2023-02-21 - School Board Meeting

4:34 The February 21, 2023 board for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. At this time, I’d like to offer my fellow board members and doctor Schiller an opportunity to recognize student staff or members of the community. Who wants to go first? Takers? Takers. I see.

5:01 Miss Jenkins, are you ready? I don’t know if I’m supposed to go first, but I will. So I’ve got quite a few. First, I want to say thank you to brevard schools found in homelessness across Brevard.

5:14 So thank you for hosting that. I want to do a huge shout out to Doctor McKinnon and her staff. And again, all of the community members and organizations that help support, support the HBCU fair.

5:25 It was phenomenal. I was not able to attend it, but I was able to help set it up. I wanted to be a part of it in some way.

5:33 And it was incredible. Even before everybody got there, just to see everybody coming together and working together. I’ve heard wonderful things, wonderful reviews.

5:41 Fun fact. Last year, when doctor McKinnon kind of threw that together, she didn’t have a whole lot of time. She didn’t really know too many people.

5:49 And it was the most incredible event with almost 500 people in attendance. This year, there was over 1000 people in attendance that day and she had a cap for 500, but nobody listened. But I’m glad they didn’t listen.

6:00 I heard it was fantastic. So hats off to all of you who were involved. I also want to say a shout out and a thank you to the staff at Gardendale’s separate day school.

6:13 I’d be lying to say if there wasn’t some challenges and concerns that I would absolutely love to have future conversations about. But those challenges and concerns have absolutely nothing to do with the hearts and the minds of the people who are there to serve those children. So thank you for all that you do.

6:30 It is absolutely not a simple job, an easy job to go to every single day. Some of you are driving 45, 50 minutes to get there every single day. It was a last minute change.

6:39 A school that was whipped together in just six weeks. I appreciate you hang in there. We have not forgotten about you and it is something we will be talking about.

6:49 I do also just want to say congratulations to everyone who participated in odyssey of the Minds regional tournament at Viera High School. It was a great event as well. It was super fun to see our kids just explore, think outside of the box and have a wonderful time and show their talents in their brains.

7:05 So thank you so much for allowing me to be a part of that day. And last but not least, I want to congratulate and celebrate the automotive students from satellite High school. Their auto tech team is the first school to win 1st, second and 10th place in the top tech challenge.

7:21 Our first place winners were Jason White and Bryson Welker. They won $10,000 scholarships each to UTI automotive School. Jason plans to go to Uti NASCAR in North Carolina.

7:33 Our second place, Bryce Giannantonio, sorry if I messed that up and Noah Arnold winning $7,500 each in scholarships to UT automotive school. Bryce plans to attend UTI after graduation and enter their diesel and marine programs. And Noah also plans to attend UTi.

7:52 And in 10th place, Koa Kelly partnering with another school. He won $1,000 scholarships to UTI. Koa plans to use his scholarship to go to UTI and pursued performance engines and diesel engines with the hopes of one day working for cat diesel Motors.

8:06 The school was awarded over $10,000 in toolboxes and hand tools and everything else for the program. But there’s more. In the Skills USA region three competition, Koa Kelly placed second, Bryce Gianantonio, sorry if I butchered that a second time.

8:24 Took third place in light maintenance and repair. Bryce and Welker took second place in automotive service technology and they will advance to state skills competition in April. Teachers Randy Pitts and Chris Bilson are in attendance along with family members for most of the students as well as principal Pruitt.

8:42 Would somebody like to come say some special words to your amazing, fantastic students? Principal Pruitt? Good evening. First, I want to thank the board and doctor Schiller for having us tonight, inviting us here to recognize the accomplishments of these amazing students and their teachers, Mister Pitts and Mister Wilson. You know, as a principal, I ask my teachers every day to provide experiences for their students that will hopefully lead to awesome opportunities after high school for their kids.

9:17 Through the continued support and resources from the school district and the commitment and dedication of these fantastic teachers and our students, they have earned these amazing post secondary opportunities. These students and teachers arrive at school an hour and a half early every day. They get extra work, extra practice on these skills in an area that they absolutely love.

9:37 On behalf of Mister Pitts, Mister Wilson and our nearly 160 autotech students, I want to thank you, the board, our school district, our CTE department for inviting us and recognizing our autotech program, our students accomplishments, and their wonderful teachers. Thank you for your commitment to the various CTE programs in our district and to our school across the district as well for all the other programs. So thank you guys so much and congratulations to you guys.

10:06 Hey, if I may interject, we usually do a picture and stuff like that, but some of you guys were telling us some of the things that we can do to improve our schools and stuff like that. So if you had one of you guys, if you could go up there and tell us, you know, what the experience is like and what we can do. I heard something about some diesel and stuff.

10:24 Go ahead man. Go ahead brother. Just so everybody knows he was nominated and then everybody else said he shouldn’t be the one nominated.

10:33 So we have no idea. We have no idea what’s about to happen here. But I’m really excited.

10:38 Just tell us about the overall program and then tell us like what we can do to help improve, man. Yeah. So our program is really phenomenal for I was, when we went to the competition I was able to talk to some of the other students and when I tell them what we have and what we’ve told them what we have, they were kind of like take it back.

10:55 Because we have a really effective program. And with the help of Mister Pitts and Mister Wilson, what’s really perfect about them is that their strengths and their weaknesses overlap. So where Mister Pitts isn’t good, Mister Wilson exceeds.

11:11 You know what that is perfect the way he said it. And it’s just that the teaching there and all the equipment we have, thanks to you all and thanks to them, it’s just helped us be prepared for our future careers. And then what can we do to help you out? What other curriculum? You had mentioned something.

11:28 Yeah. Diesel would be a very big opportunity because we’ve had two former students go on to work at Caterpillar and go to UTI for Diesel. And if we were able to get diesel like diesel equipment and stuff to train to work on diesel, I think it would be a big boost in the program and add another part of the field to get you more prepared for the field and some of the areas that those diesels are in.

11:52 You want to tell us? Yeah. So there’s a lot of diesels, like most of your concerts you go to, they’re all diesel powered because diesel is more reliable. They actually use diesels to launch rockets.

12:03 Launch rockets out at SpaceX and NASA and cruise ships are all diesel generators. And diesel is pretty much everywhere you look. Every grocery store is a diesel backup generator, diesel in both semi semis, trucking industry, all that.

12:21 It’s a massive component to trades and we use some benefits, so. You did an amazing job, man. Like, honestly, like, they didn’t.

12:28 They were like, good job. All right, I’m sorry. Yeah.

12:33 But she may, may have some more. I just wanted to kind of interject. Thank you for that.

12:37 Do you have a parent or guardian here with you today? Yes, he does. Where are they? We’ve got parents and grandparents. Great job.

12:43 Great job. Yeah, I know, I know, I know there’s a lot of you. Thank you so much for being here.

12:48 And thank you to the staff who hosted a little gathering for them right before we started this. Everybody was super appreciated, but let’s go ahead, let’s take a picture. Let’s do this.

13:36 You guys ready? You guys can come out to take the pictures if you want. Here we go. Ready? 1231 more.

13:45 I’m gonna get one. There you go, man. Can we get the family in here? Yeah, all the family members.

13:51 Come on, get in here. Family members. Let’s go.

13:58 You even know these things? Come on. We’re going to need like a row and we’re going to need another row, guys. Let’s get some diesel on this school.

14:30 All right, you guys ready? Hey, diesel. One, two, three. J.

14:34 Diesel. Yeah, I heard that. There we go.

14:37 You guys are good. Thank you. Everybody else, is that a moment where Mr. Pitts is being bad? Is that an example? Thank you, everybody.

15:14 So mister Pitts wants to make a comment, but I already know what he’s going to say. He’s going to offer for me to bring in my 18 year old Hyundai for them to fix up for me so I don’t have to buy a new one. He offered.

15:27 He offered. Yeah. Mister Pitts, you want to say something over there? Again, thank you for the board, the CTE people, and the principal for letting us do what we were able to do.

15:45 But one other comment I wanted to make is that our students are so well prepared. What y’all don’t realize, the people that we go against sometimes are fotech centers where high school kids are going to post secondary schools. And that’s who we compete against.

16:03 And some of them schools are sponsored by General Motors, Ford, Chrysler, maybe all three of them. So we’re in a battle when we go to these competitions and yet they’re not scared of them. And we come home.

16:15 We never left not being a winner somewhere in the years that we’ve been there. So again, my hats off to my students and I really appreciate their time and effort. Yeah.

16:24 Good job, guys. All right, I’ll go next. So I just wanted to give everybody a music update.

16:36 We had our jazz MPA. MPA stands for music performance assessment. It is like the championship game for band, choir and orchestra.

16:45 We had jazz band last week. I got to hear several groups. Fantastic.

16:48 So exciting. The orchestra ones, the band ones and the choir ones are coming up. And so if you guys would like or anybody in the public, it’s a free concert and you get to hear amazing orchestras back to back to back to back.

16:59 You have to sit around. You could go for three days and listen to, you know, groups sometimes, but those are coming up. But the elementary music festival is this Saturday.

17:08 The north end one is at 1230, the south end one is at 730. I think you might have to have tickets, but, you know, board if you’d like to come. We’re going to get a chance to hear our elementary schools come and sing and play and it’ll be a great week.

17:23 I wanted to. I’m going to. I’ve got.

17:25 I’ve been tasked with the science fair words, but I want to just talk really quickly. We get this lovely newspaper in our. That comes to our houses.

17:36 Oh, okay. You’re going to demonstrate. So I got my brevard business news and I just usually look at the COVID and then I, you know, put it away.

17:43 And on the COVID of this, last week’s brevard Business news, I recognized a face and that was Deborah Foley. And it said, the title of the article is BPS partners in education program teams with b two k twelve branding solutions. It’s this lovely article about our marketing, but I just wanted to recognize Deborah Foley because she has been the woman in charge of advertising and marketing for the district and bringing those dollars into our schools and our programs for so long.

18:12 And she’s retiring. And I know today that she heads up our PI program, our partners in education program. And I know today was their last pie meeting and they were all saying goodbye and having teary farewells.

18:27 And so I know she’s not here, but I hope, Russ, that you will remind her so she can go and watch the back. But I just want to express my appreciation to Deborah Foley for her amazing work. There is not hardly, I can’t think of a woman who is better loved across this county in the business and nonprofit community because of her great attitude, because of her connected ness and the way she supports our schools and, you know, single handedly, I’m sure is responsible for the positive viewpoint from so many people in our community towards our school district.

19:00 And so we just appreciate her so much. But I just wanted to highlight, if you get this bard business news, or you could probably find it online, go catch this great article. Tell us so much about the work that she does and just very sad to see her go, but wanted to express my appreciation to Deb Foley and her work.

19:16 All right, so, yes, thank you. You did a great job. Thank you, Mister Susan, for being my model.

19:25 Tell me what I need to do to be. All right, here we go. I was trying to do everything well.

19:29 All right, so another exciting we’ve had this sports state championship. We’ve got automotive championships. We are sending a boatload of kids now to the science championship games that continue on.

19:44 So let me just give you guys a little summary of what has been going on with our science and engineering fairs for our, for our secondary schools. Elementary is also going to have their awards coming up pretty soon. So brevard public Schools just completed three regional science and engineering fairs.

20:00 Across the three fairs, 572 secondary students participated, supported by 45 different teachers. The fairs were supported by many local and national industries to include l three, Harris Collins Aerospace as main sponsors, with additional support from community credit union and Fit. Florida Tech awarded over $2 million in scholarship.

20:22 $2 million? Yeah, right. I was there on Saturday night for the south End awards, and students were getting $80,000 scholarships and $72,000 scholarships. It was amazing.

20:35 80 students received a bid to the state science and Engineering fair in Lakeland, which will be in April. And our six high school best of show winners received a bid to the international science and Engineering fair in Dallas, Texas. And so here’s some results from our different fairs.

20:52 The intercoastal fair best of show in senior biological was Jeremiah Fazy. Oh, you sent me all these names, and I have to pronounce them all. Better meet than Mister Susan.

21:02 All right, Jeremiah Fazey. I’m picking on him tonight. I’m sorry.

21:07 Satellite high school. His name of the project was seaweed and spheroids, the seaweed extract. Oh, my gosh.

21:15 Now I have to pronounce all these science words, too. Oh, you’re going to be in trouble. Focoidin’s antimetastic effect on Mcf seven.

21:23 Spheroids. Year three. I think I just got smarter reading that.

21:27 Number two, the second best of show for intercoastal for the senior physical, Sharanya Natarajan from Edgewood Junior senior High School. Her project was named an engineered hub and spoke system to seek and destroy habs. Year four.

21:41 So again, an ongoing project, four years, the same project, just refining it every year. So super exciting. I don’t know.

21:47 Look it up because then you will be smarter. Mainland. Mainland Fair, which was mostly north end, right? The best of show senior biological was Jasmine Bohannon from Rockledge High School.

22:00 The title of her project was a novel imaging technique using fluorescent dyed silica nanoparticles in identifying leukemia biomarkers. I’m pretty sure that my science fair projects, like, had three words in the title. I’m just telling there was a reason why I was a music major.

22:16 All right, best of show senior physical for the mainland fair, Sophia Weiner from Holy Trinity School. Her name of her project was detecting myofacial tightness in the lower extremities and then the south fair. Best of show senior biological was Ava Otter from West Shore Junior Senior High School.

22:32 Her project was named nutrient cycling within salt wedge zone in the Indian river lagoon. Second year study. I could pronounce all those words.

22:39 Thank you, Ava. And then the best of show senior physical Laia Dimaraju from West Shore Junior Senior High School. Her project was titled novel Red Blood cell membrane wrapped septinary high entropy alloy nanoparticle for photothermal osteosarcoma treatment.

22:57 Yeah, that was my applause. So I am so proud of these students. I know we all are.

23:04 They’re going on. I think there’s actually a fair in Orlando coming up in March. We’ve got the state fair in April, the international fair in Dallas that we’re sending.

23:14 We’ve already approved that. Right? We didn’t know who it was. It was going great.

23:18 And we know they’re going to do well because our students always do well. So congratulations to all those that were also a lot of middle school winners as well, who will be going and participating. And so super proud of all our science students and science research students and the great work that they did.

23:34 So, phew. Yeah. That’s what I’m talking about.

23:42 That’s good right there. Okay. Hey, that was amazing.

23:45 Thank you for that update, Mister Gibbs. Mister Gibbs, I’m sorry. He’s that way, Mister Trent.

23:51 Sorry. Are you up here to go? Okay, I’m going to jump ahead. So he asked.

23:58 All I can say to the science fair project is, wow, that is amazing. Honestly, I cannot even imagine at that level even comprehending those things. So, congratulations to those students.

24:08 I want to follow up to Miss Deborah Foley. So I was able to participate in a pie event at the PI Disbell Chamber of Commerce puts on. They put on a luncheon every year to recognize the pie.

24:21 The partners that are helping our schools. And so every school has a specific business partner in the north end. And really what stood out to me was our faith community and how strong they are in the north end on coming alongside our schools and helping our schools.

24:37 And it was amazing to see that, how almost every single one of those schools had support from a local faith community church. And so that was very inspiring. Foley put on a phenomenal lunch.

24:48 I think Russ was up there with us, so we had a great time. The mayor was there, and he’s always a lot of fun. Dan Diesel is, you know, he’s bigger than life, so good time there.

24:58 Also wanted to give a shout out to a few other people. Transportation, this one’s been near and dear to my heart. I’m going to go ahead and do it again.

25:04 We’ve been talking about it today, but again, I just want to say thank you to our bus drivers, thank you to our mechanics, thank you to our routers, thank you to the people that are holding that department together despite the trials that we’re having right now. So hear from the bottom of my heart that we appreciate you. You are delivering our babies to and from school every day, and we cannot do it without you.

25:24 We appreciate you. We love you. We are going to solve the problem that is in transportation for every family.

25:29 So just want to give a shout out to them. I also had the opportunity to spend some time at one of my middle schools, and I’m going to give a shout out to a few of our teachers there. So, Madison Middle School in Titusville.

25:39 So the assistant principal there, Miss Donoghue, is absolutely amazing. She was able to walk me around, show me all the different things that they are doing at that school, which are phenomenal. I was able to meet with their ESE student or teacher.

25:51 Sorry, Miss Mills. And meet with some of their students there and just really inspiring, honestly, their love and dedication for students and students that are not always easy, so they just. The love that they gave to those kids was really inspiring.

26:03 And I thank the staff up there because they are doing an amazing job. All right. And I’m going to do one more.

26:09 Two more, two more. Okay. Back to the career in technical education.

26:14 So, Rachel Rutledge, our career and technical education coordinator, I cannot say enough good things about her. She really has elevated Brevard county to another level when it comes to our CTE program. So from the bottom of my heart, thank you so much for seeing the need there, meeting the need there, and really going above and beyond what is available for our students.

26:33 So you are amazing and phenomenal and an asset. And we’re very grateful for you. And then I also am going to give a shout out to our unions.

26:40 I know I want to thank them. I’ve had some time to speak with our union reps and one of the things that’s really just resonates with me is how hard they fight for our staff. And I think that they’re doing a phenomenal job.

26:55 They truly are trying to help our staff in every aspect and I’m grateful for them. So I said, we have the unicorn of unions in Brevard county because our union is a great union. They’re working hard to make sure that our teachers are getting what they deserve.

27:10 And so I appreciate them. I appreciate the 1010. I appreciate BFT.

27:14 And I just want to say thank you for advocating for our staff, employees, educators, everyone, to make sure that they get what they deserve. And that’s it. There we go.

27:24 And Mister Trent. All right, I’ll start off with the tour that I had at Merritt Island High School, which was, it was a great afternoon. I want to thank Mister Reimer for basically giving up nearly a day of his time, which is very, very valuable, especially in a large school like that, to sit us down, give us the rundown on the facilities.

27:51 I was joined by our super interim superintendent, doctor Schiller, assistant superintendent of facilities. Suhan, along with some others from the community that actually started the meeting with at Merritt island did not know exactly how it was going to go. We went everywhere.

28:10 I know every part of that school now. We looked at all the locker rooms, some of the classrooms, the stadium. We talked about work that had been done, which is plenty, and work that, you know, we still have to do in that school.

28:23 We ended on the baseball field while there was a PE class out there and got to see them in action. And they were learning some good things on field maintenance, we’ll say. But it was a wonderful day there.

28:38 I met some of the just outstanding teachers and again, I’m looking forward to visiting those schools all across the county. So those of you in Merritt island, you guys are in good hands there. We also had some time at Cocoa High School.

28:53 I had the honor to attend the black History Month breakfast. Miss Stewart at that school ran a beautiful, well run program as well as I’ve seen in any school. The choirs were amazing.

29:09 I mean, one in particular, I believe I’m going to say, mister Wilson, your daughter was amazing with her solos. That was wonderful. It was inspiring.

29:21 The speaker, Mister Kador, the councilman from Rockledge it was, his story was an inspiration to all students. And it was an honor being there and meeting him for the first time. Actually, if you don’t know more about him, look into his story.

29:38 It’s absolutely amazing. So that entire morning and early afternoon was it. It was amazing.

29:45 It was an honor. The performances from one of our charter schools, their step up club, it was at Emma Jewel, their step team was there. The performance itself was top notch.

29:57 I mean, it was as good as I’ve seen in the universities. So hats off to them as well. So I think that’s about it.

30:06 Thank you, Mister Trent. Me, I just, I wanted to reiterate that satellite beach, when I talked to Mister Pitts, he reached out and he says, hey, look what we did. So I asked Doctor Schiller to set something up and I wanted to say thank you, Doctor Shiller.

30:22 We’re trying to get back to what we had years ago, which is honoring our students before every one of our processes. And you took it to a level that we haven’t had, where they ended up having a place where the families can come in, they can have something to eat. We honor them, we meet with them.

