School Board Work Session | January 11, 2022

001[Music] we'll now call this work session to order superintendent hide yes ma'am madam chair i apologize on pulling up my while you're doing that i'm going to read our who are we statement yes ma'am thank you just because it's always a good reminder so this is the who are we statement that we created at our retreat a few months ago we are the polk county leadership governance team if we were to pick one phrase to define us it would be student-centered because we come together when we come together to work we lean on on our diverse backgrounds and experiences to ensure that our decisions are focused on providing a high quality education for all students the four most important things to our governance team are operating with integrity respecting our students staff families and each

002other establishing a culture where our stakeholders feel valued supported and have opportunities for personal and professional growth in supporting an approach of continuous improvement to ensure student outcomes collectively we need to work on behalf of the children we serve and find avenues of agreement so that we can govern the district in an effective manner there is no acceptable alternative we will always collaborate in a respectful manner in order to enhance opportunities for each student and staff member we will not disparage others our students will thrive because we will remain committed to supporting the whole child we hope to engage and empower our students and stakeholders to create a community of lifelong learners madam chair members of the board thank you for for the luxury of that time here to pull up i had the wrong

003agenda pulled up so i apologize at this time i'd like to bring up we have several items on the superintendent's report today first and foremost is a return and a renewal of the presentation on the internal funds audit so at this time i'd like to ask jennifer christensen to please come to the microphone as you recall board members we began the presentation but ms christensen was dealing with a cold or flu at the time so she asked if we could revisit and we agreed so ms christensen the floor is yours thank you as you said we went through the financial statements last month so i'll kind of go a little faster during that part of the presentation but if you guys have questions as always just please feel free to ask and so um i'm

004just going to flash these up and just remind everyone that with internal funds these are the funds that not state funds but these are funds that are raised at the schools by the students and used for the students things such as admission events football game tickets fundraisers and so you could see our summary here that compares year over year and with internal funds the money that's raised really should be spent in the same year that it's raised and so you could see we had revenue of 6.3 million and we had expenditures of almost 6.3 million so that's exactly what we would expect when it comes to internal funds and um another thing to remind everyone we had a new accounting standard um gasby 84 that was effective this year and basically what it did if

005we i kind of go back one slide we have um in the middle there we have 10 million dollars of last year it was called internal accounts payable and this year it's called net position and and really that's that's pretty much we had some changes in the names and um and the internal funds are being treated as a custodial fund as a fiduciary activity and then in our footnotes some of the more sensitive footnotes that i wanted to bring up would be the investments just we are required to disclose if there's a concentration of investments in one type of investment so we had 6.9 percent were invested in corporate notes and then we always um disclose uncertainties and right now covet 19 would still be considered an uncertainty when it comes to internal funds because

006it can certainly and it has affected the amount of activity that flows through internal funds from year to year so we like to disclose that that there could be another effect in this upcoming year depending on how things go with with covid and when we're doing the internal funds audits we do a lot of compliance testing and so these are the different areas we look at we look at admission events contracts cash receipts cash disbursements and we look at a sample that includes items from every school so we make sure that every school is is tested and that's where the bulk of our um findings come from and so and this is kind of where things went downhill a little bit last month so this is kind of what i wanted to to um focus

007on a little bit today this first chart just shows the average findings per school and keeping in mind that every year we pick a sample and so sometimes it's kind of the luck of the draw whether we cut we have a finding or not but over the total population we would expect the number to to be pretty steady over the years and so you could see from 2017 through 2021 um the average is right there between you know 0.5 and one finding per school so um so that again would be as expected here we do a breakdown to show what percentage of schools or number of schools had zero findings one one two three four five and um we always have when we look in the category of five or more i always say there

008there's usually an instance where um there may be something going on at that school especially you know we've had a lot more of um turnover when it comes to financial secretaries just due to the environment right now and so um so you could see that that was three percent but looking at the the other side of the chart we had um 84 percent of our schools that had one finding or less so that's a great stat to have so one thing that we wanted to point out are some of the more common findings that we have and we audit the internal accounts for several different florida school districts and some of the common findings we see are the same at every district and in the first one being the fundraising activity forms anytime a club

009or a group wants to have a fundraiser they have to fill out a form a request form ahead of time and get the principal's approval before they start the fundraiser and so we had 11 instances where where the form either wasn't filled out or it just wasn't approved by the principal prior to the fundraiser occurring and then um the next one has to do with deficit account balances we've had a couple and again we had 11 of those this year and um we did have a couple instances where there were some accounts that had deficit balances and when i say deficit this is for one single account so a lot of a couple of times it was the yearbook account so in total the school does not have a deficit balance they don't have negative

010cash or they don't have negative you know a deficit balance in total but it's just one individual account that that has a deficit balance and a couple of those instances were from things that maybe happened during covid where like yearbooks is a good example if they the school didn't sell enough yearbooks um in the 2012 you know 2019-2020 year they um still had to make the payment to the yearbook company so it caused them to go in a deficit and they have a plan to work out of that deficit but it is taking a little bit of time because that's it you know it's something they they couldn't turn around in just one year so um so we had some of those and then you could see deposits not made timely to the bank um

011and funds collected not turned in daily so anytime a funds get collected by a teacher if a student turns them into the teacher the teacher then needs to turn it in to the to the front office and and we just had some cases where they weren't turned in that day and then the last one is another fundraiser report after the fundraisers are done there's a like a sales report that has to be completed so that the schools realize how much profit or loss that fundraiser earned so that they can kind of analyze it to see if that's a fundraiser that they want to do again in the future and so those reports are due 10 days after the end of the fundraiser and so we had seven instances where the report either wasn't completed or

012just wasn't completed within the 10 days at the end of the fundraiser here i know this is a small small chart but if you look at it it's just more to to be able to visually see the differences in the number of findings from the last three years and so you could see the um the gold bars that's this year so you can see there are some trends but like i said before it could be the luck of the draw of which items we select to test the compliance on but um but you could see the the various um findings and one if you kind of look down the one that kind of stands out a little bit to me we have towards the bottom purchase order approved after the purchase we had you know

013a handful of findings a couple years ago and then it went to zero and part of that is a change in the process for purchase orders moving more towards an electronic process so that's really helped with that you know finding so that the schools no longer have those findings and so um as far as the district-wide recommendations you know we do issue a report for each school on the compliance issues that we come across and then we issue district-wide recommendations and so we had two this year the first one has to do with the accounts receivable at the technical colleges and i wanted to start out by saying you know each year we have an audit adjustment because of differences between old accounts receivable at the technical colleges and and when um it gets written

014off for our purposes versus when the district writes it off and in the um 2021 school year the district did write off the old they were approved by the board to be written off so the old ar were written off so we now our numbers um you know agree as far as the accounts receivable so in the future we shouldn't see any of those adjustments anymore so i wanted to first point that out but when we were going through and testing the invoices for the technical colleges um we did notice that there were several invoices out of we looked at we picked 11 to look at and six of the ones we looked at were for students who um either maybe it didn't attend and you know they registered for class but they either didn't

015attend or maybe they attended for a few days and then dropped the class and didn't attend the rest of the semester so there are invoices that should have been voided and there are amounts that really aren't owed to the district or to the technical colleges because the student dropped out before before the commitment period where they would have to pay the tuition and so that's something that we talked to them about and we define this as a significant deficiency and the reason why and what that means is it's not material to the financial statements so the accounts receivable amount is not a large number you know compared to the rest of the internal funds but it's something that we feel is important enough to bring to your attention that it's a it's a process that

016probably needs to be looked at and i believe it is being looked at and some changes being made on when the invoices a lot of times it's because the registration the office where the student registers or drops a class there's it doesn't always translate over to the financial office where the invoices are being generated and so i believe that they're going to start working on some of that process so that the communication um improves and so that if a student does drop a class and doesn't attend that the finance office will know about it so that they're able to avoid that invoice so that the invoice doesn't show up as outstanding when when it shouldn't be for the second item this is what we call an improvement point it's just something we you know we

017noticed during the audit and we just wanted to bring it up we think it's a good idea it's not considered a deficiency but the manual for the internal funds we feel like you know should be reviewed and updated it's it's about i think it's about nine or ten years old and during that time i mentioned earlier the purchase order process has changed it's become more electronic and so sometimes the policies and the rules behind it need to kind of change and be updated or even the processes that are defined in the manual need to be updated to comply with these these changes that are occurring and also there's sometimes you know changes in school board rules you know possibly bidding rules and so you just want to make sure that your manual complies with these

018rules that it agrees with the rules and so we had recommended that the manual be reviewed and and updated and um and the accounting department had mentioned that that's um an item that's a task that's on their list to do for this school year so we expect that to be updated by the time we start our audit next year and so with that i always just like to thank the people i work with i work with the accounting department lisa luke and their team and i mean they do an amazing job every year they pull so much information for us when we come out and they always have it ready and anytime we give them a new list they have it turned around quickly and that's so helpful for us as auditors and so um

019so i always like to say thank you to them and then also thank you to carol and and her team of internal auditors and so um with that if you have any questions i'd be happy to yes miss miller i'm superintendent this might be for you or your staff but i have a couple of questions the internal guide where we find um issues with fundraising inside schools either with pta groups or you know the ones you showed here do we have a um a guide that is available online like we should we should be able to give them this so they're not these aren't happening but i don't know how access accessible it is all of that information is part of their regular training and reminders we put out reminders each year but it is

020provided for them electronically and i believe it's it's part of a comprehensive document where all the school bookkeepers are trained on these things whether or not specific teachers are fully trained becomes a responsibility to school level and so we'll follow up because i have some questions to follow up after this morning's presentation as well and i have one other question and this also might be for the superintendent i appreciate your work here because it's given me a lot of information i have one high school that had considerable yearbook debt that went on for it's probably eight years now and there was discussion at one time to find a resource to pay that debt and they have a plan we haven't made progress in that so who is responsible for following up besides me asking questions

021to make sure that my school's when i say do i have any schools with significant debt who at the district is the point person to ask what we're doing to follow up with those schools becomes the responsibility of both accounting and of our um of our finance department who would manage that issue with the school to ensure that each year if there was a plan addressed um or provided and was approved that they're actually following through with that plan so i can absolutely follow up with you after this or jenkins to follow up with you to find out who that is sure i'll send an email thank you thank you miss fields i had a i had a couple of questions i don't know who would answer this do we still have the courier doing

022coming to get deposits from the schools the courier did anybody know that is that still mr jenkins is indicating yes we still have a query or that okay thank you um i want to commend the staff and the schools for the great work that they have done during a very challenging period hobit i remember when i first came on the school board we had a lot of issues a lot of things that were just not where they needed to be and i think with the staff working hard and i think with uh the assistance of of this matthews and her team we've come a long ways i know we have a a ways to go but i want to commend them for the work and i know that we've been working on the technical college

023issue for a long time i know that and i know that miss matthews has been working with with the staff to ensure that we uh deal with the significant deficiency and i think we're making progress and next year hopefully we won't have this issue up as you just referenced so i just want to commend the staff for the great work that they've done especially during a very difficult time doing kobe yes ma'am miss fordy yeah having lost a money's collected form as a classroom teacher i know that our financial secretaries are on it and i do appreciate that is a heavy lift i don't think people realize the volume of work at the school level uh for something that appears simple uh there is tracking and uh i think our taxpayers should be very proud

024of this thank you miss cunningham yes i was just going to say uh thank you also um to everyone involved i know miss matthews does and her team does a great job and i'm very pleased that we're continuing the 100 percent audit we did that changed that a few years ago you know that we do all of our schools it was interesting to note in the findings that i'm i believe i'm seeing the same issues continuous am i am i right so i don't know if there's a certain area when we do our training that we need to zero in on because it seems like it's pretty much the same things that we've seen year after year and i get it you know we've been through some trying times lately so i would anticipate that

025these you know that this audit would improve next year as we try to get back to some sense of normalcy and that perhaps we can zero in on training on these particular areas with the most common findings that's all i had to say but thank you so much for the work that you do it's very very important that we monitor our funds thank you in the audit's very timely and that feeds into one of our new strategic plan goal areas of efficient and equitable use of our resources because financial management and to your point ms cunningham when you look at the slide i believe it's slide nine and you see the last three year history you know we would expect to see those issues continue to decline but as was pointed out by ms christians

026and some of those may be related to new employees who are new to their role but they are class you could chunk these based off training opportunities for example collection and maintenance of fundraising activities and whatnot and so i'll be working with the team to identify and that will become part of our strategic plan goal initiatives to ensure that we continue to see improvements in all of these areas we provide the right training and support to our school-based staff to do so thank you superintendent thank you the only question i had was on slide eight if i may um slide eight captured um you know the most common findings of the when you list a number of instances i'm assuming that's one instance per school but that 11 is not an indication of five instances

027happening within the same school no but it can have one school can have more than one instance but that number of 11 for example fundraising activity would reflect 11 different schools not five years it would be 11 times we had the findings so there could be one school that had it you know had had it two times they would count as two on here okay so it's not eleven different schools it's eleven times all right and then that becomes the opportunity for us to do the drill down to identify are there individuals or schools that we need to reinforce and provide additional training and supports too so thank you miss miller i had one other question um thank you superintendent when you have the number of findings of five or more if there's a significant

028like if there were ten are those flagged individually or you're saying five or we've had five or more numbers four schools have had five or more findings the more is what i'm asking about like how how many more could i mean are we talking 25 i think we had one school that had six okay um if it got to the point where we had probably any more than that we would sit down with carol during the audit and a lot of times what we'll do with um when we have that in in other school districts is we'll sit down with internal audit and um come up with a plan because they likely will want to go to that school you know start right digging in a little deeper at that school so we'll do that

029during the audit before we even finish if we come across something thank you a large number thank you no further questions okay thank you so much thanks for coming back this morning come back at this time i'd like to bring jeff jeff hancock senior director for science and social studies up to the podium i'd also like to bring joe mcnaughton chief academic officer to the the dais as well as the board recalls we pulled the nearpod item from the previous board meeting prior to making a recommendation for the board to adopt it based on some concerns that were expressed to us i wanted to provide in an effort to be both transparent and to address any questions or concerns that you or general members of the public have as it relates to nearpod an opportunity

030to hear both from our staff and from the vendor as to what steps can be taken why it was recommended including its history in our school district we had previously utilized nearpod in the school district beginning in 2016. and again we want to be able to address those issues before any formal recommendation is brought back to the board just as a reminder this will be brought to two workshops before it's brought back for a final recommendation so you will see this topic again on the next january workshop meeting so there's two weeks for the board members to provide me with any further questions they'd like to see us address so that you have a very comprehensive understanding of nearpod and what steps and protections we can put in place as it relates to the curriculum

031the resources and and those that are provided by some of the supplemental providers as well and then again you will likely see this topic come back before you in february if the recommendation is going to be to move forward with an adoption but again we're here today to go ahead and hear more information on background on nearpod and what steps we can take to address some of the concerns that have been provided to us all yours sir okay good morning um so the curriculum team when s for funding became available got together and and was talking about what things could be brought to help students you passed gizmos last time we thought that would be a excellent addition as long as some other tools that'll be be coming up in the future um but the

032biggest one of the biggest focuses we saw was student engagement students have a screen time issue and teachers have not really adjusted over the years myself included when i was teaching there wasn't it wasn't screens so much as there are now so um when we started discussing this was one of the options that we saw as a way to engage kids that have a much shorter attention span than they did when we were students so that was the primary discussion amongst trying to bring near pot to to polk county the contract that we proposed was 75 000 students which is grades three through 12. being sensitive to there is some research and i saw maddie freed in the back for younger students in screen time so we wanted to keep that in mind as well

033so that's why we started grades 3 through 12. currently nearpod has 21 districts in the state of florida including some large districts and if you'd like those i can send those to you that they currently partner with we like mr hyde said have about 10 schools in the district that use nearpod currently of their own accord i know i saw miss solano in the back and when she applied for the teacher of the year contest her submission was actually done using an earpod lesson i just wanted to also bring that up so um so those are some things that that we that are currently happening um when we looked at this the esser funds required that learning loss be a part of why you would apply for for these funds so i do believe that

