School Board Work Session | February 8, 2022

001[Music] good morning i will now call this work session for february 8th of the polk county school board to order and i'm going to start by reading our who are we statements before i turn it over to superintendent hyde so we are the polk county leadership governance team if we were to pick one phrase to define us it would be student-centered because when we come together to work we lean on our diverse backgrounds and experiences to ensure that the decisions are focused on providing a high quality education for all students the four most important things to our governance team are operating with integrity respecting our students staff families and each other establishing a culture where our stakeholders feel valued supported and have opportunities for personal and professional growth and supporting an an approach of continuous

002improvement to ensure student outcomes collectively we need to work on behalf of the children we serve and find avenues of agreement so that we can govern the district in an effective manner there is no acceptable alternative we will always collaborate in a respectful manner in order to enhance opportunities for each student and staff member we will not disparage others our students will thrive because we will remain committed to supporting the whole child we hope to engage and empower our students and stakeholders to create a community of lifelong learners and superintendent hi i'll turn it over to you ma'am good morning madam president members of the board staff and community members thank you for being here today for the workshop we will begin this morning with a presentation from tobacco-free and i'll invite miss haley cornett

003to please come to the front we've been in discussions with this organization over the last few months looking for opportunities to expand their presence and support in polk county public schools especially as we look to address issues such as vaping and or tobacco usage as well as other forms of nicotine use amongst our teens as many of you are aware because you are high school all of you have respective high schools in your areas you know that that's one of the growing concerns amongst our population and even amongst our student groups is is the frequency in which they seem to come across others vaping so it seemed very timely and relevant to to bring them here today so they have a brief presentation with you and we'll talk more in the near future about our

004partner expanding our partnerships with them to help address this issue by providing secession supports for families and students targeted training for staff and also being able to host open forums with our students and establishing student groups many counties in the state of florida have student leadership groups on their campuses that help address this in fact we have a young lady here at winterhaven high school who is amongst the state of florida is a leader in this regard but we don't have a club at the school so it's an opportunity for us to look to expand our partnership further and get students involved because let's be honest having adults talk to you about tobacco cessation and nicotine cessation is one thing but having your peers talk to you seems to have a greater impact and effect

005on them so haley please take it from here and you have control over the powerpoint there using the mouse thank you so much you're very welcome thank you um superintendent hi good morning distinguished school board members thank you so much for the opportunity to sit here in front of you today and to give you all a little bit of an idea of who we are and what we do um just for full transparency purposes things are going to seem a little bit odd today only because due to florida state regulations i'm not allowed to lobby elected or appointed officials and unfortunately my youth that superintendent had previously mentioned was unable to make it this morning due to a family emergency so expect the unexpected as they say and we're going to give you a little

006bit of a modified presentation this morning so if someone could go ahead and get our presentation up you're going to control it so if you forward there you go awesome thank you all okay good morning again today we are here to talk about addressing the youth vaping crisis in polk county schools and how our organization can support you all so what will we discuss we're going to discuss who we are what we do we'll talk a little bit about the florida youth tobacco survey or fyts as we call it in the data world we'll talk a little bit specifically about polk county data and what our data trends are showing and just for you all to know a little tidbit of information excuse me this fiscal year and this calendar year right now in the

007school semester is actually when all of this data is being collected here in our schools so you're your student violence and addiction prevention coordinator is actually the one facilitating all of that right now so we hope to have some great new data in the coming months we will also discuss the benefits of addressing vaping in schools and then we will not be talking about recommended provisions of a k-12 tobacco policy today but i hope that you all will take the time to review that on your own and if you have any questions absolutely please contact me all right so here we are we are tobacco-free polk i work for an organization called civic communications which is a contractor of the state of florida we work under the state department of health the bureau of tobacco-free

008florida so we're contracted with them so we previously had these services provided under the department of health and due to a grant cycle change there are now 24 counties in the state of florida that my organization represents and provides the tobacco prevention services for one of our other initiatives is students working against tobacco here in polk we call it polk swat unfortunately she was not able to make it today but superintendent hyde alluded to who she is and really what she does um not only here at the local level but of course at the statewide level and even with the national campaign for tobacco-free kids so some of our funded activities are actually retail point of sale there is a new law that went into effect last october it's called sb1080 and what that effectively

009does is it prevents me from having any say or any leeway with getting any type of point of sale or tobacco-related retail licensing marketing policies passed here so another one of our policy areas is obviously k-12 policies and that's why i'm here standing in front of you all or sitting i should say in front of you all today and another area that we focus on is smoke-free multi-unit housing so the way that we do our work everything is is very very data-driven and these policy areas come down as directives from the bureau of tobacco-free florida so what goes on here in polk county is not necessarily the same thing that goes on in hillsborough county or the same thing that goes on in osceola county it's all a little bit different just depending on what

010the needs of the community are and what the data shows as far as trends and vaping usage so why do we need this we have a youth vaping crisis here in polk county so in polk county one in six youth ages 11 to 17 years old vape or use another toxic tobacco product one in 12 report that they have vaped on school property one and four report that they have ever tried vaping 109 say that they usually get vaping products by buying them in a store this is where our point of sale initiatives come in such as a convenience store supermarket or gas station and then of course the even more unfortunate part is that two-thirds approximately or 61 percent are exposed to second-hand smoke secondhand smoke being either from cigarettes or from vaping so

011nicotine obviously is very very highly addictive these electronic vapor products where evps as we call them contain many heavy metals such as lead nickel they also contain chemicals such as formaldehyde and then of course thousands of other unidentified chemicals and the real issue with this is is that right now as far as policy and you know legislation is concerned the food and drug administration at the the national level does not have any general over broad over sweeping policies or directives related to evps they have not really come out to say yes they're better than cigarettes or no they're worse so we really just don't know right now and that's really the unfortunate part but what we do know is we know that these products contain nicotine and we know that nicotine is highly addictive we

012know that nicotine exposure early in life can lead to developmental problems later on you know our brain is developing up until the age of 25 years old so to have 14 15 16 year olds using these products is highly highly concerning not to mention the gateway path so to speak of potential other substance misuse and disorders so nicotine impacts learning nicotine harms parts of the brain that support learning impulse control mental health and i know that we are all talking right now obviously about the mental health impacts of covet 19 on children and we need to understand that not only are children more stressed out now they're finding other ways to cope with that stress and we definitely don't want vaping or nicotine products to be their coping mechanism and unfortunately we've seen in indata

013trends just nationally at this point that between 2019 and 2020 cigarette sales actually increased so on the onset of the coven 19 pandemic during the year 2020 more people were purchasing tobacco products or more tobacco products were purchased in general we don't really know what they are yet but it remains to be seen of course all of this to say that these products taste like candy so each year tobacco and vape companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars marketing their products in florida most recently i believe it was about 650 million dollars and their marketing schemes are not just these products that you see up here or the products that you see on power walls a lot of their marketing actually comes in the form of kickbacks where they sell their products buy one get

014one for 50 off or they do those types of sales where it's like buy six x amount vape pods for however much the dollar amount is and the purpose of that is to get people to buy more products up front so that they can use those products because they've already spent the money on it to then become further addicted so these products that taste like candy unfortunately you know back in 2009 the fda did ban flavored cigarettes except for menthol but right now we have no real overbroad policies that have anything to do with eliminating the flavor and some places in some counties and in some states have elected to try and prevent the sale of those products at all but really we're just waiting for the fda to finally come down and say yes

015we're going to view these products like any other traditional tobacco product and yes we are going to do something about getting them off of the market and getting them away from the hands of children and of course this is the part that i am not allowed to speak to you all about but if you could review on your own time i would greatly greatly appreciate it and i hope that this conversation gave you all no pun intended a little bit of flavor of who we are and what we do and how we can help i know superintendent hai discussed a little bit right now some cessation access we have a partner central florida ahack that provides cessation services either via in-person group quit or even virtual group quit to one of our neighboring school districts

016so that's something that we can begin to promote to your staff and teachers now and then of course the bureau of tobacco-free florida recently launched a live vapefree campaign which is allowing for students to text a number and get cessation services without you know the overbearing need of involving their parents and you know getting it to an escalated to a higher level i know that some children feel like you know how can i get help for this if i what i'm doing is wrong and we of course want to highlight that you know this type of behavior is definitely not what we want to be encouraging but we want to encourage you know providing children with access to quit so i thank you all so much for your time and i'm really interested in working

017with you all moving forward and i will now open up to any questions that you may have missed fields this question is from mr burjesu for superintendent hyde i know we already have a tobacco policy in place uh we did that some years back so is it comprehensive as it relates to what she's presenting today has anybody looked at that i have not been privy to any conversations about that we certainly do have a a policy in place thank you i don't know superintendent hard if it deals with vaping and all that but i know that it's very uh comprehensive so we do and i'd have to go back and what's going to be brought back to the board at a subsequent workshop is an actual summary of what our current policy is and what

018additional steps the district would like to take to help address this issue primarily while nicotine is a is an incredible concern for various reasons you saw some of the data and statistics here i have a growing concern as many of you do as it relates to vaping in particular because vaping unfortunately more often than not is not simply a nicotine product it's typically a thc or other product and the ease in which those devices can be hidden um it makes it incredibly difficult to manage there's no smell there's typically no vape or source or smoke any longer and companies have gotten incredibly sophisticated in how they hide them for example there are hoodies now that students can buy or people can buy where the drawstring itself is of actual vape pen so it's not simply

019some big bulky thing that when they first began or now even just the smaller vape sticks become a problem we're also finding from time to time that young children are picking them up in their households and they end up bringing them to school thinking you know well grandma has it or grandpa has it or mom or dad have it um and they don't bring it to school necessary to use but then we find out that it has thc or it has some other chemicals in it it's incredibly um alarming for our students and so you know again there will be in some enhancements recommendations to our existing policy more specifically to training and i would like to see us bring back and reinstitute the student-led groups and organizations on our campuses because i think that's

020a powerful opportunity for us to help address this issue well i know that there's a strong concern as you said with students because when i spoke at one of the high schools the students were very concerned about the early use of vaping so you're correct there is a need to make sure that we have that as a part of our policy and do whatever we need to help address it yes ma'am thank you thank you all so much i really appreciate your time if anybody has any further questions i will go ahead and leave some flyers and my business card for you all thank you all again for your time i really appreciate it thank you mr judge going to update the presentation here momentarily but i'll go ahead and begin the transition to the

021next topic the next topic on the workshop this morning is the calendar for students staff and teachers and our para educators this is the recommendation it came out of the calendar committee for the 22-23 school year if the board approves this calendar at the next meeting on february 22nd then what we will do is create draft calendars for the next two years in addition with the understanding that there could be some modifications and we would provide timely notice to staff and families if change were to occur the the most significant change in this schedule is the inclusion of three additional early release days right now this would give building administrators four total days half days that they could redirect staff and provide explicit professional development as you know we're very fortunate to have received a

022very large grant again kudos to dr barrios and her amazing team for their submission so we will be going one to one and as you've heard me say procuring devices and and delivering them to the hands of our students and staff is the easiest part it's it's it's expensive but it's the easiest part of going one to one the most complicated portion of this is ensuring that our staff have the knowledge and wherewithal to be effective in its utilization because and again we have to provide some assurances to our families as we make that transition that students aren't we need to address the misnomer that students will be staring at a screen all day that is not what transitioning to a one-to-one device deployment or or district-wide initiative entails actually it's far more explicit and

023it's far more direct and it's about empowering students and there's a lot to that but we need the time to train staff on how to best do that the other change um within the calendar is we've moved all the early releases to to be up against a holiday break um we've also worked to ensure that we're not coming back from a break only to subsequently go back on a half day i think that's incredibly frustrating to families and it's very difficult for them to manage those those schedules and so with respect we are we already looked at the attendance that takes place the typically the friday or the the day immediately adjacent to a holiday and student attendance declines as the staff attendance in most in many instances as well so with all due respect

024it makes a great deal of sense to move the early release to that that calendar day so that we can address those issues and provide that professional development um without feeling like we're forfeiting a great deal of instructional time so that's the recommendation coming before the board i'll go ahead and get to the presentation now so again all early release days were moved to fridays all early release days have been intentionally moved to align with existing holidays so as i used the example in november the early release will occur on a friday immediately prior to the thanksgiving break the committee supported the addition of three early release days to be used for staff to professional development if adopted we'll have a total of 10 early release days four are reserved for us to be explicit

025and deliver professional development to our staff ms miller our board member and mrs ullman aboard nominee were two individuals who served on the committee who could also lend their voice and they could share some of the comments and things that they may have heard during the last committee meeting calendar committee meeting ms miller is there anything you wanted to add as a new committee member that a lot of that work was done um as when i got there but it was everybody in the room agreed that that was much more effective use of our time the question that i have that um we were talking about that august 10th date that we have to start schools by because some people ask why are we doing half days at all because in elementary schools sometimes we

026struggle to get kids to go home so the days are longer but that there was reference at that august 10th date is why we couldn't start earlier and have less half days and take full days can you talk a little bit about that so i can't talk to so the full days creates an issue a financial impact and a calendar impact for for everyone because the full day would require that we pay staff to be present for professional development during those non-instructional times the benefit we have now in utilization of half days is staff are already being compensated for those days the the reason why august 10th and i have to bring brian up to the mr warren up to the microphone but i believe that that's statutorily directed as to when we can start

027and host school there's a no sooner than and no later than window for school districts and i believe that we work to adhere to that so i think again the justification is if we were to provide full days for professional development it would add additional contract days as far as compensation for all of our employees and when you think about 13 000 employees that adds up very very quickly and may scale out of our realm of affordability and so for this too i think many of our staff would agree that a half-day professional development opportunity is far more fruitful for them than a full day because it's very difficult to participate in professional development for an eight-hour day and continue to remain engaged now part of that we have to take responsibility for i completely

028understand that that the professional development has to be appropriate to the audience and to the need so that staff are engaged throughout the process so hopefully i've addressed your question yeah that's yeah you have and there was enthusiasm for this because of um low attendance on our half days anyway to match them with the day before the holiday whether it's already low attendance plus it gives the teachers you know that freedom of um usually to do more things in the classroom and what they need to do running up on those holidays i know that parents i think when i can talk in the community they're much more they're much more accepting of this than those mid-day mid-week breaks which are very difficult for child care um so overall i think the committee was very receptive

029of this idea and i hope to see um i hope to see this continuing as we renew the calendars if there's a statutory change because we've talked about that august 10th date before and some people think we should lobby to change that um then we would address it in the upcoming calendars i think keep in mind too that part of the reason that that date exists is to ensure and it is primarily a high school and middle school issue is to ensure that final exams are completed before winter break because it's unfair to send students home and assume that they're going to study and then come back and take their assessments post-holiday the other one is graduation for order for a lot of our students to submit their college applications they're reliant upon their transcript

030and so our ability to produce a semester one transcript for those students puts them in the best most competitive position for their college submissions and some of our students are early graduates some of our students may not require a second semester so you're absolutely right i understand you know there's there's nationally there's a there's been an argument having worked in another state why can't we start after labor day versus you know like that's what they do up north and well there's reasons they do that because of temperature and climate and weather and other factors but you know it's this is one of those things if the state changes it and and the board has an interest in us modifying our start date absolutely we're receptive to that we would just have to work as as

031aggressively as we can to maintain that semester one break before the winter holiday thank you miss cunningham thank you a couple of comments to address what you just indicated there was a time when polk county public schools did not complete the first semester in december and the overwhelming comments to me from area counselors trying to get children ready for college truly gave our students the inability to compete with other kids around the country who did finish in december that could get the transcripts and stuff ready to send out to colleges so i had several of them you know contact me directly through the years and said we need to get this changed and we finally did so once i understood the reason for that i'm very supportive because our children need that opportunity to be

