know within your packet i'd have to go back miss amato do we have formal resumes on each one of these individuals so while the state of florida does not require a certification or endorsement for a building administrator for charter schools i do have some concerns regarding the lack of background ms boudreau has and also your other co-principal mr torres he's only been a dean all due respect i get vastly different from being a principal at a school yes miss
129boudreau if i'm reading your your website correctly most recently was an 8th grade science coach um so no real administrative experience so could you speak to that yes yes especially coming to florida and knowing the florida dynamic is vastly different than that of this is something that really requires for me as the expert to be the person who's on site with these individuals to get them to where they need to be but i do like from folks who who are coming in kind of like fresh and news that you can train them on the right ways of doing things in my experience you hire sometimes administrators who come with other habits another way of approaching thing on the operations side the way you manage the finances is very very it's like running a district you
130know your compliance issues and regulatory issues are incredibly complex so you know this is for someone of my capacity to be the one training an individual who's going to take my word as gospel like this is how you run the finances this is how you run the checks and balances and and that's my commitment to get this project going like i'll be working my doctorate here in lakeland as well at the same time so i think that this is the location where the next two or three years i will be like really really tight with the staff okay and and then take it from there and then mr torres i think the value mr torres is twofold he's very strong in in in second language acquisition and structure and closing the achievement gap for dual
131language students and as a dean of culture in a building as well and managing behaviors he's really really strong like you stated the principalship is like he's got the 10 percent or he's got the 20 he still got 80 to go it's gonna take a couple years to get him there but i think he's got the right mindset and the right values to do what we need to do and the same thing with miss boujou mrs budro as someone was doing operation items for me in massachusetts was the kind of individual that i would give her a task and she would just execute you know without questioning she would just follow the letter of whatever she was uh getting as well so again they may not seem to be heavy experience but experience oftentimes could
132be detrimental as well you know people may come in with the wrong the issue more so for me is not only the experience but the lack of an understanding of florida policies and practices and the expectations of a building leader and what those requirements are going to be so the difference is with your background if you're going to be on campus each day i have to okay yeah i have to be i went for a charter renewal with the orange county board three years back or four years back and i got a 15-year charter renewal uh my buddy now who's the deputy guy running cs usa he got a two-year renewal and also i got a 15-year renewal on the financial strengths on the academic strengths as well so i think that i need to
133train my folks in the ability to achieve that level of success and that's something that is definitely for me a huge priority i don't this is the only school that i will have as a site like i do consultancy work but this is my site this is my doctorate location and this is the campus where i will continue doing action research that needs to be done for me to finish my dissertation as well okay and i'd be honored if i had the opportunity to look at you folks in polk county as well thank you any further questions all right at this time thank you very much mr motto we are going to take a 10-minute break it is currently 2 o'clock we will come back at 2 10. thank you thank you so much [Music]
134you have to own who you are you have to own your feelings and when our feelings situations get the best of us we're not realizing what we're portraying right right because you're deep in that emotion yes right and you're it's very real whatever experience is fueling that and then what what experiences that are we creating for our students who are experiencing us acting out like that [Music] homelessness is everywhere you may not be able to see it and it may not look like what you expect but homelessness is out there and within polk county public schools it affects more than 3 700 students i'm ben roosch polk county public schools homeless liaison and i'm asking for your help in identifying our students experiencing homelessness so that we can provide them the services they need to
135be successful in school and life when you think of homelessness certain images probably come to mind but homelessness can take many forms according to the federal law in the mckinney-vento act students are experiencing homelessness if they lack a fixed regular and adequate nighttime residents a student may qualify as experiencing homelessness if they are sharing housing with friends or family members living in a motel or hotel or campground living in an emergency or transitional shelter living in their car park public space or abandoned building living in substandard housing or living unaccompanied meaning they are not in the care of a parent or legal guardian and they lack adequate housing a student can be experiencing homelessness for lots of reasons from hurricanes and other natural disasters to house fires domestic violence parental incarceration a death in the
136family and of course economic hardship no matter the cause or what exactly their circumstances look like students experiencing homelessness are at a greater risk of not completing their educational requirements what can polk county public schools do for these students the school district runs a program called hearth which stands for homeless education advocates restoring the hope in accordance with federal law protecting the educational rights of students experiencing homelessness hearth helps these students enroll in school stay in their school of enrollment even if they move into a different zone because of homelessness receive transportation to their school of enrollment even if they've moved to a different zone we also provide tutoring service school readiness items such as uniforms backpacks school supplies and personal hygiene products van transportation and bus passes for school related purposes assistance with health
137physicals immunizations vision and dental exam gas food and clothing whatever our students experiencing homelessness need we do everything we can to provide it to them why am i reaching out to you today because our students experiencing homelessness need us now more than ever the coronavirus pandemic has led to a severe economic downturn and with the rise in unemployment studies also predict a significant increase in homelessness at the same time more students are participating in remote learning which may make it more difficult to identify them as experiencing homelessness and provide them with the services they need if you think you or someone you know may qualify for homeless services please call 863-457-4709 and visit polk polkschoolsfl.com forward slash hearth for more information this pandemic has fractured our society and our economy please help us make sure
138that our students experiencing homelessness don't fall through the cracks thank you [Music] and we will now reconvene the meeting superintendent hi yes ma'am madam chair members of the board members of staff and committee at this time again i'd like to bring miss amato back she is at the dais i apologize um and she will speak to us about the next topic yes so item three is the berkeley accelerated middle academy's contract modification in january of 22 berkeley academy berkeley accelerated middle's board met to expand their grade levels to serve grades nine and ten their board voted unanimously they are a high performing school therefore by statute they are permitted to expand so it's just simply bringing you the contract modification any questions from members of the board and again this item will come back for
139further discussion in april seeing none mr motto next item item number four is matter academy davenport charters contract this was a school that was approved back last spring we have since finished negotiations and we do have their contract ready for your approval which will be this evening so they are coming back to back i did provide a summary of all of the changes that were made it is using the standard florida model contract with information added as needed miss fortney and after not reading that big sick thing um thank you yes and the charter committee uh suggested approval of the charter so this was a charter application that was that came to you last week right i remember and the board voted to approve it yes so from that point the charter review team doesn't
140have any impact on the contract that's negotiated between mr bridges myself and then their their general counsel i knew there was something different about the language in the contract is the boilerplate language that is that has been adopted as a rule by the state board of education uh so it's pretty much plug and play there's not yet there's not a lot of not a lot of room for for change gotcha thank you yes mr bridges miss fields i guess my question would be why is it coming back-to-back mr motto i'm afraid that that's on me because when we when i was discussing it with their attorney and we were figuring out which board meeting to put it on i was looking at the deadline for the board meeting and not the work session and so
141that is on me however the language is is what is provided in the statute so there's there's not any um any any significant change other than filling in the blanks okay well thank you for acknowledging that i just uh yes ma'am that i always appreciate having enough time to review something even though i know that's your job i i apologize that was it was simply when we were talking about the date i was looking at the date at the deadline for getting it on the board meeting and not the work session thank you yes ma'am and miss fields i when wes and i met and he asked about it i told him it was much easier to get something off of the agenda tonight if the board wanted to hold it than to add it
142back in so that's why we went ahead and put it on both there we can still push it to the march meeting if needed but as he said it's very standard language even the things that we'd like to change we can't legally change so that's why i felt like it was probably okay to bring it back to back thank you for your explanation thank you very much mr motto great job tech thank you at this time i'd like to bring up carrie barkland senior coordinator for head start oh lori allen i apologize yes ma'am you have control of your presence okay so according to our head start regulations our the governing board for polk county um head start administration funds we have to report every month so uh what we have right now is the
143fiscal report which is attached were there any questions so just for a matter of background for reference and when i met with the team we discussed my expectations to bring information before the board and while these items have typically come to you just simply as information items that will not be the case any longer so at least minimally twice if not three times a year you will actually have an opportunity to get the update in real time rather than just as an attached information item and then in the months that fall between those scheduled meetings um you they will be attached as informational only to provide you updates this way it provides greater alignment because if you as you recall as we move into a strategic plan a new strategic plan there will be formal
144quarterly updates and presentations as to each of the five goal areas as obviously early childhood and early learning falls under that so they will be incorporated into those presentations formally but i do believe it's important not just to continue to list these items as informational only and that was a concern shared by the by the team as well miss miller i do have a question on the data shown here um in our january program enrollment we have 4.9 percent of the mandated ten percent of esc serving only 46 students with ieps that is correct i would be interested in the strategic plan and this has been for a decade of trying to get trying to advertise to the community what is available because we've had kids turned away at the doorstep of units yes ma'am
145and when i was a community advocate i was very frustrated by that and we haven't made a lot of progress and maybe the new community liaisons will be able to help that but having mom or grandma drive a child to a school to be told we don't serve you is something that should have been did a long time ago yeah that's a great question that's actually just so um to give a frame of reference i've been acting uh director of preschool programs for about a month so um but i have a long history with uh preschool programs i worked for eight years under maddie in head start specifically so my understanding is broad however what i've been able to accomplish has been very narrow but we have actually already put a plan in place for
146how we're going to start addressing we've been having numerous meetings recently with esc pre-k working on how to build a process for how we're going to go about identifying and serving those children a lot of it is misunderstanding miscommunication about what our programs do and do not offer we are working towards i have a disabilities coordinator currently i'm working to get another one on staff so we can identify children quicker and not just identify but get them the help that they need in the right place so for example what we can offer in a head start program is much more than what we can offer in a half day or even a full day vpk classroom the staff that is available the itinerant staff that's available the supports that are needed depends so there has