034we have are currently setting up things that will address learning loss but i don't want to say they're unengaging but they're they could use some some assistance in some of those things but uh that had to be addressed so i know that was one of the questions that came up why is it for this that or the other it is for learning loss we can use it to help with learning loss we can use it for building lessons so that way we have individuals who may be teaching lessons that are less content knowledge ready then we have some of those things there and available for them as well and it could also be we also push out review courses to directly to students so teachers don't even see it and it's a way that could

035keep students engaged as opposed to here's a packet packets aren't engaging students are engaged by activities this will help with that engagement so i've read that individuals are concerned about this being a curriculum it is it does have curriculum but the reason that we're seeking it is for the engagement side and to help with our our current curriculum what curriculum will teachers i know that there's some concerns about teachers and what curriculum they will see i have just passed out to you a user guide on managing the availability as a curriculum team when we walk classrooms and when we manage anything we we start with the benchmark the standard in mind and that's what we do when we look in classrooms when we when we're building things so this will be addressed in much the

036same way if it does not meet a standard that is currently accepted or in c-palms it doesn't need to be available to our teachers our teachers thus would not see it we can turn it off at the district level and anything we turn off the school level will not be able to turn on the school level in addition could turn off materials and that is addressed in here so we could turn off x y and z and at the school level they could turn off r and q if they wanted to so there are uh safeguards in regards to what we can put in front of people i will say that between the last board meeting and this board meeting these funds were approved by the commissioner so for for esther to be spent i

037would uh and i will say this i have been in another county that used it um a large school district and i worked primarily in the da schools and i will tell you that the difference in instruction that i saw with nearpod and how it integrates there integrated into canvas here it integrates into schoology and without it was pretty striking you know that extra 10 minutes of engagement you get with a student who is going to either engage on the computer or engage on their own personal phone was very meaningful the years after they implemented their uh initiative with nearpod and one-to-one devices their point their their scores went up about three points across the board in each cell so uh i would there's my pitch i'll pass it over to joe but if you

038have any questions we did ask the nearpod representatives to come so if you'd like any input from them they can also provide yes ma'am what school district if i may ask did you witness orange county orange county thank you sir yes sir you mentioned that this product improves student engagement but you didn't tell us how i i'm interested in knowing how what is it that causes them to be more engaged when they use this product sure there's multiple things um i'll give you you can build formative assessments that are fun so kids do not like to take tests and nor do we really like to give kids so this product does that it allows you to build those kinds of assessments out yes sir more easily i assume than other products more easily i don't

039know if more easily is the right term i i don't know that it's easier it's more entertaining i don't know how to say it other than that they're um i'll give you an example they have a product called time to climb within it and let's say i asked you something about the first and second amendment if i were to put that in a quiz form all the kids get little characters so you're a bear and you're a penguin and maybe you're something else and you climb up this mountain now it doesn't show you anybody else's score but you see all the kids climbing up the mountain so all the kids see their little characters climbing up the mountain they get instantaneous feedback on whether they're right or wrong in a non-threatening manner that is the

040engagement piece that kids need because when they play video games they get immediate feedback good bad or indifferent and when they fail they hit reset and start over and that is the advantage of having one-to-one devices with items like this is when kids fail which they will do and i think that's perfectly acceptable first attempt in learning they go back and retry it and thus increases the engagement because they feel success in their way not in the student next to theirs so they get instantaneous feedback and they get something that's entertaining yes and i understand that i i believe that instantaneous feedback is incredibly important so but are there other products that don't do that or or this how does this product do it better have we looked at maybe we haven't looked at other

041products and that's okay that's an acceptable answer but i'm just trying to understand why this is a better product than something else on the market so i will tell you in years past being here not having one-to-one devices we did um pilot nearpod uh three right at the beginning of the pandemic we piloted nearpod because teachers asked for it teachers are asking for we have schools that ask for it and it's the same reason i brought gizmos last month teachers asking for it because they know the utilization with their kids with a one-to-one device it obviously makes it much easier without it they could still use it without a device it still can be used by the teacher without a device it just becomes a little less meaningful on the kid in terms of feedback

042so that's another feature they can use their own devices to access it yes sir okay and also with that point is that we also had schools within polk already using it so we weren't going outside of the district to look for something we're looking for something that was already working within poll so we have a product that we have familiarity with with some schools i believe it's we have 10 schools and we have numerous teachers and departments that purchase it out of their own pockets miss fortney did miss cunningham uh when i was doing my research on this because as i looked at it online and i want to thank you for the over hour conversation you had with me about it uh it reminded me and i told you that day of the old

043fcat explorer that was put out by the state and if you're not familiar with it sarah best shaking her head but uh you know for science at least and and those kids it was a a tool for them to excel and catch up you know so the acceleration piece was important and again it was before one on one so my one little computer was hot all day long with uh and they could do it at home etc so i want to thank you for that because i did have a bunch of questions when i looked at how much it cost to the number of kids all that stuff and you answered those uh quite well thank you miss cunningham dennis fields thank you uh question you did know you did note um that we currently

044have 10 schools in our district using this correct how long have they been using it if i may ask roughly i will say since i've been here we've had at least that number you have yeah so in the four years i've been here we've had at least that number with pockets of individual teachers also i will say it's it feels like it's more prevalent in social studies than it is in other content areas interesting um okay so in the schools that are currently using this what type of um educational gains have we seen compared to maybe ones that don't i know that's very difficult because there's tons of factors including most importantly the teacher in front of the classroom but if this is used to help us particularly in as you said to be used

045for learning loss um what what have you seen or is there data yet or just talk to me we can go ahead and actually pull data from team uses it yes and their score is very much beat their socio-economic demographic so what i mean by that is if we're number four in socioeconomic then your score for civic should be about fourth in middle schools does that make sense so they are not fourth but they are very very high performing when it comes to that subject so i can that's the one i know off the top of my head where they utilize it pretty much every day um and they very much out kicked their coverage i don't know how to say it okay that's kind of what i was asking super and if you as

046time goes on if you can you know give us some data i think that would be very helpful too we can go ahead and definitely do that that'd be great thank you this fields i'd like to have the names of the school districts that's doing this i also was wondering is it possible to get a demonstration link so that we can kind of see what that looks like i don't know if that's possible yes ma'am i asked before i came up here the answer to that is yes we can get you a demonstration link for everyone um would you like me to read the districts that have them no if you can just give me the list email i think you said it was quite a few it's 21. yes sir if you can just

047provide the listeners everybody in florida 21 in florida if you'll email that to me i'll follow it to the board thank you okay and then i wanted to know the professional training for the staff and the implementation process for the students to make sure that we get what we hope to see long term and i would like to see the results the outcomes of the 10 schools that's currently using it okay we can i think we can do that we can get to 10 schools shouldn't take very long uh implementation process for training so as i spoke with miss fortney we're a little late in the year i think whenever you drop something on teachers this late in the year it it it's after christmas and i i guess that's the best way i can

048say it after christmas we know as a curriculum and instruction team the majority of new things that come in come in before christmas because once christmas once a new year rolls around teachers start preparing for the test i mean that's that's i don't that is their focus so we the idea was to turn it on train our teams on and when i say our team science social studies math and ela i will say that social studies has already had pretty in-depth training on it science has had a little bit with the idea that in the summer we would then ramp up what our activities were and on contact day and moving forward we would roll those out to schools and do all the activities that we [Music] how we train on contact day would be

049trained through nearpod to get that access in the meantime we know we have teachers that are using it and would utilize it and we would highlight those teachers on contact day that are successful and using the program between now and then and we've done that with other products that we have we did that with legends of learning we freckle we've done that in other areas so it's that same kind of training model where we let the new users the early adopters go ahead and take off with it give coaches trainings and things like that but then expect full implementation to start next school year just kind of right now based on the timeline of possible adoption of this or approval not adoption that's the wrong word approval of this miss fortney and miss miller is

050that mrs reynolds miss wyatt yeah i'm pretty sure i read somewhere where nearpod is research based and we see an increase in scores with students with disabilities in our english language learners but my real question is how do we pay for it moving forward if we don't have asset funds great question so there's a reason why this came on under science and social studies so when esser funds run out science and social studies will be up for adoptions which are my areas um the idea being that if we have enough teacher usage and we see movement and growth and that is the ask we carve out if you will some instructional materials money to augment not supplement to augment the instructional materials that we currently buy and it would be done through that process so

051that that is the plan that those two years we carve out enough money to take care of that if that is what our teachers want and this the data shows that we should be doing that ms miller and ms wyatt thank you mr superintendent i have a couple of questions i tried to make a list to go down first of all usage we talked about students with disabilities is this program adaptive to all students including center school students is it able to be adapted with either devices i would have to punt on that to the near pod crew if you could come forward please either way don't go far miss miller just to be just to clarify is it are you asking if it would if it lends itself to adaptive tech in its use

052or are you asking does it will it adapt to the student's instructional level both can you use adaptive equipment to access it and two can it be modified for instruction level yeah i can answer that um and thank you for the question um we do provide a number of different options within nearpod to ensure that teacher or students that need assistive technology can use that with the platform one example of that is we have an immersive reader that is built in that reader will actually read the text aloud to a student it can even translate the text if needed and the student and the teacher desire for that to be available so yes we we look at that there are also additional ways for students to even respond so in certain cases where you know

053some students may the teacher provides an open-ended question where some students need to type in other students would be able to record their answer and submit that as well so we we allow for audio responses uh in addition to typed responses thank you that was my question um as far as usage we have teachers with different learning styles and we've had programs like you know you mentioned freckles smarties we've had lots of programs is there a requirement for this to be used because there's two sides of that one i want to give teachers autonomy to their rooms but second this is a huge investment and if we're going to invest in it are people going to use it well again just as you said there's is teacher autonomy with this uh one of one of

054the main components is this is that um our our current curriculum within is set in either one style or another and sometimes teachers adapt that one way or other they may take something that's in a powerpoint and actually make it into something for their dot cam or something like that so the idea is actually taking some of the already done in curriculum embed it within schoology so it would be uh you'd go into your lms and you can still use all the capabilities of like schoology so again i think it's there's flexibility with the teacher but the idea is that everything is housed in one place we you know again with such an expensive uh endeavor as one-to-one you know providing materials for that for teachers who are learning that that's not my native way

055of learning i'm trying to get there but it's not my native one it's my kid's native environment but allowing that flexibility for for teachers because you know jeff and i may go in look at the same standard have have been in the same planning session but when you walk into our classrooms just with how our comfort levels are and stuff and it's providing the support we will have early adopters that will run with this there'll be others that will see some benefits of it but the idea is it's not going to be used every not the intention for every day every use every second in the classroom there's so many other things within our classrooms such as centers and stations that that have to be done have we had a tech based supplement program for

056science and social studies like this one will be have we had one previously and if we did what was it we have not so this is something new for those two departments we do have legends of learning that we've used in the since i've gotten here and we are the number one user by volume in the country of that program are we going to sustain that program i think so if it flows well with this as as well so with the implementation of gizmos and so going back to just pandemic right we we have students in it and in a one-to-one environment if i'm the teacher and we've seen this this past week walk in classrooms if i'm the teacher i have kids at all different levels and in all different places and i can

057give them things that they can do and get immediate feedback while i'm working with my lowest or highest it doesn't matter if i'm working with this set of students then i need to grasp this concept i i have that ability in that setting with all these different platforms to push this out through schoology so let me say that does not take the place of our lms would still be pushed through schoology that i might have a kid over here working on legends of learning because he's truly a gamer and that's how he learns best or she learns best and then i've got a kid over here who is doing a lesson i built a near pod and i have a group that is reading with me in the front of the room and we're looking

058at text so i think that's the key is that the multiple modalities that we can we have in the classroom and the opportunities for teachers to use this to expand and reach all of the students in their class is the and it's not just by the way i'll just say it's not just about nearby this is about all of our opportunities in the one-to-one setting is the most advantageous usage of all of these things so i i wouldn't i wouldn't recommend doing that because again we have teachers that are using this like crazy mostly on the elementary level i will say that it's mostly elementary and i anticipate that gizmos will be mostly secondary and when kids go out it becomes an opportunity for us to send something to by the way there's back-end reports

059so if i run that quiz or that formative assessment with teachers i can go back in behind it as the teacher click a button and pull and see how all the kids did which then i could load into my grade book becomes very smooth and efficient in terms of getting those things but that's not neither here nor there but that is opportunities for those people to use at home as well so if we're one-to-one and my child is out with covet or he's been quarantined i can still push those lessons to them and they can do those asynchronously in a more meaningful way than than a packet yeah packets aren't successful for those students my last question is the district staff is assuring that supplemental materials anything not only near pod is linked to the

060best standards or the florida standards which are now becoming the best standards yes ma'am and i will tell you for legends um what we've done science-wise we went through every single game and lesson all and we linked all of them on our map to where they are appropriate thank you and and just a point um i know i our current curriculum staff both in ela and mathematics or actually some of the writers of the best standards so that is one thing that is their their baby and they're not going to let anything uh deter with those new there are new benchmarks in mathematics and ela so i mean it's in our best interest they're learning our benchmarks so they'll test to the benchmarks right right but that has been a concern thank you miss wyatt

061thank you i made a list too so i have a couple questions um who will determine what lessons are unavailable and i'm assuming that will be done before it's ruled out to teachers is it the same process as going through each of the lessons and connecting them to a standard well i think the process will be this is that we can unmap everything and just like current curriculum practices our curriculum specialists go through look at those items and say this is the content you know again with talking about the best standards in ela and mathematics we have people that are doing professional development across the state for training people on the bestener so they know the standards itself so going and unmapping and then putting out what is appropriate would would be the step for

062it to ensure that thank you and so does nearpod is it all the same lessons always or i would guess from time to time they add lessons is that yeah so it's on an ongoing basis so currently we over the summer remapped all of our content to be aligned to the new standards and then as new content partners or our curriculum team build new lessons those are added um and districts that have that high-level district partnership with us are first flagged of those things that they're coming so they can map them before they're rolled out awesome thank you and can i have the two of you introduce yourself just so we have yeah yeah so of course maggie center i'm the district partnership manager for florida specifically hi and i'm daniel green i'm the head

063of product for nearpod thank you both for being here yeah absolutely thank you miss fortney my fellow board members hit my last two comments with the last two mr wilson so this is more common i guess than a question um i have some concern frankly about crt in critical race theory um you know first of all in the state of florida it's illegal but putting that aside for a moment there's some other challenges with that however well intended crt started and i think it was well intended when it started i think the goal was to find avenues forward in our society to address inequities and inequalities but it has morphed and it has become incredibly divisive uh we we don't need divisiveness what we're trying to do is bring people together we're trying to create

064an environment of inclusiveness not divisiveness and that's just a reality of where we are with it as it has morphed i think i went to a link to your product and i found a lesson wherein we asked students to break up into two different groups and we asked one of the groups to to determine why they were different and why their difference mattered and what they could do to close that gap and not be different we don't do that you know that's just wrong it's wrong on every possible level we don't ask students to break into groups and identify why they're different than their classmates and you know what we can't say that's okay in one scenario and not okay in another scenario we can't do that that's hypocritical and it's not what we do

065in education maybe that's okay for adults but it's not okay for children we need to be bringing them together we need to be making sure they feel included on every level so i have some issues with that and i have some concerns about that so i'm for my vote i need to know that we're there won't be a possibility of of anyone uh doing that in our classrooms and that that leads me to a couple of questions i have and then some clarification um summary for the board and ms white i saw your hand up but you just mentioned that you in order to align to best standards here in florida that you did the mapping so at what point knowing that crt is not allowed in the state of florida to be taught are

