Updates on the Fight for Quality Public Education in Brevard County, FL
11:30 Good morning. The December 20, 2022 board meeting is now in order. I’m happy to welcome my fellow board members and the public. I would like to take this opportunity to remind the public that the appropriate place for public participation in the meeting is during your individual public comment opportunity as identified in the agenda outside your individual public comment opportunity.
11:48 Your role in the meeting is as an observer. Paul, roll call, please. Mister Susan? Here.
11:53 Miss Wright? Here. Mister Trent? Here. Miss Jenkins? Here.
11:57 Miss Campbell. Please stand for the pledge of Allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
12:20 That brings us to the adoption of the agenda. Do I hear a motion? Motion to approve. Second.
12:27 Is there any discussion? I have. Oh, no, not for that. Please vote.
12:33 All in favor, signify by saying aye. Aye. All opposed? Probably.
12:37 Talk about one thing today. How did you get that? All right, we are now on to public comments. During this morning’s meeting, comments will be limited to the agenda items only.
12:44 First, can I get a motion to allow speakers three minutes and the ability to address the board by name? Move to approve. Second. All right, is there any discussion? All right, please vote.
12:57 All in favor, signify by saying aye. Aye. All opposed? All right, we have one speaker and they will receive three minutes.
13:05 I will call up each speaker at a time, and the first speaker and only speaker is. Miss Kate Buckley, please. I’m Kate Buckley.
13:14 I’m a retired early childhood teacher from Brevard county. Stay with me here. You may think I’m not talking about the subject you’re addressing, but I am at the present time.
13:24 If you go on Beacon, you will discover that Brevard county schools needs 112 teachers, 55 instructional assistants, and five assistant principals. I, of course, want to know what doctor Shiller’s plan will be to retain and keep those teachers. But we continue as we always have in the past, at least to do nothing about this.
13:46 I am concerned that you put in an idea for a discipline program, but you are short eight school psychologists. You put in a job for book banning, but you’ve already have a school that doesn’t have any social media person. You will go through the crisis in education that we are in now.
14:08 And the crisis is, in my opinion, the rapid loss of highly qualified teaching professionals who choose either to leave, walk out, not return, retire early, or some other reason. None of your grandiose plans of book banning and discipline are going to work if you don’t have teachers in the classroom. My request for Doctor Schiller as a consultant is that he sit down as part of his process with all teachers, new teachers, tenured teachers, retired teachers, retired early teachers, and teachers who just literally walked out of the classroom and understand that you cannot have a school system if you do not have highly qualified, happy, productive people standing in front of those classrooms.
14:59 Thank you for your time. Thank you, Miss Buckley. That concludes our public comments.
15:05 We thank you for your willingness to address us in this public matter. The first topic on the agenda is to approve the interim superintendent contract. Do I have a motion? Second, is there any discussion? Yeah, I have a question.
15:20 So, within this contract, Mister Schiller does not contribute to FRS. And so it says that there’s going to be an equal contribution to a 403. And just because this is out and open in the public, do we have an idea of how much that is? It’s going to, I believe it’s roughly around $6,000.
15:39 Because he’s basically assuming Doctor Mullins’s contract for the duration. But since he will not vest in FRS because you have to have at least a year minimum to vest, then those contributions have to go to a separate account. So he’s going to identify an account that he wants us to put him in.
15:56 And Doctor Mullins was receiving approximately $6,000 per month. Per month, yes. Okay.
16:02 Thank you. I just wanted that to be clear to the public, just because that was it. And I wanted to.
16:07 I wanted to say, take this moment just so you guys understand that Mister Schiller, Doctor Schiller and I and Paul have gone through his contract. I will tell you that he is honestly very honorable in what he did five years ago. He received $300,000 for his work there.
16:28 And he was able to come in and said, look, I came here to do a job and I will do it for a reduced price. And he actually brought forward the idea to use that FRS because it saves us. So that you guys understand, if we’re giving to the FRS, then we save that, because he could have made an argument to take that FRS that Doctor Mullins was receiving and because we don’t have to give it to FRS to just add that on top of his contract.
16:54 But he said, no, I want to do what’s right for this community. And I’ve been with him a couple of times, and I can’t tell you how many times he actually has done that. He’s trying to do what’s right for our school district.