032on the same level playing field as other kids around the country that are competing for spots on college campuses all over the u.s so first thing second thing is i just want to do a shout out to june allman i appointed june i think she's been on the committee almost as long as i've been on the board very faithful always attends and cares because she understands having raised four of our own children how important it is that the calendar you know work and to hear the and to see because i printed it out this morning it's just wonderful that these extra days were moved from wednesday middle of the week which is a nightmare for parents um to the end of the week i think is fabulous so just a whole shout out you know

033to june in particular for your service for all these years i appreciate you being so diligent and then secondly to the whole committee for realizing that when things just don't make sense by goodness you know if it's broke please do fix it look at ways that we can make it work for both students families and teachers of course so um just want to say thank you i love i love the new calendar so thank you and i'm very pro if we can look at the following years and begin to let begin to start to formulate that understanding of course that as time goes on those dates can change as as we move forward but it would be nice we used to have a three-year uh rolling calendar um years ago so it would be nice

034to get back to that so thank you sir very much appreciate it ms 14 and ms fields yeah i was going to say about the same thing about testing out before semester but uh i wanted you to go back to the uh uh reference on paying staff uh for half days versus whole days uh we're talking i just wanted to clarify we're talking pre-planning days before the 10th correct no okay so i believe if i understood ms miller's question and she had posed this to me previously it do we derive more benefit by having a fully released day that's a professional development day i just wanted to clarify that and so the difference would be students we would have we're still required under statute to provide the specified number of instructional days to students to

035create a full day professional development opportunity means that we would have to extend the school year but by virtue we're essentially adding that as a contract payday for staff and again when you look at the number of staff we have that gets very expensive very quickly yes i just want to make sure everybody understood thank you miss fields i guess my question would be going to early lease on a friday that could possibly cause more staff to be out correct uh potentially i i we'd have to look again we tried to move these to days where we did not see high absenteeism for staff in particular um but yes we could and we could track that and that could be a modification that occurs in the future i would think that we would do that

036i come from a my eyes are a little bit different because of my work at girls inc yes and what i hear often from parents is oh why early release and why so often and so trying to explain it to them and so now we're adding some additional early release days and it kind of goes back to what ms miller was saying about four days parents say they'd rather for the kids to have a full day than to be having to make arrangements for early release days and i understand about the money factor and all that i don't know who's on the committee but it would be nice to know that and i think it'd be good if you had someone on the committee from a nonprofit organization that could bring their perspective to the

037table for whatever it's worth yes ma'am and then i don't know how many parents on the committee i'm sure there are quite a few but again if you can provide that list i would appreciate it mr warren will give me that list and we'll get that to the board yes ma'am thank you and the other question that i had i think i know the answer but i want to ask it anyway spring break is now a week early if i'm looking at this correctly mr warren and why is it a week earlier because it's typically always the third week in march one week earlier and with respect to the reason why and before the committee um elected to to discuss moving it up one week we reviewed i believe it was five or six contiguous

038districts around our area relative to what their calendars were and at that upon that review the committee elected that it would be best to align with what other districts in our area are doing as well yeah that's good because that was the question that i was hoping the answer would be yes ma'am because a lot of our families work in orlando and tampa and so it'd be nice for everybody to be on the same schedule so that's good thank you dr alan i saw your hand go up great yeah i'm just going to say it was good to you know hear some um history on on the calendar committee and i'm probably with miss fields as well i'm just thinking about you know both parents working and so forth if we add three extra days

039what does that look like so i would like to see what the committee makeup was as well so i'm just curious you know how parent perspectives are presented to the committee are there parents currently on the committee just some of those questions that was cured and then the vote count like what was the outcome of the committee decision i can say that from the committee perspective it was unanimous that this was the recommendation there was no disagreement there was no one who felt something differently in fact i think overwhelmingly they were excited at the opportunity some had requested we go to early release every week like some other districts do or every other week like other districts do i'm not supportive of that at this time i think we need to maintain as much instructional

040momentum as we can and and that's one of the reasons again why we moved it um to be contiguous with with holiday breaks so what you find is that in a lot of months where ordinarily we would have an early release that would essentially may not make sense you come back for a holiday and two days later you're on an early release again you know we've moved that to create as much continuity of instruction as possible brian since the question has come up twice could you come back to the microphone mr warren and share with them who you know basically who what what's the committee comprised of which individuals thank you if you wanted to follow along or click on the link there in your board docs the executive summary i'm going to read directly

041from there the superintendent's calendar committee is comprised of about 35 member members they represent the school board the community employee and staff representatives from polk education association the american federation of state county and municipal employees the district office regional administrators and principals also represented as assessment accountability and administration offices business process support finance department human resource services and information services as well as payroll and support services transportation division it really is a multi all hands on deck interdepartmental uh review as well as including those folks from that are outside of our organization and your representatives as well that are at the table and and to mr hyde's remark it was a very um collegial collaborative discussion i appreciated the fact that we had folks that were zooming in joining us each time they were very

042engaged as we went through month by month we would ask for feedback you know is there any discussion or dissension or suggestions that we want to discuss before moving forward and on each of each of the items that's presented to you today we did had we did have unanimous support to bring this calendar to you today ms miller mr warren i learned a lot just from the accountability department and what the principal's talking about testing days so i know that played a factor in high schools when they have to get testing completed um so i do i appreciate being a part of that i just learned a lot about the planning of student assessments which is a lot to do with how we do these days off there's a lot of moving pieces with the

043various representatives that are in the room at that time relative to the number of student contact days and minutes the testing calendars the principles providing input for what would help them you know relative to returning from breaks or what what's upcoming for assessments or otherwise so you really do end up with a product that's before you representative of a collaborative approach of all the the members that i've highlighted for you today miss fortney no i didn't oh i thought so okay no further questions thank you thank you so the calendar will come before the board at the february 22nd meeting for approval um to miss field's question we'll do some additional analysis to look at those dates but we'll make sure as even though mr warren provided the list of participants we'll get you a

044comprehensive list so when we talk about community members how many of those were parents how many of those were appointees um and ms feels we'll definitely um seek an opportunity to see if we can be inclusive of some of our non-profits if they're not already involved but i'll get that list from mr ward next i'd like to bring steve cochrane back up to the microphone to provide an update just as he prepares um to deliver his presentation just so the board members are aware we've had two community follow-up meetings both in the east adult learning community and in the west adult learning community i participated in both virtually um and i believe that they were able to successfully address every question that was asked to the point i believe we have a great deal of

045support moving forward for the recommendation at this time but mr cochran it's all yours good morning uh the last time i was here there were some questions uh that the board uh asked me to bring back uh with answers and i have them here today and they're they're integrated into the presentation and because it's been a couple weeks i'm going to briefly go over some of those slides and then then we'll hit that new information right away so one of the reasons that we are doing um so recommending this move is uh the declining enrollment at the centers additionally um again this is not a local phenomenon it's not a state phenomenon it's a national phenomenon we have our internal competition which from grad academy or from from fresh start we have competition from outside

046the school system new beginnings and other private agencies that work with students to help get them ged diplomas our biggest challenge is how to provide the best integrated educational training program for our ged students and our esol students at our adult schools the integrated educational training program is an initiative by the state to make sure that we not only provide academic services to these students but we also provide vocational and training opportunities for them just a review of how the enrollment has been declining statewide a snapshot of our enrollment uh we were asked at the last meeting to bring the second semester enrollment and you can see that it kind of goes up and down but the numbers um on the previous slide show that there is still a consistent decrease in enrollment this map

047is an addition that we added showing some of the high population centers this one is for east area and where they draw from and you can see we have a very large number in the davenport area that number uh will continue to increase um what we have basically done in recommending this move is shifted the focus of our services uh more to the east however i do want to reiterate and this was brought up at a couple of the community meetings we are going to continue to provide service to every community we have satellite classes we will continue to develop those and we will put a satellite class wherever one is needed or called for again our plan is to relocate our adult programs to our technical colleges fold in the staff with the technical

048colleges turn the assistant principals at the adult schools into assistant directors this will allow us to be um more fiscally slimmer and we are also recommending that we move our adult cap from 18 to 1 from 25 to 1. that is not i do want to say that 18-1 is not a state recommendation that is something that we had imposed upon ourselves and consistently our adults show up for their classes because they have life and children and other things that that get in the way work but they tend to attend at a rate of about 50 percent of the time so the plan for the facilities that would be left west very adult school would be turned over to miss usher and the facilities department east area adult school would become the new real academy

049which would allow us to free up space at auburndale high school which they are currently taking up these are our numbers for our satellite programs this is a as current as of two weeks ago i do want to make a note that the mulberry redlands christian migrant association shows zero right now we are committed to getting back in there unfortunately we've had a problem with hiring a teacher to provide that service but we are continuing to work at bringing a teacher in there we think it's very important and when we talk about um going to our students that is a place where that we want to be that's where our students are at the personnel plan for west area adult school i'm glad to say that we've had some initial meetings with all of the

050staff together and have come up with some plans these are are are currently just in discussion but it looks like that at west um the guardian that would be displaced may be able to travel with the school because travis does have an opening for a guardian additionally because travis needs a test coordinator and some teachers will be retiring at west area adult school we may not have to displace a teacher from that school so none of the teaching staff will be displaced east area adult school again we're working on those numbers and right now uh it it says here on the slide that we would have three teachers displaced right now we're working on two and we're again we're trying to bring that number down to zero so we're trying to find uh potential homes

051for these displaced teachers and keep them in the multiple pathways and serving our adult students this question was asked miss fortney to the east area adult school um the first set of bullets where it says para network manager that's to be kept or is that to be lost that is correct the parent network manager would currently be kept and additionally we are looking at a way to keep the other pair because of the specific talents that that pair brings that pera has been expertly trained on giving uh the casas test and it's a skill that we don't want to leave so again when we merge these staffs i'm hoping that we're going to be able to absorb uh that paraprofessional i do too because i worry about the displacement thank you it's on my radar

052miss miller i'm i i was going to wait till the end but regarding the displacements i appreciate you looking at this and i want to make sure um there are teachers that work like you just said with specific um areas or expertise and i don't want to i know we have to if there's not enough students or we're having to displace i know by contract we have to go by seniority but some of these specialized areas if you have a if you have a teacher who's working with that program or with in my world with students with disabilities i would hate to lose someone based on seniority but their caring and expertise that that school needs so that would be my concern and i appreciate the meetings that you had especially with the city government

053auburndale feels like this is a service to their community so assuring them that they're still going to have classrooms there and teachers there in auburndale to serve that specific community i think helped with this transition thank you miss miller and thank you for being there it was quick um there was a question asked about the real academy food service because they would need to be fed from auburndale high school we've met with the with the nutrition department they are already planning to purchase a van for additional summer lunch schedules so they're going to just park that van there so this is not an additional cost this was a van they were already planning on purchasing we would purchase the coolers when i say we i've talked about the multiple pathways we'll purchase the coolers for

054transport the gas was considered to be uh insignificant because it was under a mile from the campus and there were no additional personnel will need to be hired because those additional personnel that feed real already exist at auburndale high school so they will just travel with the band and and feed the students a note about the um about the integrated educational training we do have two programs going now a serve safe handle handler certificate and a microsoft office certificate currently 11 students have completed the servsafe program for abe and 7 ged and i want to point out while we're very proud that what we provided these are actually very minimal levels of service for the iet program i included in in today's presentation and it would be part of the information that you would have

055access to online an example from the state of the model programs throughout the state they have that architecture and construction health science and transportation and distribution these are all substantial programs that not only lead to a industry certificate but if a student were to complete the program they'd be eligible to go on to post-secondary opportunities um as as of today we are meeting with the florida institute for professional development of adult educators to work on developing more substantial iet programs here in polk county so that we will make this model this next year so we some of the areas that we plan on developing are in in logistics hvac welding building construction and we may develop other iet programs based on student interest we are working on scholarships for the post-secondary uh tuition cost and

056we are currently working on developing uh some better marketing materials to get the information out there that we have a iet program for the students in program in polk county miss fortney is this where we would work in the internship with our own uh maintenance staff hvac et cetera that is that is a another uh internship program that we're working on we have a a agreement with an organization called act which is acting as a pre-apprenticeship program okay and they um we met with ms usher on that last week and uh there are currently i believe 42 students enrolled in that program they had to be identified at the beginning of this school year and they are developing through and learning pre-apprenticeship skills and then at the end of the school year we hope to

057place them in not just jobs in the district but throughout the county thank you so we are on our next steps and we have completed we've updated the staff of both schools we've met um with our stakeholders both in person and virtually at east and west area adult school and we feel that we are ready to make this move for the students of polk county and that it will be in their best interest to provide the the brunt or the substantial amount of our adult education at our technical colleges ms wyatt and ms fields um to ms fortney's point is there's anything that we can do with some of these programs that do align with our departments at the district to maybe see if we can get some of our adult students working part-time for

058us maybe as they're completing their um their certificates in the adult programs we certainly can look at developing that and and today is a perfect day for me to bring that up because we're having our first meeting with the um with the association of adult educators and i i would like to talk to them see if there's another county doing something like that and if not figure out a way to do it ourselves i'm just thinking if we have people looking at logistics that is there a way that rob could help plug them in to look at some of our logistics on you know working in that department if there's positions that we have available maybe to to grow our own and convince them they want to work here when they finish their certificates we

059will continue to look at the best ways that we can make connections for our adult educators and i think that's an excellent idea thank you miss fields when the presentation was made last time within the height one of the things that i actually is well we're going to ensure that none of our staff were displaced and you said we would mr cochran is saying if i'm hearing him correctly he's going to try not to have anyone displaced so is that some might get displaced are we going to do everything within our ability to make sure that these folks that's listed as possible being displaced find a place somewhere so they will all be placed i i thank you for asking because it's a point of clarification being displaced from program doesn't mean you're displaced from

060the school district in your employment we have more than enough vacancies for any of those positions to place them back in other schools other programs what mr cochran is speaking of is based off the change there may not be spaces for those individuals within these two specific programs but he's working to address that both through attrition and through natural attrition with people retiring and or individuals who may pursue other options because of this proximity to their to their home or other issues that they may run into they may choose voluntarily to take a different role in another building so as far as being displaced from program there may be as he pointed out a few people who were displaced from the adult ed program but they would be reassigned to existing vacancies and in many

061instances mr warren and i have talked about this giving them choices so that if they can actually be part of identifying where they'd like to go if they can't be at this program so everybody will continue to be employed it's just a matter of what program they will support moving forward so we're doing the best we can as he pointed out to make sure they can stay within program but there are some instances where the recommendation may be to reassign them and i appreciate that i think it needs to be better explained and clarified because this place when people are displaced in their mind that means they're not going to have employment i understand what you're saying i just think it needs to be clear absolutely a lot of people think rif right that reduction

062in force kind of thing where they're being released but we have enough open vacancies and we would work to make sure everybody is reassigned so we can actually provide that clarification to staff thank you yes ma'am because miller i apologize for not making that clear and uh what words are important and uh we i feel very confident i've talked to brian that everyone will be placed my priority is trying to keep the people that want to be with the program with the program thank you miss forney just to follow up on that uh do we still have something contractually with staff that if they let's say that uh i teach at uh bartow high school and i get displaced to lake gibson high school if i don't take that job because of travel is there

063any repercussion for that or do you give me a second alternative well the answer well so no so specific to your question if there are limited vacancies and you are reassigned and you choose not to take that reassignment then you are essentially to a great extent separating service from the school district because you've been given number two but that's not a fair question and that's what i'm trying to clarify even further the fair question is at this point we have enough vacancies across the school district that there are plenty of choices for individuals and again that's not even taking into consideration voluntary transfers that may occur which create even more opportunities in many instances what we would do is try and place somebody in the best position we have available with the understanding that should