066you vetting content before it even gets to us because i don't believe the burden i'm going to be honest i don't believe the burden should rest on my staff i think as the product vendor and product support specialist you bear the burden of ensuring that you're compliant with florida standards and florida expectations so at what point at what level are you vetting all that content so that that information doesn't again become an additional burden on an already strained staff yeah so the current content that lives within nearpod does not teach crt and is aligned to florida state standards there is the ability for a teacher or staff to create their own lessons and without seeing the lesson you're specifically referring to it is unclear if that's a lesson that nearpod created or a lesson that

067a teacher created themselves we'd have to check on that first um does that answer so you're you're saying that all the content that you will provide us at its core has been vetted and filtered to ensure that there is no crt references none of that's embedded within there absolutely okay and then as you just mentioned we then own the responsibility of training and ensuring that staff understand what the limitations are for the curriculum and whatnot correct correct okay a couple quick things just to kind of miss white i'll come back to your question i want to address a few of the questions that the board asked just i want to provide further clarification so that the first one was about teacher autonomy nearpod does not erode nor does it dictate lessons and activities our current

068curriculum adoption process does not either when we adopt curriculum materials whether it's a textbook or supplemental resources that's not your core instruction those are supplements to core instruction that the teacher has access to as a resource to deliver and address standards and benchmarks that are required by the state of florida oftentimes and i don't mean this for the board but for others who are listening it's important to clarify that because i think a lot of people assume that we take we buy a textbook and that's our core that's our curriculum and we're going to teach it from page one to the very last page between now and the end of the school year that's simply not the case teachers quite frequently deviate from the textbook to infuse lessons and activities and i think that gets

069to the question about teacher autonomy there is the science of teaching which the district absolutely and the board of education controls what has to be taught to what level of specificity and rigor does have to be taught how are we going to assess it how we're going to evaluate it all those things that remains within our purview the art of teaching is how teachers will deliver that content whether it's through hands-on activities whether it's through other types of engaging activities whether it's to project-based activities that's the art of teaching that we so carefully support and direct professional development on so teacher autonomy in this regards is not eroded it becomes a supplement and i think quite honestly what hasn't been addressed as and whether it's deer pod or some other product i mean no offense

070to near pod team what this becomes is a repository for highly effective highly engaging lessons and activities teachers for the first time will have an opportunity to to basically upload something so everyone else within their grade level their content area can see that lesson in activity take it for their own modify it accordingly depending on what's going on in their his or her classrooms it becomes an opportunity we currently do not have lessons may get handed around within a school building i think back to when i taught in the classroom and inherited a four-drawer filing cabinet from my predecessor science teacher and every week's lessons were in there in a file essentially that person taught the same lesson every year during week one during week two or week three this goes well beyond that and

071allows for far more creative creativity amongst our teachers and to address some of the concerns for our students as well um as far as the implementation what and unfortunately they had some limitations in discussing how we would support this and i hate to keep going back to the strategic plan but when we talk about the goal area of developing highly effective teachers and administrators part of that is professional development and the calendar committee has had a really good conversation of late about how to best utilize early release days for professional development we've talked about this before deploying 110 000 devices to students in our school district to be one-to-one is the easiest part of the entire solution to go one-to-one the most difficult part is training staff and ensuring that all of their resources and

072systems are in place to make them effective at its use we don't want to be a device rich school district we want to be an instructionally diligent and effective school district that uses technology as a tool for learning not just simply as okay every kid has a as a laptop we should be proud of ourselves and we you know it's a huge investment we talked about the fact that that's being done through a significant grant that we received but as we look to this it's important to note that training as was discussed in in the example that jeff provided mr hancock excuse me was that we're going to utilize a train to trainer model for the remainder if this is adopted whether it's near pot or something else the model that we will utilize given

073the timeline that we're on will be train the trainer so we will train our staff first who then push out into schools and we'll train a cadre of individuals at each school who then become school-based job-embedded professional development experts we will then also utilize early release days and other opportunities to make sure that we're that we're delivering pd again to ensure that if as we go one to one that we're utilizing them effectively parents do not want kids and we do not want families operating under the on the auspices or the understanding or relief that going one to one means kids are staring at computer screens all day because that is not what an effective one-to-one initiative does nor is it that what is that what one-to-one instruction does also making sure when we talk

074about the integration i think ms miller asked is this something we're going to require because of the investment i think when you start off for the first year or two you're really trying to draw interest you're using your your early adopters to leverage others and then at some point miss miller i would say the expectation is yes after year two and this requires a discussion with pea and others what then is the expectation after a year or two of implementation as far as the utilization for all staff because again what we're asking them to do is post their lessons in here which then get posted into schoology which is a single sign-on for all of our students and families so you can see all their lessons and activities in one single landing place so i

075do believe it's a reasonable expectation to ask all staff to share their lessons to post their lessons there and to become acclimated and that does not mean they have to utilize it every day making sure that you're posting your lesson activities does not mean you're being forced to use it um if it's not applicable to the type of instruction or lessons that you're delivering so i just want to provide a little bit more clarification there um as to its use and thank you for answering my question which i'm going to be honest with you is the big question as mr as mr wilson pointed out the big question and concern the big elephant in the room is if we adopt something because you do utilize third-party providers that provide content materials and now there were

076companies that were explicitly identified by several of our community stakeholders that they had concerns with and so i find great comfort hopefully the board does at this point that you vet that to ensure that everything is aligned and limited to what florida allows so thank you for that miss white and then miss cunningham thank you um we received a question from a constituent about the number of students served because it's 70 saying it's 75 000 and we have many more reported in the district my guess is that that's charter students and pre-k students that it won't serve are there any other groups that would not be served by this they would be k through two those the pre-k through two students what was written in the proposal was third grade so that's why the discrepancy

077perfect thank you um and then i just wanted to make a comment i had a teacher approach me this week about nearpod that she and her team had adopted it during the pandemic um and just talking about how much her students loved it that they just like you know i met with them every tuesday and thursday and it was supposed to be for 90 minutes and we would get to the end of our 90 minutes and they would beg me to start a new game that we could play because in their mind their games their who can get to the mountain the fastest by answering the most right questions um and that was just her experience with it that she's like you know i was supposed to be on with them for 90 minutes and

078they would beg me to be on for three hours and we would do it because what else were you going to do during the shutdown but that's how much her students enjoyed some of the lessons that they have that they kind of don't don't even realize that they're learning as much as they do um which was a cool experience just to get some feedback on it thank you miss cutting him uh yes sir and looking at the financial piece our price is i rounded 861 000 divided by 75 000 students it costs 11.48 cents per student and if you divide that over three years right three dollars and something per student so when you think about the opportunities to financially invest as you indicated in diverse modality modalities right to allow teachers and students the

079opportunity it's not a lot of money but i will say i share the same concerns that you've heard from my colleague and superintendent hyde regarding the type of curriculum that can be accessed because once you release that to a student or family you want to make sure that everything is appropriate internally so i would echo that as well but financially to me looks like it would be a great investment for our district thank you mr wilson so there may be some additional questions but i just want to say thank you all for coming and answering our questions and i want to thank superintendent hyde for the clarification as well it's been very helpful to me so thank you thank you so board members as a next step again this will be brought back at the

080next meeting as a workshop item so if you have any further questions or or areas where you're contacted by a stakeholder you need additional clarification please reach out miss fields miss miller miss cunningham have asked for data we will make sure we provide that for you as it relates to which school districts in the state of florida currently utilize it um i know dr allen unfortunately is not here i know mckeel charter schools uses this program but we will look at i will caution our team when we do the data analytics for the schools that have already adopted this and currently are using it we'll do it at the teacher level to show improvement over years past not comprehensively across the school because not everybody within the department or school may be utilizing and i

081think mr wilson that will get largely to your question in your and i know your interest as far as using resources for for engagement and increased opportunities and outcomes for students so um we'll and we'll get those questions to you in a timely manner so and we'll invite you back to the next meeting if you don't mind even if it's um just our florida representative so thanks for being here today um and we'll move forward appreciate it if it does please the board we can actually have a mini lesson so you can actually go and experience what the kids experience and see what's going on just as a to see what's going on with that well there were three things the board asked for they asked for the list of the 21 schools in the

082district they asked for a data analysis on the schools they're currently utilizing or teachers currently utilizing and i believe they asked for a password or login so they could get in and test the system and get some access to some lessons and we'll actually create one for you perfect awesome absolutely thank you for your time this morning appreciate it thank you so much thank you and now mr is coming forward to have a discussion about our adult learning facilities both our east and west adult schools good morning i'm here to present today on a proposal for transforming the adult schools but before i get started i wanted to make a statement this is a a presentation about the current state of adult schools it in no way should be considered an indictment or reflect poorly

083on the administration teachers and staff at our adult schools on the contrary the staff at these schools are among the best in the district and they provide an important service to the community by assisting adults in achieving better employment through furthering their education remediating their academic skills and helping them obtain a ged additionally our esau classes are the foundation that many immigrants use as a springboard to achieve the american dream for the record i'm proud of our adult schools and i'm proud of the adults who decide to attend the school to improve their lives and better their education now with that being said there have been a lot of changes to adult programs over the past years and some of that is what we need to consider today so our current challenges for our adults

084are adult schools are um we're having an a decline in enrollment some of that of the external factors that impact our enrollment is we have additional compete uh competition from online companies and we have competition from uh some of our uh charter schools new beginnings being one of them doing their job going out reaching out and trying to help students achieve geds the online companies if a student will google how do i get my ged the first thing that will come up are these online companies so we have competition from them um additionally colleges some colleges are no longer requiring diplomas for specific job trade programs now this is a small but a small number of colleges and programs however it does add to the shrinking pool of possible ged candidates and there's a statewide

085enrollment decline and actually it's uh it's a national decline in students uh going out and trying to achieve geds or attending adult programs you'll see that in a later slide then we have our internal factors we have recovery programs such as fresh start which helps students achieve a penn foster diploma and we have the grad academy which has done an excellent job in helping high school students uh catch up on their credits and therefore be able to graduate on time all of these things have and the combination of the wonderful problem to have of rising graduation rates again continues to shrink the pool of possible adult education candidates our current challenges the department of education has implemented a program iet which requires us to integrate some of our adult ed programs with educational our correction

086career and technical education skills um we are to uh not only assist them in getting a ged but help them down a career pathway or into post-secondary education the goals of increasing the number of adult education completers who earn the goal of the program to earn a degree or an industry certification additionally we're have been losing funding in workforce education the amount has been decreased by 2 million since 2015. and unfortunately the problem of decreasing enrollment also impacts the ability for us to collect the tuition which is required by the state now that's uh not a huge number uh to attend our adult schools but it does it is again part of the money that we use to fund the program so this is a state of the enrollment across this across the state of

087florida you can see that there has been a significant decline since 20 2016 2017 and polk has not been immune to that decline this is our current number of students attending our adult schools and goes back to 2016. i i do want to state that that you cannot look at these numbers and and say well we have right now 800 esau students if you're looking at 2021-22 that number reflects students that have come to the program or signed up they're not necessarily all in two of our adult schools because we have satellite programs we also have online programs that many of them attend and some of them are in our programs that we have in probationary settings and in our jail settings on average 65 percent of the students that enroll into our adult programs

088we'll attend less than 225 hours now some of that is a very successful outcome some of that is our students just leaving the program additionally seven to ten percent will sign up and uh not attend so that number does not reflect students sitting in classrooms at our schools our plan is to relocate our adult school programs to the campuses of our two technical colleges the assistant principals will continue to oversee their programs while reporting directly to the sent to the director of the technical college they will also be changed to from assistant principals to assistant directors this will provide continuity for students to continue their education through the iet initiative it will allow us to share resources and make our programs financially slimmer and it will create a unified effort with polk county adults providing

089opportunities to complete their degree certificate or industry certification additionally we will move the ratio from 18 to 1 to 25 to 1. again that 18-1 is not a imposed number by the state that was a number that we imposed on ourselves at some point a while back again the average daily attendance for these adult students is under 50 percent yes ms cunningham yes going up underneath your second bullet you have does iet initiative could you tell me what the iet stands for that is the integrated uh education uh for seat for for uh career and technical programs so they want us to integrate career and technical skills with our ged and esau classes thank you very much yes i apologize if i didn't make that clear earlier the facilities plan west area adult school the

090school building would be turned over to facilities who would utilize it as a as a building to for their maintenance activities the portables that were on that campus would be moved to travis technical college for classroom and office space east area adult school the school building would be turned over to real academy of auburndale auburndale high school numbers are continuing to increase i was just talking to mr bruno the other day and he feels like his numbers will go up at least another 300 next year so that area continues to get bigger and they they need their space back so real is going to have to move somewhere additionally if there is a concern in the auburndale community that we will not be able to continue to provide some adult and esau services part of

091the campus two of the classrooms could be utilized as satellite classrooms so that we could continue to provide services for students who may have transportation issues or other issues that may keep them bound to the auburndale area portables that are left there would be moved to ridge technical college for classroom and office space what's not mentioned in here because they they really only use this as a home base is east area adult school the migrant uh farmworkers offices there they had already reached out to me earlier this year about seeing if we could move them to this side of the county as most of the students that they serve or on or migrant farm workers that they serve are on this side of this county so i have been actively looking for office space for

092them in the bartow mulberry lakeland area this is the list of some of our current satellite sites this is the personnel plan uh i do want to say this is a base plan um we believe that there will be savings in the plan but the teacher numbers could work up again this is a a plan that is still in development but the numbers could work back up but there will be definitely savings in the plan on personnel costs both of these programs are paid for out of workforce funding and workforce funding can only be spent on cte and adult ed programs so putting these programs together were one person can be paid for and serve both programs which we can't do that everywhere will be very beneficial the displaced positions that we'd be looking at

093for west very adult school would be the two custodians the guardian four adult ed teachers a resource teacher and two part-time clerical for east area adult school again displaced positions two clerical a para teacher uh three adult ed teachers a resource teacher and a part-time clerical the guardian is not represented on there because the guardian will maintain that position hopefully when real academy moves over these are our proposed next steps um is develop a facilities move plan i've had some very brief meetings with miss usher so we've we've kind of kicked that off but we haven't worked out every detail we have already spoken with the staff about the plan today and in february and march we will identify we will spend our time making sure we identify the staff that will be displaced we

094will develop new marketing material to let people know about the move and get people oriented to going to the technical colleges for their adult education needs during the summer we will implement the move and in august we would have our adult ed staff report to their new campus that is our adult education proposal ms miller you have a question ms miller i do and i'm smiling because you spent a lot of time with me already on this and i appreciate that um but this affects my district the most because it's two schools we're talking about giving armadale more space which they desperately need and moving a school that's been in auburndale since the early 80s but i think the the first topic i would like to speak on is the board needs to decide if

095adult education is a priority because it doesn't make us a lot of money um there are other ways to get geds that cost a lot more money than we can we're providing something at a very low minimal cost to the public polk county is 15 15.8 percent if you look at the poverty level which is higher than the national rate and i think employment and education is the way out of that so we need to consider where we are because i know statewide and nationwide adult education is not um a priority as much as it used to be but we have to remember i think our demographics and who you know who was with us to be able to provide opportunities um so i think that's one conversation we need to have east area which

096resides in auburndale has always had signific had more students in the west area that person has also managed 16 off-site campuses or off-site locations where the west area has not and it's no it's just not been the it's just not been the history we do have a new person in the west area school and i'm hoping they can grow that program so that's another conversation about you know marketing and trying to grow if we're going to try to grow these programs we need to provide that kind of assistance i never want to see displacement but i also know we are going to work to find other opportunities for these people i know a separate a third conversation i'm giving you lots of conversations mr cochrane a third conversation is how our other programs are managed

097both of these schools have ran with an assistant principal paid as an elementary ap running programs with east area 785 students in west at 5 49 in comparison to some of our fresh star and polk grads who have multiple administrators well polk grad has one but fresh start has 147 students with two administrators so i think we really need to start looking at equity and and how we're you know treating our administrative staff but i do see the purpose of this of trying to connect to certifications i just want to make sure that when we're doing that we have expectations that these programs will grow or we'll make the decision that they're not going to grow and we put our we put our resources in another direction i wanted them to feel supported but i

