Updates on the Fight for Quality Public Education in Brevard County, FL
12:57 Good morning. The December 15, 2002 special board meeting is now in order. Paul, roll call, please. Mister Susan.
13:05 Here. Miss Wright. Here.
13:07 Mister Trent. Here. Jenkins.
13:10 Here. Miss Campbell. Here.
13:12 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. Today we’ll interview Mark Rendell at 930, James Larsen at 1030, and Robert Schiller at 1130.
13:42 1st thing we’re going to do is we’re going to discuss the format of the questions. There was an article in one of the papers that made some accusations against one of the candidates. But if you read this, it’s an entire auditor general.
13:53 It clears the individual of any of those allegations. So just want to let you guys know if there’s any questions to it, you guys can review it. So we all have a couple of questions.
14:07 Do you guys want to start by throwing out a couple that you may want and then we can formulate it? I mean, we’ve got pretty much an hour for each one, so doesn’t mean we have to put 20 questions down. And if we put. If we don’t get to all the questions, it’s not a big deal.
14:21 But I’m open for discussion on which ones you would like to hear. So I. Where do I email you? Timmy’s made a copy because I. As I was looking through the questions, these are for the last time that the board hired a permanent superintendent. I think a lot of these questions are more intended for a permanent superintendent.
14:39 So I did a little research on more questions that were more specific to interim, and Tammy’s made a copy. They’re not all just interim because some of them are like, management style and previous teams, whatever. But I think some of these were more specific.
14:54 So I wondered if we. Because we have. We don’t know how long people will talk.
15:00 We talked the other day about having an opening and a closing. Do we each want to ask two questions in the middle? So that would be ten. Totally.
15:08 Can I butt in for a second? Yeah. Yeah. So Mister Gibbs had sent a suggestion yesterday that I think is the easiest thing to do if you guys are willing to do it.
15:15 An opening for five minutes, a closing for five minutes to each candidate, and then each board member gets ten minutes. Question, answer. So, you know, if one of your questions takes an eight minute response, then you only get one question, but put the timer on the clock.
15:29 That way we don’t go over. Because if we start messing around and people don’t get to ask questions. It’s going to get.
15:34 Get kind of confusing and not fair to each candidate. And plus, we have a crunch timeline here, but I think that, to me, makes the most sense. We can do that, and then what we can do is reverse the order.
15:46 So the first person goes with one person second. You know what I mean? You can reverse the order, and I’ll always go last. You know what I mean? So to give that window in case.
15:56 And then if you guys. The only question in that the five minutes open or the five minute response is one thing, but the other thing is, is that I would say in the event that you have a question to something they said while the other board members presenting their questions, just write it down and ask it when it’s your time. That way, you don’t ask a question that takes up the other board members time.
16:15 So if you guys are okay with that, then that’s okay with me. And also consider, I mean, we do have one on ones, too, so if it’s a detailed follow up, I mean, it’s probably more appropriate for one on one. That’s what I was just gonna ask.
16:26 Excuse me. As if we’re gonna operate off of these lists. I mean, I have other questions I’d like to ask, but I was saving this kind of more for a one on one basis versus.
16:33 These are good starting points, though. So I like. And you don’t have to take up your full ten minutes.
16:37 Like. Yeah, that’s what I was gonna say, is if, you know, I know, I understand the clock thing, but it kind of sounds like we’ve already set up, like, the inquisition here. I know it kind of.
16:48 We can not informal, but, you know, just relax it just a little bit. The only thing about the ten minutes per board member is if our questions, I think, you know, doesn’t take ten minutes to ask my questions or whatever, but I think we probably do need to, like, share which ones we want to ask, either off these or so that we’re not asking. Because if you have your list, and I was going to ask almost identical question, we can kind of plan, because whatever we do, we need to ask the same ones of each candidate.
17:16 Just tossing this out as a different format rather than ten minutes per board member. That’s the reason why I said, like, you know, two questions per board member or three or however you want to do, because that way, we make sure that every candidate asks answers the same questions. If some have shorter answers, they get to answer more questions.
17:33 Um, yeah, you know, you can. You can litigate yourself into. Just have a couple questions.
17:40 You got ten minutes. Go through them. Make sure you ask the same questions.
17:42 If you don’t get to them, you don’t get to them. And again, with this list you made and that we have, just cross off the questions that are. I’m just vaguely resemble yours.
17:51 Miss Jenkins said that she made hers already. Right. And she’s probably got some of that are very close to these, and I’ll just mark them off.
17:58 I’m only asking one question. Right. I don’t care who asks questions.
18:01 We’re probably all going to ask very similar. Very similar questions. Yeah.
18:05 And I know you already kind of said this, but I just want to reiterate, it’s going to be impossible for every candidate to have the exact same question in case some of them answer too long. But if we can try to intend on asking the same question about every candidate. Okay.
18:19 So we need to nail down the questions that we want to ask in this setting. I mean, 101 is different, obviously. Fair enough.
18:26 From the list that Tammy sent us, the ones there are a couple in just the general information that are, to me, would be very helpful. The first one, you know, top five, and we can make it three. Top facing brevard public schools timeline.
18:43 And again, just remembering this interim, and then what is one area you can make the greatest impact? How would you initiate that change? And then, really, the most, to me, the best questions for our situation are on the back, the board, staff and community relations, because I think that’s where we’re. And you really need somebody to express how they can help us build that back up. Mm hmm.
19:07 You guys all have your questions that you guys think you’re going to ask? Yeah. Do we need to go ahead and highlight what those are now so we’re not duplicating it? Yeah, that’s what. Okay.
19:16 I think you’re good, Campbell. Yeah, I’m not. So I think Miss Jenkins had said that.
19:24 Did you make your own side of the box here? Which is fine. We just need to know which ones you may have already chosen so that we don’t ask the same questions. No, I wrote my own questions.
19:33 But you’re gonna ask the same questions. I’m gonna ask the same questions to everybody. But I hear what you’re saying, Miss Campbell.
19:40 But also, I just want people to understand where I’m coming from as well. I think more than just the situation, I think it’s important also to somewhat think long term. Right.
19:54 Because it’s not necessary necessarily. The case that these interims don’t want to be the full superintendent either. So.
20:05 Yeah, I mean, what I would say to that, Miss Jenkins, is we’ll have a superintendent search with questions then, too. And I think that if they want to try to stay long term, that’s great. But right now, this one’s for the interim.
20:17 So I hear you. You can ask any question you want. That’s fine.
20:22 But no, I am asking the same question to every single candidate. Okay. So, Miss Jenkins, do you.
20:28 You have not chosen any from either of the lists that we received? Right. I would argue two of my questions that I developed kind of came from this, but I tweaked it so that it made a little more sense to. Can you give us which one of those came from there so that they don’t ask the same question? They didn’t come from here, but you tweeted it.
20:44 So if you can just cut those off the sections. I couldn’t tell you which one it is. Yeah, I don’t mind.
20:53 Sure. So two of them. And again, I don’t even know.
20:56 It’s going to depend on the timing and the answers of the candidate and who goes before me. So I have a list of questions here. I’m not going to be able to use them all.
21:02 So the two that I pulled from this and just kind of developed myself were, please explain your experience with diversity, equity, inclusion, and what you’ve done in your current role and or what you do in this one to ensure all students are successful. Focusing on the mission, strategy, and academics for brevard public schools. And then the other one is, were you evaluated in your previous role as blank because everyone has a different resume? If so, what were the results of this evaluation? What was an area identified as an opportunity for professional growth and how did you work towards that improvement? So, working on focusing on self reflection and accountability of the candidate.
21:35 So, diversity, and what have you done to overcome adversity, too? All right, Miss Campbell, come back to me. Okay. I would like the candidate to identify the top three critical issues that they see that BPS is currently facing and how they intend to attack those issues.
21:56 And. And then I would also. I really like the idea of them disclosing a project that failed and why it failed and how they would improve that.
22:06 I think that shows that they’re able to identify something that maybe that first question you asked, if you can read that again, I might just let you ask my question. I know that she. But I wanted.
22:16 I want to work with her through it. Yeah. What are the top three critical issues facing BPS and what will you do to address them? If you can add, how does your experience allow you to do that, too? All right, then that takes care of mine, and I don’t have to do that one.
22:30 All right. Okay, Miss Campbell, are you ready, or do you want me to go to Jean? Oh, they’re very good. Some of that are not on here.
22:40 Just thoughts on policy review in your previous roles or current roles, and what experience have you had in that process, you know, and specifically, too, that may not be on here. We’re losing two very important positions, and cabinet members, like HR, for example. And where’s your experience on that? And that’s something that’s going to have to be addressed.
23:06 That’s more of a now question. I mean, otherwise, I mean, very many. I love when somebody has to describe their management style, and that’s.
23:16 That is probably one of the most important. Yeah, I agree with you. So you say you have management style as your third.
23:21 Yes. All right. So just so you guys know, what I’m doing is, I think, just to help everybody out in the event that your ten minutes maxes, I’ll try to ask the questions that you had that maybe you didn’t get to.
23:35 That’s all. Okay. So, like, if Gene wanted to ask, I really like the management one.
23:40 Right. So once we get down to it, it’s just when that happens, that will be my questions for the next two. That’s.
23:45 All right, Miss Campbell, what do you got? Can I give him three? I think. Oh, sorry. From the list I typed up.
23:58 I just want to really ask those interim questions, because we do need. Oops, sorry. So, number eleven, what would a productive, successful, intentional interim.
24:07 I don’t know why I put that intentional. That was in the question. I adapted it from something else.
24:13 Interim process, look like, for our district. Okay. And then the other one would be from the board, staff, community relations.
24:23 One. Relationships. One over here.
24:29 Oh, there’s two. Those are the same. That’s why I like them both, because they were the same question.
24:34 The last one. How about building trust relationships with all the stakeholders? So I think I will do those two. It was the last one on.
24:45 No, this. So the last one on the page that I gave you guys. And then the last one on board staff, community relationships.
24:54 So kind of what I have is diversity from Miss Jenkins. Evaluate. Like, your situation when you did something that you had to grow from.
25:05 Right. Policy review, cabinet member placement, and how their management style is from Trent. Then I had the question that you had did you want to add any more questions that you were going to ask in that realm? Not necessarily in that realm, but if we’re all going to take three, I would love to incorporate the finance aspect of it.
25:24 So the second question that’s in there, what’s your vision for financial reporting, transparency and maintaining the public trust regarding the financial affairs with UPS? I would like to address that one. Okay. All right.
25:35 And then we have. I honestly don’t know how we can have interviews if we don’t ask them their thoughts on their current state of education. Right.
25:43 Someone needs to ask that question. That can be. Yeah, if we’re gonna take three.
25:47 So are we gonna go rather than. Well, I mean, I’ll ask. We’ve had the suggestion of ten minutes each.
25:53 Or are we gonna go like. Yeah, I think I like the idea of, like, rotating it down the line, one. You do? I do.
25:59 I mean, just so that it’s not. It breaks up the questions a little bit to the interviewer, too. So the only reason I’m saying this is not.
26:06 I just think, let’s be real. We haven’t had one meeting that’s been on time, and we’re really, really crunched for time. If your questions are done, you can just move on.
26:16 Right. We have an hour. So if I’m done in eight minutes, it doesn’t mean someone can’t take twelve.
26:21 And it’s not, like, solid. No one’s gonna turn your mic off. But in order to just kind of keep us focused on the timeframe we have, I think it’s really important for us to do that.
26:30 Okay, sounds good. All right, so what we have is. I’ll have a third in case my ten minutes is.
26:40 No, just get to it when you get to it. Okay. Thank you.
26:44 So what I was gonna do is. I like what Miss Jenkins was saying for the first round. I just.
26:49 To be honest with you, I just kind of went left from this way over. So the first one, Trent, will start, Wright will go, then Campbell, then Jenkins, then I’ll. If anything needs to be wrapped up, then the second one will be Wright, Campbell, Jenkins, Trent, and then Campbell, Jenkins, Trent, Wright, if that makes any sense.
27:06 In order. That way, each one of you guys gets the beginning, sort of. You know what I mean? That way it’s some sort of order before we get started.
27:13 Yeah. And then I’ll follow all of them with whatever. Anybody didn’t ask that you may want me to ask.
27:18 All right. All right. We don’t have the official interview that starts until 930, so if there’s any questions, we can kind of stop for a minute and get prepared and then come back.
27:30 What do you guys think? Sound good? I think we need to address the bathroom break that everyone’s saying you can always start, and then we’re. That builds in a little bit of a padding for later on. If we take the hour, you’ve got ten minutes before 1030.
27:46 That coffee is going to start hitting people. You can go to the bathroom. I don’t want to miss any of it, though.
27:54 How about you guys? Can we take a five minute right now? Yeah. Well, that’s what I was gonna do, is I was gonna stop, let everybody go, and then if you guys. I’ll check in every hour, and then if you guys are ready.
28:06 Sounds good. I’ll check at the hour, and then we’ll go through. All right.
28:16 You want to start a little bit early after we have our quick break? No, I’d like to start it on time. Here we go. Kind of a dual purpose.
42:21 Welcome back, everybody. Just wanted to take a second and say thank you to Mister Rendell for applying for the interim superintendent position. We have a series of questions that we have for each one of our members.
42:34 Just so the public understands, we’ve presented, we’ve come up with a series of questions that each one of us are gonna ask, and the order is just gonna kind of move down as. And the first person that goes will become the last person for the next one. So with that, we’re gonna have a five minute introduction.
42:50 We’re gonna ask questions for about 50 minutes, and then we’re gonna have a five minute close. Some of us might take shorter, and we’ll go from there. So with that, Mister Rendell, thank you very much.
43:03 You have the floor for your introduction. Thank you. Thank you, board.
43:07 Thank you for giving me the opportunity to interview. For this position of interim superintendent in Brevard is critical for the school district at this time. I want to thank you as an employee for taking the time to do this in a thorough process.
43:21 And you guys are definitely trying to do the right thing by students, the parents, the community by taking your time and going through a process. I appreciate that. I want to give you a little bit of my background.
43:34 Some of you might know that I’m the principal at Cocoa beach, but that might be all that. You know, I’ve been in the district a long time, but you guys may not know me, so I’m going to give you a little personal stories. Personal stories and background.
43:45 So you know about me, the person. So I decided to be an educator. When I was in high school, I had some really impactful teachers and coaches.
43:53 I said, you know what? That’s what I want to do when I grow up. So I went to college, did the things you got to do to become a teacher. Then when I was teaching, I was working for some really impactful, inspiring principals.
44:05 Like, I didn’t plan on being a principal, but these people made a big impact on me. I saw what they were doing in the school, impacting student achievement, helping us. I said, so you know what? When I grow up, I want to be a principal.
44:17 And then as I rose through the ranks and became a principal, I had the good fortune of working for a couple of really, really good superintendents. And then I said, you know what? Maybe when I really grow up, that’s what I want to be. And so I did the things you got to do to become a superintendent.
44:34 All of those roles and all of those roles and all of my time, the goal is to provide the best outcomes for students possible. I went into those roles because I saw people doing that didn’t go into those roles for titles or money or anything like that. Wanted to make an impact for kit.
44:49 And so in each of those roles, that’s always been the driving. Making your decisions on what’s in the best interest of the kid. A little bit of personal history about my family.
44:59 My wife Heidi and I moved here in 1993, and we bought our first house in Hammock Trace, about 2 miles east of here. And all of our children had been born in Florida. Three children, all born here in Brevard county.
45:12 We helped form found Faith Viera Lutheran Church, a couple miles away as well, founding members of that church. All of our children have been baptized by Pastor Meyer. He is still a close personal friend and pastor.
45:25 So Brevard is in our DNA. All my kids went to school here, and I’ll finish graduate here, but they’ve all spent time here. This is in my DNA as a professional.
45:35 This is where I grew up. Teacher, assistant principal, principal, where I learned about the craft of educational leadership from the people here. Names like Bob Donaldson, Brenda Blackburn, Rich dipotry, McIntyre, those are the people that I looked up to and tried to be like when I was making my way.
45:54 So I’ve been in Brevard off and on several times. Consider this. My home worked in the district when we were kind of in a better place than I feel like we are right now.
46:05 And I’d like to be a part of helping us get back to that you don’t know me as a superintendent either. So I brought a bunch of artifacts, like a good teacher, I brought artifacts and primary source documents, and I was going to get into all that, but I think my five minutes is probably wrapping up. So if we have time later in closing, take you through some of the documents I provided to you, if not, maybe in the one on one interviews, but very proud of my work as a superintendent in, in River county.
46:36 We did a lot of really good things. You are looking at me for a position of superintendent, so if we get a chance to discuss those things, I’d like to share those. Thank you, Mister Rendell.