064a subsequent position open up that we would work with pea and work with hr to reassign them further so again our the goal is not to be punitive in any way towards our employees but if someone were to refuse an assignment i'd have to refer back to our current contract but in most instances based off my historical understanding of this refusing assignment is akin to resignation um however there may be other opportunities where they say you know we'd have to work through that but i don't anticipate that being an issue for anyone i didn't want to be unfair mr hyde i just wanted to bring it out it's a good question but it requires clarification because it's again there are plenty of opportunities number two what miss wyatt was talking about that's exactly what we

065have been discussing with uh our hvac maintenance right there by travis i would love to see that happen and my other third concern again goes back out to ridge and transportation and so i was on a call with a different group out of lakeland and citrus connection was there and she followed up and they are trying to get with operations to see if they have the ability to make a specific stop at travis also so i wanted to share that because they already do service ridge but they have one that goes by travis so uh um you know just put that i'll tell you who that is et cetera if you'd like to know we've already met with them several times but they're not reliant on us approving a stop for them right they just

066needed to know what was needed they have the authority and we've been working with them actually to expand student transportation and there are some successes there where essentially not only will a parent now be able to see where their child's bus stop is and their current bus pickup time and bus number and focus but there'll also be a link there so in that case let's take a high school student who may not have a car but wants to participate in after school activities they'll be able to click on that link and they'll see the citrus connection website which would tell them that the times in which buses run and at what location in proximity to our campuses they are so we have continued to expand our partnership with them but we can definitely let them

067know that we have an interest in having a stop there i just sent you to the email so thank you i would forward it to rob i would like to say that that it will be it would be better to have the stop directly at travis but currently it does stop at polk state which is extremely close miss miller and then dr alan i want to talk about um because the next thing on the agenda is school leadership and i know we've made changes to both of the people that lead east area and west area of what their jobs will be or their job category description and i'm assuming these programs will grow my hope is that they grow especially that east side with that davenport area needing this kind of service they're not listed

068in school leadership positions but we have made changes to them you've mentioned assistant director the last thing we had in writing were directors can you talk about what that's going to look like he he cannot that's not his recommendation that comes later in the presentation today when we talk about superintendent's hr recommendations so the recommendations were to move those individuals to director level positions is commensurate with their duties and responsibilities and the number of staff they supervise so that's the change that's recommended for them that's not coming back before you today because there were no subsequent questions as to those positions at the last meeting the only questions that came up were about school level administrative positions because the recommendations were moved were to move some of our program administrators to principals so what you'll

069see here because there's no there's no vote today is the answers to those questions in item number six today and then i'll bring it back at the february 22nd meeting for all of the approvals for all of the positions that were listed previously i guess i consider them school leaders so when i saw school leadership positions i was i was concerned what we were doing with them because yeah but there were no questions related to those at the last meeting so this is from questions related not all school leadership positions that's correct thank you dr alan thank you superintendent hyde uh big vision and really i'm going to support this is huge i think it's a great uh initiative and i think it's looking towards the future which we need to be doing in this

070conversation i just within the last two weeks i think forbes had that article that talked about there were a million less students enrolled in college so i i think adult education will be a continual conversation i think it's hard to see that there's been a dip of 39 i think it was in ged completion within and that's the state of florida is that right i think yes yeah uh and that's hard so but i do like the idea that we're consolidating and you know maybe we can see a turn in that and and again i i would equate the 39 decline as related to the change that was made in the ged in 2015. um so i was curious um because i'm thinking okay we're pouring all this infrastructure into our academies and we we've

071got top notch academies right so if we see adult students trickling in that you know traculation from high school to potentially more uh technical certification and so forth um are we what's your what's your thought process on that as we look at the successful programs and if they don't pursue um you know college or university and they want that technical pathway how do we get them from there to you know ridge or travis you know to me bells and whistles are an important part of the conversation as well um travis needs and i'll continue to speak this i would love to see a renovation in travis i know we're putting portables there to sustain the consolidation and so forth but i'd love for us to continue to have that conversation because we're going to have

072students they're going to want to leave this beautiful academy with all the top-notch facilities we were having in high school and we get them to travis ridge but some some thoughts on that um vision wise how do we determine like these programs you know as far as concentrations as well and what do you see down the road for other options and concentrations well uh two areas that we're working on developing right now are cyber security which we have one class going in the district right now at sumberlin academy and logistics another area that we're developing at the secondary level we're working with [Music] auburndale high school uh to bring in a local business uh to assist us in in developing a logistic program there we've had we had two in the district um uh they're

073very teacher-driven they didn't they were not very successful we feel like this is going to be a more successful marriage of a partnership between the business the school and the instructor we are we feel like we have a very strong instructor so those are two areas that that we don't have a many opportunities for students right now but we're working on developing now as for how do we get our students from our academies to our great technical colleges well we work each year and probably not in the past two years but we bring in we will counselors identify students who have not expressed an interest in in college we try to provide buses uh from the multiple pathways or financed by the multiple pathways department from the local high schools to travis or ridge depending

074on which one is their feeder pattern get them in there present them all of the opportunities that we have additionally we encourage our instructors to talk about can make those connections within the classroom about how they can continue their education there and i should say if it's a program that we don't have but our great partners at polk state or florida southern have we try to direct the students in that direction too all right thank you so much thank you sir so the next item on the agenda are community updates i don't often time i don't get the same opportunity i feel that board members do to talk about things going on in your in your respective districts and it's important for me to highlight some things especially as i spend more and more time

075attending some of our events in our schools and i'll provide a better title to this than community events but you know i wanted to really celebrate the pole county youth fair and this will be something that we will lend our voice to um moving forward i know it's a great passion point of miss burns she was there bidding on plants and other things along with my wife and miss winchester on the last friday of the fair so she continues to have an investment there and and it's great to see her out at events still but what the youth fair has reported is outside of the livestock and the plant auction and some of those things we've seen an overall diminishment in student participation in many of the crafts and other submissions and part of that's

076largely due to covet i think everybody understands that that there's been a reluctance on behalf of some of our students to invest that much time in something to basically submit a project that may ultimately get cancelled because of covet numbers and so for i remain committed to the polk county youth fair to ensure that we're again lending our voice to this and encouraging our staff to encourage kids to participate it was such an amazing event and we was very fortunate to be there on a friday evening to hand out ribbons along with miss fortney and miss miller and you know we we purchased some plants ourselves and it was just a great opportunity and the last thing i'll say and i'll share we don't have the total numbers yet as far as how much money

077was raised because we're still waiting on the final numbers from the livestock auction that took place or excuse me i should say the cattle auction that took place on friday evening along with the the plant auction but i will say that on the tuesday alone they raised nearly six hundred thousand dollars um on auctioning off and all that money goes back to our students and allows them they typically secure those dollars and use it for scholarships and things of that nature but i'd like to also point out and i'll provide the board with their names but there are individuals in our community that are so invested in this and so invested in our children they spend in excess of 30 40 50 000 every year at the fair i mean when we arrived they were

078backing up trailers and loading them with plants thirty thousand dollars in plants were purchased by this one gentleman um and he does it every single year and it's that kind of commitment and the individuals who run that fair they essentially live on site for 12 consecutive days because when you have livestock and you have these kinds of things taking place it is 24 7. you know taking care in case there's emergencies and medical issues and other issues that arise and just protecting the animals and making sure they're well taken care of and fed and i tell you the outpouring of support that was there was so amazing and uh kudos to everybody involved and it was so exciting to see our kids get recognized i think miss fortney and ms miller would also attest to

079the fact that some of our students won so many prizes that when they came up they were literally holding five or six trophies and belt buckles and everything i was jealous i was envious of the belt buckles myself but just the sense of pride they had and to give them an opportunity to come up be recognized take a picture just it was just an awesome event and very proud of our students but it is definitely something we will continue to get behind and partner with because it's just it's part of our polk county heritage let's be honest and it's a legacy that we want to sustain and i'm a firm believer that the more children get involved in activities such as this scouting other opportunities especially anything dealing with animal husbandry the the level of

080empathy and and the the responsibility that they learn over time is truly important and it has a lifelong impact on them so what a great opportunity for them we also listed all of the different submissions there by department so you can kind of get a sense of how many of our students participate there were 401 students who entered the hog competition and it you know i know for some people miss fortney was very dismayed to learn that pork chops come from from from hogs i don't need to see the whole thing okay and your wife was the same way let me my wife was the same way um but just again i was truly impressed and having come from the midwest recently where this is a huge opportunity for our kids as well i would

081tell you that polk county youth fair really stands out i'd also like to acknowledge that there are multiple other fairs that our students participate in including the state fair that happens in tampa but there's a subsequent fair that's happening in in outside of plant city and in some instances because of age restrictions or if a hog or a something didn't qualify so in order to submit a hog or pig for for the polk county youth fair it has to fall within a certain weight range and if it didn't fall within that range they can get a subsequent opportunity to partner at the plant city one and then also go to state so again great opportunities for our kids and so well attended and it was just it was a fabulous evening albeit a little chilly

082i'd also like to give a shout out to mr cochrane and many of our rotc programs i got to go to summerlin academy and watch the air rifle competition very very impressive you know watching those students so they basically get 20 shots using the air rifles and summerlin academy has truly my understanding the most enviable indoor range in all of polk county and quite honestly in many of our surrounding counties because every rotc instructor said i'd like to see us have a range like this so i said yes i hear you all we'll figure out how to make that happen some shoot outside some shoot in cafeterias right now but i will say watching those students they have they have a specified they're on the clock they have to complete all their shots within a

083specified period of time but there's an electronic range and it captures all of their shots and where they impacted the target in real time and then they calculate a total score and then up on the board it gives them an understanding of what their total score equates to because some of those would be national qualifying scores and there was a young girl a young lady who had already shot and i saw she had a 511 total points which put her in a range just below the national competition range and she was just so excited but to see our students participate it was a great activity and something obviously all of our schools and rotc programs are committed to so first place was summerlin academy second place went to mulberry third place went to ridge fourth

084place went to auburndale and fifth place went to haines city these five teams will now travel in april to go to the state level competition in cape coral so we're excited for them we wish them the best of luck but what a great opportunity for our kids and and just to watch them shoot and the skill set that they have it's not you know having grown up with bb guns and things this is not that this is a whole other level of sophistication and the patience that they exhibited was quite impressive big fest again many of you were at pig fest i know that miss fields was there although our paths did not cross many others were there i know miss wendy dodge was there volunteering her time to support girls inc and others and

085so was marcus and many others but i want to give a shout out to george jenkins and again i always have a little bit of caution when i acknowledge george jenkins because my son goes there and i don't want people thinking i have a favorite but they're the only school team barbecue team in our entire district although it's a growing interest i'm excited to hear that but they placed seventh overall out of 43 teams in barbecue seventh overall there were national competitive teams who participate in this event they took second place in the rib category which led me to question why they're not catering events for us more frequently but they will be in the very near future i've already spoken to the teacher and others involved they took 16th place in chicken 13th place

086in pork and 11th place in brisket and they were very proud to tell me that they were just six tenths of a point away from 10th place what an amazing accomplishment for a group of teenagers at a high school and for those of you who don't understand barbecue competitions and and i don't i've never done one but you know when i retire maybe but this is an all-night event you have to tend to the equipment and to your product throughout the entire evening to make sure that everything is done right by the time you have to turn in your submissions for judges and what's what was really challenging about this year's event where the cold was the cold weather and actually several teams withdrew because they couldn't maintain their smokers and their at the appropriate

087temperature to be able to turn in a submission so they ended up not turning in something but it was a great event i'm very proud of our kids and these are these are programs that i think quite often sometimes more often not because it's a small program would go over overlooked and having been there um didn't get to sample their food but i was very proud of them and as we should be but this is also a good example of some of the amazing staff we have in our schools that are looking for non-traditional ways to engage our kids in fun activities that fulfill their time and i know that the school is excited and they're actually lobbying me to see if we can't host our own high school level barbecue challenge here in polk

088county so we're excited to to work towards that but i did want to take the opportunity to congratulate them and then unfortunately i did not make it to saturday's event uh mr cochrane and i were talking about this but we just held um our event over at uh ridge academy if i'm correct was that was that correct sir and it and it was for our health services our our health teams competition and so we had teams from across the state come here and compete we're very proud of our students and i'll provide a better update on that at the next subsequent meeting and this is just a small sampling of the things i've been getting to but just an exciting time to celebrate really what we're focused about right we should always be focused on

089our kids miss fields and then ms forney so i had an opportunity to tour the kitchen of the george jenkins high school barbecue team and from what i understand that was donated to them i believe but it is amazing and they are talking about maybe getting some other high schools to do the same thing so maybe next year at pickfest there will be an additional high school that would compete and i believe there were two of our employees i know mr townley was one i don't remember the other gentleman's name that's involved but the students were excited i didn't get to taste anything either but the the proof is in the pudding and what they got is recognition is amazing to me so congratulations to them as well thank you miss fortney yeah bingo what

090ms field said and i really appreciate you highlighting uh summerlin uh george jenkins mulberry district three rocks thank you so much i'm so appreciative of that staff and those students knowing how competitive the board is i'll make sure i highlight something from each of your regions in the future that would be nice but all right moving on there were some subsequent follow-up questions that the board asked me to review as it related to the school level leadership position recommendations to ms miller's point i should have clarified this further this was related to certain specific programs and so if you recall correctly the initial proposal was to move several of these back to a principal level position with the exception of cfaa until such time as she completed our educational leadership pipeline program became eligible again

091questions that were raised by the board was does the enrollment for the program justify the principal's level position because we have schools that have principles and is this program going to be sufficient in size that we would justify that and i think that raises another question how how set apart from the actual overall campus is the program to essentially maybe justify an independent leader um or staff shared or facilities shared you know there are some great standouts summerlin academy while on the overall high school which is across the street from the high school campus has its own dedicated campus and while harrison does share some classroom spaces at lakeland by and large most if not all of the performing arts classes are held on their own portion of a dedicated campus the other questions that

092came up was does creating the position of a principal create issues with others who serve larger groups and get paid less and potentially the answer is yes it does create some concern i did spend two days speaking with many of our building level principals and the question that came up most frequently amongst our principals and our school district used to do this and it is something that we are currently exploring is how do we differentiate pay based off the number of students that are being served by particular school level principles or by need by programmatic need or those types of things that they support and that was a process we used to have a number of years ago so we're looking at what other districts are doing to compensate school level leaders differently again based

093off enrollment size based off need based on specificity or program but that is something we're looking at in the future in particular creating a dual principle i think some of the questions and concerns that were raised were valid concerns related to ultimately at the end of the day who's the boss especially in programs that they're not cleanly divided so if a staff member teaches half their day in a program a specific program but then teaches the other half of their day in the rest of the school building if they question their evaluation can they then lobby the other principle to give them a better evaluation and it can create conflict and can create all kinds of issues especially when it comes down to scheduling and whatnot so how do we prevent issues and conflicts from

094arising between principles and right now we're very fortunate that we have great working relationships between these individuals but that's always going to change it's always going to be subject to change based off retirements based off promotions based off other opportunities there's always the opportunity for that to erode and become problematic in the future and again as i shared the question of who ultimately is in charge another good example other than staff evaluation would be student discipline at the end of the day who ultimately has the final say-so as it relates to student discipline or an academic concern or any other litany of complaints that can happen involving our students and what other options exist was the final question that was asked so i did go back and came up with another i did again excuse