098expect west area to have more opportunities i mean in north lakeland i can't we've never been able to provide we need more opportunities in that north side i think especially up in the lake gibson the more rural areas um and i'm glad that we're going to keep a satellite campus in auburndale because i've already heard from the community and they they want to keep something there for the people who you know if you're from polk county you realize from auburndale to ridge is a great distance for people who don't have transportation so we want to be able to provide that and i think if we can talk to the community and give them the plan of what we're doing this will be easier for them to understand our expectations and for them to give feedback

099so i'm hoping on both campuses we can provide a community day or a community evening to be able to answer questions so people realize that this is moving the program forward and we're going to grow the program to provide people not only their ged but walk them into a certification program so they can continue their education my one question is that i think out of the 100 questions i've already asked you is we just invested in the east area becoming a ged testing site which cannot be done in portables so where would that be would we have to reinvest in creating a ged testing site at the adult at the technical schools or will we keep that site and test ged where it's already been approved like how does that work with the ged program

100yeah well the it's we would have to make adjustments to make a room that is appropriate for ged testing but we do have space regular buildings at the technical colleges where we should be able to build an appropriate testing room i believe in the past there had been times when ged testing did exist at the technical colleges so there are spaces that we can transform into appropriate testing environment there's a requirement that there is a a windowed office and that the computers have the appropriate secured link all of these are items that are appropriate considerations but we can uh definitely make them happen at the technical colleges i think that's important um i think mainly we need to have the discussion or a consensus of the board that this you know adult school is where

101we want to see growth i'm i'm concerned with um the follow-up just to make sure that we're not even providing just geds but we're giving them away to a job geds you can get online it's very expensive and i'm not going to name the for-profit not our charters but there are some for-profit schools in lakeland that will help them but they're very expensive for people so i do want to continue to offer this opportunity to to students and even though some of these schools and i work very closely with new beginnings are very successful and i'm happy with the work they're doing but their average student is very young our adult school average student is 30 plus i mean your student of the year whoever that gentleman was was 70 or 65 and returned back

102to get his ged and i think that's important that we ought we still offer those opportunities we will and i'm glad that you brought up the uh the fact that we want to grow our adult ed programs today's plan is not the obituary for polk county public adult schools today is a suggestion of a new beginning reinvigoration reacting to the times the changes that are going on um and reacting to uh state mandates but moving them uh and a review of other um districts iet programs they're doing things tied to um automotive to medical these are things that i cannot do at the adult at the adult schools as they currently exist if i take them and put them at the technical colleges a student then can can can spend part of their time in

103their class with their gd or esau teacher and they can walk down the hall and go spend time in uh medical assisting class or in the automotive class this is going to be a great opportunity i think for polk county's adult uh adult programs adult students i i don't want to i want to reinforce that comment steve because i think that's important you know ms miller spoke about our investment i think this is a reflection of our continued commitment here and again i'll say it for the third time today this will become strategic plan goals under academic outcomes as well as whole child because this is a holistic approach for adult learning and putting them and giving them an opportunity not only to earn a ged and for many of our of our students they

104are esol students or ell students new immigrants and they're learning the language here but i think what i like most about the proposal is the alignment to career in tekken that we're moving beyond just simply providing someone a ged saying go out and and attain a minimum wage position versus a highly skilled trades position which could really change their lives and that of their families i think that's an important thing that has to continue to be highlighted here is that by putting them in the same facility we do get better supports for that but and you brought up a point a moment ago and i've i committed to the board i would bring it back in january which are some recommendations as you pointed out for some of those administrative positions there are approximately 15

105positions that i will bring and i'll address those here in a moment at the next january meeting for consideration for approval in february um because we do have as we talked about bartow ib we talked about harrison we talked about summerlin we talked about east and west area adult learning we've talked about our teen pregnancy programs i mean there are people whose job descriptions really have to be and have been reevaluated to make a decision as to how do we elevate them to their next level which would be more appropriate considering what they supervise and what they support so it's a very valid point but i didn't want to miss an opportunity to reinforce the concept of we're not just focusing on ged our commitment is both ged but more importantly how do we segue

106and provide our ged participants access to high-wage trades and opportunities at our vocational trade schools it's a great opportunity to have them in the same building versus asking a commute to one in a commute to the other so i think that becomes our marketing opportunity and that's and we've committed to having those conversations you'll probably get a bigger turnout in the east area just because of how committed that community has been in supporting that school and the 16 satellite campuses i think if they understand that that's the goal they'll be in support of the changes that will happen and i know auburndale needs the room i think they have a hundred in the real academy right now so you're gonna free up taking a hundred students over to that other facility which will allow them

107um to continue to keep growing at that auburndale high school i have miss fortney then miss cunningham then miss wyatt yeah mr cochran thank you for taking my call uh the other day when i asked a ton of questions uh but i i want to go back to uh something i talked to you about well before this when i visited the hvac shop right there at travis and uh you know a possible internship program for our students that are at the technical colleges with us uh can you maybe uh give us a little insight on how that's moving along because i think it goes in on this a little bit that's that is a a great question we actually looked at trying to start that last year but um kovid kind of restricted some of

108the opportunities and the student interest we will be looking at that again this year that a program had been tried in the past where we did have students from the technical college right along with some of our maintenance workers unfortunately i don't think it was very well planned so there wasn't a lot of preparation for the maintenance workers as to what their responsibility was i think that we can improve on that in the future by uh being more selective about who we put uh our students with and also providing some training uh as to how to work with a uh possible intern but definitely that is a program that we'd like to continue to develop and we you know i know miss usher can testify that there are unfortunately many openings in our in our

109maintenance department and we provide uh the skills at our technical colleges that we that they will need to have our job so we should be looking at at the very minimum giving these students an experience to what we do in the polk county school system possibly being able to retain them for future jobs i just have a follow-up because i'm pretty sure we have a couple of instructors at our technical college that actually do uh are part of our staff support staff that is correct unfortunately we've hired some of their best workers out to be great instructors but they have to come from somewhere to share the knowledge so it's like planting a seed you you want it to grow so gotcha thank you thank you just cutting him thank you i just want to

110say thank you to you and your team um i fully wholeheartedly support your transformative plan for the next few years i think that it's very important that we continue to educate our adults and to do it in such a manner whereby they see opportunities beyond just getting the ged when you look at the european model for education and others around the globe you will see that young people and adults continue to have opportunities to gain the necessary skills for them to become part of our society where they can work a decent wage and earn a decent living to support their family so to me looking at it from a 30 000 foot we are going to be providing not only the basic steps of the ged but we are going to be as superintendent hyde

111said look down the hallway what are some other opportunities there to truly gain skills that that individual can do to completely change and transform if you will their lives i understand that there's you know a lot of stuff that has to go into this but the overarching takeaway is that we are in the education business and we are continuing to do that and i believe within a few years after this is implemented we're going to be able to transform lives one at a time but each of those places so that those students coming out can earn a living wage rather than minimum wage and provide for their families and as we all know it's the cycle of life if i see my dad you know or my mom or my grandparent go and do this

112and they see the changes all of a sudden everybody in the family is affected the children the brothers the sisters aunts uncles it becomes life-changing for an entire family so i support this i know it's going to take time to do it and to do it properly because we do have all these things that you have presented including folks that will be displaced but i do believe that in the long run this is a awesome decision going forward so thank you so much for taking the time to explore this as difficult as it might be thank you ahead miss wyatt and miss fieldsmiths why do you still have a question yes i have several um is this something that's going to be coming to the board for approval it is okay um do we i'm

113concerned by the lack of data in some of this um you spoke about the numbers which i believe that the adult schools are on a rolling enrollment so they still have students enrolling so while it looks like there's a slight dip for 2122 i'm assuming this doesn't capture any of the spring numbers because we'll continue to enroll students through we will continue to enroll students that's cool so what pers do historically what percentage of students typically are enrolled in this after christmas i would say that it's not as busy as in the uh as in the spring but i don't have that exact number okay if we could get those numbers just to get you know looking at the numbers after a dip during covid and seeing that we're already it looks like surpassed on

114the esol enrollments for 2122 and a new year sounds seems pretty good considering we still have six months left to enroll um so i'd be interested to see what we anticipate based on historical data what percentage typically enrolls after christmas and again i want to point out these do not directly translate to students on campus this includes satellite sites it includes a a well-attended audience at our uh at our jail schools and uh our probationary programs i have been on campus and uh and noted uh this year before omicron has come on i've been on campus when there have been 56 students and i have been on campus when there have been less than 20. i'm smiling because my next question was do we have a breakdown of where these students are because i know

115you mentioned that they're on different campuses but it's hard to see the full picture when you know if they're on 16 different campuses is there one or two that they're really located at um or what does the auburndale sites actually see so if we could get those numbers sorry i'm checking them off as i go the as far as the educational personnel planning it looks like we're eliminating the adult education teachers for both sites what's the rationale behind just eliminating this there are still adult education teachers at each site we're just made some additional cuts okay so they won't be moving it should be for ged programs right now we we have proposed two and three esol so what are the what are the displaced adult ed positions there's three four one and four for

116the other four for west area and three for east area well um they're they're classified as adult eggs i'm sorry i didn't break those out into whether they were esol or ged but i can get that for you okay thank you um is that because they are that we think numbers are dwindling is that why or is it just because we're collapsing classes and increasing the number of students in each class the well the numbers are are dwindling um you know again an example across one of my visits i found no more than four students in in our ged classes so that was the day i was out there and there were less than 20. so uh we you know we we had the artificial um number that we put up there 18 and then

117you know they're adults they don't come every day they have other responsibilities and jobs and children and some of them will take the gd book and study some more at home and only come in when they have when they have a question so that keeps the number down if we include increase the class number to 25 which is the same number that we have it at our high schools than attendance in the classroom should at least be up to 12 to 15. gotcha and that makes total sense i'm just concerned if if that's the reason for cutting positions that makes sense yeah i'm concerned that our numbers are going to increase again as we see spring semester and if we're cutting units with the same number of students as last year that's concerning to me

118um steve if you'll pull the historical data on what enrollment looks like first semester and second semester for the past few years i'd appreciate it will do thank you um it shows sorry i still have i've got three more um the additional portables at travis and rid those are those additional portables i know you said they're moving for west area yeah we would move them off of the off of the property to be additional portables that we may need for the adult program okay and then at ridge it would be bringing in additional portables the same yes okay and that costs i know it's a one-time cost but i'm assuming that's not included no that's correct that's definitely not included okay i think we said you said earlier that the real academy has a hundred

119students is that that's miller maybe i don't have the exact number but that's about the number that they have and then as far as i know that they'll still need a guardian are there any other positions that they would have to bring with them that after if you know right now they're on auburndale's campus so they obviously share auburndale's guardian are there any other positions like that that they would i don't project that they would need any other additional staff they they do have a secretary they have some support staff so they have somebody who can be up front at the front desk i don't foresee them needing any additional staff when they move over there other than the guardian now and i i do want to note um that much like the other real

120academies they don't have their own uh cafeteria so at uh at real in auburndale high school obviously they would get their food from uh the auburndale high school the cafeteria and bring it back to their classroom area dwight smith gets their food from crystal lake middle and the haines city the one at east side gets their food from the east side cafeteria which is served in a portable there so there we will have to transport food over uh to real in the same fashion that we do um crystalline metal and i'm assuming that would be a recurring cost as well that will get that that would be a recurring cost to transport that food data that would be helpful yeah as far as ridge technical i know we've historically had some issues with the accessibility

121because of its location my understanding is they did finally get a bus stop out there have we seen how has that increased numbers at ridge technical i i don't have the information about whether the bus stop increased numbers or or not okay because my biggest concern with the east side is that the accessibility of it ridge has historically not had great accessibility because it is located in the middle of cow pastures there is a race track out there now but it's it's really in the middle of nowhere and not somewhere that our students can get to easily um and there's not a true community to support and rally around it like auburndale has um i know that auburndale being located in auburndale it's a pride for auburndale to have it there and there's a lot

122of unintended consequences with moving things out of a community especially with not getting the community's support first so i do have concerns about what resources will go with moving it out of auburndale i know there's their rotary sponsors several scholarship programs and things like that specifically for east area adults so i want to make sure that we're looking at that and addressing that as this is being approached i completely understand and think that we need to make sure that we're getting these adult students technical skills i just want to make sure that we're not pulling out of auburndale completely i'm thrilled that it would then be in my district 4 instead of lisa's because i've had that envy for a little while but but i do have concerns with moving it out of auburndale which

123has been fairly accessible into an area that's not quite as accessible historically well we think that we can still maintain very strong ties to the auburndale community the administrator that's at east area adult school is very active in the in the rotary and i support that um and she can remain active in the rotary at auburndale because that's the side of the county that she will be serving so won't just be serving um the ridge area or haines city or winter haven she's serving that whole side of the county so we want her to maintain those strong ties again we will maintain an adult ed presence for those with limited transportation there at auburndale or in the auburndale area as we do in a number of communities you know i think that we can satisfy

124the need of the albertdale community for adult education but also better serve our students by by getting them to the place where we can provide uh more educational opportunities for them thank you i look forward to seeing more of the data that superintendent hyde has indicated miss fields i think this is a great opportunity as mr hyde said as it relates to the ged students being able to look beyond just getting a ged uh diploma but going to get some additional skills so i think the way that we market this is going to be very important and very critical i am interested in knowing what was the response from the staff you said that you've already told the staff what's what's being planned what was their response well um obviously they're they're disappointed uh that

125there is a a move i mean people people take ownership and and pride in their school and they should and um and i would have been disappointed uh if they weren't disappointed and and it it affects me too um i don't like uh making a decision that uh that will impact some people and be disruptive uh i've talked with brian um warren we feel very confident that anybody that is displaced will be placed because we we have a number of job openings um however i know that that's still disruptive to people um but this decision is not one that was just made in haste there have been a lot of conversations i've monitored the numbers i go out to the schools although i see great enrollment numbers the completion level is not exactly where where

126we would like it at nor is the attendance um at the school um you know there uh when we talk about uh the equity of of the positions um you know all of all the administrators in the multiple pathways have different jobs and different responsibilities and different types of students um you know real academy may only have a hundred students but that's a that's 100 students that 80 percent of them come every day and they've got to be taken off a bus and they have to be fed and they have more many more discipline issues than our adults programs so they have a you know they have a big responsibility too our adult school uh administrators have a huge responsibility too because they are the focal point for serving our adults throughout the county so

127they have to think uh they have to think on a very big scale about how we're going to be able to provide services but you know i think it's important to mention that that our adult programs are our adult programs are responsible for outreaching and trying to bring these students in however the need is not uh as big as it has been in the past so with those shrinking numbers we're we're taking up a a building where we're still where we're serving approximately 50 or 60 students a day where we could be we could be doing that in a smaller footprint and maximizing our resources at our technical colleges and opening up better opportunities for our students and i agree with you 100 on that i think it's just the way that we market it

128like mr hyde said a few minutes ago my other uh concern and this is to mr hyde is i want to make sure that we uh don't displace our staff that we find a place for them yes ma'am because they already are being moved from their comfort zone and then to be uh wondering whether or not they're going to have employment to me is an added a layer of stress that they don't need not right now so i really would hope and pray that we can find placement for all of our staff yeah i think there's two answers to the atmosphere it's a very valid point and miss miller addressed that as well and i think that's really where miss wyatt was going when she asked a question about were these satellite locations or from

129the east or west center site um as it stands um so two things number one these are projected numbers every year our ft changes um so if if we can market this aggressively second half of the year this will come back to the board for a final recommendation and approval if the board agrees to move forward with the proposal um even with modifications then we would get an aggressive marketing campaign and i actually think we could see a significant increase in the number of students participating you know miss wyatt addressed the question well we you know we don't have a lot of participation in that segment because there hasn't really been transportation and we all know that that community is growing exponentially so it will grow around that program but it might be interesting to