147to be a better understanding between the two programs as to which one would better serve the need of the child and i appreciate your progress in one month has been so substantial because that's been an ongoing issue for years where i would have people on the phone at the school confused and the parents crying in the car and the yes doesn't know where to go so we have to do a better job with identifying and then you know providing maybe on the website you know resources or placement so i'm excited to see you in this position and making that progress thank you miss fields and ms fortney i would just request that when she comes up that she gives a very quick overview of the executive summary just for the record yes ma'am uh and
148then um i know that um we still have some of our committed this meeting by way of zoom i know this is one so do you have any ideas of when we'll be meeting in person since i'm going to be the board rep yes with the policy council yes we've actually been having that conversation in this last this last week because we have one coming up we would like to end that quickly but we also want to be smart and be safe so we are discussing with parents and others who attend how they feel we tried a joint model where some were in face-to-face and some were online and that did not work out well at all so we had a much better attendance when we did a full virtual and we're hoping to go
149back to face-to-face soon we do not have a set date we this morning we discussed whether we wanted to complete the year online or not um we have not made a final decision okay thank you very much you're welcome and just by question do you have a preference whatever is going to be easiest for the parents because it's a group a great group of parents and the input is is just tremendous yes and we don't want to embed that so whatever is best for them and there's the rub because that we get better participation when we do virtual but there's a real need for the face-to-face interaction yes ma'am thank you thank you miss forney maybe you could alternate i don't know okay um on the uh i spoke with kerry about that because i
150funded enrollment we are almost at fully okay that's a great improvement and um only three openings right for staff you mean yes we currently have three uh well we actually have five there are two we're interviewing for currently so hopefully by next week it'll only be three yes but we're still searching for warm bodies there yes ma'am okay qualified warm bodies yes correct me if i'm wrong based off our last meeting um yesterday um we're at 100 enrollment correct yeah every day it fluctuates there's always somebody that comes and goes but as the time at the time of printing this it was we are and again part of our conversation yesterday we're very proud of the fact that we're as enrolled as we are there are numerous around the country that can't even get halfway
151enrolled right now due to covid so yeah we're very proud of that and actually for the board um this topic will come back before the board because there are some other initiatives and items that the board had previously committed to doing but were put on placed on pause because of covid and now we're going to revisit those just to provide a reminder to the board and to community about program location program expansion program consolidation so this is all part of a much longer much larger conversation but miss field's point well taken we'll make sure you get a summary of the executive summary at the next presentation and those will be calendarized for you as well okay any further questions anything else you want to contribute i better not thank you okay great job thank you
152i was very impressed by by the two individuals and joe and the team did a great job selecting our interims they have a phenomenal uh passion for this i was very pleased to find that we're very much in alignment as far as what needs to happen as we continue to focus on improvements um we have we have great programs we have great staff but there are additional resources and supports and program expansion opportunities um to ms miller's point you know with with our enrollment for students with exceptionalities and special needs you know i had the pleasure of touring the achievement academy uh two of their sites i have not gotten to the third site yet but i got to join miss miller recently at one of those and they have a waiting list of almost
153180 kids and so there is a need out there to service students with significant disabilities cognitive impairments physical impairments and that's i i feel bad that that's an unfilled need at this time so it's definitely a program focus for us moving forward um because and again really good conversations also about the kindergarten readiness test data you know many of you know this already but and i feel better saying this for the benefit of the public one of the reasons or two reasons why kindergarten readiness data doesn't really um look as as positive as it should especially considering the investments that we make there are for two primary reasons number one only about 40 percent of students and i may be slightly exaggerating that number up meaning rolling it up rounding upwards attend a true traditional
154pre-k environment not not not a daycare not not a child care supervision type of environment but a true preschool environment um the other reason is the test takes place almost eight months after students left the preschool environment and so we're very pleased that there's a conversation right now at the state level to shift the kindergarten readiness exam to the end of the preschool year prior to students matriculating over in kindergarten and and i say that because i think we'll actually get a much better data set that's reflective of students who are in pre-school and then we'll actu also when we get to our baseline if the state does move to a progress monitoring approach they will assess students three times in kindergarten we'll be able to differentiate those two groups those who attended preschool those
155who did not and identify and we may find that there is no discrepancy between the two groups or we may find that there are significant discrepancies and disparities between the two groups and the nice thing is we won't not only get an academic read but we'll also be able to collect and analyze the data as it relates to attendance as it replaced the behavior as it relates to behavioral issues and others so we're really making some strides in early learning and i'm very pleased and proud to have the team here serving our students and community that we do so thank you next item before the board at this time i'd like to bring mr santiago up the director of our esau programming he will do a presentation for you today a summary of our district
156application good afternoon so what we have to this afternoon is the district language learner's plan it's submitted to the state every three years and it's in accordance with the requirements that the state has on insurance when developing and implementing programs and service to the students classified as english language learners to ensure that compliance there are 10 designated sections and i will go over them right now the first one is section one identification that is done through the home language service when a student enroll in a poll county public school parents are given a home language survey to complete in that home language survey there's three questions that are required for the schools to ask um from the state and if one of them if that one of the answers is yes we will go ahead
157then and follow them to step number two and the questions are pretty much um in the if there's another language that is spoken at home or if the student's primary language is other than english um if one of the answers is yes we go to section two which is the english language proficiency assessment which is the ipt test that's what we use in polk county public schools and there based on the score we determine the proficiency of the student and where the student needs to be locate a place some students they might answer yes but if they're proficient in the english language they will not have to be classified as esol students the third part section three is when we have to place a student actually in classes and for that we review the academic
158records of the students and also which is highly recommended by the esol department that the administration meet with the students and the parents to identify the goals for that student that's extremely important in the secondary level where we have so many students that are coming to our schools and they are above the eighth grade and high school so we need to make sure to place them correctly and have an educational plan for the student what are the goals for that student keeping in mind on the students language is limited but i think it's the responsibility of the school to make sure that we address those needs and that's something that our the esol department is always willing to go and help the school if needed moving on to section four we have the comprehensive program
159requirements for the student and that's where we have the different courses that we offer to our students and how the student is going to be placed once they're identified as a english language learner in the secondary level we offer reading through eso with a reading certified teacher and esol teacher a english through eso and we also have a course that is highly recommended by the essel department all our schools which is the english language acquisition development class and that's the class where we help the students purely language acquisition it's pretty much teaching the students how to do school in the united states which is sometimes something we forget about it's not just about hey welcome to our schools this is how the student needs to adapt and and and be familiarized with the process on
160how we do school here in the elementary level we have teachers but we also have majority schools have paraprofessionals and the classroom teacher is the primary provider of the esol strategies for our students that are identified as english language learners moving to section five the statewide assessments the students participate and they take the access test that's what they're doing right now that's why the eso department is working all the way up to march 18 to complete all the students that have been identified as english language learners will take a state assessment access to identify their growth within the year time in school and then they also then go ahead and participate in the fsa state assessment to measure and compare their progress with the whole population and they have accommodations so we have to make
161sure that all our ell students identify either as ly or lf which is mean would mean students that have exited the program but are still in and we're still monitoring their progress they do we do offer them the accommodations during the fsa section six is the english language um professional uh proficiency annual assessment and that takes like the two i mentioned before the access test the fsa but we also have uh ell community recommendations which segues into section seven which is how we exit the students out of the esol program and that is through a committee meeting the students have to show proficiency in either access tests fsa or through a committee which involve the parents the staff and the data that the teachers have with their assessments different assessments section 8 parents guard identifications
162and rights interpreters are used as needed in order to ensure effective communication with the families the esol department has two translators for our district one's first spanish and one for haitian creole and we make ourselves available if we're needed by this for the schools to provide translation of documents the majority of it is documents and meetings we do participate in a lot of esc meetings when they need a translator um ms suarez and mr uh masseuse are always available and dominate virtual meetings now has made it a lot easier because they can be they tell me they can be in four or five places in one day whereas before it was one or two at the most so that has been a great addition using the virtual meetings but we do offer that most of
163the schools already have bilingual staff that helps with with that uh when communicating with parents and guardians and let them know about their rights and responsibilities and how they can uh help their students uh acquire the language so they can be successful in our schools section 9 is the parent leadership council is the parent involvement and this document that we are submitting to the state it says that we will have a designated person to be the chairperson and i have already i have one person designated to be the chairperson for that committee once the board and superintendent approves the plan and then from there on we will then proceed with to have uh parent groups in each of the of the schools so they can share uh their needs and what's working and what we
164need to improve so that will be done once the plan is approved and the last one here is the section 10 is the personal training and that is something that uh as a school district we need to be very proud of the fact that we offer our teachers the endorsement class at no cost they are if the teacher comes usually from out of state or somebody who's changing careers and they don't have that endorsement we offer that endorsement at no cost and they can take them depending on what level they are and depending what classes they are teaching they call them with they get tagged with eso and then they will contact our department and then what we do is we send a plan of studies to the principal and the individual letting them know
165the courses they are to take the time limitations they have to complete the the plan and then we invite them for the courses and then the district pay for the instructors to grade the the classes and they make sure that they are in compliance within the six years that is required by the state um and um my staff works really hard at making sure that we are providing those endorsement classes for our teachers especially now when we're trying to recruit a lot of people that are changing careers and they they don't have them coming out of college most students that come from the state of florida will have a element of education degree they will already have that in their certification we also provide that for the charter schools the endorsement classes for the in
