2023-04-19 - Audit Committee Meeting - Discipline

9:55 Good morning. The April 19, 2023 Joint audit Committee is now in order. Tammy, roll call please. Mister Susan here.

10:01 Misses Wright, misses Campbell, misses Jenkins, Mister Trent. Will y’all please stand for the pledge of allegiance? I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. The first topic on today’s joint meeting is an audit committee report presented by Mister Art Edwards.

10:31 Mister Art, you have the floor. Either way, whatever’s appropriate for you, you can do it from here if you want. Perfect.

10:42 I think that would be probably better. Okay. Relaxed.

10:45 Can everyone hear me? Can you hear me? Can you hear me now? Okay, I’m looking for feedback, folks. This is yes, this is. No, this is confusing.

10:49 Can you hear me? Yes. Okay, good. Okay.

11:10 I’m happy to make a report this morning on behalf of the audit committee. But the first thing I want to do is I want to just say that it’s not an audit committee that we need to really focus on, it’s the audit committee process. And what I mean by that is, I went back and I looked at my time on the audit committee, and I looked at this presentation, and in my historical files, I found that in 2005 was the first audit committee presentation I put my hands on a long time ago.

11:45 And I thought back of my time on the audit committee, and I thought about people that made a big difference. And I’m so happy to see Kara Brooks here this morning because, and I know it’s surprising to Cara that I mentioned her name, but I’ll tell you, she was my mentor when I came onto the audit committee. She was my go to person to find out things about the audit committee and how she conducted myself as a.

12:12 As a committee member. And I can tell you, when you get on this committee, you don’t get it right off hand. It takes a while before you get it.

12:20 And Carol was always there, and I appreciate you, Carol. And that’s what the process is about. And we’re going to talk about that now.

12:29 This is the agenda. And that looks like a lot of items to cover. I’m going to try and blow through this and only cover things to detail that needs to be covered.

12:37 To detail. Can everybody see this? Yes. No.

12:43 Yes. Okay. This first page is basically.

12:50 And I’m having a problem seeing this. Can y’all really, really see it? You got the paper? Okay, good. All right.

13:01 We’re going to make this thing work. Basically, this page just which informs you that audit committees are not new. They’ve been in use for a long, long time.

13:11 And some of the better companies in America, as well as agencies in America, use audit committees. And here are a number of things you can read down through this that defines a good audit committee. The attributes are stated on this page, and I’m not going to read it for you, but I think a couple of things that I would like to point out is that in terms of governance structure, that’s one of the things how we conduct ourselves as an organization.

13:47 And that’s one of the things that they look at the internal control framework and so on and so forth. If we go to the next page and look at this audit committee, it was established back in the 1990s and it’s been a work in progress ever since. When I came on board many, many years ago, Doctor Dipatri was the superintendent, and he was a proponent of the audit committee process.

14:13 And we made a lot of good progress under his leadership. And now when I mentioned the school board chair, that’s not, I mean, the superintendent, that’s not to discount the role of the school board, but it’s very easy to remember the superintendents because there’s been so few of them and so many, so many school board members. But at any rate, the membership of the audit committee is comprised of community volunteers.

14:40 And we’re going to introduce each one here in just a second. And we come from different backgrounds. If you look in that page five, I guess it would be.

14:50 I serve as the facilitator. It says chairman on the paper, but I actually try and facilitate the meetings to ensure that all opinions are heard, that everything that we need to cover is covered, and so on and so forth. My background is engineering safety management.

15:12 I’m a certified Florida general contractor, and some other things. Then we’ve got Nicole Colbert, who serves as the vice chairman, and she has a very impressive background in accounting. She worked for Ernest and young at one time, and she’s very, very smart, I tell you.

15:35 Then we got Don Lusk. I’ve known Don for many, many years, and I think I may have messed this up in the. But we’ll get that fixed.

15:46 Don has been in the public sector for a long time. He’s done a lot of things. He’s one of those quiet leaders.

15:55 I kind of look at him as kind of like a termite, you know, you don’t see him. I mean, not in a good way. Now, I mean that in a good way.

16:09 Okay, let me explain. You don’t see them, but they’re busy. They’re doing things.

16:18 I gotta rethink that, Don. Okay. I gotta recover from this.

16:29 The next person on the agenda is Jim Slate. Jim McGinnis, one of those quiet people. But every time he talked, I really, really listened.

16:38 And I listen carefully to. To what he has to say. And the newest member is Jennifer Parrish.

16:43 Welcome aboard, Jennifer. She’s getting her feet wet. She’s very, very anxious to make a contribution, and we’re looking forward to working with them.

16:54 The school board chair, in this case, Mister Matt, serves as the ex officio on the audit committee. And again, we talked about the audit committee process. The audit committee process also includes the CFO and CFO and her staff, or their staff, I guess I should say, play a critical, critical role in.

17:19 Cara and company fall under the CFO as well as school attorney. We don’t always like what he tell us, but we always listen to what he tells us. But he keeps us in good stead.

17:35 And at least once a year he sit and he talks about the sunshine law, and he’s kind of sneaky. The way he teaches is, you know, you can’t go off in the La La land because he’s going to give you a test, he’s going to ask you questions, and it can be embarrassing if you don’t know the answer. So we do pay attention if you look at the next page, and that shows the reporting structure.

18:02 On top of this structure is the citizens of Brevois county. And it really should say the students in the school systems of Brevois county, because that’s who we all report to. That’s who we all serve.

18:16 If you look at this chart going down, you’ve got the school board, and we got two branches from the school board, the school attorney, of course, the superintendent, and his cabinet. And then over to the right hand side is the audit committee. And this is intended to show the independence, is that this audit committee is an independent part of the school system.

18:45 And the audit committee has oversight of, at this point in time, internal audits as well as external audits. And we’ll talk a little bit about that. The oversight and insight portion of things.

18:58 The next page, I think, is very, very germane in terms of showing relationships. There is a interdependency. Although we’re independent in a lot of our actions, we are nevertheless interdependent with other organizations.

19:15 We’re interdependent in terms of the working with the district staff, in terms of working with the auditors, both the internal auditors and the external auditors. And that includes the auditor general. And I can tell you over the years, I’ve developed what I consider a good relationship with auditor generals.

19:32 And I get phone calls from time to time and they ask me questions and they pass things on, if you will. If you look at our role, it’s a collaborative role and we’re working together. And by virtue of us working together, we’re looking to maintain confidence from the public in terms of us taking care of the fiduciary responsibilities of the Brevois county school system.

20:01 The next page depicts the audit committee and our relationship from an insight, oversight standpoint, our relationship with the various facets of artists. If you look on the left hand side, there’s the auditor general. Auditor general is here every three years, sometimes more often, but by law, every three years they have to come and do audits and they look at our books.

20:26 From a financial standpoint, they also look for compliance. They do some it audits and they do some operational audits. As I said earlier, I, along with the school board chair, participate in the entrance conferences and exit conferences.

20:43 So there’s a role there and the findings are reported to the entire audit committee as well as the school board. So we have good insight as to what was found. If we go over, and from the standpoint of the auditor general, our role is purely insight.

21:03 If you go over to the right hand side, the external auditors, and we talk about insight and oversight, we have limited, limited oversight, rather, of the external auditors. It’s only limited to the point where, and I digress, back in about 2012, 2013, the audit committee was doing a, I think what was considered a great job. And so the school board said, we want you to take over the external audit function.

21:36 And some of us panicked a little bit because, well, me personally, I didn’t know a lot about internal audits. I was learning, but I knew very hardly anything about external audits. And one of the things that we embarked on is if we’re going to do this RFP, we need to have a process.

21:53 And so we worked in conjunction with the procurement department directorate and we created a very, very robust procurement process for the external, for the audit function, I guess I should say. And when I say robust, you ought to go look at it. It’s over 50 pages and it covers everything that you can imagine from a procurement standpoint.

22:19 It is very, very robust. And we’ve executed that RFP process both in the hiring of the external auditors as well as hiring of the internal auditors. And the intent is to ensure that we have a value added process and to ensure that the playing field is level, that no agency has a competitive advantage over another agency by virtue of anything, that everybody has an equal opportunity and that we get the best bang for the buck.

22:52 So we execute that RFP process and we’ll talk about that a little bit as we go along. But from an insight oversight standpoint, that’s the extent of our oversight of the external auditors. Now, from an insight standpoint, they do present to this committee their findings.

23:10 Well, first they present to us their audit plan, and they present findings after the audits are completed, along with recommendations, if there are any. Now, if you go back to the middle, and this is our bread and butter, is the internal audits. And internal audits we have both insight and we have oversight, and we’ve employed that very same robust RFP process in terms of hiring the internal auditors.

23:43 And if you look at our role, and this is important, is for an audit committee to be effective, they have to be independent. They have to be independent, they have to be objective in their approach, and they have to be systematic. It can’t be a hell of skeletal process.

24:04 It has to be a very repeatable, very defined process. And we’ve got that. There are a number of audits that are conducted throughout the year, and we’re going to talk about that before we get done.

24:17 But those audits include financial artists, operational artists, compliance artists, as well as artists of our it systems. Look at a number of things, and by now you’ve probably read down to the bottom. But I think the most important thing is that not only do the auditors find things, but they come back with recommendations.

24:39 And those recommendations, by and large, get factored into how the findings are addressed and how we move on. They come here and they give us our quarterly audit reports, and we have a pretty good standing from that standpoint in terms of auditor selections. I mentioned earlier about the rigorous procurement process, I gotta remember to click the clicker, and I do encourage you to go and look at that process and I think you’ll be impressed.

25:14 The audit committee cannot take credit for creating that. We had a big input into it, but the procurement folks are the ones that really made it happen. And I went back and I looked at the original document, and one of the things that they required of the audit committee was to come to training.

25:35 So when we go through the next round of procurements and we’ve done this every time, they make us come and sit several hours and they go through the procurement process and they not only tell us the do’s, but they also tell us the don’ts, and they ensure that we understand our responsibilities and our obligations in terms of the procurement world. At any rate, we’ve made recommendations to the school board for the contracts for both the internal audits and the external audit world. And in both cases, we’ve made recommendations that included not only a base contract, but also included some optional one year extensions.

26:26 And what that does is that gives us an opportunity to evaluate, and we evaluate the auditors, both internal auditors and external auditors. We evaluate them on an annual basis. And this is not a check the box exercise.

26:40 We’re very serious about that. The plan here is, if we have, without any concern about the performance of the auditors, we don’t want to wait until the end to say, we don’t like some of the things you’re doing, we will tell them on an annual basis. Here are the weaknesses you need to go and work on.

26:59 We will also tell them the good things that they’re doing, and by and large, it’s good things. But at the same time, we’re going to be objective and we’re going to be fair. And by now, you’ve probably read down through this thing, but you can see that Moore Stephen Lovelace was the external audit firm that we chose.

27:17 RSM is the internal audit firm that we chose. And one of the things I want to point out is that the way the system was set up prior to 2014 is the auditor general comes in every three years and does an external audit. And what that meant is that on that particular year, the only external audit was done by the auditor general.

27:43 And so what the process that we put into place did is it gave the school board an option to have the school board hired external auditors to also, or to do an external audit on that third year that the auditor general is here. And what that has done is that it has allowed the auditor general to kind of relax some of the things that they do, and they use some of the existing work of the external auditor in their audits. So it’s worked very well.

28:18 This process has worked very well for the district as well as for the auditor general. The next page, this just shows the count of the world of audits as we, that we delve in. There are compliance audits, there are financial audits that we perform, performance audits.

28:46 And for the last, I’d say, at least ten years, we’ve looked heavily into it. And as we get into the cyber world and concerns about cyber stuff, we’ll be looking probably into even more, as well as connectivity things, making sure we’ve got the right tools, making sure that we’re getting the best bang for the buck from an it standpoint. Now, how do we do it? We do it by, first of all, ensuring that we understand the kinds of things that keep the school board up at night, the kinds of things that we ought to be putting some close attention to.

29:27 And we created a risk matrix. And that risk matrix, it looks at what’s the likelihood of something bad happening? And if something bad happens, what’s the potential impact? How bad can it be? And that’s what this shows you. If you look at this matrix, you begin, if you start with the bottom left hand side where you’ve got basically low exposure and a very low likelihood of something happening.

29:58 These are the kinds of things that we simply monitor. But if you go over to the right hand side, where the exposure is moderate and the impact is more profound, the attention that we give is a little different. If you hop up to the upper right hand, left hand side rather, where than the risk impact is greater and the likelihood of occurrences is a little greater, and we hand that out a little different as well.

30:31 And where we put a lot of attention is on the right hand side where the likelihood of something happening is pretty high. And if it happens, it is bad. And that’s where we try and put most of our dollars.

30:47 The audit universe is being handed out now. And just to give you a little history on the audit universe, as I recall, when we created this thing, the chair of the audit committee was the CFO for Northrop Grumman. And he had all of the good letters behind his name.

31:12 As I recall, he was a CPA and he was a lot of other things, good things, but he kind of led us to create, first of all, we looked at everything that we should be auditing and we compiled this and then we determined, well, we can’t audit everything, so let’s prioritize it. And that’s how this matrix was developed. And over the years we’ve put attention again based on that risk matrix that we talked about a couple of minutes ago.

31:53 Am I going too fast? No, no. Okay. But at any rate, I’m not going to go down through this.

32:03 But if you look at this, this is very, very comprehensive. And again, this is a work in progress. When you see this again, it might be slightly different.

32:12 Now, historically, we’re going to maintain site of what we’ve done historically. But when things pop up that we need to put some attention to it will certainly go on this risk matrix and we’ll put the proper attention to it. Moving on to the kinds of artists that we do.

32:32 It’s basically five things that we do is district wide audits, individual function audits, cycle audits, follow up audits, and other things that follow up, that crop up, rather, that we need to put some attention to. And I’m not going to go through this word by word. A lot of this is intuitive in terms of what is a district wide audit, it’s just what it says it is.

32:58 We are auditing across the entire district in terms of individual function audits. Again, it’s just what it says it is. That may be a particular function that occurs in many places in the district, and we go and look at that function in detail.

33:19 Cycle audits are things that we just do on a recurring basis. And then follow up audits are some of the most important artists in my mind, that we do, and I say most important. Not to say that the other artists are not important, but in terms of following up, when you find things you need to make, you want to make sure either one, they’ve been fixed or that someone in a position of authority has accepted the risk of not making a fix.

33:49 And that’s pure and simple what a follow report it does. And audits unto themselves are good things. Audit findings can be good things.

34:01 Repeat findings are not good things. So when we do follow up audits, we are looking to not find repeat repeat items, rather, now, in terms of additional internal audit projects, we’re going to talk about one of those pretty soon. And that’s the discipline audit, which was something that was not on our plate, it was not something we had planned for.

34:24 But one of the, I think one of the things about this committee is we report to the school board, and our responsibility is to ensure that the needs of the school board are met. We’re not a committee here to exist for our own purposes. So, moving on to the next few pages, and I’m trying to get through this so we can get on to the next subject.

34:55 We had made a report back in 2022, and it wasn’t a complete report because we did it before the end of the school year. It was in March, I believe, and we still have some time left. But if you look at what we had planned, if you look at what we had, what we completed, we did what we planned.

35:17 In terms of our follow up audits, our district wide audits, the half cent sales tax audits, we did two rounds in terms of the internal audits, we got all of that done. Looking at the next page, and this is 20, 22, 23. We’ve got some things that we’ve completed, and then we’ve got some things that are still in progress.

35:42 And you can kind of scan now through this just to see where we are. This page here is probably one of the most telling pages in this presentation because I can say with impunity, I think that’s the right word, that this is a very effective process. When you look at the number of audits that we’ve conducted since this committee, since fiscal year 2000, rather, if you can look at the follow up procedures that’s been conducted, the corrective actions have been completed.

36:29 If you look at the percentage of corrective actions that not only were completed, but validated and closed to a formal closeout process. And I talked earlier about repeat findings. When you look at a 90% rate, that’s pretty daggone good.

36:50 I think one of the most important things that, at least for me, is the fact that we have made a lot of improvements that may not show up in the data. And we made those improvements because this committee insists on lessons learned being shared across the district. When we went through things like bookkeeper issues, we shared the good and we shared the bad.

37:14 We tried to ensure that bookkeepers didn’t fall into the same hole that previous bookkeepers fell into. And we also shared best practices. If we found the best practice that one bookkeeper was doing at school, we ensured the other bookkeepers knew about it.

37:30 And so we, through that type of process, we’ve made some significant accomplishments and changes. Now, again, one of the things that I wanted to do, since very few of us have been here for 15 years or more, is just to kind of say, hey, we’ve done a lot of stuff and a lot of stuff that needs to be known. We talked about the procurement process, but we didn’t talk about the new committee onboarding process.

38:04 And COVID kind of slowed us down a little bit, and we’ve got to get our footing going again on that process. But we do have a very good onboarding process where, for new members and new school board members, that’s documents that we share. There are some sit down conversations, so we help you get up to speed.