130see whereas we may see a drop-off in actual auburndale participants will we see a significant increase in those coming from from the area surrounding ridge community high and because maybe they weren't able to participate because geographic location we've talked about you know how do we replicate programs and expand programs in a meaningful way to give everyone an opportunity so transportation doesn't become the barrier so you've given us some good questions to look at but the second part mrs fields is you know we currently continue to have a staffing shortage in all areas and so i would imagine that any staff member who finds themselves displaced would have more than ample opportunities to have their choice of other reassignments as needed thank you yes ma'am ms miller i appreciate that you just mentioned um the effects

131to auburndale and then we're going to keep a satellite room or two rooms there and also maintain we just dedicated not too long ago that um the building to the hammers mr mrs hammer who were lifelong volunteers there so i think still associating a satellite campus there is appropriate for just what the superintendent said that we don't want to we don't want to lose what's happening in auburndale i know the city has actually paid to have some of the people that work for them go get their ged so they can give them a raise and give them a different opportunity or higher in their job so i think it's important to keep the satellite campus there but we also need to look at adult education differently than k-12 adult education happens at night the east

132area runs the program out of the jail so i don't know that we would see the same attendance wise as you if you were talking about k-12 and walking into a room and i realized the real academy needs four administrators or maybe more than two one because of the discipline and all the other things but we have one administrator on the east side who writes grants and does things well above actually i guess the administration she's the adult school administrator of the state or something so i think we need to make sure that we recognize the talent we do have to grow the program and if it's rebranding is that going to be site-based because it used to be marketing at the site level then they said everything goes back to the district who is

133responsible for the rebranding and marketing we need to make that very clear and invest in that which probably should everything should run through the district but i don't know if that's going to be based on site personnel or district personnel i would be interested in the cost of transferring 100 meals every day is it breakfast and lunch or just lunch i don't know how that works i think it's breakfast seeing lunch okay and that's that's something that your department pays for for that academy because i think that will grow as well moving it into that building so um it has facilities there it has some meeting rooms there um that if we have to put in a staff there possibly is room to do that i would think are you talking about uh doing uh

134processing our own food there yes some kind of i don't think that there is a small kitchenette okay and i think they've moved out a lot of that um as a matter of fact where you come into the main office and then there's the desk up front and then those offices are in the back that used to be all the cafeteria correct okay or at least the preparation area okay however it will have certain uh advantages in that it has plenty of power that we'll be able to hook up warmers and coolers depending on whatever we're serving um uh right there and also the the uh hamer uh auditorium room uh will be a perfect place uh for their lunches okay thank you i'm looking forward to the data that so this will come back

135at the next meeting on workshop as well we'll have all the updates for you thank you thank you sir all right thank you at this time i'd like to bring brian warren up talk about tpg our contract is coming up for renewal i know the board and others have received questions or concerns about how to support staff so we have some updates for you there on some of the work being done but at this time ryan sure thank you very much i'm gonna welcome the opportunity for us to be before you today joining me momentarily will be david voss he is going to be walking you through a summary and kind of an update of our program and our relationship with our teachers with tpg joining him remotely and i think they're working on trying

136to bring in miss sujata so she can join us by zoom to also listen and participate in our presentation today she is another one of the key folks that we work with in relation to the tpg program i also want to make everyone aware that we have some other folks with us that are relative to the support of the tpg program we have principal hudson behind us that that houses i believe it's like 11 of the tpg teachers at her site and also joining us today is director cheryl hill that offers support and also teacher engagement leader jessica solano so now with that being said i'm going to hand it over to mr voss and he will begin his presentation relative to the summary and the the update of our relationship with tpg and the

137teachers in polk county well thanks a lot um yes david voss i've had the pleasure meeting some of you both to the fsba conference as well as that wonderful reception that we had here in polk county i want to thank the staff dr hudson the folks behind me for the incredible job they have done and being our partner on this program meeting both the challenges as well as the successes we still have a national teacher shortage it's just a reality and there will be a contract coming before you that mostly just increases the cap on the number of teachers that you can have here in polk county and it doesn't require a certain amount it just increases the cap it gives the principals and others the option to hire more of our teachers now i

138like to reverse order questions always come at the end we we can talk for five minutes or five hours about cultural exchange program and so i know time is of the essence you like things to be short and brief so if you could just give me a few of the top of mind things that you have on your mind including time limit then xujata who's very adept at doing this can kind of tweak and adjust your presentation to address those concerns what what might be fresh on your mind for the cultural exchange program miss i know miss forney had her hand up and i saw miss fields on the corner of my eye uh hey how you doing hi i have the same things that i bet your year about in tampa uh we have

139the uh thank goodness we had some partnerships with our churches and uh amazing community members and of course staff at these individual schools i'd like to know how we can make it prior to a rival uh exactly what i was asking about to have more of a foothold on how we can support our international teachers with housing household items uh transportation okay uh those things we will address that for sure is fields that was basically minds how can we better support i mean we we're bringing these teachers over uh and my understanding is that they basically have a suitcase and that's about it and so what can we do to ensure that they have a quality of life so they can be the best that they can be for our students and for our community

140housing is a huge national challenge as well as here at polk county and we're going to address that for discussing him in addition to those not only the support coming over and getting settled and finding that initial place to live and so forth but giving them names of community leaders and folks that they can reach out to for help as the time ensues versus boom you're here you're done go to work and zip it i mean that's basically what they've been told so i think we need to do more if we're going to continue this type of contract we'll clarify what we've done and what we need to do in the future ms miller i've asked for the contract with your group so i need to i need jason or someone to afford that i

141haven't received it for what we've paid for services i think the expectation of what you were going to provide was lost so maybe you're going to provide you're going to explain that to us ms hudson did an amazing job with her students but we haven't that's we have administrators coming out to provide services even transportation you know when i can't get teachers to school because they have to take uber's who decided where they would live in comparison to the schools you know you we've put people in places that i visited that i would not leave my dog and that's honestly not true and so we need to talk about whose responsibility it is for housing if it's not yours is it ours and what the timeline is for that so housing and transportation is an

142issue and cost is an issue for me so i need to see the contract i believe if you go back to the board docs you should be able to find where we approve that this summer and all the contact costs are in there but i'll see mr pitts is out for today but miss jenkins will look for that and send that to you as well any others yeah similar to my colleagues the housing and transportation specifically how we're communicating with them on the front end many communities have much many more options for public transportation than polk does currently and it's much more accessible in other communities so across the world wherever they're coming from living three miles away may not be a big big deal if you can hop on a subway or a metro

143or bus or something like that but it's a very different culture in polk county as far as being able to get around so making sure that we're explaining that to them as they're determining where they're living in and make sure they're thinking about how to get around absolutely i think there are some things done that you need to be made aware of and also some things that we need to do so shujata if you want to go ahead and present i think you have a clear understanding of what this board is interested in go ahead and switch to the zoom meeting and i think she's going to share her screen and we'll of course ask answer additional questions along the way beaming her in from new york i hope she's been standing by for two

144hours so i think hopefully now she can huh i hope zoom didn't time us out um it's on this hard drive as a backup yeah you know it always works when you try it ahead of time which it did just fine um let me all right she said she can't hear anything too all right yeah i've got you on my speaker on cell um they said that your camera is turned off uh yeah i still can't hear anything i just i just turned my camera on but i was waiting oh there you are there you are you just showed up now you're on screen hear anything though you guys are on mute all right i'm going to keep my phone on and we'll uh relay questions to you uh okay do you want me to

145present you you're yeah you're you are muted though yes go ahead unmute i'm muted because i'm on the phone with you if i unknown then you're gonna keep me from both locations i will hang up i will hang up and you can go through your presentation the problem is i can't hear you because you guys are we are mutiny all right well i'm mute on both ends okay okay sorry about that hello there we are if anyone's talking i can't hear you we can hear you now so go away can you hear us now yes i can hear you yeah okay please go ahead and proceed you're live sure did you already um did you already do the introduction yeah we did the introductions and clearly there is a focus on the housing and transportation

146needs here sure okay um and how much time do we have let's be as brief and as concise as we can as we're already behind our agenda timeline sure uh david should i do the shorter version of the presentation uh yes uh try to keep it in 50 within 15 minutes okay perfect um give me one second i'll share this one instead all right thank you everyone so much i'm sorry that i can't be there with you today but you have david who i think is is a better alternative so i'm glad you guys were able to meet with him um and i'm glad he's able to be there to to connect with you in person really appreciate you all taking the time um to walk through the program as well as all the support

147that uh these teachers have had in polk county thus far um so i'm gonna walk through this fairly quickly i'm just understanding the time limitations feel free to stop me at any point if it would be helpful to address any questions otherwise we can always do them at the end but i am going to move a little bit quickly um and just i'm happy to dig into anything further if that would be helpful um so the basic overview of the program is that we tpg provide highly qualified florida doe certified english speaking international educators and we focus specifically on high need subject areas sujata if you could switch to presentation mode i am in presentation mode um we're not seeing that okay go ahead um you're still on slide one the title slide um maybe

148it got frozen on your end because i'm seeing side two on my end so i'm actually going to ask us to redirect the presentation at this time the board received a comprehensive presentation during the summer when we renewed or contracted as it relates to how many staff we would secure and the process for that i would ask us to redirect today's to specifically address the questions that the board has requested um and more information on and let's start with i i think the best starting place would be miss miller's question as to whose responsibility is it that when some when an employee is secured and brought here to polk county to assist them with housing and transportation what's the process what do you provide where is there potentially a gap that we need to consider

149filling whether it's directly by the school district or in partnership with many of our wraparound support service groups here in the community so if we can start with answering that question and then we'll go through the list of questions the board asked before sure um david if you guys can't see my screen would it make sense for you to present the slides that we had put together on housing and i can speak to them no not necessarily and we'll struggle with that too but you can put your slide back on and go right to that slide which has our responsibilities and their responsibilities and they can see that and you can walk them through that thank you sure i am doing that so i think for some reason the thing got frozen on your end

150because that's what i have up on my screen so i think you guys aren't seeing what i have on my screen which is fine i can just speak to it um but i don't think the slides are working um okay so to take a step back um the when the teachers are selected um we partner with them to help them with housing but ultimately it is their decision to finalize their housing and the reason for that is obviously these are all professionals who are adults um who have their own family considerations as well as budget considerations to keep in mind when they are choosing their housing if we finalize housing on behalf of someone without them making an active decision and making the final choice as to where they want to live then frequently there

151are disappointments and there are people who feel frustrated and feel like they don't have their final say over where they're living so it is you know they are they are making a full salary and they are paying the rent and so it is extremely important that when they make a final decision about where they want to live that is their decision so what we will do is that we will connect them with landlords in the area who we have been in touch with apartment complexes in the area that we have been in touch with and give them options that are available but fundamentally they are signing the lease they are paying the rent and it is their responsibility to finalize housing this year was obviously an unprecedented year and i think that's something that we've

152seen across the board it is not specific to exchange teachers it is not specific to polk county it's something that we've seen nationwide and you know was a result of supply train crises and covid as well as other issues that were going on in the world this year um so something that is always a little bit tricky in terms of finding people housing when they're coming from other parts of the world was extremely exacerbated this year just because of you know the confluence of events that occurred with covet and the supply chain and all of that so i think you know it was particularly complicated this year what ended up happening was that many of the teachers ended up in extended stay housing which thankfully there are a large number of affordable areas to stay

153across polk county in terms of extended stay hotels and things like that and then they spent had to spend a little bit more time looking for housing and we spent a lot more time looking with them for housing after they arrived here in the united states um you know one thing that definitely helps with housing is knowing as early as possible who is coming and where they're going to be placed so i think in terms of the timeline this year um you know the teachers weren't even interviews until july and then we typically didn't find out where they were going to be placed until the end of july or early august and so there was very little time before the start of school to figure out that specific area and where they could potentially live

154i think one of the major learnings from both sides this year was to you know front load that time frame as much as possible so that the teachers will be interviewed as early as possible we'll know where they're going they will know where they're going and we'll be able to work with them on housing with a much earlier time frame on that point the uh you are back on screen uh maybe a little bit more on the division of responsibilities for housing and transportation issues and local support sure um so as i said you know it's a teacher's final decision to to make sure that they are comfortable with the housing opportunity that they decided to go for and that they've chosen many of them do prefer to see the housing in person before they

155finalize it and that obviously does you know extend the time frame if they want to get here first see the housing and then finalize it we do try and take their individual priorities into consideration but fundamentally per their contract they are required to secure and pay for their housing we provide as many options as we can in terms of what options are available in the area but fundamentally it is the teacher's responsibility to finalize their housing you know we built a lot of really great relationships across the district this year and we'll continue to leverage those relationships obviously if there are local relationships that the board has or anyone at the district level or even anyone at the school level we are always open to receiving that information and building partnerships wherever available didn't we

156recently develop a chart or a graph of who's responsible for which things i believe you have a slide on that and then they also drafted something here in polk county uh that would clarify uh different roles and responsibilities yeah um i don't think that we have the responsibilities as a slide um but that is something that you know as a takeaway and a lesson learned that cheryl and i took away from this year and we put together um a very clear responsibilities document um you know the pcps team and our team together worked together on that and put together their responsibilities document in terms of who handles each responsibility um when it comes to housing the responsibility on our end as we see it is to provide as many options as possible to the exchange

157visitors and help them navigate the area and understand where things are what options might be available so that they can then make a choice and then fundamentally their decision to make that final choice the other challenge that was really brought up was transportation particularly in polk county where public transportation isn't always available to people what are some of the options in your experiences uh that that we can provide and help them with whether it's car loans or whatever uh and and trying to make this smoother next year absolutely um so one thing you know the thing that we always encourage the teachers to do as much as possible is to build relationships and carpool with others from their school and there's a few reasons for that number one is that almost every single teacher comes

158from a country where they drive on the other side of the road than we do in the united states and so we found that if they start driving immediately there are a lot of accidents um and you know that is not something that we want to happen um we definitely you know their safety is our priority and so making sure that they are comfortable with the rules of the road and just a little bit more familiar with what it's like to drive on the other side of the road is important before they actually get into a car and begin driving the second reason for carpooling is that it does provide an informal mentorship type of relationship that we find is very very helpful for the teachers when they first arrive here a lot of the

159times they'll have a department head an ap or principal maybe a formal mentor through the district a formal mentor through our program but sometimes they feel nervous to ask basic questions um you know questions that they feel like are too simple or that they feel embarrassed to ask um for someone who is a formal mentor or formal supervisor of theirs so a lot of the times that informal relationship that they build while they're in the car allows them to ask some of those questions that they might feel a little bit less comfortable asking in the context of a school or their formal exchange program and then lastly it allows them to familiarize themselves a little bit with the area before they settle down save money and buy a car we do have relationships with car

160dealers um in polk county specifically that we've been building over the years and that you know some of our teachers have actually gotten cars in polk county from dealerships that we've put them in touch with we try and be agnostic with regards to the dealership and not push them in one direction or another it fundamentally should be their decision you know where they decide to ultimately get a car again um this year with covet and supply chain shortages you know i think there has been news that all of us have read almost every single day about the crisis in cars this year and how expensive they have gotten and how limited they are you know how limited the availability is um and so that has definitely been a challenge and it's been a challenge not

161only in polk county and again not only for the exchange teachers but nationwide and everywhere that we work and everywhere that you know new teachers are moving or anyone is really moving and needing to purchase a car or get something um you know that they didn't have before and so um putting them in touch with the dealerships but really also making sure that they're in a place where they are comfortable before they decide to make that purchase is also important um you know we've been working with the pcps team with the teacher engagement team and they put us in touch with an organization that does carpooling in a more formal manner of fashion and so that's something that we're looking at implementing for next year and we've been speaking to them over the course of