17:05 And instead of adding the extra component onto his salary, he asked us to put it towards FRS, which saves us some considerable amount of money. So with that, any other discussion? Yeah, I wasn’t finished, so I don’t know who would give me this answer at this point, but I’ve asked this previously as well. And again, I think it’s important for the public for transparency purposes.
17:26 We never actually had a nominal amount of the severance for Doctor Mullins as well, so if we could get that to the board members so that the public can be aware of that as well. Sounds good. Any other discussion? All right, please vote.
17:43 All in favor, signify by saying aye. Aye. All opposed? Congratulations, Mister Schiller.
17:51 You are now our interim superintendent. Thank you, sir. Next, FSBA will provide a superintendent search presentation.
17:58 Before you go, Mister Vogel, I just kind of wanted to. The reason that this meeting was called was so that we could, as you guys know, just listen to him, tell us what we need to be thinking about over break. And in discussing with him, we’re going to shoot to try to have him come back to take the direction from the board.
18:18 At our off site meeting that we have in early January, he expressed that that would be a good idea to get it earlier than the meeting that we had, and I didn’t want to have to make meetings to make meetings, so we might just put it on there. So with that, Mister Vogel, you have the floor, sir. Thank you very much.
18:33 First, I’d like to thank the board for the opportunity to come before you and work with you again, as we did several years ago. And I’d like to also thank the staff for the warm welcome I got when I came in this morning, too. And certainly we’ve worked with Tammy in the past and she’s awesome to work with.
18:55 Also, congratulations to Doctor Schiller. Doctor Schiller and I have had numerous conversations in the past, and I’ve made an excellent choice. And I know our paths will cross during this whole process.
19:08 We value his experience too, and we will definitely lean on Doctor Shiller throughout the process too. So thank you very much. We’re going to go, as Mister Susan said, we’re going to try to run through relatively quickly an overview of the process and give you some items to think about how we want to proceed.
19:30 So we’ll go ahead and get started. Andrea Messina is on the phone, so if we need Andrea, he certainly is available to us at all times. Of course, as you know, choosing the next leader is probably the most important decision the school board will make.
19:48 And we really look forward to being a partner with you in bringing a strong field of candidates so we can find that ideal person. Things have changed in Florida lately. We have 29 appointed superintendents, but there’s been a lot of change.
20:05 There’s several openings right now, about six openings, and also there’s been a number of new superintendents that have just come on board. We recently completed searches in Orange county and also Pinellas county. So there are a lot of new superintendents coming in.
20:24 But I will tell you that I’ve already received people and calls from people who said, is Brevard open? When are they going to start advertising? So I think, you know, your district is very desirable and I think we’re going to have a, a strong field. We work as a team. We have a multiple team approach.
20:47 Andrea Messina, former school board member in Charlotte county and she was also the director of board development with FSBA. She’s an outstanding trainer and a facilitator and also certainly for the last number of years has been the CEO of FSBA. I am a former superintendent.
21:08 I’ve spent 16 successful years as a superintendent in St. Lucie county and Seminole county. When I was in Seminole, we were, and I told misses Wright when the test results would come out and it was FCAT back then, boy, we were looking at Brevard every one of those tests. We were.
21:28 You challenged our team and it was really nice because your superintendents would invite our teachers over for training, especially in science. And so we had a great relationship, but it was a very positive. Also, I’ve stayed current.
21:42 I’m the chief negotiator for Manatee county schools. Before I was superintendent, I was in HR and labor relations. So I’m pretty much up to speed on what’s going on statewide, along with John Reichert and John Reichert’s retired executive director of human resources and professional standards.
22:02 John has done all the training for new superintendents in these areas for many, many years. He’s actually worked in about half the school districts doing training very up to speed. And what this does is the three of us are very familiar with all the educators in Florida, throughout the district, and we’re able to really attract and bring a lot of good candidates forward.
22:26 So we work in a team approach. We provide on site representation, we facilitate community meetings, focus groups, attend board meetings. Anything you want us to do, we’re just like an extension of your staff and we’re finished with our job.
22:42 It’s sad for us to leave because we established really great relationships and in fact, in our last search, Orange county, they asked us to stay on so we’re still doing work in Orange county, even after they selected their superintendent. So we really, really tried to do everything we can. We’re really about relationships, and we do what the board would like us to do.