095me let me refresh or take a step back i did provide you with the enrollment update just so you're aware um and this does not reflect the change i apologize because oh i'm sorry summerlin is in there so i added summerlin academy ib cambridge haines city ib kathleen high school cfaa tenor rock high school's cambridge program and lakeland high school's harrison finding performing arts school we gave you the total enrollment for the overall campus we gave you the total number of students presently enrolled in the program and we provided you a percentage of the overall school enrollment to give you a kind of a breakdown obviously harrison's to stand out with the greatest number of students and percentage of participants in the program itself with kathleen being the next highest yes ma'am miss miller i

096have a question um and i know we talked about students enrolled in programming and some of these programs are relatively new so two questions if a program was to change does that person follow or what would we do with the person that we give this title to could you i mean could you clara meaning does if the program went away or if the program if the program goes away the program goes away then there would be a modification to return them back to a traditional um schedule and so i think i i'm just i think i'm looking at this overall i mean we're talking about comparing harrison which is a standalone building um and students to program small programs within other high schools like is this does this need to be done in one can

097they be looked at separately and or they all have to be done as this next level i think my argument would be we do them all comprehensively okay i think the the question that you're raised really that we're going to have to get to is how do we increase enrollment in some of these programs tenant rocks will grow center rocks will grow relatively new so we have to grow cambridge is new um there may be some opportunities for us to do some things with zoning that i've mentioned previously but tennorak is also getting another program that would also be assigned to this administrator and that would be the 3de program um in conjunction with junior league and others so i think it's important or not junior league junior achievement thank you um so i think

098it's important to note that that program will grow um cfaa is relatively large um we'll con you know but again there's opportunities here i think miss miller to your point how do we grow the enrollment and participation in these programs because it's clear that that the need is there and the opportunities exist thank you so i based off the comments and the questions and requests of the board i did work up a modified proposal so rather than the position title of principle which would eliminate the concerns related to who ultimately is in charge we would give them as we currently do operational autonomy i think it's important to clarify that in most instances that we've been asked well we need a dedicated principle the principal discussion has never really revealed why it has to be

099the principle and most often times than not what the community members tell me is we want to have somebody who has operational autonomy within the program ahead of school allows that it allows them to best support support and function in that capacity with a high level of intentionality and focusing just on that program and the needs of its students while also comprehensively being part of the overall campus and so head of school designation may be a better solution to that and so what you see here is a modification to salaries based off a recommendation that we move to head of school and some of these have to continue to be evaluated each position has to be evaluated further to make sure that our numbers are correct and that we're properly addressing those things but ultimately

100this would as compared to the first proposal the total cost for this would be about forty five thousand dollars versus the initial proposal which was at 63 almost 60 or 70 64 almost 65 000 so considerable savings i think it helps address some of the questions and concerns that the board has i think it does create equity across all programs we did include harrison and summerlin based off the requests of the board to make sure again that comprehensively we're looking at all these programs simultaneously to ms miller to your point earlier i think what we may be able to do differently for a program like harrison right is if we do bring a recommendation in near future about modifying the salary schedule for some of these positions based off program enrollment then that would that

101would be addressed further at that time but again we tried to look at all these kind of school within the school programs to make sure that we that we created a little bit more equity across the board i think this is consistent also with what the board has done in the past it raises other questions um for for opportunities in the future but for right now i wanted to make sure that i gave you and i felt that i tried to address your questions and your concerns to the greatest extent possible yes ma'am mrs miller ms cunningham just wanted to say um thank you because i know a lot of us spoke about this at our last work session um and i appreciate you taking the time to reevaluate it and i really think that

102putting the head of school really delineates the difference between the program head if you will and the principal on the campus by by not having two principles i think that's a great great blend so thank you so much for doing this and bringing it back to us this morning and i fully support this and particularly harrison knowing how hard they work and and the need to have that differentiated as well so thank you sir and i apologize i should have clarified the harrison change as well so what took place in the past was we did do an enrollment modification at harrison when the program fell below a specified threshold the current assistant the principal vacated their role if i'm if i'm recalling the historical history of harrison correctly and board members feel free to correct

103me if i'm wrong the harrison principal retired or moved on the assistant principal was promoted at the time the decision was made not to maintain a 12-month ap but they cashed it in dropped it back down to an ap 10 and the justification for that was enrollment that they had fallen below a certain threshold of student enrollment with an understanding that should they exceed that enrollment threshold in the near future that they would get the ap 12 back and so that's why that was included in here was that my understanding is they've exceeded that enrollment cap threshold again and so they actually requested a review of of their enrollment and their staffing and i know the board had brought that up before as well miss wyatt and ms fields for the harrison and i was

104under the impression that we were you were just bringing the either principal or head of school positions this week and that the anyone reporting to them so guidance counselors teacher that the staffing plan would be brought later on is there a reason to bring the ap 12 for harrison right now when they already have a principal no we could we could actually move the ap 12 to a to an end-of-year conversation and make that modification for the subsequent school year it was brought here as part of this conversation simply because the question was asked what about summerlin what about harrison and so to get a comprehensive view of all of these programs in one snapshot but again the recommendation for that change could wait until the end of the school year okay because my understanding

105they would be the only school with both an ap 12 and a principal which obviously they have a higher enrollment but i think we need to look at i know you're you're planning to do staffing plans globally correct i'd like to wait until that conversation just to make sure that it's equitable across the entire district yes ma'am again only included because the question was asked and i didn't want people to feel like somehow we'd left the program off and you had pointed out summerlin to me earlier so i wanted to be respectful of each program miss fields and emma's cunningham i'm trying to find someone or is someone on the modifier summerlin was on um the numbers excuse me i provided the numbers for summerlin's enrollment all right and i had i had the same

106comments that miss white had about harrison but i wanted to know if it's possible to add the threshold of the capacity for these schools that would help yes ma'am and then i wanted to know are we going to do a modified job description for the head of schools we will and i wanted to know if we could clarify that the salary includes benefits because i think a lot of people are of the opinion that these people are making this amount of money and it's causing a lot of confusion and heartburn yes ma'am these all include benefits so if we could say that yes ma'am we can i'll make sure that the table also reflects that it'll say current salary with benefits yes as well yes ma'am thank you but for the public for the record

107all of these include benefits and mr warren uh mr pitts confirmed that previously for me yes sir thank you ms cunningham yes um i respectfully disagree with my colleague i feel that this needs to be addressed particularly harrison with this group i don't think we need to wait till may april may for the staffing plan you've identified this you all have taken the time to go through and i think this is very fair and equitable and quite frankly the school needs this and i think we need to move forward with this as part of this entire plan so i would like to see this brought forward whenever you bring the others as well thank you yes ma'am dr alan yeah i'm going to speak in favor of that as well i think it's you know

108quite telling if we look at the students in the program and i think you're addressing that but in a future date as it relates to the salary you know for school that's got the higher enrollment you know at the ap level there so you know even seeing that in future conversation as well but that to me reveals that there's a huge need there to to draw attention to this now thank you sir anyway miss wyatt i was just too a misfield's point on the making sure that that includes benefits if you could create a column that shows because i know we're we're trying to show that our benefits are very valuable so if maybe we could have what the salary is but then also have the salary with benefits on any of these that come

109forward in the future i think that would be helpful in getting that message out absolutely thank you yeah it's a great marketing strategy for us as well you're absolutely right now for the harrison thing please understand too i'll do a little bit more research um to make sure that that ap very well may be on a 30-day extended contract currently so even if the board were to take action on harrison it would not necessarily have to take effect until this summer so they're a 10-month if they're given an 11-month extended contract that would get us through june and we would just offer the the position change at the june july 1st change to take effect the subsequent year so they would become 12 month essentially at that point so it's not necessarily that you would

110see because again i put in here that the costs assume it's a july first start date and not a proration so these costs are what they would cost us in totality for a whole year but since they haven't been in those roles these will cost will be adjusted as far as our cost as a school district based off of where we are in the school year not necessarily retroactively at this time so but there's an opportunity to bring harrison forward with understanding it would not necessarily take effect until july 1st so it wouldn't necessarily be this year um essentially on the budget line but does that make sense i hope i hope that clarified and that's what miss white was saying i thought pretty much yeah i just would like us to have the conversation

111when we're looking at the staffing plans for everything just to make sure that there's not other programs and i'll also provide you i you know when we first started having this conversation several months ago i identified for some of these programs so for example um summerlin summerlin academy does have a system principles as well they have a essentially not necessarily an assistant principal they have a 12 month employee below the principal bartow ib also has an assistant principal dedicated to the program so let me do that comparative analysis for you again as a reminder because that's where we started to see really some of the disparate numbers especially when you look at enrollment numbers how do you get you know ahead of school and an ap for a program that only has 200 and some

112odd kids whereas we have school building principals that have four or 500 kids and don't have an assistant principal so this is really what we're trying to get at so thank you and i'll provide you some further analysis next at this next meeting in february ms forney and then in the meantime we have elementary schools that have a principal and an ap with like 1100 kids that is correct which and one is one counselor and and maybe a counselor one right yes ma'am this fields and that's what i was saying there's a lot of heartburn a lot of conversation out there now about the inequity so we had to be very mindful of that absolutely you know especially for positions like counselors and this is actually a good segue unless there's any further comments about

113this um to move into the national school counselor's um week week acknowledgement here we're gonna i'm gonna read the proclamation the board will take action on it at february 22nd however given that um school counselors week launched effectively last friday and it goes throughout this week we would be remiss if we didn't acknowledge the work that they do and to miss fortney misfield's points we have some schools 13 14 1500 kids at the elementary level that have one school counselor and the amount of work that they're being asked to do is immense and they do an amazing job but i had the pleasure of meeting that group last friday as they were going through some professional development and get to talk with them and and share my support for what they do and my sincere

114appreciation our sincere appreciation for all that they do each day to support our kids and committed to having further discussion with them but that was something that came up quite honestly when we had our community meet and greets when i was first being interviewed where staff were coming up saying mr hyde how do you plan on addressing the disproportionality and staff to student ratios in many of our positions so you know so the board has some comfort any recommendations that come forward with changes to the staffing allocation i think we need i'll say this publicly nothing will happen in one fell swoop in one year it's it's not impossible it's just simply not possible secondly everything will be prioritized and so even though i will bring a recommendation there will be tier one tier two

115and tier three recommendations meaning we feel that these are the most relevant let's get at these in year one and then as flexibility in our budget provides opportunities let's get to tier two and let's drill down to tier three so it's a very valid point that that others have brought up consistently over time is let's be careful about how we do this let's make sure that we're being equitable let's make sure we're addressing this this is i think this is a good step in that direction looking at how do we provide consistency in in uniformity across our programs but taking into consideration the staffing taking into consideration the enrollment and how does that compare to other programs how does it compare to other school levels and then based off our you know where do we

116invest our dollars which really should be at the classroom level and school level so great discussion but i did if there's no further questions on the topic of this administrative piece i think i have my takeaways and what your expectations are for the 22nd i'd like to go ahead and move into the national school counselors week proclamation if that's i see no further questions so again the board typically reads the proclamation we are working as a school system to capture all of these so you'll get them in a timely manner so we can read them ahead of time so the board can take action unfortunately in february as i said the board meeting falls on the 22nd which is two weeks full two weeks after national school counselors week so i'd like to go ahead

117and read the following whereas school counselors are employed in public and in private schools to help students reach their full potential and whereas school counselors are actively committed to helping students explore their abilities strengths interests and talents as these traits relate to career awareness and development and whereas school counselors help parents focus on ways to further the educational personal and social growth of their children and whereas school counselors work with teachers and other educators to help students explore their potential and set realistic goals for themselves and whereas school counselors seek to identify and utilize community resources that can enhance and complement comprehensive school counseling programs and help students become productive members of society and whereas comprehensive development school counseling programs are considered an integral part of the educational process that enables all students to achieve

118success in school therefore the school board of polk county public schools does hereby proclaim february 7th through the 11th 2022 as national school counseling week to be affirmed at the meeting on february 22nd any questions or comments about school counselors we love our school counselors as ms forney said we love our school counselors that is absolutely correct so can we get a break yes ma'am we can take a 10-minute break it's currently 10 37 i would ask everybody to be back here by 10 50. we'll take 13 minutes thank you [Music] okay and we are back maybe i think we are close to a quorum all right we have a quorum sitting down thank you madam chair moving on in our agenda the next item is the book review process as the board is aware

119there are several books that have been requested to be reviewed and challenged so in fairness to our community and fair in an opportunity to be transparent i wanted to review the process with the board and also um by virtue with our community and stakeholders so the background is that several months ago we were provided an initial list of 52 books that a stakeholder group had found concerning or identified as concerning and potentially inappropriate that we that may or may not have been contained within our school libraries and at that time we had not done the audit to determine which books were actually located in our schools and at which schools they were located and a number of books that were present was still being reviewed as well so we did find that a number of

120the books were not in circulation in any of our school buildings and we were able to provide information to them as to where those books are again the quantities of books and we went a step further and actually provided the history two to three year history of the number of times those books had been checked out at each school so then as i shared we discussed with the group uh the process that the school district has had it's a long-standing policy i had forwarded that to the board some several some time ago so that you're aware of where it's contained within the admin policies and admin regulations that allows for any resident and or parent who resides within poll county public schools to challenge media materials there are two challenges that parents and community residents

121can issue in a school district as it relates to materials one is instructional materials there's a specified timeline so when the board takes action to adopt curriculum and subsequently curriculum materials there's a 30-day window in which parents and or residents can challenge the adoption of said materials that's one process the second process as i just outlined or as i shared previously is the process in which a parent or resident can challenge a resource material that's contained within a school library and so just as we shared i shared with them that process that they would have to take to address those concerns at the school level i also outlined for them that you know very much as we've outlined in our human growth and development curriculum parents can opt their children out of specific titles and

122or themes by virtue of notifying the school of their concerns with those with those with that content on friday january 21st i was then subsequently made aware of allegations that the group was alleging that 16 of the books were in violation of florida statutes specifically statute florida statute 847.012 which relates to harmful materials in florida statute 847.001 which is which relates specifically to obscenity laws based off that information you know i wanted to provide the board with some context here and so this slide shows you of the 16 books the frequency in which those books were checked out for all of our schools so for example the book titled it's perfectly normal by robbie h harris over the last two to three years has never been checked out by a student so there are actually

123five books that have never been circulated in any of our schools there are the countless you can see here the rest of the books the majority have been checked out um only less than five times and so the most frequently checked out book quite honestly was drama um for our students and so and i'll update that number in there for you so again we wanted to provide some context here to say yes just the mere existence of these books because part of the concern is that the presence of these books somehow unduly influences children by their mere presence in the school so you have to look at circulation how frequently are children actually checking these books out i think that also raises a question and this is where mr where mr bridges and others will

124have to lend their area of expertise which is what's the definition of distribution and the supreme court has actually ruled on this matter previously that in this regard distribution would not come into consideration when it's a voluntary process that children take to check a book out from the media center so this is a complicated process it's a very complicated and delicate issue with concerns on both sides i mean i would share the same concerns as many board members and some of our community members that we want materials in our school libraries to be appropriate we want to make sure that they don't conflict and create issues for our students and our families and our values and that's appropriate but we also have to walk a fine line and so you know the decision was made

125as i've been asked why did we quarantine the books why do we temporarily pause distribution of these books and the easiest answer to give is quite frankly if if there's a claim that we're in violation of statute and more importantly one of these statutes specifically says that each instance that these books would be checked out constitutes a separate felony charge now that felony charge is not going to rise to my level i'm not the one checking out the books nor is it going to arguably rise to the level of a board member it would however subject potentially subject staff our media specialists and our media paras who end up subsequently checking out these books to basically if there were an allegation or a charge that they would be potentially charged with a felony for each