166paul county miss fortney and ms miller oh lord i'd love to give a big shout out to all the wonderful esau teachers and paras i've worked with over the years they do amazing work thank you and um how are we on staffing now that you ended on number 10 the personal training so as far as for example right now um we have 892 of our teachers enroll in classes we invited over 1400 to teachers to enroll in the classes that's one of the things that we're working closely with school-based administration to encourage their teachers to complete the courses i feel this is part of the professional development and uh when i was a principal i encouraged my staff to complete it and that was that was one of the uh items that we check on
167the list because we want to make sure that when that teacher is in front of an eso student they have the strategies to meet the needs of the student and the only way to do that is by taking these endorsement classes miss miller this is another area of a great a great lift here in polk county because of the need my good question is when i see students who have made it into secondary you know middle school and high school who have significant needs that speak english as a second language are our staff following them like if you have a student in high school who is who is not able to read at a proficient level are we working outside of our silos i'm only saying this because this is it from an outside view
168it looks like the same issue we've dealt with for years like the ideal way would be for teachers to follow these students or i know records follow them but is there any link outside of the normal files following a student that allows the esau staff to have input on student progress or honest relationship with students i find it a little concerning that we have kids in high school who needed supports in elementary school and never got them um and maybe that was because of language delay or you know to fill in the gaps is what i'm concerned with we have specific people that work on that or is that just relying on one teacher to talk to the last year's teacher to understand progress looking just at data we shouldn't have high school kids as
169delayed as we do just because they're this is not towards you this is the system um to have students sometimes we find in high school um scoring low on tests may be a language delay or it may be they should have been tested years ago for supports and it just didn't happen so what is that is that a social work component what is that component to make sure we're meeting the needs of those english second language students so to answer the first part of your question um unfortunately the teachers don't follow them because they are at their school the esol department we i only have eight eso uh instructional coaches um but i do see what you have said what you said about continuing the track of the students and that usually happens for example
170in air in schools where the coach is assigned to a student that goes to a middle school let's say from elementary middle school that is within the zone or the area that he or she works with but that's not that's usually by coincidence oh look i have this student i remember him from elementary school um so but like you said it goes pretty much on the notes that are taking on when these students when we meet as a committee to see where the student is as far as language acquisition that information is received by the next school if and then they read to see where they are but no there's no we we can we don't follow a student right now we have about 12 000 to 15 000 students between lys to lf's in
171the district so um we usually rely on those good paris like miss forney said earlier that in in teachers that relay that information to the next school when they come and also it's sometimes difficult and i want to make sure everybody understand and you brought a good point because sometimes i looked at students that are in the high school in the 9th 10th grade and they have been in eso six seven years the max is six years we try to exit them after six years but something to keep in mind and is that the entry date of a student that start counting the six years is not necessarily we have found out that not necessarily the students in is in a u.s school for the six years we have many instances where the students go
172back to their country and then they come back yet when you look at the records of the student you're going to say oh look lisa has been here for six years but in reality she's been only here for two she went back to puerto rico and then she came back so that's something that that is the the committee and the teachers pay close attention to and then as a department we make sure that we provide those services to the students regardless if we are getting fun for the student or not because the truth is that that student is going to make it to high school and it's going to impact our schools and our community and they need those services i think he just spoke the public school mantra of taking students that we don't
173get funding for to make sure they get what they need i mean i appreciate what you do i i think this program probably could be doubled and still um be challenged with the growth that we have in certain areas of the county yeah this year's and she mentioned the girl we have been receiving um and and that is from um my two translators they get a lot of transcripts and miss suarez who has been here for over close to 30 years she's the number of students that we are that are coming to polk county used to be mexico puerto rico cuba now we're getting students from all over venezuela bolivia ecuador brazil a lot of portuguese speaking families coming to our country especially to the east uh side of the of the district and venezuela
174has a lot of students and they they're very methodical at making sure that the students are placed correctly because some of these schools their education system is a little bit different than ours and some of them in school at the in the 11 what we call 11th grade some other go another year so it's it's been a challenge with the the high volume of transcripts that we're receiving for our schools but we welcome them because we want to make sure that every student is placed correctly because eventually it's gonna they're they're part of our our students i always tell the school i said remember that the eso students are paul county students first to make sure that that that we do everything we do for all our students we do them for our eso students
175too miss fortney then ms miller you brought up a good thing and made my brain start working uh even quicker um why six years is that a state statute yes ma'am okay and then i i can remember back we had kids and i don't know if this is still an issue or not that were actually behind in their native language that like they it was hard for them to learn english because they really didn't know their native language grammatically or same thing with math uh because apparently some of them had not even been enrolled in a in a school before they even got here yes we still find that yes that's one of the challenges we have right now usually um when teachers usually especially at the elementary level like that challenge when the students
176they come very little they don't know their own language because then we teach them english from the beginning and they don't have that they will acquire the other the second language at home because that's what they speak so the in the elementary teachers like that and i experienced that as a principal at palmetto where the teachers are like that's that's fine we will work with them the challenges are right now are with the students that do not have um schooling in the last three four five years and they're now 15 16 and they're coming to our school because i taught secondary and that's really where we saw it and that number is increasing immensely there's a lot of students just you know for informational purposes a lot of students while they're trying to come to
177the united states they go from south america to central america they don't go to school there it's not like here where we open the schools for them so they are out of school for a year two years and that could be the transition between middle school and high school elementary school and middle school so when we receive them here they have been out of school sometimes for two three years and we welcome them and we work with them and that's where the portion what i mentioned about meeting the administration meeting with the parents and the students to identify their goals it's critical because we offer a lot of programs and we have to make sure that we offer them one that fits the needs of the student not just put them in one grade or
178in one school because that's where they they will go we have to make sure what are their needs how long have they been out of school and how long do they have to complete high school so those are the things that we encourage our schools to do and and we do miss miller i think this is more a question for the superintendent i'm interested in you know is there some kind of committee or group looking at that kind of growth especially with the different countries you've mentioned coming in and just like other support services like esc are we have we sometimes run into issues where principles doing what they've always done and not understanding the depth of either um you know the law or or what we provide here so how is there other than
179a principles academy which i know we're working on and i don't want to put other things on their plates but i've walked into situations where principals have or maybe the ap they just this is an area they just don't know much about how are we helping support schools and especially that east area with the influx of population and the administrators who may not be experienced with this i don't know that i would agree with you that they don't have much knowledge about this in fact you cannot become a school-based leader without extensive knowledge about esau and ell strategies whether or not there's a comfort with those vastly different or and let's be honest whether or not we have embraced that as a priority for our students is also another question and there's a lot of
180difference i think you know what miss fortney just touched on a few moments ago when we started talking about language transfer early models were really based upon a presumption that if you were literate in your native language and and it did depend on which language you were trying to learn so for example if you're fluent in spanish especially in a dialect castigano castilian your ability to acquire italian or french is much faster than it would be russian because there's so many similarities in the language and so again early models were very much based upon the assumption that students who were coming to the united states and spoke a different language were literate in their native language and yet we're finding in many instances as was pointed out very politely and gently by mr santiago there
181are disparate educational systems across the world and so i think to your point do we monitor yes mr santiago and i have had conversations about the number of different languages spoken here and so many of those are really just dialects that are spoken so we can say spanish or but there are multiple dialects that are vastly different just simply because i'm colombian-american and i have a background in castilian does not necessarily mean i can always understand every conversation with everybody else from any other latin or hispanic location because again our dialects can be vastly different so are we focusing on these things yes i think what our growing concern is becoming and much to edgar and his team's credit you know we're challenged now with languages we've never seen before i think earlier this year
182we had a family relocate here that were scandinavian and we were struggling to try and find somebody who could speak that language so tran it's not just any longer about translation it's that we're no longer just seeing one demographic subgroup that we have to train and get our teachers knowledgeable in so when we look for an el teacher we're not just looking for for an el teacher who has a background or or proficiency in spanish we're looking for as he pointed out portuguese we're looking for french we're looking for italian we're looking for um tagalong we're looking for so many disparate languages and so there is an area an opportunity for us to continue to grow but acquisition does vary greatly and success varies greatly and is still largely dependent upon each child having a
183strong foundation in literacy in their native language because it does help facilitate to a certain extent but many times where we have students who are going to be orally fluent proficient in their native language they can't read it they may not be able to write it necessarily but they have an oral proficiency and then we're trying to train them in a new language at the same time we're trying to establish some background and some knowledge in their in their in their native language as well so if i misspoke please clarify but i think those are some of the steps we're trying to take thank you go ahead sir any other question dr alan you know if you're ever recruiting or anything we know that miss cunningham can speak five languages no thanks for the presentation
184um you know i'm just trying to put everything together in my mind as well because you threw out a lot of acronyms i'm like okay what does that mean what does that mean so the ly from just probing a little bit on the doe website is initial into the program and then the lf would be the two year period as they came out correct yes sir so we have them for the initial period is six years and they're l y um and then we the ell committee meets and then we decide if the student should exit the program um it's recommended that at six years the student exit and then goes to lf and one of the misconceptions is that well if i have ly students the funding ends at six years so many well