30:38 And I think, to be honest with you, it’s one of the first true trades programs that has won an award that we bring back in front of us. Right? So hats off to your commitment to that process. And thank you so much for that.

30:49 Doctor Shiller. I truly appreciate that. I would turn it over to Russ Broun, who carried out all of the details for tonight.

30:56 Sure. Thank you, Russ. Thank you so much.

30:58 Then also, I wanted to say, I reiterate to you about our teacher union, our 1010 union and our BAsa union. They have been going through with Doctor Shiller, through the discipline, the small discipline committee to just identify some of the things we’ll be speaking about tonight and that commitment. Doctor Shiller, in the short amount of time you’ve called them, I think three times for a total of like nine to 12 hours, and you guys pounded away at it.

31:22 And I really appreciate your commitment to that and their commitment because they are tasked with one heck of amount to try to climb. And we’re getting there. And I just wanted to say thank you to that.

31:35 Rashad Wilson, great presentation today. Great work towards all the dedication towards our transportation, the work that you did with the disciplinary process today, with the notifications on parents that are not going to go out to get on our buses anymore, retention and recruitment. And we’re going to negotiations next month with Doctor Schiller, with transportation and our teachers.

32:00 But I did want to say, Rashad, from the bottom of my heart, thank you for taking that thing on. You really worked hard to try to get that thing taken care of. So everybody here, Rashad, if you can just wave to them so they can see you.

32:13 There’s two types of leaders in the world. Rashad’s one of the ones that goes, and he gets to work and he goes straight to the people and he understands him. So thank you so much for Shad, for everything you did.

32:24 I wanted to say thank you to everybody here. One of my favorite people, Mister Bryant’s here today. And all the families that came to support all the people that are here.

32:32 You guys are amazing. And thank you so much for your dedication. And I just wanted to say thank you to sue Han.

32:40 She went over some redistricting stuff with us. And for those of you that don’t know, two years ago we had the opportunity to redistrict. We did not.

32:49 So now we may have to redistrict for our school board seats. There’s some options on the table. But I wanted to say thank you because our board is kind of a difficult one to try to grab and get them moving on stuff.

32:59 I just want Shiller quiet. But I wanted to say thank you for her dedication to getting there and getting that started. So with that, Doctor Schiller, what do you have? Yes, thank you, Mister Susan.

33:10 I too want to echo the incredible work, effort and devotion that our entire staff, and particularly the cabinet members are contributing. And I’m pushing them very hard. As you’ve seen the big rocks and the hills and all the highlights, it just is a remarkable effort that these folks are working with and I’m very proud to be part of coordinating that effort.

33:38 I just would want to say that in the last two weeks since our last board meeting, I want to thank the board members who have been able to arrange their schedules to accompany me, join me on the visits to schools. And so many times I am just going and calling my wife and saying I don’t believe the kinds of outstanding programs that I’m observing firsthand. And so happens tonight that we’re going to be showcasing the all of CTE with our incredible leadership of our director.

34:13 And momentarily will be going on to that. But I just wanted to point out again that I’m never disappointed when I go visit a school in BPS. And I’ve got a lot of experience to gauge and compare, but I’m never disappointed.

34:27 In fact, I’m amazed at so many things outstanding programs, the devoted and talented staff and their instructional techniques, and the students that I see, unless it’s all staged, which I know is not, are really engaged in self directed learning, higher order thinking, analysis and synthesis, skill development. And I just have to tell you that it just is a pure pleasure to visit the schools that does not say that we don’t have schools that are challenged and classrooms that are still challenged. And we need to address those diversity gaps and lower achievement in certain areas.

35:14 But this district, the folks who are watching here need to know from a clear eye, old time view of around the world and throughout this nation what’s happening here. You really need to understand the value and quality of the instructional programs. Yes, we like a school district anywhere.

35:38 We’re a very complex district. We have our issues, but we have a staff that’s digging in under my direction to try to address and bring to the board solutions. But the one area that we don’t have to dig very deeply because our staff’s already been doing it for years, will be presented and showcased tonight at CTE.

35:56 Thank you very much, sir. That brings us to the adoption of the agenda. Doctor Schiller.

36:03 Thank you. On this evening’s agenda, we have administrative staff recommendations, two presentations, 18 consent items, two action items and seven information items. There have been some changes made to the agenda since release of the public because we’re always updating.

36:21 I would draw your attention which we’ll go to is a seven administrative staff recommendations, d eight, the superintendent report, where we’re going to have 2.0 presentation on the budget process. We started this two weeks ago and it’ll be an ongoing.

36:35 So our stakeholders and all fully understand all aspects of the development of a. Of a budget that we’re doing in a slightly different and more accelerated timeframe. And we also be doing the career tech education update.

36:52 Unfortunately, we have the business of an f twelve of student expulsions and under I 35 aboard policy for review. Thank you, sir. Thank you.

37:09 Doctor Schiller, do I hear a motion? Move to approve. Second. Is there any discussion? Seeing none.

37:18 All in favor, please signify by saying aye. Aye. All opposed? Thank you very much.

37:24 Doctor Schiller, would you please let us know about the administrative staff recommendations? Yes, Mister Susan. Members of board, there are four items for your consideration. Do I hear a motion? Second.

37:39 Is there any discussion? Yeah, I just want to. There’s a. There’s a principal on here.

37:46 Miss Salomone, I know you’re probably not watching, but I’m going to say it anyway. This was the principal who hired me into BPS. I had not yet walked across the stage with my graduate degree.

38:00 And she chased me out in the parking lot to offer me a job. And I was just. Just months away from getting married to my husband, who was an educator.

38:08 I broke down crying and thanked her. Harbor City always has a little special place in my heart because she was so supportive. I was the only speech language pathologist at a title one school with a caseload of like 55 to 60 students.

38:21 I had no idea what I was doing. But she was so helpful and so supportive and gave me the time to learn and grow and breathe. She also gave me the opportunity.

38:31 When I was pregnant with my daughter, about to have my daughter, there was a position that I really, really wanted in this district that opened up to work with our pre k esc kiddos itinerantly across the district, across our low income schools. And she pushed me to do it. Typically, it was kind of a period where you really weren’t supposed to do that, but I was going to have a baby, so it’s fine.

38:52 Made it, broke the rules. But she was again, such a supportive, supportive human being. And I appreciate her.

38:58 And I don’t know if I ever had the opportunity to tell her how much she impacted me and guided me through my career at BPS. So thank you so much for everything you’ve done for me. You’ve definitely helped shape me to who I am today.

39:09 And I’m happy for you because I have a feeling you’re doing this because you want to. So congratulations on your retirement. I’d like to report another distinguished individual, but unfortunately, who is not with us this evening, who has announced that Miss Kane is retiring from the position of principal at Cape View elementary, effective June 30.

39:37 We will regretfully accept that. On a happier note, we have two people with an awful lot of support here tonight. Miss Stacy Soreno is being reclassed on the position of title one teacher at Jupiter Elementary School to the position of assistant principal at Holland Elementary School.

40:02 And that would go into effect? Well, actually, yeah, it’s going into effect officially tonight. And I would like for you also to recognize Miss Elaine Sauerman, who is being reclassed from the position of literacy coach at Stone Magnet Middle School to position of assistant principal at Fair Glen Elementary School, effective upon the board action officially. Ladies, congratulations and thank you to all of your supporters and all family who have joined us tonight.

40:35 Mister Brunei, good evening. Thank you Brevard public schools and school board members. I’d like to thank Misses Chorisi and Misses Willette for their unwavering support over me throughout the years.

40:50 I could not have done a lot or continued on this path without them. They are both such amazing instructional leaders and I am grateful that I had the opportunity to work for them over the years and to learn from them. To Miss Allison, thank you.

41:07 Thank you for choosing and entrusting me to be under your leadership and to be a part of the Holland family. Thank you. I also want to thank my family.

41:15 Unfortunately, they cannot be here as circumstances arise that are out of our control. But I know they support me. So with that, I’m excited and I look forward to continue to serve every student with excellence as a standard.

41:30 Thank you. Thank you. I want to thank the school board for the opportunity to be here tonight.

41:46 I am honored and feel blessed to be recognized amongst my outstanding leaders, peers, and some familiar faces I see in here of Brevard county stakeholders. I’m extremely excited to start serving the staff, students, of course, families, and community of fair Glen Elementary. I have had multiple opportunities to work over there.

42:13 I’m excited to work with principal Christy Mraz. We hope we finish the year strong. Looking forward to new opportunities that we will see as the year closes.

42:26 And lastly, I want to thank my family that was able to make it tonight. My mom and stepfather drove 3 hours. I said, you can probably watch it on Google or YouTube, and they say, nope, gotta be here.

42:36 So their support has been unwavering through everything I’ve done throughout life. And this is something they didn’t want to miss. So it’s a big honor to be here.

42:45 Claire, Glenn, I’m excited and thank you. Oh, how nice. We wish you the very best in serving our schools and our children.

43:08 And congratulations to you and for us. Condolences to our retiree. Yeah, I wanted to also say something about Miss Salman.

43:20 She was an iconic person inside of our HR and in some other areas before she became a principal over there. And one of the things that I remember is when we first came in, I walked into her office when I first was elected as a school board member. And she didn’t know me before that because I had just heard stories about her.

43:38 And when I walked in there, the first thing I noticed was she sat me down. She said, okay, let’s just not talk about everything. We just got to get to business.

43:46 Business. So here’s what I need you to do. Like, she just literally set the tone, and that’s who she was, and she ran a tight ship.

43:51 Right. The other thing that I wanted to do is, is that she actually has this affinity for Elvis Presley. So like, I walked in there and all of a sudden I looked around and there’s like thousand Elvis Presley heads and all kinds of stuff.

44:07 So I was just gonna play a little bit of Elvis for as her little galaxy away. Because we haven’t had ever let Elvis played before in my life here at the school board. But I figured the heck with it.

44:19 Since Miss Salamone is a huge Elvis fan, I would actually play it on the floor for just a little bit. So. No, no, I’m not going to do that.

44:27 That’s good. That’s all we need to do. But I just wanted to say thank you for your dedication to Brevard schools and the time.

44:33 Schiller, are you going to do it? I swear. Wait. I was waiting.

44:37 I will turn that back on if you will do it. No, we gotta get to business. But I just want to say thank you, Joy, for your dedication to our schools.

44:45 You’re gonna be. Well, you’re gonna be missed. So thank you.

44:48 All right, Doctor Schiller, you let us know about the administrative staff. Yep. And then.

44:56 Yes, Mister Susan, the board. Okay. Okay.

44:58 Doctor Shiller, would you let us know about the staff recommendations? We did all that stuff. Sorry. Got the Elvis going.

45:03 Here we are now at tonight’s presentation. Doctor Schiller, we have two present. Let’s go back to it.

45:12 You have to jump. That’s what he did. He came out.

45:15 No, he came. He jumped me over. All right.

45:19 Is there any discussion, for those of you guys that don’t know what’s going on, doctor Shiller said, we were all shook up. So, is there any discussion on the topic? No. All right.

45:35 Please vote. All in favor, signify by saying aye. Opposed? No.

45:40 All right. We are now in tonight’s presentation. Doctor Shiller? Yes.

45:43 Thank you. The first presentation, according to our agenda order, is by CFO Cindy Licinski, who is now going to make her second guest appearance at the board. This is 2.

46:22 0. For those who have not seen last week’s or two weeks ago presentation is that we’re trying to go through every process of the board through a timeline, schedule, revenues, and we’re looking at a program by program basis of building the board for a budget for the board based on the board’s priorities and goals and objectives. And we’ll turn this over to the CFO, Licinski, for her presentation this evening.

46:33 I think you’ll get a lot out of it. And take good notes because I understand that Mister Susan has a surprise at the end, no surprise. He was going to provide a test.

46:48 Was he going to be multiple choice? Here we go, Cindy. Let’s hear this thing. Chairman Susan, board members, Doctor Schiller, good evening.

47:02 It’s a pleasure to be here again. Quickly, want to go over the agenda and we’re going to go back and review what we talked about yesterday. Just real, I mean, last two weeks ago, real quick.

47:26 And then we’ll talk about what a student FTE is. We’ll introduce what the Florida education finance program is. We’ll go over the budget timelines and then we’ll talk about what you want to do, what’s up next? And my suggestion would be the FEFP in six easy steps, but to move on.

47:53 If you remember from two weeks ago, a budget is a plan, it’s a starting point, and it will change. A budget is based on priorities and we must maintain a strong financial condition. We can’t spend more than what we have, and we have to make sure that we are.

48:29 Again, we have to make sure we have the dollars before we spend them. We have six distinct individual funds with separate purposes. And you can see that when you add all those funds up together, it’s almost $1.

48:47 5 billion. And then we broke these out in pie charts, all funds and operating funds. So now this is where I wanted to start tonight.

49:07 And student enrollment drives our operating dollars. It’s our bread and butter. That’s how FDoe calculates the funding for the, for the FEFP.

49:24 So what is a FTE? And I know people get confused between membership and FTE, and membership and FTE are different. One FTE represents one student enrolled for the full school year with a full time schedule. So that’s one FTE.

49:46 Now, if a student comes in halfway through the year and has a full schedule, that’s a 0.5 FTE. So membership is when a student comes through the door or is on virtual.

50:05 When you get the membership, we count all those students, but FTE is the students that are actually enrolled the entire year with the full time schedule. And then moving on to the Florida educational finance program. That’s the majority of the dollars.

50:16 We talk about the operating dollars, the FEFP, more than most of the other funds. And you can see the FEFP is about 75% of our operating funds. The blue is the money that comes from the state.

50:37 And then you can see the dark blue without the dots. That’s categoricals. And then you can see also the local funding, and that’s our property taxes.

51:05 And you may, you know, a lot of people think that the FAFP is very, very complicated, complicated formulas and, you know, very difficult to understand. And that’s, it can be very true. However, if you just kind of think about it simply, it’s total FTE and the type of student.

51:45 And when I say type of student, each student gets a certain factor, a cost factor, and that student, you know, if they’re k through three, k through third grade, there’s a certain cost factor. If they need additional accommodations, it’s a different cost factor. So that’s when you start weighting the FTE.

52:05 However, for this example, and when we talk about this, I would just kind of want to keep it high level and stick to the unweighted FTE as we go through this. And so the FEFP, it also changes, it changes five times during the year. And so the first, the first calculation is the conference report, and that’s when the legislature, they go through what the governor’s budget suggested, they go through it.

52:19 And at the end, and in this case, it’ll be maybe fifth or 6th, we should be getting a conference report. And that will be our starting point because that’s going to tell us what dollars we should have. And again, things change and budgets change.

52:41 Second calculation is when we get the millage rate. And so once we get the millage rate in July, we have a pretty good idea of what we can expect. However, everything’s based on enrollment.

52:46 So we project enrollment and we project October enrollment a year ahead. And the third calculation is when they calculate the actual. So if we’re off on our FTE projections by a lot, we could lose dollars.

53:13 This year. We did very well. We had, our projections were very close.

53:29 The state did not go past their cap, so we didn’t get a proration. So this third calc was pretty good, and I was pretty relieved. Now, the next calculation is going to be the fourth calculation in April, and that’s going to be where the legislature uses those numbers to work on the, the conference report for next year for 23, 24.

53:49 And then finally the fifth calculation is kind of cleaning up. Is there any questions on that? Not so far, but I would pay attention to some of the things that are going on, some of the calculations and equations. Right.

54:11 Go ahead. So this slide is, if you take anything from this presentation, I think this slide is very important because, again, enrollment is our bread and butter FTE. It’s money that we get to support our students.

54:34 And you can see, I’ll start with 2021. And that’s when we were hit with COVID and you can see that in the district column, that enrollment went down understandably. And then you can see the charter and the scholarship.

55:03 So you can see in 21 22 we’re starting to come back still kind of flatline on increased enrollment through the district. And then you can see the charter and then you see the scholarships. Now the scholarships, when you look at that number, you’re like, wow, it doubled.

55:11 But most of those students were actually students that never set foot in a BPS school. So the majority of those increase were actually kids that were already in a private school, already being homeschooled. And now, you know, they’re able to fund that education through the FEFP.

55:21 And then when you look at 22 23, that’s where we are right now. And that is our third calc. So it’s going to change again.

55:49 I’ll get you. And based on our third calc, you can see what our enrollment is and the charter and then the scholarship. Now the scholarship went up again.

56:10 And when we looked at that, it was about 400 students, again, are students that are already in private school. And then there was about 200 kids that were our students that went into pre K or kindergarten that never stepped in afoot into a BPS school. Miss Cindy, Miss Lucynski, Miss Wright has a question.

56:22 I just have a question about the projections here. So when we look at the 22 23 school year that we’re currently in, if you look at the charter and the scholarships, those are almost, I mean, that’s 30% roughly. But then when I jump to next year, 23 24, those numbers are down drastically.

56:35 What’s the thought process there on why from so 23 24. Yeah, the percentage. I know, but.

56:51 So the percentage this year is showing that 11% are in charter, right? Or. No, it’s the growth. Okay, so what, the percentage of growth for the 23 24 is significantly less.

56:57 Right. Because the change in the legislature the year prior increased the amount of scholarships allowable. I can tell you that the increase for the, we had a new charter school open up this year down in Bombay.

57:05 Part of the charter, as you think. Yeah. So some of the increases, some of these years where the charter increases a lot.

57:08 We had, we’ve had several new charter schools open up. We had Pine crest, Pinecrest, Pineapple Cove. Viera expanded.

57:13 Right. Right. And Viera went to high school.

57:27 And so those were just open, more seats opening up in high schools. All right. Thank you.

57:47 Yeah. And as the laws keep changing and becoming more and more flexible to the scholarship, those same families are just as likely to send to a charter. So it’s kind of impacting both those numbers.

57:54 So they’re both going to deflate or they’re both going to start to get a little bit stunted because there’s more opportunity now to use a scholarship versus just going to a charter. So real quick, do you have the. How many estimated homeschool students do we have? That’s the other component of this.

57:59 Right. They’re not on here for the scholarships. We don’t have scholarships for them.

58:00 They’re just registered homeschool students. Right. I would have to go back and get that information.

58:06 Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay.

58:22 Thank you. But homeschool can apply for scholarship. Sure, yeah.

58:51 Thank you. Okay, so the 23 24, those numbers are from the governor’s proposed budget, and those are going to. It’s going to change.

59:05 And once we get the fourth calculation, that is going to be what the legislature actually uses, 423 24. So these numbers will change. We received an email from FDOe about charter scholarship again, and it looks like they grew again for about 150 students.

59:15 And that will. So that number will change for the scholarship. And then 2425-2526 that’s all based on the Office of Economic and Demographic Research.

59:27 And that’s their forecast for district charter and scholarship. Now, there’s, you know, with scholarship, there’s. I don’t.

59:43 I can’t really foresee what’s going to happen. I know the governor’s budget recommends we increase that by 3% every year. And so there’s different things out there.

1:00:22 The reason. And then you can see here as well, this is just more graphic of the percent of the FEFP. And this slide is super busy.

1:00:58 But this is what I really want everyone to take away from this briefing, is the FEFP funds the charters, it funds the FE’s or the scholarships. And so it’s a pass through. So when we say we have $624 million in the FEFP, the district’s number is different, the charter’s number is different, and then the money that the state takes for Fe’s, that’s all part of the big pie.

1:01:25 And then you can see when we get a calc and you look at the different categoricals, you may look at it and go, oh, okay, $18 million for ESE, guaranteed. But in actuality, charters get a portion of that and Fe’s gets a large portion of that because a lot of the FE’s scholarships are heavy on ESE children or students. So again, you can see that there’s a difference.

1:01:41 So when you look at a calc, or you hear that, you know, student transportation, or you hear that these different allocations have increased. You can also just keep in the back of your mind that that large increase might be a little deceiving because some of those dollars are going elsewhere. They’re not all going to our district, in our schools.