126and every time again that they checked this book out to a student it's not a fair position to put our staff in nor is an appropriate position to put them in as superintendent as you know and as board members we have an obligation to investigate and address any issue where there's an allegation that we're in violation of statute so at this time it made the most sense to put those books on what we basically could say is an adaptive pause to until such time as the books can be reviewed our board policy 2520 and and we've received some questions how is it that we have a different policy or how is it the superintendent has made a decision to do this when that hasn't necessarily been board policy in the past and that may be

127true in the past however our current board policy only speaks to the adoption of instructional materials it does not speak the board by virtue of its role or myself by virtue of a superintendent's role in authority i don't neither of us adopt materials at the school level for media centers media centers typically will purchase those materials either through grants through donations from their pto pta other types of donations fundraising events and there is an allocation that they receive more often than not from the school district to help them supplement their collections but those books are not authorized or proved or vetted through the school district as instructional materials are and so the board policy speaks specifically to instructional materials and again there is a there is a significant difference in definition between instruction materials and

128supplemental resources additionally resources are contained within the media center and so by virtue of that the board policy however means that i have to have administrative policies and regulations and so admin policy sits behind board policy which sits behind statute that basically is how we as a school district will address these issues moving forward and why board policy did not explicitly address school level or media center materials it did address instruction materials and so we actually have a long-standing process that allows for materials to be challenged in essence what takes place is a parent or resident can go to a school where they have a concern employees can challenge and i think i've provided the board previously with the history of book challenges here in polk county going back over 30 years and but interestingly

129enough it's been a pretty steady process for us and so what ends up happening is at the school level a committee is formed what i did was i took our administrative policies because at the school level if that committee meets and decides to uphold or retain a book then there is a process by which that resident or parent can challenge at the district level and so we would subsequently put together a district review committee be given the number of books that exist across the school district and the burden that that would create for each and every school to have to address almost 13 books depending on the school level it didn't make sense to address it that way so we elevate it to a district level concern a district level review and so we put

130together a very comprehensive committee the committee structure typically take takes into consideration or typically includes a school level administrator a media specialist some teachers and some parents what we've done is we've gone well beyond that in our committee structure here so we will have two committees previously i had recommended to the board that we have an elementary committee and a secondary committee based our further discussion with with our group in order to do this expeditiously and in order to stack and create these committee structures and again to allow them to proceed in a timely manner the recommendation is just to have two sitting committees and the books were delineated here for you and we'll go through those in a minute the committee structure for each committee will include either the chief academic officer or his

131or her designee so that would be mr mcnaughton it essentially would have to be a curriculum a district curriculum level specialist or higher level position it will have at least two library or media specialists on each committee to teachers per committee to parents per committee one representative from the florida association for media here in florida one per committee one representative from the naacp one representative from equality florida one representative from the concerned citizens of polk one representative from the ccdf student support services would also have two representatives that include school counselors psychologists and or social workers we would also look to incorporate a child psychologist or child developmental spell development specialist likely to come from one of our local colleges and universities and then students at the secondary level with parental consent we would allow

132for the high school level two students to participate in a review committee which is allowed under our district policy presently for school level reviews given the nature of the concerns with these books we would require a waiver and then we would also have a facilitator for each group ms foreign are we going to have a first amendment lawyer on these groups we're not thank you we have we have the ability to have representation and or additional insight mr bridges will provide some directions as to what the committee is required to address and what they are to focus on and i get into that here in a moment however should there be a subsequent challenge after a book is reviewed then yes we would have we would have access to specific legal counsel if needed we

133have we have a recommendation on tap for for a uh a first amendment first amendment attorney who routinely represents school districts successfully thank you just just a point of clarification the committee structure um as it relates to parents teachers and district level staff is cons is commensurate with what our current policy is in admin regs with the what we did was we limited one representative for each community-based group so um just for clarification there miss fields so will there be an application that the members would have to complete and if so who will determine who gets selected because i'm sure you're going to have a lot of people they're going to want to serve yes ma'am so yes there is an application in fact the application for staff went out yesterday and as of this

134morning we had almost 100 applicants so there is a vetting process number one um that hundred staff is inclusive of all of those positions right so we would look to see how many have applied we'd look to see what school level they represent the application does ask them what specific skills that they believe they bring to the review process and basically what they hope to accomplish in this partnership and so those will be reviewed at the district level for placement on those committees so we have capture all of that the applications for community members will go live tonight mr geary is waiting after this meeting it will the emails will start flowing to go out to our community members and many of these community groups we've already reached out to and they're aware that that

135will be coming to them and then the applications will come back to you and someone else to determine who gets to serve on the committee that is correct and if the board would like to see those applications in their entirety i'd be happy to compile those i'm not asking for that i just wanted to know what the process was yes ma'am thank you miss miller can you talk about the process of at the site level the school level for parents notifying schools what that looks like and can you also answer do our schools have the capability of locking down google and youtube and tick tock and snapchat and instagram okay so let me take one question at a time so i apologize i mean no disrespect by the chuckle so the first question was what's

136the process so there is a form within the administrative regs that has to be submitted by a parent or a community member to the building principal to trigger um the review again considering the number of books being challenged and the frequency in which they appear in our schools it is none it's an unmanageable burden to place at the school level so we elevated it to our level and based off the documents that have been submitted to us we're using that as essentially qualifying as the form being submitted as far as we do have filtering for for a lot of the content that you that you talked about as it relates to students using um our network to gain access to youtube the internet and those types of things so we do have filtering available there

137as far as our ability to lock down that content on personal devices and or outside of school we do not have the mechanism to do that and that really rel falls more to prevent parents establishing parental controls on those students accounts their children's accounts on their phones and their personal devices um as a parent i i definitely understand parental control the form i just want to make sure it's it's um you know it's available to parents if they have that form and this is for a lot of things i know of a parent of a 10 year old i decided to wait to um even talk about national issues of violence that are often discussed at school 911 was one of the things before i wanted her reading or viewing about people jumping out of

138windows to their death i wanted to discuss that with her first so i've i was very much vocal about what she was allowed to see in second grade because i thought it was important that i introduced that because this is about parent responsibility and parent control if that form is available is it online is it in the portal where would they find the form to fill out for content that they want to limit so i would have to defer to staff as to where the physical location of that is mr mcnaughton if you'll look into that i can come back to ms miller's question if you can give me an answer during workshop today thank you yes ma'am dr alan and mr wilson great thanks for opening up the procedure right um so can you

139assure us that this isn't like the end all conversation in a sense because let's just say the outcome of the committee you know says this but do we still meaning parents do parents still have the option to utilize their right as it relates to procedure at school-based level yeah regardless of the decision made by the committee parents still have the opportunity to say i'd like to filter the content that my children have access to just as again as i pointed out that we do for human growth and development but we have to make sure that parents know exactly which content is available to their children in the library so giving them access to um that database and or themes so that they could choose not to have their child gain access to certain content that's

140a that's a parental choice um but it's something we already afford them at this time great and that brings up that question about uh you know our destiny system i was just probing the software a little bit it does seem like a good opportunity to maybe enhance the usability from a you know a user standpoint from a you know parent chance to look at our catalog and the catalog is there per school per site right but i'm not i'm curious what the what that looks like as far as steps for a parent to select on a material and say that particular book or text i don't think is appropriate for my child at this age for example i've had parents you know address like hey you know my first graders at like way above reading

141level but the i survived series you know specifically related to the holocaust i don't know if they're quite ready for that conversation so they'd want to pull that book from from their selection but they went through the process and it was very clunky and hard to navigate so maybe that's something we can bring in the conversation as we start to unpack this a bit to make that access way more easy for our parents the second thing is but i i feel i need to reject here that is not our system correct destiny is a third-party provider and so we can have a conversation with them but unless we're going to pay for that modification i just want to be clear that there is the likelihood of them just simply doing that just for our district

142having worked with software companies in the past is highly unlikely but we can bring that to their attention yeah and i think that's going to help media specialists because you know as this conversation unfolds i think you know drawing attention to it more we're going to see more engagement i hope and i think you know parent engagement is a good thing i'm curious how this will play out in conversation with our local library systems as well so because every student right has access with their id card to access any material they want in a sense it will not just for a matter of record it will not impact their access to content in a public library public library operates under a very different set of rules and policies as it relates to first amendment rights

143and they may not restrict content and so quite frankly they are in a better position when it comes to these types of topics to say no we're not going to erode that right for a child or for a family if you object don't check out the material but that's the position they can take as a public library we're not we're a public school setting and so there is some ambiguity there and more flexibility on our side as to how we want to address that but just for the sake of clarification public libraries are under regardless of the outcome here are under no obligation to filter that content and that's what parents need to be aware of and again i think we need to go back to this slide though if these are the most concerning

144books and they're not being checked out is there justification in the argument that somehow these books are exposing students to content that's basically flies in the face of family values and other things and that are eroding our social system right i think quite honestly the better argument is what's being done to protect children in an online environment at home in their own time on their own personal devices because the greater there's a greater likelihood they're accessing content that way than they are clearly through these print materials very interesting there have been a number of new stories in which it has been reported recently that these materials that were that were present but not circulated have suddenly had a spike in circulation as a result of the the attention being paid to them yeah and i

145mean i i think you know historically we're always you know considering the copycat syndrome and so forth right you know even like in in film you know i think the film program there was a scene that was edited out because students were copying you know they were playing chicken in the middle of the road right so again i don't think the conversation is anti-intellectual and i think it's a valued process that we should work through because if we if we hold to the position that is anti-intellectual but yet then you know culturally speaking within the last two weeks we're seeing you know a flipped narrative that's addressing you know de-platforming content on spotify in a sense well really in essence we're de-platforming but we're asking to ban content i think we're seeing this as well

146as colleges and universities we're uninviting guests to come speak well words are words so we're choosing to try to ban those particular voices so all that to say is it's not anti-intellectual i think it's you know like you said it's a long-standing procedure that's been in our district for a long time so um i i think that it would be of value for the procedure to be moved to an open board policy and i'm not sure if that's even a consideration as well in the process mr wilson thank you superintendent i my comments won't be brief so i'll defer to my colleagues if they have some things i'd like to share first ms cunningham yes my question is we also have charter high schools in polk county do we know number one if they contain

147these books and number two as our committee explores these will it be able to be uh the information passed along to them if in fact they have the books in their libraries as well they so the answer is yes they do have some of these books in their libraries several of our local public charter schools do as to whether or not our decision will influence their schools they will have to arrive at that decision themselves all of their books are not contained within our destiny system but we can search based off there is a process in which and quite honestly and would be best to to answer that question um where we get an inventory um every so often or they have had access to our system so we can basically gain some insight and

148so yes some of those books do exist on their campuses um we have asked for clarification from them as to what extent of not just the 16 but the original 52 exist and we'll i can share that with the board but as far as what action they may subsequently take depending on what happens with our committee it's ultimately up to them right and i do understand that i'm just saying when our committees complete the evaluation of these books the two committees i would just like to make sure that that information is in fact passed along to the charter schools that contain the book so that they can make an informed decision thank you yes ma'am miss forty you may be going to cover this uh mr hyde but uh uh will the committees be provided

149a rubric and uh to score these books yes that's in yes ma'am okay and um you know i'm all for parent choice of what their kids do and don't read uh my my thing is uh you know we have a we have all students all kids and it's kind of unfortunate that these titles are going to be not accessible even though they have not been heavily checked out especially given the increased in popularity recently like mr allen dr allen was saying and mr bridges so uh i just wanted people to be mindful you know uh when you ask for things like this you know it affects all kids not just your kid and you do have the power over your child but i just want everybody to be mindful of that thank you miss fields

150i just had a question and you might have already given this to us is there a brief overview of each book i mean like a one or two sentence have you given us that no i have not what i did provide you was the rubric that was completed by the group that outlined and highlighted the passages that they felt were in contradiction with the statutes or they felt were concerning okay i wasn't speaking of that i was just wanting to know like the one the one book that had 70 check outs what that basically covered but it doesn't have to be answered right now yes ma'am i can see if we can provide that for you thank you miss miller the ones that movie like a movie was made about which i think is the

151one she's referencing that probably had more there were more interest in it there was more subject matter um i know revolving around that it's teen suicide but that was um but that has had public interest some of these i've never heard of and that's i'm sure most people um hat and that's why you have zero but i think the ones in drama because it's a um very popular now with children is the um somebody give me the name of the books that are not comics graphic novels are very popular and drama is a graphic novel so it's very picturesque comic-like and so i think that was what made it so popular yes ma'am mr wilson would you like to wait till the end because i still have a few slides okay um so i covered

152a review um excuse me the committee structure to review steps to miss fields or miss misfortunate to your question the committee members will have to read the book in its entirety they can't just simply glaze through it they can't just highlight it we actually have to create a timeline in which they review and read the entire book now thankfully some of these books are picture books and others are very quick reads some of them are very lengthy reads as our teamers finding out so we've ordered enough books for the committee structure to ensure that everybody has a copy of the book the chief academic officer or the curriculum specialist that he assigns will notify me of the meeting dates and times we'll provide that to the board we will also advertise that with the understand

153um and and there will be people who are allowed to sit in the audience with the clear understanding there is to be no commentary from the audience the committee will have the minis will take place here there'll be an open discussion we will not tolerate jeering we will not tolerate comments from the audience if that occurs quite frankly we will remove them from the from the meeting it's not appropriate let the committee function in the format in which it was created but we'll provide all those expectations i've had conversations with multiple stakeholder groups who are all in agreement that they will help abide by that and help spread that information because again we want this to be an uninterrupted process and a fair process and then the facilitator will convene the meeting of the school

154library media committee and essentially mr bridges will provide an introduction as to focus and intent the minutes of the meeting will be taken meetings will be advertised as they shared members of the public may attend but are not permitted to comment from the audience we will also record the meetings as we do school board meetings and we'll post those on our website for stakeholders to see the committee will follow the approved agenda for examination requests and the ballots balloting process the vote by committee must be by signed ballots so it's not just a yay or nay everybody has to sign and attest to their vote and final recommendation as to the book the chief academic officer curriculum specialist will then notify the superintendent of the decision by telephone and in writing and then send the

155packet to the superintendent including the memorandum of decision checklists for all the materials evaluations that were completed and the final copy of the ballot signed ballots the superintendent will then notify the board and the complainant of the committee's decision so and rather than waiting to all the books are addressed as these books are addressed in real time there'll be a constant flow of information to the board as to the committee's recommendation it is important to note that the committee has really several options available to them the committee may vote to eliminate a book from circulation based off concerns they may opt to maintain a book in circulation they may also make a recommendation to modify the grade level band in which the book is appropriately placed so for example a book right now that crosses

156that has an age band or grade level band that's six through twelve the the committee may make a recommendation to move that book in its entirety to the high school level um and so those are the three options available to them so again what does the committee have to look at they look at age and grade level appropriateness they have to answer several questions and this really gets to miss fortney's question about the rubric these questions are reflected in the rubric that they complete as individuals is the checklist the same as the rubric or no i'm not following the checklist that was mentioned on the very first so they have to they actually go after they read the book they will complete the form that addresses these questions and that serves as the rubric or

157the checklist yes ma'am okay that was my question and that that rubric is the same one from our past procedure right correct everything from here was taken directly from existing policy will reading or listening to this work result in a more compassionate understanding of human beings does this work offer an opportunity to understand and appreciate better the aspirations achievements and problems of different cultures and or minority groups without stressing differences of class race color sex education religion or philosophy in any adverse way are questionable elements of this work an integral part of a worthwhile theme message or attempt to develop a character in what way or ways does this work support and promote the educational goals and objectives of polk county public schools in what way or ways are concepts presented in a manner appropriate