23:05 We really, again, use a team approach. Our three people are available. In fact, one thing that’s really good, it saves on travel expenses.
23:12 John and I are living in Seminole county, are only 65 miles away. I checked this morning and we’re about an hour away. We very rarely ever would stay overnight, so we keep the travel down.
23:28 One of the things that we like to do is we work very closely with your school board attorney throughout the process. We also would have a staff liaison in addition to the chairman and the board members. Not sure who that would be, possibly Tammy, who we worked with before, but whoever.
23:48 And then we would also work with somebody in HR. We always recommend the applications come to us directly, but there is. We work very closely with HR on reference checks, and they’re part of the process, too.
24:04 Also the communications team, we would work with them and the IT staff, because a lot of the work we do, we do hybrid meetings, which we’ll talk about a little bit later. We can do them in person and we can have also people join virtually. So we really always want to work with the it people.
24:25 We also will talk a bit more about that. So I’ve already met, certainly talked to Mister Gibbs and Jackie Church, and it has already told me some of the amazing things you all do because of COVID you had to really adjust your technology for access. So I feel like we’ll have a really good relationship there.
24:50 And everything that we do is personalized. For brevard schools, even though we do quite a few searches, every search is different based on what the school board needs. We work for the board and we do what the board would like to do.
25:06 And we will provide a lot of options, options for you. Two resources that we have that really nobody else has. We have come up with these.
25:18 We have key decisions for the school board. We’ll provide this document to all the board members so you can get an overview of the board role in the search. And also we have a district staff liaison booklet that we have put together based on all of the liaisons who we’ve worked with in the districts, and we’ll get those to you all throughout the process.
25:41 We will definitely work very diligently, and we’ve never had an issue with the Sunshine law. We work with the attorney. Depending on what community advisory groups you have, we do training for those advisory groups.
25:55 And we always follow the Sunshine law. We’ve never had a question on that. The same with public records and also with public input.
26:03 So we really focus on the transparency that we bring before the search. There are several things that we do to ensure a smooth search. First, we establish the team who we’ll work with and we’ll probably work with doctor Schiller and Mister Susan and board, find out who the it contact would be, who our contact would be to set up meetings and so forth.
26:31 We’ll do that. And then what we have is what we call a pre search interview. What we like to do is we have a protocol that we use and it gives us an idea on the priorities of the board.
26:45 We base everything that we do on your strategic plan. I looked at, you have four areas of your strategic plan and we look at the vision, mission, strategic plan, and we focus on what the priorities of the board are. And then we also focus on relationships with internal groups and external groups.
27:02 And we would get you that protocol. And Mister Susan had a pretty good, a good idea to possibly, if we can kind of tie that in together with your retreat that’s coming up on January 9, that would be really helpful because then we’ll find out kind of everybody’s kind of direction you want to go on that. And we’ll provide that protocol to Tammy later.
27:29 We can provide it later today so you can see what we’re going to be asking. But that’s something that would be the first thing we would start to try to do. Then we would have to determine what kind of community input that you would like to have.
27:42 And that’s a real important one. And some of the options that we have on community input, first thing we would do is work with your it department to set up a website portal. The website portal has everything to do with the superintendent search.
28:03 So you can click on your website and you go to the website portal and say superintendent search. And every document that is produced at every event is listed on the website portal. When the applications come in.
28:20 Because we operate in the sunshine, we even post the applications throughout our process. When you get down to the semifinalist or finalist, we recommend even that those individuals provide video responses to questions that the board comes up with. We even post those on this website portal.
28:39 So that’s, we will talk about the contents of the website portal. That’s something that we really do. The other thing that we would suggest for your consideration is a survey, an online survey.
28:53 And what we would have to, we would usually base that on your four areas of your strategic plan, but we would want to have someone from your team assigned. Every district has a survey guru or someone, or you might have some existing surveys that you already use, but we would want to post that online survey. And we’ve had amazing responses to our survey in many of the districts, and usually it’s for all employees.
29:24 Could you sign on? And they can take their choice of this, of the survey if they’re employee or. And then we also have a way of it. People have a way of coding it by zip code.
29:36 It’s all anonymous, but then you can kind of get an idea by zip code what people are feeling, too. So that’s another option that you have that we can talk about more on January 9. The other thing that we do is we can have internal focus groups.