1:02:05 Yes, ma’am. If I can ask a question about this slide, I see under on the left hand side where you’ve got the breakout. You know, there’s a couple of categories where the charter schools don’t get, like the DJJ, because that’s all coming from our funding and federally connected students.

1:02:43 But why, why are some of those categoricals under the scholarship? Like, why would the money for a teacher salary increase allocation go under the scholarship amount? That’s the way the state is took the money this year. So we don’t actually receive these dollars. They take it up front.

1:03:01 And these are the areas that, where they took those dollars. And so if we don’t separate out this way now and in the future for the categoricals, we will have absolutely no discretionary or flexibility because then all of the FE’s dollars would have to come from our discretionary dollars, which we don’t have much of right now. So basically, it’s just a straight percentage that we’re taking from all of the categories.

1:03:10 Well, they’re all different. Like EsE guaranteed charters aren’t very heavy on ESE students. So that’s when you look to the right, you can see that the per FTE is lower.

1:03:26 And they also don’t have, like you said, the DJJ. They don’t have the federal connected students. They don’t receive a portion of that.

1:03:37 And also they only the schools that have transportation or buses receive money from charges. Right. I mean, for the family power scholarship, that is a straight percentage across, except for ESE, because it has to be based on the number of students who are ESE.

1:03:56 But all the other categories, are they pretty much just a percentage of our amount? I believe so. Okay. And this is taken exactly the way the state took it from us.

1:04:17 Okay, thank you. And then, so if you look on the right hand side, you see the charter, you see the scholarships, and you see the district per Fte. And again, I’m not, you know, trying to.

1:04:43 The only thing that I really want to make clear is with the FEFP and the scholarships. Originally it was going to be, it shouldn’t impact the district, the scholarships would not impact. So I don’t know why it’s within the FEFP.

1:04:56 However, there’s still growing pains and there’s still things that it’s kind of a lagging. So we’ll get a voucher with all, or a payment voucher with all the students and now it’s 4000. It used to be 1000 and then the same two people have to go through it and figure out if that’s correct or not.

1:05:24 And the funding, like I told you, the calculations five times a year. But for scholarships, that doesn’t change. Once it’s set, it’s set.

1:05:34 So if there’s a proration, everything else will get cut, but not the scholarships. So there are some things that we really need to understand and work through because the thing that I want to do is make sure that we protect the dollars that are meant for our students in the district and the charters and just make sure that it’s done correctly and fairly. One more question.

1:05:40 So the, so do the payments. The payments don’t come directly from us, they come from the state. If a family has a scholarship, they’re getting the money directly from the state.

1:06:03 Right. Okay. And do they get it all unit? This may be more, but you said something about that doesn’t get prorated.

1:06:39 So do they get it all in once in a lump sum, whatever that payment file is? And again, it would be like if we said, you know, you’ll send your child, you get $8,000 for private schools, spend it the way you need to. They’re not going to turn around and say no. Now it’s 7500, but that’s.

1:06:59 So it’s set on the, with the first calc, however, charters and district, if there’s a proration, if there’s any cuts, then that’s shared and it doesn’t impact the scholarships. And then you can see the bottom line, 70 million for charters and 44 million for Fe’s. So it’s my understanding that the money doesn’t directly go to the family anymore, that it follows the child wherever they’re going.

1:07:11 Because there was a lot of hot topic conversation around that. Why families who were receiving Gardner scholarships were really frustrated and upset by the change of the scholarships and the expansion of it because it actually took away their autonomy to get the services that their children need or they feel they need, and it was going directly to the sources instead. So.

1:07:28 And HB one has different language as well. So that is all I have. If there’s no more questions.

1:07:37 And again, this is the budget timeline. We went over the last board meeting and we will have our capital budget workshop on April 11. Everything else is tracking.

1:07:58 Anybody have any questions for Miss Licinski before I get started? I just. Thank you, Cindy. You’re welcome.

1:08:17 I appreciate that presentation. I think it’s important for the public to see. It’s important to see them to see the impacts of some of the decisions that Tallahassee has been making, as well as the confusion and possibly misrepresentation of the impact those scholarships will have on the district.

1:08:27 And you know, there has been increases to education, but at the exact same time, there has been a rate of increases that percentages are going to charters and to those scholarships that once may not have come through the district. So it’s important for the public to be aware of where their tax dollars are going to. Thanks, Miss Campbell.

1:08:50 Any additional comments? Have you guys. Miss Lucinski, I want to notice. I wanted to check the theme that’s been going on here.

1:08:59 Miss Suhan has been doing videos and pictures of goats and now you’ve got dogs in yours. Is there some sort of thing going on with the cabinet that I don’t know about over here? There is just checking competition between Miss Hann and I. But she continues to win. How does she win with a goat presentation and you win? I mean, the tough dog seems pretty.

1:09:13 I mean, you have some serious things. You need a tough dog. But how can you not notice a dog playing card? I didn’t want to say anything because card playing.

1:09:21 We didn’t want to talk about promoting here at the district and the head of the CFO’s here, of course, it could be a learning math experience or something. Something like that. Miss Licinski, I was trying to hold back a little bit while you’re sitting at the table.

1:09:26 We had considered having music of Kenny Rogers singing. I don’t know why you guys didn’t. Well, we’ll CFO.

1:09:34 We have to up our game. We got to keep pace with Miss Hahn. I think.

1:09:52 I think that’s what gets it over the top. Or having an actual dog here at the presentation might also do it too. You know what I mean? You don’t want to go here too? No, I don’t know.

1:10:04 We might have some fun stuff, but I was going to make sure that some of our board members were appropriately paying attention. And I didn’t know if Mister Trent could give us an overview of the FEFP equation and stuff like that. That’ll be after the meeting.

1:10:11 That’ll be the next board meeting. So just so everybody understands, Miss Licinski and I talks before this thing and I said, you should give Mister Trent the actual equation. So I didn’t even know she hadn’t given it to you.

1:10:17 So I thought, I thought that she was going to give it to you and I’d call you and you get it, but you didn’t get it. So here we go. So anyways, thank you, Miss Licinski.

1:10:23 I really appreciate it. Thank you for all your work as far as our budget. And I really appreciate all your time here tonight.

1:10:35 All right, thank you. Thank you. Next up we have Doctor Sullivan.

1:10:43 Doctor Sullivan is going to give us a presentation on CTE or introduce the individuals to give the CTE presentation. Yes, I always elevate. Wait, before we get started, I want to say thank you.

1:11:05 We spoke before. This was, I think it was like two months ago that we sat down. Was it about that long or a month ago? It was a while ago.

1:11:08 And you had just yesterday, Mister Suzanne, I said, I was like, hey, I got some questions about some of the, the expenditures and stuff like that that are inside CTE. And you said, well, Mister Susan, we’ve already started working on publishing the budget for CTE and all of our budgetary items. So I was floored to say the transparency that you guys are moving on and that the, it seems to be a movement.

1:11:20 So thank you. Yeah. Thank you, sir.

1:11:36 And Chairman Susan, members of the board, Doctor Schiller, thank you so much for having us tonight. And yes, we are extraordinarily committed to transparency and have done a lot of great work in our division. You’ll see some of that tonight.

1:11:55 In our career and technical education. I have to say serendipity is the word that comes to mind because February is CTE month. Our newest board members are out there visiting these incredible programs.

1:12:21 In particular this month. This month we were able to recognize some incredible students tonight that represent the best in our students, the best in our teachers. And we decided, and I appreciated Doctor Schiller’s guidance, to move what is normally a May presentation to CTE month in February.

1:12:39 And it’s almost embarrassing that we didn’t think of that before, but you’ll just ignore that little fact now. Members of the board, Mister Susan, we don’t have animals in our presentation, but we have lots of amazing kids, welding machines. We have cool stuff, cool kids, amazing teachers that I know that this district is going to join me in celebrating for our families that are here tonight.

1:12:48 We wanted to get you into the fun. So actually where major Neal is sitting back there, we brought a bunch of extra folders with some key information because we want you spreading the word. I’m tired, tired of hearing that CTE is of the best kept secret in Brevard.

1:13:25 I don’t know how else to not make it a secret. We thought last year we did a pretty good job with our monthly tours. I’m ready to dance, whatever it takes.

1:13:45 But we’ve got folders back there so that our community members can also share the amazing thing that’s going on. And I hope what you take away from tonight is intentional and deliberate work to keep our programs relevant and impactful for our students. I know that Rachel Rutledge doesn’t need much of an introduction because I am really fortunate to have her on my team because she is all things career and technical education and we have such a great time conceiving of new programs and putting those resources in place.

1:14:04 So without any further ado, I’m going to turn the microphone over to our exceptional director of career and technical education, Rachel Rutledge. And she’s going to virtually introduce her small but mighty team. Thank you, misses Rutledge and doctor Sullivan.

1:14:18 I want to thank you as well for your leadership and vision to help keep our department moving forward and supporting our students. Secondary all right, good evening Chairman Susan, members of the board, interim superintendent Schiller, it is great to see you this evening. I’m so excited to talk with you about career and technical education.

1:14:41 I’d like to first introduce you to my small but mighty team. I have a ten person team that consists of six content specialists and three support team. And they are absolutely amazing.

1:15:02 The picture of us as a team, we had to step out and watch the rocket because it’s what we do. We’re career in technical education, so we have a lot of fun together and just really excited to get to do the work that we do every day. All right, so I know that all of you are very well versed at CTE, but for anyone that is in the audience today, I want to be sure you understand.

1:15:20 What is CTE? It’s college and career preparation. And students at every ability level have opportunities in career and technical education. What our programs do is it partners academic success with technical skills and is ever changing and adapting based on needs in our community, preparing students for high skill, high wage and in demand career paths.

1:15:44 And it’s not the old vocational education that you think of in the past. It’s very high tech. Why now? We got some recent statistics and in 2022, only 53% of our students enrolled in college immediately following high school.

1:16:04 This is important because we are preparing students with a skill we have so many kids that want to go to college, that want to go after that four year degree, but so many of them want to go to work, maybe have the business pay for their education. There’s going to be some type of step that kids are going to take when they graduate, but it looks different for everybody. Some may want to go directly into an apprenticeship program, others into an associate’s, some a bachelor’s.

1:16:37 Everyone’s going to need additional training when they get done, and CTE helps guide them towards that path. For many of you, you may not know that CTE has two brights futures scholarships. One of them is looking at the number of courses they take in a CTE program and the other is looking at the industry certifications that they earn.

1:16:58 So as I mentioned, our kids are going towards college and have multiple opportunities for funding to support it. One of the things and in your folders, if you take a look, you have one of the recent materials that we created along with Eastern Florida State College to help students understand what a pathway would look like, how classes that they take in high school articulate to college. And we have articulation agreements with eastern Florida fit, Embry Riddle, Kaiser, Lincoln Tech and more.

1:17:44 So our students have that advanced opportunity to move on into the next step when they graduate, should they choose to do that. So our federal legislation that governs career and technical education is the Perkins grant. It now has a fancy name, strengthening career and technical education for the 21st Century act.

1:17:54 It’s a mouthful, right? Basically what it does is it strengthens the value of CTE in our schools and puts more of a focus on work based learning, think internships, school based enterprise, and also on special population groups and comprehensive local needs assessment, meaning that we’ve got to involve our community in what we do. It’s no longer just this sounds like a great program, but how is the community supporting and driving what we’re doing to get the right kind of programs in place for our students to lead them into those high skill, high wage, in demand career paths? We have many community partners that are supporting us. I know as soon as I put this up, I’m going to get an email or a phone call that says, but we’ve been doing.

1:18:06 Yes, you have. Our community partners are so supportive of our programs. They are coming in, working weekly with our students in CTE to help them understand a skill.

1:18:17 They are hiring our students as interns. They are providing pathways for our students when they graduate direct to work. There’s so many ways that our community is supporting us so this is not an exhaustive list.

1:18:47 All right. The Career and Professional Education act. This is actually a state law that helps support our industry certifications.

1:19:17 I’m not going to read through all of this, but it is intended to help prepare this generation for the careers of tomorrow. So we are always looking at what industry certifications are students, students can earn that can transfer into the workforce. And the Career and Professional Education act, or CaPE is what helps provide funding for our programs as well as for our industry certs for our students.

1:19:34 As Doctor Sullivan mentioned, we do have a new resource for grants, full transparency of where our funds are going, which funding stream is used, and so on and so forth. There’s a link in the presentation that takes you directly to this page and you can see the breakdown of how funds are being spent by school, by program. And please feel free to take, you know, take some time and go through that to understand how the funds are being spent to support our programs.

1:19:54 Other legislation has to do with executive Order 1931. I’m sure you’re familiar with this from years ago. The governor put out a chart, of course, of Florida to become number one in the nation and workforce by 2030 and ensure our Florida students are prepared for jobs of the future.

1:20:42 We are supporting this and running with it because we know that career and technical education has the ability to fill so many of these in demand careers in our community. So we’re jumping on board with that as well. Two other bills here, one established an annual review of CTE programs and another defined credentials of value.

1:20:57 We’ve had some changes in terms of our industry certifications and what’s considered valuable now based on demands in our community. So I know there’s been lots of conversations about new programs, and I’m about to share with you some of the beautiful things that, sorry, some of the beautiful things that we’re doing within our schools new program wise, but it’s not an easy process. As I mentioned, it takes into consideration, is there an industry certification that’s involved? Is there some opportunity for a student to be involved in work based learning? Is there a full program of study and not just an individual class? How does it align to what’s happening within our labor market? And is there some sort of student organization that can help support it? All of these pieces need to be in place to build a robust program.

1:21:23 We want to be very careful in our planning to ensure that we’re going to have a successful program that’s going to help prepare kids, kids for jobs in our community. We’d love them to stay here if we could. Currently we have 43 high school CTE programs.

1:21:44 Those are unique CTE programs. We have 23 middle school course offerings. And our latest data from the state is a 97.

1:21:55 3% graduation rate for CTE concentrators. It actually went up from the year before. Now, when you compare this to the state graduation rate, at the same time, the state was at 90.

1:22:18 1 and we were at 97.3. Why kids get it.

1:22:29 Kids want to come to school because they’re doing something that they enjoy, where they can see a path towards their next step. And they’re in classes with other students that have the same interests as them, and they have goals and they’re setting plans for their future. We’re getting them graduated and we’ll continue to do so.

1:22:49 Okay, this year. Here are the new programs that are currently in our schools. We started a brand new firefighting program at Palm Bay, cloud computing and virtualization at Merritt island.

1:23:11 We’ve added 911 to Palm Bay and Rockledge, and added a business management and analysis program which has an entrepreneurial flair to astronaut, Ogali and Space coast. So our kids are having the opportunity to get in and test some entrepreneurial principles, and it’s really exciting to see what they’re coming up with. And here’s the grand announcements.

1:23:29 You’ve probably seen all of these, but let’s talk about it. We have the new Cocoa Beach Aqua science program, or sea bass. Pretty clever, isn’t it? I don’t take any credit for it.

1:23:52 What the students are going to be doing in that program is looking at the Indian river lagoon, an ecology restoration. They’re going to be cultivating oysters and clams and seagrass and little fish called mummichogs that live in the lagoon. It’s a very science rich, robust curriculum, and it is a choice program.

1:24:05 And we have many partners that have been coming alongside us with curriculum. Most folks in CTE, myself included, have special areas of focus, like mine was business and marketing. I have people on my team that are really strong in engineering, others in construction, others in culinary.

1:24:35 So we come alongside together and work these programs out with our community partners input because we want to be sure that we have a full understanding of the programs before we develop them. We also have the junior achievement or JA Hope project. This is an entrepreneurship curriculum.

1:25:00 We have a full time person right now at Coco High School that’s been there this whole year that has helped support the implementation of this program for next year. This coming year, Heritage is also going to get a full time person on their campus to help support it. So junior achievement has really been driving this forward and they have been a huge supporter to us through this.

1:25:34 They’ve been helping our students find internship opportunities as well as my team. And this is a choice program that’s available to both Coco and to heritage for next year. I just need to chime in, give credit where credit is due.

1:26:02 This program is fully funded by a grant from Commissioner Zanka, and I just felt that it was really important to emphasize her leadership and her support of these programs. All right, we also have a brand new carpentry program that’s going in here at Viera, and students are going to be learning about complete site preparation, building codes and installation of a structure. I’m really excited for our students at Viera to have a hands on program like this.

1:26:11 It is something we saw a need with the growing area and have been plugging into our community partners to help make this a success as well. And this one is hot off the press. You may have seen an announcement, but we have recently had some additional standards added in at the Department of Education to tie our programs to the Space Coast Consortium apprenticeship program.

1:26:29 This is a huge win for our students because partners that are involved in that apprenticeship are companies like Northrop Grumman, United Launch Alliance, Launch Alliance, Lockheed Martin and so on. These are. We actually have a couple of students right now that are participating in a boot camp that’s put on by the Space coast consortium at eastern Florida, where, I mean, they’ve got high skill, in demand jobs that are right there waiting for them when they graduate with some very exciting companies in our community.

1:26:44 All right, so when I thought about CTE, I started thinking about what is it that defines our students? So I agree, Doctor Sullivan. I think we kind of take the cake on the pictures, aside from the dogs and the goats, because we’ve got kids, right? We’ve got students. And when I think about our students, the words that come to mind are competitive, innovative, civic minded, collaborative and future focused.

1:26:59 So tell you a few stories here. I promise I won’t get too long winded. You just met our wonderful students from satellite.

1:27:20 But I don’t want to miss that. There were a couple of other teams from Ogalley and Titusville that also took home wins. And our students from our students from Titusville, Dalton, same, and Alex Nelson, their team took third in that UTI competition.

1:27:41 And Connor Long and Kaylin plass from Ogalley took 6th. So we’re very proud of those kiddos as well. They’re so passionate as you see, so proud of the work that, the work that our teachers are doing for them.

1:28:01 Tara Dakis was also very competitive. She was named the CTE US presidential scholar for our district. We moved her forward to the state and she is a student at Cocoa beach marketing and digital design.

1:28:15 She obtained her own paid internship last summer and is doing it this year at an independent marketing firm. She’s also working on her academic portfolio, volunteers at her library at a local school, and is part of national Junior Honor society. I’ll put our students up against anybody in the state and nation.

1:28:36 I’m so proud of the way that they compete and stack up against others. Innovative. We have Palm Bay students in TSA Technology Student association that placed third place nationally in a video game design competition last year at ogalley.

1:28:42 We had some students that attended the Space Coast Consortium apprenticeship program. And one of the young, the young lady that’s pictured in this picture, her name is Lauren Henrickson. She wants to be an engineer and go to the Eastern Florida space Tech program to get her integration engineer degree.

1:29:08 And while she’s at space Tech, she’s going to be working at Kennedy Space center for either Lockheed Martin Blue Origin or SpaceX. Then she’s going to continue her education at State College to become a full engineer. So pathways pathways for these students.

1:29:30 She’s going to start work, get paid, get her education taken care of. So many cool opportunities. And the other one on here is a picture from our entrepreneurship rally where we brought students from four schools together to celebrate and get fired up about entrepreneurship on their school campuses.

1:29:51 Civic minded. This young lady here, her name is Naomi Schiavones. She was.

1:30:05 She’s actually a culinary arts student at Melbourne High School and she is always volunteering for any extracurricular activity that chef asked her to be a part of. She was also one of the team that prepared these Florida orange cakes for the children’s hunger project. So once again, competitive, innovative, civic minded, collaborative.

1:30:24 You see pictures here from four different areas. The one on the left is actually a Zoom meeting between some CTE interns and government community relations interns. These students are preparing a revised CTE video that’s going to further educate students about the value of CTE.

1:30:58 They have been all over the place catching video and still images and I was going to show you a teaser tonight, but I’ve decided we’re all going to wait to see that. Okay, but these students names are Erin Martin, Alexandra Tadros. Both of them are from VHS, and Dominic Corso from bayside.