158to the ability and maturity of the suggested audience how does the material make a significant contribution to the history of ideas is the information in this book current and or accurate and as far as we are aware or you are aware are illustrations appropriate in good taste as it relates to students developmental age could the work be considered offensive due to profanity brutality sexual behavior violence cruelty abhorrent behavior political positions portrayal of societal groups or portrayal of religious groups and what is the work's literary intent and then essentially once they conclude that they come back they reconvene they have a discussion and then they vote as i said it is a vote by signature ballot um and so then the committee will make a final recommendation to my office here's the proposed timeline for committee

159number one week one they'll have an introductory meeting they'll be trained and they'll be assigned the first week reading the first book to read which will be two boys kissing in the second week they'll review the the book two boys kissing and they'll also be assigned the kite runner to start reading and then you see the progression here of how to address this so we anticipated taking roughly 13 to 14 weeks to complete this process committee number two you see the books here listed they'll begin with drama they'll then go to beloved the vincent boys extremely loud and incredibly close um they'll have a bye week to accommodate spring break they'll then have real live boyfriends the tricks and almost perfect and i am jazz so that's the that's the proposed timeline again everything is

160submitted back to the school district um through my office and then be brought before the board um for the board to take basically take into consideration what the recommendations are as to the book's status in our collections and that's again both the committee structure the process the timeline and the questions that committee members will be asked to complete to miss field's question the sign up link went out yesterday as i shared we had a little almost 100 participants or candidates sign up following today's meeting this link will also be sent out to all of our parents asking them if they choose to volunteer we've already been contacted by several parents asking so they'll be provided with the link as well so that they if they can submit an application with their intent to participate and

161we'll go from there so mr wilson i believe that concludes the majority of my summary so i know you said you had a lengthy comment so i do thank you superintendent yes sir um i was contacted by some concerned parents they asked me to look at some passages within some textbooks and in our libraries and i agreed to do that when we met they didn't talk to me about titles they didn't talk to me about themes they didn't talk to me about styles or anything else related to the book itself they talked about very specific passages within certain textbooks and they had two concerns they were concerned about passages that graphically portrayed forcible rape and passages that graphically portrayed bestiality those were their concerns just those two um they asked me to read them i

162read about i read a handful and i had to stop i was saddened it was disheartening it was horrific dehumanizing defiling humans and it was vile the passages i read had that effect on me um you know science tells us the human brain is not fully developed until sometime in the in the mid 20s and and largely the portion of the brain that's not developed is the ability to discern and differentiate the ability to tell what is right and wrong and what is good and bad i think in our society today we see a proliferation of violence among young people and i think that's a product of normalizing violence in our society i'm not sure why we want to normalize forcible rape and bestiality and i think by having those uh you know textbooks and

163our libraries and we're not a public library we we have i think a big responsibility um that we do that we by having those pro those books in our libraries we normalize that i think and i i i think that i have concerns about that you know i've talked to as many people as i could about this i've talked to my friends my relatives i've talked to teachers and parents and students and folks i ran into in the grocery store and i asked them about this issue and across the board and without exception everyone said that some things should not be made available to our students that there are some things that should be banned now everybody had every folks disagreed on what should be banned and what shouldn't but everybody agreed that there were

164some things that shouldn't be made available to students in the k-12 environment most folks agree that pornography should be banned although not everyone there were some folks who told me that the bible should be banned but interestingly those same folks said that classical literature should not be banned so i looked up the definition of classical literature in the dictionary and the bible qualifies as classical literature is the epitome of classical literature so that seemed rather illogical to me so i asked them why do you think the bible should be banned their answers were all the same because of the concern that young people might be unduly influenced by it so we we have they believe that young people could be unduly influenced by the bible but not by graphical portrayals of forcible rape and bestiality

165they think somehow they have the ability to differentiate that seems to me to be um just stunningly illogical but that's where we are as a society i want to commend mr hyde for his approach to this this matter because the passages i read and i looked at the statute and the passages i read i think could very easily exceed the threshold for pornography and i think we needed to take make sure that we're doing the right thing and protecting protecting our employees so i just want to thank you for that um this is not banning books is not a decision that i will make or that superintendent will make it's a decision that will be made by community members and that's the way it should be i think that for my concern i would hope

166we could refocus this discussion away from banning books because the reality is everybody agrees that some books some material should be banned what we should be talking about is the are the materials that we think are appropriate for our students and what are the standards that we want in our community and as a community we should have that conversation and i'm going to offer a thought for a standard that we might use you know i may be i may be out of touch i might be wrong about this but i suspect if we took the passages that i read and put them on our website they would come down very quickly i think our community would be outraged and i think that's something we could use as a standard if we can't take a passage

167out of a book and put it on our website maybe we shouldn't have it in our library right so i don't think that those passages i read would would be on our website very long i think our community would be up in ours very quickly so again i'm offering this you know if we could reframe this discussion and move away from the discussion the banning books because everybody agrees some things should be banned how do we set the standards in our community that's the conversation we ought to be having and we have to have that community that conversation as a community our community ought to be involved as it will be and i think that's the right thing to do so thank you for allowing me an opportunity to share that thank you sir ms

168miller i have a question on how books get into our library from the state can you explain that like state approval doe are we are choosing them amongst ourselves are they district-wide are they chosen by separate schools to be removed i mean to be there and then chosen by separate schools to be removed in fairness i'm going to limit you to one hard question per workshop session lots of hard questions that's what i call actually it's it's a very good question and i think to a certain extent it gets to exactly what mr wilson was pointing to at the end of his his comments which is what's our standard and what's the minimum standard and what's our threshold so presently we do not have a particular process for how materials are adopted and this is

169an area where um publishers to a great extent have sometimes taken advantage of school districts so here's what here's what typically happens a school says we got a grant we have five thousand dollars and we want to buy materials for our library we're in elementary school so we contact one of the providers and they source books for us and sometimes we get high frequency books and some meaning those that are in high demand and high interest and other times they're supplementing the books that they're giving us with low demand books and it really falls upon us to then vet every single title that comes before us and that has not consistently happened in the past i can i can tell you that hasn't happened and that's not a polk issue that's an everybody issue which

170is why you see the legislature and and countless others trying to ramp up and and encourage and require a process where vetting takes place at the school level for instruction materials i've had this conversation with board chair wyatt and we as a school district are adopting that policy in anticipation ahead of time because even if this doesn't pass in legislature i think we need to to mr wilson's point which is what is going to be our standard threshold for what's acceptable and what's not and how are we defining pornographic or obscene or and that's that's a tough place to live and mr bridges reminds me frequently that we've been arguing about how to define obscenity for well over 20 years in public education but it's something we have to address so ms miller to your

171question is there a vetting process no does the state of florida provide us with approved books they do to a certain extent they do not for libraries they do provide recommended books that they feel support the curriculum the standards and some of our specific projects ap for example advanced placement has books that are recommended and some of those books were are going to arguably are going to be on the challenge the original 52 book list some of those are there and i think people have come to understand that there are books that while i may necessarily find them offensive they may not rise again back to mr wilson it may not cross that threshold where they're unacceptable and so that's the difficult conversation that needs to happen right now but we do we have not

172previously had a methodical process for the review of adopted materials at the school level nor is there an approval process at our level i will say much to mr mcnaughton's credit that since he's taken the position he's worked very closely with the rest of his team and we have caught some titles and prevented titles from getting into our schools over the last six months and i'm very proud of the fact that we were able to do that so i think it's important for us and incumbent on us we've reached out to help address this issue knowing that there's a potential language moving through the legislature i had a conversation with one of our local legislators and offered our assistance if if the state isn't going to take a definitive role in giving us a list

173of books that they will defend that they will stand behind then let's create rules and policies that give us really concrete operating parameters and stop putting us in a position where it's very ambiguous and leaves it up to us you know and i i'm the first to defend local control but i'm also a rule follower so if you give me the rules and they're ambiguous is it really a rule and it creates more issues than it does benefit us and so we've offered to be of assistance in this discussion to say you know what is going to be the process moving forward for how books are donated or adopted purchased and for our school libraries i think that's important because i think that that's coming and if you think about how many books we currently

174have is the expectation we now go through an individual review every one of those books what's that process and timeline look like or is it just moving forward with certain expectations there's a lot to unpack there miss miller and hopefully i was able to address least part of your question but we are working on a thorough process um i i did in light of again some bills that are moving through the senate in the house ask staff to start to develop a process to we can best support our schools with that review and i have no doubt that some books will be contested saying well we really want this and others don't and then what we'll do is we'll default back to our review structure and allow the that committee to make a decision an

175informed decision and we'll follow some of the current draft language from the state that says that parents and community members need to be part of that discussion i think we're very open to that i'm very receptive to empowering our parents and you know dr alan to your point earlier you know his destiny there are very few systems in education that aren't clunky to you to use your term uh you're absolutely right so how do we provide much like we did with human growth development can we provide an easy to find list that categorizes books by themes by topics not just by titles alone reading a book title isn't going to tell you anything about the theme arguably and i think it's important for us to make sure that whatever books are in our library parents

176are aware that they're there what the recommended grade level appropriateness is and what those themes entail and so if parents want to click ok i want to block my child from having access to these themes there you go we can click make it a one-click approach and and that becomes a notification that goes into destiny to the media specialist it's a little bit more labor-intensive on our part unless destiny can work with us to create a better system and who knows maybe there's a better system out there other than destiny which of course my having said that now panics everybody in the audience that works in that regard because they're thinking we're going to adopt something new that's not what i'm saying but we'll have to wait to see what we can do to address

177that but we are working on that miss miller did i satisfy your question i'm sorry yes i just i'm looking forward when whoever forwards that form that's available and how to access the form for parents who are concerned and then because i'm interested in how we're going to put things into themes that might be difficult as well so yeah themes in genre are very common so almost every book that we purchase has um you know little click links under them that identify the themes that are commonly associated with that book um so it's actually something we already have and i'm also i'm very interested mr wilson touched on it what students are um subjected to but you can look by this list my you know maybe we need to look at working with safe schools

178we need to talk about what's available to them in their hands some of the things that i've i cannot imagine what children are seeing at a very very young age and yes while this is very important and we have parent choice i think we need to maybe parents don't understand what the kids are accessing with the devices they're holding um it's things you never could have imagined or dreamed of and that's where you get into you know the sheriff explaining how children are taken advantage of you know all the way to trafficking we've you know parents we've got to help maybe educate them on what their responsibilities are for things that are very much accessed as well as how they can you know avoid topics or genres of books these books became very popular now

179like you can't i'm sure amazon is selling out because we've made them an issue which i understand the reasoning behind it but i think we after looking at that we need to look at you know tech is where we are losing these kids and so maybe we need to have some kind of parent portal or parent resource online that gives them um you know things to look for and what to do and how to use how to block things on their children's devices because i can tell you the themes that mr wilson very well described can be found within two clicks for any child and i have kids i've seen kids little kids three and four years old with phones with no kind of parental guidance so maybe we should offer that as well under

180some kind of parent portal make sure you're looking at these things because this is you know be concerning to your child absolutely thank you thank you miss fortney that's a great point miss miller kind of brings me to it you know we um this is just my thoughts and i've uh talked to a couple other people here close you know we we rate everything else like even video games get a rating you know adult uh whatever maybe you know when mr wilson is talking about our standards you know and that's an easy way for parents to understand it's pg it's you know whatever i just gonna throw that out there and uh the other thing is i'm so glad you set up the rubric to where the readers have to read the entire book and

181not just individual passages that would be taken possibly out of the context of the meaning of the book instead of just picking and choosing what you would consider to be inappropriate thank you i appreciate the credit but that was not me that was our existing policy thankfully which required that so i think and they took that step to prevent exactly what you were commenting on thank you dr alan yeah thank you superintendent hyde i mean the openness of the conversation is what we're looking for and i think that you've set it up in a very public manner and you know i'm definitely valuing the time the thought the protection as well of our staff our students as well and i think the conversation you know what we're saying even when i hear ms miller speak

182about you know write the technology i think historically we are always addressing technology and messaging um and it's never it's never just you're this way or this way right in regards to accepting messages accepting technology um you know we've got individuals in society we've got say the amish what they did was they rejected technology which in essence rejected messages you've got the luddites historically as well that rejected technology rejected media messaging so you know as parents we're constantly on the scale of accepting rejecting we want to separate uh maybe we want to reform messages as well so um the thought that you know it's just this way or that way is not the case and so i think it's again it's a good good way to distill ideas and and the thought that we can

183engage more parents uh in this i value it so thank you yeah so the last thing is cunningham i'll i'll go let you go next um so the the question about internet usage and things of that nature so um most school districts adopt so as we go to one to one there'll be a discussion about a different software and i'll use one name that i'm familiar with because i've used it it's called securely so every month a report actually goes home to parents via email and it allows them to see every web search their child has done through our filthy system and it is important to note that parents should really look at that students are very creative if they want to see something it's amazing how many different ways they will phrase it spell

184it to try and get around and circumvent the filter to get it content and it is it is today's world in technology it is our own version of the cold war because every single day content you know outside people we can use the phrase bad players always want to find an opportunity to get at people around filters and so it is this war of attrition and where you're constantly having to evolve and your filtering system is being responsive and that's one of the things i like about our filtering system here is it is responsive so the parent company provides us regular updates saying okay we're seeing increased traffic in regards to this and we're finding that um pornography and other type of content may be linked to this so they block it and they white

185page it and then we block it internally and it's just this natural progression but getting parents to understand what their children are searching because even when you're outside our system even if we go one-to-one when we go one-on-one next school year everything funnels back to our system so even if a child's on their wi-fi at home and they think that they're accessing the internet outside of us they are not they're constantly being funneled back through us and so that securely report will reflect every term that their child's looked at and parents need to pay attention to that because there's a powerful opportunity there to have a conversation with their child about appropriateness in their searches and that's really what we're trying to do and there's no misnomer that somehow us giving a child a device

186is creating that children are currently looking for that content on their own personal devices and it's it's an important tool and a process for us to bring parents along as we go one to one as we look at this that how do we help inform and give parents the tools and the knowledge and the resources that they can actually feel competent in being involved in researching this and supporting their children and filtering content appropriately or when it's when they find something how can i have a parent how can i have a conversation with my child if i'm finding this in the search engine and that's important to note um but and there's no deleting that history it's not like going into your search history on a on a personal device and delete it doesn't happen

187in that system so there's no way to mask it thankfully and it's it's whether we go with that company or another company that will be part of our process and i think that provides parents with a high level of comfort that we're constantly monitoring those things and it also works to the advantage that if a child were to search for themes that are violent or self-harming it automatically triggers a response and it triggers the crisis team to meet with that child and a parent immediately and that happens in real time it doesn't happen 24 hours delayed which is really important so it's a great process and there's lots of companies out there offer similar products but that will be something we'll be discussing in the near future ms cunningham thank you i just want to

188say thank you to you and staff for addressing this and bringing it up to the board and coming up with solutions it's difficult when community members sometimes come up with different things and we're all very busy but i think this is one of those topics that is most concerning i know it's only a few books and a few passages but it's very important that the content that we have in our school libraries meets with what we need to be educating our students with so i just want to thank you [Music] that when this was brought to you that you are being proactive and creating the committees and including community members to continue to look at this and i'm sure it'll be an ongoing process as we move forward because i'm sure these are not the

189only ones in our school libraries and i want to thank mr wilson for your poignant comments today thank you for taking the time to actually read the books and the passages i was not able to do so because of the content as you spoke it's pretty gross to me and it took a lot for you to go home and to do that on your time and i just want to say thank you and thank you for your comments and i wholeheartedly agree that this is something that we need to continue to look at and as you said we need to come up with the standard that by which we're going to have for our books in our library so i just want to say mr wilson thank you so much for doing what you did