29:53 If you’d like us to meet with internal groups, the teachers association or the support association or the administrative staff or staff in this building, whoever you’d like us to meet, we go ahead and can do those groups for you, too. We facilitate all those. And then we also do community forums.
30:16 We go out in the community. Wherever you’d like to go, wants to go. If you’d like to have, I know it’s a large county, spread out.
30:25 If we can go to North county, south County, or wherever you’d like us to do it, we can do as many of those as you’d like to do. And what we do with all of the information we get is we’ll summarize after every one of these forums, we’ll send you all the information. Then we’ll summarize for you and come up with a draft list of qualities that we think that the people in the community and people in respondents have for your consideration.
30:54 We try to limit to about ten, and then we include that in the advertisement, so. And then also those qualities you can utilize when you’re doing your interview process, too. So we’ll do all that for you, too, if you’d like us to do that.
31:08 One thing that some, some districts like us to do is student forums, and that’s one of our favorites. We do those, usually virtually. And I talked to Jackie already.
31:20 She says, no problem. We can come down the district office with students. We’ll send out the protocol ahead of time, and then the students can go ahead and they can go ahead.
31:31 And usually they’ll be at each school and we can get them all online, and then they’ll give us responses. And we summarize that with students. So we really enjoy doing that.
31:39 Also, one of the other areas that’s an option is to have a superintendent, search, advisory or screening committee. Now, what we emphasize is the board makes the decision on hiring the superintendent. Some districts choose to set establish a community advisory committee.
32:01 We have no problem working with those advisory committees. It takes a few weeks longer when we have an advisory committee. Depending on the role of the advisory committee, some of our searches, the board just says we have plenty of opportunity for input.
32:17 And, you know, we really don’t need to have a separate committee doing it. Some boards like to appoint several people to be on the committee. Other boards will use the committee for screening.
32:31 Some boards will use it to help. Once we finalize all the qualities before we go and advertise and the qualifications, we’ll go ahead and let them review those and get their input on that. So that’s going to be a decision point the board can be thinking about.
32:48 If you decide to do a community advisory committee, we’re open to the numbers. Some boards will just have each board member select three people. If you want to go that route or however you do that, but we’re fine.
33:02 However you would like to go ahead and do that. And if you have an outside committee like that, as Paul will tell you, they’re subject to the sunshine. And we go through that process with that committee, too.
33:13 So that’s another thing also. We have usually have a forum. We have a community event.
33:22 Once the finalists are selected and they come into the area for interviews, then we’ll have a community meet and greet, and we can do that in person. We’ve also done those virtually, too. During COVID we did them virtually.
33:39 We’re very adept at technology. Andrea Messina is amazing with technology. And we actually had huge turnouts when we did it virtually, too.
33:47 Normally these meet and greets, though, we’ll bring anywhere from 150 to 300 people, too. So we will do that, too. And then also, board members, I know are very accessible to the public and like input.
34:00 So throughout the whole process, people can call the board members at any time, too. So that’s one of the things on January 9 that we’ll want to finalize. Because when I go to the next slide, which talks about timeline, that’s one of the things that we have to decide what we want to do.
34:22 Because on January 9, we’ll need to know the date that you want to select the new superintendent, and then we’ll work back. We can meet any schedule that you would like, but we’ll work back from that. So you can see on this timeline here in the pink, there we do the pre search interview.
34:44 We talk about the qualifications, methods of advertisement and so forth, website portal, and then we move into the area where we finalize the decisions. We post the application, and we like to post the application for about four weeks. So I’m thinking, just thinking up out loud here, if we can get the decisions on some of these key early areas in January, then we can get into the community involvement pieces.
35:17 If we use forums and meetings like that, we can kind of group those into about a two week period possibly, and maybe get this out advertisement as soon as you want to. But the main thing is we’ve got to figure out when you want the person to start. And then we’d also kind of look at what kind of overlap we want.
35:40 So this timeline will give you just a general idea of the activities that we have right there. And I don’t need to go through it anymore, but essentially, as I see, the elements are, one is all the pre search work and the timeline, we set that up, and then we go into the advertisement period, and then we go to the screening of the applicants. If you have a community committee, you know, they would, they would help with that process a little bit.