1:31:15 We’re so excited to see what they’re going to come up with. The young ladies in the second picture, and gentlemen, they’re from satellite high school early childhood education program. Carson Wagner, Caitlin Troxell, Madison Suchek and Magnolia Miller.

1:31:29 Caitlin’s actually planning to go into college to learn how to teach elementary ed. So once again, pathways they could go right away and become an IA in our schools or go on to college and pursue that degree. The students in the third picture are from Southwest Middle school.

1:31:55 Did y’all know we have an architecture and construction exploratory class at southwest middle? These kids are designing a building floor plan scale with grid paper and plastic walls so they’re getting that little hands on in the middle school to help them make decisions as they move on and future focused. The students on the left are from Cocoa High School’s exercise science program. Burrell College of Osteopathic Medicine comes in monthly to mentor these young ladies.

1:32:01 They are working on suturing at this point in this picture, Mackenzie Navarret is planning to go to Georgia Military College, getting her aa in pre nursing. And then she’s gonna be a second lieutenant in the army and continue her nursing career in the army. Very specific, like, this is where we’re headed.

1:32:17 Okay. And the machining student on the right hand side, his name is Jayden King and he plans to pursue mechanical engineering. He’s currently in the Space coast apprenticeship program and he’s checking apart.

1:32:33 He was milling for a company on the manual mill. So our kiddos, I couldn’t be more proud of them. And I know that’s a lot, but I just want you to understand our kids are being prepared in so many exciting ways within our CTE programs for whatever their goal is, it might not be exactly what they’re learning right there in their program, but it’s helping propel them to the next step.

1:33:11 I mentioned last year. I’ll share it again here. We’ve started branching out a little bit into elementary school.

1:33:31 We had 13 elementary schools currently offering digital tools. And last year 359 6th graders earned their first digital tool, learning a little bit about literacy and cybersecurity. Our students are still participating in Hunchback High school.

1:33:45 Students united with NASA to create hardware. They have someone from NASA coming into their classroom doing design challenges like Palm Bay Magnet and Space Coast Engineering program. Bayside’s machining students are working on projects as well as Ogali’s aviation.

1:33:57 Their items are going to the International Space center only through CTE, which is pretty, pretty exciting to me, I wanted to at least I’m not going to read all of this, but want you to understand this whole concept of work based learning, that it is a continuum and we want students to start understanding in elementary school just learning about work. We don’t expect somebody that’s ten years old to have a life plan, not at all, but start to understand like what kind of jobs are out there and what might I like to do. And as they move on through their high school experience, start to figure out what direction they’re going to go.

1:34:19 We currently have 89 students this year in CTE internships. Many, many industry certifications that are part of our programs. CompTIa certified nursing assistant, Autodesk, Revit, solidworks, 911 Dispatcher all of these wonderful opportunities for our students.

1:34:35 And if I didn’t mention at no cost to them, and many of them, they have multiple opportunities to take. These are adult certifications. 100% aren’t going to be passes, but they are doing an amazing job.

1:34:43 We’re 10th in the state in terms of size. We’re 7th in the state in terms of industry certification performance. So batting a little bit outside of our, outside of our league.

1:34:59 Wouldn’t expect any less in Brevard, would we? A couple of upgraded facilities. We have some new visibility opportunities happening at ogalley’s outboard marine lab and we just completely redid Madison’s middle school family and consumer sciences lab. And more, more things are in the works right now.

1:35:24 Once again, our kids are involved in all kinds of competitions through their career tech student organizations like Technology Student association. They’re also involved in aviation aerospace career day. We took over 400 kids to construction career days in Orlando.

1:35:32 At fairgrounds, we have student internships. We have kids going on tours of the port. I’ve heard they’re going on one of the ships soon and they’re super excited about that.

1:35:56 Ran into some kids the other day. Long term planning. Where are we headed? Well, we’re going to continue looking at our middle school programs to figure out where we need to tweak them a little bit and where we need to enhance what’s happening to better serve our students.

1:36:17 We’re going to continue identifying the facilities that need to be upgraded to make just a better environment for our students, expanding our career, dual enrollment opportunities for students to get that post secondary experience early on, further engaging our stakeholders. This is our year where we go through the comprehensive local needs assessment again through Perkins. So that’s an important part.

1:36:27 And starting to plan for aerospace space exploration on the north end. Okay, we’re hearing it. We’re going to pull some people and figure out exactly what steps we need to take to get here and work based learning is also a part of our strategic plan.

1:36:47 We’re going to continue to provide opportunities for our students to work in the industry they’re learning about. We need your help with that continual to help make those connections. A student says, I want to work in engineering.

1:37:05 Let’s help them find that opportunity. What kind of challenges do we have? As with all of education right now, recruitment and retention of highly qualified teachers in CTE. Though it’s industry experience that we need, they can bring such a wealth of knowledge into the classroom.

1:37:21 It’s hard to compete with our with industry salaries and that type of thing. So this continues to be a challenge for us. Also the dynamic nature of workforce demand.

1:37:35 It’s constantly changing when we talk about just living in Brevard and all that we see happening around us. We do our best to find the right fit and then something changes and shifts and we have to try to be flexible to that and listen to our community. Also, facility and equipment costs continue to go up.

1:37:53 Always need more funding to help support our programs. Something that I budgeted 3000 for is now nine. We are majorly dealing with inflation right now with our purchases and that’s going to continue to be a challenge and expanding our business partner paid internship sites.

1:38:00 So you have a document in here. I’m asking for your help to help our businesses know what this opportunity looks like. Attention businesses takes them to our website that tells them more about the program.

1:38:09 All right, I know that was a lot tonight, but I’d love to answer any questions you have about our programs or just turn it back over if you have any, any questions. Board. I just want to say thank you.

1:38:19 You have absolutely contagious joy when it comes to CTE and it is exciting to hear you present for us. And I’m just really grateful for the amazing job that you’re doing for Brevard county with CTE. So thank you, Mister Gibbs.

1:38:26 I mean Mister Trent. Well, no, I have to say no. I would just echo what Misses Wright said is thank you very much.

1:38:57 From seeing it in the schools personally to observing some of these certification tests. Just thank you for what you do and these kids love what you’re doing, doing. So whatever we can do to help.

1:39:11 Thank you. I appreciate that we couldn’t do it without our wonderful teachers in the classroom and without my great team. So thank you.

1:39:17 First of all, can you send us this in a digital format? So we can share this one. Absolutely. Wonderful.

1:39:24 And then great job. I’ve got a question. One of the programs that was newer, the business and entrepreneurial program, not the hope one, but the other one that’s at the other schools, is that also sponsored by JA or partnered with Ja? It’s not sponsored by Ja, but absolutely, they’re a part of it because in that program is an entrepreneurship class, and they have really come alongside us through that entrepreneurship grant to help with that training within our classroom.

1:39:48 So we’ve got kids that are learning about entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship in construction, in welding, in healthcare. It’s not just your business students that are learning about that. Everybody could potentially be a business owner in our CTE fields, and we want students to understand that connection as well.

1:39:59 I love that. I love that. So I. You know, the challenge is.

1:40:17 Yes, you know, I know we just. I was at. We were at Milhigh with doctor Schiller just a week before last.

1:40:25 And, you know, they have the nursing, the CNA program, and she had the teacher from the program up at astronaut maybe, who was down there learning from her. And I know it’s really hard to find those people who will step out of a very lucrative nursing career to be willing to come and teach and just. We have some really amazing teachers in those fields, and some of them are retired and some of them are not.

1:40:38 You know, they’ve literally stepped out of the workforce to do this. And that’s been fantastic. I think that the word is getting out.

1:40:46 The reason why I can see this happening, because I invited one of our, you know, a couple. Over the last couple years, the board has challenged itself to get elected officials into our schools. And I was able to take one of our Palm Bay city council members into heritage just a few weeks ago, and we hadn’t even started the tour.

1:40:56 And he was like, I wanted to. I want to see what if we can get some of these kids, because we need some of these kids to be interns, paid interns in the city of Pompeii. We need to get them.

1:41:05 And so we introduced, and actually, the works were already in process, but, I mean, the word is getting out. He knew before we even started on the tour, I might have some people who can fill some jobs in this building. And so it’s starting to get out there.

1:41:12 So we’re doing good work. We’ll keep going and we can be the cheerleaders because there’s definitely lots to cheerleaders about. So.

1:41:19 Thank you, Miss Jenkins. I’m good. You know, I appreciate you and everything that you do, I have no questions.

1:41:30 You are always fantastic, thorough, and on point. So thank you for everything you do, and please don’t ever leave us. Thank you, Miss Rutledge.

1:41:36 I just wanted to go through a couple of things. So Palm Bay was. They’d been.

1:41:47 They’re one of like, Coco and Palm Bay are like our two best people when it. Years ago, they used to hire our kids all the time. I don’t know if it didn’t.

1:41:57 They haven’t recently, but they’re really good. And I really appreciate you connecting those things. Hey, why don’t we do some tours? You guys up for it? Getting some t shirts and.

1:42:06 Yeah, always up to showcase our programs. Maybe. Maybe we set something up where we divide it up among the school board members.

1:42:17 And before we get out of here, we can do some promotionals with space coast dailies and Florida todays and all that other stuff. What do you think? They’re looking at me like, why are you asking me this right now? Always love to show our programs. Okay.

1:42:40 All right. So maybe that. So one of the things I was going to ask is one of the areas that were really hurting inside of our counties was the veterinarian programs.

1:42:52 You know what I mean? Like, a lot of our veterinarians are down on people. Have we ever evaluated that? As far as, like, they don’t have. They’re in the same component that we are.

1:43:03 What’s going on there? Sure. So haven’t evaluated it specifically for Brevard. But I know that when I was in another district, there were some challenges just with onboarding the program.

1:43:19 Not that it’s insurmountable, but because the specific certification that teachers have to have is very difficult to fill, as we see with a lot of our other programs. And also the student hours that they need to put in to earn their certifications are really over and above what a high school student is able to complete. That’s been my experience in a prior evaluation.

1:43:36 Not to say that it’s not something we couldn’t take another look at. Maybe there’s an advocate, because a couple of things is that both the veterinarian areas, just as far as veterinarians, both small and large. Right.

1:43:50 But then the other thing is, is that many of our areas here in the county are not. When we think, you know, veterinarian or anything like that, we’re thinking like large agricultural. You know what I mean? Dairy farm and stuff like that, it’s not true.

1:44:12 There are a lot of people that go and take care of the horses inside of many of the horse barns and stuff like that, that there’s not many of them. We used to have a horse and take care of it all the time, and there was just to get a veterinarian to come out. So there’s so many opportunities that I think that we may want to look at.

1:44:24 And if there’s something that we need to advocate at the state to lower some of those recommendations so that they can get in there. You know what I mean? That’s it. So one of the barriers is that regional demand list, and so we consistently have to go to that regional and state demand list first.

1:44:34 Rachel and I have started looking down, actually, I think it was representative placencia that had sent us some really good resources. And so it’s definitely on our whiteboard. Yeah, yeah, they had mentioned that they would.

1:45:00 All right, the other thing is that we, Doctor Sullivan, you and I had worked on, I don’t know if you remember, but we. I flew out to Johnson Space center out there in, in Texas, and NASA had offered to come here with their hunch program, put two engineers at Space Coast High School and literally start the NASA manufacturing center. We just never got around to that.

1:45:12 Now, can we do that with that career and technical one that we just put in there because it looked like some of the machines were the same kind. We are very optimistic about machining options with Space coast. Good.

1:45:19 Right now, those students are being served with our partnership with eastern Florida, and that is working really well. You know. Are they over there? Is that what you’re saying? They go to eastern Florida? They do.

1:45:26 We actually transport them, and we have a coordinated program just for Space coast, those kids, and we actually transport them. And so those teachers work closely with the eastern Florida teachers. One of the things we try to maximize, and Rachel’s done a tremendous job of this is our facilities and the footprint of our facilities and having shared spaces, because they’re very large, very complex, and very costly.

1:45:46 And so the more that we can do combining with eastern Florida, the better for them, the better for us. We’re actually in some preliminary negotiations on some more shared spaces. Maybe that’s where a veterinarian program would be more fitted.

1:46:12 You know what I mean? Maybe we build it there. I do have a veterinarian assistance program that is part of that pipeline. There you go.

1:46:34 And then we dual enroll to those CTE courses, too, at the eastern Florida state. So that’s a great fit. That’s the way it should have been, like years ago.

1:46:53 Just so everybody knows, the community college were supposed to be the workforce, so they were supposed to build, build out a lot of the stuff that we had. And then because of the manufacturing dropped and we sent everything over shores, we had to basically create more and more programs that they normally would do. They actually said our facilities were better than theirs.

1:46:59 They actually gave up some of the programs between Lori Benjamin and adult education and, of course, our career tech expenses. And then is there. One of the things that I really see is that the 911 dispatch and the police, is there a way to enhance that for them to more pipeline into police, to become police officers type stuff? I mean, is that, you know, there’s been some discussion with some of those instructors.

1:47:03 What do you have going on there? So, criminal justice, the program itself leads students towards many different areas in that field. We added a 911 as a capstone so that students could have a direct to work certification, which has been. I get lots of calls about that, trying to fill the pipeline, you know, and so.

1:47:21 But our criminal justice program as a whole is leading kids in a lot of different directions. And our teachers do an amazing job bringing in community partners to talk to the students. That 911 program is going to have an internship component towards the end of it so that kids can go ahead and start making those connections and understand the world of work and be engrossed in that.

1:47:31 So is that answering your question? No, it does. I just. And we have those at home.

1:47:55 Bay Rockledge, Titusville. Titusville. Okay.

1:48:06 And then the last piece is, I got approached, and I’m going to be speaking at the ABC, the Associated builders and contractors. One of them had mentioned, hey, what are we doing? And then they all got worked up. They said they would throw a construction competition between our schools on a weekend.

1:48:12 And because I told them, I said my stuff, if I asked them to do it, just like the look you guys gave me over the tours, I think they would blow their head gaskets. They said we would take it completely. We would invite them.

1:48:26 We would take the curriculum that they have. They just wanted to get the opportunity. Is that something we could engage with or what do you think? Potentially, I would say one really great step that we could make now would be to get some of those business partners into the classroom to work with students on some of those skills, and then start to get them excited about competition, because that’s an area of need for us, is to pair up our partners.

1:48:36 We see a really good situation happening right now at Coco. Yeah. With Hedrick brothers, who’s working really closely with them to come in on skill, and then they’ll get prepared.

1:48:51 It pushes them a little further in their curriculum. Then we can look at competition. I love that, actually.

1:49:02 If you think about the model, I think you’ve judged on it before. You know how the ja does the shark tank competition, but they bring in people. They bring in entrepreneurs to school, men who mentor the kids through their projects, and then they come to the competition.

1:49:04 So I like that idea of getting them in there. And then I just think they do plumbing, they do electrical, they do framing. We could set it up on a Saturday, let them do it and just battle it.

1:49:15 Yeah. And I would suggest even a school day, because I think it’s a really good use of time. It allows us to transport kids for ensuring that all students can participate, and it decreases another outside of school hours obligation on our teachers.

1:49:17 But I love it. And you can even pit the companies against each other. You can come with me to when I speak, and I’ll just say, hey, she approved everything, so I’ll be there with you.

1:49:22 Thank you. That’s it. Thank you very much.

1:49:26 Anybody else have any other comments? Did you say something? Do you want to talk? You sure? Something going on down there? All right, get back here. Thank you very much. Thank you for the opportunity.

1:49:48 Thank you. As usual. Always amazing.

1:49:53 Let me just get back to this. Good job. Okay, we’re getting there.

1:50:26 I think we got speakers now. Get this. Okay.

1:50:35 We are now at public comments portion of the meeting and on agenda items. First, if I can get a motion from the public comment to move the public comments non agenda items to the public comments agenda items portion of the agenda, giving all three speaker all speakers three minutes and the ability to address the board by name. Move to approve motion two.

1:50:51 Approved. Second. Okay.

1:51:15 Is there any discussion? Please vote. All in favor, signify by saying aye. Aye.

1:51:25 Opposed? All right, we have a total of 14 speakers, and each will receive the three minutes. I will call up three speakers at a time. The first three speakers are Kathy Ebersberger, Robert Ray, and Richard Weber.

1:51:43 Can you hear me? Yes, ma’am. Hello. My name is Kathy Ebersberger, and I’m a concerned community member and taxpayer.

1:51:52 I’d like to talk about how to keep some of these awesome teachers. First, I’d like to acknowledge your devotion to brevard public schools, its students and staff. I truly believe that each of you has a genuine concern for our children and our community.

1:52:07 I applaud your energy in attacking the challenge to reward our excellent teachers and staff with the limited budget that’s given to public schools. I think we’d all like to be able to pay our teachers more, what they’re worth to our community today and for the future of our workforce. Despite the low pay, we have extremely dedicated teachers and support staff.

1:52:18 Why? Because they love our kids. They believe in them. They believe they’re our future, and they want them to be able to fulfill their potential.

1:52:49 Our unions have focused your attention on the discipline problems in our schools, and you have heard them. You’ve stated that you want them to know that you have their backs. That is indeed how to stem the flow of resignations.

1:53:07 But let’s talk about some other ways. First. Acknowledge teachers professionalism, training, and experience.

1:53:19 Show them loudly and clearly that you appreciate their efforts. Show them you don’t think they’re grooming our kids to be gay or trans. Show them you don’t believe that they are indoctrinating our students.

1:53:30 Show them you’ll stand behind them if a parent challenges their actions under these new laws, unless it’s a clear violation. Show them you trust them. You trust them to choose appropriate books for their classroom libraries.

1:53:44 You trust them to select books and materials for the media centers. The orders to close classroom libraries until books are vetted and to vet every book in the media centers tells our teachers you don’t trust them. Worse yet, teachers are being threatened with a felony prosecution in the unlikely event they make a mistake.

1:53:57 These orders and threats are insulting to our teachers and have been heaped on countless defamatory accusations from politicians. You might say you’re powerless, you’re merely following the law. But you have the ear of Brevard’s legislative delegation.

1:54:04 Tell them to stop the attacks on our teachers and amend the immediate specialist training and rules. They are hurting our schools. We have a book review process.

1:54:08 Let’s use it. If anyone wants to challenge a book, they can. We’re wasting precious time and energy while too many kids can’t read at grade level.

1:54:08 Let’s stop handcuffing our teachers. Show our teachers we trust them and focus on eliminating the achievement gaps. Thank you.

1:54:23 Robert Ray. Richard Beaver and skip Parrish. Hello, I’m Rick Beaver.

1:54:35 Good to see you all. Is Robert Ray here? Pardon? Robert Ray, I think you’re before Mister Bieber. Me? If you.

1:54:44 I didn’t mean. We just got to go in the specific order here. If you’ll go and then have him go.

1:55:01 Thank you. Sorry, Mister Bieber. If you just hang on just a second.

1:55:12 Thank you. Sorry, didn’t mean to take your place. Hi, I’m Bob Ray.

1:55:22 I’m one of your substitute teachers. I came right from the classroom to be with you today, but I didn’t think I was going to follow Elvis. A little bit about me before I share some thoughts with you.

1:55:32 I taught music and gifted in Pennsylvania for ten years and then retired from IBM. I’m grateful for the opportunity to teach again. I moved here to be near my family.

1:55:44 My grandsons are at Auburn and Jefferson, and I’ve substituted in over 16 of our schools since January of 2020. When school is in session, I always seek an assignment over 700 days anyway. Okay, yay.

1:55:56 A few words about my experience. The administration and staff are very, very helpful. Especially people like Lisa Green at Merritt island and Jenny Clark at Space Coast.

1:56:07 I don’t know if you know about these folks or not. They’re on the staff and they’re the ones that get the substitutes in to cover the classes. You wouldn’t believe how hard this is.

1:56:16 Jenny will send you a thank you note after you teach. You know, it’s really amazing. So they managed to find these subs on a daily basis, which is very difficult.