190and going the extra mile thank you mr wilson um you know i i think if you read the passages that i read there's no way to rationalize it you can't say well if this is part of a bigger picture it's okay it's it was just pretty awful stuff um you know i think we can't control what happens outside our district we can't control what students do with their own devices but you know not not taking some sort of action here i think we're implicitly condoning things that that normalize activities in our society that i personally don't think we want to normalize um i think about alfred hitchcock and the stories he wrote and he didn't have to portray things graphically he could talk he could he was very creative in the way he um impacted

191our imagination and i'm wondering why it's so important for authors today who are critically acclaimed authors to to sensationalize things the way they do in in the in the graphic portrayals that we sometimes see and and you know what happened to creativity what happened to the ability to share those things with us without without being so graphic and why do we because i think it goes back to this to me it's very simple it's just normalizing something we don't want to normalize it's it's a pretty awful thing in our society whether it's rape or bestiality or violence i i you know i think that we have responsibility to try to try to address that and set some appropriate standards so i don't it's my personal opinion you just can't rationalize that so those are my

192comments and thank you ms cunningham for your for your comments mr superintendent mr bridges if i might ladies and gentlemen this is a pendulum that is swinging widely and wildly not only in polk county not only in florida but all across the country so if you if you follow this on national news you'll see the same issues that are that are coming up everywhere you look the seminal case that everybody is talking about from the supreme court is island trees versus pico which is a 1982 case and in that case the um the the terminology that was used to describe the materials was anti-american anti-christian anti-semitic and just plain filthy and the supreme court of the united states finally considered this case and it was the most divided and split and fractionalized court that i

193i think i have ever seen and i i want to read this to you and and i dare you to follow this let's see here justice brennan announced the judgment of the court and delivered an opinion in which justices marshall and stevens joined in all but part 2a one of which justice blackman joined justice blackmon filed an opinion concurring in part in concurring in the judgment justice white filed an opinion concurring in the judgment chief justice berger filed a dissenting opinion in which powell rehnquist and o'connor joined justice powell filed a dissenting opinion justice rehnquist filed a dissenting opinion which justice berger and justice powell joined and justice o'connor filed a dissenting opinion the case came down it was it ended up being a technically a 5-4 decision but it was really four four and

194one nobody agreed with anybody it is splintered you know the the result is you know you can articulate the result the result was the court came down and basically said that you can't the local school districts are constrained not to violate the bill of rights that you have broad powers but you can't violate the bill of rights and that means that you can make decisions about what's in your library based on whether you like it or or don't like it that it has to be it has to be nearly focused you should be aware that there are at least two bills active right now house bill 1467 and senate bill 1300 their companion bills and they address this to some degree and they talk about about library materials this is this is concerning each here's

195the proposed language each book made available to students through a local school district library media center or required as part of a book list used in the classroom must be selected by a school district employee who folds a valid educational media specialist certificate regardless of whether the book is purchased donated or otherwise made available to students i don't know how many thousands of volumes there are in school media centers these days i assume that it's still thousands um but that means we're going well we're going to have to see what that means does that mean that books that are already there have to go back and be individually reviewed by and and not by teachers not by administrators but but by media specialists imagine the load to to try to accomplish that so that you

196have every single book and in the in the language in both of these bills talks about books it doesn't talk about electronic materials which is another issue for another day but every single book in that in that media center is going to have to be vetted and and selected is the word they use by an employee as a media specialist certificate so that is an enormous load i suspect but watch it and watch it carefully you may be interested to note that both of those of those bills also include provisions about school board compensation uh and and so they're likely to get they're likely to get hearings because of the the the textbook and and media center language but the the house bill initially called for the elimination of compensation the senate bill tied it

197to the compensation of state legislators my understanding is that on friday the the sponsor of the house bill removed that provision and replaced it with term limit language so that's that's one way of getting compensation and term limits before the legislatures i think they'll at a minimum some of that will get a hearing but the the point of all of this is that this is an exceedingly complex issue uh and when the supreme court of the united states is that fraction that fraction fractionally divided so that it is hard to follow what that does is it gives it gives parties on both sides encouragement to seek to go and make some new law and all they need is a defendant so it behooves us to be very careful to be very thoughtful to be thorough

198in our processes and i think that that mr hyde and his staff are are doing that thank you sir all right last topic before the board here today is a topic on workforce diversity this is going to fit very well under our strategic plan goal area of developing great teachers and leaders i've had several concerns be brought to my attention of late especially as we and as we head into the end of the school year we'll have subsequent administrative appointments and whatnot the following concerns have have been brought to my attention since i've arrived here there appears to be disproportionality as it relates to minority employment in school level administrative and senior administrative roles minority candidates are underrepresented in the pool of pipeline programs and our school staff including leadership is not reflective of the

199demographics of that school and or its community so that caused me to do a little bit of research so we pulled through human resources and thank you to their team and they're actually pulling some subsequent data for us to do some further analysis there are 344 school-based administrators of which 227 are female of those almost 70 are white 23 percent are black and 8 percent are hispanic 117 of our school-level administrators are male of which 62 percent are white 28 are black and 10 are hispanic demographics we delineate further by position type so for our female administrators 143 of them are assistant principals again predominantly white 68 percent uh 10 hispanic and 22 percent black 80 of them are principals 70 are white 5 percent are hispanic 25 percent are black and the the demographic

200report that i received from hr also included four assistant directors um and two of those are white one is hispanic one is black for our male administrators of which less than 50 percent of the total population is compared to female administrators 74 of our assistant principals are male 59 are white 12 percent are hispanic 28 percent are black 37 principles we have in the male ranks 67 65 excuse me are white 5 or hispanic 30 are black and of the assistant directors we have three um white assistant directors or 75 percent of them are white one is hispanic and there are zero african-american black assistant directors now that again focused solely on school level we're pulling the district level positions as well to look at that um so we also started to kind of drill

201down so if it's true that we aren't seeing and questions have come up recently as we've done appointments do we have any minority candidates the school is predominantly hispanic why wasn't there a hispanic candidate that applied or was there a hispanic candidate applied and there were not in many instances we're not seeing candidates come forward and applying for the job which raises two questions number one are candidates not feeling confident in applying number two um are we actually recruiting them to apply for for certain job openings within the county and number three do we have enough in the bench the pool of candidates that they feel competent and are willing to apply for those jobs so we started to drill down and we look at our pools so we have a pipeline program here in

202polk county public schools as all school districts do a grow your own program for administrative ranks for both assistant principals and principles so interestingly enough when we looked at the demographics of our pool by ethnicity overwhelmingly again i think you see the disproportionality aligns to exactly what we're seeing our administrative ranks the overwhelming majority of candidates in the ap pool right now or 62 of them are white three are hispanic and nine of them are african-american black when you look at the principal pool based off ethnicity 66 of them are white 8 or hispanic 26 are black then we started to drill down so outside of our cohort and outside of our pipeline what are we seeing through university south florida who we partner very closely with for educational leadership programs again you continue to

203see a pattern there overwhelmingly disproportionately white candidates um three or five were hispanic eight were black um and one was asian pacific islander so you know for us in particular i started to have conversations with our regionals and asked after following a principal appointment saying you know what strong assistant principles do we have who are hispanic we're looking at one school in particular that overwhelming as a hispanic population and community so what's strong assistant principles because the assistant principle is not hispanic they're white they're not black they're not they're not african-american black or hispanic they're a white assistant principle so the question comes will do we not have strong candidates that we could reassign or relocate so that we can create greater diversity amongst our administrative ranks and the answer that i got was no

204so i started meeting with the regionals and having conversations with them saying well how many minority candidates do you feel that you've interviewed this last summer and one regional in particular told me that she'd interviewed six or eight minority candidates and not one was selected for promotion and so it raises some very valid questions and and i've had this conversation with cabinet i've had this conversation with cheryl joe in particular because i want her to take no offense but tough questions have to be asked we're not seeing minority candidates applying to the pool gaining access to the pool and being successful of those who are why aren't we seeing a higher placement rate amongst them what is it that's happening after the pool when they get when they complete that program that ultimately isn't leading

205to them making the transition to the next level this is not a commentary that says that our pipeline program is deficient it may be a commentary and if for further discussion and evaluation as we move forward as to what are we doing after they've complete the program to ensure that they're getting access to projects and assignments and duties and responsibilities that continue to further their growth and then how are we as a district going to target advertisements to ensure that we are trying to create greater equity across some of our schools now i will preface all of this you know by saying our commitment at the end of the day is to put the best most highly skilled administrator and teacher in every single classroom regardless however there are some other commitments that we need

206to make sure based off the data that we're seeing we need to ensure that our leadership pipeline program provides adequate training and experiences to ensure that candidates have a high placement rate upon completion we're seeing a high number of candidates who ultimately aren't getting hired into jobs we also need to work with our building leaders to be quite frank i've had conversations with several employees who i would tell you are highly skilled absolutely hands down can do the job except they themselves are telling me that they've been overlooked and told you're my best candidate except i can't hire you because i have to go internal then why are we interviewing why aren't we just having a conversation say let's just directly appoint somebody why are we putting on this farce of an interview when you

207know you're not going to select an external candidate and i think quite honestly what really lies behind some of this is there's an underlying culture that people are quite honestly not willing to put themselves out there anymore because they they question whether or not this job is really open i was asked that by board members when we talked about community liaisons we've talked about other positions is this a real vacancy or are you going to already put somebody there because i'm hearing rumors that so and so has already guaranteed that job and i will tell you that in every instance thus far those have been false every single instance and i think much to board members surprised and delight the reality of it is is we have to make sure that we have a vacancy

208that it's really a vacancy and we're open and receptive to those things but i would like to see us go back and we're going to have this conversation and do a boot camp for a lot of our bench candidates to say how do we make sure that they're really prepared to make that next level transition because once they complete the pipeline we're really reliant upon their experiences at the school level to further their professional growth we've not really approached it with a high level of intentionality to ensure that that happens and let's just be honest schools are very busy some principals are excellent mentors and others are so caught up in the day-to-day we talked about you know one school could have 1300 kids but they only have a principal in ap and another school

209may have a principal and ap with 800 kids or 600 kids i tell you their day to day is very different as far as workload and things like that not skill set but their workload so do they have the time to dedicate to grooming somebody else and mentoring them and so that's an opportunity for us moving forward we also have to ensure that our staff is reflective of the demographics of our school district and communities we serve again we're always going to be committed to hiring the best and most highly skilled and qualified candidate i believe we have an obligation to ensure that everybody comes out of the pipeline meets that definition and i think we're seeing that that's not the case right now and we have to explore why i'm going to be very

210honest with you we will be meeting with candidates who have not subsequently been hired into these jobs to say what happened in your interview we also have to get very comfortable with giving people real feedback we are really good everybody loves the compliment sandwich i'm hoping everybody knows what that is i open with you know mr green i've always appreciated you as a building leader but i'm really disappointed how you handled this but i'm a sh i'm positive you're going to leave this office today and you're going to do a great job i will assure you i've never had that conversation with mr green to date but i had to use them as an example um that's that's a good example of a compliment sandwich right we start with a compliment we throw something in

211the middle that's a problem or a concern and then we immediately backstep and throw another compliment in there we're really not giving feedback we're not we're not comfortable giving critical feedback and it doesn't have to be critical and that's what the shift that we're going to have to make which is how do we give corrective feedback and then start to align opportunities for them to improve and let me use a teacher as a great example if we walk into an evaluation with with a school-based teacher who's working their behinds off every single day and we say you're not going to be highly effective this year i'm going to rate you as effective and every single year we look at the evaluation for that person let's say five years goes by and they never move from

212effective to highly effective it's not the teacher's fault every single time it's not we're not identifying opportunities to help them and create trainings and exposure and mentoring and coaching we're not creating that opportunity to move them from good to great we're not if we're not doing at the classroom level and let's acknowledge that we're not doing at the classroom level we aren't doing it at the leadership level either and so what i'm bringing to you is when we talk about our next strategic plan we talk about developing great teachers and leaders there has to be a sincere commitment on how do we move from good to great and we have some phenomenal leaders don't get me wrong this is not a diminishment of the people working hard every day we've got to move from good

213to great miss cunningham and i think part of that we talked about during the interview process for the superintendent because the one thing that we don't have in this district since i've been here quite frankly because you know day-to-day operations take up most of our time is succession planning and i know how much you and i had that conversation in our little one-hour meeting that we had during that process and you assured me that that was something that you build into any you know organization that you work with and i think here because what you said about the external candidates saying well i understand you know it's going to be internal the internal says it's going to be external we've done both but but i think in order to be fair to our employees it's

214very difficult if you don't have succession planning and grooming you know for me to say wow where is my next step what can i aspire to do in the organization because if we don't have that which is what is happening people are going to leave and the whole point is to keep and retain not just teachers and so forth but folks at the district office folks in our maintenance divisions it doesn't matter people want good pay good benefits and they want the opportunity to move to the next step so i am a big proponent of the succession planning piece so i kind of feel like what you're saying here today is that we'll be moving into that to evaluate tell you where you're at here's some things i think we need to do because we

215can all improve and then if you do here may be some opportunities for you that gives people hope and i think that's where we need to be and i appreciate you bringing this up today and i look forward to seeing some of the succession planning as we move forward for our employees thank you and this applies like i said to district level positions and we'll provide you the analysis of that in the near future but also classroom level positions are students walking in the classrooms and seeing themselves in the classroom um but it's really important too that when we provide feedback after an interview that we're also providing that feedback back to their immediate supervisor because when that person leaves and doesn't get the job it's going to fall to that immediate supervisor to then

216provide a support plan to put them on a trajectory to be successful in the future and that's really where we have to continue to invest and i think our employees are really i'm going to be honest with you i think they want this i think they're asking for this um and we've got to get past this you know create a different culture where people feel enthusiastic about the opportunities in front of them and not that again i i the frequency in which i hear i i've already heard this job is guaranteed to somebody else is alarming um and i got to be honest with you i think it creates an ad it negatively or adversely impacts our overall culture because people start to believe that and let's be honest they may have seen instances where

217that was true and at the end of the day they don't apply why would i do it it's already guaranteed for somebody else and so i think we have to be more respectful and reflective of that practice you see there the last bullet you know ensuring that the information is shared so it becomes a coaching opportunity and for us to continue to refine for our aspiring leaders you know where do they need to grow where do they need to go and i think miss collins uses a phrase you gotta go to grow because she likes moving people around to give them varied experiences to get them ready for the next level and that's an interesting process and some school districts do that quite frequently so miss fields so superintendent howard i want to thank you

218because we've had some very serious tough discussions about diversity and the importance of embracing and preparing our staff so i'm happy to know that we're going to sit down with the staff and and help them to understand what they need to improve or do something a little bit different i don't think anybody want a handout they want an opportunity correct based on their ethnicity based on their gender they want an opportunity and i feel that i have talked to many people and i think the the bottom line is that after they apply so many times they get discouraged they get tired and they say why even apply and they are never given feedback on what they need to do better so they are in a rut and they're trying to figure out how they can

219get out and prosper so i'm happy about the boot camp i appreciate you bringing this information that we've talked about so we can see it for what it is and what we need to do to improve and not wait until later because you said it was urgency we needed to look at it now and so now that we have it and you have some things in place i'm hopeful and i hope that the staff that's listening are hopeful as well and know that they do have an opportunity to grow if they're willing to do the the work so thank you for that i really appreciate it but bottom line nobody wants to be given a job because of how they look they want to be given an opportunity to get into a position that's better

220than where they currently are yes ma'am great point ms miller i think this has been a conversation like you said from the very beginning about succession planning i think i'm four years into saying that's what we needed um because we need to also be transparent about what we're looking for that way if there is an interview because i've heard that too i've heard well i interviewed but they already had someone in mind or i didn't have that opportunity that to have to know ahead of time and i've even talked to people on interview panels we're like well they kind of wanted this to go this direction that's not good business and so if we can be transparent on what we're looking for and then the follow-up and i know you've already addressed that because i've