36:12 And then we go to the semifinalist. The board wants semifinalists. Sometimes the board just wants to go to the finalist.
36:20 We do a vetting process with that. Then we select the finalist. Then we have the interviews.
36:25 Interviews we usually have. We always have one on one interviews with the board individually, and then we have group interviews. So the board has a very good perspective of the candidates.
36:39 And then we work with the interim superintendent in this case to determine what kind of overlap that you would like to have. So that’s kind of an overview of that particular process right there. Moving forward with that, then what I also did was I looked at the qualifications that you had last time advertised, and this is another decision that you had.
37:09 And what we would do is we’d probably finalize those after we get more input from the community and the board looks at them. But the last time you had it pretty much open is what we recommend. And so that did not exclude anybody who was a non traditional candidate the last time.
37:28 If somebody was from the business community and they had extensive experience, they were not excluded from that. So that’s a decision that you would want to look at also, too. So we’ll have all that information for you.
37:41 We can look at last time compensation. Now we have a list of all of the salaries of all the current superintendents. But I can tell you it’s kind of a new dynamic now with all of the openings and everything that’s going on, a challenge with a housing market, with a lot of other factors that are going on out there.
38:06 So we’ll have to look at the salary carefully because that is an attractor, especially if we look at people from out of state that we, that, you know, and so we, you know, we have to look at that also. So we’ll, we’ll have all the information to you, and if you’d like, we can provide a recommendation to you also, based on the current market conditions. And then also the vetting process.
38:33 We will review all the applicants. We’ll receive all the applicants. As soon as you receive the applicants, the applications, the board sees all of the applications, and all the applications are posted.
38:45 Whether the person meets the qualifications that you set forth or not, you see every one of them. And then we’ll vet those applications and then we will start doing our background checks. We work very closely with a law firm, Greenspoon martyr, and they do a complete background check as a legal firm can do.
39:08 And then we work with your HR department and do our background checks that the HR department’s only group that can do the final person to check if there’s any pending actions. But we work very closely with them to get all the vetting done. And so when the board has their list of qualified people that they’re interviewing, all that is cleared, all that information is provided to the school board, attorney and the board members.
39:34 As far as interviews, as I mentioned, we would have individual interviews and we would have group interviews. And the group interviews are open to the public. They can look at those, watch, see all the candidates, and then there’s a lot of things that we do with the interviews the board might like.
39:57 We have an opportunity to interview the candidates on YouTube. So we, as part of it, sometimes the boards like us to have an interview of the candidates all by the time they get to the finalist. If you like the idea of screening using videos, we can go ahead and post those.
40:17 So there’s a lot of information out there on every candidate. And everybody in the community can look at that website portal and they’ll be able to see the candidate. They’ll be able to see an interview with the candidate.
40:28 They can come and meet the candidate in person, and they can even listen to the YouTube interview when they’re in town at the interview. So we really try to make sure the community is very involved with it, of the process. The cost, as I mentioned, that cost is working, the attorneys working that out with FSBA, I think you’ll find we’re very reasonable.
40:55 And the advertising. Our advertising package is relatively inexpensive. We have, we advertise nationwide, and all the advertising we do is under $3,000.
41:09 And we actually have, based on our experience, have actually determined the percentage of applications that come from each of the places we advertise. And so we have a list of all those, and the board makes the final decision on that. But we do.
41:24 I already talked about travel. John and I are very close, so travel is minimum. Background checks are very inexpensive, and then there’s a limited amount of cost, depending on the number of finalists you bring in.
41:38 Normally, we recommend between three and five finalists are brought in for interviews, but that’s kind of a choice there. One thing that we’re exceptionally proud of is after the search we create, we feel like we create successful conditions for the new superintendent. We have protocols that we use.
42:00 We like to have, we like to sit down with the board. One of our team members can do that, or Andrea can do that and talk about the initial protocols that are so important. When a new superintendent tenant comes in and starting a relationship with the board, what are the first things that we need to work on? So we feel that’s very important.
42:18 We set common goals and we discuss what kind of evaluation process they’re going to have. But what I always like to say is this, at the end of the day, and this is what our three goals are. And we, believe it or not, we accomplish this in just about every search that we have.