1:56:23 Doctor Rendell and Mister Rainer have been very, very supportive, especially and offered me long term assignments. So all of these folks deserve a big shout out. They’ve got one from me, but they need it from you.

1:56:34 The faculty is very helpful with great lesson plans and everyone always says thank you for coming. Makes you feel like a star quarterback for Penn State. Sorry about that, but we did win the Rose bowl.

1:56:45 Anyway. The best part is that you really get to know the students and care about them. I’ve taught all grade levels and subjects and got to do some wrestling coaching.

1:56:56 So we appreciate your effort to recruit and support subs. I know that is a challenge. The increase in salary and the Red Rover app is great.

1:57:10 It’s really, really nice. I don’t know if you know about that or not, so here’s an idea that might help. It won’t cost anything.

1:57:19 It doesn’t take an agenda item. So when the kids ask me if I’m a substitute, I say no, I’m an actual human being. So I have a dear friend who teaches third grade.

1:57:23 She’s from California and she had a suggestion. Her idea is rather than call a substitute substitutes, call us guest teachers. I like it.

1:57:49 Yeah. So from now on, when the kids say, are you our substitute? Say, nope, I’m your guest teacher. So that’s the way it’s going to rock for me anyway.

1:58:04 So it’s so much kinder and gentler and you don’t feel like a third string quarterback. I’m sure I am alone in feeling this way, but I’m not looking forward to May 2016. I guess I’ll have to find a hobby until August 10.

1:58:31 I’m thinking surfing. Okay, thanks. Thank you, Mister Ray, mister Viber.

1:58:49 Skip Parrish. Katie Delaney. Thank you.

1:58:57 Well, I had someone up here talking about substitute teaching. This article I found in the New Yorker is about a substitute teacher, and it’s called a letter from the south. Why some Florida schools are removing books from their libraries, and it says underneath, if I weren’t living through it, I wouldn’t believe it is happening.

1:59:16 One parent who has worked as a substitute teacher said it was written by Charles Bethea February 3, 2023. Just going to. Oh, and there’s a picture of Ron DeSantis with the article.

1:59:37 Some Florida parents see a recent state law cracking down on books in public schools as a reflection of Governor Ron DeSantis presidential ambitions. All right, so let me read this about the substitute teacher’s experience. In late January, at Greenland Pines elementary, kids attended a party for an event called Celebrate Literacy Week.

2:00:04 Florate Literacy week Florida there was an escape room and food trucks. Brian Covey, an entrepreneur in his late thirties, came to pick up his daughter, who’s in second grade, and his son, who’s in vet. His kids looked confused.

2:00:35 Did you hear what happened at school today? His daughter asked. They took all the books out of the classrooms. Covey asked.

2:00:50 Which books? All the books, she said. Covey’s son had been reading, measuring up a coming of age story about an immigrant to the United States from Taiwan. Students who read from a list of preselected books, including this one, were rewarded with an ice cream party.

2:01:11 They even took that book, Kobe said. Covey went into the school classrooms to see what his children were talking about and found bookshelves papered over to hide the books. He also went to another local school and later uploaded a video to Twitter showing that his shelves were bare.

2:01:42 This has never been an issue before, Covey told me, noting that he’d grown up in the same public school system in Duval county, which includes Jacksonville. I read books about consequences of this kind of thing when I was in school, he was thinking of fahrenheit 5451 in 1984, he said. His kids, he added, seemed confused about what would make a book inappropriate for school.

2:02:31 The only way I could get them to understand was to ask what happens if a book in the library or classroom had the f word and hit a bunch of times, he told me. My son said we’d bring it to the teacher of the librarian, Covey couldn’t think of any books at their library that he would keep from them. Now this substitute teacher was actually fired by the contractor that had him employed with the public schools at the behest of DeSantis.

2:03:06 Mister Bieber. Thank you. Skip Parrish, Katie Delaney, Gregory Ross, please.

2:03:27 This is Mister Parrish. Howdy everyone. Earlier today during the working session, one of the school board members made a comment about more liberal county members needing to consider moving away because Brevard is a conservative county.

2:03:39 Now for starters, according to the supervisor of elections website, only about 42 and a half percent of registered voters in Brevard county are Republicans. And in the district for the school board member that stated this, there’s a 1.1% increase in the number of Republican in his district.

2:03:51 And I’m just curious. As you know, we heard all these things about freedom and parental choice and all these other things during this last election cycle. What political party are the kindergartners? What political party are you, the 10th graders? And if more liberal members of the county are supposed to leave because of the policies you all plan on implementing, what exactly are you planning on doing that you don’t think individuals or groups on a local or national level will not find legal ways to fight against, to run off people that have been in this county since the eighties? Since the seventies? My first memory is in the house that I live in.

2:04:00 I’m a 48 year old man on that same property my 72 year old Desert Storm veteran mother lives. How exactly, mister school board member, are you planning on running us out of a county that we have both lived in longer than you? How exactly do you plan on governing in this way when you want to be this divisive? Many of us will be here over and over again. We will stir the pot over and over again.

2:04:19 Mister Susan, for as much as I disagree with him, will work with people on the other side of the aisle. Your district is not 100% republican, Mister Trent. And there are people in the center.

2:04:43 Not people like me. I’m very obviously no longer in the center I was earlier in my life. But there are people in the center that will grow tired of your childish escapades.

2:04:52 Thanks much. Thank you Mister Parrish. Miss Katie Delaney, Gregory Ross, James Diamora.

2:05:19 Miss Delaney. Thank you. The first thing that I’d like to talk about is the budget.

2:05:43 We are. We appreciate the presentations that have been made, but honestly, that’s not exactly what the public is asking for. What the public is asking for is for the budget to reflect line items.

2:06:22 We want to know where every cent is going. We want to know what exactly is being paid for and how much onto the discipline. I have been to all but one of the discipline steering committee meetings and I have a lot to say about that, but I don’t have time for that today.

2:06:47 We need an action plan. And it’s obvious where the breakdown is happening. And most of the problem isn’t coming from the classroom level.

2:07:04 The inconsistencies are coming from the district and we need to find out where those are and bring them out to the light. And if there our inconsistencies happening amongst our children being disciplined, that needs to be brought to light. We need to look at the top of this pyramid.

2:07:19 Now, I would like to talk about the process for policymaking. About a year and a half ago, I came to speak and give my comment about a policy policy that was being talked about. And Miss Campbell, you told me, well, if you’d come to the workshop, you would have been able to give your comment while we’re making these policies, and it would have been able to be, you know, taken into consideration.

2:07:31 Well, since that day, I’ve come to every workshop and I will say that I wish that the public hearing or the public public comment on those policies. I don’t know if this is able to be done, but maybe if the public comment comes at the first reading of those policies, while you guys are rulemaking, then considerations from the public could be heard at that first time, and then it wouldn’t have to go through rulemaking again by the time the public has a chance to. To speak on it.

2:07:42 And just because I have some time left, I just want to comment on the books. There has been one book, one book taken from brevard public schools, and it had sexually explicit pictures of children. Incest, pedophilia.

2:07:54 This is not fahrenheit 451 or whatever else. This is sexually explicit pornography that’s being put in front of our kids. So let’s stop that narrative, that false narrative.

2:08:02 Thank you. Thank you, Miss Delaney. If I can have Gregory Ross, James de Amira and Virginia Hamilton Hampton, please.

2:08:06 Good evening, school board members. My name is Gregory Ross and I’m here to speak tonight once again on the words, the actions and performance of this school board. It’s a shame I only have three minutes.

2:08:16 I guess I’m going to be a little more direct. Mister Trent. I listened to your diatribe this afternoon during the school board work session.

2:08:44 I’m deeply concerned about many of the statements that you have made to the brevard community about the termination of Doctor Mullins. Here. Let’s quote exactly what you said.

2:09:03 I just cannot allow this narrative to continue. That the board made a mistake and now we’re paying for it. Can’t allow it.

2:09:24 I don’t want to hear that anymore. We made the decision and we. Go on.

2:09:41 We made it based on what we felt was right for the district. Therein lies the problem. Your words are troubling to the many who heard them.

2:09:52 You openly admitted that you and other board members made the decision to terminate Doctor Mullins based on your feelings. You have openly admitted on more than one occasion that there was no data, no facts, no metrics used in the decision to terminate Doctor Mullins. A decision that has cost the taxpayers of Brevard county over $750,000 up to this point, increasing every day.

2:10:04 You have admitted, on more than one occasion you can’t or won’t look at data, facts and metrics before making important decisions. One must be left to reason that you made the decision due to one of two reasons. You terminated Doctor Mullins for political reasons, number one.

2:10:20 Number two, you and other board members didn’t understand the implications of such a decision and are therefore unqualified to make a decision. I look forward to you clarifying the exact reasons for that decision, but I suspect those reasons will not be forthcoming. However, those were not the only troubling words you spoke today.

2:10:23 You followed up on your previous statement with what was talked about earlier. That people who. That this is a conservative county, right, and people who don’t fit.

2:10:26 Fit that narrative should move on. How does one respond to that non inclusive statement? I’ll tell you my response. What you’re talking about is not conservatism.

2:10:32 It’s extremism. If you need an example of a true conservative, please look to your left and learn from Misses Campbell. A true conservative who at least backs up her arguments with data and facts and empathy.

2:10:42 She would never demand one of her electorates or students to leave this county if they don’t like it. You would be wise to learn from her example. In reality, based upon how fast this board is blowing through brevard school funds, even Miss Jenkins is more physically conservative.

2:10:45 Thank you. Three of the current board members appreciate the time. You know who you are.

2:10:53 Virginia Hamilton. Thank you. Please head to the podium.

2:10:59 Max Maddow. Crystal Cayce. Thank you.

2:11:05 On deck is Max maddle, crystal cayze, and Paul Rao. Diamira. Oh, James, you haven’t gone yet.

2:11:30 Miss Jenkins, did you pass out? Hang on. Hang on. Mister.

2:11:40 Is James Diamiro here? Because I thought that was him. So James Diamiro is not here. Okay, Miss Virginia, go ahead.

2:11:49 Hello? Sorry, hold on. I. I thought this was a packet you gave everyone. Yeah, sorry.

2:12:06 That’s okay. Thank you. Okay, let’s pick on Jean Trent.

2:12:27 Night after the discipline meeting on February 9, I spoke with Jean Trent and two mothers in attendance. I shared with him a program I used in my class called stop and think with a self management form where students selected an area they would like to improve. Whether it is academic or a personal choice, I chose the behaviors of the students making the poor choices.

2:12:58 Each time I observed the behavior, the student marked the sheet with a tally. After three tallies, the sheet went home for parent signature. Parent involvement was a success in my classroom.

2:13:12 However, if parents were not involved, then it can’t be a success. Success. I contacted the creator of stop and think, Doctor Howard Knopf.

2:13:29 He was kind enough to offer to speak with this board, which I highly recommend. I also had stop signs all around my classroom so that if a peer caught another student not following a rule, they pointed to the stop sign. So peer interaction was very successful in that.

2:13:46 So Mister Trent said, classroom management is a huge issue, especially with the younger teachers when further asking where we are in society. If our kids are getting to the upper grades with this behavior, Mister Trent said, that isn’t our problem. It shouldn’t be on the 6th grade teacher to fix what kindergarten didn’t.

2:14:06 I was teaching in 6th grade at the time. Rather than commenting negatively, Mister Trent, you should have asked to talk more about this program since the workshop did not come up with suggestions or be a proactive committee. How can we expect our students to succeed in making appropriate choices if we have groups fighting against using anything remotely similar to Sel? Moms for Liberty joined a lawsuit in another state stopping the use of a curriculum called character strong that teaches kindness from grades k through eight.

2:14:22 A parent stated not everyone requires her children’s empathy and respect. She said this does not go along with her religious values and beliefs. Empathy is not a christian belief.

2:14:53 And lastly, since I volunteer at Sheriff Aidys Shelter, he asked me my thoughts about the discipline issue. I suggested that we form a committee of high school students to help with ideas. He liked the suggestion and said the kids could develop better ideas than we as adults.

2:15:17 I would love to throw my hat in the ring to work with these teenagers. I have 31 years experience in teaching as a teacher here in Brevard County. Mister Trent, please focus less on shifting the blame and more on educating yourself on some programs that work not only with discipline, but all other areas.

2:15:28 Be proactive, listen, and we have ideas and some solutions to help. Thank you, everybody. Thank you, Miss Hamilton, Miss Max Maddle, Crystal Cayce, Paul Ralph, please.

2:15:46 Good evening, board. My name is Max Maddle and I am a junior in high school. This year there’s an array of different things I could talk about about this new cell phone policy that’s coming.

2:15:58 I know you guys are currently just enforcing or asking administration to enforce it more and you can’t really do anything with it yet. I’ve read through all the redline documents that you’ve provided that you how you want to change the policy, but I kind of want to talk about how the current contract stands because in the contract I have it up here. One of the lines says, students shall have no expectation of confidentiality with respect to their use of cell phones.

2:16:14 Ws WCD’s on school property. I want clarification on what that’s supposed to mean because nobody’s allowed to search a student’s cell phone unless there’s reasonable suspicion of a crime or there’s a warrant in place. That’s all.

2:16:28 Thank you, Max. If you have any questions, you can go to the back and Miss Sullivan, Doctor Sullivan will answer those questions for you. Thank you.

2:17:06 Crystal Cayze, Paul Raub, and Samantha Kirvin. Good evening, Doctor Schiller and distinguished board members. For the record, I believe that Jean Trent is doing an exceptional job today.

2:17:25 I’ll be speaking freely about the First Amendment to the US Constitution. Let me begin with a Supreme Court quote. Discrimination against speech because of its message is presumed to be unconstitutional.

2:17:59 Speech in this public forum must be within the jurisdiction of the school board. Speech restriction here may not be viewpoint discrimination. In other words, a speaker is permitted to use names for praise, but is censored if names are spoken in criticism.

2:18:10 As an example, Pete Soza was permitted to speak Robert and Brock Doty’s name in praise of last October. However, I was interrupted for speaking the same in criticism two weeks ago. At no point was there a disruption of board business.

2:18:37 Every aspect of board policy was met. The current version, letter e, states that you may address the board member by name, but there is no mention of not mentioning a staff member’s name, if I am correct. By the way, if a parent wishes to complain about the Viera High School baseball program, please email hawkscorruptionmail.com dot in fact, Ryan Morrison with the Institute of Free Speech stated, the First Amendment protects parents right to criticize their public school system and elected school board without censorship.

2:18:43 We will appeal and ultimately prevail, just as the Institute for Free Speech has in other school board cases across the country. This first amendment case is currently being appealed and litigated. I am, however, heartened by Doctor Shiller’s implementation of an appeal process for BPS ethics complaints.

2:19:09 You see, if you scrutinize the evidence that I presented BPS professional standards, you will discover multiple violations of my First Amendment rights perpetrated by the principal of Viera High School, Sarah Robinson. Does this board condone BPS employees violating a parent’s First Amendment rights? It would be prudent to take another look at my ethics complaints of board policies and standards of professional practice. Recently, BPS professional standards released an incomplete ethics complaint investigation letter.

2:19:14 No mention of the standards of professional practice of alleged violations was included. Let that sink in for a second. The investigation was not complete.

2:19:32 That was February 15, 2023. Does this board permit incomplete ethics complaint investigations? It is my sincere hope that this board will take decisive action to address my ethics complaints in their entirety, as well as holding BPS employees accountable for violations of board policy, standards of professional practice, and the first amendment to our us constitution. Thank you.

2:19:54 Thank you, Miss Casey. Paul Rao. Samantha Kirvin.

2:20:14 Kelly Kervin, and then Diana Haynes. So I was planning to come here and talk about the book review committee, which apparently might be a figment of my imagination, but it’s hard not to talk about some of the things that were said earlier today. That you cannot allow the narrative, Mister Trent, that the board made a mistake and we are now paying for it.

2:20:29 Weaving the board. We don’t think you made a mistake. We think this was on purpose.

2:20:40 We’re paying for it. The students, the teachers, literally the taxpayers. Mister Ross mentioned some of the costs, I don’t know how many, you know, bus driver salaries that might have paid for of this search after we fired a superintendent for doing his job.

2:20:59 Don’t believe that it was a mistake. An accident that the again, possibly fictitious book review committee was temporarily suspended awaiting replacement members who haven’t come yet and now sort of indefinitely on hold. Yes, while we’re waiting for a new policy that keeps getting bumped off the agenda but will eventually essentially be a wood chipper.

2:21:40 But we know that there’s sort of a statewide wood chipper book policy coming down, so blame can lie elsewhere. Yay. And you mentioned that you hadn’t heard this kind of commentary from the business community, which is nice, but this isn’t the chamber of commerce, this is the board of education.

2:21:47 And it would be wonderful if parents, teachers, students came first. And that’s not really what we’re seeing. And looking at some of the results from the superintendent survey search that was published.

2:22:01 Couldn’t resist running through and kind of tallying up what some of the more popular answers are. The more common answers are. The number one challenge listed was discipline, which I’m not going to pretend there aren’t problems there.

2:22:10 And of course there’s been lovely publicity campaign about it, so that helped. But number two, number two with a bullet, and number two, by a wide margin, if you lump a few different terms into, was literally the second most popular answer after discipline is moms for liberty. And that’s without a press conference in front of a bonfire or a COVID ward or anything like that.

2:22:15 That’s just people noticing what’s going on and being terrified. So where’s that conference? Where’s that roundtable? Where’s the discussion about that? Where’s the let’s not be taken over by these folks conference? But I mean, I guess why worry about being on the wrong side of history when it’s rapidly becoming illegal to teach history? And hey, the teacher shortage, maybe we’re not going to need so many teachers when the curriculum is dumbed down to mega levels and when most of the kids are in detention or expelled due to these zero tolerance policies we keep hearing about. That’s it.

2:22:27 Thank you. Thank you, Mister Rao. If I can remind the crowd that when people are speaking, there’s a microphone.

2:22:49 And if the online needs to hear him. So I know you’re cheering for the guy that you are supporting, just understand that sometimes his speech can’t be heard because of the thing. So just as a respectful thing, if we can avoid that.

2:23:16 Samantha Kirvin. Kelly Kervin. Diana Haynes.

2:23:50 Hello. Can you hear me? Yep. Okay, well, I’m Samantha Kirvin.

2:24:34 I’m an 8th grader at the moment and good morning. So I hope everyone’s doing okay. Hope nothing has been really bad lately.

2:24:45 But I like to address a certain problem that I have been seeing and dealing with me, my friends, my peers, people I’ve been working with constantly. I see them every day other than weekends. And we’re constantly being told that our generation is just so disrespectful or immature.

2:24:50 And we’re always glued to our phones. And it’s just. It was just ironic when at this morning’s workshop, Miss Jenkins was talking about an important issue on, well, the firing of Doctor Mullins, which is important, it’s important to know about.

2:25:00 And Miss Wright just happened to laugh at that. Now, Miss Wright, as a woman, I think you would know that stereotypes about women being catty, going after other girls at, well, any chance they get, and you almost fit that perfectly. You were an example, and I noticed how y’all were trying to just say to lead by example and you didn’t show that.

2:25:36 And just our school board should be working in the best interests of the students and that was not represented to me at all. I just kind of lost count of how many times a new, as well as like new superintendent. I noticed how Mister Susan, you know, I noticed how you kept saying, like about referencing the new superintendent as he a lot, and you ended up kind of just quietly saying she to me.

2:25:55 That implies that you’re implying that woman is likely not going to be the superintendent. And I’d like to disagree with leave with that. You can shake your head all you want.

2:26:11 That’s all. Thank you for your time. Thank you, miss.

2:26:29 Kirvin. Kelly Kervin. I’m just going to say for the record that I’m really, really, really proud of my kid.