46:48 And there were some that I was looking at also that I’ll ask those questions when it gets to that point. Mister Trent, you’re up 1st. 1st off, I’d like to thank you very much for being here, putting your name in.
47:03 It’s an honor to have you here, sir. So thank you. You may have noticed we’ve discussed some of our policies already here in the school board, so I’m going to jump specifically to your thoughts on a policy review for school boards as large as ours, possibly.
47:22 And have you had any experience in that process, in reviewing a change in policy? Yeah, absolutely. So when I was a deputy superintendent in St. Lucie County, I oversaw a policy review committee. It was something we had in place in St. Lucie.
47:36 We reviewed policies every year, annually. Now, most districts rely on Neola or some other organization to give you policy updates that are a result of legislation. But instead, the policy review committee in St. Lucie, it was like a work group or committee.
47:52 Policy review committee had members of the community, parents, community members, teachers, other staff members, and we were open to reviewing any policy that the policy review committee decided we needed to review. So the policy review committee might say, hey, we need to look at this policy over here about how we handle student choice or transportation or something like that. And if enough people on the policy review committee voted for that, then I, as a deputy superintendent, would take it to the superintendent and we would engage with the board to see if the board wanted to review those policies.
48:23 So the idea is that we don’t necessarily wait for Neola or wait for the legislature to tell us about policies we need to change. We’re a living, breathing organization. We need to respond to the needs and changes.
48:35 So if we have policies that are in place that are not necessarily working, then we need to go ahead and address those and change them. So I would want to engage in some kind of. I don’t want to have more and more and more committees, but you need to be able to respond to feedback that you’re getting, that some policies aren’t working.
48:55 You need to have a vehicle in place to address that. Thank you. Yep.
49:02 That’s great. Were we switching? All right. All right.
49:10 So thank you very much. So overall, and being the first, I think this is. I think general questions might be better off is briefly, how would you describe your management style? Yeah, collaborative leadership, for sure.
49:24 I’m definitely not always the smartest person in the room. You want to try and gather as much feedback and input before you make a decision. If you have a team of people that you meet with regularly, then you consult them and you get their opinion before you make any decision.
49:31 If you have the ability to seek input from the stakeholders, that’s what you need to do all the time, looking for collaborative input before you make a decision. Now, if you are in the position to be the decision maker, you do make the decision, but you gather as much input as possible. Think about it as a sports coach.
49:53 No head football coach has ever scored the winning touchdown. The idea is that they create the conditions for success. So the idea is you build that team, that successful team around.
50:02 You set the conditions for success. You set some expectations, some standards. You provide people with training.
50:10 You provide them with the support to meet those standards. You hold them accountable to meeting those standards. But all in all, it’s a team effort.
50:16 You know, everything is a team effort. When I became the principal of Titusville High, at my opening meeting with the faculty, I compared our work to being on a ship that oftentimes we are. We do our work.
50:30 Like, if you’re on a cruise ship, like, we all have our own separate rooms and we come together for meal time, but then. And maybe for some excursions, but we don’t really work together on things. We need to operate more like a Viking ship where everybody’s got their hand on an or.
50:45 We’re all rowing in the same direction and, you know, working together for a common goal, but you can’t do it alone. Everything has to be in a team. So collaborative leadership style, for sure.
50:58 I got time for another one. You do? I do. Yep.
51:02 Yep, I do. And this would be a good one. And I might have not have mentioned it earlier, but I think it’s important here.
51:13 What makes you the ideal candidate for this role? Yeah. Sue, you’re in a unique situation. We are here in Brevard in a unique situation.
51:20 You’re going through a transition. I’ve already been a superintendent, so the job is not going to be new to me. I’ve been a superintendent here in Florida.
51:27 The job is not going to be new to me. I’ve been a superintendent in Florida, in a neighboring district. So the job is not going to be new.
51:34 Challenges are there. It’s an extremely challenging position. They’re there, but the job won’t be new.
51:40 If you hire somebody from the outside. They don’t have the knowledge, the Florida knowledge, experience. They may have been a superintendent or something like that, but maybe not here.
51:49 They don’t know the Florida finance rules. They don’t know sunshine law. They don’t know all the things, you know, with, with our current situation.
51:57 If you hire somebody that has been a superintendent, then they’re going to have a learning curve. We’re not really, I myself, perception is that we’re not really in a position for a learning curve. You really need a steady hand on attila right now as you transition, you know, as you make some changes and do some things, so you know that I’ve got the experience I can put in my cover letter.
52:17 It’s a challenging position. I’ve met those challenges. So that’s why.
52:25 Thank you so much, Mister Trent. You finished? I am. Thank you, Doctor Rendell.
52:32 All right, Miss Wright. Thank you, Doctor Rendell. We appreciate you coming here and taking the time to interview with us.
52:39 I have to disclose you were the principal when I graduated from Titusville High School. So. A few years ago.
52:44 But, yeah, it was a positive experience. It was. It was a positive experience.
52:48 You got me through the finish line, so there you go. Yeah. So looking at Brevard county, and obviously we have been a hot topic lately, what would you say three most critical issues are that we have right now? And how does your past experience prepare you to be a good fit to fix those issues? Yeah.
53:05 So I think the top three is there’s a fracture right now between the community and the district. That’s one. Next one is a staffing shortage all across the board, teachers, support staff, bus drivers, everything.
53:18 And the other is a sense of disengagement from the student body. So the first one, the fractured relationship. I’ve been in a couple situations before where I needed to be the healer when I came in, so to speak.
53:30 For example, when I went to Morrisville High School in Morrisville, North Carolina, when I left Hydrosville, there was a real disconnect between the district and this teaching staff. And I just came in, listened to everybody, tried to find some common ground, brought people together, worked on some projects together. Then once we worked on some projects together.
53:47 People seemed to value each other and stuff like that. So in this situation here, I was dismayed, I think is a good term when I saw not just here in a lot of places across the country, I view our students and our families as our customers. And I saw customers coming to the business, giving input, asking for things to change.
54:14 And the company didn’t listen. You know, I think the idea is that when. When people come to you with concerns and issues, you need to listen and you need to bring them inside the tent, so to speak.
54:25 You know, that’s the. So the community would know that we’re listening. The community would have, you know, avenues to provide input and that we would.
54:34 And we would evident that we’re listening. We would provide evidence that we’re listening and making changes based on their input. Not always going to give everybody what they want, but the idea is, we hear you.
54:43 We’re going to take into consideration what you’re saying and we’re going to, you know, look at policies and maybe make some decisions, some changes like that, you know, just people. It’s as simple as when a parent comes to complain about something, you sit down with them, you listen, and you figure out if there’s a way for you to meet their needs and respond. Our community is the same way.
55:02 You know, over the last couple years, they’ve brought some concerns to us, and in some cases, we may not have listened as intently as we should have. Now, I wasn’t in these roles making these decisions, so I can’t really say for sure whether we did the right thing or not. But the people need to feel like their voice is being valued, limiting time for public speaking and doing things like that.
55:24 They’re the customers we need to. I don’t mean the customer’s always right, but we need to be listening. They need to have input.
55:29 They need to feel valued. They need to feel like their input is being taken into consideration for the staffing shortages. We just need to make sure that we’re doing everything we can to recruit and retain the best people possible.
55:43 One of the things in Indian river, in the packet of information you have is we did some things in the strategic plan to try to make sure we retained as many employees as possible. That was at the beginning of this start of this teacher migration out of work, and we were able to increase our retention rate. So the idea is, again, you listen to the folks, you find out what is they need, what they value.
56:07 Most of it was workplace conditions, working conditions. It wasn’t necessarily salary. We did raise our average teacher salary higher than any other district in the region, including Brevard, at the time.
56:16 And, but we also worked on working conditions to make sure they understand that, you know, not just teachers but all the other employees that they’re valued and that we listen and find ways to give them things that they’re asking for. And so I would take a look at, it’s in, I think, another document that what are we doing to recruit? Who’s going on the recruiting trips? When I was assistant superintendent in St. Lucie and then when I became deputy, I kept HR and I would go on the recruiting trips, so I would go to the college recruiting trips. And there were not other assistant superintendents or deputy superintendents on recruiting trips.
56:53 It was your recruiting person, you know, but it seemed to make a big difference to some of the candidates that, you know, a district level person was there wooing them, trying to get them to come. So I would take a look at what we’re doing in recruiting, take a look at what we’re doing in retention and try to put some things in right away to make sure we stem the flow of anybody leaving and do what we can to attract and retain and then the students. It’s a big issue.
57:21 It’s something that we need to take a look at and figure out how to solve or resolve. You know, some of our students were out of school, you know, in person for a few years, and some of their social norms may be different. You know, their expectations, what they, what they were, their behavior policies or whatever, when they come back, their expectations.
57:42 When I was teaching in the classroom, when I was at Satellite high school and in Virginia, one of the first things I’d say to the kids on the first day of school is, this isn’t the mall. Like you said, this ain’t the mall, but this isn’t the mall. This is a learning environment.
57:54 This is a formal learning environment. There are some norms here, some expectations, some ways that we’re going to interact and behave, and some things I’m going to ask of you and then you’re going to ask some things of me. And I think we have a group of students who aren’t meeting those norms, those standard norms in the classroom that we expect.
58:16 And so we need to figure out how we can remedy that. Some of it is raising the expectations and holding them accountable. You know, this is, it is a formal learning, but that’s a formal learning environment.
58:26 There are some things that can happen in a classroom, and there’s some things that can’t that shouldn’t. And if those things are happening, they need to be addressed and responded to, you know, I’m not afraid to, you know, enforce the discipline code and everything like that. When I was a dean at Milhi, I had one of my regulars in the dean’s office one day and he says, you know, mister Rendell, we have a nickname for you.
58:50 And I was like, do I want to know what the nickname is? I’m not sure if I want to know what the nickname is. I’m like, all right, Matt, tell me what the nickname is. They call you the book.
58:59 Oh, because I throw the book at you as a dean, I throw the book at you. He goes, no, no, no, you go buy the book. If we skip, we get Saturday school, if it’s our second time of skipping and we get, he says, you go by the book.
59:10 You do everything by the book. Everything is standard. When I was a dean at Cocoa, you know, challenging situation, you guys can check with Doctor Sullivan, but I don’t know that I had any parent complaints a year and a half being a dean at Coco, any serious parent complaints, because you treat kids with respect and, but you hold them accountable to the behavior expectations and I think, I’m not sure how to do that as a district, but that’s something we need to work on.
59:39 Thank you. All right, so we’re going to skip around a couple. These questions are a little bit all over, so bear with me here.
59:45 What is your vision for financial reporting and transparency and maintaining the public trust when it comes to our financial affairs with. Yeah, so publishing a comprehensive annual financial report at CAFR. I’m not sure if we do that.
59:58 If we do, I’m not aware. So maybe people need to be aware and maybe the community needs to be aware that we publish everything. All school district money is plain to see, all the interactions, all the budget, everything is in the sunshine.
1:00:13 Everybody can ask for information. So maybe hold some budget workshops where we present the information to the community, you know, to show them this is what the money is going to, this is what the money is being spent on. I think the voters did show the community did show a lot of trust in bps, you know, approving the additional property millage.
1:00:33 You know, that shows that they do believe that we are good stewards of the money. Now we need to make sure we show them that we’re good stewards of the money. You know, I know that we have, these oversight committees are there.
1:00:43 How are we sharing their information, their reports? We just come to a board meeting, and we review it. We view it here at the board meeting. Do we take it out to the community? Do we go to rotary? Do we go to chamber of commerce? Do we take this information out there and share it with the community? Or do we just do it all here in a board meeting? And we feel like, well, you can watch the board meeting.
1:01:03 It’s all. But, I mean, sometimes we need to take the information to the people. But school finances in Florida are open, open book.
1:01:13 You can see everything. Maybe the CAFR. We need to have a whole workshop on the CAFR and show everybody where the money’s going.
1:01:20 And so they don’t, you know, there is a lot of times some education that needs to be done as to, hey, you know, you have a citizen say, oh, I pay my taxes. You know, you don’t need any more money. I pay my taxes.
1:01:32 And maybe showing them how that money is then divvied up into different buckets, and it can only be spent on certain things. Like a lot of times, you know, capital money can only be spent on capital. Can’t use that money for teacher raises or anything like that.
1:01:44 So, you know, probably some opportunities for education. Thank you. Miss Wright, you have 45 seconds.
1:01:52 Oh, wow. Okay. All right, so this one is really quick.
1:01:55 Can you tell us about a time that you’ve implemented a program or you were involved in something that failed and what you learned from that experience? Yeah, the one that always comes to mind. Not that there’s a lot, but. No, but the one that always comes to mind is at Titusville High School, we were on the block, and I thought it would be a good idea if all 10th graders took English first semester.
1:02:15 So they would have all of 10th grade English done before they took the FCAT rights in February. Made sense to me. Have all of english pen done before you take the writing test.
1:02:27 And the teachers told me it wasn’t a good idea, and we did it anyway, and our writing scores dropped. So I met with the faculty at the end of the year when force came in and apologized, said I didn’t listen to you. You’re the experts.
1:02:43 You’re the practitioners. You’re in the room. And you told me this was not a good idea.
1:02:48 So we will go back to doing it the way we were doing it before. I will listen in the future and not think I’m smarter than you. And we did.
1:02:58 And our writing scores went back up. In fact, they increased higher, I think, the next year than they had in the previous two or three years. But I did have a faculty member pull me aside months later and say, no one’s ever done that.
1:03:11 No one’s ever stood in front of the faculty and apologized and said they were wrong, and they said that’s a sign of a good leader or something like that. But that stuck with me all these years because that’s probably almost 20 years ago, but, yeah. Thank you, Mister Rendell.
1:03:26 Now we have Miss Campbell. All right. Good morning, Doctor Rendell.
1:03:32 So I want to start with what I feel like is maybe one of our most important areas that we’ll have to address within interim, and that is board, staff, community relations. So how would you build and facilitate a collaborative and trusting relationship with and among school and district leaders, families, teachers, support staff, basically the businesses and the community, all the stakeholders. How are you going to build those relationships? And if you have some examples of where you’ve done that in the past, would you show that? Sorry.
1:04:04 Yeah, go out and meet them where they are is the biggest thing. You go out and meet them where they are. So you go to the chamber of commerce meetings, you go to the rotary meetings, and you provide them information, but you also listen.
1:04:14 Like, you need to go and listen. You need to go and maybe do a little presentation, but then have plenty of time for questions and answers and things like that. I would also open up some kind of town hall, regular, functional, like, every Monday night, the superintendent is in the boardroom and the community is welcome to come and ask questions and whatever.
1:04:32 Just open town hall type of meetings. You know, maybe not do it here at the boardroom, maybe go around different parts of the county. We’re pretty long, pretty stretched out, you know, and people from Mims might not want to come all the way down here for a meeting.
1:04:44 So maybe go to Mims, but you go out and meet people where they’re at and you ask for their input. You ask for, you know, questions. When we were hybrid, when we had, you know, fall of 20 through 21 2021, we were hybrid.
1:04:58 We held a lot of information meetings with our parents on Zoom as a principal and as administrative staff. And at one point, I just had open office hours. Like, Rendell is going to be on Zoom from eight to nine.
1:05:10 And if you have any questions, just get on Zoom and ask them, you know, and I really think that we need to do some, have some kind of open ended opportunities for communication with the community, but then you. But then you need to do something with that information, you know, I think that’s the part of it. If people are going to take the time to come and meet with you and talk with you and give you information.
1:05:29 We need to do something with that. We need to respond. So even as the interim, I would start setting up some of these open forums, town halls, whatever you want to call them, you know, office hours, whatever you want to call it, where, you know, you know, we put out there.
1:05:43 Hey, if you have any questions about our schools and what’s going on, you know, Doctor Rennell is going to be here at this time, might have staff with me or whatever, and we do that, we seek input, and when we get the input, we do something with it. Thank you. So what do you, what would a, you know, over this time? The interim time is likely to be, you know, four or five months ish, at least.
1:06:09 What would a productive, successful interim period look like for our district? Yeah, I think there’s several things that you would want to see get accomplished in this time. Number one, start working on some of those things that are glaring and need to be worked on, like this fractured community relationship. We can’t say we’ll wait for the permanent superintendent to come.
1:06:30 We need to do the work now. You know, I think one, another thing would be kind of an assessment of where we are on the strategic plan. You know, one of the things that, you know, I think, is that supposed to be our guiding document? That’s supposed to be our, what we shape all of our decisions on, all of our work on is the strategic plan.
1:06:51 Not supposed to be a document that we generally, you guys spent months building that strategic plan. You know, we spent months building a strategic plan in any river. And it shouldn’t be just a document that sits on the shelf.