42:35 We feel like we can bring candidates that make a very difficult decision for the board to select, but we can bring a candidate the board can reach consensus on and board members can all be pleased with. So we have the board. We have unity on the board.
42:50 Second, we feel like the way we’re able to involve the staff, the way the board would like, we can bring the staff together, too, in support of the new individual and the community. Because of all the input through our forums and our way, we reach out and the availability that we make ourselves available to the community on. During the whole process, we’re able to bring the community together, and that gets the new superintendent and the board off to a good start.
43:19 That’s what we do. Just a couple of other things that you might be interested in. We’ve talked about how our reaches in Florida, we have a national reach that’s pretty incredible.
43:32 Remember the National association of Superintendent Searchers we’ve developed. We have. We work with these search firms throughout the entire country, and we can call any of these firms, these group, these groups, and find out about any national candidate.
43:48 They share applications with us. And in the Polk county search we had, four of our top finalists were out of state candidates. So we feel we are, even though we’re Florida school boards association, we feel we are extremely strong on recruiting out of state candidates.
44:05 And I have contacts out of state. I have people that already call me every time they know we’re doing a search. And they say, we’ve got some people for you to consider.
44:15 We’ve already talked about the sunshine. And again, the final we have, we’re on the ground, we know what’s going on, we know the challenge of the school board, and we really appreciate the opportunity to present to you today, and we love to answer any questions you might have right now. But basically this was just to kind of give you an overview of the process.
44:36 Thank you, Mister Vogel, I was just going to ask if you can do three deliverables for me before we allow it for discussion. Absolutely. The first one is if you can send that presentation doctor Theta.
44:45 Just send to us in an email. Right. Okay.
44:47 The next one is if you can send your list of school district needs to doctor Thetti so she can start organizing staff. You had mentioned social media, all those other things, whatever those individuals are that she needs to start working on, that would be great. Okay.
45:00 And then also if you can send a list of deliverables that you want from us, answers in early January and send that to doctor Thetis so she can appropriately send that out to us, that would be great. Okay. I would be more than happy to do that.
45:12 I sent the PowerPoint already, so you guys already have it. I understand. Thanks for the update.
45:18 Appreciate that. Ok, great. And I did send, and Andrea sent me while we were doing this meeting and I just sent it out to you guys, some pre search work session agenda and superintendent search key decisions for the school board.
45:33 Perfect. So if that includes everything that you need, then we’re going to be in a good place. But let’s make sure that it is.
45:38 Okay, what I’d like to do is this. I’m not sure what your agenda is for your retreat, but in order to make our work not be to be fit with what you were planning to do on that retreat, I’ll have Andrea talk to Mister Susan after he sees that pre search interview, if that sounds all right. Sounds good.
46:02 So we’ll be all coordinated. We’re already available on that date, so we’re in good shape. Sure, sounds good.
46:07 Okay. Anything comes up. You have our business card.
46:09 We always answer our cell phone. Our cell phone and email are all there. They may have some questions for you.
46:15 Miss Wright, you seem like you’re leaning in. No, no, I’m Mister Trent, do you have any questions for Miss Campbell? Yeah, really quickly. And we.
46:22 I noticed when we were doing our search for the interim, I pulled up our superintendent job description. It looks like it hasn’t, except for like, some AdA formatting, looks like it hasn’t been updated in some time. Would it be helpful for us to take a look at that in conjunction with the search process? Yes, I think that’s an excellent idea.
46:42 And that’s one thing that what we normally will do on the job description is. Maybe I could get a copy of it, but HR usually will do that. We want to make sure whatever we advertise is consistent with the job description.
47:00 So we’d be more than happy to take a look at it. That’s normally something that the board would approve, but we’d be happy to take a look at it. Very good question.
47:07 Because that’s going to be something we need to work on. Right. And we’ll approve it before we send the advertisement.
47:13 Definitely. Okay. Thank you so much.
47:17 Anything else we might have, Miss Jenkins? Yeah. I just want to thank you, number one, for driving out here. I know you say you’re not far, but thank you for making the drive.
47:25 I appreciate that very much. I also appreciate you addressing, obviously very broadly, like you said, this is just kind of an intro today, but addressing the community issue, because that’s something that I personally had questions about because it’s really important here in Brevard, I’m sure everywhere, but definitely here in Brevard. I also appreciate you so much for including our students and intentionally including our students.