2:26:46 When I pick her up at 330 and I’m listening to the workshop, she knows at 430 or after it ends that I’m going to go to the beginning and she’s going to be able to listen to it before she comes to this meeting. When I brought her to this first meeting, my assumption was as a teenager she would find it boring and now she doesn’t want to miss them. I’m going to also highlight this morning’s workshop if we’re going to require the education requirement of our new superintendent to be at least a master’s or equivalent, preferably a doctorate, which was something I had mentioned at the community forum I had attended at Bayside.

2:26:59 I think it’s really disrespectful, Miss Wright, to say that Florida laws are too difficult to understand. If they have a master’s or a doctorate from college, they are perfectly capable of comprehending what our laws are. Maybe it’s projection.

2:27:18 I’m not one that likes to insult people. I just feel like maybe everyone should thought about this before we fired the guy who was completely and totally qualified for this position. I understand that Doctor Mullins was viewed politically.

2:27:30 I will not ignore where we are as a society. However, he proved time and time again that even if he didn’t necessarily agree with the board direction, he was going to follow it because that was his job. Gene, you talked more today than I have heard you talk in a while.

2:27:46 And I’m actually going to personally invite you to talk more because what you showcase today for all of Brevard county is the political erosion in our school district. Speakers earlier talked about Democrats first Republicans registered in Florida. I looked up the data.

2:28:02 I know you’re not a fan of data. The Florida Division of Elections stays in Brevard county. There are over 130,000 registered Democrats and just shy of 11,000 registered third party and 126,000 who don’t declare a party either way.

2:28:11 So if I ignore the latter number, you’re suggesting that over 140,000 prevard county residents and their children should potentially look somewhere else to live. Mister Susan said earlier that our transportation is collapsing. Want to see a collapse of a school district in our county? Ask 140,000 residents to leave and take their children with them.

2:28:33 You want to talk about CTE programs, you’re not going to be able to fill them. You’re not going to be able to fill our schools. You’re not going to be able to fulfill the business requirements of employment that our county needs to function.

2:29:06 And I’m going to ignore some things I would just like to highlight in the back row where I was sitting. You have a group of BPS bus drivers in this room that rush to this boardroom after they finish driving your buses to speak. But we’re told that they couldn’t because they cannot physically get here soon enough.

2:29:21 So while you consider changes to the public comment policy, maybe consider adding the ability for people to sign up until public commenting starts, which we used to have to allow more voices to be heard, especially when the voices your policy are silencing. Thank you, Miss Kirvin. Appreciate the time.

2:29:55 Miss Diana Hayes. Miss Diana Hayes, please come forward. Good evening.

2:30:44 I’d like to start off with my little corp of, you know, definitions. Malfeasance, the act that causes physical or monetary harm to someone else, especially by an official or a public employee. Malfeasance is the intentional conduct that is wrongful or unlawful by officials or public employees.

2:30:55 Let’s talk about the hundred million dollar worth of malfeasance you’re going to be having coming your way rather shortly. I’m talking about the lawsuit with the Steele family regarding Sophia Steele and what happened to her. That the previous board, based on their policies agreeing to go against Governor DeSantis’s no mask mandate and which your own paid attorney advised against.

2:30:56 Miss Jenkins, you went in wholeheartedly. And as a result of that horrific policy in December of 2020, 115 complaints were filed against the Brevard county school board. Now, I’ve done my homework.

2:31:08 I’ve gone to and through Pacer monitor, and I’ve read the case, I’ve read the depositions. Okay. And I have to ask, why is it okay and in the middle of a multimillion dollar lawsuit for Miss Jenkins to have felt compelled to harass the victim’s family and purposely go after them to destroy not only their good name, but their reputation in the community? Miss Jenkins, you have called Doctor Jeffrey Steele a doctor of theology, a liar and a fraud on your school board public media page.

2:31:23 That is malfeasance in response to Randy fine, you said, what about this family you hosted at a press conference that crowdfunded over $100,000 with fraudulent photos? You, Miss Jenkins, are in the middle of a multi million dollar lawsuit, and you are playing games on social media, tit for tat, verbal diarrhea that is going to cost the students of this county, the teachers, the bus drivers, the taxpayers. Sophia is the little seven year old, nonverbal, autistic child who was the subject of this hundred thousand. I’m going to ask you to stop the public comment from saying a juvenile’s name like you would any other public comment.

2:41:50 And we were speaking to that, Paul and I. No, we were not. No, no, that’s not true. Let’s avoid the use of juveniles names and stuff like that.

2:42:01 Oh, okay. I’m sorry. I apologize.

2:42:03 That’s no problem. Okay. You stated that she was not a victim of your policy, but yet I believe this lawsuit tends to differ with that.

2:42:16 And why is it, Miss Jenkins, you are the only one in the entire lawsuit being sued for defamation? Just wondering. Thank you, Miss Haynes. We have.

2:42:27 We can take a five minute break. Use the restroom, stuff like that. Am I hearing a consensus on that? Okay, we’ll be back in five minutes.

2:42:32 We are now at the consent agenda. Doctor Schiller? Yes, sir. The first item that we have under the action portion.

2:42:43 It’s a consensus. It’s just the. There are 18 agenda items.

2:42:54 There are 18 agenda items under this category. Thank you, Doctor Shiller. Does any board member wish to pull any of the items hearing? None.

2:42:59 No items pulled for discussion. I will entertain a motion to accept the consent items, with the exception of these that were not polled. If applicable, please move to approve second.

2:43:01 All right. Is there any discussion? All in favor, signify by saying aye. Aye.

2:43:09 Opposed? It’s passed. Doctor Shiller, would you let us know about the action item? Yes, sir. Today’s agenda under h 30, department and school initiated agreements.

2:43:15 That is the first item. Do I hear a motion to approve? Second. Any discussion? Yes, I have discussion on 31.

2:43:21 H 31 procurement. Sorry. Yeah, we’re good.

2:43:33 We’re good, but we’re on h 30. Look at. You’re ahead of it.

2:43:51 You’re ahead of the game. Here we go. So age 30, any discussion? All in favor, signify by saying aye.

2:44:03 Aye. Opposed? Okay. The next item is age 31.

2:44:09 Do I hear a motion? One two combo. Come on. Second.

2:44:21 There we go. Is there any discussion? Yes, I have discussed on this, Miss Megan. I just want to discuss this one because what this procurement solicitation is for, it looks like it’s for videoing at middle schools.

2:44:32 And really, when I look at what this costs the district, I really think that we could task our kids that are in video production. We’ve heard about many of the programs tonight at CTE. I would love to see them do something of that nature rather than the district hire an outside company to do that.

2:44:57 And I think they would have pride and ownership and they would be able to highlight their own school and it could be a fun, almost competition. So for that reason, I don’t like this one. So I will not be.

2:45:13 I personally will not be approving it. I just wanted to put it out there on where I was and why I was where I was. So.

2:45:28 Okay. Any other discussion? Yeah. Doctor Schiller, could we have Mister Broon give a description of the purpose and where the funding would be coming from as well? Mister Broome, please.

2:45:43 Good evening again. Board. This program would be paid for by art money, American Rescue plan money that was earmarked for this type of project.

2:46:07 This is an enrollment project that will highlight all of our eleven traditional middle schools. The programs, the staff, the options, the opportunities that are there. We did this the last two years where we spent money that was our own money that we raised in GCR to actually highlight our teachers last year, in the previous year to highlight schools in Titusville and in Palm Bay.

2:46:21 Again, this is not. This is art money that would be used for this project. It’s eleven schools, eleven videos, highly accelerated timeline to get these shots and edited and put on our website and to be shared.

2:46:37 This is one of the things that lets us stand out. And so we thought it would be appropriate use of money and the only use of this money because it is an enrollment plan to kind of keep, make sure that our families come to our schools versus other options. Thank you.

2:46:51 Thank you, Mister Brun. And this is a local company local small business also, and who does excellent work. They’re also a big part of our junior achievement which gets involved in our schools.

2:47:17 And I understand, I love the idea of using student projects to highlight them. But like I said, this just to clarify, that money, the american rescue plan money was given with certain, you know, parameters. But then the state specifically said, want use some of that for that, you know, go find those missing kids, right? Because we lost our enrollment.

2:47:41 And so that’s when Mister Bernie was talking about that. Those dollars that was funding that goes in specific bucket that has to be used for recruitment and getting people back in our schools. So just wanted to make that clarification.

2:47:48 Thank you. Anybody else got any discussion on it? Yeah, I just want to say how much I appreciate this because we were just talking about this the other day and I don’t remember what it was, but about how fantastic those videos were highlighting the high schools. And I wish we would kind of just roll them out again.

2:48:11 Like, I don’t know, maybe we are, but can we put them out there into the universe again because they were so good. And so it’s exciting to see that we’re going to start doing this in middle schools too. Because I know that it’s one of the years that parents are most afraid of.

2:48:25 And it is one of the years where we have families that are making decisions to potentially, you know, send their kids to charter schools before they hit middle school because they want to keep them in there through those middle school years. So it’s a really good way for us to capture some families that may not really know what they’re going into. That’s why we obviously chose, you know, that those grades, 7th and 8th grade, because we know that’s what parents sometimes have concerns as their child goes into their second school and starts to hit those, those ages.

2:48:29 So we have a lot of great things happening in our schools and doctor Sullivan is leading that with the reimagining of our middle schools. And so again, we think it’s appropriate use of the money and we’re proud of the work that we do with rock paper simple, which is the company that Miss Campbell referenced, locally owned and award winning. And this Friday, the video they shot for us with our teachers last year is going to be winning an award this Friday.

2:48:43 So this is highly professional work. That’s a great reflection on the district. Hang on.

2:48:48 Just ask Mister Trent. No, I think it’s a wise use of the funds and it is a great time to get that message out to families at that 7th, 8th grade years, and I’ve been in those middle schools and have taught them, and there’s lots of good things going on and we need to get that information out. Thank you.

2:48:55 So I’m going to come back to you. Just wanted to run through it. Do we have anybody on staff that actually makes those videos? They could make those videos, yes.

2:49:16 Okay. And then $6,000 per video. A lot of.

2:49:28 I mean, when you talk about Arp and going out and trying to retain and recruit some of the students that are out there, I do have concerns about that. Right. I mean, like, we’re looking at a video that they’re going to do and saying that it’s $6,000 because there’s eleven of them.

2:49:32 Right. And we’re doing. Yeah, it’s like five and a half.

2:49:43 But still, I mean, that’s a lot of money to put towards it. Like, I do have concerns over it and I appreciate you bringing it up. I was going to talk with.

2:49:52 I was going to pass it and ask to push it just to get some better understanding of the art because. Because one of the big things that we have is one of the largest homeschool education, you know what I mean, where all these students have left and is that Arp. And then we have a lot of the other components that are inside of there where, you know what I mean? We might be able to find better ways.

2:50:21 I mean, we’re saying that we’re going to attract kids to come back because we make a video. I think that there’s some other ways that we can do that that might be a little bit better. You know what I mean? And I think taking that money and approving it right now may not be.

2:50:28 I think that’s. That’s the way I feel. Miss Wright, you had some questions.

2:50:36 I just had a quick question. So in regards to this money, if it’s not used on this video, what other things could it be used for? It’s earmarked for enrollment and retention of students. So it could be a variety of things, but it’s through media.

2:50:54 It’s not through, you know, programming that money’s being used. You know, there’s money for that as well. This is for outreach and marketing.

2:51:06 You know, I would just remind everybody that when I go home to my house in my mailbox, I get charter school flyers, my kids go to public school, and they remain doing that. It’s a competitive landscape, that I’m a competitive person, and our kids belong in our middle schools. And so I think we should take that opportunity to be as competitive as charter schools, as home schools, as private schools want an equal chance to tell our story.

2:51:09 And this is a great way to do it. You would be proud to have these videos as part of our district. I’m not disagreeing with that.

2:51:32 I guess this is nothing against the small business. I’m just saying I think it would be really cool if our students made a video and had. They had the ability to show the pride in their own school.

2:51:37 That’s all. And so this is nothing against the company whatsoever. I just would like to see a student led initiative when it comes to some of these things, because who better to tell, but future students? What is so amazing about you, their school, than the students themselves? And there is an avenue, you know, our CTE program, what you’ve been talking about a lot.

2:51:54 You know, one of the photos showed, you know, one of my, one of my team members working with, or two of my team members working with interns on video projects. So that’s happening. Yeah.

2:52:19 This is just an addition. It’s not. It’s not one thing or the other.

2:52:41 Our video program across the district from, you know, Viera, Palm, Bayside, up north, there’s a lot of talent, but this is a way that we could actually be competitive in education. Can you circle back around? Yeah, so I think it’s a. There’s another circumstance where it doesn’t have to be either or.

2:52:56 It can be both. And we don’t have those kind of programs in our middle schools. And so, not that the high schools couldn’t come over and.

2:53:10 And do it, and sometimes they go out to sports events and everything, but this is a specific venue, so I think we can do both. And the thing is, this funding is ending, so if we want to do anything in the future, we’re not going to have art money to do it. And so this is certainly.

2:53:18 And the other thing I would say is, as far as the cost, if we get one student back, if we get one student back per middle school, that more than covers the cost, because every student that comes back into our doors is over $8,000 in funding. So, you know, it’s a great company. If you haven’t seen any of the work that they’ve done, they do incredible work.

2:53:32 And I’m not saying our guys don’t do Mike Francisco back there, who’s running, he does incredible work. But Mike is one person, and we have a lot of video projects, and he’s in addition to all this, and he’s doing all of the other things too. The heart of brevard videos and everything we’re sending, you know, he’s getting sent out to schools to cover all different kinds of programs.

2:53:43 So in addition to running, you know, our very long meetings. So I just, you know, it’s, to me, it’s a, it’s a good use of funds which have been earmarked for this purpose. So, you know, everybody vote how you feel like.

2:54:01 But I. I definitely think this is worthwhile endeavor. Thank you. I guess the question is, how does the video attract people? Like, where are you putting it? How are we pushing it? What’s going on? Like, that may be the piece that I’m missing.

2:54:17 So we make these videos, three to four minute runs. Where are we going with them? Well, it’s similar to what we did two years ago. So this is not a new template.

2:54:27 And so you’ll remember that, you know, the schools themselves use them as for family nights, for open houses, for their social media. Chamber of commerce has used those. The city of Titusville used our videos.

2:54:36 That’s where you get your play. They’re on YouTube for pre rolls as well. So there’s a variety of ways that we use them.

2:54:47 Obviously, we use them at the district as well, on our social media platforms, and they’re on our YouTube as well media. So how you use them is. It’s not overly complex, but what you want to do is show a family what’s going on inside the school.

2:55:00 Because as we know, we hear all kinds of stories. Everybody has a story about somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody who said something and saw something, but we want to actually show the kids, we want to show the teachers in action. And we do that, we do it well.

2:55:04 And you’re convinced that because we had done this in the past, but I didn’t know if we had done it to this degree. Like I thought wasn’t. I looked at some of those expenditures and they were right around 20 grand.

2:55:10 Is that right? I mean, have we ever done 60 grand for eleven room? Eleven room? Like, what is the. No, we’ve used this price has gone up over two years. Correct.

2:55:24 Okay. How many did we cover before? The first run was 1414 and that was in the high forties for the cost. Okay.

2:55:31 And last year we did the teacher my. You know why education matters? The shoot was much different because it was interviews and that was in the twenties for a total of twelve videos. Yeah, I just.

2:55:48 I agree with you. Rock, paper simple is a good company. I know him.

2:56:01 He’s, I think he’s wife is city council member in West Melbourne. I think there’s connections there. I just.

2:56:12 I literally look at $60,000 and I was like, maybe this is something that we can utilize in a different way, and maybe we can have the kids do the videos. So I’m at a place where I would. You know what I mean? I could try to use a different way and then maybe discuss it longer.

2:56:25 But if there’s a majority to move forward, then we can go that route. Miss Megan Jean, does anybody else wish to discuss. I have something to.

2:56:36 To say. Go ahead, Miss Jenkins. Mister Brune, do I respect your expertise and your professionalism? I respect everything you’ve done since the day you come into bps to turn the ship around in our communications department, to shine a light on the positive things that brevard public schools does.

2:57:00 So I want to thank you for that. Again, I have to rebuttal this statement that’s always made over and over again about homeschool significantly increasing. It’s not significantly increasing.

2:57:24 The numbers increase because of the way it’s reported to the state. Are students leaving and homeschooling? Yes. Did they for COVID and stay? Yes, but that’s not, that’s not the point of this.

2:57:32 The point of this isn’t to only get students back. It’s to keep students where they are. We have a competitive market with charter schools in which they market to families that their kid can stay in that school from kindergarten to 8th grade.

2:57:59 And so the point of this is to market to families. It’s okay that your kid’s going to transition to one of our middle schools. Look at these wonderful middle schools that we have to offer.

2:58:13 Not only was it used in all the ways that you mentioned, but one of the, one of the significant partnerships was with the Realtors association. They had asked for the booklets that were made as well, because they have families that are saying, what does a school look like? Like, you know, there’s families who were deterring from living in a certain area that they loved, loved this home, but it was zoned for a certain middle school. And so that’s why these videos are so important.

2:58:22 It’s not just important for brevard public schools, but it’s important for our community partners and our business partners. Again, it’s comical to me that we’re sitting here debating over $60,000 that we approved for this funding already, when we can just so willy nilly spend so much money over the past three months. This is a reputable business partner.

2:58:30 They do amazing work. They did amazing work previously. We need to capitalize on those videos we already did because they were so fantastic.

2:58:50 I am grateful for you and your opinion here, and I would just suggest to my fellow board members, remember the link that we talked about last time? We had questions and concerns to maybe not drill our staff members up in front as if these decisions weren’t the right ones. Well, thank you, Russ, for doing everything you do. However, I’m still in between.

2:59:02 I mean, there’s a need for these videos. I mean, there’s so much going on out there today with topics that we all don’t have to rehash at this time of night. We know, and we all know somebody that has a horror story at school.

2:59:12 So this is important. We need to highlight the good things that are happening in our schools. Remember, we’re Brevard county.

2:59:25 We have wonderful teachers, wonderful schools. It doesn’t mean that everything’s always bad. So these are very important.

2:59:35 We have to be competitive in the market out there, against charter schools, against other options out there. Do we need to look, maybe in the future of incorporating what we’re saying here, where our CTE programs or schools can participate, maybe a little bit more into it. But it looks like this money’s already earmarked for this type of expenditure.

2:59:42 I’m sure they’re going to be great videos. We just need to make sure we get them out there and use them. But, I mean, I appreciate the conversation on trying to question every dime spent, and that won’t be the last time we do that.

2:59:49 But we do need to advertise and push up the positives out there. So that’s. That’s all I have to say.

3:00:00 All right. I just wanted to state that the home school numbers inside of our county, just so everybody knows, was one of the highest increases in the state of Florida. And we have one of the highest percentages in the state of Florida, too.

3:00:15 The issue is, is that something that I think we need to be near and dear to the program. So approved already. It wasn’t approved, so we’re approving it now.

3:00:33 So the thing is, is that there’s a vote. Let’s call a question. All in favor, signify by saying aye.

3:00:33 All opposed? Nay. Motion passes. We move on to mister.

3:01:12 We will move under the information agenda, which includes items for board review and may be brought back for action at subsequent meetings. No action will be taken. There are seven items in this category.

3:01:21 Does any member wish to discuss any of these items? I do. Okay, Miss Jenkins, which item would you like to discuss I 38. Okay, Miss Jenkins, you have the floor.

3:01:32 I have a question, Mister Gibbs, when someone calls a question, do we have to immediately go to a vote and discussion ends? It would depend on if everybody had the proper number of times to address the issue. Thank you. Okay, so I want to talk about I 38.

3:01:44 I just want to say thank you to our staff and the county staff, as well as. Sorry, I don’t have a question. I promise not to freak you out.