1:07:02 You should be revisiting it all the time. You should be making all of your decisions based on what you’ve identified as your priorities, what your goals are. And there should be strategies associated with, with achieving those goals, objectives to meet measurable.
1:07:13 So you can see if you’re meeting those objectives, you should be visiting that at all times. So I think one of the first things I do as the interim is take a look at the strategic plan and how we’re doing in the different areas. What are we doing? Are we meeting our performance objectives? If we’re not, why not the work of leading the district? We can’t wait for the permanent superintendent.
1:07:33 The interim needs to get in there and lead now. Lead at board direction. You know, one of the things I’m not offering you is a 60 90 day superintendent’s entry plan because it wouldn’t be my plan.
1:07:46 It needs to be our plan. The superintendent and the board need to sit down and set some objectives for the next four or five months. What we want to have accomplished in the next four or five months.
1:07:56 There are some big positions to fill. I think those positions need to be filled. I think we need to start looking at retirements and things like that.
1:08:03 I think that is in a documentary in the folder. There’s some things we need to look long term about HR to make sure we have people in place. There’s a lot of institutional knowledge walking out of the door in the next couple months and the next couple of years probably that we need to start thinking about how do we replace that institutional knowledge? Where are the next leaders for Brevard coming from? Are they within? Have we trained them, have we prepared them? If not, but in reality, it’s going to be up to you, the board and the superintendent interim, to sit down and set some measurables, some goals for the next four or five months.
1:08:37 Obviously, you don’t want to leave things undone saying, well, we’ll wait for the permanent superintendent to get here. Kids are in school every day. They’re supposed to be being taught every day.
1:08:50 We need to make sure we’re doing everything we can to provide that best educational outcome every day. We really can’t wait. There might be some things we say we’re going to do this until permanent superintendent gets here, but, you know, I think that’s a board superintendent decision, interim superintendent workshop or something like that.
1:09:09 Thank you. I’ll ask you a short question and then I’ve got another one, since we’ve got time. What is your availability? I’m asking.
1:09:20 I know you’re here with us, but I’m going to ask that of everybody, so I want to be even. What is your availability? Yeah, I’m available to start as soon as you need me to. Obviously, I’m in the district, so there’s no issue with that.
1:09:30 We would need to make a decision about Cocoa beach junior senior, how we’re going to handle leadership there, that kind of thing. But, you know, I’m here, ready to go. Thank you.
1:09:39 And then I’ll just add one in here. What do you believe to be the ideal working relationship with a school board? How and how do we get there? Yeah, I think open and honest communication, you know, obviously, I don’t know if you meet with the superintendent on a regular basis, but the most best relationship, the better relationships that I’ve been in with school board members and as a superintendent is honest and open, regular communication. You know, for example, you know, we have a set meeting on every Thursday from 09:00 to 10:00 or whatever, or set meeting every Wednesday from eleven to one, or something like that.
1:10:18 There were some times when a board member would say, you know, I’ll just see you at the board meeting. You know, I don’t need to meet with you. We don’t need to talk about things ahead of time and stuff, and that’s not necessarily productive.
1:10:28 You need to be able to talk to board members about issues that are coming up, get their, you know, their take on things, you know, have them give you feedback, information, input, stuff like that. I think you sit down and you set as a board some goals for the superintendent, some measurable performance goals. And you’re always referring to those measurable performance goals as you go through the year.
1:10:49 And that’s something we did and it’s something I would look for here. I know Doctor Mullins had that, I believe, and we’d be doing that. But I think the short answer to the question is open, honest communication, and there shouldn’t be any surprises at board meetings and stuff like that.
1:11:07 You guys should all know what’s on the agenda and I should know what is coming, that kind of thing. All right. Thank you.
1:11:18 That conclude your questions? Yep. All right. Thank you.
1:11:23 Miss Campbell, Miss Jenkins, good morning. Kind of already heard this question I’m repeating again for you. It’s been a little while.
1:11:34 I knew that was going to happen when she asked that question. I apologize. Oh, no, no.
1:11:38 I’m not. I’m not pointing that out as an issue at all. I’m just.
1:11:40 I’m joking. You’ve heard it already. So.
1:11:43 So, were you evaluated in your previous role as a superintendent? And if so, what were the results of that evaluation? What was an area or areas identified as an opportunity for professional growth? And how have you worked towards that improvement? Yeah. So, obviously, evaluated annually as a superintendent, served four years in Indian river. And so the first couple of years, my evaluations were pretty.
1:12:09 Pretty good. Pretty darn good, actually. Pretty strong.
1:12:12 Always opportunities for improvement and things like that. The last evaluation, third year, whatever, was the last one I received, there were pretty strong evaluations from some board members and not as strong from some others. Areas to work on that were identified by the ones that didn’t score me as high as they had previously was board member communications.
1:12:33 You know, things like, you know, they didn’t feel like I was communicating well with them, board member relations, something like that. I’ve always tried to have regular, honest, open communication with everybody. I work with.
1:12:47 So I’ve just tried to work harder at that to make sure that everybody I work with knows, you know, where we are, what we’re working on. You know, I value their input that I’m going to take into account what they, you know, their advice and their input, and we’re going to work on it together and stuff like that. But really, that’s the only one I remember as being something that I said, you know, this really, we can work on that, you know, try to improve that in that area.
1:13:17 I’m actually. I’m gonna go off a little bit just because there was a lot said, and I feel like it’s important to ask those questions as, like, a follow up. So you had given an example that, you know, our school district is kind of like a business, and we have customers that we need.
1:13:36 And so you had said that there were times where we didn’t listen to the change. So my question is, what changes do you feel like were presented that we didn’t listen to, and how was that not accomplished? What would you have done differently? Yeah, I think there were some concerns about different reactions to the COVID crisis, the mask mandate, for example, things like that. And it seemed like we had a good amount of our customer base saying one thing and another sizeable amount of our customer base saying another.
1:14:10 And it seems like, you know, we basically chose one customer base over the other. We also went against state direction, you know, which I’m a rule follower by the book. And so, you know, when we get direction, I feel like we need to follow that direction.
1:14:28 I think that’s probably the example that comes to mind. Okay. And then you also said, oops, sorry.
1:14:42 Sorry about that. You also said, because you’ve had a history with brevard public schools, you made a reference that we were in a better place then than we are now. What do you mean by that? Yeah, I think it’s just a general feeling.
1:14:54 You know, we. We used to basically compare ourselves to any other district in the state with our student achievement and our hiring rates and everything, and it seems like we’re not quite at the top where we used to be. That’s just a gut feeling.
1:15:10 So I haven’t based that on any data or anything like that, but I feel like we just aren’t where we used to be, where we were one of the premier districts in the state. And I might be wrong, but it’s just the feeling that I have. I want to ask a question that doesn’t give me.
1:15:26 Yeah, no, no, no. Miss Jenkins, I just wanted. I’ll pause it for a second.
1:15:30 I think that these are great questions. It’s just that according to some of the other stuff, if we can just make sure that we ask questions, follow up questions that we want to ask, some of those we should ask inside of our round tables. But if we can keep consistency with what we ask each candidate.
1:15:44 I hear you. I appreciate that you’re asking follow ups. No problem.
1:15:48 But according to Gibbs and others, we want to kind of ask the same questions, the same people, and then follow on our own. So just a little reminder, that’s all. Absolutely, Mister Susan.
1:15:58 But I can ask whatever questions I want to ask, and those are just general statements about the district. I’m not asking deep down, nitty gritty questions and follow ups to those responses. So thank you very much, Miss Jenkins.
1:16:07 I just wanted to make sure that you understood that it’s not about that. It’s just about asking the same questions. I will be asking the same questions to the candidates.
1:16:14 So now to my second one that will be asked to all of the candidates, please explain your experiences with diversity, equity and inclusion, and what you’ve done in your current role and or previous roles, and what you would do here in this one to ensure all of our students are successful. Yeah. So you’re always looking at data to make sure that every segment of your student population is succeeding.
1:16:34 And so the first example I’ll share is, when I got to Indian River, I wanted to see, you know, how our students were faring in all different areas of academic achievement. And one of the things I noticed is we did not have a lot of participation in advanced coursework by our minority students. And we really, the percentage of our minority students was not represented in the percentage of students taking AP and IB courses.
1:17:00 And so I said, why? Why? And so we did a little bit of investigation. We found out there were some barriers in place that we needed to remove to make sure that every student had the opportunity to take an IB class or an AP class. For example, at Vero Beach High, to take an AP class, you had to have, I think, four teacher recommendations.
1:17:21 You had to write an essay and your parents had to fill out a form. It was a lot of stuff that really had nothing to do with whether you could be successful in AP or not. So we identified a group of students that showed potential to be successful in AP or IB courses.
1:17:37 That is, they scored three or higher on whatever the state assessment was at the time, FSA, I think, or FCAT. And we said, these kids need to be encouraged to take AP and IB courses. And so we met with the families.
1:17:50 We actually had meetings at both high schools with. We identified the families of the students that we thought could be taking AP and IB courses and showed them why we thought they should be taking AP and IB courses, and made sure they understood that not only were we going to enroll them in the courses, we were then going to support them and make sure that they were successful. And so we had a lot of minority students enroll in APMIB courses.
1:18:15 We actually identified white students that were scoring at the rate that they should be in AP and IB courses, and they weren’t in APIB courses, because, again, some of those roadblocks that were in place, some of those things that just didn’t seem to have any bearing on whether you could be successful in AP and IB class. So we increased AP and IB enrollment by great numbers. It’s on the resume, especially the black, african american students, hispanic students, but even white.
1:18:43 We even increased the number of white caucasian students taking AP and IB courses. And our performance on the AP and IB exams did not suffer. One of the things we did after the first year is we checked to see, we put more kids in these AP and IB classes, theoretically not as strong students in those AP and IB classes, and we saw a negligible or no drop in percent of students scoring three or higher on apartments and achieving IB certification.
1:19:11 The idea was there was a barrier to access. We identified that barrier to access. We removed it, we put the students in and we supported them.
1:19:20 We also had to have some frank meetings with the teachers to make sure they understood these students were worthy of being in those rooms and they deserved to be successful just like everybody else. So there was a paradigm shift would be the nicest way to say it, you know, but we had to make sure that those students received every opportunity. And I believe the numbers are still fairly strong there, although I haven’t, you know, have access to that data.
1:19:46 Thank you, Miss Jenkins. You still have two minutes if you’d like to ask any other questions. If you don’t, we can just roll.
1:19:55 Kind of running a little bit on the. So you mentioned. One of the important things, obviously, is to recruit and retain a staff.
1:20:13 And so I guess if you can give me an example, either in your position currently as a principal or your previous position as a superintendent, what do you think was the most effective tool to do that, and how did you accomplish it? It’s really how you treat people like. So as a school principal, it’s how you treat your employees, if you treat them fairly, you value them, you show them that you care about them, that you do more than just say good morning in the morning, but you go and talk to them. You talk to them about their lives outside of the classroom and that kind of thing.
1:20:45 And they say, okay, my boss cares about me. It’s a pretty good place to work. I like working here, that kind of thing.
1:20:50 So individual conversations, individuals, how you treat people and stuff like that, you know, that it showed up in one of the artifacts there. We did stay surveys and exit surveys with our personnel on Indian river. And the responses in the stay surveys to how they’re treated by their administrators and how they’re treated by their employer, their supervisor were very strong, and that was a way that we were able to show that you treat people right, you provide the best working conditions.
1:21:22 They’re going to stay, you know. So I think it’s all about how you treat people, you know, individually, and then as a group, as a whole, it’s a wildlife stay. The working conditions, the support, obviously money.
1:21:34 If you can provide additional income, that’s going to help, you know, better wages and stuff like that. But again, most research that’s done about why teachers leave, it’s the conditions, not necessarily the pay. Thank you, Mister Rendell.
1:21:54 Did anybody feel like they had a question on their list that we had already approved, that did not get answered? Ask. Before I start in, I wanted to give. I have ten minutes, but I wanted to be cognizant of you guys.
1:22:06 We just understand we have to ask that question again to the rest of us. If not, I can start in and then we can get moving. Okay, we’re good.
1:22:15 Mister Rendell, thank you very much. I wanted to take an opportunity to. We are a unique school district in the fact that we will be preparing the backbone for space travel.
1:22:29 And one of the things that’s been my since day one has been the career and technical portion of our school district. And for six years we have had amazing results building the infrastructure. But our results as far as aircraft to aircraft techs and those in some areas are really good.
1:22:52 But in some other areas, we have some kids that are taking construction just to be able to avoid the test at the end of the year because it gives them a different way around. What I would like to do is hear from your perspective what you’ve had experience in career and technical in the past and what you may be able to help us tweak in the short time that you might be here. Yeah.
1:23:16 So as a high school principal, I’ve always tried to make sure we had a strong CTE program on campus. For example, back at Titusville, we had automotive technology. And that program ended up being so strong, we hired two teachers again by supporting the teacher in the classroom and making sure the kids knew about the benefits of enrolling in those classes.
1:23:36 We actually drew students from astronaut just to take the automotive technology program. So one of it is making sure the kids understand the values of those programs. You know, that the fact that you don’t necessarily have to go to college to earn a good living, you know, some people, you know, might say that they’re not really interested in going to college, but what are the options? Well, make sure they know that there are viable options, that they can receive the training that they need either at their local high school, at their neighborhood high school, or a high school that they can attend through EPO to receive the training that would provide them that career.
1:24:10 One of the things we did in Indian river was actually open a technical college. So we secured some money from the DoE to open a technical college. Fresno Technical College is in Gifford.
1:24:20 It’s right in the heart of Indian River county, right in an area where job training is needed. And so the technical college is open to high school students and adults. So the high school students can go to Vero Beach High School or Sebastian River High School for part of the day and then go to the current technical college votec center and people would call it for part of their day.
1:24:41 The idea is that you look at your area, we do this here, PTE does this here. You look at your area, what the job needs are in your area. The high wage, high tech, high need jobs.
1:24:51 And you try to put programs in that prepare your kids for that, provide them that avenue again, like I said earlier, the best educational outcomes for students doesn’t necessarily mean a four year degree from a four year university. It’s whatever is going to put them in a position to be successful. So I think one of the things that we still probably need to do a better job is making sure people understand that’s a viable option.
1:25:13 CTE is a viable option. It’s not. Every one of our kids needs to go to college.
1:25:17 And I think. I don’t think that message is still out there. I think that’s something that we could work on.
1:25:22 So in the short time, if I was the interim superintendent, that might be one message. If the board and that workshop says, we really want to hammer this and get this going, we might try to get the word out about that, because we have really strong CTE programs at the high schools throughout the county. And I mean, it’s amazing the opportunities our kids have.
1:25:40 I don’t know if the public knows about them all. I know that in previous roles, superintendent, deputy superintendent, assistant superintendent, as high school principal, I’ll go to a rotary meeting or chamber of commerce meeting and somebody will say, what happened to vocational education? You guys don’t do vocational education anymore. And we do.
1:25:58 They just don’t know. Thank you, mister Endo. I’m going to give you some time to.
1:26:06 For your closing, you wanted to present some material and stuff like that. Yeah. So what I do is I brought some artifacts.
1:26:14 You might only know me as the principal at Cocoa beach, if you even know me as that. So you’re interviewing me for a superintendent’s position. I wanted to share some artifacts to prove that I was successful as a superintendent in Indian river.
1:26:29 So what I prepared for you is a couple of documents. These are primary source documents. So you have a big three ring binder there.
1:26:35 Not going to go through the three ring binder the whole way, but there’s a couple documents I wanted to show you. So the first, if you see, there’s a tab that says strategic plan. So if you flip to that, so that shows you a publication that we put together that shared our strategic plan with the community.
1:26:50 So you can see that there’s five areas there. Student success, culture and climate, high quality workforce, communication, engagement and strategic partnerships. Very similar to the strategic plan that you guys have, or we have here in Brevard county.
1:27:05 And that’s a tab in the back. Actually, if you want to pull that out, you can slide that out. I didn’t put it in the rings because you might have it out to the side.
1:27:12 It shows you that the four areas, the four goal areas or objective areas of the strategic plan here in Brevard are academic excellence, exceptional workforce, community collection and operational sustainability. You guys should all know, especially the members that have been on the board, should know about all those. So one of the things that when we engaged in the work to develop a strategic plan in Indian river was, like I said earlier, we didn’t want it to be just this document on the shelf.
1:27:35 We wanted it to be our guiding document. You know, when we make decisions, we want to say, how does that tie to the strategic plan? Obviously, the first area you’re always going to focus on is academic achievement, student performance. So that whole first section is on that.
1:27:47 Then culture and climate. It’s like, how are we doing as an organization? How do our employees feel? You know, how do our customers feel? And then high quality workforce is, we need to make sure we have the best teachers in the room, the best support staff, the best people working with our children. Communication, engagement, how are we doing communicating what we are doing with the community, and how are we engaging them in our work? And in that last one, strategic partnerships.