162the last couple of months to start to prepare and understand what that might look like and then you know we were also working with the pcbs team to try and see if school buses is or something that we might be able to leverage as well as the public bus system in terms of coordinating that around where some of those especially the larger apartment complexes that we're working with and some of those routes that a lot of the teachers are traveling so those are all initiatives that we've been working with the teacher engagement team on one of the most profound lessons and i think moving forward that we really have to keep in mind is the start earlier issue just by getting them here earlier by you hiring them earlier us making them available earlier we're

163dealing with human beings not a system who are moving from other countries to move here and resolving some of those issues are just going to take more time and i did want to shift before we finish and then take any other questions that you still have to the survey results and then dr hudson with a comment about um what the principals think of the program you got can we cover that briefly sujata and then turn it over to dr hudson absolutely so um you know in response to some of the feedback we were getting we did directly survey the principles to try and understand you know what were the areas where they felt we could be doing a better job to support the teachers and also how were the teachers performing in the schools just

164so we could get some feedback from them and and share that with you um you know 83 of the principals who we spoke to felt that they their tpg teachers were performing better than average um and the teachers fill vacant positions as well as you know that they excel in content expertise this is something that we've heard across districts but it's great to hear in polk county as well the teachers are obviously experienced educators they all have the equivalent of a bachelor's in education and at least two years of full-time teaching experience so they do have very strong content knowledge and it's something that you know we're seeing in polk county as well in terms of areas of improvement in areas where they felt that they would like our help teaching to standards was important

165and that's something that we have incorporated with the teacher engagement team in a week in a monthly webinar that we've started for the exchange teachers as well as something that we've been working with the coaches on and then classroom management so and that's what we are targeting our pd and the pd that we're working with the teacher engagement team on as well um and this here is a quote from dr hudson who i believe is there and available to speak to you um but she said to us you know the tpg cultural exchange program has been extremely beneficial the teachers are professional coachable eager to learn and assume new responsibilities and dr hudson if you're if you're there and want to say a few words that would be great thank you for the opportunity i

166just want to say that we can't take all of the students in polk county all around the world but we can bring the world to the students in polk county through this program we have been a very beneficial opportunity for us at mclaughlin i think that i was asked because we were one of the first schools to have four teachers with the tpg program in addition to that we currently have 14 teachers which is the largest in one school population that's honestly why it works because we made sure that when we interviewed teachers we tried to pair them with someone else from their country so that it wouldn't be one person isolated coming from ghana but two teachers coming from ghana two teachers from jamaica so on and so forth so being able to pair

167them also when we interviewed um some of these best practices i've shared with miss heal and we're looking to possibly work with tpg to share them with other principals onboarding so that so teachers don't have to go principles on to go through some of the pains that mclaughlin went through but we can share some of the best practices and in interviewing one of the things that i asked all of the applicants that we considered was do you know where we are lake wales is not miami so they know miami they know tampa they know orlando so once they identify that they knew where we were we asked them that do you have any family any friends in this area most of them didn't and we immediately became that social service agency to pair them with

168housing transportation et cetera building those relationships with the housing authority in lake wales to provide housing opportunities near the school that they could walk to work we knew that a lot of times that that was not available in other schools and so and then also its preference as what was mentioned and so we provided them with housing pamphlets from nearby housing apartments for them to consider for their choice and let them know to move expeditiously on that as far as transportation mr davis has been very helpful we have teachers who do catch a school bus in the morning not only does that help build relationships with them from individuals with in their countries but also with our students how awesome is it for your science teacher to catch the bus with you in the mornings

169or in the afternoons as well as we do provide those actual opportunities as staff to partner i do want to thank the the board for having us to have this opportunity because i couldn't imagine operating a school with our population with 14 vacancies so having the opportunity to bring international teachers in fills those vacancies they're eager to learn i wish i could have brought them here today but as you know we're dealing with shortages with kovitz so we want to keep as many teachers in place and be able to provide this i do want to extend an opportunity for each and every one of you to visit our campus at any time to see teachers in action with the great work that they're doing through this program but there are ways that we can work

170miss hill and i've talked about building up on boarding for any school who wants to move in this venture next year we share some of the best practices so that we grow as a district thank you so i'll address a few things that the school district is doing um and has been doing since we became aware of the issue so mr warren mr pitts and others have been engaging several of our real real estate groups i have several meetings coming up with communities within our developers within the davenport community who feel like they have some solutions to offer we've reached out to the state and the federal government to inquire as to the use of federal funds to offset housing costs so for example if one of our own teachers were to take someone in

171and allow them to use to be basically to be to co-share a house or an apartment could we offset some of the housing costs associated with that citrus connection is a group that we're engaging as well citrus connection continues to expand all of their busing opportunities and we will be able to provide a list of those and access through the web so that they can look from their present location to the site that they have to reach if they choose not to purchase a car then they have an affordable cost option and as you know we have a strong relationship with citrus connection and we may have be able to negotiate that they would be able to utilize that transportation around the clock seven days a week at no cost to them finally we are

172mr rob davis and his team have been looking at existing bus transportation routes to make a determination as to whether or not there's a route that passes in close proximity to one of their homes and would allow them to ride with students we get actually we benefit twice we basically get a built-in bus aid or bus monitor at the same time they get transportation to school the transportation home becomes the questionable issue a lot of our staff stay after school for planning meetings and other activities and we don't run routes in the evening so that's where citrus connection and other options come to the table um in my previous districts um we used to recruit heavily from from spain and from puerto rico and we actually partnered very efficiently with our credit unions and what

173the credit unions did was they worked with all new hires and gave them the option of a very low interest low cost initial loan of up to 2500 to 5 000 which would give them enough financial wherewithal that they could actually get first month last in security and utilities and those types of things to basically secure a location um i like you know what was shared previously is there an opportunity for us to partner individuals so they can share residence or or an apartment to reduce costs and as you know and as was shared at the beginning nationally there's a teacher shortage there's a national bus driver shortage there's beginning to be a national shortage across the board in all employee classifications and many school districts have looked at the options of affordable housing for

174their staff and it is something that we're currently pursuing as well not just for this group but for all employees and i know miami-dade and other districts in the state of florida have kind of dabbled in this topic but we've seen states like arizona we've seen california where housing costs just absolutely skyrocket in order to sustain a workforce they have to do something a little bit more aggressive to address affordability of housing so we are taking a multiple tier approach to what options we we can provide but i think going back to something miss fields asked you know even providing transportation and providing a residence doesn't mean they have a home they have to have a bed they have to have furniture they have to have those things and i think that's where some of

175our wraparound providers and partners can best be a resource for some of our staff much like our teacher store is there an option for us to partner with goodwill with united way and with others to basically create almost a furniture or home goods version of that but we do have some of that through dr letz's program castle thank you i want to say toggle for some reason but tassel which does provide homewares for many of our employees and our students families as well so there are option opportunities and we do have the resources at this point it's a matter of alignment and so they've been working aggressively to help address those issues you also provide a loan opportunity right yeah thank you so much for that i think you know understanding some of those options

176that you're looking into is extremely helpful from our perspective as well um just a couple of things to note that we do provide an interest-free loan to all the teachers upon arrival and nearly all of them take it and we provide a loan of up to three thousand dollars per teacher which is interest-free and then they pay that back over the course of about 10 paychecks so they have five to six months to pay back the loan and it has no interest attached to it so that is what most of the teachers are using for security deposit and things like that um even with the loan um you know it becomes difficult to they're trying to support a lot of different things that they're doing immediately when they get here so it typically is enough

177for security deposit and really those initial things that they need to do to get settled um and in terms of apartment sharing you know most of them do share apartments with each other when they first arrive we encourage them to arrive by themselves at first without their families um really to give them time to get situated get settled um and get them get their feet on the ground before they get you know before they bring their families here and begin supporting their families as well if they are able to show us that they have enough savings as well as a plan to bring their families and they bring them when they come but otherwise they get they come here they get themselves settled and then they bring their families and they do tend to cry

178to share um you know one thing that is important to keep in mind is that there are cultural norms and cultural differences so in america we think of people you know having a one bedroom apartment living by themselves and kind of commuting to work if they are single or if they don't have their families with them most of them are from countries where that's not really the way that they live they are used to living with a lot of other people and living with people around and that's kind of the familial uh way of living that they are from that they're comfortable with and so a lot of the times they will choose not to live by themselves or they will choose to actually share a bedroom with someone else and that's an active choice

179that they're making because it's something that they feel more comfortable with they don't like that feeling of being lonely or being alone in a bedroom or in an apartment because that's not you know how they live when they're in their home countries and so that's just something to keep in mind the other thing to keep in mind i completely agree that helping them with furniture and building these partnerships is extremely important we do you know we do take them to walmart for an air mattress immediately upon arrival so that they at least have something um and then they kind of build from there they all have different priorities in terms of where they'd like to spend their money and how they would like to move forward a lot of them will choose to spend as

180little as money as possible because they're actually sending that money back home to their home country a lot of the time they're using that money to send their children to a better school or private school in their home country maybe they're saving for their families to come here and there are other different things that they are saving for that they're choosing to spend money on so it's also just important to understand that sometimes if someone didn't buy a bed it's not because they don't you know it's not because they don't have enough money or they you know haven't gotten there yet it's maybe they they're okay with the air mattress and they're comfortable and they they would prefer to spend that money elsewhere so it's just you know a balance in terms of understanding kind

181of where they're coming from and what their priorities are while also continuing to support them which is of course so important and we are so grateful for all of the support that they have been given i saw miss miller's hand up in miss fields i have a couple questions first what what do you charge them when they're recruited nothing we don't charge them any money so it just comes from the districts can you name what can you you said you partnered with um groups here already can you tell me who they were um so elsa on our team was ready earlier this morning but she's in another meeting right now um she's the one who was on the ground in polk county and working with the apartment complexes so she's the one who's familiar with

182the different landlords and apartment complexes that she's been working with um i would like more information from elsa when that she's available and you have someone here that it's an amazing principal who went over and beyond what any other principal knew to do because a lot of our principals didn't know what to do i walked i walked into one apartment and heard from people who were locked into a lease that they did not understand that was too expensive for where they were living that teachers had to go negotiate with landlords for repairs like this isn't we're not asking we're asking teachers to bring them on as peers to mentor them in the classroom but i think this time around and it probably was what we need to plan we were having teachers go way beyond

183i mean you have principals who took people home for the holidays which i think is amazing and that's you know and that's wonderful but i some of the principles have conveyed they did not know and it might be the districts it might be on our side we need to do a better explanation they did not realize the level of support that was needed um not only for classroom supports but for life supports and i know this year was different because covet they had to they had to quarantine in hotels and that expense was on them and so i know that this year was different you know we had some differences and we've had some personnel change but i there was a huge gap in information from our site staff when i'm having principal secretaries use

184their own gas money to ride people from lakeland to the east side just so they could get to work like this i don't and it's not time to go back and and put that on someone but i'm trying to figure out how we prevent this from ever happening again sure um one thing to address we covered the covid quarantine hotel stay for all of the teachers so when they arrived here tpg paid for them to stay in a hotel and we paid for them to have transportation to the district from the hotel most of them landed in orlando um so that was all covered by tpg so if there was any you know just if there was any confusion there um that was something that we were covering if they decided to stay in a

185hotel after the quarantine stay um then that was kind of you know their responsibility after the quarantine stay but in terms of making sure that they had a safe quarantine that is something that tpg covered um in terms of you know making sure that the the communication with the principles is clearer for next year as dr hudson mentioned one of the major things that we are planning to do this year is to do a full orientation for principals who are interested in hosting exchange teachers next year before they hire um so that would be something that we're partnering with dr hudson as well as the teacher engagement team to set that up and be very clear with the principle in terms of what are they going to have when they come here what are they

186not going to have and where are the areas where it would be helpful to be able to partner with the principals and kind of work with them on all of that in terms of making sure that you know we're very clear on all that we have reached out to every single principal and visited the majority of the schools with new teachers um and we have not heard anything in terms of you know renegotiating leases but if there's a specific follow-up that we can do we are in touch with the teachers on a regular basis and encourage them to come to us with any issues or questions that they have um if there's specific issues that are outstanding at this point obviously you know in terms of what has already been completed it's hard to go

187back as you said um but if there's anything that we can do better moving forward we are absolutely here and available and you know this is why we want to have this conversation with you to make sure that we're all on the same page fields sorry i want to be very mindful what i say but it's very very troubling to me that someone from another country would come to our city our county with very little and not have the resources that they need to just have a viable decent life and you said they're humans you're absolutely right and i believe that we should all abide by the golden rule you do unto others as you will have them do unto you would i want to come from another country with a suitcase and nothing else

188and just trying to my way around no i would not we have got to do a better job just go around and thank you superintendent high for what you said is in place and thanks to all the employees that have gone above and beyond and people in the community as well hersh chapel i know did some things in winter haberman and i want to commend the principals and and i'm not singling anybody out but i worked directly with dr hudson and i know she was really scrambling trying to find anything that she could so that that so that their teachers could have what they need so uh some of the answers that were given to me were excuses i don't want excuses i want to figure out how we can get the best resources for

189these teachers so that they can be successful because if they're successful outside of the classroom when they come into the classroom they're going to be successful they're not going to be worrying about where they're going to sleep where they're going to lay their heads what they're going to eat and all that that should not be a concern so i hear the presentation i appreciate it some of the answers i think were just excuses and i am not about excuses i'm wanting to figure out how we can do a better job for the next group that comes uh over to help our students yes ma'am miss fortney my name is wyatt yeah i've been on this for a while now and uh dr hudson thank you so much uh i actually uh at the hearst chapel

190uh they had talked about a home goods store it was filled with everything from coffee makers to mattresses bikes so that onboarding and best practices you talk about dr hudson i would love follow up on that because it is valuable your experiences uh who is uh who did you work with with the responsibility document that you mentioned cheryl and i worked on that together and we can circulate it if that would be helpful cheryl yeah joe hill hill okay all right and uh the mentor program i heard who is in charge of that here we have an internal mentor program within tpg where we connect them with exchange teachers who are here already um from their same country in their same subject area i don't know if that was the program that you were referring

191to though i heard the word mentor and i was wondering if that's part of our onboarding process or because i think that was part of the problem be quite honest i mean i had to take a paycheck from the district office to auburndale high school for a kid uh for a teacher not a kid too but you know what i mean tpg has a mentoring program for like persons but we also strongly urge the district to do what they would normally do for a new teacher which is assign a mentor uh in the same school as well and i think they've done that uh we we're miss if i may yeah miss hill and i've discussed using some of the teachers at mclaughlin to actually mentor the onboarding teachers because they've been here for longer

192so when we bring in new teachers next year our teachers can help them with some of those challenges with classroom management standard alignment so that we can make sure that all students receive that equitable education right and and i guess what i was kind of what uh miss miller was saying if it hadn't been for a few of our folks within the schools that didn't even know who they were when they showed up like miss fields was talking about like all the sudden they see a or a community member see somebody walking to church that that's how people found out i'm just saying that and not you know we want to improve we want solutions and because you know it is exactly what dr hudson said basically it is a good way to get our

193kids exposed to the global viewpoint without a field trip and uh you know so i'm all for helping all right whatever you need i'm on board miss wyatt thank you you mentioned that tpg was responsible for helping identify housing options are you working with anybody that is from polk county that understands what our housing options are in polk county what different neighborhoods are like how you know something may look like it's a mile away but you have 15 lakes between here and there so it's actually a 30 minute drive do we have anybody in the district that's or in polk county that's helping you all identify places so elsa who works specifically with polk county lives in orlando um she has been visiting polk county since march when she joined our team we literally had

194an orientation with the teachers where a good 10 minutes of that orientation was just elsa on google maps showing them like let me give you an understanding of what does it mean what do these different areas mean just because you're going to poke and you're going to poke does not mean that you're going to be anywhere near each other let's look at each of your schools let's understand where these are let's understand what these neighborhoods are um and we had you know we had all of them on zoom in their home countries watching us go through the map and kind of explain the different locations to them all of them were attend you know all of them did attend that zoom call live and were available both elsa and myself were available to answer questions