38:27 One of the things that I’m extremely proud of is the district won the Florida Governor Sterling award, and this was back in 2007. And I don’t know if you know about that award, but there’s no walk in the park. Get that.

38:44 And the work of this audit committee was pretty prominent in terms of the submission and in terms of us getting that award. One of the other things that we did is we recognized as a committee that we had to have some due diligence in terms of ensuring that the external auditors and internal auditors had good succession plans, that we didn’t have a case where we might have an audit firm that loses a key person and sets us back in terms of our ability to get our work done. So one of the things that we put into the contracts is to make sure that there are good succession plans for both the internal auditors and external auditors.

39:39 The next page, it talks about the half day workshop that we do, and that workshop is devoted to training the audit committee members. And I talked kind of jokingly about. Well, not jokingly.

39:57 I was serious about the school attorney. He drills us on the Sunshine law and he makes sure that we understand what the responsibilities as well as the potential penalties for not being compliant to that law. One of the things that has helped us as a committee is we developed an action item tracking system.

40:27 And in that tracking system, it has evolved over the years. And one of the things I would like to give credit to the school board chair, as well as the superintendent, superintendents, rather, is they have always been willing to take action items from this committee. And what that does is we’re community volunteers and we take this very, very serious.

40:53 And when the people that we report to take it serious, it means a lot to us. I think I could speak for the committee in saying that it means a lot. It also works to that independence.

41:06 It allows us to say, yes, you appointed me, but this is something that you need to go do. And so I appreciate you guys taking us seriously when we give you action items, taking those action items. We talked about the bookkeeper training.

41:23 We talked about. I was working with the procurement department and we talked about the annual evaluations that we do. And let’s see here.

41:37 Now, one confession I’ll have to make is when I worked on the space center for many, many years, I had a secretary that was a secretary secretary. And so I did not learn a lot about creating charts and that kind of thing. So my chartsmanship is not the best.

41:56 So if you see things in here, this repeats, you know, it’s blame my past secretary because she held me back in terms of my learning. But at any rate, this last chart, they have some repeat things. But a couple things I want to point out on here is we do maintain a sensitivity to sensitivity, rather to opportunities to go and make improvements.

42:21 And I think we, as a committee, do a good job in pulling those things out and putting those things on the table and making sure that we are attentive to them. We’ve completed 100% of our goals and objectives. Sometimes we have to change those goals and objectives, but we have a good track record in terms of getting things done, and we continue to review ourselves.

42:49 We’re in the process now of reviewing our charter for continuous improvement. And I would like to share just one thing that has happened to me, and it’s mentioned in here about other school boards benchmarking. Brevard County.

43:06 I attend church in Titusville. It’s an African Methodist Episcopal church, St. James. And we have these festive days where we have out of town visitors coming.

43:18 And this particular day, the speaker was on the school board, I think Pinellas county. And so afterwards, I went up and I was talking to her, and I told her where I was from. I don’t know how the audit committee came up, and she said, I want to talk to you.

43:34 And I said, what? She said, yeah, I’ve heard about before, county and your audit committee, and I was totally shocked. But when we talk about other counties benchmarking us, this is Israel. We get phone calls from time to time, and they talk to our auditors because they want to do some of the things that we’re doing.

43:55 With that, I guess I would just like to say to the audit committee, appreciate you guys, appreciate the work that you do. And to the school board, we appreciate the attention that you give to us and the support that you give to us. And Miss Carroll, we appreciate you.

44:16 Thank you, mister Art. I wanted to. Next step we’re going to do is have RSM give their presentation.

44:20 Presentation. But I wanted to give the board any opportunity to try to talk. Right before we get into it, I think Art gave us kind of an overview.

44:27 You guys may have experiences with the audit committee or something like that. If you wanted to share ahead of this next presentation, I was going to open that up for you guys. If not, we can keep moving, but I just wanted to give you an opportunity.

44:39 I’ll be brief. Just want to add my thanks to all of you for the work that you do as volunteers. There are frequently.

44:47 There actually more frequently. Last few years, there have been conversations that people have had doubts, questions about what goes on in the district and this committee. Because you are independent, because you have been established for a long time, because you are those extra eyes that, you know, like that independent word.

45:03 I agree. Mister Edwards is very, very important. You are accountability that we need in addition to our roles.

45:12 You play a vital role. And so I just want to thank you again for the work that you. That you do and how well you work with our auditors, RSM, and that we don’t have our external auditors here today, do we? But thank you for the work that you do to keep us on the right path.

45:26 And again, that longevity is really important. So thank you, guys. Anybody else? Yeah, I’m not going to double down on anything that you just said that was perfect.

45:38 But thank you. Thank you for volunteering your time to ensure that everything is on the up and up. And I appreciate it very much.

45:46 Thank you. Mister Trent, Miss Wright. Pretty much the same.

45:50 You know, I want to take the opportunity to say thank you for your time. To do something so exciting as an audience takes a special brand of person. Exactly.

46:04 So if you could, we couldn’t ask for a better person. You might have to turn it on. Flip that switch.

46:18 I just want to thank you as well. So this job is one of those thankless jobs. Auditors is like, oh, you know, you hear that word and it makes people cringe, but honestly, it holds us accountable.

46:27 So more eyes that. That are looking at what’s going on helps us improve. So we’re grateful.

46:33 I’m grateful for all the years of experience, mister Art, you are, you’re a rock star. So we appreciate you tremendously. Thank you.

46:40 I want to say that I agree with the sentiments many of the board members who are new this process is. I want to tell you a couple of little quick stories I relied in my first year, like, you’re going through an audit right now. Prior to Miss Campbell and Miss Jenkins being on here, we had two audits that I called outside the scope, and in both cases, they were needed to be audited.

47:01 And I want to tell you the independence that occurs when you make a phone call to request an audit for something that’s really going to be a tough situation for the school district. And you pick up the phone and you call art, and you say, hey, art, here’s what’s going on. This is what I feel.

47:15 Here’s the valid piece behind it. And art says, you know what that sounds like? It needs to. We need to take a look at it.

47:21 It does work independently. And I will tell you that RSM, through the years, you guys have not only done a great job as far as auditing our school district, but there’s many things that I wanted the new school board members to know with budgets, with everything else that you can call on them, like I can call Laura or Jennifer, within two days, be inside your office sitting down, going over whatever my concern is. And that is incredible.

47:43 Many people don’t know that their headquarters are here, so whereas we have an amazing opportunity because they live and they have children that go to our schools. So it’s a different piece. I don’t know how many municipality school boards they represent.

47:57 It’s in the hundreds. So we have that here. It’s pretty incredible.

48:01 So I wanted to say thank you for your time, too. Don and I have been on this road for about five years now, and his commitment to this audit committee has been well noted throughout the years also. And I wanted to say, when we came forward with this discipline request before, I thought I was walking into a, hey, this is good a job.

48:20 Let’s go ahead and do it. And all of a sudden I found out, like, I was having to justify everything. I was having to lay it all out.

48:26 And I want to commend you for doing that, because that is also your independence. So when we were talking before and we were trying to get it through, to get it approved so that we could do it, you guys were amazing. And I think that that process really worked, and I was very honored to be a part of that.

48:40 And your points that you all brought up were really, really good. And I just wanted to take a second and say how much I appreciate everybody, because there’s been some times over the last five years where there’s been some critical points in our school district, and this is the committee, and RSM is the group that I’ve relied on to get some things. So it’s really a good thing.

48:56 I just want to say thank you. With that. With no other communications, I would really like to give RSM the opportunity to present.

49:05 Testing my mic. Can you hear me? I can’t sit and present, so I’m going to get up and walk, if that’s okay, and thank you all for the kind words. What a nice way to start.

49:19 Is the presentation loaded? Tammy, do you have a clicker? Art. Thank you so much. If you have some of those extra copies, if we can hand them to some of the groups, that’d be nice.

49:52 I think we have a group over here, if you can hand them. There you go. Thank you.

50:08 All right. Is that better? Yes. Okay.

50:10 It was pointing down. Well, thank you for having us here today, and thank you for those kind words. I don’t know if it helps you all, but I am a mom of students in your system.

50:21 So thank you for educating my kids. And unfortunately, I think that means that I’m probably tougher on Brevard than I probably would be for other school districts. So when.

50:30 When you do hear some conversation about an independent audit, know that, yes, you do get a true independent audit out of us. I hear a lot of feedback, so I might just hold this if that’s a little bit better. Okay.

50:45 So, thinking about brevard public schools and your internal audit function that you just learned a lot about, and how do we support your mission, serving students with excellence as the standard? Yeah, maybe I could just use one of those handhelds. Oh, okay. Maybe I’ll stand back here, see if that works any better.

51:05 This function absolutely directly supports the mission at BPS. And when the board and the audit committee directed RSM to take a look at student discipline, it’s for the benefit of those students. And so that we could really take a look in the mirror and understand how we can improve here.

51:21 Here in BPS a little bit about the objectives of our audit. We took a look at, because we are auditors, right? We are not behavior specialists in any way or educators in any way. We are process controls and compliance documentation.

51:40 So we looked at compliance with certain board policies here related to student discipline. We also obtained data out of the student information system on reported referrals and did some data analytics based on that as well. And at the board’s request, we conducted a survey of certain BPS stakeholders.

52:00 We surveyed your teachers, administrators, and bus drivers as well to get a feel for the culture at BPS and pick up on common themes that may not be picked up through a traditional audit. The population of referrals that we looked at for our audit testing was taken out of the student information system, which was recently implemented here at BPS starting in August of 2022. So we had a first semester worth of data to take a look at and to detail test.

52:32 All of the information that we looked at was current and was very recently processed in the schools. We did not test, and I want to make sure I explain this completely and thoroughly. We did not test completeness of the population, and I want to explain what that means.

52:49 When I say completeness, I’m talking about all of the behaviors that happen in our schools. It is impossible for the district or for the auditors to understand every single behavior that may happen in a school. If a teacher or administrator doesn’t input that into the system, it is unauditable and unviewable.

53:08 So we are able to audit and analyze whatever is reported in the student student information system, the appropriateness of discipline reviewed. Again, we are not behavior specialists. We did not take a look at the corrective actions applied to student behaviors and decide if it was good or not good or effective or not effective, or whether Johnny or Susie should have been suspended less or longer.

53:33 It’s purely in compliance with the process. Did it follow process or didn’t? It is what we took a look at. There are also many additional processes related to student discipline or that sometimes happen concurrently with the core discipline process, such as sorry, such as behavior threat assessments or title iX.

53:53 We did not look at those either. The focus of our audit was purely the referral process. BPS has already begun some remediation efforts for some of the recommendations that we identified in our audit.

54:07 Miss Hahn is going to walk you through those directly after my presentation and once remediation is complete here at the district as your internal auditors, we will then go back and perform full scope follow up testing to ensure that everything has been covered. So now I’ll talk a little bit about the background and the story behind this audit. As we became brought into the process by the board and the audit committee to begin our audit, we began researching to understand the discipline concerns in k twelve education.

54:42 And here at BPS, we learned very quickly. This is a national level conversation. Districts around the country are talking about their challenges with student behavior and student discipline.

54:54 We identified and categorized the key factors that we found in our research in these little bubbles around our green wheel impacts from the pandemic. Students who were not in person, not in a classroom setting, and coming back from the pandemic maybe have picked up some behaviors or forgot some really good behaviors on their way back into the classroom. The turnover in vacancies wheels this continues to be a struggle with k twelve education, not just at BPS, but across the country.

55:22 Teacher turnover is a problem and vacancies and the teachers positions and administrators positions is a concern of many, many districts. Parental involvement continues to change. You have continuing ends of the spectrum on how involved or not involved the parents are or are not and how that works together with our school leaders.

55:42 Class size is also a challenge. When you are short on teachers and administrators, it can impact your class size. You could have more kids than you had planned in your classroom room.

55:53 The FDOE regulations continue to change as the state updates its position on education and discipline, which makes it challenging as a district or a teacher or an administrator to follow current guidelines. And mental health is a challenge for many, not just k to twelve education, but worldwide this is a topic that we continue to analyze and evolve and adapt timeline just to show how quickly we were able to move through this audit. We began having the conversations with the audit committee chairman and the board chairman back in December related to this internal audit and how we could accomplish it.

56:31 And just want to give special thanks to all the district leaders and the staff and the principals who worked with us on such a large project in such a short period of time. Really appreciate their time and their input. Also appreciate the additional agencies that worked with us, Brevard Federation of Teachers and others.

56:47 Thank you very much. Some key metrics from our audit just to give a little bit of a picture of how those key factors are playing out here at BPS in particular, if you start at the top left, these are the total student incidents reported in that student information system for the past four years. You can see that before COVID in 2018 to 19, we had approximately 62,000 incidents reported each year.

57:11 You can see the dip over the next couple years as Brevard and others moved into a remote learning environment and a hybrid learning environment, and then back in 21, 22, up to 56,000. This was a return to a traditional classroom setting for the first semester. In 22, 23, I believe there were, it’s in our report, but I believe there were 25 ish thousand for the first semester.

57:49 So we are on track to meet about the same amount of incidents or exceed on the top right Brevard public schools teacher vacancies as of a couple of points in time four years ago. In January of 1819. About 88 teacher vacancies in 22 23 January, 158.

58:12 That’s an increase of 80% year over year. Four years between the three gray boxes there on the right middle side. These are just some operational statistics that we were able to pull out by analyzing the data in the student information system.

58:30 Oh, there’s my number. 29,000 total incidents for the first semester. 1.

58:56 03 days for teachers to document an incident in the student information system. So about a day after something happens, they’re able to get in and document it. And 3.

59:17 4 days for principals to determine the corrective action. Again, this is documented in the system. This does not mean that they didn’t address it or take action immediately.

59:34 It just is showing you how long it takes to get in the system. And in the bottom middle there, this is our five year teacher retention rate. So teachers who were hired in 2018, how are we doing at retaining them now? You can see within their first year of employment here at BPS, retention was about 78%.

59:56 By the time we hit year five, it’s around 48%. Keep in mind that this five year retention rate crosses through COVID and significant challenges in the teaching profession. But either way, it demonstrates that we are losing teachers just like other k.

1:00:13 Twelve districts are. And the classroom management skills and learning and training related to discipline is lost when you lose your teachers who have been trained. This slide is just a snapshot to give a picture demonstrating the complexity of the regulatory environment governing student discipline.

1:00:39 Not only are there federal regulations, there’s state regulations, board policy, administrative procedure. It’s incredibly complex and highly regulated. Now, let’s talk a little bit about how student discipline is managed and administered here at BPS.

1:01:10 I wanted to demonstrate through this picture that many, many folks across the district have a responsibility as it relates to discipline. This is not just a conversation about the school board, or about the schools, or about leading and learning, or about the superintendent. It’s about all of these various roles and how they work together to monitor and manage the discipline here at BPS.

1:01:40 Now, how is a referral actually reported and documented in the system? The four squares on the top, kind of our workflow. If a student has a behavior in the classroom that doesn’t meet our code of conduct, the teacher will document the details of that incident. In the student information system, the school principal or designee, sometimes in larger schools, there’s a dean or assistant principal who’s assigned discipline, will go into that student information system and review the details.

1:01:55 If they need to conform with the teacher to better understand what happened, or they need to do a little more investigating, they certainly will do so. And then at the time where they feel everything has been completely documented in the student information system, that principal or designee will code those behaviors to the proper codes that it should be coded to, and apply corrective actions taken. When I say corrective action, I’m talking about the disciplinary responsibility to a behavior.

1:02:16 So sometimes that’s a detention, phone, conference with the parents, suspension, those things. So I mentioned that you also have to code the behavior. There are two systems for coding the behaviors here in the state of Florida.

1:02:52 The state has defined in state statute what we call Cesar. This defines and identifies 26 behaviors with very specific definitions and criteria for each one. And then the state of Florida also allows for every single district to create its own locally defined behavior coding system.

1:03:19 And when you think about that, that system is designed here in Florida so that each district has the ability to create their own code of conduct, decide what behaviors are or are not acceptable in their district, and then track that to see if students are following it or not. So some of those behaviors are centrally monitored by the state under SASER, but some of those are not and are very specific to the needs of each district. There are some training and resources here at BPS to help with our schools in administering the discipline policy.

1:03:35 There is a district advisory committee that was put in place in 2017. There are some trainings that have been provided from central district out to the schools. And as I mentioned, the student information system has been implemented in August and updated, and there are some select checklists for certain behaviors to guide principals and teachers in determining the proper behavior codes.

1:03:56 So I want to talk a little bit more about that dual coding system that we were just discussing where there’s the state system and our locally defined system as well. As I mentioned, there are benefits to that. It allows some flexibility in the state from district to district, but there’s also some risks.

1:04:33 And as your auditor, I need to tell you about risks. So this is what we’re going to talk about when you have in any Florida school district, two sets of codes. There is a possibility that some of the locally defined codes could closely resemble assessor code, and schools may inadvertently use the wrong code.