1:28:14 We had a lot of organizations in Indian river that wanted to partner with the school district, so we wanted to take advantage of those partnerships, but also go out and grow and develop more. So I wanted to show you a couple pieces, places in there. So you want to.
1:28:27 I tabbed them all for you. So we should be able to find them pretty easy. So if you go to the second purple tab, it’s in an area that says goal one, student success.
1:28:38 You find the second purple tab. What I wanted to show you was that each goal area has an objective, and each objective has three strategies and three measures of success. So not only did we put these goals out on a piece of paper, then we also said, okay, how do we achieve these goals? What can we do to achieve them? And then how do we measure our success? So every one of these has this format, and if you want to skip to the executive summary, that’s just a document that shows kind of how we presented the information at the end of year one to the community.
1:29:10 One of the things that we did was we set up measurements, KPI’s key performance indicators for every year. It’s a five year strategic plan. You have a goal you want to reach at the end of the five years, but you need to know if you’re making progress at the end of each year.
1:29:24 So we set up year one goals, year two goals, year three goals, and year four goals, and so on. And so we presented this executive summary to the community to show them at the end of year one how we were doing. This is only a few pages.
1:29:38 One of the ones I wanted you to see, there’s a tab there. It’s an orange page, and it has some numbers, and it talks about increases in CTE, actually. So increase 73, 73% increase in completed industry certifications in just year one of focusing on that as an area that we wanted to improve on, then there’s increases in dual enrollment, AP IB courses, and enrollment in career pathways.
1:30:06 So when we focused on trying to improve the educational opportunities and outcomes for our students, even after year one, we had really good success. So we shared that with the community. So the next chunk of the whole thing is a report that I gave to the board and the community at the end of year one, kind of like a state of the schools address, but it was, how are we doing on a strategic plan? So it’s actually 72 PowerPoint slides, so I don’t expect you to go through them all.
1:30:37 I highlighted a couple that I wanted you to see. So the first one, I think it’s on page two, there’s a purple tab there in the blue box at the top, and the slide at the top says five year strategic plan. Then it shows that five goal areas, three objectives in each goal area, three strategies for each goal, three measurables for each strategy monitoring framework, which I did not print for you because it’s like 100 pages long at 197 data points.
1:31:03 To measure our success, we were checking 197 data points. The idea is what gets measured gets done. So you have to check your progress.
1:31:12 You have to have these key performance indicators, all these things all the time. You set a five year strategic plan, you have five year goal, but you want to be able to check your progress after end of each year. So we did that.
1:31:23 So this 72 PowerPoint slides checks every single objective. The next one that I wanted you to see, I believe is on page five. That should be your next purple tab, page five of the big packet there.
1:31:41 And it talks about students receiving high quality instruction and how do we measure that? We measured it with academic achievement. If you look at that chart there, almost every column on the right, almost every number is green. That means an increase, an increase in student achievement.
1:31:56 Even after. Just after year one, we saw significant increases in student achievement in almost every category. The only one that dipped was 7th grade civic.
1:32:04 And then the next year we bumped that back up. But one of the things I’m most proud of is the 14 point increase in algebra one. We looked at how we were teaching algebra one.
1:32:11 We looked at whether we were focused on the identified standards, because you have that, the state tells you what the identified standards are, you’re focusing on them. Are you preparing the kids for success? On the algebra one EOC, we looked at teaching our kids how to solve word problems, because a lot of them on the EOC are word problems. So we focused on algebra one.
1:32:31 And you see at the end of the first year, a 14% increase. The next one I wanted, and I’m showing you one in each goal area. So we’re not going to go through all of them.
1:32:34 The next one is in the goal area of culture and climate. One of the things that we did there is ask our students and our staff to grade their school. And so you can see the from 2017 1617 to 1718, most of the grades went up.
1:33:00 The people felt better about their school. The students felt better about their school, staff felt better about their school. So some might say that’s not a quantitative measure, it’s a qualitative measure, how people feel, but it’s real.
1:33:12 You can measure it. And so that’s one thing that we did was we wanted to say, okay, how do you feel about your school? And, you know, just after the first year of concentrating on that, the increases went up. The next one’s on page 21, your next purple tab.
1:33:27 This one I talked about a little bit earlier, made a conscious effort to make sure that we retain as many of our teachers and staff as possible. And almost every one of those data points shows an increase in retention. So we focused on making sure that our employees felt valued and they stayed.
1:33:46 So that was good data. Even just after year one. The next one, page 27.
1:33:56 This was feedback from stay interviews. Like I said before, we did exit interviews and stay interviews. So these we asked employees to respond to.
1:34:06 Our first year employees were the bulk of that. And you can see the responses are all really strong. For example, 87% said their employer treats them fairly, if their boss treats them fairly, stuff like that.
1:34:20 And the one I think that was really promising was 78% said that they plan to have a long career with Indian River county schools. So the idea was we were working on retention and we were succeeding. Last one I want to show you is the last page.
1:34:35 Page 36. This is a huge document, 197 data points. The five year strategic plan had a lot of stuff in it, but it really all comes down to relationships and outcomes for kids.
1:34:49 One of the programs we put in place was that we worked with big brothers, big sisters, and we put it in place. A program where employees could qualify as a big brother, a big sister, and become a big brother, a big sister to a kid in our district, be a mentor to a kid in our district. And so after just the first year, we had 30 employees volunteer and qualified to become a big brother to a student in our district.
1:35:13 I qualified and was a big brother to a student in our district not working in the district anymore. I don’t qualify to be his big brother anymore, but I still text and talk with him quite often. But this is something that, even though we had this huge document and everything still comes down to individual students and how we’re impacting them.
1:35:29 And that’s why that slide is the last one I wanted to show you. Is this part of my closing too. So it’s actually surfaced earlier.
1:35:36 One of the reasons that I think I’m a really good candidate for this position is I’m already here, I already know the district, I already know the job, I’ve already been a superintendent, I know the challenges associated with it, I know the rules about what we can do and we can’t do. And so in this time of transition, you need somebody that has already done the job and knows Florida and knows Brevard. Thank you Mister Rendell.
1:36:02 Really appreciate all the time. I’m going to give each board member about 10 seconds to just say thank you if you can. And then we have about five minutes that we can break to use the restroom.
1:36:12 Mister Trent, we’ll go in order from you because that’s how we started. Again, you’re probably going to hear this. We extremely appreciate you throwing your name in this.
1:36:21 I mean, it’s a daunting job and I know the, the community well where I live and how they think about you. So I appreciate the time. Thank you so much.
1:36:36 I want to thank you also for being so well prepared. This is very insightful. I appreciate your honesty and your ideas.
1:36:43 And yeah, I look forward to our one on one. Thank you. Stepping up to even just interview process puts you and your family in a spotlight.
1:36:54 And thank you for taking on the extra pressure of this process. Appreciate it, Miss Jenkins, thank you. I look forward to our 101 as well and talk about the spotlight.
1:37:05 I didn’t realize that this was going to be recorded for you guys until yesterday afternoon, so I understand the pressure of that. So thank you. Thank you Miss Jenkins, I appreciate it.
1:37:16 We’re going to break for five minutes. We’ll come back at 1030. Thank you very much.
1:37:18 Thank you. Good morning everybody. I wanted to say thank you for returning with us and thank you Mister Larson, for coming and applying to be the interim superintendent, Brevard Public Schools.
1:43:08 I appreciate your time looking over your resume. It’s pretty impressive coming from Orange county public schools, which is we’ve all got friends that are over there on the school board, so we appreciate it. I appreciate you taking the time and the way we’re going to do this today is have a five minute start.
1:43:24 And if you’re coming close to the end of it, I’ll let it roll. It’s not like it’s going to stop. You’ll see me stop the time, let you roll a little bit.
1:43:30 But if you can be respectful, and then we’re each going to take ten minutes max to ask you a couple questions. The questions are going to be the same as they’ve been asked of the other people. And then I usually ask one and try to make up the back end of that to give you roughly about ten minutes to respond in the end, to have closing statements and make anything that you feel like didn’t get asked and you might have an opportunity.
1:43:51 We’re good on that. Absolutely. All right.
1:43:53 So the beginning today, we had Mister Trent start with the other one. What’s that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But he.
1:44:01 Mister Trent’s gonna be the first one to ask. Miss Wright’s gonna be the first one to ask your questions. But you now have the opportunity to give us the five minutes.
1:44:07 So it’s all yours. Mister Larsen, just, just before you start, can you pull that microphone a little bit closer so the broadcast picks you up? Thank you. That’s good.
1:44:16 Well, first of all, thank you for the opportunity to sit in this chair today. Not a decision that comes lightly to take on and apply for such an important role, especially in an interim position where you’re in a big situation of transition. And so having an opportunity to speak to my family.
1:44:35 And we have been actually having much conversation about next steps. January 3 marks 30 years for me in education. And the thought was, well, what’s that next chapter going to be? Why not open another chapter in an opportunity like this? And so that’s why I’m here.
1:44:57 It was never anything I wanted to do. I’m one of those that believe that it is a calling. And I was not listening.
1:45:07 I grew up in what, the seventies and eighties where if you were a math and science student, you went to engineering. And that’s where I went. And my father, after retiring from the air force, went into education.
1:45:20 And I saw what he brought home every day at the dinner table. What he harbored and shouldered from the students and just the work itself. And I was like, no, not for me.
1:45:30 Not for that kind of. Not for that compensation. No, no, no.
1:45:34 Made it all the way to my senior year and I just couldn’t ignore it anymore. And I walked out, went down to the guidance office and said, I need to be a school teacher. Get me out.
1:45:46 And so revamped my entire degree from a bachelor of science in electrical engineering to a bachelor of science in liberal studies. Four minors, my minors are in mathematics, engineering, behavioral science and physical science. Not your typical liberal studies degree.
1:46:02 And within a month I was teaching at a high school, high needs, low socioeconomic school, 8th grade science on January 3, 1993. And that started. And that’s what got me to build the resume that you had before.
1:46:17 It was a calling and still is 52 years young. Got a five year old at home. Not looking to be done anytime soon.
1:46:25 My oldest is 28. But at a five year at home, you’re pretty much invested for quite a few years. So we’ll see if this opportunity has comes through and if so, what happens after that.
1:46:41 I recognize that it’s an interim, but it’s an opportunity I could not pass up. Thank you. Thank you, Mister Larson.
1:46:51 First up is going to be questions from Miss Wright. Miss Wright. Well, I want to thank you for coming over, obviously, and doing this interview process.
1:46:58 This is a bit, it is putting yourself out there. So we appreciate you being willing to eager to jump into this. And so we’re going to go through a few questions and we’ll just, I’ll start right away with Brevard county.
1:47:10 I’m sure you’ve noticed that we’ve made news headlines recently. I know you’re not part of our district currently, but what would you see the top three issues that Brevard county is facing right now? And what do you think, or how do you think your experience that you’ve had thus far in school systems equips you to handle those issues? So I don’t know that many of the situations and needs that you have are completely different from other districts with regard to hot topics and things of that nature. I think one of the biggest issues that we’d be facing right now is this transition and is the position of the interim superintendent and how that rolls out.
1:47:48 And it is very easy for an interim superintendent to either make waves or actually make progress. And this is a very, very important decision that you’re making today. So I think that would be my number one because I think a lot of people are sitting in a tenuous position going, what’s going to happen? January? What’s going to happen? This isn’t a summer where you get a chance to have certain meetings that you can have in the summer that you might not be able to have during the school year.
1:48:21 You’re jumping in in January. And so I believe that that’s a very important thing that’s going to come up. How do I play into that? I think I had a very eclectic job experience based on, even though it may have been entirely in Orange County, I think my opportunities have been very eclectic.
1:48:29 I think I bring a lot to the table. Although it’s been a linear tidal progression, there’s been a lot of lateral opportunities that I can bring to the table. And that way I’m not coming in with no knowledge.
1:48:50 I still have knowledge. Now we just have to connect it. And how is it going to work the best here in Brevard? So that’s number one.
1:48:57 Number two, I would say marketing. Marketing our district, putting our best foot out there, making sure that we’re putting out as many positive stories as possible, that we’re showing what programs are viable and thriving and how are we getting that word out? I think that is something that most school districts do struggle at times. You hear people sometimes say, well, you know, our work should tell the story.
1:49:28 No, we have to tell the story. This is a competitive situation. Schools are competitive now.
1:49:34 We have school choice. We have to compete. Thus we have to market.
1:49:38 So we have to take the positive things. But at the same time, let’s not oversee the fact that we also have to in that marketing acceptance the challenges that we have and meet them forefront and say, look, here’s some challenges we have. Here’s what we’re doing about it because that’s just as much marketing as it is selling the good.
1:49:57 You’ve got to be able to show that you’re willing to take on those challenges. And so marketing is a big piece. Then I think it goes into what I would consider the third challenge, which is vacancies.
1:50:09 Teacher shortage everywhere, specifically in our exceptional education roles, not just in the instructional but in the paraprofessional world as well. We’re wearing ESC teachers out because they don’t have the support in the room with them. How are we going to market our school in order to bring and attract that talent, not just here in central Florida but across the United States? Are you willing to move here? Because we’ve got the opportunities for you.
1:50:38 And right now it’s a teacher market. Teachers can decide any school they want to go to, there’s vacancies everywhere. So what are we doing and how are we coaching up our school leadership to produce environments and climates on their campus that says, I want to come work for you, I want to come work for BrevaRd because I believe in the leadership and I believe I’m going to get the support that I need once I get there because at the end of the day, they want to teach children.
1:51:05 That’s what they’re called to do. We just need to help create that environment so we can mitigate those vacancies. Thank you for your response there.
1:51:18 I’m going to switch gears a little bit and I’m going to ask you about a time that you’ve had a project or a program that you were involved in that failed and what did you learn from that and how did you change your, maybe your direction moving forward? You know, I’ve asked this question in many interviews and I’ve actually had people say, I can’t recall time and you just look at them and go, really? Really? So for myself I would have to say it revolves around mastery learning. I’m a believer in mastery learning and some students may not get it by Friday test day, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t and should not have an opportunity to still acquire that knowledge. The teacher’s job is to teach.
1:52:02 They should be rewarded for a student’s excellence. And so trying to implement a mastery learning mindset at a school and just tossing it out there and assuming that everybody had the same mindset, not the best way to do that, a lot of pushback, a lot of arguments. That’s not the real world, that’s not how we live.
1:52:23 It’s, you know, you either get it or you don’t. It’s dog eat dog, you know, dog eat dog world. So when I repurposed that conversation, I realized that I needed to have more input, right? Especially from my union representatives, you know, teacher leaders, because they’re the ones that were going to support it or not.
1:52:44 And having them have an input on how should that roll out and how should it look. And so when we rolled it out the second time, the why was there. We didn’t have the why before.
1:52:56 And then the first rollout, you’ve got to provide the why for them to have the heart. And so we did that and we said, look, here’s the situation. I mean in all reality, look, you could take the back in the day, FCAT, FSA, whatever it is, you could take as many times so you passed it.
1:53:12 We take the algebra PMA as many times until you pass, you get a current score, you take the SAT act as many times as you need to get the score you want. Why shouldn’t we do that within a certain time frame within our own classroom? If a child and a student does not have the extrinsic or intrinsic motivation to continue to learn the content and they simply fall further, further behind. And as a math teacher, I can empathize with that, sympathize, sympathize because I’ve been through it.
1:53:40 If they’re not willing to take the extra time to put the work in to learn that content, then that’s a gap. So we’ve got to learn how to incentivize those students to say, look, I just. I want to get a little bit more at the backside of that.
1:53:54 It’s not just struggling students. If a child gets an 88 on a test and wants that a, why don’t we give them the opportunity to show that they’ve learned the material that they didn’t get to get that a. And I went over a lot better the second time when we talked about the reasons and how and how we could do it.
1:54:12 We took the burden off the teachers and placed it on after school personnel that I paid for to provide those opportunities. So it wasn’t additional work for the teachers. It was just an opportunity for students to continue their own education on their own or through tutoring or personal help, to continue to strive to learn that content and move forward.
1:54:35 Thank you. Thank you for that answer. Would you say that you were able to track success? Absolutely.
1:54:42 In your method there? Absolutely. Our graduation rates went from 72% to 91% in the time I was the principal at that high school. Grade point averages went up extraordinarily.
1:54:54 And there was a lot more. There was a lot more buy in from students because they knew that we believed in them and that we weren’t just about a test at the end of the day. It was about learning the material so that you could become a stronger student for next year and for the next year.
1:55:10 And so there was a lot of value to it, not just a tangible grade, but the feeling that the students and teachers had about the success that students were experiencing. Great. Thank you.