185let me keep them longer they will still continue to receive accommodations as an lf and that's for two years and if in those two years we monitor their grades if the grades take a dive then they go back to well why and then what they will get is a little bit they will get more support in the classroom but for assessment purposes and tests every test not only fsa or access tests but classroom daily accommodations they will get those so we monitor that and then um usually within six seven years if the student is here continuously remember that i mentioned that some of them leave the country and then they come back so we have to keep that in mind as the committee decides is the student should exit or not yeah and you mentioned
186twelve thousand students that your staff is right now about we have about twelve thousand since fifteen if we include all the lfs and wow and how many staff members did you say eight so i have eight instructional coaches but i i have to say that uh mr mcnally and mr hyde are working with me diligently with the title iii grant to make sure that we increase the number of instructional staff members and that is done purposely uh so that way they can devote more time in doing the cycle coach with this with the teachers and working with the teachers and the students i have my coaches work with the students if needed because there are a lot of elementary schools that do not have teachers they have paraprofessionals and they do a phenomenal job so
187that's when my instructional coaches come in and help them out to make sure that we follow the lead from the classroom teacher which is the primary instructor when it comes down to eso strategy so the numbers i know i already talked to mr high mr magnum we will increase that for um the this the next coming school year with coaches yeah it's clear that you're doing some good work so really appreciate your thank you mr santiago could you clarify again this is because i've recently returned but if a student passes the fsa with a level three or higher but fails the access test are they still retained with an ly designation no if they if they pass there there will be the fsa yeah the fsa as long as they pass that but if they
188fail the access simultaneously as they pass the fsa they can still be exited then i want to make sure that yes okay all right thank you ms cunningham thank you mr santiago it was such a pleasure when you were a wonderful administrator um in my area and did wonderful things with children and teachers you're an awesome man and on behalf of the students particularly on the east side you know what type of populations we serve and the families i just want to say thank you because without having these opportunities to work with these students if you enter you know school at different times based on when you might be entering this country you need that lift you need that nurture to be able to start to learn the language and become proficient because i know
189what it feels like having been a child like that dude if you're smart you're intelligent you get it but if you can't communicate it then you don't do well on testing and it's reflected as years go by so um on behalf of all the students and parents i just want to say thank you you're doing an awesome job and we very greatly appreciate it so thank you miss miller one last question how many interpreters do we have that attend meetings iep meetings student meetings i mean how i've always felt that we are i mean i know we're in desperate need but how many do we have serving our current population so we have one spanish interpreter and one haitian career interpreter in our staff and they do participate as requested from you know the schools
190for the iep meetings and um any other uh school-based meeting that they have i know we rely a lot on school staff that also is um they also are in charge of interpreting documents i've walked with parents who came from a different country with ips or you know documents in hand that need to be interpreted so we have one we have two total doing that yes formally in title there's a difference because you pointed out school-based staff are very well-versed in a lot of that and assist on a daily basis but as far as formal translation interpreters yes some are but some are registrars already some of them are already front office staff um so they're not necessarily but if there was a meeting and it's a para educator or an instructional staff member it's
191typically you might you may be right they may be pulled out of the classroom or away from normal duties we have discussed other alternatives other school districts have looked at online in real time translation services that basically are charged a fee for we've been in discussion about that we can look continue to look for opportunities there again oftentimes it becomes an issue of of dialect and access but it is definitely something that we need to look at to further enhance our options for families miss fields my question was similar to mr to dr allen's question and i guess uh mr sanjeel will kind of answer that but are they at uh are there stephanie's being met are you understanding my question because there's a whole lot just from listening to him this is the first
192time i've ever remember us having a very detailed discussion on esau it's been a while that was the intent and so is staffing adequate for the needs of our school district and our students i'll let mr santiago answer that i know what my answer is so um everybody knows the answer i'll answer it um so yeah i want to tell you my experience is that we have in the secondary levels high school and and middle school we have a great deal of uh certified teachers that are serving our students our eso students in the elementary uh world it's a little bit different um i've always and i already have this discussion on mr hyde that we we could use more teachers certified teachers in elementary schools the issue becomes the number of lys and that
193we have per school but they are schools i i strongly believe as a former elementary principal i can tell you that having a an eso certified teacher in an elementary school it's a benefit to the school and not necessarily they have to be one per school i want to make sure that we're clear on that because we also have to be aware of the cost that comes with it but and we can do like for example i always say what the strings uh teachers do they share a teacher within two and what that does is it plays a certified teacher in esol with experience in the classroom during those planning sessions where you have to advocate for the eso students and remember if the number 10 was teachers that are getting their endorsement so we
194have teachers that are not fully endorsed yet that not to their fault but they're still learning how to use eso strategies in the classroom and this will be something that will be extremely beneficial to have somebody there already as of right now our esol instructional coaches are feeling that that that need but um i think that we there's always room from improvement but i can tell you that uh no student in in in our schools uh does not receive the the necessary tools to be successful our teachers are very dedicated and i have gone visited many schools and done professional developments for for our teachers and our teachers are very passionate and that is because of the nature of our communities that they're part of our community and they know what the students their awareness
195of what the students go to so um can we have do we have more i'm pretty sure that we all would like to have more esol teachers but is it feasible not right now but i think that gradually we're um in the right directions because we have been increasing and this year i handle a lot of appeals from schools requesting esl teachers and they have been granted we look at the data and if it supports that we push forward with it and they have been granted especially schools that are growing right now even new schools because sometimes just having a professional is not enough there's different than other areas the eso um aspect also includes the you have to do all the paperwork because we have to make sure that we uh follow the students
196with their ipt test their home language survey everything i talked about today and there's a compliance piece that has to be done that cannot be done by our instructional coaches he has to do it has to be completed by the school staff but our eso instructional coaches are usually more than happy to provide guidance on how to do it and that's due to the title three grand but that's one of the areas that if you go to any of our schools you will see that those paraprofessionals our teachers are very dedicated and and they do an extensive amount of work making sure that not only the paperwork is correct but also that the students are getting serviced and that's reflected in all the audits that we have which we have been very successful but to
197give you the succinct answer the answer is no we're not adequately staffed and we are working on it and much to his credit and that of mr mcnaughton and others who continue to you know as you've seen we've brought continual opportunities to the board and my commitment to you was to bring a new staffing allocation model or several options for you to consider that will address not only el esau students but also our students with disabilities and then hopefully we'll be able to select a model that aligns to our strategic plan goal initiatives and our outcomes that we expect but also affordability nothing that i can bring before the board will be a one year fix it will it will take us three to four years to be able to address both existing salary disparities
198and also be able to staff up to where we feel that we're comfortably meeting the needs or we're able to meet the needs of all of our students but it's you know we've started and i'm appreciative of the board and you know this evening i know the board has to make some some final decisions on staffing recommendations but i think i shared with you before the reason i was bringing hr recruitment and retention recommendations now was we could preempt the end of the school year and start recruiting and getting after those applicants early but we are very fortunate we have a strong team they do a good job we and again polk county has done an amazing job managing considering the resources that we have but our needs continue to grow and at this point
199i think our needs are starting to outpace our ability to keep pace with their needs and so i'm appreciative of mr santiago and his team and and the team that sits behind me in support of our initiatives and focus for these kids so all kids i should say thank you thank you sir no further questions thank you so much good job last item on the workshop today under superintendent's report let me clarify is uh an update on our covet recovery funding and this is being presented to you today by mr baldwin and i believe i don't know if miss jenkins will be joining him but we'll provide you with a summary of our initiatives and expenditures and recommendations to date good afternoon everyone i'm here to provide an overview of the covaid recovery funding that
200has been provided by the federal government through grants to polk county schools there have been three major pieces of federal legislation which have impacted education the first one was passed in march of 2020 right as the covid pandemic was starting out that is the coronavirus air relief and economic security act also referred to as cares later that year in december of 2020 the crr ssa act was put into place and then finally the american rescue plan or sometimes referred to as arp was passed in march of 2021. under the cares act polk county schools received just over 30 million dollars in the sr-1 grant under the cares act we also received several smaller grants and it's odd to call these grants small just due to the scope of the other grants they they are smaller
201in comparison but they are rather substantial grants in themselves under the crr ssa grant or the esser grant polk county schools received over 122 million dollars and under the arp grant poll county schools is scheduled to receive 275 million dollars for our sr1 grant which was just over 30 million dollars the majority of the the money went to two main categories the salaries for during the march of the 2020 closure right as a pandemic was happening the polk county school has incurred about 12 million dollars worth of staff expenses which we are able to realign towards this cares act grant the other one is about 8 million dollars worth of instructional technology purchases most of that is student computers that we purchased to transition students into online learning models under the crr ssa or the
202sr2 grant again we received 122 million dollars for this grant during last year's florida legislative session the legislators split this 122 million dollars into four main categories and so effectively splitting one grant into four smaller grants with one of the grants being what's called referred to as the lump sum where we have about 86 million dollars that we can spend on various categories overall the majority or a large portion of the funding was is planned to be spent on staff support such as premium pay stipends and supplements for teachers professional development for staff and additional staff costs we're also spending about 21 million on instructional resources including a wide variety of digital software books curriculum supplies all types of things to support students with direct support under arp the sr3 grant this is the largest
203of the three grants and it is a total of 275 million dollars it it has the longest life of the of the three grants as well i'll show you a slide in a second that breaks down the timelines for each of these grants the the largest portion of funding for this grant is scheduled to go towards cleaning sanitation and air quality with the majority of the projects being hvac restorations remodeling and then some installation of uvc lighting and possibly some dedicated outside air systems which provide some fresh air into the schools we're also providing a significant amount for staff support including additional premium pay stipends for staff some additional staff and some professional development as well here is a slide that shows the summary of all the grants the sr1 2 and 3 they're relative