1:04:49 This is why it’s really important to have thorough, in depth understanding as someone in a classroom or as a leader of a school of the definitions of these codes, so that we don’t accidentally code something to a local code instead of assessor and inadvertently not report that to the. So some of the codes at bps that are locally defined, that closely align with Cesar, but there are reasons why they’re different than Susser are some of the ones on the screen, some that also became very commonplace for us to discuss throughout the audit was the fighting code. So assessor.

1:05:08 Fighting code is very specifically written. Sasor requires three things to have happened in a school fight for it to be called assessor fight. There has to be an injury, there has to be more than one party, and an administrator has to have told the students to stop fighting, and they didn’t.

1:05:30 If all three of those don’t take place, you cannot call that fight, assessor fight. So BPS has created additional fighting codes so that they can capture and track fights that occur in their schools that don’t meet all three of those criteria. So there are locally defined codes that say fighting.

1:05:48 There is also assessor code that says fighting. Very, very important that all of the stakeholders understand the difference between those, so that we’re capturing the information accurately. Additional complexity comes in with the coding system, a single incident that happens on campus with our students can also be coded to more than one code.

1:06:07 It’s common for something to happen, and maybe it’s a fight, maybe it’s assessor fight. But we also need to code maybe physical aggression or verbal confrontation for the same incident. So when you’re analyzing the data and looking at the trends across the district, it is not a one for one.

1:06:39 Many times an incident will have more than one behavior identified and more than one corrective action. So let’s continue talking a little bit about the behavior and the severity schedules. And this is where you can see student discipline becomes very, very complex.

1:07:02 So it was important to us to put a picture around this to make it a little bit easier to understand. At brevard public schools, all of the identified behaviors, whether locally defined or Cesar, are categorized between levels level one through five based on severity, and these are the definitions of the severity. The district also has two separate severity scales for grade behaviors for k to six look different than behaviors for k, I’m sorry, 7th through twelve.

1:07:21 So here is our pre k to 6th grade. We have taken the severity levels and broken them down by locally defined an assessor codes so that you can visually see where all the behaviors fall on this spectrum. As you can tell by looking at this, most of these cessor codes are at the higher severity level.

1:07:31 So the state seems to want to have centralized definitions and tracking for more severe type behaviors. However, there are a couple, as you can see, level twos and one level three as well. The majority of the locally defined behaviors are at the lower level behavior.

1:08:06 Here’s the same scale again for seven through twelve. Very, very similar. There’s one or two minor differences that are noted through here.

1:08:29 So, once we understand the severity scale and you understand how the principals are coding the behaviors that they’re seeing come through the student information system. Now, this guides how the principals can assign code corrective actions to these behaviors. So at brevard, the policy is, and this was set up to guide and define consistency in behavior that based on the severity level of your behavior, you have to assign at least one corrective action from that category of severity.

1:08:52 The principals, though, also have the authority and discretion to assign additional corrective action as needed, which can be from any of the buckets. And the reason this system was designed as such is because the purpose of assigning a corrective action to a student is meant to deter that behavior from happening ever again. So, student cheats on a test.

1:09:34 Let’s use hypothetically, if you know that that student doesn’t really care about detention and isn’t going to respond to that. You might decide a phone call to the parent as well might be more effective. But if another student decides to cheat on a test and absolutely hates detention because they’re going to miss their soccer game, that might be effective enough to deter that from ever happening again with that student.

1:09:47 So the principals, in theory, will know, the students know their personalities, know their drivers better than anyone up at the district level, and can effectively decide, using their judgment, which corrective actions will deter that student from performing that behavior again. Now, there is also some centralization of approvals for some of the more severe corrective actions, for long suspensions or for alternative placement considerations. There is a due process that comes centrally through the district here for approval and review, and that’s to ensure that those severe punishments are treated equitably across the district.

1:10:01 So this is some additional complexity that can be added in, because when you look at a behavior, it’s not a one for one. When this happens, then this corrective action happens. It’s when this happens, this kind of correction happens.

1:10:14 Plus you can use judgment. So again, the severity levels and the corrective actions have two separate scales, k to six and seven to twelve. And they are listed here for reference as well.

1:10:18 Laura, I was going to say we have a notice that we were supposed to start the meeting at a certain times and stuff like that. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to break the meeting real quick. Art’s going to reopen it and let you continue.

1:10:23 Great. Ok. All right, we’re going to take a second.

1:10:31 I’m going to break the meeting. Meeting’s adjourned. Ok.

1:10:41 I’m calling the order of the school board. Brevoy County Audit Committee. Today is Wednesday, April 19, 2023.

1:10:53 Good morning, everyone. We’ve had the pledge of allegiance. I turn the floor back over to Laura to complete the discipline audit.

1:11:06 Thank you. It’s a nice intermission. Thank you.

1:11:36 All right, so let’s talk a little bit about alternative placement. This was an area that the board wanted the independent auditors to take a look at. So we’ve included some information here in this presentation as well.

1:12:12 There is a process for deciding whether alternative placement is the appropriate corrective action or not. It includes many, many parties, including the parent or guardian of the student, the student themselves, the teachers and the principals, as well as the district centrally here. In addition to that, when you say alternative placement, that doesn’t automatically mean the alternative learning centers, there are additional options that could be taken, include home education or private school as well.

1:12:27 So now I’m going to begin walking you through a little bit of the data analytics that we performed around the data in that student information system. But I’m going to remind you that because of that dual coding system that we talked about, the only way to compare districts to each other equitably is to use CeSAr data only. And remember, again, because each district has their own code of conduct and may decide that certain behaviors are or are not okay and may look a little bit different from district to district, we can’t compare locally defined codes to other counties.

1:12:39 Locally defined codes. It’s not the same. The challenge, though, is that when you look at total reported behaviors here at Brevard, only 3% of the total reported behaviors are actually cesor behaviors.

1:12:50 So it’s not a good picture of all of the behaviors that are happening out at our schools. It is, though, a good way to compare and normalize between county and county. So that’s what we’ve done.

1:13:14 We’ve selected several comparable counties that we wanted to benchmark bps against. You can see that Brevard is right in the middle here. It is the red line.

1:13:31 You’ll also see some peaks in some valleys. Remember that we had COVID as an impact in some of those years, so we understand why there’s a decline there for those periods. Also want to mention that this is data that was posted to the Department of Education’s website, and it was only posted through the 2021 school year.

1:13:55 They have not yet posted the 21 22 data. As we know, that was a return to a traditional school environment. So I would expect that when that data is posted, we’ll see some increases in all of these counties here.

1:14:11 Also, took a look at that data and wanted to slice it by the top ten behavior categories. And how do we compare? Not just from a total SUSR incidence perspective, like on the first slide, but in terms of behaviors. How do we compare? We benchmark that not only against our comparable counties, but also against the entire state of Florida, just to depict it a little bit here.

1:14:20 But keep in mind, there’s factors at play when analyzing data, just like with any other kinds of data. For example, those locally defined codes that we talked about. If there are or are not locally defined codes that might capture some very similar behaviors.

1:14:26 Some of these counties may be reporting behaviors a little bit differently than BPS’s. Like we talked about fighting right in the middle there. You can see that.

1:14:50 Oh, come on in. It’s fine. You can see that the fighting data kind of varies quite a lot.

1:14:59 1.1 in Brevard, 5.7 ish for our counties, and 2.

1:14:59 2 for the state. It may very well be impacted because Brevard does have locally defined fighting codes and is capturing those non cesar fights that way. Comparable counties may not have that and they may be forced to capture all fighting data under that cesser code, which could be inflating that don’t know.

1:15:58 Didn’t audit every single county in the state of Florida, but wanted to mention what the data may or may not be telling us. It still is directional in pointing out a few high level trends. You can see tobacco clearly a trend.

1:16:22 You can see that that is something Brevard is cracking down on probably more than others are in the state and in our neighbors. We also took a look at corrective actions, not only because we wanted to see how the district was implementing corrective actions and following policy, because again, I’m an auditor looking to see that we followed process, but also just looking for some general trends here in what BPS is doing. So these two charts will show you the top corrective actions applied for cesser code behaviors, and then the bottom chart, the corrective actions that are applied for our locally defined behavior codes.

1:16:45 You can see there are some significant repeats, those that are used more often than others. But again, just like when we’re looking at data, we have to remember what this says and what this doesn’t say. Keep in mind corrective actions.

1:16:57 There can be multiple corrective actions for a single incident. So this doesn’t necessarily tell me that there were, for example, 59 teach reteach student expectation incidents. It could very well be that those are combined with other applied corrective actions that are in this table as well.

1:17:21 We also wanted to slice the alternative placement actions taken at BPS and understand what was driving alternative placement here. When are we using it? Broke that down by Sasser and by locally defined. You can clearly see that for our cesser alternative placement actions, that drug possession and use is the number one contributor for alternative placement at BPS.

1:17:46 And for our locally defined codes, physical aggression and fighting seem to be the number one. And number two. Again, keep in mind a single incident can be coded to more than one behavior code.

1:18:13 So if you’re looking at this and thinking, oh my goodness, I can’t believe that there are four alternative placement actions for vulgar language. That seems a little extreme, well, this could very well be an incident that also included drug possession, threat, intimidation, and vulgar language. And it’s captured here in this chart in those places.

1:18:44 So with that, I’m going to move into some of the recommendations and observations that we noted throughout the, the actual audit. The purpose of these is to help BPS define and refine its process operationally, to help streamline how discipline is implemented in our schools. The number one observation that we have listed here, the first one is communication with law enforcement.

1:19:13 This is an area that Major Neil, I guess he’s gone, but we have the under sheriff here with us that we discussed was something that they had already noted and were taking steps on when we began our audit. We have included it, though, in our audit write up just to encourage the district and the school board and law enforcement agencies to continue working on the things that they had started. And it gives us the ability to keep following up on it from an independent audit perspective as well.

1:19:35 So statute requires that districts engage with law enforcement agencies, agencies with a memorandum of understanding that dictates that they will communicate when there are threats to school safety. BPS has those in place. We are compliant with statute, but in order to just enhance that further and make this a little bit even more highly functioning, there is an opportunity there that BCSO is leading through office of district security here to define that even further.

1:19:55 Spell out a little bit what that looks like, maybe what types of acts are we talking about? Dig into the specifics of the communication process itself, again, just to enhance and clarify so that all of the agencies that BPS partners with to keep our schools safe are working under the same process. It’s a community effort to bring the community together under deeper understanding of what school safety is and what everybody’s role in responsibility. Responsibility is here as well.

1:20:12 So kudos to all parties engaged. Number two is going to be the major topic and you’ll see how it’s going to affect the rest of the observations that I walk through. But here we’re really talking about the elevated risk of student discipline in k to twelve education today, like I walked you through in the very beginning.

1:20:46 Those various risks factors, those are nationwide. We’re seeing trends in turnover, we’re seeing mental health, we’re seeing vacancies, we’re seeing these things all over the place. And k to twelve education just is not able to operate the way that they have been any longer as it relates to student discipline.

1:21:15 We must evolve and adapt just like commercial entities do when there’s a change in their landscape and in their industry. K twelve needs to, to do that as well. So we’re recommending here at BPS, the structure that has worked in the past should be evolved as well as it relates to discipline.

1:21:23 And instead of having remember the wheel, different roles and responsibilities across the discipline, we should create at BPS here a centralized discipline department with a cabinet level position that reports either directly to the superintendent or the deputy superior superintendent to oversee and govern discipline in our schools. The overall goal there is to streamline the communication. One stop shop for our principals and our teachers to call, ask support from, get clear guidance on on instruction and enacting discipline in their students.

1:21:51 Help us apply that equitably across the district as well, and provide comprehensive, very robust training to our users at the schools. Consistent messaging support so that teachers, administrators, bus drivers, district personnel, all on the same page, marching to the same drumbeat about what we’re doing here at BPS to address discipline. In addition, the discipline advisory committee could be elevated.

1:22:14 The discipline advisory committee is made up of many different stakeholders. We encourage that. We think district security should be part of it.

1:22:57 BFT teachers, principals, district folks and other stakeholders that the district might identify as having an important perspective on discipline in our schools. And this committee should have direct access to that leadership role in the cabinet that we were talking about leading that discipline department. It also should probably report to the board on at least an annual basis to provide an update on progress and actions taken by that committee.

1:23:13 In other words, should be elevated. Number three, formalized monitoring processes. The district’s new student information system is really cool, and some of the things that they have already begun to do with it, which I know sue will be able to tell us a little bit more about after I stop talking, are really exciting, and we’d love to see that enhanced.

1:23:38 For example, we could get deeper into the corrective actions taken, dive into those analytics and those details on a real time basis so that the district can support compliance out of the schools. See if a principal needs help, see if a teacher needs help, or see if they just need a little extra oomph to get their items documented on time, also could provide some really key interesting information to the board and to leadership so that you all can make real time decisions on policy and whether or not policy that you have implemented is as effective as you would like it to be. You can make those decisions real time with the data that you’ll be able to have now.

1:23:51 Number four, automated discipline procedures. That student information system is pretty great, but there’s still some pieces to the process that are manual. We still have some manual approvals of suspensions or manual conversations taking place.

1:24:12 There’s many, many steps that actually can continue to be brought into that student information system. So it’s more of a one stop shop to track a referral from beginning to end. So we encourage the educational technology department to work with the folks who are going to lead this discipline department and build that out to make the entire process as automated as possible and keep all the documentation in one place as well.

1:24:37 Number five, the student information system resources. This is not. This did not surprise me, knowing how lean that Brevard public schools is, especially in their educational technology department.

1:25:10 But there is one person who has super user or administrative access to the discipline piece of the student information system. So we’re recommending that BPS consider cross training or bringing on additional resources to support that functionality for the student information system. And I’m sure if Russell was here, he’d say, I need that for my whole department.

1:25:27 And I wouldn’t disagree with him on that either. Number six, formalize procedural documentation. This is a pretty common finding for an auditorium, but usually when we’re going through our understanding and our walkthroughs and our interviews to really understand how things work at a district, we’ll find that certain steps may not be documented in a procedure manual, but they are actually taking them and are in place.

1:25:43 So we found a few, which is very common, and we are recommending that the district document these as well in a procedure manual. The next two observations, number seven and eight, are directly in response to the actual audit work that we did. Of the referrals, we selected 85 referrals out of our student information system, tested them for compliance with the policy, and came out with a couple of observations here that we categorized two ways.

1:26:09 This first one is the compliance category. The next one I’ll talk about is accuracy and completeness. But here in compliance, we had some referrals where we noted lack of, for example, the first one, suspension, pre approval in talking with the schools.

1:26:33 Again, it just comes down to use of this system and enhanced training for our schools. But sometimes this pre approval could be verbal, it could be a conversation in a cafeteria or a text message or what have you. And as an auditor coming in, of course, I’m looking for a piece of paper, paper or something to document.

1:26:51 So as the district formalizes and automates and pulls this centrally together under a centralized leader, I would expect that a tightened up process would make some of these concerns go away as the implementation becomes firmer out in the schools. Also can’t discount the use of a new system. Sometimes these things existed and maybe just getting used to the new system.

1:27:24 We are just needing a little additional training to help folks get it into the system so that when the auditor asks for it, it’s there. Number eight, accuracy and completeness. When we took a look at the data, some of these either had not been completely filled out yet, or perhaps we’d need some more training for users to help support them so that they understand how to fill out the referrals.

1:27:35 There were some fields of information that weren’t necessary complete, and some fields in here that weren’t necessarily accurate either when we went back and compared to supporting documentation. And lastly, the alternative learning centers. Again, we’re auditors.

1:28:09 We’re very much staying in our lane here, but we couldn’t help but notice that when we looked at data, it appears that there is a capacity issue in the ALCs here at BPS. So we wanted to present to you some of the enrollment data and how it appears to be exceeding capacity, and we would like to see the board work with district leadership to address how this could be mitigated. The third piece of our audit, we did our testing.

1:28:26 We did our data analytics. The third piece that we did was our survey. We sent a survey out to teachers, administrators and bus drivers.

1:28:37 We asked several questions, which are detailed in our full report, and had them rate their responses from zero for strongly disagree up to a ten for strongly agree. You can see that our completion rates here are on the right, and as an auditor, I would probably have liked to see a stronger completion rate, to feel really confident about that data. But I do think that there are some answers in here that the district and the board can take away and follow up on further and look into some responses here.

1:28:48 However, I would not extrapolate these results across the entire population. That would not be appropriate to do so. Brevard Federation of Teachers also conducted their own survey, and we attached that in our full detail report as well, so that you could have all pieces in one place.

1:29:07 So with that, I’ll conclude my presentation portion. And, Miss Han, I’ll turn it to you. Thank you.

1:29:22 Good morning, everyone. So, thank you, Laura. I appreciate that and appreciate the thorough and complete work that was done by RSM and the guidance that that document is going to be able to, to give us moving forward.