1:55:22 We’re going to switch over to finance now, and I’m going to ask you, what is your vision for financial reporting and transparency and maintaining the public’s trust when it comes to really being stewards of the funds that we receive from taxpayers? So transparency is a word that gets thrown around a lot. It’s a word that, as transparent as we, as a board or a cabinet, we feel we’re being transparent, but there’s always that, no, you’re hiding money. You’re hiding things.
1:55:53 So, you guys, I know in your strategic plan, you were rolling out a new financial reporting and implementing it, and then I saw that in your plan, and it’s not enough to just have a strategic plan meeting here in the boardroom. We could drop the screen down. We could put up the numbers, but there are a lot of numbers, and it’s a lot for community members and even some of our stakeholders to understand our budgets are not necessarily run like private organizations, for sure, and they’re definitely not run like home finances.
1:56:27 Right. The different pots of money, the categoricals that we have to really define. And we feel sometimes that we’re doing it very clearly.
1:56:36 We feel like, I thought I said it pretty clear, and then you realize that you just haven’t. And so a singular presentation of where the dollars go. Right.
1:56:44 Even with Esser funds, which I’ve been working with now for the last six months, with Esser three, you think that you’re laying it out there, but you’ve got to give folks an opportunity to have those questions and going out into the community and saying, hey, you want to know a little bit more about the budget? Let’s sit down and have a conversation. And it’s the same thing with our union members. Right? I mean, reoccurring costs are reoccurring costs, and we’ve really got down to brass tacks about where do we have pockets, where can we save? And then just ask me the question.
1:57:16 I’m going to give you the answer, and let’s get to that point where you actually believe what I’m trying to share. Thank you, Miss Campbell. Thank you.
1:57:28 Well, welcome and good morning, Doctor Larson. Appreciate you coming to invest in this process. So how would you build and facilitate collaborative trust and relationships with all the stakeholders among our school and district leaders, teachers, support staff, parents, students, business partners, how do we build those relationships with our community as a whole? And if you have some examples of how you’ve done that in your past experience, share this.
1:57:58 Sure. First and foremost, be present. You’re not going to do it sitting in an office, putting out an email or putting out robocalls.
1:58:09 That’s not going to build those relationships. I pride myself, and I think most people that have worked for me would tell you that I connect with people very well and very quickly. Of the five strengths of strength finders, two of my strengths are wooer and related, first impressions, long term relationships.
1:58:29 And that’s what you’re going to need in this position right here. Right. Because it’s interim.
1:58:32 So you got to have that woo factor. You got to be able to sit in a room and say, look, it’s going to be okay. Let’s talk about what’s available now.
1:58:36 Let’s talk about what could be available down the road. Set up a structure and a skeleton, because even if I’m not in this position permanently, we should still be building that structure. We should still be setting it up for the future.
1:58:48 There was a plaque on my father’s wall when he was an educator. He said, success is and there are like ten things on there. I only remembered one.
1:58:56 And success is knowing that people were better because you were in their lives. That’s the same thing in this position right now, whether this position is four months, five months, six months, or turns into a permanent role, are you going to leave Brevard better than when you got there? Now, the only way to do that is to have that relationship with the board and myself initially. What are your priorities? What has to be done now? What can’t wait? What has to be done now? What to are your priorities? Number two.
1:59:25 Excuse me? Number two, how does that then relate to the school buildings and the districts within the school office? Right. So one on one meetings, group meetings, you’ve got to get in there. What’s going on in facilities? Where are we? You’ve got four capital projects that are out there right now.
1:59:41 We’ve broken ground on or in process. You’ve got the middle school x coming in. So where are we? What do you need? What do we have to get pushed forward now and have those conversations and then what’s going on in the classrooms? So, for the last four years, and actually six of the last ten years of district leadership, I was in schools every single day, walking classrooms, sitting in, planning meetings with the teachers, with the paraprofessionals.
2:00:07 In this role, you need to jump on a bus, do. In this role, you need to go work the lunch line as you’re visiting a school that day. Right.
2:00:17 There is no more, no job more important than another. We’re all working together. For one thing, it’s and their success and their outcomes.
2:00:25 My job would be to connect those community partners, those faith organizations, businesses, the schools, all in coordination of the priorities of what the board lays out. You are the boss. You say you do, and so it’s imperative to keep those relationships and lines of communication open.
2:00:46 Phones never off. It’s an unfortunate part of the job. The phone’s never off.
2:00:51 So I believe that all of my roles, from even being a teacher and connecting with parents in a high needs school to now trying to get 19 fund managers with a billion dollars worth of Esser funds, all on the same page, making sure that we’re monitoring it, because, you know, the audit’s coming and making sure we’re all on the same page. And that’s just, that’s being available. And that, I think, is number one.
2:01:20 Thank you. I think you’ve already touched on this, but if there’s anything you wanted to add, my second question was, what would a productive, successful interim process look like for our district, like I said, you’ve touched on some of those, but if there’s anything else you’d add, jump in there. Sure.
2:01:36 If this was a permanent position at this point, I would walk in with a hundred day plan. As it is, I put together a little 30, 60, 90, but again, it’s a skeleton. Right.
2:01:47 It’s what I think would need to be done. For instance, what rfps are out there that need to be looked at, what contracts need to be renewed by the end of the year or maybe sunset. Those are things that have to be done.
2:02:01 Those are non negotiables. You can’t let things fall through the cracks at this point just because you’re interim. When you’re in this interim position, you’re the superintendent, you’re the one that’s going to make the decisions and you need to understand that.
2:02:12 You also need to understand that in the interim role you should be taking the time to meet with all the stakeholders because I would consider it my duty to gather as much information from as many stakeholders as possible so that whoever does follow in this role permanently, be it myself or someone else, they got a head start. This is what the community wants. This is what the businesses are looking for.
2:02:33 This is what your staff is looking for. And that’s both administratively through classified, which I like to call support professionals. And so I see those as being huge roles.
2:02:51 You’ve got to be prepared to make the decision. You’ve got to be prepared to say, thank goodness hurricane season’s over. But you know, you’ve got to be able to make those decisions and you’re in this role and you’ve got to.
2:03:03 Your title is interim superintendent. But you can’t think that way. You got to think like this is, this is the job, you’re doing the job and you need to prepare for the 23 24 school year just as much as you need to get through testing at the end of this year, which again, brand new.
2:03:18 Right. So there’s a lot of things on the table that as an interim you just can’t look at it that way. Thank you.
2:03:27 This one’s a pretty quick one, but what is your availability? So it’s frs, I’m ready to go. Let’s do it. So as I said, January 3 marks 30 years for me.
2:03:41 I am available. I know that the superintendent last days, the 31st, I think the last board meeting I heard that the expectation was January 1 that this would be in place. The name’s on the line.
2:03:52 Okay. Thank you. And I think I’ve got just a few minutes left, so I. My last question has to do with superintendent board relationships.
2:04:04 So describe what you believe to be the ideal working relationship with a school board, and how do you achieve that? It’s two way communication in all forms. Phone calls, text, email, whatever we need to do to communicate. Information needs to come this way.
2:04:18 Information needs to go that way. You need to trust that what I’m sharing with you is exactly what’s happening. You’ve got constituents reaching out to you every day.
2:04:30 I understand that. Having the opportunity and the availability to text me or call me and say, hey, James, what’s going on with this situation? I’m hearing there’s something going on here. Board relationships need to be.
2:04:42 You’re setting policy. I’m enacting policy. And as things come up throughout the school year or the day, how are we going to.
2:04:52 How are we going to deal with this together? All right. And hiding behind something or hoping something goes away is the most detrimental thing that can happen between a board and a superintendent in their cabinet. It’s got to be absolutely 100% out there.
2:05:08 And I use the word out there because it. I want to keep saying transparent. So understand that we may not agree.
2:05:17 We may not agree on every single topic, but when we get off the phone or we finish our meeting and I walk out that door or I hang it up, I’m 100% on board. This is what we’re doing. Let’s go, team.
2:05:29 It’s not about what my belief is, politics, or my thoughts. I share those in those meetings. And once the decision is made, then you press forward and you take care of business.
2:05:43 Thank you very much. Thank you. Miss Campbell, Miss Jenkins, good morning.
2:05:49 I think we’re still in mourning. Doctor Larson, thanks for joining us in Brevard. So my first question is, were you evaluated in your previous role? And I’m gonna.
2:05:59 I’m gonna go off of your last position as a chief academic officer for Orange county public Schools. And if so, what were the results of that evaluation? Was there an area or areas identified as an opportunity for professional growth? And how did you work towards that improvement? Sure. So my last role as area superintendent reported directly to the deputy superintendent.
2:06:21 And that evaluation, there’s two pieces to our district leadership evaluation. There was the operations side, and then there’s the school performance side, as we’re on the teaching and learning side. So the operations side, the highest you could get is meeting expectations.
2:06:37 I received meeting expectations, which meant that all of the compliance issues, drills, you know, you name it, everything was completed on time and was done appropriately. So I was meeting expectations on the academic side. I was satisfactory.
2:06:54 The highest is above expectations. So I had 30 schools that I was overseeing. Eleven of those schools were in very high need coming off the pandemic, especially low socioeconomic areas.
2:07:09 And so there were eleven of them. Nine of those schools improved their grades, one to two letter grades. But we did have two grades, two schools that did drop, which accounted for that satisfactory.
2:07:20 Both schools were one point from a d. The heartbreak, and when I say one point, I’m talking like four tenths of a point. It rounds up.
2:07:27 It was heartbreaking, but that would be so there wasn’t anything that was denoted that I needed to work on. It was simply, we had two grades go down satisfactory as opposed to above expectation. Thank you.
2:07:42 Yes, ma’am. So I’m going to go a little bit off here based off of something that you said, and I think it’s really important to ask you this question. So you mentioned that you manage nearly $1 billion worth of Esser funds over in Orange county, which is comparable to our overall budget.
2:08:00 And so obviously that can’t be simple. Obviously, there has to be hiccups. So what was the biggest challenge or one challenge that you faced managing such an enormous budget and team of people below it, and how, how did you manage that? So I am so fortunate to work with an individual, Kim Gilbert, if you’re watching, who manages most of the dollar side of that house, and when we say if the first award was like 8 million and then 55 million and then 850 million, and then when you add in all of the additional state Esser funds that come out, not just from the federal government, it drives up over that figure.
2:08:40 The money is the easy part. I mean, to be quite honest, you know, balance it, zero it out. If it’s encumbered and you spend it, great.
2:08:51 If you’re over, where are we going to pick those dollars up? Where are we going to, you know, where are we going to save to make sure that we’re balancing out? That’s actually the easy part. The difficult part that we’re really, and I’m spending the majority of my time doing is monitoring those activities that we said we were going to do. So there are over 170 activities just in Sr three that we’re monitoring that could be anywhere from tutoring to tier one intervention teachers that we’re putting into all of our schools.
2:09:21 How are they being utilized? And then also on top of that, the return on investment and the program evaluations that we’re doing on those big dollar tickets, because at the end of this, in 2024, right, dollars have to be spent by September 30, 2024, there’s not going to be s or four. And even if there is, we have to go into it with the mindset there’s not going to be s or four, right. What’s sustainable? What’s going to have to drop into the general fund.
2:09:46 Right. And if it’s not having a return on investment, then we need to sunset that. We need to be honest about it.
2:09:51 But we need to do that with data, not because we don’t feel like this program is working, we need to see it. So I work very closely with research, accountability and grants department on program evaluations and return on investment. And so trying to manage what are we going to sunset in 24? What are we going to continue all of the new amendments? Where are we over already? That’s what I’m working on right now.
2:10:13 Have we overspent in the first quarter of SR three? Have we underspent? There’s areas where we’ve underspend. There’s areas where we have positions, for instance, say social workers. Now we’ve allocated money to put additional social workers into school, but if we can’t hire them, that money is still sitting there.
2:10:29 So what are we going to do with those funds and where can we shift those to bolster programs that have a better return on investment? So that’s what we spend most of our, most of my time doing. Can you please explain your experience with diversity, equity and inclusion and what you’ve done in your current role or previous roles and what you would do in this one to ensure all of our students are successful? I hope this is your last question because there’s only five minutes. You can take all the time you need.
2:10:56 Don’t worry. Don’t feel pressured that there will be another question. It’s okay.
2:11:00 Equity is one of those words that I think a lot of folks get a little worked up about. Equality, equity, you’re taking something away and giving it to someone else. And that’s not the case.
2:11:11 Equity merely means that you’re taking resources and giving it to people that need the resources. You’re not taking it from someone to give it to another. I think that’s where we get really worked up when we don’t have that reality and we think equal, equal, equal.
2:11:25 But I want to put that in terms because I am going to answer the question in, and I know my resume dictates quite a bit of it, but I’ll highlight some of those things in my resume. If you’ve got a class of 25 students and you’re sitting in an algebra class, Alsbury in high school, definitely, right? That’s a lot of work there. 20 of the students do not understand ax plus b equals c and five students do equality means I’m going to make those five students who already understand ax plus y equals a b c have to do the same thing over again because these 20 students don’t do equity applies to those students as well.
2:11:59 They need to be moving on to ax plus b equals cx plus d. So equity works on a range. And I think that sometimes when we hear that word, I think people get a little nervous about equity because, oh, we’re going to take something from one group and give it to another.
2:12:11 That’s not the case. When I began my work in the minority achievement office in 2015, it was some of the most rewarding work that I think that I’ve been experienced in my role up to that point. The calculus project, we took low socioeconomic students.
2:12:31 We took gender. We looked at why do we not have as many females in middle school algebra? And provided a system in the program to additional support after school. It was a contract.
2:12:46 We brought the parents in, said, look, they’re going to do additional work after school, they’re going to get tutored after school. You’re going to do this. We’re going to provide folks from the community, Lockheed Martin, to come in and really talk about why is algebra important? And so the calculus project was in design.
2:13:02 It came out of Boston, and it was to get more students through calculus by the time they graduated high school. Because if you’re only taking algebra by the time you’re in 10th grade, you’re never going to get there. And in 9th grade, you’re probably not going to get there.
2:13:14 So that was kind of one of the things I did a lot of work. I was the BPO discipline at the time, the business process owner of discipline. And so restorative practices was brought in the year before I got there.
2:13:26 Again, a lot of misconceptions behind restorative practices, folks here, oh, restorative practice. We’re going to sit in a room, we’re going to talk to each other, and you’re not going to suspend these kids and you’re not going to discipline them. And that’s a misconception behind what restorative practices really is.
2:13:43 I would give you my philosophy on discipline. Discipline should be administered at the lowest level appropriate to the offense necessary to modify behavior, not punish, but modify behavior. And sometimes that might mean a ten day suspension.
2:13:55 Sometimes the lowest level appropriate is an expulsion because it’s a level four offense. And I think that that needs to be clearly stated. But what we did was we looked at the disproportionate suspension rates, and we looked at how many days students were missing school.
2:14:09 What was the average number of days students missed if they had one suspension during the year. We looked at recidivism within different subgroups. And when I say subgroups, again, not just demographics as far as race, we looked at as gender.
2:14:14 We looked at our Ell populations, we looked at our ESC populations. So when you say disproportionate suspension rates at one school, it could be with this group, at another school it could be other. And so data is so rich, we have it, and it shouldn’t be used to hammer a teacher or a principal, because what’s happening at their school, it should be used as a tool to say, hey, we’re obviously not connecting with this population.
2:14:49 What are we going to do to connect to this population? Because we’re missing it. They obviously don’t feel a part of the school the way we need them to. So as important as data is, it’s doubly important as to how we use it and what we’re doing with it.
2:15:04 And so I’ve had an opportunity. We put the minority leadership minority leader scholars program award, where we were taking high school students and bringing them back to the feeder middle school as mentors to our students in the middle school and telling them, look, this is what’s going to happen when you get to high school a. This is what you need to be prepared for.
2:15:28 And we saw a lot of, a lot of success in those programs and students just really taking off and taking charge of their own education. And that’s the beauty of it, right? We’re not taking something from someone else. We’re providing the resources to the ones that need it.
2:15:53 I was keeping an eye on it. Thank you, Mister Trim. Thank you, Doctor Larson, for coming out and put your name on the list to be here and congratulations me and in the finals.
2:16:07 Thank you. Of this position. So I’ll get right to it.
2:16:11 Some will be the same. Questions your thoughts on policy review as a potential superintendent, and have you had any experience in this process and how it would work? Sure. So a couple different experiences in my career with policy review on two different levels.
2:16:31 First of all, I’ll say this right. Any legislation that comes down is going to predicate the need to review our policies. And so you’ve got that top down approach from state legislation that says, okay, we’re going to make these changes, so we have no choice at that point.