204amounts all three grants total up to about 428 million which is a significant portion of money sr1 has been funded and we have received those funds and we have spent almost the majority of those funds and the vast majority we only have about a million dollars left unspent but technically we have spent those money we just have to reclassify that into the grant fund sr2 we have received the funds and we can spend that money up through september 30th of 2023. the sr3 grant under the american rescue plan we have submitted to fldoe and are awaiting programmatic approval for our grant application once we receive those funds we will be able to expend them through september 30th of 2024 this just shows you a visual representation of all three of the grants combined and each
205of those kind of similar categories to show you how they are split up among the different pieces in december last year we provided an opportunity for various stakeholders to be able to provide input about our esser plans we provided an online survey where different stakeholder groups could provide responses we provided a list of the activities that we had planned or the the activity categories that we had planned received a total of 550 responses to that survey um almost 95 of the respondents said that they agreed with the categories of spending that we intended to provide and then we also had an opportunity for the public to provide kind of open responses and i just provided a summary of some of the common feed that we received some of the public was in favor of staff
206compensation while others were not in favor similar with cleaning some uh the overall majority of people thought we should be continuing to spend money on cleaning sanitation and air quality but some people did think that we have spent too much on cleaning and sanitation similar with mental health support student health care and wellness and instructional options and opportunities just a wide variety of feedback that we received that's all i have for you today miss wyatt i just want to make sure that we highlight that there's been a lot of talk in the legislature lately about sr-3 and districts not spending their funding but our plan has not been approved by the department of education which is why we can't start spending those funds part one part two is that we've budgeted to use them later
207on because they're valid until 2024 i believe um so we're trying to budget wisely and knowing that we can spend them later because the ramifications of covet and shutting down schools is going to last far beyond the next six months um and we want to make sure that we can put those mental health supports and things like that into place long after covid because there's there's still going to be remnants of it for years to come so i just wanted to make sure that that was highlighted it was more of a comment than a question but that's why we haven't started spending our dollars because we still have other dollars to spend well and there's been a considerable exchange with the department because we've asked for clarification on items prior to their submission to ensure
208that they're allowable expenses for example offsetting our costs because we've had instructional vacancies to allow us to offset some of our internal budget impact by using for international teachers we could contract through esser additional school buses because we wanted to reduce the capacity of our buses um so that students weren't having to sit as close to each other the doa units i mean but to your point i think we've received tentative approval on the majority of our submission so far the department keeps coming back with additional questions as do we um but at the end there is some concern and we've asked for some additional clarification from the department and potentially may have to um send something to the feds my worry is that a significant portion as you saw of sr3 is on facilities
209issues that become preventative options for us in the future better air quality filtration uv sanitation all of those things are our key in key requirements for us moving forward touchless water fountains are things that we're going to rely on should we ever find ourselves in this situation again or should we continue to deal with various um you know variants of of of covid the the issue for us though is if you think about over 50 million dollars of what we currently have allocated in sr3 are for those doa units we've talked about these repeatedly it brings in more fresh air but 50 million dollars knowing that we're competing with school districts across the nation to not only procure those because they're very large pieces of equipment but then the installation to accomplish that in all
210of our schools by 2024 is going to be incredibly difficult so we we are in the process of asking for clarification that and i know that andy and i go back and forth and he's adamant as to his position on it i i'm adamant on the flip side saying so long as it's encumbered it should be allowed even if it goes beyond 2024 and much to his credit he's like i appreciate what you're saying mr hyde but the reality is we're going to have to get a waiver to allow us to extend those expenditures beyond that deadline and hopefully the feds in the states come together and issue that type of flexibility in the near future but it's important for us to point those out because buying something and getting it installed in this competitive
211market i mean so our three our schools that we reopened or excuse me our schools are brand new schools that we opened this year just this week we're still getting deliveries of equipment and fixtures that had been delayed because of covet shipping and and raw materials issues we talked about another another uh commodity earlier so it's i just felt the need to clarify that because it's it's something we need to pay attention to um we have been very diligent in how we've administered these dollars the team has done an amazing job just to give you a little bit of background every single department came in and was allowed to ask for their requests and then based off conversations with me and the team we then prioritized their requests as a tier one tier two tier
212three and unfortunately if all the money was gone after a priority one a tier one initiative then tier two tier three fell off the the spreadsheet altogether and so they were tough conversations because everybody you wanted to do what they felt was best for students and for staff and for others so i think what we provided was a very balanced approach um showing how we're focusing on these dollars where they matter most which is at the classroom level you see nothing there that largely or that in any way benefits senior admin or the district in its entirety as far as the district offices the priority as it should be was at the classroom level where it directly impacts students and our staff and this has been a collaboration with pea with afscme and with others
213but i did want to give miss jenkins and and mr baldwin you know incredible amount of respect because this has not been an easy task to manage and to submit and go through all the constant revisions and and to be put in a position where you have to come back to your superintendent say mr hyde they said no to your idea and then i send them back with a revised idea um to debate with the department on um it's not an easy task that they that they that they carry in this so i wanted to say thank you and and turn it over to any further questions to the board okay seeing none great job thank you both madam chair that concludes the superintendent's report section there are four items up for information and i
214do have a comment on item number two as requested previously from the board did i summarize any grant in excess of a million dollars the whole kids foundation i looked at that uh on that donation report that was fifty thousand dollars was does anybody know if that's for the gardens or bees because that's a i do not know maybe mr mcnaughton no it is it is the very first site combee i'll just go out there and ask him it's no big deal that that's a huge amount somebody had to write that grant because that whole kids foundation is awesome if you haven't ever looked at it i think that's for more than one i don't think it's just specifically bees that's what i'm asking yeah we'll get you clarification before this evening no i mean
215i i want to go out and look at it whatever it is 50 000 worth of that is you know that's my point it's huge mr wilson i was i was just waiting to make sure we were officially moving to item number two all right so item number two under the american rescue plan homeless children and youth project there's approximately two million dollars 1.8 million dollars that we're being provided specifically what this will target is allow us to continue to provide transportation to our homeless students based off their school of origin so no matter where a student relocates to they're allowed to be bused back to their original zone school for stability and supports also it will allow us to continue to provide these students and families with school readiness materials such as any school
216supplies and also inclusive of uniforms backpacks and personal hygiene products it increases the awareness through the mckinney-vento act and hearth presentations within our district and community it does pay for additional hearth staff professional development it allows us to further our case management to assist our homeless children and youth to ensure that they attend school regularly fully participate in school activities connects with wraparound services and provides referrals to community agencies and programs to meet current needs it provides our homeless children and youth and families with motel and hotel vouchers to meet supplemental housing needs it is interesting when you look at the total number of students that qualify 2 million or almost 2 million sounds like a lot of money but when you look at all of the supports that we're putting in place in particular
217motel and hotel vouchers that money goes away very very quickly i think if i recall correctly miss jenkins and andrew when we met with the team to talk about this and we looked at the total number of students that qualified it almost boiled down to roughly 250 dollars per kid and so that's that's a tough way to make decisions for spending so rather than just identifying one or two key initiatives what we allowed the team and what we recommended was give them the ultimate flexibility based on the specificity of that family's needs to allocate those funds to help support them that's why you see again with with little less than two million dollars here it seems like a lot that we're saying we're gonna be able to support but not every family may get every
218single one of these based off it's specifically targeted to their individual needs and so it also allows us to continue to expand our collaboration with local shelters and to provide summer educational wrap wrap-around services and supports for our students and finally technology we've been very fortunate as you know with a large grant but some of this will also go so far to ensure that students who are highly mobile because of their transiency or transient nature of their family circumstance will maintain some connectivity back to the school district and not necessarily lose on any instructional supports that they may require so that's a summary of the grant miss fields can someone give us a very brief overview of what other consists of that's a large amount of money for other 382 thousand hundred 500 i would
219have to ask if there's i don't see anybody here from that oh yes sir come on i apologize good afternoon what was the question what is what consists of the other amount 382 500 can you give me some categories oh okay yeah so we will be purchasing store cards um that's an allowable expense to this grant so we can purchase cards for like walmart or bells for unique clothing items that someone student may need we initially thought store cards for food would be something we could do but fdoes said that was not going to be an allowable expense under this grant to use it for food we also were able to put in here two contracted service positions one was a uh or is a systems navigator so that would be a position um we
220are seeing more and more families that are homeless for the first time i've had so many calls this year from families who have jobs have income but when their lease ran up they were essentially booted out because the rent went up so so much that they had nowhere to go but a motel so with these families they don't have a vast knowledge of what resources are out there and the system's navigator position will really help them get connected with the services that they need in our community and then there's another position for it's a community outreach facilitator and the important of the importance of that role is getting out into the community and doing some presentations us putting up our mckinney-vento hearth posters throughout the community in places that our family is frequent just making
221sure that our families out there are aware of our program aware of our services if we don't identify the students then we're not going to be able to to help them and so this position is going to really uh you know help us with identification by getting the word out there ben getting back to miss fields just real quick there was 382 thousand dollars for other and if i recall correctly it was there were the cards for home items and clothing but that's also where the uh housing allowance was coming out of fire yes that's correct i'm sorry you're referring to the budget impact analysis yes sir yeah that's correct for gift cards and housing housing yeah the hotel vouchers and the the store coming that won't go far no ma'am you see in the