1:29:56 So I just want to give kind of a brief overview of where we are as a district from the staff perspective. Overall, I think this is a significant issue nationwide, statewide, but it’s a significant issue here in Brevard. It affects our academic performance.

1:30:35 It affects teacher recruitment, it affects student recruitment. So it’s a significant issue here. And I think this is a great opportunity for Brevard to really be a leader in working through these challenges that we’re seeing across the country.

1:31:10 So the document that RSM has provided has given us a pretty good roadmap to try to work through some of these issues with some strategic work on our part. So just a couple of, couple of points in terms of the, the concept of centralizing and elevating, we agree. And as we’ve debriefed from the audit, it became painfully clear that we have distributed responsibility and authority for discipline throughout our district.

1:31:43 And because of the increase in focus on discipline over the last couple of years since the pandemic, our systems and structures were not really conducive to doing a stellar job of addressing disciplines. So I think the audit report confirms what we know and we’ll be able to move forward given the direction to address our structures. So part of the centralize and elevate concept, I think first, is the organizational structure at BPS that was discussed, talked about the discipline advisory committee.

1:32:11 Our, our folks on the leading and learning and student services doctor Cody is leading a cross functional team working through what the charter would be for a discipline advisory committee. And we felt that it was important to establish a charter, rather than this being an ad hoc committee, that we would document the responsibilities, the membership, how the committee will function in terms of communication with the board. And so we’re working through that process now with a group of stakeholders to bring a charter for consideration to the board.

1:32:41 Training was a significant issue. If you look at all the survey data that was included in the report, including the BFT survey, as well as the survey that was done by RSM training, is something that is important to our stakeholders and we believe we need to do a better job, both in terms of the compliance training that I think Laura kind of talked about the compliance piece of it, but just in terms of working towards better outcomes in our classrooms. And I think we can put those things together.

1:33:09 And we’re starting to engage our training folks that are in HR, in our organization, and trying to bring them into what we’re talking about on the discipline side of the house. So we think we can do some different things with training and we’re looking for some advice from our stakeholders. We’ve gotten some good input from BFT as far as what they would embrace for training that would help us perform better.

1:33:53 So that’s an area where some cross functional collaboration, both within the district teams as well as with some of our stakeholders, I think can make a tremendous difference. The other aspect is broadening communication. Again, the survey had some interesting results and not that they were statistically significant, but you could understand how people were feeling when they were responding to the survey and recognizing that the communication needs to improve.

1:34:23 There’s some disconnects in terms of our communication and so engaging our parents, engaging our students, engaging our stakeholders, engaging our own staff in terms of their responsibility and accountability for better outcomes in our classrooms. It’s really important and we need to take a hard look at how we do our communication. And our student information system that has been in place since August of 22 is really an outstanding vehicle for doing that.

1:35:00 As the former facilities person a month ago, I have recently become acquainted with our new student information system in the context of this audit. And it has so much powerful data in it that we can use as a, as cross functional teams throughout our district, our leading and learning folks, our student services folks, our training folks, like everybody can use this information to perform better and respond to several of the things that were found in the audit, just the list of referrals. We can go back and look at those referrals and we can correct those issues that were identified in the audit using our student information system.

1:35:16 But the other thing that I think is super powerful and requires an add on module is the ability to be transparent with that data. Right now it’s based on student names, student numbers. It’s not something that we can share, but there’s a module that we can add on to the system that will allow us to do some public facing dashboards so that we can be accountable to our community, to our stakeholders using data that is live.

1:35:24 And so I think that is another area where we can move rapidly towards some process improvements and bringing more information to the forefront so that everyone who’s involved in this can understand both our issues and some of our solutions. So I think, I think I’ll stop there. Just know that this is a serious issue for our teams and we have pretty much the entire organization working on what has come out of the audit and these recommendations, and we believe that they are actionable, they are sound, and we’re prepared to move forward.

1:35:41 So thank you, Mister Edwards. Any other questions? Comments? I think we’re going to go through it. I think what I was going to ask is if we could go through each one of the recommendations and take our comments and our direction and then go.

1:36:04 That’s kind of the process. But I think art wanted to have a couple of procedural things that he wanted to take care of. Okay.

1:36:08 The first thing I want to do is to thank Laura and the team. I know this has been a real labor and a lot of unexpected expected things happen along the way. And I just want to thank you guys for your professionalism, your dedication to task.

1:36:18 You did an awesome job. I think as a matter of procedure, we probably should go ahead and adopt this report as an audit committee. So I would like to entertain a motion that we accept this report formally, please.

1:36:30 Okay. It’s been properly moved. And second, that we accept this report.

1:36:52 Are you ready for the question? All in favor? Aye. Opposed? Okay, so it’s carried. Mister chair, I turn this back over to you.

1:36:59 You can finish up your portion. Thank you, Mister Edwards. If you guys would all allow it to go, that proper process, I think giving us some opportunity to speak and then go through each one of the sections recommendations, because I think that’s.

1:37:10 Miss Hahn, if I’m correct, Miss Han, sorry. If I’m correct in the idea that you need some direction to start developing some practices in a general way, not like specifics, but yes, I think specifically around the organizational structure change in item two. I think that would be the area where we need some direction from the board.

1:37:19 Thank you. Thank you. So we’re going to kind of go through each one of these, and then we’ll give direction when needed and make comments when needed.

1:37:36 And we’ll get to the end of them and then we can wrap it up. So with that, if you guys will go to the first recommendation, which is on page. So I just want to jump in here.

1:37:43 Hang on just a second. Let’s just get to this. Hang on just a second, Mister Susan, respectfully, you asked if that’s the order we’re going to take, so I’m going to respond to that question.

1:37:51 You can laugh. I agree with going through the recommendations, but there is plenty other questions and things that need to be discussed that had to do with this audit that aren’t part of the recommendations. So there needs to be time to have that conversation as well.

1:38:09 Yeah, absolutely. That’s what we were saying is that we would leave some time for that. But I wanted to get through the recommendations so that we could get direction.

1:38:31 The first one is communication with law enforcement, giving the guidance. That’s pretty much you guys. After speaking to the sheriff, he had already been moving on this.

1:38:54 This is something that he’s got a recommendation for, and we’re in a good place. Do you guys feel secure with that? Any comments, you guys, on this topic? Yes, Miss Manlove. I know when we were having conversations, post audit about this area.

1:39:02 I’m sorry, I’m gonna take this away from you. I know one of the biggest concerns was not necessarily communication with law enforcement coming from our end, but vice versa. And so I just would like you to confirm publicly, because there was a lot of statements made publicly on December 8 that BPS was not relaying certain information to law enforcement.

1:39:08 So did you feel that you found that throughout this audit, did you feel like there was a lack of communication? Because we used so many different law enforcement agencies and they all have different ways of communicating back with us. So while we didn’t follow up on specific allegations and really just looked at it from a process perspective, we would agree that the process needs improvement. And it’s a.

1:39:22 Communication is always a two way process and there’s opportunity for improvement there. Thank you. Okay.

1:39:32 Absolutely. You guys have the opportunity to ask questions in deep dive. I don’t know, but make sure.

1:40:00 Is your mic on? Flip the switch towards you. It’s on the top. Pull it towards you.

1:40:26 Okay. Can you hear me? You got to be kind of close. Do you want mine? Can you hear me now? Is this one better? Yes.

1:40:45 So one of the things from an individual standpoint that we had done with respect to law enforcement, we had been given an incident report of incidents that happened on school property that were reported with law enforcement. But when we did a public records request, there is no record at BPS. So there is, and I have the reports to show where we made.

1:41:15 We have the incidents, and some of them were pretty high level. Some of them were in the level five category, assaults, some suicide incidents at different high schools. That my concern is that if there is no notice of it, there’s a student sitting in a classroom that doesn’t have the proper mental health assistance or discipline, that’s sitting in a classroom with other peers not knowing how to cope with what’s going on.

1:41:49 So that is one thing. I was excited to maybe see it, that I was going to get brought to light and to defend RSM, they can’t audit what they don’t know, and if it’s not being reported, they have no knowledge of it. So how do we fix that would be my first question.

1:41:54 I can speak a little bit if you need. So my only response to that is, I’d have to take a look at what you’re talking about, and we would have to look at our process and where we fell short in our process and correct it. Yeah, I think, if I may speak, RSM was talking about the process of how is this being communicated? And I think that you’re 100% right that it is both ways of communication.

1:42:11 Where we’ve seen some of the other incidences and where some of this comes up into play is law enforcement and some of the municipalities on videos with buses and stuff like that, is not enacting certain things that they’re supposed to be based upon communications and setting that up. So this will help with that process, because whereas it’s explaining to them and them explaining back and everything else, with the communications process, it’s setting up a formal process that we can identify. And RSM was just like you said, not so much looking into actual incidences and saying, there’s one, there’s one, there’s one.

1:42:46 No, there is a communications that we need to work on. And I think that’s what does this. So if that helps.

1:43:12 I think you’re right, Miss Jenkins. I think everybody agrees that we need a process that needs to be improved, and it’s there. I have a clarifying question because of what was just brought up from what I believe was said in a meeting with RSM.

1:43:33 So I need some clarifying answers. For me, what I heard, and correct me if I’m wrong, in our conversations, was that significant incidences that were happening actually off campus or after school hours were not necessarily being reported back to the school because law enforcement was handling it. I did not hear about significant incidences that were happening on our campus that we weren’t reporting to law enforcement.

1:43:56 So I feel like that was what was just said, unless I’m mishearing it. So did your audit reveal that to be happening on campus? So our audit focused on what was reported as a disciplined incident. And I do believe that the process could be improved, whether on or off campus.

1:44:08 And I believe that my conversation with BCSO, they feel the same way and have taken steps to work with chiefs of police, of the other law enforcement agencies as well. And they are working on what this should look like as a collective community. But specific allegations or incidents? No, we did not audit that.

1:44:20 And I appreciate that. The reason I’m asking and following up these questions is because there’s significant implications to what that means, both on BPS’s side, but also on the law enforcement side. And I want it to be clear that when things are said that the law enforcement aren’t reporting to us, it’s not necessarily that the law enforcement is doing something wrong.

1:44:43 They’re doing their jobs they’re handling it right. And so the improvement isn’t that necessarily corrective action isn’t being taken or things aren’t being done. It’s the lack of communication piece.

1:44:49 And I just want that to be the focus and highlight. The reciprocal communication is where we need improvement. It’s not that those incidences are not, not being addressed.

1:45:19 And I think that the last portion of what that is, and this is going to be consistent throughout the audit, is that we’re not looking for a target, a person, a thing, that it is. We’re not looking for the assessor violations, we’re not looking for title IX violations, we’re not looking for any of that. The idea is that there’s a process issue, here’s a better process, move forward.

1:45:36 And that’s what I think. So if that helps Miss Jenkins, that’s, that’s good. Those other things are being audited in another way.

1:45:59 I just want to clarify one thing or ask a follow up question to that. If it’s not so with the law enforcement report, how do we know someone at district is looking at any of these incidences to make sure that it’s being handled at all? Is there like where would someone be able to verify that? So that’s being done right now through another department and they’re working on it. As far as not only those, but then other, other discipline areas that we have.

1:46:15 So it has been, it’s an outside agency that’s starting to look at that to say, hey, here’s some recommendations. And the idea was that we as a district need to look at processes and improvements and stuff like that. Not actual trying to, to find incidences, get in reporting, you know what I mean? Those things.

1:46:35 Because I’ve seen some things that are on videos, I’ve seen some things that are there that, you know, there’s room for improvement. But instead of getting into each one of the ids and saying hey, this is wrong, this is wrong, we just find the process, move forward, but those reports will eventually come. So just to help you, Mister Susan, I think this actually is a great segue into, and I’m not trying to rush this along, but I think it’s a great segue into number two, which is, has a big part of it.

1:46:42 It’s the training. Yeah. So are we all good with number one? Are there any other questions? Mister Trent? Miss Wright does have anything just for a clarifying purpose on the memorandum of understanding.

1:46:47 This is just going to make an even playing field with all police, municipalities, so we understand what they are looking for from us and what they, what are, you know, what they want from us and what we want from them. So it should just make it even. So we don’t have, we don’t have Pom Bay doing one thing and we have cocoa doing one thing and we want it across the board.

1:47:19 So the memorandum really will clear it up. I think this will help. And then now we know, moving forward, a clear expectation we will have a clear result that will be produced from that.

1:47:27 So I’m in favor of number one moving forward. Yep. Okay, let’s go on to number two.

1:47:38 Yeah. If there’s no further conversation from the audit group, are there any questions to discipline, governance, structure and training? There’s been a recommendation and this is, I think, one of the bigger ones. Do we move to an assistant superintendent who oversees and give them the opportunity of the district to come bring back a recommendation to us over what that process looks like? I think what Miss Han is looking for is, yes, these are good recommendations or no, and then allow them to go back, develop that, and bring it back to us.

1:48:15 If you guys wanted to talk about what you think that looks like to give a direction, that’s fine, but I think that’s what you’re looking for. Miss Hand. Yes, sir.

1:48:28 We would be developing kind of a strawman type of organizational structure that would be looked at as part of the budget and with the new superintendent. Perfect. Is there any discussion wrapped around this? Yes, I’m going to jump in there.

1:48:42 I’m going to follow up with discussion by and just Miss Parrish. Because where I think this dovetails into this conversation is, and as we go through this, I think this is very important to remember, Mister Susan said it earlier, the natural response is to try to find who’s responsible for this, right? We’re trying to find the bad guy. And honestly, sometimes it feels like that’s what’s happening from the state coming down, looking at us with a microscope, you know, you know, saying, who’s responsible for this? And the truth is, these issues, these findings are how we got here, and not just us.

1:48:49 That little diagram with the circles all around it, that’s how we got here. Constant change, constant vacancies, lack of training, all of that. Communication can always be better.

1:48:55 I can’t think of a single circumstance where communication can’t be better. So when we talk about this, I think, you know, how do we solve that problem where we might have cesare violations that aren’t being coded training? Because there’s not. It isn’t there.

1:49:12 Everybody who puts the things in. It’s at the school level. There are things at the district level, but there aren’t people at the district level who are undoing.

1:49:22 Oh, look, principals are reporting too many Cesar violations. Let me go and uncheck those boxes. They’re not doing that.

1:49:25 I don’t think that’s what we’re finding here. But we may have situations where the people at the schools who are doing these, putting these codes in don’t have the proper training, enough training to know what is this? How do I code this? What is the discipline? So this is so important. So I, as a, on these different issues.

1:49:50 As far as the training, yes, this is so important so that we’re all on the same page. Everybody’s speaking the same vocabulary, the required vocabulary from the state. Want to be transparent with this.

1:49:57 So, yes, absolutely. Support the efforts. And I’m here.

1:50:04 I’ve heard that from staff as well, our cabinet level staff. We need to support that for our, not just our deans, but our principals and our other assistant principals and our teachers so that everybody’s on the same page and we can speak the same language. As far as the committee, my question would be, because there was, Miss Campbell, if we can just stick to the.

1:50:10 I am going to stick to this because it does the decentralized piece. If we can give her direction, then get to each one of them. Well, you didn’t clarify that, Mister Susan.

1:50:21 So I was, if I seem a little all over the board, I’ll get it all out and then I’ll be done and how everyone do it. Thank you. Sorry.

1:50:44 My brain thinks in different orders sometimes. I didn’t realize you wanted me to limit myself to the cabinet level position. No, no, no.

1:51:02 But I can stop. No, I want to honor your leadership. So cabinet level position I. We’re talking about having a assistant superintendent of discipline.

1:51:12 I think that I might just thinking about what we’ve heard from our stakeholders, including our employees and the public, to add a cabinet level position. That’s just with that, I’m not sure that I’m there. The next level down would be a director.

1:51:20 Absolutely. I think that I could, and I could be talked into something else, depending on what the structure of the. We’re talking about adding another cabinet level position definitely needs to be somebody who has direct supervision of as they report.

1:51:33 I would agree with superintendent or deputy superintendent. I’m just not sure what that would look like. I’d like to see maybe if there, and maybe there just doesn’t exist and maybe we lead the way.

1:51:48 Forward. But I’m not quite there with the assistant superintendent position. But definitely needs to be core.

1:52:11 Unless it’s we make one of the assistant superintendents. Not like they don’t have anything else to do be dual, you know, I haven’t made my mind up completely on that. Okay.

1:52:35 Mister Trent, Miss Jenkins, anything? Sure, I’ll jump in there. Thanks. As far as a cabinet position again, I think we have a very important decision to make in a week or so.

1:52:45 And that’s with new leadership and a superintendent. And this would be a great spot where this person’s experience and knowledge and vision of something like this would come into play. So we’re so very close to having that person that’s most likely going to lead us in their vision of their charts.