3:01:52 I just want to say thank you as well as to complete. Commissioner Tobiah, this is a unique opportunity for Hoover Middle School, as well as partnering with the county for a joint use facility that kind of already used to be treated that way, and then it kind of went away and there was lots of questions. And it not only serves the community of Indian Atlantic, but I know plenty of people who came from over the bridge to utilize those soccer fields and stuff like that.

3:01:57 So thank you very much for the opportunity to improve that facility and walk into a joint use. Thank you. Great point, Miss Jenkins.

3:02:39 Anybody else? Okay, moving on. We now have board member reports. There were no board member reports that came in.

3:03:17 We do have to move to our topics that we did not pass during the workshop. So we are moving to be on. The next topic is student council safety and security.

3:03:29 If you guys will go to the workshop, you can go there. Or inside of your books. There’s been copies that have been presented by Miss Tammy that you guys can go to.

3:03:50 So with that, doctor Schiller is going to lead this conversation. Yes. Thank you.

3:03:58 I want to appreciate the staff who’ve been here all day, and we can. I want to report that student conduct the policies five 6115-600-5500 and 5610 had been brought to the steering committee last week and there were no recommendations for edits submitted at that time. I’ve encouraged any changes or recommendations that they would have to come to the board to me, so that we can consider them as we have in the past.

3:04:03 Therefore, I’m presenting these tonight for the board’s consideration, if it wishes to consider any changes or edits, and think about it and roll it over to next month if you wish the next meeting, given the time. The one policy I would like to come back to is why we have staff. Here are the ongoing edits and deletions and recommendations that we have, as you will find for the WCD policy.

3:04:12 And that’s. We have staff that can address what changes in edits are there. That’s come through from the steering committee and trying to reflect what the board had said.

3:04:52 And so that is the one that I would like to use the expertise to the staff, why they’re here in order to answer your questions or discuss or just to present. So I would ask that perhaps that one might be the first one that you would look at the WCD based on that input. Sir, I normally don’t have an issue, but Paul, if you can.

3:05:06 We normally are supposed to go in an order that it’s been agenda. Is that for discussion items? It doesn’t matter. Okay.

3:05:18 All right. As long as there’s a consensus to take them out of order, you’re fine. We’ll be getting direction.

3:05:18 Okay. What one was it that you were trying to look for, Doctor Shiller? It’s 5136. The wireless communication devices.

3:05:25 Okay. And staff has put together here the most updated draft for the board considered based on the input that we have received. Am I missing it? I thought it was the last attachment.

3:05:30 Okay. Okay. It’s the same thing as this, right? Okay.

3:05:51 So she just didn’t get it. Scientists. Are they going to walk us through the changes? Would you like to walk through this? Doctor Webley and Justin Hamilton been doing the staff work on this.

3:06:05 Good evening. Good evening. It’s Armstrong.

3:06:20 Good evening. Good evening, board. Thank you.

3:06:30 At this time of night? You know, let’s just roll a long day. It’s okay. You’re okay.

3:06:33 I don’t know if you all know Justin Armstrong, but he is assistant director and student services and amazing and knows discipline very well. So he’s here to assist this WCD. There’s been a couple changes recommended through the steering committee and we will discuss those.

3:06:51 First of all, adding in the first paragraph, smart watches, air buds and earbuds following me. Okay. Any questions on that? That makes sense.

3:06:57 Right. Number five, the BFT recommended in between classes be removed. But that was not agreed upon by the principals.

3:07:00 So that’s just something we highlighted as a discussion point. Just to go back to that, are we. Would you like to present everything and then we come back or would you like to.

3:07:04 Just as we go through it. Just. We can do as we go through.

3:07:10 Okay. So section one, one of the issues that we had was, is that, you know, we put in their telephone paging devices, beepers, pages and any other web enabled devices of any type. Could you make the argument that it’s, you know, web enabled? Isn’t.

3:07:39 Is that the technical term for all wireless devices? Right. Yes. 100% yes.

3:08:15 Okay. All right. I just wanted to make sure because it gets to the point.

3:08:23 All right. That’s if that’s the proper term. Okay.

3:08:33 And now you said something about. Yeah, go ahead. You said something about the union.

3:08:41 So on number five, at the steering committee meeting, there was discussion around removing the in between classes. So if you read that the WWCD before and after school, during the lunch breaks, and in between classes, during after school activities. So they’re authorized to use them if the principal authorizes it.

3:08:51 Now, the principals wanted to remove or site leadership to team, so there were two discussions around that. The principal association did not agree on removing the in between classes and wanted that bring to you for discussion. So, basically, can I ask about the site leadership team? Is that because some of our sites don’t have a principal? I’m thinking about our Alc’s.

3:08:57 They’re not considered principles. They’re considered course, they don’t get to use them. I think a lot of this discussion.

3:09:12 Okay. The discussion was more around autonomy of the school, and the principal, being the leader of the school, would have the full authority. Right? Right.

3:09:27 I guess I’m just trying to figure out what site leadership team would be at so they could appoint someone if they want. Right? Yeah. I think this definitely needs to be under the principal.

3:09:44 I don’t think that’s a problem. I will. Just as far as in between classes, I had a conversation with one of our high school principals, one of our large high school principals, and I think the thing is, we don’t want to put something in policy that’s not enforceable and that’s.

3:10:05 It’s just not worth chasing down, is, you know, with the thought. So, you know, it’s. We’ve.

3:10:23 We’ve said very specifically, during instructional time, in between classes is not during instructional time. So walking from class to class, I don’t have a problem with that. I think I would want to leave that in there.

3:10:31 However, it says when authorized and approved by the principal, because there are some schools, and this is where things can differ. There are some schools that. Middle schools that said none, zero in the hallways, and they’re able to do it.

3:10:34 So I like leaving it there. For some schools that high schools, if it’s a 912, it’s a little different than a 712, possibly, who knows? But let that principal have that autonomy to be able to change that. So, yeah, that’s where that little wiggle room can come in.

3:10:39 I think it needs to be in there. Okay. Anybody else? Miss Jenkins, Miss Wright? I think I made it clear where I was on the last meeting on where I was at with cell phone so, I mean, I. This is a compromise, the in between classes.

3:10:49 I can understand why you would not want to allow a student to have a phone in between classes because it does cause disruption a lot of times, the fights that are happening and whatever else is happening in between classes, and that’s when the phone’s coming out and the recording and all that. And so. But, you know, it’s going to be what the majority of the board wants to, want to direct on this.

3:11:00 So my vote would be to. To remove in between classes. But I understand wanting to appease all parties.

3:11:20 It’s not possible. So it’s just not possible. That’s the reality.

3:11:35 Okay. Miss Jenkins, wish to say anything? No. Okay.

3:11:39 I agree. I think what we’re doing is like the first wave of what we’re dealing with. And if you go to an extent that you’re trying to do too much, then we might not be able to get there.

3:11:43 So I truly believe in what you said, that the in between classes is a dangerous thing because there’s opportunities. But at this point, let’s try to get to a point where we can go through it. I’m okay with that.

3:11:48 So what’s the next one? Okay, so again on number six, removing the classroom teacher because the autonomy of the principal is the building manager. So that would be on five and six, removing the classroom teacher or the leadership team. So it’s up to the principal.

3:11:59 We good with that? So for that example on that, that would be if an administrator, you know, if a teacher comes to an administrator and says, hey, I’m going to do this and I need to kid. Are we good with that? Right, right. For example, some of our video programs, you know, they might, sometimes they don’t.

3:12:11 Nowadays, I don’t have to send them out with a little camera. They can send them out with their phones to do video recording. So that.

3:12:31 But it would have to be pre approval of the. By the principal. Exactly.

3:12:45 Bill, you want to go ahead? No, you’re fine. Correct. Anybody else? I was.

3:13:01 I got something I want to say on this one, but just so real quick. So that’s an email saying, hey, here’s what it is. Some sort of approval process, some sort of verbal, written something.

3:13:19 What is that up to the site? Yeah, I agree. I think that would probably be left up to the site administrator. We didn’t propose any sort of process in which that wouldn’t look like so ongoing.

3:13:31 Would have to say, hey, for the next 1010, whatever whole year, we do some lessons and this is what we do. That kind of stuff. What I don’t want is for somebody to be sitting there and just say, well, you know, we do this and then have the cell phones out, utilizing them to a point where it’s so, you know what I mean? Does that make sense to you? So we’ll take a look at it and if it does, then we might have to go to some sort of approval process to get them in.

3:13:58 Does that make sense? We’re good. Okay, next. Okay, so you want to do number seven? I’ll share.

3:14:00 Share with Justin. Number seven. The adding of the use of the WCD for non educational purposes, including but not limited to recording staff and or students without the permission of knowledge.

3:14:04 Recording fights and or sharing non academic related content is strictly prohibited. I’m trying to figure out where seven starts. It should be right up at the top.

3:14:08 If we’re on the same. The numbers, seven, the numbers are not like it’s the red line. Yeah, okay.

3:14:22 But to the point of that. And I guess, I guess where I’m, as a parent of teenagers, I’m just wondering if at a school where they’re allowed at lunch in between passing period, if my daughter texts me, hey, can you go put something on the Walmart list? I mean, that’s not an educational purpose. Are we getting down that far into the.

3:14:39 This is for recording. Okay. For recording, okay.

3:14:50 Because it says use. Thank you. Reading is fundamental.

3:14:52 That’s my second time today. It’s late. It is.

3:15:01 Thank you for enduring as well. I’m good. I think we add, it was important that they discussed the sharing as well because sharing with the each other.

3:15:24 Just want to point that out. So this is the line that technically was already in our policy, but we just made it clear, clearer added, share. A little more modern language to say don’t share this, but it’s already in the policy.

3:15:34 It repeats somewhere else of you are prohibited from voice recording and video recording. Okay, good. And taking pictures and stuff like that.

3:16:01 Right. So if I’m taking pictures, I’m recording it. If I’m taking voice, I’m recording it.

3:16:12 If I’m taking video, I’m recording it for the intent of this meeting. Yep. Okay, got it.

3:16:31 Number ten is the next change. And it’s just an addition. It is just giving, with prior approval from the principal and or teacher, the example for a certain students to use WCDs to include but not limited to heart monitors, diabetes monitors and other WCD assistive technology required for healthcare services.

3:16:38 Yeah, there’s never been a question. I have a question about that. Are we allowed to require them to do that? I guess.

3:16:42 Like, isn’t like, I don’t know, is it part of their healthcare plan? It just seems a little odd, like Fer HIPAA FerPA, like that they have to disclose that they have something. Wouldn’t kids in that situation, wouldn’t students have a 504 or something like that? I think that’s kind of what this is speaking towards, as if it’s on their IEP or section 504, that they’d have the ability for assistive technology. That’s how it was.

3:16:52 I interpreted. Teachers would have those, right? Yeah. They usually have like, a health plan or something that would say, like, we have kids that have diabetes, they get an alert on their phone, so then they have to call the, like, health clinic.

3:17:01 The teacher does, and then they send them down there to have their insulin levels measured. I guess just the only question I have is, you know, not every single one of our students with a healthcare issue has a 504. And so, you know, I’m just questioning if that, like, puts us in a weird, sticky situation that we’re forcing kids to disclose that they have healthcare issues.

3:17:06 That’s all. I think it’s not demanding that a 504 is just demanding that bring it to the principal. Principal will allow them to turn it on.

3:17:11 It’s not saying they can’t turn it off if they don’t want it. It’s not requiring them to turn it on. Right.

3:17:31 So they can turn it on if they would like. There’s no requirement for a 504, but they just have to get permission from the principal. I’m not saying there’s a requirement for a 504.

3:17:42 I’m saying you would have to then disclose your health care information to the principal in order to get that permission. That’s all I’m saying. Well, they fill a health issue.

3:17:48 Yeah. That information is the school. Not everybody in the school has, but the health farms would have to have that on there.

3:17:56 I think we all agree. Okay. And I think that’s it.

3:18:03 There was on section 14 and 15 that was just fighting was inserted, but then we removed it. That was not originally in the policy, so that was just removed. And then the last was the letter that they put into as a review.

3:18:07 I didn’t know if you wanted to comment on that. It was a letter from Polk county doctor. No, that was a reference point.

3:18:11 Just as a reference. Yep. Sounds good.

3:18:18 So just a point of clarification. That’s a reference for us to look at. That’s not going in this policy.

3:18:24 Correct, correct, correct. Okay. Just wanted to make that really clear.

3:18:45 Pretty close to what we’re experiencing. Good job. All right.

3:18:54 We’re good. All right. Thank you very much.

3:19:19 We appreciate it. Now we get to come back. Let me get to this organization.

3:19:30 We move to 5611, dress and grooming. Oh, boy. Here we go.

3:19:53 As I indicated, we have not received any specific edits in this area. And what I’ve put is what it is in the event that the board wishes to give us some input so that we can go through and make any recommendations. All right, so open the floor.

3:19:59 If you guys want to just kind of discuss. But if you have a lot of discussion here, then we can go by section. How do you guys want to roll through this? 5511.

3:20:15 He’s asking for any kind of board discussion so that he can set a little bit of direction so that he can come back with a policy to know what we’re actually talking about. So the dress code policy. Where are you guys at? I will tell you that as much as I don’t really want to go through a battle of dress code, there’s some language in here that’s not what we’re doing.

3:20:23 And again, I bring it up, brought up in another policy. I don’t want to have a policy that we’re not enforcing. And, for example, this one still has language about hair color.

3:20:46 And we stopped enforcing the rules about hair color the first year I was on the board, I believe, or maybe the year before. And also, it talks about no leggings. You can’t walk onto a campus of any age, and teachers are wearing leggings.

3:20:56 Everybody. Well, not necessarily teachers, but. So I just think it’s probably good to update it.

3:21:14 I will tell you this. We have what is great about our dress code policy, because I’ve actually got an email one time from a group criticizing dress code policies because they were gender specific. And I’m like, well, I’m just gonna ignore you because clearly you haven’t read ours, because ours is not.

3:21:21 Ours is, you know, it’s the same. This is the rule for head. This is rule for upper garments, this rule for lower garments, footwear, all that.

3:21:34 But I think it would probably be good for us to take a look at this one, because, like I said, I don’t want to have something in here that we’re not, you know, actually going to enforce. So this one, I think we need to. So your concerns were over the leggings and all? Yeah, I mean, you know, I mean, I want to keep everything more modest about anybody in this room.

3:21:40 But I also don’t think we. Why should we put something in there? Now, there’s, you know, like, for example, the haircut. Extreme hairstyles or hair colors that create a disruption are prohibited.

3:21:45 Now, hairstyles, if somebody’s wearing their hair 3ft off their head and nobody can see behind them, unless it’s like a special day where the girl put their bottles in their hair and whatever, I mean, that’s not a special occasion. But extreme hair color, I mean, we are in 2023. We are not keeping kids from coloring their hair green.

3:22:01 Right. There is no such thing as extreme hair color anymore because people do whatever they want or haircuts. Right.

3:22:16 So I just think it just needs updating. And there’s some fashions, for example, number one, c one, lower garments. Pants shall have no holes or rips.

3:22:26 That one’s an issue. This is the flavor of what I’m trying to hear from the board. We did not want.

3:22:40 I did not want to advance something. Well, yeah, we need to go back. We need to update this.

3:22:49 Yeah. Any concerns here, Miss Jenkins, with the policy? No. I don’t know who’s emailing you, but I would argue some of this is super gender specific.

3:23:10 There is way more stuff about females in here. We actually, one of my, one of my first board meetings, there was a couple of female students who came here and said, why do you have this one and a half inch width, you know, tank top policy? It’s ridiculous. I don’t even know where to find a one and a half inch width tank top.

3:23:16 We live in Florida. I think we can be a little bit more reasonable here. So, you know, it keeps up with the time.

3:23:23 I think there’s a lot of, like, really specific statements in here that are gender specific that we don’t even really necessarily need. For instance, you know, it says do not expose undergarments. I think that’s pretty clear.

3:23:38 Right? Like, we don’t. We don’t need to talk about sports bras and things like that. I think it should just be.

3:23:47 It should be pretty general about what’s expected, acceptable and not acceptable. And again, I agree with you, Miss Campbell. There’s some things on here that are clearly, we’re not up with the times, and it’s not an issue for certain, for certain schools.

3:24:14 I will say this as far as the timing goes. I mean, I think we need to update it. I don’t think this is urgent.

3:24:41 We need to. To update this right now. No, because the other thing is, we should have it in place before the next school year.

3:24:57 It’s not going to be a good idea to change the dress code mystery. And I don’t think we’re actually, I don’t think we’re talking about changing anything as far as the way things are being carried out. We’re just maybe getting our policy in line with what’s actually happening in our schools.

3:25:05 And for those board members who are, for those board members who are scheduling the forums, it might be a good opportunity. Opportunity? Yes. To get the input and then that could be factored in here.

3:25:13 This is not an emergency. I have been a press at these middle schools and these high schools and there is no enforcement address code. I mean, kids are coming out of the car literally with a half shirt and shorts that are up the rear end and I’m like where’s the dress code? And what it is, what it is right here is that because we have leggings and we have all these things inside, right.

3:25:24 We’re not enforcing any of it. We can’t enforce it because then the parents say, well you’ve got all the leggings, but when you look back and it says standards of safety, health and welfare of students and it starts getting into not considered appropriate and you get into the meat, it’s exactly what we were just talking about, which is if you have those generalized concern, you know what I mean, you’re able to enforce it a little bit more. I do have extreme concern on both boys and girls with the way that they’re dressing, you know what I mean? And it is off.

3:25:40 I do say Mister Trent, did you have anything before I got onto mine I was just kind of starting to roll there. But again, yes, this needs to be looked at. Yes, it’s not going to take effect until the beginning of next school year.

3:25:52 We know that. So I’m just happy if we get the cell phone policy under wraps then we can look at this policy. Yeah, the language is outdated.

3:26:02 We can talk about what’s actually happening in the schools. So we need to spend some time on this. And I think what doctor Shuler said was excellent.

3:26:13 If we made any adjustments to this and then had our town hall meetings, I don’t think I’d show up myself. So the teenagers are going to have some. Correct.

3:26:30 So let’s, let’s, let’s get some feedback from our community and spend some time on this. I think. Well, no, I think, I think if we, if we decide as long as we put it in place so it gives our administrators enough time to be prepared for next year.

3:26:39 Here’s the other thing is, is that even if we decided to change it, like tonight, we’re looking at may before it’s in anyway. Right. But we’re there, I think.

3:26:52 So if any student handbooks. So if anybody has any issues, input, I was going to give mine. I don’t like the rips, tights, spandex leggings, bike shorts, that stuff.

3:26:56 Right. I also think dog collars, tongue rings, wallet chains, large hair picks, chains that connect. We can get rid of that one because it falls under the standards of safety, health and welfare.

3:27:01 And then as far as the head goes, no hats, carriers, bandanas, sunglasses. I mean, go ahead and try to enforce putting kids sunglasses on top of their heads as they’re walking through. So that section, the head and the pants with no holes.

3:27:06 Section C one and then e two. I would say we could upgrade, but I’m willing to take any ideas and move forward. Well, again, we’ll get feedback if it’s okay if I pick it.

3:27:22 But being in the schools and being on the other end of monitoring that you just mentioned, sunglasses, it’s very important for us to see students eyes. Yeah, for lots of reasons. Right, right.

3:27:32 How red they are. I mean, it is so they’re not hiding behind those sunglasses. So.

3:27:41 Yeah. And that can be enforced. But this is going to take some discussion.

3:28:03 Yeah. Yep. All right, so we’re moving forward with.

3:28:14 We’re moving forward with. But they’re going to bring back a recommendation. Doctor Shiller, do you anticipate? So maybe March 21, maybe March 21 you’ll bring it back because that puts us into the end of May, which gives us enough time to prepare.

3:28:23 I mean, we’ve got other stuff that we’ve talked about that we’re coming. I would suggest we start in April because we’re not even. I’ve got my meeting scheduled for March 1.