222budget where the bulk of our transportation where the bulk of our costs and expenditures are is in transportation because again we have students at this point i believe we still have students who are crossing county lines to get back to their zone schools that's correct um we're partnering with hillsborough county right now to create a route for a family that lives here but attends their school of origin as in is in tampa um another important thing to note with the store cards is you know we are required to get receipts for every store card that's used that's going to be very challenging to do with our families so um you know we may have to partner with other agencies to utilize these store cards to ensure that we get that so that if we're audited
223we can provide those receipts to fdoe thank you miss miller when a child or student moves out of the hearth program let's say that they find placement in an apartment with the parent do you do they still stay in touch with um your program to make sure they're supported because i've just had an issue where the apartment has caused them to lose transportation so the mom is working now and can afford an apartment but losing transportation means either has to be homeschooled or go to a different school because they're 100 feet away from you know the bus stop or whatever the issues are do we support once they once we try to graduate them out of the program is there support for those people so they can you know maneuver whatever is needed to continue
224their child in the current learning sure so a student who qualifies as experiencing homelessness per the mckinney-vento act can receive services for the entire school year even after becoming housed so if that family was in a homeless situation during this school year and became housed it's their it's federal law that they're to receive school boards and transportation to their school of origin for the remainder of that school year okay i'll get with you after the meeting yes ma'am thank you see no further questions you're good thank you sir thank you next item and ms amato is here to address any questions is the polk pre-collegiate academy relocation seeing no question miss wyatt is there any type of deadline is a motto if you'll come forward sorry them to have to give us this information as
225to where they're moving just because this would be for next school year correct it is it will be for the 22-23 school year they are based on their current contract they are to notify us within 48 hours of them signing a new lease or contract which they have well they have notified us that they are in the process of doing that they are not required by statute to give us any certificate of occupancies or any other documented inspections until 15 days prior to the first day of school okay so they will have to have a space ready to move in by like end of july correct okay thank you no further questions thank you last item madam chair members of the board is the financial statement for the period ending december 31st 2021 ms jenkins
226is present i do not see ms hester in the audience do you have any questions about the financial statement madam chair i defer to you thank you and we'll now go to reviewing our agenda for this evening all right any questions on section d for approval of minutes then we'll go through the consent agenda f through i sections k through l miss fortney uh elementary 21c that's out off of 60 miss usher off of channel lakes i couldn't think is that is that it okay that's all i need to know that's fine at the corner thank you any other questions on facilities or human resources mr wilson is your i wasn't sure if your hand was up or if you were moving your mic i have a question but it's not that's all the next
227one okay i'll keep going in through p mr wilson um actually i have a comment about near pod i i think uh dr allen um clarified that this is a platform predominantly i think they did publish some but this is predominantly a platform it's going to be altered but i think that's that benefits the district um and so we saw we had a lot of folks come forward and talk about how what a uh how excellent this particular platform was and how it met the needs of our community so i think we got plenty of input on this and i'll be voting to support this this evening thank you thank you mr wilson dr alan sure i just wanted to maybe get some clarification on consent item n1 do we see that wrapping up this
228go round or is this that's what the recommendation is this will be the remaining funding to take us through the end of april and then we'll be ceasing our service contract with them and they've already been notified of that in fact we two of their individuals may become recruitment opportunities for us they'd like to stay and work with us and we have a need um so but yes sir this would be the culmination of our contract with them at this time okay and is there going to be some type of analysis just an evaluative of that service as we came through just because as we look ahead if this is something that we need to bring back um so we can consider the successes um of the program yeah in a sense actually so the
229answer is yes and that was part of the exit summary by our like my cogni as well is how do we do program evaluation so as we sunset this program it is a little bit complicated because their role varied significantly and in times included our own staff and we had to find when the volume would peak it become became unmanageable for any single entity to to manage the number of calls and tracking that had to take place so it was us in partnership with the health department and with our schools but i think we're in a very good position to acknowledge the the volume that they supported and served the types of calls that they supported and served i know that our county health department will would love to come and attest to the fact
230that without metasource there's just simply no way they could have managed this with us and they were very deeply appreciative of our investment there as well and involvement staff also our ability to take a significant burden off of staff because contact tracing as you know um especially in the early stages of covid before more flexibility was afforded to us by the cdc and others it was just unwieldy i mean one case could become 150 phone calls very quickly depending on where that child was and how many other how long they were on campus and you know those close contacts added up very very very quickly so we were very fortunate but yes sir we'll do some programmatic analysis and provide those statistics to you okay great and can i continue on on the consent agenda
231item number p2 on the near pods i was curious um when i when i looked at that big spreadsheet that we had of all of the devices that have been deployed i was on one campus that was speaking to the fact that the tablets that they had were not up to date from like an ios standpoint as it related to near pods system recommendations just so just bring that as a point of um you know caution in a sense as we adopt it i'm going to be speaking and voting in favor of nearpod i think it's a great application um i'm i'm trusting that our administration will be vigilant and protecting the content that's being deployed to our classroom i just wanted to bring that up as a point of concern as we move forward
232miss courtney thank you dr alan because i had missed a note that i was asking about the sun setting as well and uh also the near pod because in my schools i've heard the same and actually even with kids being able to access it on other devices like at home etc so yeah that's very important but i'd be curious and what you brought brought something up about the follow-up with meta source will that include having our administrators that were our boots on the ground able to give some sort of review on how it did help them etc does that make sense yeah we can we can we can incorporate a narrative i because i i know a lot of our schools had did have to make a lot of phone calls and you know maybe
233it was there was no way to absolve every party of the number the volume of calls simply because of the volume of cases that we were receiving each day um i don't think any of us could have prepared fully for i'd just like to hear their feedback sure absolutely any other comments on in through p okay section q miss miller i have a um a question and this is mainly an organizational um i guess input and the superintendent i have talked before and i know and i appreciate that he's come in and and working on equity of positions just as a fiscal matter and i don't think this will come up again and i am voting for this but my one of my high schools was given a program that we applied the cambridge program
234which we applied for a grant that we did not receive at that time we did not move that staff member into the next position of an ap 12 she was having to work that 10 months and now we're taking her to a to a new position and going to add a new program that may be two years before we add students um so currently there's 85 students in the cambridge program it was not grant funded the money was used from winterhaven's program to start it we want it to continue to grow but i but going forward i think fiscally um making these making these changes before we have students in the seats because the new program coming in is going to be phenomenal and i hear all of how great it's going to be but
235it's going to be two years out i'm hoping we don't have these gaps and i know the superintendent has a plan not to create those anymore um we were putting people in positions to work in programs i guess without compensation um but now we're compensating for programs that aren't 100 in place so i'm supporting this because we have people's names attached to it and this is not anything about our the people working because they're doing these jobs and have been doing them in the future though i just want to make sure fiscally we are creating positions um to support staff members with programs that are in place and we'll be and we'll be watching for growth to keep them in those positions because i'd hate to have programs that we cannot continue after we've made
236made places for these people to continue their work so i am supporting this i was a little hesitant because looking at it even trying to provide equity within that list some of this is you know we're having people run entire schools with programs and then we have some programs that have less than 100 kids but i know this isn't all a grand scheme to help things be more equitable in the future so i will support this just these dollars are hard to sell sometimes in the public i'm going to go to q1 were we supposed to see did i miss that email a checklist for the tpg on who's responsible for what as far as the company versus no we have not brought tpg back so we are still in conversations with tpg that's not
237part of this under cue today okay because well it's showing right tpg culture exchange services are you looking are you on the road q1 is the reorganization discussions of school and central office positions and then auburndale high school yeah that's right and uh tpg number one action agenda tpg cultural exchange services reorgan repurpose of vacant positions auburndale high school naming mata academy is three you know i think that okay i'm looking at my computer yes ma'am refresh it oh refresh it well i wouldn't do a refresh because respectfully we didn't pull the item today so it was pulled previously um so i'm not sure why you're seeing that i think it's on a hard copy that we got no i was looking at it right here um and i just refreshed and it's still there
238okay whatever um now i forgot the whole thing geez never mind it doesn't matter but ma'am tpg will come back madam madam chair uh miss fortney tpg will be brought back with a revision um and a recommendation we've still they've requested an additional follow-up meeting with us i know that they have been responsive to some board member questions uh mr warren and mr pitts continue to work with them number one we have to make a decision as to any expansion with our current partnership with them that will not happen unless we've satisfied all the concerns and conditions that you have outlined for us previously or maintaining our current program so that we're not displacing the current staff who have joined us and essentially penalizing them or the schools that they serve and the students that
239they serve and and basically bring a recommendation just to honor our existing contract through its termination that's what will become before the board but that will not come until next month okay well it's still right here i apologize on the work session it is still listed on that pdf if you go into the board meeting for tonight then it is not listed anymore it's already been removed thank you you're not crazy i didn't think i was but it could be very possible uh but i do want to follow up with uh what miss miller was saying i sent you a couple three more emails about bartow high school and just to make you aware all right no more miss fields so i had this conversation with superintendent hyde about bellacita and i had a chance
240to go and walk the the campus and i told the superintendent i had concerns about how tight it is going to be adding the middle school component [Music] i love the idea of a k-8 school that's not my concern my concern is whether or not there's enough space to accommodate that with all of the things that need to be in place for middle school students um and and i think if my memory serves me correctly mr hi you said you said you were gonna show me something yes ma'am so i'll ask miss usher if she can provide that for this evening miss usher we need to set backs from the property lines what ms fields is concerned about is once while there's adequate space how close to our boundary lines does that put the building
241how congested will that campus feel i assured her that there's adequate field space on the northwest corner that's retained for the elementary school play area and then they'd have their track but could you see if the architect has the setbacks please come forward has the setback distances from the property line so that we know how close the building will be yes mr had i can get that for you mrs fields i went back after all we walked the site and checked the acreage we have a little over 20 acres here and we don't need any retention because the development district is taking our water we usually buy 15 for elementary school so we have 20 acres net space so i know we'll be able to meet the setback and the architect did all that it's