1:52:52 And if it’s an entire cabinet and a staff over just discipline or combination, which could be discipline and security, however this person sees it. But I see moving forward, we can not entertain the idea. And I’m sure next week in interviews, this kind of question may come up with our new superintendent.

1:53:12 So I know the importance and we will be addressing that. Okay. Miss Jenkins.

1:53:24 Yeah. I don’t think we should be moving forward on a decision like this without a new superintendent in place. Again, I agree with Mister Trent.

1:53:39 Just because of the timeline, it doesn’t really make any sense to rush forward. However, the overall point of this is to develop new positions in a centralized place at the district to deal with discipline. And I think every cabinet member would agree that that’s necessary, because right now, we have other cabinet members doing this role.

1:53:53 There’s staff doing these roles, and it’s just too much. It doesn’t really make any sense. Basically, like, every position we have in this district, I’m with Miss Campbell.

1:54:13 Like, my gut feels like it’s probably more of a director position. And I say that because of the information presented in this audit, we are not an anomaly from the rest of the state when it comes to behavior itself. The point of the audit is to find things for us to improve.

1:54:34 So of course we’re going to find things to work on, and centralizing it and improving the communication for our staff, like they asked, is really important. But we don’t have more behaviors than everybody else. So I think it’s.

1:54:52 I think it’s best for us to wait for a new superintendent to come in and discuss what they feel comfortable working with. Miss Wright, I tend to be in agreement with this on waiting. This is where the area superintendent was really great, because they were able to be a little more closer to home when it comes to that structure.

1:55:13 But I think it’s best that we wait and find out what our new superintendent wishes to do as far as centralizing or not. Okay. One of the things that I think the reason the recommendation came forward, and I understand the concerns as far as like, letting the new superintendent go is that we’re about to go through the budgetary process.

1:56:07 And I think if I can speak to that, that they’re going to need to put together a budget based on those things. So that was the first concern of, hey, we may want to start putting this together. The other portion of it is that we select somebody on May, you know what I mean? Early May.

1:56:17 They come in, we negotiate their contract by middle of May. They may or may not start by the end of May. You’re talking about June and now you’re talking about putting together processes, procedures under a person to hire them, then turn around, starts to become a situation where we’re now into two weeks before school starts and this person takes over as the first.

1:56:30 So I think there was a little bit of concern wrapped around the timing of it, which I understand 100% what you guys are saying, like is the new superintendent going to break it from a centralized power down to three different areas? Are they going to keep it the way it is? Is this a director level? Totally understand. But what I would say is, is that if we can give direction in this regard based upon the necessity that we have and that we are willing to allocate funds up to a assistant superintendent so that they can sort of start putting that together as part of the budget proposal that helps whether it’s director or assistant superintendent. The other thing I wanted you guys to remember is that there’s so much part of a component when you look at this as far as a director level, there’s who they report to is the first piece that comes out, I think what they were trying to do, and I may be speaking for you, is that, and if you, if I say it the wrong way, please raise your hand and say you’re wrong.

1:56:55 But the assistant superintendent gives the autonomy of being able to work without having to report to anybody above them. And then that gives the accountability back to one person. They’re going to be overseeing all the discipline records.

1:57:19 They’re going to be receiving all the reporting. So when you’re talking about the reporting, you’re talking about ten different areas that are coming together. You’re also talking about who develops the training for those disciplines.

1:57:30 So when we talk about, do we or don’t we want to wait for the new superintendent to do it? This individual also has to put together the training that people will be doing before school starts. And if we’re going to talk about making sure that we have those in order, we may need to give direction in a quicker way than just kind of putting it down and saying, go right. The other piece is that you have surveys that need to go.

1:57:44 There’s individual logins. There’s a ton of things that need to happen very quickly if we wish to try to get it done prior to next year with effectiveness. So did I say that about right? Was that where you guys were? Did I miss anything? I mean, we agree we would like the direct report to be in cabinet so that action can be taken quickly.

1:58:00 Okay. So with that, I think the idea was, is that with them being inside of cabinet, they can coordinate. With them being inside there, they have one person to report to.

1:58:09 I think allowing the new superintendent to come in, and if they come in and say, you know, hey, this isn’t the direction I want to go, they can always take it down. But I heard kind of a. I’m not sure if it needs to be director or a assistant superintendent.

1:58:12 And I would say the recommendation says assistant superintendent, recommendation says cabinet. And I would say that we would probably want to kind of give direction so that they can get moving on some of the recommendation coming back to us, at least. So does that help a little bit? Miss Campbell, you were grabbing the microphone.

1:58:21 Well, I think I, you know, I think the structure of who it is and what that job, I don’t. I don’t. I’m not ready for us to initiate a new job description.

1:58:31 I think that needs. We need to wait on that. I mean, as far as.

1:58:40 Can we. Can we authorize the people who are building the budget right now? Because, honestly, we have a director over discipline. It’s just that it has.

1:58:58 It’s not working the way they’re suggesting it should work. It is decentralized. For example, we have a director under secondary leading learning who handles, for example, the expulsion process.

1:59:52 And we have a separate director of elementary who handles the expulsion process, but they’re also handling a bunch of other things. Things rather than the one person under student services. So.

2:00:03 And I don’t know if it needs to stay that way, but if. But if we obviously need to add resources and build into the budget some more resources for that person, I think it’s going to touch on educational technology because their department needs to be able to pull these reports and be trained on these reports instead of just one et person. I agree.

2:00:15 So, you know, I am okay with, I’m comfortable with saying, you know, you guys develop a plan with some flexibility so that the superintendent who will be coming in shortly can shape and mold that, but definitely start putting the resources toward that, build that in the budget so we are prepared. But honestly, I don’t necessarily think we need to make the, what level position is it going to be? Is this going to be their sole focus? Are we going to have a cabinet position that includes this and discipline? So that needs to be the decision of the superintendent. So if I may ask, do we want to be able to have this prepared and ready with fidelity prior to the beginning of the year? I think we all agree with that, right? Anybody against that? Right? We’re all there.

2:00:35 I’m not against that. Let me just run through just a thumbs up and then I think if that’s okay. Job descriptions usually take 30 days.

2:01:04 Implementation of some sort of training takes time. There’s a, we have roughly 30 days until the end of the school year. Then we have 60 days till the beginning of the next school year.

2:01:24 We have 90 days. And I think that timeframes miss hand. The recommendation, you know, the inner workings, does waiting for a new superintendent for their direction and all of that slow the process down? And is there a happy medium between what we’re trying to do here? I think everybody’s saying we want something, but they’re waiting to see maybe.

2:01:35 What are your thoughts here? So I think it may be challenging to stand up an entirely new department, entirely new process between, between now and the first of the year, regardless. But I do think this is a significant issue for us and we need to move expeditiously towards the outcomes that we want. So I feel like I have enough to kind of start sketching out some of our discussion points.

2:01:58 And maybe as the board makes the decision for the new superintendent, we can workshop this issue in late May and kind of have some discussion around the more specific direction. Would that work? What I’m hearing you say is we all feel like there needs to be something. You’ve heard enough from us what that looks like.

2:02:19 You’re the intelligent person that needs to come back to us with the, you’re the expert that needs to come back to us with a recommendation. You make that recommendation back to us. Start working internally about what that is.

2:02:36 And as long as you feel confident that we can put a lot of these in, I think we’re all wanting it to happen before the beginning of next year, but I know it’s going to be tough, but no, it’s fine. So I’m going to jump in here and say we’re not all wanting it to happen before the beginning of next year, starting because I’m with Miss Han. That that is a really unrealistic feat.

2:02:55 We don’t want to put something in place like this that’s really critical, important, and will impact how we deal with behavior going forward and rush through that process. Obviously, we want it to happen as fast as humanly possible, but we don’t want to rush through it. We have to create job descriptions, an organizational chart, a hiring, a plan put in place, and a training to be implemented.

2:03:08 So I’m not jumping on board for a definite starting at the beginning of the year, I think I trust sue, and I trust whoever we hire going forward to make the right decision to make this happen in the appropriate timeline. Mister Trump. All right.

2:03:14 So as a combination of things, obviously, I think we all can say that discipline is at the top of the order here. Of our candidates coming in. I’m sure it’s in the top of their list of why conversations like this is happening.

2:03:47 Miss Campbell said, we have many people that are doing much of this work, work already. It’s just spread out all over the place. So bringing them together before the beginning of next school year should not be an insurmountable feat.

2:03:59 Okay. And these people are coming in with great leadership skills. I’m talking about superintendent.

2:04:13 This has got to be at a top one, two on their list. So coming from my end, it certainly should be at the top of the list to get to discipline straightened out. If it’s a cabinet member position and if Miss Hahn wants to start the work on the process of what it would look like, as long as we’re not naming names and a job description doesn’t do that, I think that would only be fine if we can add one more thing to miss Hahn’s list of putting together, if they’re willing to do that, absolutely.

2:04:17 But, yeah, we certainly, as a board, should be looking forward to having this or something that looks like this in place by the beginning of the school year. So that’s. If you’re looking for direction, that’s mine.

2:04:26 Okay. Thank you. I don’t want us to get stuck in the feeling that we have that it’s either or, that if we don’t stand up a cabinet level position and get this new department up and going, then we can’t start the school year with better things in place.

2:04:28 We absolutely can. We have. We, you know, we.

2:04:43 The training needs to happen regardless of if we have that there ready to go yet. So I don’t want us to think, oh, we don’t hurry up and get that. Then we can’t say we did anything.

2:04:56 No, absolutely. They’re already started. The ball’s already rolling.

2:05:04 We can get this going. We can get better training through the summer for our administrators, through our teachers. That process can go ahead and start, and we can have better, a better school year start, better results, even if we don’t have this cabinet change.

2:05:23 And so I don’t want something. We gotta get this done, or it’s, we can’t have that better start. We absolutely can have that better start and better processes in place, even if we don’t have the position quite figured out yet.

2:05:49 Miss Wright, I’m in favor of sue putting together the plan for us and bringing it back. It’s probably not gonna be perfect at first. It’s going to be fluid to some degree.

2:05:58 We are basically creating something that it sounds like no one else really has. So this will be a work in progress, and I think it’s smart of us to get ahead of it and start it as soon as possible so that we can try to make next school year a better school year when it comes to discipline and stabilizing at the district. Thank you.

2:06:15 And I would say just the nine years that I was a teacher in the beginning of the school year, the first week is the most important to set the tone for the entire year and having all the processes in places, and having all the trainings in places, if we can accomplish that through the other means. While this is going for fidelity, I think that there’s no. I strongly believe that when we start that school year, that we need to have the accountability in order.

2:06:30 We need to have the trainings in order. We need to have all of that stuff. So if this person or this process can do that, achieve that that way, then I’m fully on board.

2:06:41 But if it’s not, and there needs to be somebody in there, I’d like to move on it. So, Miss Hand, you feel pretty confident about the direction that you’ve received? Yes, sir. I think this is enough to move forward, and you’ll probably be hearing from me again, you know, regular intervals, about our progress.

2:06:53 Yep. Mister Susan, may I make a comment? Absolutely, Miss Martin. Listening to all of you and, you know, learning everything that we did through this process, and sometimes I know that we were corrected as auditors when we use the term discipline.

2:07:15 And we should have used the term behaviors, right? So this kind of encompasses so many different things as that wheel. We tried to demonstrate with that wheel. It is so complex.

2:07:33 Having worked at the district for as long as I have, these guys have super full time jobs. It is so challenging to. For.

2:07:49 For our team. I think we talked to a dozen people to figure out the processes around discipline. So the challenge that we see, which was not long ago, we had this with information technology, it was so decentralized that at one point in time, the school board had to say, we need a CIO.

2:08:19 That’s how old I am. That the elevation and the level of training based on all of those factors that are going around the wheel, the turnover, the vacancies. I mean, folks have left bps that had been here 30 years, 30 years.

2:08:52 And now we have a lot of new people at bps in the classrooms from all different walks of life who may have never had a session of. About behavior and creating better behavior. We had students at home.

2:09:18 You all know this, you’ve lived it. But the ability for one person that currently is on staff to pull some of these things together is incredibly challenging in our mind. So having been around the state, working with some different school districts and seeing some of the creative things, none more creative than brevard public schools, what they are able to do with the resources and what they have is impressive.

2:09:27 But what we left and made sure that we wanted to make sure we spoke up about was the training, a comprehensive training platform that really takes what you all decide is your code of conduct and extrapolates it out to all the stakeholders, not just the deans, right. Not just the folks here up at the district who read code and statute, but to the teachers, to the bus drivers, to all the stakeholders. So there’s one message, and that is a really significant undertaking.

2:09:39 And just because we have spent so much time here and working with all of the folks, I think it would be super challenging. Challenging to pull that all together in a comprehensive way to serve every student with excellence as the standard in that short period of time. The timeline that you laid out to start the beginning of the year, super challenging.

2:09:56 I just want to add on that, too. I appreciate you. I appreciate everything you just said, but I also just want to re highlight something you said.

2:10:06 This isn’t going to be one person. This is going to be an entire department. And so the people who are doing these jobs right now aren’t going to just be moved because those people are doing other jobs.

2:10:39 They may or may not want to do this job and move there, or they might want to stay where they are, doing all the other jobs that they’re doing. So this is hiring potentially an entire department of people. And that was my hesitation to putting a set start because we want to do this correctly.

2:10:47 We want to make it effective for our teachers and our administrators. There’s no point of rushing to this process and then finding out we still have communication gaps. So thank you.

2:10:52 So, Miss Han, you have enough initiative to come back with a recommendation of some sort of a department and their functions, and we’ll get moving. Yes, and I think I’d probably include the timeline for some of the pieces of this things like what training will we be able to roll out, how will we stand up some additional student information system work, you know, all of those things. So I think there’s some component pieces of it that I’d like to advise the board on once we get through this today and get our plan together.

2:10:57 And I think, I think getting back to that training, I did not want to take Miss Campbell’s component of. She wanted to speak to that. Maybe some of you guys have too.

2:11:10 Miss Campbell, you had said that you wanted to speak to those, those items. I just wanted to give you that opportunity. No, I think we got it.

2:11:28 I think we got it. Said. I did have some input on the advisory committee.

2:12:04 If that was the last piece of this, if everybody’s okay with, we all say there needs to be training, right? So we can move on to the discipline. Is that okay or did you? Let’s let Mister Trent talk to the. If we’re going to be talking about the training.

2:12:15 As a former educator, when I hear we need more training, that means we don’t know what we’re doing. And it’s not the intent. So from looking at the data and the survey, the teachers feel they know what they’re doing.

2:12:30 If you look at the survey, it says they don’t feel supported by district, which I hope so that’s kind of what we’re talking about when we’re centralizing the behavior or discipline wing of district, that maybe it could result in the teachers feeling more supported in what they’re doing. I’m not a dean, but I haven’t met a dean that doesn’t know our discipline policies and our codes. I actually haven’t met many teachers that don’t know that either.

2:12:42 And the data shows that they feel very confident in getting that information out to parents and then themselves. So again, I just wanted to be on record. Training is always good.

2:12:47 But I just don’t want it to go unnoticed that we have an incredible teaching staff and communication. Hopefully that’s the reason they don’t feel supported. But we do need to address this.

2:12:55 Thank you, Miss Campbell. Yeah, I appreciate you saying that. Again, we’ve talked about this before and, you know, we’ve, this, the audit the auditors have gone through and said this is important because we’re not all speaking the same language.

2:13:16 And it doesn’t mean that teachers don’t know what they’re doing. And I absolutely agree. We have teachers who like, you know, feel confident, but we do have a lot.

2:13:22 And we talked about this every time. So I’m going to say it one more time. We have new teachers coming in every day from other fields who have never taken a classroom management class.

2:13:42 And I know even as someone who went through an education program, I appreciated being sent to love and logic and the different things that help with just basic classroom. And some of it I was going as a music teacher, I was going out finding my own stuff because there wasn’t anything to help me in my area. And so we’re also talking about other training of the deans, of the principals.

2:13:55 So everybody’s on the same page of the people putting in the code. It’s important. So we’re all on the same page.

2:14:16 But yeah, as far as the committee goes, we’ve talked about reinstating this. My ask would be, we talked about a little bit in December or January 1 of those conversations, and we were asked this before. We kind of put a little halt on it for each of the board members to put an appointee or a recommended person.

2:14:31 I’d actually like to see that. I have a fantastic person in mind then. And I still have actually, that person asked me just two days ago, hey, is that still happening? And I said, pause, I’ll get back to you after Wednesday.

2:14:54 But I think that would be an important, that’s an important stakeholder to include. I don’t know if that was included in 2017 because that’s before my time on the board, but I would like for when we work on the charter, to consider the addition of board appointed representatives. Miss Ann, at this time, that is included in the draft charter.

2:15:13 So we’re still working through the details of that with our stakeholders, but that will be something that you all be seeing shortly. Does anybody else wish to add anything to the discipline committee conversation? I want to talk about the training piece. Mister Trent, I appreciate you highlighting that.