2:16:43 We’ve got to get in there, we’ve got to look at the policy, and we’ve got to be in compliance with the regulations of the state of Florida, and that’s taken care of through the cabinet and appropriate folks in the school district that work on that, in that department, say, for instance, extracurricular activities. And then the proposal is made to the board where the board has the oversight on. No, we want to see these changes included.
2:17:08 We want to see this change taken out. And so it’s got to be a very cohesive conversation about what that policy is actually going to finally look like because you’re going to be signing it. So myself personally, while I was, I was a Title IX coordinator for the district and all kinds of legal, I was working with the legal committee, and I think I was involved in the revision in 2015 to 16 with, I don’t know, as many as possibly ten board policy revisions.
2:17:40 Where we sat down, we got the information we needed to make the appropriate revisions so that we were not only in compliance, but that we were doing the best to protect the district and protect the students and staff, because that’s part of why policy is there, to keep things in check, the checks and balances. So I was able to firsthand work on revising policy myself with legal department and others involved. And then at the cabinet level, all of those board policies come to us before they go and present it to the board.
2:18:14 So at that point, you’re involved in any board policy review that takes place, and everybody has an opportunity sitting around the table to provide their suggestions and or concerns. But it’s not outside the realm of reality, where, as a superintendent, you look at the board and say, hey, can we talk about this policy? I think we need to make some revision and have that conversation just as much as it is for you as the board to say, hey, we need to take a look at this policy. And so that’s, that’s also a two way street there through the communication.
2:18:48 And then once it’s determined that a policy needs to have revision, let’s make the revisions. Let’s make sure they’re legal. Right? And then let’s sit down and say, what else? What? Is there anything else that needs to be done, or are we good? And if we’re good, let’s sign it in, and then we follow.
2:19:04 Thank you very much. All right. One of the other questions would be your management style.
2:19:13 I’ve heard, you know, some of the questions. I kind of get an idea, but how would you describe your management style? So I’m a code shifter. I remember the big, big, big.
2:19:25 And this is not my answer. We have heard it for so many years in interviews. Servant leader, servant leader, servant leader.
2:19:31 And it was so overused. I’ll do whatever I won’t ask anybody to do, you know, that I’m not willing to do. And, oh, God, it’s really overused.
2:19:39 And there are times where that is appropriate, but I consider myself more of a situational leader. There are times where you need to be. Let me make sure I get this right.
2:19:47 Not authoritative or, you know, there’s the good side of it and the bad side. It’s a time where you have to be, look, I’m putting. This is it.
2:19:55 I’ve got to make the decision. All right. And then there are times where you’ve got to bring folks to the table and say, okay, let’s have a conversation.
2:20:02 You’ve got to be able to delegate. You’ve got to delegate to people what they want delegated to. And that’s not, you know, placating to people.
2:20:13 They’re doing what they like to do. They’re going to put more effort into it, more heart. It’s going to have more value.
2:20:18 And so that’s the same thing we do as we’re building leaders in our school systems. Right. You know, when you’re trying to build a dean to an Ap and an Ap to a principal, you give them roles that they’re interested in so they can thrive, and then you build on what they might be lacking.
2:20:33 So I consider myself situational. I can adapt to anything that’s coming at you. And again, sometimes you’ve got to hit it quick.
2:20:43 You’ve got no time, and you’re definitive about it. And when you’re wrong, you’re wrong. When you’re wrong, you say, you know what? Okay, I blew this one.
2:20:53 My bad. Let’s hit it from a different direction. Maybe I was a little too quick on this one.
2:20:59 But you’ve got to have the humility in leadership that I think sometimes we folks get this idea of, well, I’m in charge. I need to always look like I’m in charge. Well, even a duck on a pond looks palm on the top.
2:21:13 Their feet are churning away underneath. Right. As a leader, that’s how you need to portray yourself.
2:21:18 Your feet are churning, your wheels are spinning. But when you’re on that water. You look as graceful as a duck on top of that pond is moving, but it doesn’t look like you know how.
2:21:28 And that’s the same thing a leader needs to do. And I try to emulate that. You don’t need to look like there’s a crisis when there is a crisis because that’s when everybody all of a sudden starts to act like there’s a crisis.
2:21:43 All right, well, thank you. So how much time do I have here? You still have almost four minutes over four minutes. So the question was, what makes you the ideal candidate? I’m going to switch a little bit on this because of the question that we had for our last candidate being recorded.
2:21:59 It’s out there. I’d like you to have maybe a little bit towards that. You mentioned situational leader, which I think is very important.
2:22:06 So when you have a situation that you have a clear direction from our state, you had mentioned even that on policy. We had a situation here in the last couple years where I believe we had a clear direction from the state and from the governor. Our last candidate kind of hinted maybe where we didn’t listen to the public and that was really on our mask situation.
2:22:34 Sure. So in the last couple minutes, how would you have liked to see that that had played out if you were in this role? Would you, would you have been that situational leader? I don’t think, I think at that point you’d have to know you make the decision. I mean, that’s you flex over into.
2:22:52 Okay, if this is the state mandate, right? I mean, let’s take a look what’s happened down south. You know, you buck the system and boards get replaced and then other things, ramifications that come in that are both financial, personal, professional. And so you have to understand your place.
2:23:13 I think that goes back to humility. Right. My politics do not determine what I am instructed as a superintendent of a school district to do.
2:23:24 No different than when my superintendent tells me in my role now or previous roles. This is what we’re doing then. To me, that was a mandate that came from my boss.
2:23:34 You are my boss. State tells us what to do. The piece that really is difficult when you’re in that role where you’re like, look, we’re going to follow the state mandate and this is what we’re going to do is how to find a way to be an empathizer to all of the stakeholders to be able to walk that tightrope of, look, this is what we need to do.
2:23:59 This is why, this is how we’re going to try to mitigate it. This is how we’re going to try to make it as painless as possible. But this is what we’ve been instructed to do.
2:24:10 And that’s tough because you’re going to get hit. You’re not 73,000 students. How many of those are families? You’re not going to make everybody happy, but you got to give them the why and you got to work through the best ways to do it.
2:24:25 And I think that’s where the conversation sometimes, and not just necessarily in the mask mandate, but I think that’s where the conversation should sometimes roll in other situations, such as instead of saying, let’s just buck the system, no, we need to do it, but let’s talk about how we can work within those parameters. Is there a little wiggle room here? What can we do here? What are your ideas? Don’t just share with me that you don’t like it. Don’t share with me because that’s not going to help.
2:24:52 And I can’t help to say this is what we’re going to do. All right, now we’re at a stalemate, but the conversation needs to shift away from no yes, no yes to how’s the best way to make this work? How can we make this? And that’s through conversations. And that means sitting there getting berated at times.
2:25:09 You know, that’s through being, you know, lots of names being thrown your way. That’s gonna happen. You can’t take it personal, right? It’s personal for me as a parent with my children in the school system.
2:25:23 But when I sit in that role, in whatever role I hold in the school district, that’s my profession, to take care of what’s best for children. And at the end of the day, parents can be mad at me all they want, but if I’m making the best decision for children, I’ll sleep at night. Thank you.
2:25:43 Good, mister Trent. We’re good. Is there anybody that felt like they didn’t get a question asked that I could actually ask for you before I move on to my one question that I have and give him enough time to finish out? We’re at 1112 and I want to give you ten minutes.
2:25:59 So I’m going to give myself two minutes to ask you a question in response because then that’ll give you the ten minutes. And then if anybody needs to use the restroom for five, we can before we start the next. So my question is, is that one of my big passions for the past six years has been career and technical education.
2:26:16 We’ve spent a considerable amount of money in infrastructure building footprint of career and technical programs. One of the issues that we have is that the students that may be taking those classes may not see that as a career, but rather just an extra class to take, which is okay. And I think that there’s also a need for some of our students that may have at risk and some of those other things to see a career through those, as opposed to sometimes maybe they wouldn’t be the best fit for college, but if they’re not, then sure showing them that there’s something they can succeed at also.
2:26:49 So I want to kind of hear what your vision would be somewhere wrapped around how a successful career and technical program would work. I know I don’t expect you to understand our infrastructure and everything else, but just philosophically, like, how. How could you take one and put it forward? Because in my mind, we’re preparing to be the footprint for space.
2:27:07 Yes. So with that, it’s all you, man. So I’m going to start with a personal anecdote.
2:27:12 My 28 year old son went to high school, where I was the principal, God bless him, and sat through all of my meetings and all of our conversations about post secondary education. And when we would sit down at home and say, okay, what do you want to do? He had two passions in life, music and nascar. That was it.
2:27:37 Those were his passions. Anything else was not important. And so he’s like, well, I’m gonna go to Florida State for music.
2:27:44 And I said, all right, we’ll get you on the path, and we’ll start looking at Florida State for music. I came home from work one day, and he’s sitting on the couch, and he’s like, dad, we need to talk. And I’m like, well, no, let’s not have that conversation.
2:28:00 He says, I’d like to go check out a school tomorrow. And I said, all right, what school? And he goes, universal Technical institute. I said, oh, yeah, over there off Taffyland Road.
2:28:10 He says, yeah. He goes, I want to check out the automotive school. I’m like, all right.
2:28:14 So I said, yeah, there’s no school tomorrow. So, yeah, we’ll go, you know, I’ll take it. He goes, oh, we have an appointment at 03:00.
2:28:19 I’m like, who are you? We got there at 03:00. At 06:00, I signed a contract to send him to North Carolina for the NASCAR Technical Institute. I was so impressed with the program.
2:28:30 And he graduated UTI, and he is now working Kentucky for volkswagen. And on the way home, from that check. I looked at him and said, dude, why did we just have this conversation today? He goes, dad, you’re a high school principal.
2:28:47 I’m supposed to go to university. I said, you sat in my meetings with juniors and seniors, and I’ve always talked about CTE, military university, workforce. What are you thinking? He goes, dad, you’re a high school principal.
2:29:01 I thought I had to do it. I’m like, well, I obviously didn’t market it to my son. I sure need to do a better job marketing it to everybody else.
2:29:08 That was part of the problem, right? 1970s grease shop is not automotive, right? And so in where we’ve been, one of my mentors was the associate superintendent over CTE in Orange. He’s one of my current mentors, and he said it best. He says, why are we pushing kids into AP or Cte? Why can’t you have steak and lobster? And why are we only marketing it to this group of students versus this group of students? And that’s what it comes down to, right? It’s the marketing, it’s the viability, not just of the program, but the future.
2:29:40 A teague welder can come out right now and make 70,000 plus to start. That’s such a trade. That’s such a skill.
2:29:48 An art is what I would call it. How are we not communicating with businesses to build these programs over in orange? They turned it into Orange Technoblade College with five campuses as opposed to these five remote sites that were all set. And unfortunately, when I became principal, and I know I’m out of time, but when I became principal, most of the programs that we had, we had an automotive program at the high school, but it was then sent to the site, and then it all got pushed out to the site.
2:30:15 And so now we’ve lost that connectivity necessary sometimes in those schools, it is crucial for our society to build those programs and to not treat them mutually exclusively. And it goes back to one of the three challenges in a school district, marketing. What are we doing to sell this as a product and not just as a.
2:30:42 Here’s something else. Here’s something cool you can do. That would be my thought.
2:30:50 Thanks for that passionate speech. I didn’t know that you would get into a relationship with your son, so thank you for taking that time. That’s good.
2:30:57 I’m going to give you eight minutes because I was going to give you ten. We kind of rolled over. And I have to be respectful of the other individuals.
2:31:04 Being able to use the restroom. I get myself in trouble because I forget sometimes when we roll completely, I give you the eight minutes and this is your floor to tell us anything that you may not have been able to, and we appreciate it. So here you go.
2:31:16 So I shared that my father went into education after the air Force, and I’m gonna hold on right now. So when he passed in 1997, a young age of 50, he never got to see me progress through my career. I’ve been a teacher for four years.
2:31:41 I have worked my entire career to honor his name. I’m not here today about a legacy. I’m here because I was drawn, say, can I make Brevard a little bit better, even if it’s only in four months than when I got there? Because I do feel like I’ve been able to do that throughout my career.
2:32:08 In all of the assignments that I’ve been given. I believe that if you were to do any research on me, the value of relationships, how you treat people, why they keep coming back, and while they’ll run through a wall for you, even if they don’t understand or don’t agree, but they believe in you that much, that you’re their recognized leader. We do panorama surveys, garner support, thoughts about support.
2:32:44 My learning community office was 95% favorable rate. That’s with all administrators, AP’s, principals. But they’ll tell you my title doesn’t matter, the job matters, children matter.
2:33:01 The title just gives me some latitude on how much I get to do to get there. But I’ll lay on the floor and talk to a child in trauma. I’ll sit in a classroom and do a one on one with a child.
2:33:17 I will sit with a teacher who’s ready to quit and a principal. Well, numerous principals over the last two years that were ready to quit and say, we’re going to make it through. How you treat people is how you’ll be remembered.
2:33:35 And that’s something my father instilled in me. That’s why I’m here. Can I bring a relationship base that can bring stakeholders together after the last two years of high contention? And I think that I’ve got that skillset to maybe heal some wounds.
2:33:57 Scars are not going to go away, but maybe heal some wounds, build some trust in district leadership, school board leadership, with the folks that are out there that are doing the job. I believe that’s what makes me the best candidate for this job. Thank you.
2:34:17 Thank you, Mister Larson. I’m going to give each one of them an opportunity to say a couple of words real quick. Mister Trump.
2:34:24 Well, Mister Larson, I just again want to thank you very much for coming out, laying all on the line. You’re an impressive human being, so I appreciate it and I wish you all the best here. Thank you.
2:34:37 Miss Wright, I want to thank you as well for coming and putting your name in the contest here. That’s a step of bravery. It is.
2:34:44 I look forward to our one on one this afternoon so we’ll get to know you a little better. Thank you, Miss Campbell. Yeah, thank you.
2:34:51 And it always brings an extra spotlight, especially since we have you lined up like we’re the inquisition and live stream. And it’s nothing like a little pressure. We very much appreciate your time and your candid responses.
2:35:04 Miss Jenkins. Yeah. Thank you again for taking the drive over here and joining us today.
2:35:09 I appreciate it very much. And I appreciate your responses, not only about your professionalism, but as well as your personal. So thank you for being open and honest, and I look forward to our one on one.
2:35:20 Mister Larson. I know you got a couple of FSU fans up here, so thank you for telling that story. I do have one that went to Florida too, I just gotta say.
2:35:28 Right, equality right there. And I did want to say you have a very impressive resume and I appreciate the time for you coming here before us and taking the time to answer some of these questions. I’m excited.
2:35:39 I’m looking forward as they are. So let’s get moving. Thank you.
2:35:43 Thank you very much to all of you. Thank you. Hello, everybody.
2:43:43 Welcome back. We’ve got some of our. For all those that are tuning in, we have our next contestant for the interim superintendent.
2:44:15 And we have a series that’s going to be the same exact way. What we have is a five minute introduction, which is followed by a series of ten minute question, multiple questions by each board member. And then I usually come in at the end, depending on the time.
2:44:34 Ask about one question, give you about ten minutes to finish up with anything. That may not have been an opportunity for you to do so in the past, but with that, I think we get started. I really appreciate you being here and taking the time to apply and to come.
2:44:51 You came from out of town and we really appreciate it. I know. Still out of town.
2:44:55 It’s a couple down. Ship will ride. I know the road well, but we appreciate you coming.
2:44:59 So thank you very much. The floor is yours. Well, good morning.
2:45:03 And I appreciate the opportunity to talk with you about your expectations for the interim superintendent and how my extensive experience both in the interim setting as an interim superintendent in several districts, and my executive skillset in very large school districts and state settings and highly diverse communities and very large school systems may fit your needs, particularly as you go forward through a nationwide search for your permanent superintendent. Let me be clear. I believe that an interim should not apply to be a candidate for the permanent role.
2:45:45 And I base that on many a lot of experience, both as a search consultant where I’ve done a number of superintendent searches, as also as the interim superintendent. And number one, you want to have the maximum flexibility as a board, I assume, to attract the finest candidates and not restrict in any way someone who might apply for the job. Okay.
2:46:16 And so you don’t want the interim to try to do your business in the short term and sometimes making some very hard decisions with the board in order to, so to speak, address the issues. You don’t want your permanent superintendent to have to handle day one and you don’t want that individual looking to campaign for the job simultaneously. So what I’m saying to you is that when I’ve walked into interim positions, I’ve made it known if the legislation, as I explained, perhaps you had seen when I was in Baltimore when the state took over and I was brought in as the CEO and CFO, that the interim could not be permanent.
2:46:57 And I think that was the best arrangement. It allowed the school board and for me on school board’s agenda, to make hard decisions, to do the kinds of things necessary. It also allowed for a very thorough nationwide search.