242still an unincorporated pole county so we have to adhere with their land development code but i could get that everyone specific but this site is bigger than a standard elementary school site and we don't have any retention on site and that takes up a big part of the site i still would like to see it please okay okay thank you and then the other item the near part i wanted to just say that i went to two of our elementary schools and walked some classrooms and the students were very very much engaged and excited about learning and i think it's a great investment and i spoke to leadership as well as to the classroom teachers and they all were very positive and thankful that this is something that they won't have to try to figure
243out how they can pay for it out of their school budgets through their ptas or through their sac committees that they'll be able to use those dollars elsewise so i think this is a a great investment and they said that the leadership will be able to ensure that only the lessons that's been approved through the lesson plan process would be used and that they didn't see any issue with teachers being able to wander into things that might not be appropriate for the students so i just wanted to share that thank you miss fields and bella ceda is currently on the consent agenda are you okay with leaving it there do you want to put it on action item that's a good question it's up to you i think maybe leaving it there with the understanding
244that miss usher will get me that setback before the board meeting okay and if you change your mind before the meeting just let superintendent heider i know thank you thank you thank you dr alan thank you madam chair i'm just curious about this q1 in particular are we voting on this as a whole or are we voting on those individually i know there's the document that has it listed in groups they were broken out based off my conversation with the board chair i miss miss winchester and i made sure that they were clustered based off role position or title so that if the board chose to address them individually you could okay you can make a motion to address those individually yeah i mean i i think it'd be wise if we actually did break
245them out but that's just me i i don't know how we would discern that as a board um if it's clustered together as one item i don't know if i'm comfortable at this point voting on it as one item does that make sense and and i'll i'll speak to my rationale if that's okay so you know i think status and position titles are important uh and normally i'm a very slow processor just so everybody knows but you know i went back to our previous two actually yeah our previous work sessions and and watched um our past discussion on group five so if you look at the clusters uh it's in regards to the specialty schools and i'm hoping that we give a little bit more attention to the admin title at our specialty programs although
246i i hope that we have a long tenure in their specialty programs in regards to the administration but i believe the principal designation is vital for future leadership and these specialty programs overall i think status and position titles are important and sometimes more important than salary levels in particular and i'm only coming at it from my frame within higher education where we have you know different designations from a professor standpoint you have a instructor assistant professor associate professor and then you have full tenured professors and as professors move through the ranks it's highly unlikely for a tenured faculty member to transition you know maybe to another institution to an assistant or associate level position it does happen but it's it's highly unlikely so i see that in a very similar fashion as it relates to
247our specialty schools so for example in the future you know maybe our specialty program um would transition their leadership and so then the head of school designation may be considered a demotion in a sense for a so to speak i would say like a tenured full professor because really our principles are at the highest status in a sense in our schools so you know for principal to move to an associate or assistant professor or within the context of our scenario ahead of school so the title for me is it says at times way way much more than the salary but then i was also thinking well okay we just went through a superintendent search and um i was trying to maybe process that a little bit and let's just say our cabinet makeup was the
248same and with the chief of staff designation that we currently have and i appreciate you in that role but what if the position title that superintendent hyde applied for would have been considered like head of superintendents not sure and i'm just curious like would he have applied for that um in a sense so again i just think that the principle designation is vital for future leadership in these specialty schools sitting principals that may be interested in leading one of our specialty programs may not apply just because of the title variation and then secondly i'm not in favor of extracting the harrison from the conversation i think if we were discussing school level leadership within our specialty program specifically high school we should not be kicking harrison's or chart down the road i think the question
249was posed during our last work session does the enrollment justify by far i thought the percentage of the enrollment in students in the harrison harrison specialty program should communicate the inequity being applied to one of the finest arts programs in our district so and i'm speaking from experience as i look at these students that are coming through in their motion pictures programs and so forth this is an international program and i cluster in the specialty program maybe i'm not supposed to but i think it is a specialty program so the fact that we've now sort of pushed it off as we look at our specialty programs i'm not in in in favor of that i think the this position designation that we discussed last work session with harrison specifically the ap role has a history
250going all the way back to superintendent leroy and i think it should be addressed within this cohort so at this point sorry that i've just unpacked all this but i will not be voting in favor if it's clustered if we break it out into groups um i probably wouldn't vote in favor of that one group so we can break those out as this so it'll be six separate motions for that agent agenda item and we'll just take those separately miss winchester and keep notes okay thank you miss fortney dr allen would it be the group five that you are talking about yep group five in particular i really like your reasoning sorry miss cunningham thank you um i would have to agree um that was quite an analysis that you did um regarding our administrators
251going forward and i'm sure the board as well as i have received numerous emails concerning the designation of head of school you can say what you want but there is a perception that a head of school does not hold to the same level as a principle so i put that out there as well because this is very important because i know that we're trying to look at fairness and equity and set the stage going forward so i think this discussion is very important i also agree with dr allen regarding harrison and i know some said let's address it some said nope let's wait till the staffing plan i think for me i need to understand when if you're not addressing it now when was the plan to address the harrison ap going forward can you
252help me with that the next meeting that's what that's clarification i provided dr allen previously when he inquired so harrison was only addressed at one meeting at one workshop and to be respectful of not bringing items back to back right which the board has expressed a concern with i chose to delay that conversation for one more meeting because when we began this conversation harrison was not included in the conversation right because harrison has a dedicated principle right whether that's the right designation or not can be discussed at a future date sure because theirs was specific to an assistant principal right not being moved to head of school so it is a completely separate conversation okay because this situation involving harrison is is it's completely unrelated okay but we we you you do have the plan
253which you've just indicated to bring that forward at our next meeting for discussion and then a vote that's correct thank you very much any other comments sorry mr wilson so i have some concerns as well so i guess my question is do we need to have further discussion about this matter or what would you recommend superintendent hyde i would my recommendation is we go through and address each one of the items as separately as separate motions if the board does not vote favorably for the recommendation for group five i think there's an opportunity for further discussion and i know i can definitely share some comments as it relates to some of the ones that dr allen made i'm simply trying to rectify a situation trying to find the most amicable way i think quite with
254all due respect the designation of that of principle is the true head of school and there is no such thing as a principle of program never has been and they're not commensurate roles they're simply not programs that are supported by administrators the head of school designation is appropriate it's recognized by ib it is that they have and i've spoken to ib staff they do not recommend a dedicated principle within the program i think there's a lot here to continue to discuss but this is the history you're aware of the principles are not pure in program at night either so that means staff are not solely dedicated if we were talking about summerlin or even harrison a true school within a school model i think there's greater justification for that designation than there is currently and
255this gets back to ms miller's point and i think some of the other emails and concerns that board members have heard expressed by current staff i'm a principal at a school and these individuals are going to operate something significantly smaller than me and in some instances may make more money than i do as a sitting building principle so i think there's a lot of additional discussion we can have this evening i have provided the board with two options the board will give me some direction tonight and if the board wants me to go back to the drawing board i'll go back to the drawing board i'm more than happy to do this this is not something that has to be done and finalized today it's it's worthy of discussion it's worthy of of the the
256checks and balances right to give and take because i need to be aware of your perspectives and i'm very appreciative and respectful of those and i'll make you aware of mine and hopefully there you know we we have a great dialogue but at the end of the day we want to service our schools and our programs well but there is a purity much as you said dr alan to positional title and positional authority that we're trying to maintain as well and we have to be a little bit careful there so i look forward to discussion later this evening miss miller do you have comments i just um are we gonna hear from our new community liaison is are you gonna we gonna have time to introduce her tonight i'd have to check to see if
257she'll be here this evening so she'll be is that before before we vote like we should vote and then introduce her yes okay i just wanted to be able to give her an opportunity like we had the others and i didn't of course thank you okay thank you he'll introduce all of the administrators and you can heckle her if you would like i just want to follow up on the group five so just much like you said dr alan with the semantics of the title i've heard from a lot of principals that are more concerned of i am a principal at my school you're putting another principal at your school my school they're only in charge of two to four hundred kids i'm in charge of 2 400 kids how why would a principal ever
258leave being over a group of two to 400 kids to go and be over a group of 2 400 kids but i think there has to be a middle ground you know assistant principal is not a strong enough title for these program leaders but principle just isn't it's not equitable across the board when you look at our schools that have 3000 students approaching very quickly so that's kind of where i'm coming from on that so i just wanted to to follow up so thank you but we will go through madam chair if i may add one additional clarification based off a question or a comment that was made earlier when we went through donated items there was a lot of incitement and enthusiasm as it relates to a 50 000 donation we have found out
259that that was a typo it was a 500 donation um no less importance um but i i just felt the need to make sure we clarified that i appreciate it you all online watching us and then quickly quickly sorry to be the bearer of bad news on that one sarah ford i do think there was a 25 000 donation though that was real for athletics i believe was that auburndale high it was either fort meade fort meade i believe i'll have to go back and look but um so you can get super excited about that one i can still go look at this all donations excite us right but that one just stood out because of all the zeros they do bees and gardens i guess y'all whatever okay listen any other um super sorry
260superintendent hi do you have a report no mail not today and then um superinter attorney bridges you have a report and miss matthews is not with us all right so back to the work session mr wilson had asked if he could make some comments and then we'll go into any board member reports that they have mr wilson thank you madam chair um i made some comments at the last work session about the book issue i think unfortunately being called book banning and after the meeting i was criticized for taking passages out of context ironically some of the folks that criticized me for that had no problem taking my comments out of context and misrepresenting my contacts so i find humans to be an interesting study but i want to clarify what i said what i