2:15:30 Nobody thinks that our teachers don’t know what they’re doing because I too, as an educator, had to sit through some pd’s that weren’t really the most relevant things in the world. So appreciate that. But the survey I read told me that our teachers actually do feel supported by their administrators when it comes to the referral and discipline process.

2:15:49 And the teachers and the administrators themselves asked for more training, but not training on how to be educators and manage their classroom training when it comes. That’s what this recommendation is, training for the discipline referral process and like the focus piece of this all and the communication piece. And so I think that’s the part that they’re recommending.

2:16:43 There needs to be a consistent training on how to use the actual program itself because it’s not being done equitably across the district. Okay. And I would agree that there’s many, many components to the educational process that would make this better.

2:17:11 And I think we all agree and I think pinning it, I think what we’re trying to do is avoid saying that. Go ahead, if I may. I just wanted to bring it back to process and how the training, I mean, I hate taking training too, but how this really supports our teachers in helping them have a better experience in our schools.

2:17:17 If you think about it, if a teacher really has heard the same message that the administrators and the district folks do about what’s less or what’s not cess or what those definitions are, when the teacher has an incident in their classroom, they’ll know, oh, you know what, there was an injury in that fight, I better document that that had an injury so I can be sure that that’s categorized as a cesser fight versus a non cesser fight, because a cesser fight is level four and will have more severe consequences for that student that disrupted my classroom. If I didn’t know that documenting that injury was critical to getting that level, and I might have accidentally not documented it because I didn’t know, I wasn’t told, and it would be called a non cess or fight, which is a level three, not as serious of a consequence. It all comes back to the perspective of the teachers in what corrective actions are applied for the student behaviors that they’re seeing.

2:17:36 And if they have a thorough understanding of what the administrators in the district are looking at and documenting to assign those corrective actions, they can be sure that they’re providing the necessary information so that those students have appropriate discipline in their classrooms, they feel better supported by the district and their administrators, if that’s an issue. And I think there’s something that has come up. That reference that you made to them feeling supported by school administration.

2:17:40 Less than half indicated that they did. And there’s a reason for that. They had.

2:17:58 Many of our teachers will write a referral, and they have indicated to us that many of the referrals to kids come back to class too quickly. There’s situations, and that’s not anybody’s fault in the process. It’s not the administrator’s fault because then they’re the ones that are complaining about the fact that they send it up to the district and then it changes coming back from there.

2:18:12 So there’s just a lot of that. So I think that the training overall is going to be 100%. So thank you.

2:18:19 I think we’ve given. Do you have enough? I have one last comment on the discipline committee is that we’re going to include teachers, include students, include parents, ptos, SAC committee members, kind of stuff that’s all inside of there. It’s your guidance.

2:18:24 There are pieces inside of there. We don’t want the committee to be too large so that we can’t function well. But I think some of those can be picked up through board member appointments and some of them will be picked up through members of the committee.

2:18:34 So I think we were looking at around 15 ish members. Okay. So we’ll bring something back for you all to chew on.

2:18:44 Beautiful. I just wanted to kind of say that because we’ve gotten some. Hey, are we going to be included? You know what I mean? So I think that would.

2:19:21 That’s it. So everybody’s good with that. Move on to the next one, which is centralized behavior discipline function.

2:19:43 We pretty much went through that discipline committee and then summary formalized monitoring process. Does anybody wish to speak to this? Yeah, I would just. I don’t know.

2:20:12 I’m not trying to rush us, but unless someone has something, I think when we get to 345678, I think those are all more operational that I don’t know how much I’d like to, to, I mean, ask rather than going through each one specifically if there’s, if sue needs direction on anything specific, but I think that’s all operational items that they’re already working on. We’re also not only giving direction, but we’re also having conversation wrapped around it. So there’s certain things that if nobody wants to talk about it and it is operational, then we move on to the next one.

2:20:18 But formalized monitoring process. I wanted to tell you guys, I made. Does anybody wish to speak to the monetarization process? So I made a series of public records requests when this happened, all the way from Title IX, Cesar, ten day pending discipline, like, so many components, right? And if you guys remember, what happened is all of a sudden, I started getting the requests back.

2:20:26 Some of them, I still don’t have all of them, but some of the requests were coming back and saying, this took 11 hours, this took 6 hours. And I was like, what is going on on? And the main reason I wanted to talk to this is because we should be monitoring this stuff already. So when I was asking for certain data points, like how many workers comp incidences were being referred to by students, we immediately went into that request and found that we couldn’t even make the request from our workers comp database because we didn’t have that function.

2:20:40 So they had to go through, around and around about it. Right. Then we made requests for ten day pendings and all these other things.

2:20:57 Title ix. And I started finding all of the barriers for reporting. It’s not like it’s easy to just take these things and put them into one.

2:21:00 I wanted to say, this is going to be a daunting task to pull in. You know what I mean? Everything from title ix, Cesser ten day pending risk ratio, I mean, all of it. All those data points are coming into one thing.

2:21:09 So I didn’t want you guys, if we wanted to give them direction, to be able to put together the cost of a system and those kind of things, they need to be able to have that direction, too. So I think we’re okay with the district moving forward with any costs related to doing that, is that. I just wanted to touch base on that.

2:21:18 We’re all good. Thumbs up. Okay.

2:21:22 All right, number four, and I’m sorry. If you guys want to cut in, just let me know at any time. Automated discipline procedures.

2:21:47 That’s pretty. Pretty much what we’ve been working on. Does anybody wish to speak to that? No? All right, student information system resources.

2:22:00 Again, pretty simple. We’re good when it comes to. I have a question.

2:22:07 Yep. So looking at our new system that we’re using, focus, that we’ve just transitioned to, is this a system? I’m not very familiar with focus, and so I’m not sure who I should be asking this question, too, or if they’re sitting here. Is there capability for us to be able to monitor that? Because it’s my understanding that focus captures a lot of the information and there’s a lot of features that we’re not currently utilizing.

2:22:21 So would that be a possibility to help in that arena? To be able to monitor some of it. I think we had representative from student information services that would be here for answer those questions. Misses Wright? Yes, I talked about that with Mister Cheatham.

2:22:35 And we would like to get sort of a dashboard database out to the board members so that you can monitor it. So that’s part of what we’re doing. Okay, thank you.

2:22:50 You’re on it. Okay, so with that formalized procedure documentation, I think we all agree with that. That is staff, does anybody have any conversations on that? No.

2:23:13 Student discipline policy, compliance, anybody wish to discuss any, anything related to that? I think this all gets captured with the first thing we talked about. Yep, it’s all there. Accuracy and completeness of discipline documentation.

2:23:36 I think a lot of these, just as Miss Campbell had spoken to the director or assistant superintendent will be working through. Correct? So we’re all good all the way through eight. All right, let’s get to number nine.

2:24:12 Who wants to start alternative learning centers? I think there’s a couple of recommendations here that we have to give some guidance to. I think we can start with, you know, the fact that there’s two recommendations of expansion or looking at some of our referral processes in relations to drug possession and stuff like that. Does anybody wish to begin the conversation? Yeah, I’ll start.

2:24:38 And I know we’ve said it again, but not in this. It was more of a, you know, not as in a bigger audience. I would continue to request that we look at alternatives for our, because we have such a high percentage at the ALCs for drug offenses, specifically to marijuana, and there are other counties that are handling that differently.

2:25:01 And so I continue to ask, you know, if we can find a more effective way to deal with that particular behavior, which might, you know, which is, and I know when they get there, they do group them. It’s my understanding, you know, like when they have their, their group sessions with the social workers or with Eckerd Connect, you know, representatives that they, you know, like they put the one, the drug offenses together, one of the fighting offenses together, so they can talk about their individual things, but that is just skyrocketed with the THC oil. And so if we can get kind of be handling that differently, I think we will drop our numbers down our ALC to a much more manageable level.

2:25:24 But we need to have something that’s effectively helping those students because that issue is not going away anytime soon. And so I’d love to, but I don’t know that the ALC is the best option for them. And then the other thing that I would like for us to look at is, as I’ve had some conversations even in just the last week of what some other counties are doing with their, with their alternative programs.

2:25:41 Just about everybody has an ALC, whether they are a smaller county that has to outsource that or if they have, you know, stood up their own or multiples, you know, everybody does it a little bit differently. Some of them have kind of a, kind of a halfway point, but there’s kind of a step before the ALC. I don’t know.

2:25:54 I don’t know if we need to go to that drastic, but I just kind of like to take a look at what other areas are doing. But again, my biggest focus is finding, we’ve been talking about for several years now trying to find a better option for the, specifically for the drug offenses, not for selling, distributing, but right now we’re sending them for having it on their person, you know, and I think we can end for potentially for using it. So we need to find a better solution that will help those students.

2:26:03 Can I ask a quick clarifying question? Because I think I knew the number, but I don’t want to throw it out. We had referred to the, to, to support what you were saying, please. A number of students that were at the ALCS that were there for drug possession as opposed to the rest of the ALCS.

2:26:21 I think it was the largest of all the components. And then I remember it was over half of the actual kids that were there. But I wanted to verify, if you can, that that’s all those numbers to support.

2:26:34 Miss Campbell, slide 20. We are indicating the behaviors that led to alternative placement. So this may not correlate with number of students.

2:26:39 This is behaviors. But drug possession is by far the number one contributor for Cesar incidents that led to alternative placement. And when I was, for some reason, when I was looking at it, it was well above 150 out of the kids that were there.

2:26:45 I do remember over half of them. When I saw the numbers after I got that public records request back, it’s a significant number, which, to your point, I just wanted to verify would significantly reduce the amount of children that are there if we found a different path. So.

2:26:56 I’m sorry. Go ahead, Miss Jenkins. Yeah, I mean, I just want to remind everyone what I said on December 8.

2:27:26 We’re number one in the state for ALC placements. It’s a red flag. We have plenty of red flags that we kind of ignore.

2:27:50 So I’m glad we’re not ignoring it anymore. Absolutely. Should be thinking of an alternative for our students that are there for drug offenses, it makes absolutely no sense.

2:28:02 Nevermind the fact that some of these students are not struggling academically and then we’re creating more trauma in their lives, removing them from their schools with these significant consequences, and then causing a decline in their academic performance, which doesn’t benefit them in the long run. But I think we also need to take a look at our drug offenses overall, our drug use overall for all of our students, and figure out what. Figure out a way how to best support our students proactively before we even get to this point.

2:28:09 Because ultimately, these are the kids who got caught doing it. And so if we really care and we want to make a difference in our students lives, we need to be proactive and think about how we can do this and target this whole holistically across our district. I want to ask a really silly question, and again, and this is what I am concerned about with taking the approach of being more lenient towards drug possession.

2:28:24 And this is a silly question, but do these kids get arrested when they get caught with these drugs? As though they would, if they were on the street, they would be arrested, right? I mean that. Are they being arrested or. No, no.

2:28:30 So just depends. Yeah, we’re hearing sometimes, but if miss. It depends on and what it is.

2:28:41 Miss Sullivan, if you want to come give a present. You know, I’m just curious. Sometimes quantity products, there’s, there’s a lot of different factors and municipalities have some slightly different processes.

2:28:49 It just. It’s a sometimes answer because every one of those cases are different. Okay.

2:29:12 And I hear what, what everyone’s saying here. I just. I have pause when it says, hey, let’s create a more lenient consequence to the use of drugs.

2:29:36 And so that is a concern. So I think we just need to be careful with that. I don’t disagree that what we’re doing isn’t working because these numbers are skyrocketing.

2:29:49 So what are we doing to maybe get ahead of it? Is a better way to look at this or is the discipline measure that we are implementing effective to help that student not commit that offense again? So it’s something we need to look at all the way around. But this is a conversation that’s gonna. I think we’re gonna have many more conversations about Mister Wright, I hear your concern.

2:30:14 I just want to throw something at you to kind of reshape your frame of thought on that. It’s not more lenient, it’s the more appropriate consequence or response. So when you talk to somebody like from Eckerd’s connect or for a behavior analyst, they’re going to tell, tell you that the consequence, you should, yes, be a punishment of some sort, but the result should modify, change, and improve that behavior.

2:30:21 So it’s not that they’re getting away with something. They’re not going to just be able to go back to class by any means. But ultimately, we want to somehow benefit that student for the behavior that they had and we want to reduce it from happening again.

2:30:29 You have a question. Yes. So I had just asked, and this might seem silly, but at some point is it ever going to get resurfaced to bring back a dare type program to kind of create the awareness level? So obviously, if we’re number one as far as placement for this exact cause, don’t we think some sort of program, another conversation? I mean, I don’t know.

2:30:35 There’s. Yeah, go ahead. One of the reasons why we’re number one is because other school districts aren’t sending these to their alcs.

2:30:49 There’s very few school districts who are handling it the way we’re handling it. What do they do instead? 64 of them suspend. We expel to expel.

2:31:00 And some of them have, you know, doesn’t count. Right. They’ll have drug programs, which we don’t.

2:31:01 No. Right. And honestly, and I remember having conversations with Miss Bland over the last couple years about, you know, she’s building a relationship with the courts, with the teen courts.

2:31:05 Right. And so that was starting to build so that we knew kind of what’s happening on even outside of the schools, so we could provide those resources. But, and I hear what you’re saying, Miss Wright.

2:31:13 I mean, because. Absolutely. No.

2:31:16 I mean, it’s not okay. I actually love. We’re bringing up a lot of good things.

2:31:36 We need to be more proactive and our students need to lead the way because teenagers don’t want to hear adults telling them about the dangers of vaping. Sorry. They just don’t.

2:31:56 They need. It needs to be student led. We support that.

2:32:15 We were supporting it with the vaping a couple years ago, but specifically with the THC, I think that we can lead the charge in that. But so we have that proactive, but having something that is really hitting the target because the most, you know, the most repeat offenders I would put forward are also drugs. THC, specifically THC.

2:32:20 We’re not talking about crack cocaine, although, because it’s so much more accessible. And so we, you know, like I said, we’ve got to take a look at maybe what some of the other districts are doing. I loved the idea, and this is going to take a lot of funding, but I love the idea that was brought to us a couple years ago about a recovery high school.

2:32:39 And I’m not saying we go that far because it’s, you know, like. But it was something that was done in Houston and the students had to go there for, and it was specifically drug focused to get them back on their feet, to do all the things that they needed so they could go back. Whatever it is, I don’t have a solution for that.

2:32:58 But I just want to think we need to do it differently. But I hear because there is that concern. Oh, my gosh, we’re not going to.

2:33:20 No, we’re going to handle it. But, you know, as far as being arrested, you know, our state attorney, Phil Archer, we were sent an opinion a couple years ago ago that he sent, they’re not in an adult population. They’re not arresting for that frequently because they can’t prosecute them.

2:33:55 They can’t because of the way the laws are. So he’s not prosecuting any more marijuana cases. I think opening up the conversation to bring our new board members up to speed on Mister, on his memo that he sent us is one thing, if I may speak to a couple other items.

2:34:15 The thing is, is that we have this one anomaly, right? And if it continues, we will have to either expand or find a way to reduce. We know that. But one of the components that I think we’re missing is that almost every breakdown of our discipline problem with communication to parents, with communications and training to teachers, and all of that fills into a component here.

2:34:31 And I’ll tell you why. If you have, say, for instance, communications, that at the beginning of next year, going out telling a story about a student who was a great student, who ended up with drug possession and had that story, that resonates with the other students to make sure that they kind of remember, hey, this is not the appropriate behavior, I promise you, those kind of communications, both to the parents and the students, will end up reducing some of those cases. The other piece is as far as training for the identification of people who may be in that area that may start slipping into those type drugs and stuff like that, we all see it happening.

2:34:53 Just say, hey, how can I help you? And all those other things, having those components in place which are not in here are what would rectify some of these cases to being reduced. The other piece is that 65 out of our 67 counties make it a second level offense to expel, and they have programs in place to actually catch it. I’ll tell you why.

2:35:14 Some kids are double offenders where they get caught first time, then they come back and they’re caught again. And that’s on us because many of us, we don’t do the proper behavioral trainings and help those students. So I think that there’s a couple of things that we can put in place that would reduce.

2:35:33 But the ultimate question is if we are going to continue down this line of either reducing the actual offense to a second level expulsion or if we’re going to keep it here, we do have to proactively look at the expansions and everything else because there’s another component that we have where these students aren’t full time sitting inside of our schools. Right. Like, they’re not, they’re on a part time basis.

2:35:44 So we need to give direction on whether we want that to stop and come back or, you know what I mean, continue. So those are just some of the things I wanted to put on the table. Do you guys have any other thoughts on that? You guys want to weigh in on bringing them back from virtual? Oh, no.

2:35:56 I mean, they’re doing what they can to make it happen with the students they have. And I know it was brought up at one point, I think, by our former interim superintendent about opening, reopening a third ALC. I’m not going to be in favor of opening a third ELC until we get control of what is this large expansion that’s happened with the drug issue.