195and really just in terms of kind of the map and situating them as soon as we knew that we were going to be bringing teachers in this year i also started visiting polk county starting in june and really just starting to drive around and understand what were some apartment complexes that might be available who were some landlords that might be available and things like that the trick really came where we didn't know who was coming in and who was going where until much later on in the process and so even if we had met landlords and identified apartments and things like that at the end of the day when push comes to shove it is what apartment is available when this person is actually arriving and so giving them those resources and working with them

196on that is extremely important but also you know to david's point hiring early so that we know where they're going as early as possible and can really start making those connections as early as possible is extremely important and i do absolutely understand the feedback in terms of you know the goal here is not to have excuses the goal is to say what can we do better next time and i think as it relates to finding housing and pairing people with housing fundamentally the earlier we know the much the easier it will be to make sure that you know we get a part secure apartments as early as possible that are ready for when they're actually here thank you and i had the opportunity to meet elsa recently and she's wonderful so this is nothing against

197her but you need somebody from polk county working with her whether it's a contract or you you can't explain polk county to people i know our superintendent recently was looking for housing in polk county that you you can't explain the neighborhoods and what the the areas are to someone who doesn't who's not here all the time who's not driving through some of these neighborhoods at night after dark and just making sure that we're starting off by recommending good places to stay to some of our people because it's in hearing some of the stories it's not so much it's that they were given bad advice for some of them which isn't isn't fair to them and i think that's something that we could easily remedy by having somebody local help with that those recommendations right and

198i think you know to superintendent heights point some of those local realtor connections might also be a good way to move forward with that because they just have such a finger on the pulse in terms of housing specifically different areas and where they would recommend thank you so mr jenkins i'll ask you to come up as we transition i'll go ahead and cover staffing updates thank you very much i'll wrap up this topic a little bit because you know it's important for us to address all of these questions and concerns and develop a more robust mechanism so that we can support the onboarding of these staff because the reality of it is contracts and partnerships like this are not going away we continue to see a long list of vacancies and we've had a great

199deal of success thus far with these individuals when it comes to their instructional delivery and their ability to interact with our students and provide perspective and all of those things so it's important and incumbent upon us to make sure that this program continues to thrive it's something that this is not new to us this year is my understanding we had a similar contract previously although not at the scale we're currently addressing i think that's why we're seeing more concerns rise to the forefront so i will be more than happy to bring back to the board a more comprehensive support plan that outlines transportation outlines mentorship outlines you know access to resources but also working developing an aggressive timeline so that as you heard tpg to talk about today companies like theirs need to hire early

200so that we can begin the onboarding process and give people as much time and information as they need to make informed decisions and we'll be there to support them along the way and i use that to segue into staffing very briefly because there will be some recommendations for staffing changes that will come before the board at the next meeting that actually will help us best address this need teacher recruitment teacher retention in other areas miss miller talked about you know the east area school assistant principal and what she does and the west area assistant principle what they do and we've talked about those programs and the very disparate level of assignment for individuals with an organization i'm proud of the fact that by the end of the month all of our senior administrators will have

201completed a comprehensive review of every single job description that falls under their purview now that's not just done in isolation from the employee the employee is part of the dialogue what's changed in your role when was the last time we looked at your job description what's changed how many people do you supervise has it gone up has it gone down and then we will make recommendations comprehensively and it may take depending on the scale of what has to change it may take us a couple years to get there but we will get there and we do have very disparate systems and i'm going to be honest looking back at the history we didn't create that nobody created the disparate levels of positions we allowed it to happen over time and i want to clarify what

202i mean by that so when we talk about the fact that there was a principle assigned to bartow and we don't have a principal assigned to cambridge and we don't have a principal and we have a principal assigned to harrison and a commandant for summerlin what i have found historically in speaking to to others within the district was when the schools were originally budgeted for those positions they were budgeted equitably we allowed the school levels to make changes in the position level so that they could be more responsive to what they felt their local needs were the problem is it creates a perception over time that we're not equally funding all of those positions and it creates disparity and so we're finding more and more of that and that's okay we knew we had to

203review all of our job descriptions some of them i can't bring to you because they require their union-based employees and so we'll have to sit down with pea and walk through any changes that we're recommending or proposing or to discuss but from that perspective just know that comprehensively there'll be a long list of some recommendations that i will bring to you to help address some will be for end of year some will be now about half of those will be requested to implement now others will be based off end of the year i will assure you that everything is cost neutral it will either be completely paid for as a result of current cost savings that we have realized by consolidating positions which was my promise previously or they're fully grant funded for a minimum

204of two years so that nobody has to face the possibility of being cut or rift um over time so i think and then there's some other recommendations um for some contracted services and things that we i'm going to recommend that we walk away from or transition and bring back in-house that will bring a considerable amount of savings back to the school district so that being said i wanted to go ahead and plant the seed for staffing updates because a lot of what we talked about today does segue into that and i know we have many people listening who have had these conversations with me um so that i can best address those but i wanted to go ahead and have ms jenkins and miss miller i'll answer your question but miss jenkins is here to

205talk about polk education association teacher contract ms miller i just have a question before um we get into the details um two things i appreciate that you you know you said we didn't do this we definitely did this because we allowed it to happen without oversight so from now i think we need to be very clear on who the oversight is when these things start happening because it's not i today it seems like we're just talking about the very top tier there are multiple tiers okay so you're going through all of the department every single job description in every single department is currently under review for the next 30 days it will take you two years mr warren but i appreciate the effort we've allowed it to happen for years and years without oversight and

206that's where we need and it's we're not going to be able to bring everybody back to where they should be tomorrow but i'm so glad there's a plan to do that um in asking the is there another other than getting the employees input is there another review of efficiency or efficient use of that position because an employee who's always had four assistants may not need for assistance but they believe they need four assistance um how do we decide is it is input from two sides to just to even out winchester's been instrumental in assisting me with this as has mr bridges so i i initially was under the impression we would have to go out to rfp right um for an equity audit my understanding is at this point time we do not and so

207we will be advertised i'll be directly contacting several providers to ask them to submit essentially a different version of an rfp for them to conduct an efficiency audit for our school district we did something similar several years ago in conjunction with dr vogel and his group um and they gave us a list of things to address um many of which were done miss tedra miss porteous did a very good job transitioning us from a very antiquated system of a paper-based system to to largely electronic she was instrumental in bringing about uh ms solano and her group to help support our teachers recruitment retention and and those supports and that has paid off dividends um if you watch those ladies engage our staff at these community events it's very impressive and they're they're they're absolutely very

208much loved by our staff and deeply appreciated so those were great initiatives but getting that to job descriptions and to your point looking at efficiencies that's why we you know when i first started we started consolidating positions meaning if somebody had taken on the dues and responsibilities that that because of a vacancy elevate that person's role cash in the other role will this person will get a benefit of a pay raise but we still get a return savings back to the district and if my numbers are correct we saved almost four hundred thousand dollars doing that alone with just a handful of positions very early on and we've continued to see um savings um over time so um yes ma'am we will look at efficiencies as well miss wyatt um i just while we're talking

209about that um i met with both carol and wes last week and they will be doing the same thing with their departments and making sure that our job descriptions are up to date in the school board's office to align with what the rest of the district's doing as well since they don't really fall under that but they're going to be doing that as well miss jenkins mr warren's actually going to give us a little bit of an overview of our negotiation process and then i'll discuss the cost implications with you all if we'll segue to the executive summary i'm going to be a brief in the interest of time but i do want to bring to your attention several salient points of summary we're very pleased to bring to you that we have collectively bargained

210the tentative agreements for contract language including salaries and supplements and elementary and secondary school emergency relief funded supplements over the next three years in summary that went out for ratification through the union it was approved with 96 percent ratifying the votes there were a total of 2520 teachers that did respond to that so it was approved unanimously the group began to collectively bargain this issue looking back to november 19th oh i'm sorry i i need to scratch the word unanimously is the incorrect word but the percentage is actually 96 of the votes there is a total number of cast votes to that detail in my correction and thank you for that of the unanimous uh piece of 2520 of those 2420 or 4 and 100 were rejected thank you for that clarification my mind was

211in gear and i want to go down next to discuss the point number one 2022 self-funded employee health plan uh the salient point here is we do have increase that is being born by the district at forty dollars uh per uh employee that cost has not been passed on to the employee so there was no increase for employees to see relative to that health benefit item number two is the 2122 salary schedules in summary the teacher contract has increased from a value of 45 172 to 45 we also increased values within the grandfathering i'm sorry the grandfather teacher schedule the school psychologist and the teacher performance pay schedule you can see those highlighted there in short you'll see that we increased everything in the schedule by 210 dollars for grandfathering and for a psychologist for

212the teacher performance pay there was an increase of 315 dollars added to each current pay level that also followed across four school psychologists on that particular pay schedule as well you'll notice that for occupational therapists and physical therapists that was likes likewise also increased 210 port for each level as well the group is also very pleased that we had good work that was done relative to advanced degree supplements we're going to be seeing increases to advance degrees over the next two years you'll notice that they were increased this year at the levels of masters specialist and doctorate at values of 490. 809. and thousand seven hundred seventy eight dollars progressing to that next bullet you'll notice the following year you would see an increase again um which would ultimately take it to an additional increase

213of 491 for in the following year a total of 3162 for masters and then for specialists another increase of 809 for a total of 4517 another increase of 1778 for a total of six thousand seven seventy six for doctorate degrees with respect to esser funded supplements uh again it was a three year agreement and i want to make the point that all instructional positions that are defined as being covered under the teacher collective bargaining agreement are eligible a list of those are found on page one or two of the contract the agreement was for a thousand dollars after taxes each year they're working on that money being paid out in two sums that would come in early in the year in december and then later in the year in may and uh employees would have

214to be active on the date of that payment to be eligible to receive those funds and then there is an ongoing agreement with polk county public schools and pea to continue to work together to add the thousand dollars into the salary schedules following the completion of the esser funds uh which are used to assist with those raises or those values that i just discussed the teacher supplement salary schedule item number four was also prioritized and reviewed we added a laundry list of new annual supplements at various values that i'm happy to break apart and tease out for you but these were based on requested need and also on on on a basis to assist with areas that are hard to recruit and and and workload i want to uh go beyond now to the highly

215effective teacher if they are on the grandfathered salary schedule there's an increase there of and then if we have teachers that are in a critical shortage area there is a list that comes out annually from the florida department of education they will be eligible for an additional as well and that assists us with meeting compliances with differentiated pay requirements required by law at this point in time i'm going to pause and in a moment uh hand it over to heather and walk us through the financial impact relative to the bargaining components that i've just summarized for you with the new 11 minimum base hourly rate that we've added for our hourly employees and also our changes to our health fund the board has contributed 5.5 million dollars to date to ensure that we don't have

216to pass those costs along to our employees that brings our estimated fund balance to about 3.9 percent that includes salary increases for teachers of 2.3 2.3 million dollars our advanced degree supplements for 2122 and 2223 totaling a little over 2 million our other supplement changes those have not been updated for many years so that totals 5.8 million bringing us to a total of 10.2 now in respect to our fund balance as you all know we've submitted several costs for reimbursement to esser which once we make those adjustments there will be changes in our fund balance as we move throughout the year we're in january we always see it go up and down as we track so we'll keep the board updated monthly and our total plan contribution pending approval is 29.5 million from our esser

217dollars so we're trying to put that funding back into an area where it can aid our employees and also aid in learning loss ms this may be off topic but i heard on the news this morning that private insurance is going to be responsible for these home covered tests have you heard that mr hyde it's not related to us we receive our test kits through the health department and we distribute them at the school level or through other means so to my knowledge i'm not aware of any implication unless an employee went out on their own and sought remember i think it's the ones that are being mailed to i don't know i don't know i just thought i'd bring it up i'd have to speak to miss kelly and dr let's look into that

218with miss scott please thank you sure miss fields i wanted to know if miss jenkins could give us the information that you just repeated about the fund balance and the monies that's going to need to to be available to take care of us not increasing not charging staff for help for the health plan because that's a big piece and we talked about gradually coming up with a very small amount to charge each employee i know we don't want to do it i just want to make sure that we are going to have the resources in place to offset that increase yes ma'am our estimated fund balance with all our changes including changes to the health plan is 3.9 percent it's above our state minimum but below the board goal of 5 we've contributed 5.5 million

219dollars to the health plan that's with no increase to employee contributions our employees are 100 percent covered and we haven't added anything to what they have to pay for their families our health plan does need a little bit of work in our health fund that's something we'll have to bring to the board to discuss where we want to go with that so that we can continue to increase our fund balance and meet funding requirements with it as well and as requested we have submitted requests to cover some coveted claims and we will update the board on on the approval of that and how that will affect the health fund as well i'm sorry what was the last statement the coven claims the board had asked previously if we could submit those for esser reimbursement and

220we have put those in the application so as we move forward in the process i'll update you on how that affected our fund balance for the health fund okay i just want to make sure that we know that our health plan is not healthy yes ma'am and that we need to make sure that we're aware of that no ma'am but i want to just a point of clarification real quick ms woodman jenkins make sure everybody understands um minimally our fund balance is presently at 3.9 percent there are other factors including the reimbursements to esser that will we will realize an increase in our overall fund balance at this time we'll provide a monthly update to the board so that you're aware of what has been reimbursed and what impact that has on our overall fund

221balance but we anticipate that should the majority if not all of our claims be reimbursed we will be above the five percent uh threshold that the board has established but we'll provide that as a regular update to you um so that you know the status of our fund balance moving forward uh but miss fields is absolutely correct we have an unhealthy health plan when it comes to the finance finances behind it which creates opportunity and you know whether it's pursuing you know what ms field said the most the most distasteful solution is is passing some of those costs on to our employees um or are there other opportunities for us to secure um more appropriate insurance at lower costs through other providers or other vendors and i think that's the opportunity for us to pursue

222at the same time miss fortney and then ms miller i just wanted to thank miss jenkins because i had a colleague sitting on a different board i don't know if you remember that email that i sent you and how we included our covid in our plan and she was very thrilled to get that information so thank you you're welcome it was a good good idea ms miller you mentioned looking at other options first of all i do appreciate that you're very conservative with the fund balance but i i think we had to have the discussion before that we assumed that it would go up after reimbursements were given um but i would like to see other what other districts are similar large scientists are doing with health plans and how we are bidding that out

223to other because rates change significantly quickly um and so i don't want to wait until it's time to do it i would like to see you know what's out there so we can review options before we talk about charging employees because that's that's a hard hard one to sell and i would like to see if we can be efficient somewhere else with the plans thank you dr allen uh great thanks for the update and uh you know when i'm looking at the tsia and that increase how are we looking comparatively to districts around us you know as we looked two years ago i think the goal of the state was to try to get us at 47.5 in regards to that starting base salary and we're at 45 487 so i'm just curious you know

224if you have some thoughts on that how we're comparing in regards to that starting salary because i you know definitely want us to be a competitive in in that range as well and you know i appreciate the cautiousness on the um the 3.9 percent as it relates to our fund balance i'm curious how in superintendent hyde maybe you can speak to this what your perspective is on the policy that's the board has adopted as it relates to that that number is it at a point in time you know what what the board policy states as it relates to that fund balance i'm just i want to understand what you're thinking uh as it relates to you know the way that you're communicating with miss jenkins as well how we manage that that board policy that

225states we should be at what percentage five five percent so you know because you know i appreciate the conversation that it's on a rolling rate we're considering that but does a board policy allow that um and i know then you know 3.9 boy we're teetering on that half percent where the state says if you go under 3.5 that's not good oh is it three percent okay so three percent of the clarification on that so we're not in jeopardy of going below three percent correct my reference to the fund balance is because as i look to polk county and our future as a school district providing and negotiating successfully negotiating these contracts at this time was a huge infusion of positive energy and you heard community members come forward we need to pay our employees bus