261suggested was a community conversation i suggested that we talk about that matter because that's how we move forward that's how we find solutions and indeed through that process there were a lot of folks who reached out and offered some good ideas and some solutions and one in particular that i think will be acceptable to most the folks in our community and i won't i'll defer to superintendent high to bring that forward at the appropriate time but i think we have at least one solution to this that i believe most of the members of our community will uh will accept um there will be those folks of course who want to go to their corners they want to wait for the bell and they want to come out fighting so we're going to have some of
262that of course and that's unfortunate but i was very very uh buoyed by the response that we got from that and the facts that the fact that folks were willing to come forward with a productive conversation and positive conversation as everyone knows this has become a national issue and i think it is unfortunate and disappointing that it has been portrayed as banning themes and genres because that's not what it is it's about certain specific passages they are passages that are cruel and dehumanizing and traumatic there are passages that i can't read in a school board meeting in context because i'm certain that if i did i would be removed from my seat that speaks volumes my children both of my children graduated from this school district and i would not want them to read those
263passages i'm not saying that i would not want them to read those books i'm saying i would not want them to read those passages and i think there's an important distinction there there were folks who reached out to me said to say that those books were inspirational they were they had a positive impact on their life and their lives and they have significant literary value so there is that issue that's a very real and valid and relevant issue but these passages are are a separate issue that is also very relevant and valid and to suggest that we can't focus on those passages because it takes them out of context means that all we have left to do is fight over the issue and i frankly am tired of fighting i i want to find solutions
264the only path forward is if we understand there are two very real and relevant and valid issues here in understanding that we have a pathway forward and those folks that talk to me that's how they came up with i think is a very valid solution because they understood they're two separate and relevant issues so i just want to say thank you to those folks who did come forward and offer their thoughts and and did so in a very productive and positive way and i as i said i think we have a solution that will be acceptable by most most the folks in our community so i want to share that thank you madam chair thank you does anyone have any other comments or board reports from any of your liaison meetings ms forney uh the
265accreditation uh happened uh 2 14 but before that i met with um that meeting with the central florida florida school board association and we had uh quite the uh docket full of legislative updates which had probably already changed as i took copious notes but a couple of things that uh kind of stood out the school grading and the automated adjustment and the doe and the involvement of the doe [Music] making that work for spring testing is going to be an issue because student assessments um it's going to end up being still a big test at the end of the year basically is what they were saying um and that would be house bill 1193 and senate bill 1048 sarah beth there's a big push to for all to make fifteen dollars an hour um coming
266down uh which is going to be proved very costly for a lot of large districts uh included they've tried the state has tried to include scholarship students in our base student allocations without a category of categorical work and i know miss dodge is working on that but it could result if the error is not corrected and in us losing quite a bit of money as well a little bit of good news um teacher salary allocations it looks like they're gonna maybe allow us to uh use some of that for our veteran teachers a little bit better percentage for that um and uh the rest is probably not even valid anymore um because this was a week ago and they've already changed a lot of the added amendments etc so but that's what it was about
267um was mainly a legislative update and i urge you all to join the florida school board association's equity committee of which i'm the chair we are trying to do good work for all kids thank you yes um if you go on florida school board association there is a drop down you can join you can tell me i'll put you on the email chain we are looking for ways to not just make equity accessible but make it there's a difference between equity and equality so we are working with each other in different districts trying to provide support for school boards find out where they are as far as what their needs are and then also looking internally at fsba itself to make sure that we are promoting what we say we stand for by the mission
268statement dr uh i mean reverend golden from manatee county is the vice chair oh put you down amen yeah can do this fields has volunteered gotcha thank you miss courtney all right does anyone else have any reports dr alan yeah just a couple things a big week today for well actually big week today big week this week for the community partnership school in crystal lake elementary as we're meeting they have some of their key interviews happening right now for their certification process with ucf so a huge heavy lift for our community partners but definitely a very exciting journey for them so i was just thinking of miss hagan today and her leadership or principles of crystal lake polk vision heartland for children rob crowley with the united way and the staff at southeastern university there's
269a lot of touch points that are that's building into that community partnership school as they go through that certification process which is a rare opportunity for us in polk county with that initiative secondly i'm really excited about the junior achievement opportunity to serve on that committee and we have some great things happening as we move forward with the 3d school and so i'll save that development for another day but then i wanted to circle back to what lynn wilson was just discussing as well i did have some community members reach out to me about our selection of the committees and i'd already mentioned this to superintendent hyde earlier obviously we've got our special interest groups that are a part of those committees but i had some questions that came forward in regards to how the
270parent selection group took place so i don't know if superintendent hyde if you wanted to address that you know just for sake of our community i apologize board members you've received an update regarding two students in a motor vehicle issue so i'm sorry i was temporarily distracted could you repeat that again dr alan yeah yeah so i just had um reached out to you earlier today about the selection of the parents within those two committees yes thank you so the committee uh did it finalize its selection process there were a little over 200 parents who applied there's only six slots there's an elementary middle school and a high school slot on each committee and essentially what the team did was they looked for representation from across the school district so they did not heavily select
271from any particular municipality or city so they were very intentional in that practice they were also looking to ensure that in the submissions that there was nobody who indicated an initial preference so that we were open and that they were very objective in their how they attended to approach this process and not subjective so individuals took a very strong aggressive position on either side may have initially been excluded but so that's how the committee was structured it's also a very diverse community uh or book review committee as you know it's representative of various community stakeholder groups but also um very diverse racially and based off gender as well all right great and you know definitely valuing the process and just wanted to affirm that this is not you know the end uh to this we
272still have our school-based procedures that are in place so as we work through this process parents still have the opportunity to address their concerns moving forward at school level sites to make sure that that's aware so i think it's beneficial to our community to actually see how the book review process goes um and you know i i've thoroughly enjoyed working through the process i wanted to take a little bit more of a broad perspective on on the conversation rather than looking at individual text so um now my wife she's she's taken on that initiative to read some of the books um and then a lot of my friend group um they've been doing it as well but i wanted to bring more of that theoretical lens on there and i've been pondering the concept of
273childhood and my charge to the committee is that we consider what childhood actually means in this and neil postman if anybody wants a recommendation on a book it's called the disappearance of childhood and neil postman started the media ecology program at new york university several years ago but the text was written in the 80s so you have to put that in the context but looking at like medieval period when childhood was not there and how the alphabet was a big proponent and moving forward the idea of childhood in sequential learning and child growth and development so you know within this conversation on the side note i'm wondering if we can get some type of a demo as well um on the destiny system i know that um the ledger had covered some articles had referenced
274something from our pea president about how easy the destiny system um is for parents to select materials that relates to you know parents really having autonomy on their children's access to library materials so i think it'd be beneficial for us moving forward that we can maybe demo the destiny system so parents are aware of how that system actually works and i i don't know what that looks like but maybe like a work session or something so we can bring that forward as another touch points for parents in this conversation thank you dr allen miss miller we just have two things one on that subject i've talked to board members previous board members through the you know that were here through the early 80s i've afforded some to to wes who who got to respond and
275i just want to say that the um policy we have has worked i didn't realize in the past that people have used it slaughterhouse five was not used at one of our high schools and another high school committee decided it was fine um so we do have these things in place this is not a new um this is not a new thing that we've never done before and community has not looked at books it has been done it was done i've talked to someone in the early 80s that they had specifically made sure policies were in place so these things could be addressed so i just want the public to know this is not something that's just come upon the school district and we weren't prepared we have followed policies in the past in reviewing
276books out of the library but they've been done at the site level based on what the community and the parents have children at that school decide for their school and i think that's important to remember when we look at this going forward i just want to mention on the lighter side of things it's ben's birthday today and he decided to join us um if you want to wave everybody say happy birthday to ben and thank him for joining us that's all i have thank you thank you miss miller anyone else miss fields so my comment would be we hired superintendent hi to come and to be the leader of our school district and when the the banning of the book or the quarantine of the book discussion came superintendent hyde basically told us what he
277wanted to do correct me if i'm wrong and we all heard the process and at the time i don't think anyone had any problems with what the process looked like so my feeling on this matter is that we need to let the process work we have 16 committee members they've been given they will be given their assignments over the next week we need to let them do the work and then the superintendent will bring it back to us correct me if i'm wrong no ma'am you're correct and then at the end of the day we will vote on it and then the superintendent will take it from there but i think that we need to be objective and let the process work otherwise why do we even have 16 people that's going to take the
278time to read eight books that's just my take on it thank you you're welcome any other comments what else i just wanted to quickly um make sure you saw the calendar invitation from a vet we'll be having our joint meeting with the board of county commissioners on march 29th and then next on your calendar superintendent hyde and i are speaking at the state of the county that polk vision is hosting on march 28th at 8 a.m at the center for public safety this is the first time that education has been included so we'll we'll see how it goes if we get invited back um and then i just want to we just posted it out on our social media from the school district but youth leadership polk is a program that's morphed a little bit
279over the years but this is the first time that they're opening it up to all junior rising juniors and seniors it's a week-long leadership pull program specifically for our high schoolers i spent a few days with them last year and it is an incredibly impactful program so if you have any rising juniors or seniors in your life it's a week in june but it is so much information we have a couple of the youth leadership hulk kids that are now interning in several of our departments throughout the district so encourage any of the the teenagers in your life to apply um and then last is superintendent hyde i know academy open enrollment just closed like friday but can we at some point get an update on our numbers for opening for yes ma'am both choice
280and the high school programs yes ma'am thank you and i believe that is all we have today is anything else before our five o'clock meeting all right we'll be back at 5 p.m for our board meeting [Music] you