2:36:25 So I think, you know, we need to, is an issue we need to get a hold of. In the meantime, I think they’re doing good work with what they’re doing. And it may not be ideal for everybody, but, you know, it’s, it is.

2:36:58 It is what it is. And I. It’s dangerous to have them all there in person over capacity. Okay.

2:37:22 So when we talk about overcapacity, I’m pretty familiar with being in an ALC when we have too many kids in classroom. So the drug program, I can see where you’re saying this, right, is where it’s the appearance that we might be going easy on drug possession. I could see that very easily from a parent side, you know, of seeing the kid out, the student out for five days, and then they’re back.

2:37:36 However, when I was sat down and I was a explain what a drug program could look like, it was even more help for the students and the family if they’re in that program. When I was explained that originally, I said, I think some parents are going to choose the ALC because it’s a lot less work on them, but it is a family situation. So I look forward to hearing presentations on what we could do.

2:37:47 I was more excited about hearing the program because it is actual help. I mean, if you, if you actually looked at the amount of sessions that they’re required to have when a student is sent to an ALC, I believe it’s like five, you know, regardless of how much time they’re there, I think they may actually get more help out of this because that’s the idea. It isn’t that we just want to send kids to ALCS.

2:38:09 We want them to get help that they don’t do it again. And these programs made more sense when I heard it was a one and done type program. If you’re sent away or you go through a program and you get caught a second time, we’re not sending you through the program again.

2:38:26 We’re saying it’s not working here. And now you do go to the ALC or you do do homeschooling or you do private school. So that could alleviate a lot of ills.

2:38:32 It could help the student and the family more, and it would help us by not needing to open and look at opening a third ALC. And then we could actually then focus on helping the kids who are at the ALC at that time. So we don’t have little Johnny or Sally who got caught with a, you know, a vape pen that had THC in it and they didn’t even know what it was, you know, that kind of thing.

2:38:47 So again, new superintendent coming on board. This is another area that is going to be staring them right in the face. And I look forward to working with them and Miss Bland and the current organization, the ALCs, and giving us some alternatives.

2:39:07 Miss Wright. So I’m adamantly opposed to having them virtually. I just am.

2:39:22 I feel that a lot of our parents are sitting at home trying to manage a child while they’re going to work. I feel like it’s the responsibility of the district, have them inside of there. I’ve heard many times from students that they think it’s funny because they get to go stay home.

2:39:37 And I’ll be honest with you, I don’t feel that the virtual way of learning for some students is the best way of educating them. And I feel like if we’re touching them every day, we have a better chance of curbing behavior, making them feel like a community and everything else. I feel the virtual peace in every aspect isn’t a negative.

2:39:47 And that’s just how I feel, you know, and I feel like we say we have an overcrowding issue and we’re going to have them stay home. I feel like our number one job should be to control the numbers and then bring them back in. And I would.

2:40:11 I would. That’s where I think the direction from me would be, is that if we find some sort of a way to reduce the amount of students that are going to be getting. I mean, if you take just the drug possession ones, reduce them.

2:40:33 You’re inside of compliance. You have enough. The other reason we had a problem is that we were having trouble finding teachers inside of those schools, and making it go to virtual was another piece.

2:40:52 We had principals, we had other things that were turnovers that were an issue. So I can understand the move to virtual, but because of those reasons, I said I would like to bring them back into our schools. Can anybody else weigh in so that we can get some direction? I hear what you say, and I appreciate it because we’ve obviously, over the last few years, seen that, you know, some students can thrive on a virtual and some students can’t.

2:40:59 But I would just remind the board that the alternative learning center is an alternative to expulsion. And so I. You know, when I think when you hear say that it’s a really heavy burden on the parents, the alternative would be you’re out of our schools and you don’t get any services. You’re on your own.

2:41:13 You have to go home school. Or, and I’m not trying to be harsh, but, you know, your child committed an expellable offense, whatever that might be. And so instead of you having to flounder and figure out on your own, we’re going to give you this alternative.

2:41:20 And even with that alternative, you have to sign this stipulation agreement that says while you’re here, you’re going to follow the rules. You’re not going to cuss at the teachers. You’re not going to continue to bring drugs in.

2:41:27 You’re not going to get in fights on the bus. We have kids who, even with that second chance, they lose it because they do get in a fight on the bus, because they do bring drugs to the ALC. And then you’re done, and then you’re home.

2:41:42 And then, I’m sorry for the inconvenience of the parents, but that’s where the parents responsibility steps in. And they can send them to private school. They can try to.

2:41:59 If some of them will accept, some of them won’t. They can send. They can do Florida virtual school in some cases, but I am.

2:42:12 And without us getting these numbers down in it again, the one way I would like for us to look at the numbers, obviously. Besides, let’s get systems in place so that we can have better student behavior overall. That’s the ultimate goal.

2:42:25 Right. But with the ones who are committing these offenses, I want us to get the numbers down by doing something different and creative with the drug offenses. But I am not in favor of just bringing people back just because virtual is bad, because the alternative is we’re not serving them at all.

2:42:37 And that, you know, they have to find their own other, their own option. And this is, we do by providing the lcs. It may not be the ideal situation, but it is an alternative to just to being expelled altogether.

2:42:44 Miss Campbell, in a response to you, I didn’t. One of the things I wanted to say was it may have been misinterpreted. The majority of the students that are in these situations come from homes that may not be the best in the world.

2:43:10 And so they’re at home by themselves. And many of the other parents that are there, that they come from good homes, don’t stop working. They just have their kid at home and that kid sitting at home just saying, hey, this isn’t so bad.

2:43:21 I get to watch tv, I get to sit online, and I don’t think that it does a good job that way. That’s all. I just wanted to kind of create that.

2:43:37 So, Miss Jenkins, you want to say something? I can see you there. Yep. I would question how often or if we’ve ever visited the ALC, both of them, since they went virtual and had conversations with the staff and the administration there.

2:43:54 That’s number one. The reason that they made this decision wasn’t just because of capacity. It’s also because of staffing.

2:44:10 It’s also because we’ve got middle schoolers with high schoolers that created an issue. We’ve got to capacity issue. And if you do speak to the staff and administrators there, they will.

2:44:21 All of them will tell you, actually, their academic completion rates and performance have increased and the behaviors have decreased. Students who are in fifth and 6th grade go every single day. Students who have ieps or 504s go every single day.

2:44:40 Students with unique circumstances, like really troubling homes that have been identified by home visits, come every single day. But the students are still held accountable while they’re home. They’re not just playing video games.

2:45:02 They have to be logged in and completing work. And if they’re not, they’re held accountable for it. And they come in on Fridays for their group sessions, or they come in on Fridays to make up that work.

2:45:25 So, the point of this meeting, and the point about talking about ALCS, is for us to consider the high number, or their recommendation is to consider the high number of drug incidences that we have in here. It’s not to talk about getting rid of virtual. So, I think we shouldn’t even be having this conversation in this meeting right now.

2:45:29 But I would encourage you to actually visit the units and talk to the staff who work with those students every single day. When we possibly rectify the situation and the numbers go down significantly, the opinion of the people who are in that building every single day might change as well. But having this arbitrary conversation isn’t really useful right now.

2:45:40 Miss Jenkins, if I could ask one question, if capacity was not an issue, would you want to have them virtual or in person? I would want someone to visit the ALC and speak to. To the actual staff members who work there every single day, and not just make an arbitrary decision based on an opinion that we have. Okay, so, no answer.

2:45:52 Okay. Anybody else? No, that is my answer. Would you like me to be more specific? No.

2:45:56 What I would like to do is, how many times have you visited the ALC? I have been to the ALC many times. Tell me, Miss Jenkins, this is completely inappropriate. You just asked me a follow up question and said I didn’t.

2:46:06 It is not about. Okay, well, that’s what I’m trying to get at, is we can’t make these decisions just based off of our opinions. We have to use data and facts and go to the people who do it every single day.

2:46:21 So go ahead and visit it and talk to them. That is my answer for you. It’s not a no answer.

2:46:34 That’s my answer for you. And there’s a lot of statistics to say that virtual education is not the proper way to go. And that’s where the derivative of the argument comes from.

2:46:48 Mister Trent, you have something to say? Just again, lots of agreement here. The recommendation is to get our numbers down. And I think once we do that, we can have other conversations of in person versus hybrid.

2:46:59 I think data shows that being in school five days a week is better than being in school two days a week. Otherwise our public schools would be a hybrid model. So I don’t think it’s really a discussion on that.

2:47:13 Yes, but let’s get, let’s get. Let’s get the conversation of getting our first time drug offenders in a program and get them back into our school so it doesn’t affect their academics. And then we can address the issues.

2:47:33 And we have plenty of issues that are in the ALCS. If you’ve been there, if you’ve worked there, if you’ve visited, you know, many times, we have a discipline in our schools. We still have discipline issues in our, in our ALCS.

2:47:58 That’s, that’s a whole other topic that things would happen and then they would stay in the ALcs when we all, many of us would assume that, you know, they’re gone. So we can talk about that. And sometimes that was just a result of the overcrowding.

2:48:09 But first and foremost, let’s get that overcrowding and let’s serve our students and families the best we possibly can. Yep. Miss Wright, do you have anything to say? I think that’s step one, honestly, is tasking the staff with how are we going to look at getting these, these numbers down? And we can’t really even have the discussion of opening it up to five days a week until we get the numbers down because we don’t have the capacity right now to do it.

2:48:17 So I’m in favor of asking staff to bring back some, something to us that is a suggestion on how we’re going to move forward on helping these students, especially when it comes to the drug offenses. But I want to make sure that the discipline action correlates to changing the behavior. So that’s, that’s my major concern, is that I don’t, you know, the leniency of it.

2:48:24 Maybe we are implementing the wrong discipline and that’s why we’re not seeing a behavioral change. So we need to look at that. So I think the recommendation is not expansion as far as facilities and stuff like that to bring back a conversation.

2:48:48 We can probably do that at like a workshop and we can deep dive some of these into some deeper conversations as far as fidelity. Yes, sir. I think we’ll be prepared to do that shortly.

2:49:56 Doctor Webley has been working on that with her team. Beautiful. Anybody else on that piece? Nope.

2:50:13 All right, so that’s pretty much the. All of those recommendations. Is there any just openly conversations that we wanted to speak to? Some suggestions and stuff like that? Anybody wish to start? Anybody? Don, you’ve been kind of quiet today, man.

2:50:29 Miss Nicole, you have anything, Don, surprising coming from me, but as an audit committee, because we initiated the audit, we approved the report from RSM. What is our next step towards to ensuring that the recommendations are being met and the oversight is being done from someone that is appropriate my thought process was to create a parking lot item, because I don’t think we know enough right now to bound these recommendations somehow, but to put an item in our parking lot that we can go back and maybe address in a few months as they kind of filter things out. Are we looking for staff to report to us? Are we going to, at that time, determine if RSM is going to look at the recommendations in place? I would ask RSM to come back and go through each recommendation and tell us where they think things are, and then we can kind of forge a path from there.

2:50:46 That was my thought process. We plan to perform a full scope follow up once remediation has been put into place. And since the district is working on that remediation plan, it’s not appropriate yet to do that follow up, but we’ll continue to monitor.

2:51:07 I think it’s going to be incumbent upon us. I agree with the idea of the follow up, but it’s going to be incumbent upon us to go back, take a look at our audit plan and see how all of this is going to fall in. We got to make sure we’re using our resources wisely.

2:51:20 And we haven’t come to the school board and ask for additional money. But we may get in a position where there are things that we need to do that we can’t do because we are expending resources on this one item. So in my mind, there’s a lot of follow on conversations we need to do.

2:51:48 And it’ll be a few months down the road. But I do agree that we’ve got to do some follow up. You guys have anything? The one thing that I had, and I guess this is a question from Mister Gibbs, is, you know, we started with the.

2:52:11 Basically the school board and we went to the audit committee and back to the school board. So from the standpoint of a public’s record documentation, I’m not. And I’m not looking for an answer.

2:52:20 I just want to put it on your mind, you know, how do we properly document this? Do we have concurrent records for both the school board section and the audit committee section? Or do we break it out somehow? So if you want to know what happened in the school board section, you can pull it and only get the school board section. I’m not looking for an answer, but it’s something I think we need to think through. Because five years from now, we need to be able to go and have a succinct recording of what happened.

2:52:30 In my mind, yeah, the recording can be put on both categories as far as minutes go, Mister Susan adjourned the board meeting at ten and you convened the audit committee meeting at that time. So the finishing up of this would be under the audit committee. So we might have to take that audit committee meeting minutes and put them under the school board sign and that would be fine.

2:52:33 As long as we have. As long as we know how we’re going to do it. So you used all my time.

2:52:37 Mister Edwards, if I may, what kind of a timeline do you want on this parking lot item, as far as getting a follow up from RSM? Three months. Six months. What’s reasonably.

2:52:50 Three months. Three months? Sure. Okay.

2:53:08 Three months. I think it’s reasonable. RSM.

2:53:23 Do you guys have a December meeting? Okay, you guys want to say anything before I get to the board? And then gavel it? You guys are good. Okay. Anybody over here? Yeah, I just wanted to add, I want to share my appreciation with the audit committee.

2:53:38 I know there was some question as to whether this fell under your jurisdiction, because it’s not really a financial thing, but really it is because every family that leaves our district to go to another school because they’re concerned about the discipline issue. That’s a financial issue. Every lawsuit, because I didn’t think we handled it correctly, or a staff member that leaves, and we have to.

2:53:49 Those are financial issues. And so while it’s not directly financial, I appreciate you guys taking this punch to approve the change in the audit. And by the way, I’ll just, I know we had to move a really important audit off to put this one on the property control one.

2:54:03 I am absolutely in favor of that being next in line getting done. So. But I just again, wanted to thank you for being flexible in this because this is such an important issue that we needed to tackle and we needed your oversight on this issue.

2:54:13 So it’s not just us, it’s a whole community, whole organization, effort and eyes on a really important topic. And I’d like to speak to that. Oh yeah.

2:54:26 I think we do, as a committee, need to go back and relook at what we did not get done, but what needs to be done. And if we have to come and ask for more money, we need to do that. But we need to go do that.

2:55:22 So that would be an item for the next meeting as I see it. So you guys have got homework. Go through this thing and come back with ideas.

2:55:44 Thank you, Jean. Jennifer. Yeah, so I have a couple of questions that I want to ask.

2:56:10 And so what’s difficult is we’ve been talking about this conversation for six months, there’s been chaos and controversy, and this audit was completed and it’s brought forward to us with recommendations, talking about the process, which is wonderful. But I have to ask questions that were obviously deep dove in to by RSM when they did this audit that weren’t necessarily presented here today for clarification’s sake, because, quite frankly, lots of damaging messages were put out into the universe since this conversation started. And I think that the staff of Brembard public schools schools deserves to hear and be recognized, as well as the community that supports our schools.

2:57:05 So I have a couple of questions. So, question number one, the survey of our staff is on a scale of one to ten. Can you please reinforce everyone what that scale actually means? That it’s not a percentage? Sure.

2:57:36 So all of the questions were designed to be responded to on a scale of zero to ten, from strongly disagree to strongly agree. And in our full report, not here in the slides today, but in the full report that was issued, we did plot out the frequency of response for each category as well as the overall average for total responses for that question. Thank you.

2:57:50 So if a response had a five, it doesn’t mean 50% of the people necessarily said that answer correct. There were a lot of accusations made that our number of referrals were deflated, probably because we were handcuffed by laws, lessening the number of students that were being referred because of race and disability. Did your audit reveal there to be a lower amount of students of a certain race or disability than compared to other counties? We didn’t audit for that particular allegation, but the reduction in total incidence was primarily due to the COVID pandemic.

2:58:09 It did dip that year that we went hybrid, and it did, or, I’m sorry, remote. And then it did also stay lower level the next year when we were hybrid and our survey asked our staff members if they felt like they were pressured by their administrators to not report. Do you remember if that was a neutral response, a positive response? 1 second, I can pull it up.

2:58:20 You were asking if the teachers felt pressured to not report. Right. There was a question that basically asked, do you feel this pressure to not report as often? Oh, as often.

2:58:41 So there were three questions about pressure to not report on page 53. The first one is, I feel pressured to not submit based on student characteristics. Then there was pressure to downplay severity, and then there was not submitting a referral because it takes too much time.

2:59:10 So the responses are plotted out there. In general, they range right around the midline, around average of a four to almost a six. Okay.

2:59:41 So no overwhelming response that BPS is pressuring their staff members not to report students. It was also said since December, over and over and over again, that BPS was intentionally hiding or misrepresenting CeSar codes to the state and Department of Education. When you were doing this audit, did you.

2:59:59 You find serious red flags that that was something that we were doing? We didn’t find evidence of intentional misrepresentation. That would be more of an investigation. But we did see a process that could lead to misappropriate use of codes because of lack of training and lack of centralization of the process.