2:47:12 Ultimately, the teachers and administrative association and the board went to the state board to change the legislation, which they did so to offer me the job. I refuse to accept it. I don’t go into a job and say one day I’m only going to be an interim, the next day I want the permanent job unfair.
2:47:31 So I’ll say that upfront to you. And so I appreciate very much that you are looking for an interim, and I think you understand I could begin immediately to provide a very seamless transition so that when schools open right after winter break, I hit the ground running. In fact, I would appreciate that if you do decide to appoint me, that I could begin the next day at 08:00 to start debriefing your current superintendent and working with you individually and as many stakeholders between now and the first week of January.
2:48:06 I’m in a position where I don’t start another consulting position contract, which we just received last night until late January. But I will have already talked to my partner and explained that if I was so fortunate to work with you, all bets are off. I will not be doing that.
2:48:24 I will simply find someone else to replace me in that role and everything else I would do. Because what I do when I take over a school district, either in a permanent or interim basis or on a consulting basis, when I do my thorough and efficient studies, like 89 districts around the nation, everything else stops in my life. My wife doesn’t like that, nor does my dog.
2:48:48 But the bottom line is that you deserve 24/7 my attention and my effort. As I pointed out, I’ve specialized in leading large school districts, states with multiracial populations, multiethnicity, wide variety of socioeconomic levels, and I’m talking about the second largest school district in the nation. I’m talking about Baltimore, 139,000 students.
2:49:16 I’m talking about, yes, I’ve even taken on some smaller districts. But the point being is that in the districts I’ve run as a permanent 49,000 students and whatever, that in each situation that I’ve walked into in my entire career, because I was trained for this is a district or a state in transition, I have followed always in the middle of the year, those superintendents were departing for one reason or another. So having very specialized experience in this area allows me to bring a perspective that I hope could be of value to you.
2:49:57 And seriously, I’m at that point in my life and career where I choose to work at the projects and wherever and help districts out because it’s my way of giving back and I enjoy it, get a great deal of personal satisfaction out of it. As we talk here, you’ve seen my paperwork. I’m sure you’ve read through it.
2:50:17 You know my life better than I do, probably at this point. But I think what’s important is that I’m also having done consulting jobs and everywhere from huge districts. I just completed one that took over a year, Baltimore county, and did a large lion’s share of that in every aspect of operations, as well as for the county government and Houston the year before.
2:50:39 And I can go on. I don’t know if I sent you a list of the consulting assignments in districts, I will provide that and even the studies I’m so interested but has allowed me to know how to move into seamlessly a school system. I’ve already done a deep dive into every document that your district has online or the state has about you.
2:50:59 I know your strategic plan, your metrics and your outcomes under your organizational structure. And I read through your recently adopted budget line by line. This is what I do.
2:51:10 I immerse myself in and be knowledgeable of. That’s what I’ve been trained to do when I was at Wharton of how to move into a transitional situation. So I’m not going to go on to talk anymore.
2:51:24 I think my time may be up. It’s just that I’m really looking forward to this conversation because it appears to me that you’re very focused on the notion of an intro and not conflating that with that of a permanent, because they are two distinctive roles. Very, very distinctive.
2:51:43 And I speak only from the fact that having been in all those roles, I know the difference. And also having been the chairman of two state boards, I know something about what it means in terms of having to manipulate all of that, and also what to do with regard to board policies, directions, regulations, and the context of state and federal laws. Thank you for that time.
2:52:12 Sorry, I went over. No, Mister Schiller, I don’t mind going over a little bit. That’s why I give up my time at the end.
2:52:17 So thank you so much for those comments. Miss Campbell’s going to go up first, then Miss Jenkins, then Trent, and then Miss Wright. You have the floor, miss.
2:52:26 Thank you and good morning, Doctor Schiller. Good morning. Good to have you with us today.
2:52:30 Just fine, yeah. So my first question has to do with relationship building in our community. So how would you build and facilitate a collaborative, trusting relationship with all of our stakeholders, our school and district level leaders, students, families, teachers, support staff, even our business and community leaders.
2:52:49 And if you would give some of your experiences in doing that, sure. I’m going to frame most of my responses from the perspective of interim, the experience I’ve had as intro. If you want me to talk about my high school years as a principal of 2300 students in New Jersey, I can roll that in and whatever.
2:53:11 But in every situation that I found that I walk into a district community somewhat in transition whereby credibility may need to be improved or restored with the stakeholders, elected officials, governors, and that the interim has a very critical role. Assuming that that particular matter that you praise, Miss Campbell, is high on the board’s agenda for the interim, then I’m going to rely on you to help me open the doors to meet the right people at the right time, visit the schools together, meet with the right stakeholders so they understand that together, the board and its chief executive officer are marching in the same direction and looking to see what we can do to build the relationship that you as a board need with your community and stakeholders in order to go forward. Example, my last assignment as an interim in the number one rated academic school district in Fairfax county in Virginia.
2:54:27 Superintendent left with difficult situation. The board and the city council were fractured. There was no credibility in the budget.
2:54:39 And the board said, okay, bob, do some magic. Do whatever you can to repair. We need to get in.
2:54:47 They believe they needed a new high school. They needed a school, elementary school to be renovated and expanded. And sure enough, it did need all that one.
2:54:59 I built the budget in public, line by line, piece by piece, with the board and with the public, in public settings, and of course, all of the city council members who I brought in as partners because they funded us. That developed a lot of credibility because it answered people’s questions of, oh, you’re spending too much. You’re not spending in the right place.
2:55:26 My school’s not getting as much as another school. Number two, getting to know the informal and formal leaders of your community, the opinion makers, the ones who you believe, both elected and appointed, and also the informal. Those are the important ones, to what extent we can draw in and I can work with them and you as a team, partners to address their issues and to restore the credibility for one purpose, in order to put together the foundation to hand off seamlessly to your permanent superintendent.
2:56:07 Nothing harder for a permanent superintendent to walk into a community that’s fractured or doesn’t have a lot of trust and belief. I can go on forever in terms of how much time and how much effect. But the important thing is openness, communication, going to these folks and seeing it and talking with them and listening.
2:56:31 And again, it’s not what I, as the interim, may do, it’s what I, as the interim on your behalf, am doing. And that’s why I would ask, as I do in other cases, and I know you all have jobs and families and obligations, and although this might be your highest paying job, that this is the kind of time that needs to be invested, and I know you probably will make that investment to the extent you can. The other thing is that from my experiences in this role, remember I walked in, into, after being appointed by the governor and a state superintendent in Baltimore, after they took over this school district of Baltimore, took it over, removed the entire board, removed all the central administration, canceled all the contracts, negotiated agreements immediately and said, go get them.
2:57:26 You have to negotiate the contracts, which I do. I’ve been trained in that rebuild. A budget was in multiple millions of dollars of deficit.
2:57:36 I’m certified as a chief financial officer, school business administrator in about five states and turn around the lowest performing urban school district in the nation, academically and in your spare time, rebuild the relationship with the community. Now, mind you, Baltimore is largely majority minority. I’ve worked in many of those kinds of districts around in Shreveport, Louisiana, and Los Angeles, and I can go on.
2:58:13 That’s been my career. And for me to go in and to be able to build the credibility that was needed, and I guess the highest testament that I could point to it was the fact that, as well as with the mayor, because I had to create a fiduciary, single fiduciary unit of the school district separate from the city, well, all these folks are the ones who had gone forward to the legislature to want to make me permanent. We did something right.
2:58:47 The point being is that I don’t know what will work here, but you and I will find out what will work in right quick order, meet with the right people and go down that road, because what I want and what you would hope at the end of however long this will be, and I’m sure your search consultants are going to tell you, expect six months to eight months before someone is here. If you’re going to do work with any of your national firms. I’ve worked with them.
2:59:14 I was part owner of the second largest one that we sold out to one of these in 2012. Okay. I know what the process is, and it’s so hard these days to find quality candidates who are going to relocate, move, and come in, much less leave their district before the end of the school year.
2:59:36 So. But the point is that we would set the table for and rebuild as much credibility as we can through the budget, through our openness, through our willingness to listen and to respond accordingly. And not everyone’s going to like what we have to say or agree with what we have to say, but we’re going to be honest and frank about what we’re going to say and what we’re going to be capable of doing and turn it over.
3:00:02 So when your new permanent superintendent comes in, whether you choose someone from within or someone from wherever, that individual can benefit from the fruits of our efforts. Thank you. Thank you, Miss Campbell.
3:00:18 That’s right. Thank you. You actually answered my second and third questions.
3:00:21 One was, what would a productive, successful interim process. Yeah. Yeah.
3:00:26 So my second question that you, you covered already, so that’s good. About what this interim process might look like. And then what is your availability? You said immediately, and in fact, immediately.
3:00:36 Immediately. Pre, immediately. Yeah.
3:00:38 08:00 tomorrow morning. There you go. There you go.
3:00:42 So my final question is, what do you believe to be the ideal working relationship with a school board, and how do you achieve that? It’s different with an interim relationship with the board than that of a permanent. And I’ll tell you why. One is because as the interim, I am following your specific objectives and directive and our agreed upon plan.
3:01:15 I’ve been fortunate to work with extremely fine boards, particularly on an interim basis as full partners. I had to train in service the entire new Baltimore city board before I could release them to the. For the legislature.
3:01:37 Let them to take over as function as a board. Okay. I’ve been.
3:01:44 I’ve had close working relationships and personal relationships that have been ongoing for years with many of my former board members. They’ve been to my home. They still come here.
3:01:53 Maybe it’s because we’re in south Florida. They come visit. We talk often, those who are still with us and alive.
3:02:01 But the point being is that it’s a partnership, folks, on an interim basis. Highly interactive, communicative, on the phone, weekly written update. So you all know what I and my staff are doing, and the critical nature is the fact that we look upon this and send a message to your public.
3:02:26 We’re in this together. Yeah. I may be the figurehead who may be more available than you all might be at times, but I’m doing your work.
3:02:35 I am representing you, Miss Wright, you, mister Trent, and the collective board. I follow your policies, your directives to state laws, the federal laws, and implement them faithfully with all of my staff. I don’t interpret, I implement them.
3:02:57 Thank you. Thank you, Mister Schiller. Miss Jenkins, are you prepared? Yeah, sorry.
3:03:00 Thank you, Mister Schiller. So I’m going to have to tweak my questions a little bit, because you have a different experience and you’ve been very forthcoming about your intentions here. So it kind of changes the questions that I asked previous candidates.
3:03:26 You seem to work for yourself. It seems like you’re your boss, technically, but you’ve rotated from place to place when you step into these roles. And so I guess my question would be, you never necessarily had an evaluation from these positions that you’ve stepped into.
3:03:42 But I’m sure there’s been some kind of feedback. And so has there ever been a scenario where you stepped into these school districts where the feedback might have not been so positive and offered an opportunity for professional growth? And how did you take that and possibly implement it to something that you did in the future? I didn’t burden you with sending to you my evaluations going back to when I was a principal. Okay.
3:04:05 I’d be happy to give them all to you. State level, district level. Okay.
3:04:13 On many contracts I’ve worked with pay for performance bonus effect, where I could tell you proudly, I got 100% of the bonuses that were put out there for hitting the goals of student achievement, dropout rate and whatever. Okay? I’ve been trained into management by objective and results process at Wharton Penn. And I’d be happy to offer that to you.
3:04:42 Generally in my early years, the criticism, okay, where I need growth, impatience, wanting things to happen in districts and organizations more quickly because of the inertia that bureaucracies have. And I can remember one interesting, because I was going through, my wife hates all these boxes I have. I keep these things.
3:05:15 Okay? You know, and going through one yesterday, going through a box, and she’s always telling me I have to get rid of more stuff. More stuff. Where I came across one from Illinois, I was looking at the evaluation and the only real negative was the fact that I don’t have enough time in the day to balance all the time I spent externally visiting the school districts and the universities and with legislators and also inside the agency, the department.
3:05:47 And, you know, that is a balance in a particularly in a large, diverse district like this one. How does one balance being out there? And I will promise you this, I will be in your schools two to three days a week with you, if you’re available with you, okay. And also balance what I have to do inside.
3:06:08 But the key is if you have a very strong team inside your deputy, and I know your organizational chart, and I know the announced departures and their dates of departure and the challenges they are, but if you have a strong team, got a strong CFO, you’ve got a strong, effective folks in all the key positions like the facilities and whatnot. And I happened to watch a portion before I got to a dentist’s appointment of your board meeting where you, your assistant superintendent, was addressing your facilities questions and getting flashbacks to other school tracks I had to build and everything like that, okay? Because I’ve been heavily involved with facilities, facilities management contracts, new schools. And if you have a strong internal team, given the management style that I like to talk about with you, that when folks know what the expectations are and the standards, and we have agreed upon knowledge of where we’re going, what we’re going to get accomplished, I’m not going to do their work for them.
3:07:19 I’m going to hold them accountable, work with them closely. But they’re the experts in the field. I know about all those things very deeply because I’ve done every kind of review of districts in each of those areas, even it, which is not my strongest suit, but the point being is that sometimes it’s hard to balance, because where’s the fund? The fund is out in the schools, in the community.
3:07:48 But I am a day to day manager that I will tell you. I balanced that in Los Angeles with 700,000 students. The daily operations with the internal running of a department.
3:08:02 Okay. My time out there was lessened in my time inside. One thing I’ve learned is that I adapt to the needle by situation.
3:08:15 If the need is from you all to be external, rebuild and build relationships, you know where my focus of attention will be. Making sure that in the home front, all the trains are running on time. If the attention is that I got to attend to some of the major issues inside the department in order to support.
3:08:37 And that’s all the central office does, provide the support to the schools, then that’s where I will be, or I will find that balance very quickly. You know, when I do these evaluations of school districts and superintendents and operations of a mall, one of the things I always look at is how is someone using their time and to what extent it’s effective and where are we putting our efforts? So in a long, the short term is that I’ve learned that I have to adapt to the need of the organization. And I would expect that you, with whomever you choose to be your intro, I’m sure you have other fine candidates that you will sit down and say, all right, as a board, this is what we’re going to focus on.
3:09:30 And consequently, we’re going to have checkpoints every month, every two months, every three months, or at the end. What is our scorecard of what you expected and how we are going? And I think the important thing is it goes back to, and I know I’m repetitive here, the iterative relationship between the board and this is, for me, working with five board members, I’ve worked with as many as 15, typically nine. Okay, this would be a luxury.
3:10:10 Now, I don’t know about you individually, but you’re gonna take that back. Okay. I appreciate you actually formulating my next question for me.
3:10:28 So you said that you adapt to the need, and you identified a very significant need that we’re going to have day one come January. We are losing two extremely talented cabinet members. We have a very, very strong internal cabinet.
3:10:47 And so how would you address that need if you were to step into that role immediately? The backbone of a school district is your HR. You’re staffing, and that’s the critical issue that you’re facing, as well as every other school district, immediate and long term, one of the things I would ask for you to consider if we go forward, do you want me to bring an interim assistant superintendent, deputy superintendent, so that the new superintendent can choose or if you want to go in? My preference would be, oftentimes internally, who might be someone or might be somebody who might want to become permanent superintendent and have the exposure, if not already, but exposure at that level in the district, if somebody, if we can find, and I often look to find folks from within, groom them, help them understand. I’ve done a lot of executive coaching of new superintendents and others, and I’ve oftentimes, I’ve been teased that I have a pretty good eye for good horse flesh.
3:12:03 Okay. In that being able to pick someone out of a district and elevate them. One of my best friends was a high school principal who I elevated to become my deputy in no.
3:12:17 Started off as an assistant superintendent for HR, then became my deputy in Caddo Parish, Shreveport, Louisiana. I mentored him, and then when I moved on, he went to two large school districts as superintendent, and he’s a great friend of mine. But the point being is that perhaps we could reason together, telling me, all right, Bob, bring in someone immediately from the outside.
3:12:44 We want them on an interim basis. He’ll leave the doors open. Or, Bob, how about some of these people from inside you could look at, and I would look at those folks very closely.
3:12:56 If I could find someone or you had someone in mind who could step in, in those roles, temporary or even permanent, and could bring a lot to the table, and with my guidance, I’d move there tomorrow. If these two folks who are leaving and they are critical to your operation in those positions, then that would be, I would think, job one. And, Miss Jenkins, you said that the board considers that your internal cabinet team.
3:13:30 Strong boy, that’s music to my ears. I wouldn’t want to begin to tell you how many places I’ve walked into and had to replace people immediately or shortly thereafter who just simply could not. That’s why I went in Baltimore as the CFO as well as CEO.
3:13:49 He drove that district into deficit, $30 million by mid year, gone. And so, point being is that we want to get the best team that will meet your need short term and or long term, and to be able to go forward with that, that I think is really critical. That’s what I would look at.