226drivers custodians and others a living wage and i'm very proud of the work we've done but it's just a start we have to our fund balance is reflective of not only our ability to provide ongoing opportunities to provide additional pay raises to staff moving forward so we can retain them and recruit but it's also a matter of if we're going to add 50 000 students in the next 12 to 15 years our fund balance has to then rep allow us to grow positionally even now we know that we don't have i would say from my opinion as an educator that we do not have an adequate staff to student ratio for guidance counselors social workers and school psychologists very under they're overwhelmed the the number of students the staff to student ratio is incredibly high

227um and so i would say that when i look at fund balance um i look at what's sustainable is five percent sustainable i'd have to go back and figure out and understand why the board chose five percent what was the concern at the time and what were we saving for at that time um but i think heather and mr pitts more importantly can probably bring me up to speed on that but i always look for a healthy fund balance above four percent in state of florida um simply because again we have to make sure that all of our revenue is and our costs associated with staffing and and operational costs are sustainable so anything above four percent tends to lend itself to that but five percent i think gives the board that comfort level and

228that buffer knowing that as we move forward and we negotiate and that five percent could be reflective of the five million or some some number that we were investing in our insurance policy each year because we did not pass the cost on to our employees for at all i think we're one of two if not the only remaining school district in the state of florida that doesn't charge its employees for insurance and not that anybody has a takeaway that that's what i'm recommending i'm simply saying you know that might be why the five percent is in there because we know we have ongoing operational costs that are going to show that ebb and flow of our fund balance and our fund balance i i don't see it going down as much as it will continue

229to rise simply because of our growth property tax revenue sales tax revenue and other opportunities we have new revenue streams coming in that we didn't have previously so i think our fund balance is a good place now and will continue to rise because of our utilization of esser funds to offset some of those things i think we've been very thoughtful in our fiduciary responsibility but investing those dollars where they should be invested and as they're required to be invested so but i think we'll see the benefit of that at the end of the school year i think when we look at fund balance the most important date is your end of year date your end of year your end of your fiscal calendar is the most important fund balance date because that is the number

230that we will base all new initiatives and or supports for in the upcoming school year so that's i think the date that matters most in my mind i don't know if ms jenkins disagrees and she's welcome to but to me for my purposes and planning and implementation that's the most important thing thanks for the clarification on that and if you can maybe speak to the teacher salary increase allocation just would love to hear your thoughts just because we're not part of that bargaining process it was there an opportunity to increase that or did we cap it out at that and then allocate that to other areas we were given 1.8 million dollars over last year's allocation we had 18 million so we worked with the union and this was the maximum amount we could give

231based on the dollars we received but we've made we've had some really really good collaborative meetings with the union and have made plans and commitments to get that up as high as we can based on our funding great which is part of the fun you know part of our fund balance we're planning for our future awesome thanks and uh yeah i mean i would say uh you know steffi okanam she does a good job i don't know if you guys uh in engaged the peas youtube um page you know she gave a good explanation on on this contract as well so there's some good resources in this conversation for us as well so thanks ms fields i just wanted to say if my memory shows me correctly a lot of what you said is true

232about the fund balance but i remember we were not getting the funding from the state uh during a period of time and we knew that we needed to have a a good fund balance for emergency purposes and stuff so i think that's one of the the rationales for us having a five five percent fund balance mr allen yeah i mean i i just think that uh you know as i'm sitting i'm listening um we're at 3.9 percent you know so then we're under board policy we should be afraid you know so i just want to make sure that my feelings as it relates to the fact that's being presented is accurate and in accordance to what the policy states and if if it's not meant that we go underneath that board policy at a moment

233in time so be it so i just want to know what the clarification was as the policy was established initially so and i i think that that helps what you said superintendent high that it's alluding to at the end of our fiscal year we need to be here so i if you're confident in that and that's what we i think maybe we should address that from a policy standpoint so it is clear i think that was the conversation when that policy was set um uh i think the it was it was understood that that during the year that that that number fluctuates um but i i think you're right the the policy says five but the intent was uh at the at the end of the year after you've reconciled all the all the reimbursements

234that you would come up to five is there so many budget things that take place during the year that it does go up and down but the the contemplation at the time the policy was adopted was that it would be five percent at the at the end of the year after everything was reconciled great yes miss 14. dr alan uh reminded me uh i did watch the youtube uh negotiations and it was quite enlightening uh and also the explanations and i have shared with fellow board members across the state those links for how we negotiate how we came up with our superintendent search how we did our committee of concerned citizens and you know i believe we uh at least the group of people that i know across the state always are asking what do

235you all do in polk and then i can send them something good uh and it's usually on a youtube uh bit or uh you know or direct email to you i mean i just want to thank you because it's collaborative in in such a good way thank you that concludes the superintendent's report there are six items on under listed for information two of which i'll address given the fact that they exceed a million dollars per the request of the board the first is a unisig supplemental teacher allocation fund that is about 1.2 1.16 million dollars the goal of supplemental teacher allocation is to provide supplemental funds to recruit and retain highly effective and effective state vam teachers who are teaching and impacting our most vulnerable students at the most fragile schools in order to be

236eligible for unisex supplemental allocation a teacher must meet the following criteria be providing direct instruction as of august 30th 2021 in an eligible school an eligible school is defined as a title 1 school with a 2019 grade designation of d or f or a 2021 opt in grade of a d or f in addition the teacher must have a state van or highly effective or effective rating whichever is best under the three following options a 2019 three-year aggregate the new 2021 state van calculation it contains the 17 18 18 19 and 2021 school year or an algebra one teacher who can use a one year state vam score from 19 2019 or 2021 and lastly they have to have a advance of state vam score comprised of at least 10 student assessments the preliminary supplemental

237teacher allocation funds for the 2122 school year are up to 15 thousand dollars for a highly effective state vam rating and up to 7 500 dollars for an effective state van rating the second grant that's listed here unicef grant would roughly equates to 290 000 per eligible school once again eligible schools are those with a 2019 school designation grade of d or f there are three areas that they primarily focus on transformational leadership this includes a recruitment and retention incentive for both the principal and assistant principal and the performance incentive for a qualified principal it also focuses on standards-based planning instruction and learning it includes a best standards coach additional professional learning time and english language arts supplemental materials to support the new implementation of best standards and lastly the positive culture and environment it

238includes supplemental pay to promote or supplement safety training on our school campuses those are the two items that exceed a million dollars again as i stated there are four other items grants management quarterly report if there are no questions miss courtney are you just going to read those i was just going to go through them and see if there were any questions grants management quarterly report charter administrative services guide both are the charter administrative services guide you were you were provided with a crosswalk document that showed you the changes in the document um head start administrative update this is required annually miss fortney i have a question on that on the board executive report i know that's in november have we made any headway in our current vacancies oh there's carrie there my computer's frozen

239and i wanted to say that our buddies please our funding enrollment is up too that's awesome could you direct your question again oh i'm sorry hello thank you uh have we made any headway with our current vacancies as of november at gibbon street uh jesse king we have completed a couple of interviews this week i had hired somebody um for one of the positions at ojp which is not even on here and another school took her so i'm back to the drawing board there we could interviewed several people yesterday i'm waiting on their answer we made them an offer so hopefully those should fill we did not focus on our coaches there's no viable candidates we have been facing the challenges that everyone else has been facing with finding instructional staff so rather than fill

240a resource position if we had a good teaching candidate we put them in one of our teaching vacancies got it and for that 99.6 enrollment yeah so we finished november with 938 children of our funded 942 we december we're at 9 42 and today we are at 9 42 so we are fully funded thank you thank you ma'am and lastly the copy of donation report madam chair that concludes the workshop for this morning thank you next we'll look over the agenda for the special board meeting which so the only thing on this agenda is our approval of the minutes for december 14th and then the teacher contract any questions we went over the teacher contract already all right now i have a few quick things before we wrap up the work session i announced in

241december that we would be doing the evaluations for miss matthews and mr bridges and then when um yvette and i were looking at the excel document it is locked so i have recreated the excel document in a dot form which will make it it's the exact same form it just is online and will compile all of the um data into one form itself as opposed to having staff take the time to do that um those will go out this afternoon mr bridges and miss mr bridges and miss matthews have both had an opportunity to look over them it's the exact same form as before it's just online as opposed to in excel and mr bridges has given us the legal stamp of approval that it looks good so i'm excited about moving it onto a

242digital platform i think it'll make things run a little bit smoother also excited the jotform allows five free forms and we only have four staff members that we evaluate so that works out nicely too um the charter review committee um as amato reached out back right as soon as i got got elected as chair i believe to say that we need two more members so we the two of us work together to establish how we typically get members and we went back to see which districts have appointed over the past several years there was it seemed to be going in a district numerical order so we went through the two next districts that would be up would be district six so mr wilson and district seven with miss miller and neither one of them had

243appointed before as according to our records so would you to be able to and willing to appoint yes mr wilson i have a question i have asked a few people and the question they have is what are the what are the typical time constraints or what are the typical time how much time do they do someone would they be expected to spend on the committee miss motto good afternoon yes afternoon um so thank you mr wilson so unfortunately i don't have a specific time amount that would be required because it really depends on how many applications we receive um we do ask that as the as the community member that they do review the entire application because it does impact various sections of their world and and the community in which the school is looking

244to open um we do have we do still work with mrs mace who's our contract advisor who helps navigate that process so it does become a little more streamlined we will continue to offer our meetings virtually through zoom so there would not be any requirement for the community member to come to bartow or to lakeland we will still offer those virtually so it's really a matter of how many applications we receive but it is it is it can be a daunting process how long generally does it take to review one single application if you were to guess a couple hours yes a couple hours okay thank you that i would that i would mention is the statute changed a year ago so that a process that used to take place once a year over a

245period of a couple of months now can take place any time that doesn't mean that there will be more time spent depending on how many applications there are it just means that it could take place at any time during the year not just during the old application window i think that's preferable for you you don't have six you don't have seven to ten applications at one time you could but you also have the opportunity to stretch them out over the year um that's a not necessarily always a great idea because it does tap into district leadership that is also needed to review those applications and we have a 90-day turnaround time and that has not changed so we could actually have multiple 90-day timelines overlapping each other while we're reviewing multiple applications mr dr allen

246thank you just maybe giving some clarification on uh how recommendations come forward uh just as a new board member i do have community members that have actually reached out to me about serving on that committee in particular you know maybe background of how many individuals currently serve on that committee outside of our point our appointments maybe just help me have some frame on that a little bit so i spent a little bit of christmas break going back through all of the minutes to figure out who where our appointments have come from and and who appointed each of them which was a lot of fun and there's a lot of handy tools in uh in our our board docs now um but we have three community members so we previously had one and i believe it

247was in 2013 um they decided to suspend board policy to add two additional and then formally put it into board policy later so there are three community members that serve um on the oversight committee at any given time and then there's also several that i'll let you speak to too so there are so the board does i'm select three and then we have about 23 additional uh variety of district leadership from curriculum certification hr pd um you name it facilities transportation food services and we all we all take apart full of people and it is a substantial lift it is it is an important committee and the duties do take uh you know there's no use kidding ourselves this is a committee that requires some noble degrees are you speaking from experience there everything ever

248since 1997. absolutely absolutely understandable um so is there are there any more questions on that um just so the two of you know that have appointments coming up they the timeline we do have one that we believe will be submitted on february 1st um so if it is at all possible to have your appointment before the end of january meeting that way we can get them onboarded and make sure that we have community members representing us that would be helpful yes ma'am if mr wilson for example doesn't currently have someone in mind but yet dr allen does have a community member who spoke up i mean this is a very fluid situation so i mean i'm just saying if if it didn't happen now he might be next but if you have someone that could

249fill in quickly and move forward that might be something to think about so it's kind of what we've always done thank you absolutely thank you miss cunningham mr wilson yes so i will know something by the end of this week and if if i don't have somebody that will work i'll reach out to perfect perfect and she can reach out to mr allen awesome thank you so much both of you any other questions all right and i believe that was my last update um i had at our december meeting we had discussed using the board comments in this section for any updates from either conferences or committees that you serve liaison on um does anybody have any updates miss fortney yes uh i attended uh the central florida coalition meeting and uh the main focus

250of the meeting was uh legislative uh updates from different uh counterparts of miss wendy dodge from the central florida districts they did have some superintendents present who shared their concerns from legislation that's possible in tallahassee their big concern the superintendent rep was a revenue problem esser funds have saved us with that revenue problem and the 15 an hour uh compensation for staff was a big concern mental health of staff and students and of course school safety and security some of the fsba concerns shared were progress monitoring bills for assessment and accountability trying to grow our own teachers through grant programs and then there was so many possible pieces of legislation that were discussed everything from civic literacy bright futures iep school bus safety school zones uh um trying to read my notes here uh senate

251bill 1300 was discussed school concurrency was a big topic of discussion um about striking the language and making that a district wide assessment miss fortney just before you move on i spoke to um representative calibre yesterday and he's offered to make an amendment to that so that it would best suit polk county to keep big districts able to operate a little bit more efficiently in that manner thank you miss wyatt representative killebrew thank you uh because the capacity will be challenged uh for sure um and there's some talk about new uh uh fefp language and somebody has filed a bill house bill senate bill 298 uh once the starting salary target is met to dr allen's comment that we have a little bit more flexibility with the money that is uh being sent to our

252district as far as veteran employees and that's about it thank you miss fortney anyone else with updates dr allen uh well yeah maybe just a recap on the last half cent sales tax oversight committee i just want to say thanks to miss usher um an initiative that came forward i know alex hunt has probably spoken to a lot of you guys hey let's let's get a sign um at every um physical plant that's being under construction that notes um you know the contributions of the ascent sales tax initiative and that's what this is this construction is being prompted by so i'm happy to say that that sign has been completed and what it's going to look like and the design of it and it's going to then be deployed at every construction site um noting

253that so i appreciate superintendent hyde and miss usher for initiating that as well as you know the plaque that's going to be at each location as well then you know transitioning from that committee junior achievements coming up haven't had a chance to meet with that i do want to hear a little bit about the curriculum committee that uh isn't a new it's a new committee right um so superintendent hyde may be something uh in in line with that committee when that's going to start who's chairing that committee so i know um as well um sorry for my tardiness today uh first day of the semester with florida southern so i had to service my classroom as well but i tried to tune in with your conversation around nearpod and some of the other topics but

254i did want to speak to the near pod there for a moment as i heard the discussion as we move forward into that next work session to discuss it we talked a lot about the interactivity um of the tool and you know what the impact meaning the outcomes of that tool but we didn't really talk a lot about the content of the pods that are within nearpod so i just want to make sure that we're addressing not only the form but we're also addressing the content and how that's being deployed within the classroom and managed from an oversight perspective so you know when we think about the enhancements there's always reversals to me you know like the automobile for example reversed us into traffic jams although there's an enhancement to the automobile it reversed us

255into something so as we move to enhance the classroom in some way i want us to be aware what kind of reversals would be coming our way and how do we prepare for that obviously it's been in the classroom for a while but i'm just curious how that management's going to take place but something needs to change its function as well so is there something we can take away there's a give and take as well we're going to spend you know this amount of money but is there a particular piece of software that we could take out of deployment because this is going to fill that gap as well so just a couple thoughts to recap on earlier conversations that you were having within the agenda so glad i can make it and be back

256to celebrate what's going to take place in a few moments thank you and just a reminder you should have an envelope on your desk that has your invitation to polk county day if you want to join us in tallahassee on january 26th the florida legislature did begin their session today so send lots of nice notes and and kind words to our our legislators in tallahassee i believe that concludes our work session and do we want to take a five-minute recess before the i'm saying shaking heads no move straight through okay all right so we will conclude our work session and let me pull up the other one [Music] okay our tech team needs to take a break so we will be back here in five minutes they've got to get the next um channel started

257for the video feed [Music] you