47:47 So I hope our board goes ahead and feels that that’s also something we should be tackling as well. So thank you. Thank you very much for that.
47:57 The only other thing I’m going to say just to our board is I just want to ensure, because this is something that Mister Vogel brought up. I haven’t taken a look at the agenda for January 9. I don’t even know if it’s posted yet, to be honest with you, but we need to be really intentional for the time that we’re going to spend with FSBA on this.
48:15 We’ve been packing our agendas way too heavily, and this isn’t something that we should be rushing through. So we need to take a hard look at that agenda before we have that meeting. And ensure that their time is not going to be wasted and that it can be as effective and efficient as possible.
48:29 Thanks. Yep. Thank you.
48:30 And what I would say to that is, is that if you can get us that list, we’ll be more organized by the time we come there so that we can make decisions in a prompt manner. Yeah, I’ll try to get that to you for that. We’ll be able to get, we’ll be able to get moving on it too.
48:42 All right. With that, that’ll conclude the discussion on the Florida school board association. I did have two things that I wanted to bring up real quick just so that everybody knows when they start seeing the emails.
48:54 I met with the umpires and retired referees last night. They asked me to come to a meeting in the middle of the time. Apparently there’s been some situations where they haven’t been getting paid with in the time period that they’re supposed to get paid.
49:06 So I’m just going to meet with staff to talk to them about, hey, how can we change this? There might be a, they’ve suggested a couple of ideas, so you’ll see some of that coming up. And then the other one is that our bus drivers and mechanics before you guys came on about four months ago, the discipline issue I brought to the table and also an opportunity that we have a group of, we have like a series of many bus drivers and mechanics that are no longer, that aren’t working for us, their vacant positions. Revenue falls to the bottom line.
49:36 Kind of like what we did with doctor thet, kind of like what we did last board meeting with taming is to take those and somehow give a mini bonus to the people who are already doing that. So, for instance, the bus drivers have been covering routes like crazy. They identified at transportation that they would be able to identify how many and who did what since the beginning of the school year.
49:58 And the mechanics, there’s only like 13 out of like 25, 24. And they’ve been literally doing all of our buses that are supposed to be looked at every 30 days. So I was going to just kind of go to staff, ask them to bring something back to the board.
50:12 But if you see the emails and the conversation, you know where it was coming from, that’s all. If there’s nothing else, I think that’s the end of the meeting. We’re good.
50:20 I have something I want to talk about because this is our last meeting before winter break. I just want to make a public thank you to the children’s hunger project for packing meals for our students for over 50 schools and about 3500 students. I appreciate you very much and everything you do for our community, that’s how we survive.
50:37 That’s how our students survive. So thank you. And I know that there has been an all call from some of our schools in the community who are still looking to kind of fill their local pantries at their school.
50:46 So if you are looking for a place to give, reach out to your local school. Ask them how you can help because there are so many students who still absolutely are in need. I also have one last thing I just want to say.
51:03 I want to take a moment to thank doctor Thetti. I want to thank you for providing a letter to our families regarding the discipline issue. And I most especially appreciate where you said, I encourage families and staff to review the three highlighted school board policies.
51:21 These policies are not new, but I feel it is important we all abide by them to help facilitate a positive learning experience. And I appreciate you because it went a long way to ease the concerns of our community and clarify that BPS has always followed comprehensive, comprehensive discipline policies and will continue to do so. We all care deeply about the safety and stability of our students and our staff.
51:47 And so I just want to wish everybody here at BPS and within our community a restful and happy winter. And I hope we can return working together. Our teachers, our parents, our staff, for our students and for all of our students.
52:03 Thank you. Thank you, Miss Jenkins. And for a little bit of clarification, Miss Campbell asked me some of the.
52:11 Your point, basically to kind of give an overview of what, what we had agreed to last Thursday. And just so everybody knows, the principals are now allowed to suspend up to five days. They have more local decision making authority and the enforcement of the zero tolerance policy.
52:29 That. You’re 100% right, Miss Jenkins was developed by the school district with community members over a long process under doctor Blackburn and then the enforcement of our cell phone policy. So just those things.
52:40 With that, I adjourn the meeting. Thank you very much. I’m not done.