3:14:10 I have a network of folks that I might be able to turn to who might walk in here short term. But the point being is that how wonderful it would be for me, if I was your interim, to have people who know this district, who, you know, who trust and again, seamless, and that’s what I work for. A seamless transition with me coming in and an absolute seamless transition with the new from me to the permanent.
3:14:38 And that, that’s what I’m about, that what’s what helped you. I hope that answers your question. Yes.
3:14:46 Thank you. Thank you. Mister Shiller, Mister Trent.
3:14:52 I’m actually struggling to find a question you have not. I’m sorry, did I mess up your order or your structure here? Perfect. No, you’re doing great.
3:15:02 I, brother, you know, I think you’re getting, I think you’re getting a sense of who I am. I’m much more conversational than sitting here and giving you a rote kind of response. And that’s the privilege of age.
3:15:19 Mister Trent, you could ask a policy question. I don’t think we, yeah, I think that’s, that’s been there, so we’ll go back to the one. All right.
3:15:26 So more of the day to day thoughts on policy review committees. Have you had any experience in this process? And have so very heavy. Yes.
3:15:34 Okay. Very heavy regard to school district policy review with our committees, with our board where I’m at the table to give the advice. And of course, you know, you subscribe to probably the Florida school board, association policy and other associations that will give you and through your legal office to have them vetted and so forth.
3:15:55 But I think as a new board is a really critical issue and I’ve done that with many of my new boards to go through the policy, because you are now in effect representing your community and you want your policies to so reflect that. And so consequently, I think I can bring to that process insight, great deal of experience, and also importantly to make sure that their implementation through regulations, whatever, and with staff carried out with fidelity. And I think that’s the real key.
3:16:36 You know, one of the things I studied when I was at Penn was the impact of initiatives and policy, you know, in terms of how they are designed and how when they filter through a system, how they are no longer recognizable. And so I think what’s important, Mister Trent, is the fact that I think I could be an asset in this area as much as you would need and your policy committees would need. I could give you my best thinking and advice, but I will not, I will not put in my own personal venue perspective or biases.
3:17:09 This is your community, it’s not mine. You know your community better than I will know your community. And you want to be reflective of your community’s composition, direction, philosophy.
3:17:26 Is that all right? That’s absolutely perfect. Thank you, Mister Susan. I’m actually going to just pass it on to you, if it’s okay.
3:17:35 Yeah, well, it’s Miss Robyn. Yeah, well, to take over. Yeah, no, I was thinking the same thing.
3:17:40 I was like, I may not even need to ask. Sure. Yeah.
3:17:47 Yeah. Okay. Miss Wright, it’s all yours.
3:17:50 I know. I too am also struggling with finding a question that I have prepared for you that you’ve not asked you questions. So.
3:17:56 I know, I’m like, I feel like maybe we have to switch this around. All right, so you have already indicated one of our major needs. Obviously, as this interim superintendent, from your experience, what would you say our top three needs are? With obviously the interim being one of them, maybe two more needs that you see within our district.
3:18:14 Number one, need your search process. They get your permanent superintendent. The person who you select, she or he who is going to guide this district, hopefully for a number of years.
3:18:31 I’ve say this to all of my boards, is that I think that’s said somewhere. That’s your main role. Who is your chief executive officer and if for whatever reason, you leave the board this year, next year, personal reasons, at the end of the term, to somebody who’s going to be your legacy.
3:18:51 So you putting your effort on that search, number one, ma’am. Number two, internal housekeeping, staffing. Staffing, staffing and staffing the schools for next year.
3:19:08 Tough market out there, tough times in school for schools, hard to get people to relocate. I’ve had to go through massive hirings for school systems, particularly in interim roles and etcetera. And I’ve got some notions of how we’ve been successful.
3:19:27 I helped Houston Independent School District of 250,000 kids two years ago as part of the study there to revamp all of what they’re doing with their recruitment and hiring. Recently in Baltimore county that studied there did the analysis looking at the people who are leaving and their outgoing interviews and causes and surveying why people are leaving. So not so much recruitment folks to focus on, although we have to bring them in.
3:20:02 It’s the retention of what we need to be focused on. What is it that’s driving folks out or away from the profession, from Broward county. So I think that’s really critical.
3:20:15 And third, you’ve raised it okay for whatever, and I don’t know the depth, the need for strengthening community and school district credibility and support. I think those are probably brevard specific. The other things I mean, I’ve read your budget.
3:20:39 You know what, your superintendent and CFO know what they’re doing with regard to constructing a budget. I can bring some dimension to that and ask the right questions and build it in a way to assist them and to guide them in what you’re looking for. So, you know, and it appears that many of your projects are doing well.
3:21:01 So I guess the big picture is to help you move forward with your search for the permanent. I’ve done a number of searches. I’ve helped as an interim.
3:21:12 I’ve helped districts along with their search consultant, because who knows better what the job is. And, you know, I’ve served as that resource for candidates, briefing them, preparing the briefing books that I turn over to them before they come in. You know, I can help you in a lot of those kinds of ways if you so choose.
3:21:34 Okay. But I think what we would need to do, and that’s my question to you, what does the board want in the next six to eight months realistically to accomplish with your superintendent, your strategic plan for this year, your metrics, all that stuff? I mean, it’s all boilerplate and very nicely constructed outcomes. What are the outcomes? You know, looking at all these things.
3:21:58 But most importantly, here’s your time in the district in transition and transformation. How to redefine Brevard county schools. I’d like to be a part of that.
3:22:12 I have one more question. This is a little off script, and again, because you have already achieved the answers of all the questions I was going to ask you, does that mean I could leave soon? That means you’re going to get lunch early. So looking at your resume, it looks like obviously you have a lot of experience, none of which is really in Florida, though.
3:22:29 How familiar are you with Florida statutes and our rules here? I conducted the search for the national search for the commissioner of education, Florida, like four commissioners ago. Okay. Okay.
3:22:41 Got to know Tallahassee real well. Actually, I’ve been living in Florida since 1950 through 50 something when my parents moved their business from New Jersey to Florida, started to go to Florida school, so they realized they were not in Miami, not meeting my needs. And I went back and was educated in New Jersey, but spent more time.
3:23:03 I’ve surfed all your beaches. I’ve fished all your waters here, up and down. Been here a long time.
3:23:11 My father and I and business associates actually tromped through a place called Kissimmee when it was all swampy and whatever. And someone said this notion of a Disney world coming here. My father didn’t see the investment, I’m sorry to say, that’s so good.
3:23:28 My wife and I have personally owned our homes here in Martin county since 1979. My folks passed on, but after they moved from Miami, years later, sold out their businesses, I spent. If I had frequent flyer mods for all the times as a kid, I would fly.
3:23:51 I watched Miami from downtown Miami, from nothing to what it is today. Okay. I also conducted a major study of Sarasota county and had responsibility for their reconstructing and doing the thermofficient for their budget, HR, transportation.
3:24:20 I know I, I know the green book. I know every aspect of the laws here. You’d be surprised.
3:24:25 I mean, I do this for a living. I’ve done this my life, whether it’s California, you know, people say, oh, you can’t just parachute into. Well, sure you can.
3:24:34 There’s not that much difference. You know, it’s a pastime. I read school codes.
3:24:39 Okay. There’s not going to be much that I’ve never encountered. I’ll tell you to.
3:24:44 And I know Florida. I know, I know Florida very well. For 50 some odd years, yes, we’ve lived, and I have lived in other states with jobs we require, but we’ve always had our main residence in Stewart, Florida.
3:24:59 And so my wife and I are, that’s, that’s been our world. Personal. My wife was a former elementary school teacher and assistant principal and counselor.
3:25:12 That’s how I got into education. I was all set to get my MBA in economics. That was my training originally, finance economics.
3:25:20 But there was this thing about the University of Southeast Asia that attracted me back in the Vietnam era, which, and I came out of it. And my girlfriend at the time, who now my wife of 53 years, introduced me to the wonderful world of elementary, of education. So I took a job.
3:25:41 I got paid. Want to guess what my first salary was as a teacher of English? $27,000. $11,000.
3:25:52 5800. $4400. How much? $4,400 to be a high school English teacher.
3:25:58 And they gave me $400 to be the varsity basketball coach and city baseball coach. And in New Jersey, they also gave me a shovel to shovel off the infield and a pitchers mound for baseball. I got hooked.
3:26:16 I was hooked in education then, and fortunately I’ve had wonderful mentors along the way to keep driving me. They recognized something in me that I didn’t see. And you can see in rapid order.
3:26:29 I taught honors English, advanced placement English for four years, became a high school principal in another district. You talk about parachuting with 2300 kids that was out of control. And my mandate from the board and from the superintendent was bring this school, high school, under control, discipline wise.
3:26:50 Okay? Stop the food fight, stop the excessive cutting, stop the violence and whatever. That was my job to start off with. Okay.
3:26:57 And then in rapid succession, you’ve seen. You’ve seen my life. This is your life.
3:27:03 I’ve laid it out for you. Thank you. And I got the scars to show it to Miss Wright.
3:27:11 You still have a minute and 45 seconds. Do you want to give it to Miss Jenkins? I was gonna. What I was gonna do is ask him, because we’re getting close to the end, if.
3:27:18 If we can ask you a question and you can tie it into your final piece also. Does that. Cause it kind of goes with what I think you would say anyway.
3:27:27 Miss Jenkins, if you. I’ll give away my questions right. Miss Jenkins, if you can ask that question, and then if you can roll from that question into your final, we should be able to finish up on time.
3:27:40 Sure. I kind of avoided this question originally just because I felt. Don’t get me wrong.
3:27:46 When you step in as an interim, our stools are still running, students still need to be successful. But I was deviating a little bit just to make sure I had the other questions in there, because I think this is even a bigger picture kind of question. So do with it what you think is appropriate for the role you believe that you will be filling, please.
3:28:03 So, please explain your experience with diversity, equity, and inclusion, and what you have done in your previous roles and what you think you would do in this one to ensure that all of our students are successful. Could you repeat that? I’m having a hard time hearing from the distance here. Yeah, the echo we hear.
3:28:22 That’s okay. So, please explain your experience with diversity, equity, and inclusion, and what you have done and what you would do in this role to ensure all of our students are successful. And again, more framework of what you really believe your role as this interim would be.
3:28:40 I’ve worked, as I indicated to you, mostly large, diverse school system, many levels of socioeconomic many. And when I talk about diverse, I’m talking about students with special needs. I notice your percentage is about 6% higher than that of the national average of those who are classified.
3:29:03 I’ve dealt with consent decrees in special ed, consent decrees with integration. I’ve worked in school districts with high levels of hispanic population, non English speaking, like Los Angeles, African American, Shreveport, Louisiana, my states throughout. Okay.
3:29:29 And I’ve endeavored that any child who walks into any of our schools, whether it’s any state school or schools that I was responsible for up to 2.4 million students or in our district schools, regardless of condition identity, regardless deserves a safe, secure environment, which I’m a bugger for, as well as the education, the best that we can offer by making sure that we provide this supports structure rigor needed for them to be successful. To that end, my boards and I will give you all that data you would like.
3:30:13 You can see it on some of my accomplishments list. If you had a chance to look that over, I sent to you. My boards can proudly point to in every situation I was in significant closing of the gaps among subgroups, African Americans and even special ed students at the state level and the district level, and even in short term assignments, those that needed attention academically.
3:30:42 Now, I didn’t have to attend to that in Falls church because the number one academic. But I did assure us all to become the first recognized k twelve International Baccalaureate district. Okay.
3:30:56 But in the others I can show you, and I think I’ve demonstrated it to you. I can give you all the press releases and state reports like in Baltimore, Los Angeles, in such short order to turn around the test scores in each of these areas. Performance big focus.
3:31:15 Number two, engagement. I am what I am. This is how I am with people, regardless of race, nationality, ethnicity or choice.
3:31:30 I will protect your children. I will have our staff endeavor to implement fidelity, the highest academic delivery program possible with the highest standards and most importantly, to carry out the efforts of trying to rebuild after three hard years and we’re test scores have plummeted. State ratings and academic report cards here in Florida for your district and others have tanked the turnaround and in a short period of time going to be hard.
3:32:05 But if I can set the framework in place, the foundation your permanent superintendent can carry at home, and I think that’s what a leader does in a transformative environment like this one. Be the table to prepare the meal, so to speak, to allow then it to be delivered. And therefore your permanent superintendent takes on a different dimension.
3:32:30 And that is the one who implements and drives home what you’ve wanted. In which I might have had a hand, not I. I’ve never created a program on my own and said, we’re doing it. One thing I’ve learned about policy is how you build from bottom up.
3:32:47 That’s where it flows to implement. So I’m proud of what I’ve done. And that’s why.
3:32:56 That’s why I didn’t settle in on just a comfortable suburban districts for a career well, they, okay. Whereas by taking on the assignments that I’ve taken on and some really crazy ones that people don’t understand how it would jump from, you know, district to a state state back to a district takeover. Districts, I love the challenge.
3:33:18 I love the challenge of diversity. In fact, let me close with this. I was tasked first as a consultant and then as the interim deputy superintendent for eleven months in Los Angeles.
3:33:33 The state was poised to take over the school district academically unless someone came up with a plan to convince them they could do the things they need to do for the, all the middle schools and all the high schools. New superintendent who did not have a background in education, who I was helping as an executive coach and as a consultant, asked that I put together something. And with my knowledge at the state level and spending time up in Sacramento and going back and forth, I built the plan with my staff and the community, very important because they were going to have to implement it long after I’d gone.
3:34:11 Strategic plan for priority schools to turn them around. The California State Board of Education approved it unanimously. State backed off from taking over the school district.
3:34:25 I think I may have included in there accomplishments the noted improvement in the test scores and the school ratings for those schools, particularly for minority, hispanic, non English speaking and special ed and black students, was phenomenal. Outdistance every other school district, my board, that board there, that superintendent was very proud of that. But trust me, it’s not what I’m saying, but I’d be happy if you ever wanted to see any of this stuff in the data to give it to you.
3:35:02 It’s what happened. I wouldn’t have held on to any of those jobs because again, I work into a, I’ve worked with compacts, with my board on performance and with quarterly reports. How am I doing? How are we doing on everything that we said we’re going out to do and we did them in public.
3:35:22 I don’t know if you’re doing that with your strategic plan and all your metrics or not, whether or not that’s a, that’s something that’s being put up as a scorecard, as a dashboard, and also reporting to the board. I like moving my boards into policy boards, corporate type policy board operation and not in the weeds boards, administrative. And if you have the central office horses that you say that you have and you have trust in, I could see this board giving them the size of this district.
3:35:53 Remember, you’re the 48th, 49th, 50th largest district and growing in the nation. You’re large, you’re diverse, you’re running a one point, almost 5 billion all in budget. You need to be thinking big as a board.
3:36:10 How you operate, the big picture and your outcomes. You hire interim, permanent and central office staff to make sure that what you want to get accomplished is getting accomplished on the timeline you want accomplished. That’s what I could put into place.
3:36:29 And I’ve done that. Sorry for a long answer. Did that include your conclusion or.
3:36:39 We have about a minute and 20 till the time where we have to break. Let me just say this one. It would be an honor for me to join you immediately.
3:36:51 I. Like I said, I can stop writing the books I’m writing and I could put a hold on my consulting. I’m flexible at my time. And most importantly, it’d be fun.
3:37:05 I think we can laugh together, we could cry together. And most importantly, I appreciate this opportunity to have a conversation and not just structure, structure, structure, question. It’s artificial.
3:37:19 And if we are going, if you still want me to hang around for the one on ones, it’d be my honor to continue the conversation. Thank you, Mister chairman and members of the board. Thanks so much for this time.
3:37:31 Mister Schiller. Thank you very much. I mean, I want to say a million things right now because that was if we hire you, do we get all of these reports that I was reading from all of the other places that you’ve been at? All right, Mister Trent, you have something to say? I just want to say thank you very much for putting yourself out there and it was a pleasure.
3:37:51 Thank you. Thank you, Mister Trent. Yes.
3:37:54 I appreciate you coming in and all of your knowledge and expertise. I look forward to the one on one. Yeah, I do too.
3:38:01 All right, well, you’re used to the spotlight, so an extra pressure of being in the public. And of course we’re live streaming, we’ve got the inquisition set up here. So appreciate you being here.
3:38:11 And I look forward to our conversation this afternoon. I do too. Thank you.
3:38:15 Same thing. I appreciate you being here. I look forward to our water one.
3:38:18 Thank you for the laughs and the chuckles and just being a real human. I really, really appreciate that. Thank you, Mister Schiller.
3:38:25 It’s been a pleasure. Thank you very much. Thank you, sir.