3:28:35 I don’t know if you guys. No, I’m serious. And you guys don’t even have your scheduled yet.

3:28:47 So I think we’re, like I said, we don’t need to rush. The one thing that’s going to be a deadline, and this may be a Mister Brune question, when we get that change in that, when do we have to print those? The student code of conduct or wherever the dress code is. I don’t know what our deadline is for, but we are going to run against a deadline somewhere in the summer for printing because it needs to go into planners and whatever.

3:29:16 So can we kind of get where that printing deadline is and then work backwards? From there. Plus we need to be able to educate our people on how to enforce it. And I think by the time we get to the summer, we need to have something in place.

3:29:33 But that means we can start in April. All right? That’s why we’re starting. But everything can fall in place with our end goal in mind.

3:29:46 All right? So if that kind of gives direction, then we go. Next one up is policy section 5000 students. It’s 5600 in a student discipline.

3:30:02 Doctor Schiller, you want to explain it? Yes. This one is kind of self explanatory. We’re looking, and this is fairly base policy.

3:30:14 Okay. And what I’m looking to do is once you get your input, and if we hear any other input, then as we process this, we can then process the administrative regulations and making sure that it’s also processed through once it’s approved into the student handbook. And so I would greatly appreciate in your leisure time, any suggestions that you all would like to see to be considered.

3:30:25 And again, understanding it’s input time, input process. So I’ll amended other board members for discussion. Miss Campbell, you have anything on this one? No.

3:30:40 I guess I understood the rest of it was as of right now, the workgroup is not suggesting that we suggesting any changes to any of these. We’re going to hear from the public. I don’t have any right now.

3:31:06 The only one that, I mean, I just was telling off the top, the only one that I think that I need to address is the dress code policy. But there’s not anything at this time that I have on any of the other ones. All right, Miss Jenkins? Mister Trent? Same.

3:31:18 Yeah, I feel like I need a little bit of time to. So for me, when I look through these, because I thought we were looking through them for some sort of recommendation, Florida Statute 1003.32 goes over the teacher authority.

3:31:23 So when we look at this, it says, superintendent shall publish, superintendents shall inform, super principals shall have the authority. And then it says down here, teachers, bus drivers and other employees in the bus. Like it’s like this last bit.

3:31:30 Right? But then it references correctly the Florida statute 1003.32, which if you look at the teacher authority, it gives the establishment of code of conduct, establishes and implements consequences designed to. It gives what the teachers truly are.

3:31:42 And so what we find in some of these policies is that they kind of just give a real quick and then they reference these things, but it doesn’t truly show the authority that’s inside of this policy to the teachers. So my recommendation, Doctor Shiller, moving forward of course it’s up for discussion is to add those two in their entirety to the bill, to the policy. So what ends up happening is when a teacher goes to read that policy, they know what rights they have.

3:31:59 The other one is that. So that’s 1003, section 32. And then 100610 is authority of school bus drivers and district school boards relating to discipline.

3:32:20 So it just kind of gives them. Because up here it’s just kind of like super. It gives a whole lot of the superintendent section.

3:32:28 But see what I mean? I think it would be more whole. So that’s my suggestion to staff. With that, I think everybody’s good to go.

3:32:41 We’re moving on to 5500. Doctor Shiller, do you have anything to say? Yes. This one, as you can see, was revised about one year ago.

3:32:47 Okay. And so it’s not as though it’s been sitting there like the others. Well, no, what I’m saying is that obviously the board had reviewed that and brought it up to date with as recommended with illegal.

3:32:56 And Naola had looked at it in 2021. I just think I wanted to bring that to your attention with regard to your consideration. If there’s anything that needs to be done as opposed to the previous or the next 120 15 and some of the others.

3:33:00 So I just wanted to bring that to your. We’re on 5500. Does anybody have any direction that they want to just kind of give before we get.

3:33:17 Get started on 5500? Miss Campbell. Miss Jenkins? No. Mister Trent? Miss Wright? The only thing I had, the only thing I had written down is that we’ve had those new Cesar rules that came out from the Doe.

3:33:23 Some of those other things. You know what I mean? I would. You know who is.

3:33:40 My concern is identifying which of the charges law enforcement shall be. And that’s kind of in the of assessor updates. So that’s all.

3:33:49 So as long as we’re doing that, we’re awarded reflective coming from. Thank you. Awesome.

3:33:53 With no further discussion, we’re moving on to 5610, removal, out of school suspension, disciplinary placement and expulsion of students. Anybody have any discussion on this one? Just to point out, this is where the teacher authority act is in policy. Yeah.

3:34:07 So I don’t know if you want it in both places. Well, yeah, I mean, like it’s not going to hurt. Like.

3:34:20 So that teacher authority act is not even close to the teacher authority act that’s inside of the statutes. Like, like you look at statutes here, it is like a through k and then two a through d. This is a little section so we can put it in perfect in those two.

3:34:28 Or the only section that, according to teacher authority act, that’s out of the. Of teacher responsibilities. What? I mean.

3:34:42 Yeah. If we’re going to cite this statute, I think we need to list all of it. I don’t know.

3:35:02 Yeah. Or just what we’ve done inside of the statute is if there’s a specific area, like the teacher authority act, that may be in section 32 of section 1003.32, then what we do is you just put that section in there.

3:35:12 Right. But on the other one, I feel it very confident that we need to print those. But this one right here, the teacher authority act, it gives kind of a quick overview of it, and it’s even referenced inside of there, so we can keep that.

3:35:40 We’ll just move through it. Yes, sir. I just would point out it’s been a while since this one has been reviewed.

3:35:59 Okay. And I had highlighted some of the areas that I think that we would need. It does spell out in b about the code of student conduct as approved by the board.

3:36:09 And the handbook should specify bum, bum, bum, bum. And I wanted to point out again under c, the superintendent’s administrative procedures and speaking to one through four, expulsion, breach of conduct, and removal from class and referral. These are the things I think.

3:36:26 And there aren’t any administrative procedures for this, for this particular policy. Right. So, time to start getting it wrapped.

3:36:37 Yep. Absolutely. Yeah.

3:36:49 This one I would put on, once you get input, and we’re running, making sure that all the legal statutes and everything else is correlated. And this one I would probably put fairly high up on the totem pole to be addressed as soon as the input would come in. Is that sounds be my sound suggestion, but does anybody else have anything that they were concerned about with this thing? Well, Paul, run this through Neola.

3:36:55 Yeah, we’re going to actually get those, review them, all of that. And I just would point out your zero tolerance policy is, this is where it was originally pointed out on page five of seven. The board has zero tolerance for conduct that poses a threat to school safety and.

3:37:01 And whatever. And so these. That’s pretty much where I want to, but it keeps repeating in number six, Superintendent shall develop administrative procedures.

3:37:09 And so that’s an area that, you know, we’ll take. Doing that would be accordant with the board taking its input and the policy. You can’t lead with the administrative regulations unless it refers the board.

3:37:17 But much of this is going to be straight down the line of the legality and what’s required. Does that make sense? Yep. So, Miss Campbell, Miss Jenkins, anything on this? No.

3:37:25 Two on this, where I was, some suggestions that I had section e nine on the page. E nine. It says the principal designee may suspend students.

3:37:39 We had established that we wanted to give the principals the authority to suspend up to five days. Just. That was one of the things that we took.

3:37:56 Talked about. And if you. No, I’m on the right one.

3:37:57 I’m on the 5610. Section e, subsection nine. Yep.

3:38:12 So it talks about exceeding three days. They would have to have approval. I would like to talk about giving them the approval to five.

3:38:25 Real easy. Right. And then in nature to a.

3:38:46 We philosophically wanted to bring this up as a topic. So in our alCs, we’ve identified. Because you guys have seen the numbers that we have about 270 plus possession of controlled substances.

3:38:55 Right. We are one of very few school districts across the state of Florida that expels for just possession. There’s many that come in for suspension and stuff like that allows them to come back because I feel, and I made this point before, that drugs is a different beast.

3:39:03 Right. Using. And this is amazing.

3:39:23 Like, if you look in here about how they’re supposed to come back for drug related and alcohol offenses, completion of a controlled urine screen would be immediately prior to. And it talks about, you know what I mean, working with. Are we currently doing that? No, let’s not talk about it.

3:39:36 So anyways, the thing is, is that what I would like to do is philosophically have the discussion wrapped around. If we have 274 kids that are sitting there with that, that we might be able to. We talk about student achievement and all those other things.

3:39:42 These are kids that made a mistake, had possession, but then they come in, and then all of a sudden, they’re literally sitting around a bunch of other people that are of higher crimes. Right. And we are now at a place where over two thirds of our actual alCs, which we have a capacity problem, are being held up by these kids and we’re not able to effectively send the other kids in.

3:40:05 So my argument would be to have the philosophical discussion about that. I would love to have the philosophical discussion about putting them on probation and bringing them back immediately. But that’s not tonight.

3:40:21 We’re late. But I did want to talk about an opportunity there. How does this coincide with law, though? I mean, when it comes to possession charge, and it’s illegal.

3:40:33 So if you look at it, the discipline infractions, the opportunity earned return, currently under our earned return. So we literally can, under this current policies, allow them to come back on earned return and set up a different system. The board, zero tolerance is aggravated battery, the sale of drugs, you know what I mean? And all of that other stuff.

3:40:45 A kid can have a vaping tool or a vape that has marijuana in it and get expelled. And that’s the kind of stuff that we may be over bearing our ALCs from. Right.

3:40:57 They actually get an earned return. They’re our fastest returning ones, usually, I guess, probably. Yeah.

3:41:11 Doctor Sullivan’s shaking her head. So a couple years ago, we had this conversation. I like the idea of having a philosophical conversation because a couple years we had a conversation about Chris Moore and Misty Bland brought us this video of something called recovery High School that a district, I want to say, in the Houston area or somewhere in another state doing to just meet the needs of their students with drug offenses better.

3:41:32 And of course, you know, stuff like that takes money. But we clearly have a problem when you look at our data and it does cause problems in the ALCS because it’s full, you know, and just, you know, they’re in the same classrooms with kids who are there for fighting. They do get separate sessions like the, you know, that they’re.

3:41:48 When they work with the social workers and the counselors who are there, they, you know, all the students with the drug offense is there, like, working together. And the ones we’re fighting are working together. But, you know, I think we can come up with a better solution.

3:42:02 And I don’t think the solution is we don’t take it seriously, but maybe there’s something that we can work better with. You know, Misty Bland is great. She goes to the drug courts every Friday to see.

3:42:27 Cause when she finds. Actually sometimes there’s kids that are in our schools, but we are not aware of their drug offense because it happened outside of the school. And so we may not be meeting the needs of those students as well.

3:42:40 So. And again, everything costs money, but it might be a time just throwing this out there. This might be something that we take a look at using a portion of our millage to a problem that we look at solving.

3:43:16 I don’t know what the solution is, but I think it’s time to get creative because we want to do something that doesn’t just free up our ALCs, but helps these students get and stay in school and focus on what they’re there to do, which is learn. And THC is a huge problem in our community. We might need some community partners to step up and help us, too.

3:44:06 But I’m ready to have that conversation as well because it may be time for a creative solution. I think the other component to that is that, if I may, that, again, this is times of the essence. Right.

3:45:02 So if we want to try to make some of these major changes by next year, we may want to have this thing come before April. Right. And sometime in there to have this discussion to set the direction to try to do those kind of things.

3:45:36 The issue we’re going to have is we won’t know the true budget until the beginning of May. So if we wanted to fast track something like this, we can set up the meetings, have it lined up. But the issue is, is that if you’re talking about money, I think it’s respectful to say maybe this is one of the components that we do, because to be honest with you, we need to do something for our students in this regard, because there’s an issue here that goes beyond, and we’re not doing that.

3:45:49 And it’s also hurting the other side, which is the ALC is being overrun as far as us having to go to virtual, you know what I mean, and having those conversations. So just philosophically, we need to move to it. Yes, sir, if I might.

3:46:09 We are doing an intensive study right now that Doctor Webley and her fine staff are looking deeply into a number of these areas, like the ALCS. We recognize that we have some issues there also. To what extent the children who are having some of these difficulties, to what extent are their services available in the county or whatever, because all we’re doing is repeating the issue, putting them out of school, then come back and they have the same issue without providing the kind of supports in some way.

3:46:12 So what I would suggest also is the fact that the board, as we chat it and the board’s working toward this, is that as we put this budget together, the board has to establish its priorities, because ultimately, it’s the board’s budget of how it wishes to allocate the money as we move toward that program oriented look at the budget, you know, like Miss Rutledge had pointed out, you can find out exactly what our CTE program costs. But if the board starts now, each of you putting down those priorities so that the rational process then is to allocate the limited funds, funds that the board may have. But think of it over a two year budget process of priorities.

3:46:42 I’m trying to through, you know, for us to think about, these are things that we want our shopping list, but recognizing that the best way to plan, as I think Miss Licinski was trying to point out, is that you look upon this, of what you can do year one, what you have to, you want to do now, but you can’t quite until year two, but you have the priorities already set that the board is doing. And so as you’re identifying each of you, I think it’d be wise that if we have a session to really hone in on it. So then when you get to the point of knowing the money and what’s available funds, well, there is consensus that priority one was, priority two was, priority three was, and now we’re digging down and we may not get the four and five and six that may be for the second year.

3:47:00 And that would help your permanent superintendent for planning purposes of knowing what your priorities are and how to plan in multiple year sequences. Same thing as a strategic plan that I want to talk with you about, because, you know, in my judgment, the best type of planning is a sequential and what if analysis. And it’s not just going from year to year, it’s how do we get to what we want to be and recognizing there have to be variations on the theme dependent upon funding and conditions.

3:47:11 But at least you have something in place that’s more than one year. Yep. So with that, I had a couple of questions related to the ALC.

3:47:34 Is it that every kid in the ALC is remote now? Like what is the breakdown? Like, you know what I mean, like the percentages. Can somebody just give that to me now if you can just. We have 500 kids say, well, who’s on remote, Mister Hamilton? So, yes, so right now it’s split.

3:47:53 Our middle school goes two days a week in person. The other three days are in a virtual setting. Our secondary high school kids go two days.

3:48:02 The other three are in a virtual setting. Our elementary from k through six, that is a five days a week. So one of the reasons I was asking is that the approval that we got from the DOE to do this, it states that we were going to move on, that only 20% and 30% of our actual kids were going to be going that direction.

3:48:21 But we’ve expected expanded that. Have we asked for approval for the plan that we are currently doing? It’s saying that 20%, it says here we have two sites, one site totaling 85, and approximately 20% are e learners. Second site totaling 109, and approximately 30% are e learners.

3:48:38 Right. So what we have today is completely different than what we applied through the state. Have we gotten any other approvals for that since that application? I’ll have to confer with Miss Bland.

3:49:01 Regarding as far as that, the other issue is that this application was approved for on April 21, 2021. That’s during the height of COVID and it was prior to us even mask mandating. So this was approved and looked into during the time when we did allow e learning and stuff like that.

3:49:31 So I would say, I would ask immediately to the DOE, send them up what we have, ask for permission, see if what we have is correct. That way we can continue the end of the year. If not, I think that, you know, if we’re not, then we make changes, but we’ve got to make sure that we’re not, because fte I’m kind of worried about with this thing.

3:50:00 Mister Chairman, thank you for bringing to our attention. Once we have that data, we will get that out to the board as soon as possible with those answers. Thank you for bringing it up.

3:50:12 There’s another major population at the alcs that are there five days a week as well. Any students that are on ieps or 504s, what services are there five days a week as well? And some of those students who come two days a week are actually coming an additional third day because they’re getting their services and therapies. So it’s not as.

3:50:28 It’s not as simple and low as it sounds. I want to jump in on the conversation about our students with drug offenses. I think it’s important that we’re finally having this conversation that it’s not just about discipline.

3:50:36 We should have been talking about behavior the entire time. The root cause, the why children are doing the behaviors that they’re doing, because any behavior analysts and specialists will tell you, you teach, reteach, modify the behavior in order to change the behavior, or it will continuously happen again. And when we’re talking about drug offenses, there’s a biological component there, a chemical component there that we don’t have control over.

3:50:39 And our wonderful community organizations and partners that partner not only with our alcs, but with our schools are more than willing to sit down and have that conversation. I’ve been invited to go visit a school nearby in a different county that is doing it very differently than we are here. And it’s not just to reduce the numbers in our alcs, but it’s to better service our students, to change their lifestyle and their behaviors and make a better difference in their academic experience.

3:50:51 I would request that whatever, whatever contract you’re looking at, if you can forward that to the rest of the board or have someone else forward it if you’re not allowed to forward to us. But I’m curious to look at that one, because I’m curious if that was drafted because of COVID virtual learning and not necessarily for this actual revamping. This was the series of documents that was used by Miss Bland to justify our alcs.

3:51:00 I requested all justification. All the emails and information came back. I did want to say part of the statutory authority and stuff that they were even referencing in here when they said it was.

3:51:08 The amount of FTE reported for blending learning courses should be reflective of the student’s schedule. The f total FPE reported for a full year blended learning course should not exceed one 6th FTE for surveys, two and three combined semester courses. There’s some stuff in here that we need to just make sure we’re okay with.

3:51:11 And I would say that when I asked for all justifications, this is what was brought. So, look, if we’re okay, we’re okay. If not, we just got to make some decisions.

3:51:21 That’s it. I just want to bring that up. Mister Sutton, that’s not an accusation.

3:51:31 And Miss Campbell just said that we were all sent it already, so I’ll take a look. Yeah, I didn’t know the email I have was the first one before they gave it out to the rest of the board, but everybody did get that. It’s just.

3:51:55 I don’t know if people were paying attention. This was five months before we mask mandated, right? This was all year. Yeah, there was, but.

3:52:02 But this was. This was April. We mask mandated in August again because of the first year.

3:52:17 Right. So. So what I was saying is, is this wasn’t like something that was.

3:52:29 Was done after we were done with it. And if you remember, once the numbers started coming down was when. That’s when DeSantis came out and said, no more e learning, come back.

3:52:41 I just want to make sure we’re okay. That’s all. I agree, Miss Jenkins, to follow up with what you were just saying in regards to the surrounding county that does this program a little different than us, I would.

3:52:46 I think it’d be a good idea if we maybe looked at that and took a field trip over there to see what they’re doing, because it may be something that we need to look at here in Brevard County. I was actually going to say something similar. And we have two people on our, two interim ladies who are coming from, who’ve been in other counties, who can maybe share what was being done in Pinellas and Seminole and other places that they worked.

3:52:51 That would probably be a good idea, because I’m a big fan of not reinventing the wheel. So field trips are always fun. And as long as we’re not going together.

3:52:57 Right, Paul? Yep. But I think finding out what other counties are doing and saying that’s a great idea. I don’t know if you guys know, but we have one of our ALC principals here who’s probably arguably one of the most caring people in the entire world.

3:53:01 I’ve seen him deliver. Do you want to say anything on this topic? All right. I’ve actually seen him delivering stuff in the middle of the day to kids in come.

3:53:03 He’s got a huge heart. But the bottom line is, is this, is that we just need to make sure. And philosophically, we need to look at if there is Houston, there is a problem, we may need to move to shorter sentences for some of those things to alleviate some of the need.

3:53:06 So I’m good on that. Doctor Shiller, did you need any other ones? Thank you. Okay. And I think with that, we’re good to go. Does anybody else have anything else? Yeah, I’m just gonna. Sorry. I’m doing a quick search of my email right now, and it’s not. I don’t. It’s not easy for me to find. I didn’t find it. So if someone could just forward it on to me, I’ll forward it to you. I’ll forward it. I have it. Yeah. Thank you. I mean, I’m not saying I didn’t get it. I just can’t find it. So please. And there may be other stuff, but I think if we can just send up to the doe the request, then we’re good. All right, everybody good? All right. Thank you very much.