221had some people reach out to me that would call hr wanting to follow up from hr but really hr is the facilitator of the interview hr needs to lead them back to their direct supervisor but make sure our supervisors understand that is their job to help these people move to the next level and what that looks like which i think we'll have with succession planning to know this district is 58 hispanic and we have schools with nobody that speaks spanish with schools full of children who do and i think a lot of this is we're so desperate for them in the classroom that we're probably not helping develop them because who will be in that classroom that's bilingual um and so i don't know the answer to that but i think we need to invest

222in especially that bilingual in the in the east area the county those bilingual schools that need not only teachers but administrators that can help these students is very important and i'm not sure where to begin doing that but i think this is a huge improvement and i'm looking forward to our district staff our teachers even people that are already in the district having a trajectory of where they could go in their job what's available to them if they complete whatever coursework or supervisory roles needed because we do burn them out and they leave or they'll sit in ap rolls forever and we could have made them great principles but they felt defeated and so they don't try it again so i think this is very important i appreciate this coming up i also love this

223book are you going to talk about this book i can okay excuse me mr wilson then dr alan and back to miss fortney i believe so like my colleagues i want to commend you on this i think this is incredibly important but i think you know we talk about feedback but it's not the feedback it's how you do it right and you talked about that has to be done in a very positive way and you know we know children learn in a positive environment learning environment not a negative learning environment well employees are the same way they they respond to to a positive environment and positive feedback so um you know i look forward to modeling that for our district and and as you as you have all along so i appreciate that thank you

224thank you sir dr alan so speaking of the sandwich method and i was curious on the flip side of that if mr green had ever said that to you [Laughter] mr green has never included the bun mr green always goes right to the meat of the matter yes yes there is no having been on the receiving end of that in the past i can assure you there is no softening introduction he gets right to the point um but i will tell you he what he modeled gets back to what mr wilson just said holding someone accountable does not mean diminishing them as individuals and human beings it creates an opportunity to challenge somebody to do better to rise to the occasion you do an ins you do an injustice and a disservice to people when

225you sugarcoat it and you don't tell them explicitly what it is they've done wrong and what they can do better to improve that and then you create the opportunity to then be successful so being candid does not mean being unprofessional or not being kind and in this business nowadays we have to work hard to keep people whole and they have to see the value and the feedback that they're getting and that the opportunity will present itself again for them to ultimately be successful so i think that's an important part yeah indeed and you you said it well this this will impact positively our students and as as a parent a senior 17 year old you know in that college discussion just just this week um you know i had mentioned ida lovelace to my daughter

226and uh you know i am very familiar with ida lovelace and her her impact on computational theory and so forth and my daughter is interested um in computer science right and and we recognize that there are not enough um females and women in stem and you know as we look at all the spreadsheets and so forth the school that she's interested in you know she knowed it she's like dad that school's only got you know 23 24 um females and you know and at the dinner table you know she's dad i'm a christian feminist just so you know and it's just really fun those conversations but i will say this um ms stacy is her robotics and her ap computer science teacher and that has influenced her in such a positive dramatic way to have

227that female that's leading her towards a field that does not have a lot of women in that field so i see what you're doing and really appreciate that and the impact that that will have on our students so thank you thank you okay and for ms miller's miss fortney the useful and constructive feedback after the interview however we can process that out i know we have spoken about that numerous times but uh also uh just food for thought maybe some sort of a survey uh with your aps and your uh deans and even your principals on because here's what i hear and and i'll just say it out loud i hear that it's a numbers game so we don't want to we don't want to stand out so that nobody notices us in the district

228is having bad behavior that kind of thing it's it's not focused on what you just said per se by sight so if you could get that feedback um that would be wonderful um i would think to really find out you know a they're not going to be scared to fill it out for repercussion and b you know maybe you could get an idea of how many have thought about applying for something did not because they already heard why bother yes ma'am so permiss miller's request each board member received a handbook today that is your principal's profile handbook we'll also send you an electronic copy for those of you who don't want to carry this around it is broken out unfortunately we weren't able to number the tabs but the first tab is is region one

229it subsequently goes through there so you have every principle but you also have your principles you get a little bit of biographical information on each principle i asked them to provide some little insight as to themselves type of music they listen to books they read hobbies you get some good information about their school i've always tried to provide this in the past and this was something that i actually was provided when i first transitioned to duval county public schools as the chief academic officer you know when you're starting to make the rounds the last thing you want to do is assume someone's the principal and find out that they're really not the principal um and so you know when you're first transitioning you're flipping through that book as you're pulling into a parking lot to

230hey get a little bit of background about the school get to know them personally because the best introduction to someone isn't to walk in and say hey i'm fred hyde i'm the new superintendent you're the principal here it's really to start out on a personal level hey i saw that you have a family and you have two kids and they play sports or they you have dogs and your hobbies are such talk to me about that it it starts a whole other conversation right it starts on a positive note when you're establishing a relationship you're establishing a rapport that's more collegial rather than just supervisor to employee and so there's a great opportunity for you you have their birthdays you do not have their birth year that was a promise i gave them so you

231have their date their month of birth and their day of birth so you'll have to guess at their age i know some of you i heard flipping through earlier saying this is an old picture and that could be that could be but and this will be updated we're going to try and modify it slightly so each principal was asked to provide this i'm sorry it took a little bit longer to put it together we did have some other priorities and other issues taking up our time but kudos to jason miss winchester and everybody else who helped us pull this together to verify we had everybody reflected all new principal appointments are in here with the exception of any open vacancies presently and so you'll get those updated pages in the near future but again it

232gives you biographical information about them and a little bit about their schools so if you're visiting you know keep it in your car you can pop it open look at it and you know if i don't know if you're gonna intend on sending any birthday notes to your to your principals but i just gave you the opportunity right and you have their contact information and things like that so i think it was important for you to hear from them and and get to know them as as the people serving in our schools and so it's a great transition here thank you miss miller for the opportunity to discuss that with you but you have that and hopefully you find it beneficial if there's something missing and you'd like to see us add it to in

233the future please let me know okay madam chair that concludes my portion of the workshop today thank you superintendent hyde and i have a few quick updates before we go to our committee reports um so the first is you should have all gotten an email from polk vision this week that thursday april 28th from 8 a.m to 10 30 a.m will be the state of the county for the first time ever they're including education as part of the state of the county um so superintendent hyde and i have been invited to speak with commissioner santiago and this county manager as well as joy from the department of health so we would love to see you there it's sure to be a great event and there is also a zoom electronic option as well evaluations thank

234you all for submitting your evaluations um they are all complete i'll get with a vet this week and we'll make sure that we get a copy out to everyone and then i'll be scheduling meetings within the next week or so to meet with both carol and wes to go over their evaluations one of the things that actually carol brought to my attention beforehand is that they had never seen the bullet points of information that we get of these maybe good options for notes and there were several of those that you may see the same bullet point in four different categories which obviously if you're really great at that bullet point then it's not a bad thing but if it's something that you struggle with you're going to get hit with it three or four times

235so as after we look at the evaluations i've asked both of them just to take a look at their evaluations what the actual metric is and make sure that it aligns with their job description that they don't have anything that they're concerned about i'm being evaluated on this and this really isn't something this position does or this is going to hit me four times by us basically yes correct so that i ask them just both to bring those um to me when we review the evaluation then i'll bring those back to the board if we have any recommendations to change them moving forward along those lines i've now received from all of the staff that either report to us or report to someone who reports to us their job description updates we mentioned last meeting

236superintendent hyde is doing that globally so we wanted to make sure that our staff members get included superintendent hyde and i are in conversations about making sure that our staff are aligned to the full district staff because it's a little bit of a weird situation and that we're one organization but 10 people that work here report to us and the other 13 000 plus report to the superintendent um so making sure that our positions are aligning with what we're doing with the rest of the district and we'll bring those proposals to the work session on february 22nd you looked like you were getting ready to say something okay um and then strategic planning date we asked all of you to bring your calendars last time and then forgot to look at strategic planning dates um

237so superintendent hide let's do that um i did i are we looking for a half day i would suggest another half day okay um i know their request previously was mornings worked um for for the collective group morning seemed to work better and then the request was to start at 9 00 a.m versus an 8 a.m start if we were to do that again i believe only correct me if i'm wrong either dr allen or mr wilson had a conflict with early mornings depending on the day correct okay is it tuesdays you had a conflict on okay tuesday thursdays typically so superintendent hyde i think your schedule is probably the busiest of us do you want to or wendy do you have a date that the seventh works of march if we want to look

238that far out i know most of the board appreciates several weeks notice because you're very busy so monday march 7th works on my calendar with all due respect we'll will accommodate whatever the needs are we have a work session on the 8th i could make the 9th work we have a groundbreaking on the 10th so we could do an afternoon session on the on excuse me on the 10th if that would work and then um those are several dates for the for that second week of march if that works for any for the board i don't know if we want to start there so do we want to look at march 7th first yes i'm good i cannot do more straight we cannot do march 7th i cannot do the ninth i have leadership book

239that day the 10th 10th works for me i can't do the 10th what about the 11th superintendent i could make the 11th work because miss joachim will be upset with me but i can make the 11th work in the morning thank you ma'am yes the morning would work fine morning or afternoon works for me on the 11th morning needs to be morning yes ma'am so like nine to one on the 11th perfect anybody speaking now or forever hold your peace i think we can get the bulk of items done in time for mr wilson too okay i have a equity committee meeting at 10 30 but i'll just step out yes ma'am and superintendent hyde will you get with kim i'm assuming kim needs to be here as well yes ma'am i didn't check the

240date with her and she said she didn't think she had a conflict but she was going to double check so but if you'll circle back with her yes sir yes okay we'll try to get the public and we will make sure the lunch is here who knows maybe we'll get to george jenkins barbecue team and location i'm assuming will be dependent on whether or not we're in the back in the board room so that will be forthcoming but it will be here this friday i'll give you another update we're waiting on the technical equipment some has been delivered some we're still waiting on as soon as that arrives the installer from tampa will come over and begin the process but i'll get you an update as quickly as possible thank you and actually we could

241host it there we would just have to figure out what jason how to record that work session but we might be able to accommodate central office if need be okay thank you the only other thing i have is i've had the opportunity to be in tallahassee with miss dodge a couple times over the past few weeks and she is a powerhouse and i'm really glad that we were able to retain her again this year because it is amazing how much she knows and other districts realize it when you have other board members going to ask your legislative person questions because they want the right answer and she's she knows it all so i'm not really sure the story behind the huge pencil that was traveling with us last week but i'm sure dr alan will

242probably give you a little bit of that update in his report but does anyone have updates from their committees fsba have any update the board of directors really was centered around legislative posturing et cetera what could possibly come down the pike they are in the process of creating a new national school board association fsba will be a founding member of that board we did a equity and diversity training uh from it was a part two from our board of directors meeting in fort myers which was very good um that uh basically talked about uh model companies and it's not just words you put on there about equity and diversity it's how you actually follow through with that and your actions speak much louder than your mission statement if you uh don't follow through with that

243and uh that that was about it for um i believe and just confirming the new national organization is not the national school board association it's a coalition or something yes it's called something and i apologize i did not bring my notes and i had them i just wanted to reiterate that it is totally separate from the one that was in there actually the florida school board association has withdrawn its membership from the national school board association and they are along with i believe 23 other states going to build their own coalition of a national platform because we still i guess felt like we needed input and understanding of federal guidelines federal type training etc and i believe bev slough is going to be the representative for that new coalition as well she's out of st

244john's county i believe all right that's it thank you anybody else miss miller i'm gonna mention because i've talked about it all in tallahassee and recruited all kinds of people the polka education foundation i've also recruited the superintendent and maybe his wife polk education foundation is having a um a new fundraiser we've never done in polk county it's a it's a clay shoot at night but it will it's getting a lot of attention and it's going to raise a lot of money for our students so i'm excited to attend that on march 4th and you're welcome to come and watch if you don't shoot clays or you don't shoot them at night i've never done that but um it will be a great time to be with our community partners and help support students right

245mr hyde you're going to shoot clays i thought school board came yeah oh yeah we're going to work on this we if the school board members would like we did discuss i'm in a school board team um i don't sure what our results would be but it would be a good effort for kids to see us mrs hyde will be there as well i'm excited so that's all we had at polk education foundation and i'll let dr alan speak of the giant pencil we carried around it was a great time to be in tallahassee i kind of prefer i would hope that polk days would fall closer to that fsba conference because it's i think once we visit polk days and get to meet with our community members there at the capitol to go back

246another week just a week later i know that's not our scheduling um i just think the board members that weren't able to make it to polk days i think that's much more effective because you get to be around other members from polk county elected officials as well as lobbyists and people that work in work in government and the conversations from that are very very beneficial but i know i know we don't just we don't um schedule those so hopefully it will fall closer if not in the same week next year dr allen i'm sure you have input oh my goodness um well i was thinking more of the banter that you guys were having over there on that side about the hogs at the youth fair i think the 401 exhibitors and it just reminded

247me of the opportunity to be able to share kielbasa and bacon with you while we're in tallahassee miss forney so really no i mean tallahassee okay but it was really a great opportunity for us to to roam the halls and to interact with our legislation um alongside whitney dodge you know she did just push out her summary from her time up there and she is really magical i mean the way that she understands each of our delegates and will address particular bills and the impact that those bills have in our district it was really neat to see her work and do her magic there not necessarily magic but you know she was just working it really well um yeah so the pencil is there it's a symbol it's a symbol of creativity and if you

248want to know anything about the pencil misfields um i could give you all the history of the pencil i do have a featured documentary on the pencil that's out there i didn't i don't know if you knew that but i love taking it out into the classroom and you know the kids just get all excited about it and then on occasion i'll talk about the history of the pencil it really did change society in dramatic ways so there you go i almost brought it as a background prop today but i held back but we'll see it's not still in your car it actually says polk county public schools on it though chris it does absolutely and it was moving around the streets in tallahassee everybody needs to know about polk county and speaking of there

249was we did sit in on one of the committees the house pre-k through 12 educational subcommittee and it really it was really interesting they they have a new allocation called putting parents first allocation and it was in the summary who knows got a long ways to go but it was a 200 million dollar allocation and my understanding from wendy dodge's summary is if that actually went through polk county would get 106 million dollars 118 118 wow um so quite interesting quite interesting one follow so those are a couple of my updates thank you madam chair but can i add something to that but that that 200 million dollars comes on the backs of the 12 districts that stood by their parental rights because they voted for a mass mandate and uh and their parents in

250their districts wanted their kids to wear masks and so you know we're actually gonna maybe benefit from their misery which i can't think it can be good on that side of history right and just to be a part of that conversation was intriguing to watch so thank you thank you anyone else yes miss fields thank you for coordinating the evaluations i wanted to know in the future for whoever sits in these seats if we're going to be using that format that we can put as a part of the directions that in order for us to access the the documents we have to wait to get permission from the office staff to give us that permission i hope i'm making sense yes ma'am there were several things that i think miss yvette and i learned and

251we have noted all of those so that they'll be moving forward if we're able to use the same um format it's already created so that it'll be a much smoother rollout well she did great but i didn't realize that that was something that i had to wait on because i do a lot of my work late at night or early mornings right and so just as long as it's made known to whoever is going to be doing it in the future yes ma'am yes one of the things um yvette and i have been working on is every time because of course this is the first time going around of everything for that office so as they're doing each new thing making sure that they're adding it to a binder so that as we we move

252on you know in 50 years when she's not here with us anymore um she'll have someone to pass all of that onto so we don't miss the content as we're updating procedures thank you thank you anything else right with no further business to come before the board this work session is adjourned there is lunch next door [Music] you