3:00:50 Appreciate all of your recommendations, but just for the sake of clarity, for the district again and for our staff, would you agree that some of these things were things that our staff was absolutely aware of and or when suggested, amendable to and ready to implement and or have already started processes of. I’ve had positive reaction to all of these recommendations. Everybody has been open minded and on board to making this work.

3:00:53 Okay, thank you. And then I have one really important last question. We did this audit because the office of Safe Schools required us to have an audit done.

3:01:06 And so you can answer this as succinctly as you’d like and feel comfortable answering. How active was the office of Safe Schools in this process? How often do they respond or communicate with you? And did they address specific concerns with our data, or did they ask specific concerns about specific staff members? The OSS is conducting their own investigation, separate and apart from ours, but we communicated a couple of times. I kept the OSS apprised as to the status of our audit so that they could pivot or do whatever they needed to do with their investigation on their side.

3:01:28 Okay. Thank you. Appreciate it.

3:01:40 Miss Campbell, anything? All right, Mister Trent, I have one question. Just because I legitimately want to know. Most of the questions that are in this survey are simply a yes or no question.

3:01:46 You would answer it yes or no. But for some of them, they’re scaled with this one to ten or zero to ten degree, which it’s messing with the numbers a little bit for your average percentage, because what I look at is, I’m looking at, hey, how many of them are grouped in the 8910, so they strongly agree, or in the zero one, two? They would strongly disagree. I’m looking at the extreme ends of both.

3:01:59 And, you know, that’s basically a yes or a no. So why choose the scale like that? None of these are yes no questions. Every question was a scaled response.

3:02:14 No. I know, but that’s. Is this BFT survey or is this your survey? Sorry, I’m trying to.

3:02:19 You may be looking at BFT survey. It doesn’t indicate in here, does it, that it’s BFT’s versus yours? BFT’s is attached all the way at the end. Appendix D is the federation of Teachers survey.

3:02:32 Well, just, I mean, like, these are all yes or no questions. I understand the requirements and content outlined within the BPS student code of conduct and discipline manual. That would be a yes or no, right? We felt it was important to capture the level of comfort of the stakeholders.

3:02:48 Some may feel a five. Sometimes I feel comfortable, sometimes I don’t. Some might feel like a ten.

3:02:56 I always feel comfortable every day, every incident. And in order for us to provide better feedback to you all about the degrees of comfort, we thought a scaled approach was best. Okay.

3:03:13 All right, thank you. I think it does go back to the statistics that you were doing. And if you look at, say, page 52 of the report, I have experienced student behavior that’s led me to unsafe, feel unsafe in the classroom.

3:03:25 The percentages would be of what their feelings are. So 30% was a level ten. Right.

3:03:48 13% was a level nine, 8% was a 17. So basically you would take, if you were to say 7.0, which is the median, that 817, 13 and 30%, that percentage, which is total, it’s roughly 69.

3:03:59 70 is felt as a seven, eight or nine on the scale of experiencing student behavior that’s led them to feel unsafe. Is that correct? The way I did that? Sorry, I didn’t realize that was at me. It’s okay.

3:04:18 No, I’m sorry. So when you’re looking at. If you can take the middle school survey results for the teacher and it says that it’s a 7.

3:04:25 0, say for instance, when you’re looking at the percentages, that’s just how many of the total respondents fell into 012345. Correct. So if you have a 50% mark, that would be that.

3:04:35 Like if five plus five plus two plus five plus two plus eight went all the way over until you got to 50% would be about where that is. And is that where you drew that? 7.0.

3:05:15 So the 7.0 is a pure average of all the responses together. So the average response was that the people felt middle school, 70% of the people or not 70%, but the average score among all representatives was a seven that they felt like.

3:05:51 That’s the level of behavior has led them to feel unself in the classroom. Correct. It’s an average score of all the responses.

3:06:05 Right. And if you wanted to figure out the total number that are in each one of them, then you can just figure out out of a percentage that those. That 50% or wherever they’re at is inside there.

3:06:20 So thank you. Anybody else have any other questions? So I’m going to ask a question that I’m pretty confident I know the answer to in order to give some information to follow up questions. Were you able to identify the types of classrooms that saw behaviors occurring more often? So was it kindergarten classrooms, middle school classrooms and ESC classrooms, or was that something different? There is a lot of data in that student information system, and if the district wants to.

3:06:47 To slice what we did even further, and I would encourage them to do so, but we did slice it to some degree. If I could find the page for you in our statistical analysis sections, starting on page 29, there’s a number of ways that we looked at data in the top left hand chart beginning on page 29. We did slice data by level of school, not all the way down to the grade level degree, but you certainly could with the data that the district has available.

3:07:20 So the reason I asked that question is because I presented that information in December. And I would assume it’s probably still the same if they pull that information today. But it’s important for information for us to know because this survey was completely anonymous.

3:07:38 They didn’t even identify what grade level they were teaching. Correct. And I think even though this isn’t a majority of our teachers, it still matters that people feel that way.

3:07:56 And it would behoove us as a district to accept that data as accurate and real and rerun it today and find a way to communicate with those classrooms, those staff members that are inside of those classrooms. I’m making an assumption here. My gut tells me people who filled out this survey probably experience behaviors that frustrate them daily.

3:08:01 Cause they came out of their way to fill out this survey. And so if we go to the classrooms that have the most number of incidents and reports and had conversations and a survey to those teachers, we can figure out a better way of supporting them. What exactly is making you feel unsafe? Is it because you don’t feel supported by your administrator? Or is it the actual physical behavior of the child in your classroom? What kind of behaviors are making you feel unsafe? Use this actual information to make a significant impact instead of making a broad stroke across our district.

3:08:22 And I understand why RSM made it super, super anonymous because they wanted people to actually respond. But I think it behooves us as a board to dig even deeper so that we can continuously make progress for our staff members and our students. Okay.

3:08:34 And I would say that when we have over 1000 teachers that respond to something and we have numbers like this, that even if it was one teacher that was out there, it behooves us to do the right thing, to try to figure it out. What I would like to say is everybody else pretty much completed. Everybody else good.

3:08:48 I think everybody, thank you so much for putting stuff together. I’m going to turn it over to here to art in a second. But I think that when we look at this overall, I think everybody agrees that the findings that we have are great to assist in the disciplinary process.

3:09:05 I think that we’ve all agreed to move forward with every one of these recommendations in one shape or form. And I just wanted to say thank you to the audit committee and the RSM for the work that you guys did. I think that we have a lot of good things in here.

3:09:26 And I think that we’re going to improve our disciplinary policies because of it. And I think that you guys went down the right scope and found the right processes and stuff like that. So with that, I’m going to hand it back over to art.

3:09:38 Okay. One thing, additional thing I like to put in the parking lot is for the next meeting, for them to come back and just talk to us. Lessons learned, things that we could do different, better, whatever the case might be.

3:09:42 I know this was an outlier. And a lot of things caught you guys by surprise. And I don’t want to surprise you now with spontaneous response, but I would like for you all to think about it, come back and advise us how we can be better, how we can do better.

3:09:44 What are the lessons we learned from this exercise? And for the record, I want to go on the record of saying, my friend Don Lusk, I was not talking about beginning and end of the conversation, the destructive nature of termites. I was talking about quite efficiency. Just for the record.

3:09:54 Okay. Now, having said that, there are a few things that we do need to cover from the audit committees perspective. Yeah.

3:09:56 If you can recess the meeting so we can leave and then re adjourn it. Yep. He.

3:09:59 We already. We didn’t. It’s his meeting, right? Yeah.

3:10:12 Mister Susan already adjourned. So, yeah, we can leave if we want or not. Afraid.

3:10:52 There you go. Okay. There we go.

3:11:10 Thank you. Thank you. Okay.

3:11:20 We’re gonna try and efficiently take care of the rest of our meeting. There are a couple of things that we do need to do. We need to prove the minutes from the last meeting and we’ve got to act on the contract for RSM.

3:11:30 And is there anything else we need to cover, Mister Brooks? Property control. Okay, do we want to stay for that? It’s almost noon now, so I guess I’ll ask you guys the urgency for property control. Is there an urgency? Thanks.

3:11:38 Okay, so what? Property control. That would be the end, I think. Enough, because we’re going to discuss that contract.

3:11:48 Yes, treasurer, we’ll take. We’ll take your lead on this, but there’s not an urgency from our perspective on the property control. Okay, we can defer that committee.

3:12:11 Excuse me. Oh, do we have procurement here? Yes. Where? She’s right there.

3:12:14 The lovely lady with the blonde hair and the black suit. Oh, okay. On the RSM contract.

3:12:23 All right. There you are. Can you just tell us briefly where we are and what action, if any, we need to take the day? No, but the chair.

3:12:38 Yeah, please, you got to turn it on. Don’t forget the minutes, Mister Edwards. Right.

3:12:57 All right. Good afternoon again. My name is Christy Rodriguez.

3:13:10 I’m the director of procurement and distribution services. If I may interrupt, Mister Edwards, you need to end the recess. Okay.

3:13:25 The recess is ending. Okay. All right, so the current contract, RFP 18 p zero 30 drop.

3:13:39 Internal auditing services. The contract with RSM is currently set to expire July 26, 2023. We do have one remaining renewal available, and so I’m requesting the audit committee provide guidance on if we’d like to exercise that final renewal.

3:13:55 Okay, what are your thoughts? I think they’ve done a good job. Microphone. I think they’ve done a good job.

3:13:58 However, I’m concerned about the competitive. And I presume they are. Have we done any competitive research with their contract? We have not done any research as we’re currently under our contract.

3:14:08 The last time the solicitation was done was 2018. We’re talking about a one year renewal, and then we would go through the RFP process. In fact, we don’t have time now to go through the RFP process.

3:14:30 If we had to. It would be very condensed, I think, because the audit committee was previously scheduled to meet, I think, a month ago. So it would be a little rushed at this point if we followed our standard process that we created.

3:14:36 That’s about a four month process. Yeah. Three to four months.

3:14:49 Yeah. I’m sorry. Turn the mic on.

3:14:51 Have you met me? I would move that we extend it for the one year that’s allowed by the current procurement and contract. Okay, I’ll second that it’s been properly moved. And second, that we extend the audit committee the audit contract for RSM for the one year period that’s currently in the contract.

3:15:05 Are you ready for the question? All in favor, say aye and opposed? Okay. Aye. Savage carried.

3:15:12 The one thing I would ask is that at our next meeting that you bring the process back so, you know, these guys have a chance to see what’s involved in it. Absolutely. And we can go through it.

3:15:16 Absolutely. I’ll be happy to. Thank you.

3:15:30 Okay. Thank you so much. The other thing we need to do is act on the minutes from the last meeting.

3:16:00 Move approval. Second. Okay.

3:16:30 It’s been properly moved. And second, that we approved the minutes from the last meeting. Are you.

3:16:47 Are you ready for the question? All in favor, say unopposed. Okay, so it’s carried. The other item is the auditor general report.

3:17:09 I think we had a couple of actions out of there, but is there anything we need to discuss today? I can give you a quick update on that. At this time, all the deliverables related to the report have been completed, and the final report was issued on March 24, 2023, shortly before the report was sent out. We held an exit conference a couple days before that.

3:17:30 At that meeting, Claire and Mark went through the process that they had done and communicated at that time. There were no audit findings during the final review process in Tallahassee, one of the managers discovered that there were function codes in the fund 100 budget to actual report where we were over budget. That occurred during the final year closeout process, when we were doing the accruals and the final payouts.

3:17:42 So some functions were over, but the overall fund 100 budget was under. So we did have a finding that they included in the report. We got together under Cindy’s direction, created a corrective action plan, and we’ve been implementing that.

3:18:05 We’ve been doing it the last two closes. There’s reports we generated, and the budget department and accounting services talk to make sure everything’s complete before the process. We do take it seriously, and we did put the corrective action in plan, and we’re moving forward.

3:18:14 All in all, we’re still proud of the work that was done here at the office, at the schools, and our partner departments who assisted with the year end work. It’s just that we have that one finding, and we’re working to make sure it doesn’t happen again and that no other ones come up someplace. I missed it, I believe.

3:18:31 I don’t know what the finding is. So, in the final report, in our ACFR, there was a fund 100 report. That’s budget to actual.

3:18:42 And there were some function codes that we were actually over budget at year end. The reason they were over budget is because we had done the transfers and the final payouts and the accruals, but we didn’t get the final budget amendments approved to move the budget so that they wouldn’t be over. So more of a procedural thing that we missed.

3:18:54 And did they accept your remediation of it? Yes, it’s in the final report. And yes. Okay.

3:19:10 Has that information been relayed to the audit committee? I don’t remember seeing that, that additional item. This is the first time we’ve had the opportunity to get. This is the first time we’re together after the report.

3:19:15 And when, I mean, when did, when was this founding made? The report came out on the 23rd, 24 August. Oh, I’m sorry. 24 March.

3:19:25 Okay. All right. I guess my expectation in the future would be when something like this happens, that you let us know, you know, whether you’ve got the solution or not, but at least that we’ve got an issue.

3:19:33 And my next question would be, is this something that should have been picked up in the external audit? Should MSL have picked this up? It could have been. I’m not sure. Okay.

3:19:47 So, yeah. Yes, to answer your question, it could have been, yes. Okay.

3:20:03 Well, I’d like for you to come back to the next meeting and tell us if we had a process breakdown. I mean, we need to understand. Yeah, okay.

3:20:07 Yeah, we definitely did. That’s why we got the corrective action. And, you know, we put reports in place to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

3:20:18 I mean, a process breakdown from the standpoint of the firm that we pay to do these audits, was there a miss on their part? Oh, okay. I’m not looking to crucify anybody. Yeah.

3:20:34 No, no, that’s what I understand. An audit doesn’t catch everything. I mean, it definitely was missed, but, and I think because we don’t understand where it came from, we’re hearing that it was a procedural miscue.

3:20:49 No financial impact on the financial statements. No. Okay.

3:20:52 It didn’t change the audit report. It still says that we’re, you know, that the information is correct and there’s no material weakness or anything like that. Okay.

3:21:00 It’s just defining we need to clean up. Is it a founding or an observation? Am I wrong to ask for, like, the reports to review it, or. Well, that’s, we’ve asked for them to send that to.

3:21:04 Yeah. Did I miss it? No, we hadn’t received it yet you can now. It’s called an additional matter finding.

3:21:21 Okay. And it’s. It’s right in the front of their report.

3:21:28 Did you send us that report? I don’t know if it was sent. We got quite a few before the meeting. Was it in one of the emails? I’m not sure.

3:21:36 I’ll find out. And if not, if you will send it to us, please. Yes, sir.

3:21:51 Okay. What was the amount involved there? There were various amounts. Student services, 187,000.

3:22:14 Instructional media, about 79,000. General administration 8000. Okay.

3:22:35 So generally speaking, it wasn’t a material amount. That was a classification issue. Correct.

3:22:41 There was a big one, the facilities acquisition, but they were the payments to the charter schools. That was a little over 2 million. But again, it’s the overall fund 100 budget wasn’t over.

3:22:50 It’s just when we did the accrual and move these line items, the line item went over, not the overall budget, and those payments to the charter schools are required. Was that a matching of the budget to the actual. Is that what we’re saying here? Yes.

3:23:07 Okay. So the budget was misclassified, is that what we’re saying? Or usually right around the time we make those payments, we do a budget transfer so that the budget and the payment hit at the same time we made the payments and the budget transfer didn’t happen. Okay.

3:23:36 They did happen, or they happened at a later date. Was it a timing situation? In this case, it didn’t happen. Did not.

3:23:56 Yeah. And the only time this happened is year end. We went back and we checked the whole year throughout the year year, and we didn’t have any other instances of this.

3:24:14 It was basically the year end when we do those final payments, accruals and reclasses. So is there a process change we need to put into place to make sure this doesn’t happen in the future or. That’s what our corrective action plan did.

3:24:27 We’ve created a couple, two new reports, one that I run and one that the budget director runs, and we actually talk right before we close the books each month just to ensure that that doesn’t repeat. So let me ask you another question. Are we saying that we get down to the closeout of the year and we move the budget around to match the actuals? Is that what we’re saying? Or.

3:24:48 I don’t want to put you on the spit here and turn you over a couple of times, but the issue is a budget’s a budget, and if you blow the budget, you blow the budget. But if the budget was inappropriately, allocated to a particular area. That would be the process that I would think needed to be addressed.

3:24:51 We move it for a couple of different reasons. The big one was a result of, again, the expenditure and the transfer usually happen around the same time. And we made the expenditure and we just didn’t get the budget transfer in that case. Okay, so you’re saying it was a standard process, it just wasn’t done at the closeout time? Yes. Okay. Okay. Is there anything else we need to cover today, Miss Brooks? No. The only really important things were the minutes and the RSM renewal. Everything else, I think the property control and the update from ET can be pushed off with the action items until the June meeting. Okay. Thank you. Okay. I apologize for keeping you guys over, but I’m going to treat you. Thanks, everybody.