Updates on the Fight for Quality Public Education in Brevard County, FL
0:00 music
1:46 Thank you.
5:46 I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America
5:53 and to the republic for
5:55 which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible with liberty
5:59 and justice for all.
6:03 that brings us to the adoption of the agenda do I hear a motion
6:09 motion is there any discussion all in favor signify by saying
6:15 aye all opposed this meeting is for a board to convict conduct
6:19 interviews with the finalists with no decisions will be made
6:22 public comments prior to the interviews will not serve to assist
6:25 the board to making a decision therefore there will be no public
6:28 comments in this meeting there will be public comments at the
6:31 next board meeting
6:32 which will afford the public an opportunity to provide their
6:35 input pertaining to the interviews to assist board members with
6:37 reaching a decision however I will make myself available to
6:40 anyone who wished to meet after the conclusion of today’s
6:43 meeting
6:44 all right if we could have Mr. Schneider please come in as Mr.
6:50 Schneider’s coming in just so the public understands we’re going
6:52 to interview Mr. Schneider and Mr. Mark Rendell and then Mr.
6:55 Jason Weissong welcome Mr. Schneider I’m going to give my board
7:01 members an opportunity to speak if they if they can and
7:02 and then we’re going to go into some of the questions I’ve got
7:05 15 minutes up here because apparently each one of us has 15
7:08 minutes so we’re going to try to move through it pretty quickly
7:10 and we appreciate you being here Ms. Campbell if you wish to
7:12 well good morning and thank you for being a part of this process
7:16 I’m Katie Campbell and I represent the south end of Brevard
7:19 good morning um hello again got to say hello really really fast
7:25 Jennifer Jenkins it’s nice to meet you and I’m glad that you’re
7:27 here
7:27 hello hello Mr. Schneider Megan Wright again I got to meet you
7:33 uh just briefly a moment I represent the north end of Brevard
7:36 County thank you for coming and being part of this process
7:40 and welcome uh I represent the middle part of uh of Brevard
7:43 County and and we did get to meet shortly over there but uh
7:47 thank you and welcome
7:49 I wanted to say thank you um we’ve done I think all of us have
7:53 done our due diligence in interviewing you
7:55 and we really appreciate you coming forward to interview for our
7:58 school district um I represent the area that’s
8:01 around here um through the center part and we’re honored to have
8:04 you and the other individuals here today um we have 90 minutes
8:08 for our board approval interview today you’ll have three minutes
8:11 to provide an opening statement each board member will ask a
8:14 series of thematic based questions general leadership which
8:17 includes board as superintendent
8:19 relationship academic excellence exceptional workforce community
8:22 community connection operational sustainability based on our
8:25 strategic plan
8:26 each board member is allocated 15 minutes and is prepared with
8:29 four to five questions the number of questions each gets to will
8:33 depend on the length of your responses you will have time at the
8:37 end for concluding thoughts or questions for us I will tell you
8:41 this we normally sit down at your level because this is we hate
8:43 this like overarching like we’re on top up here but the way that
8:49 the way that the
8:49 the camera systems work the camera systems work and everything
8:51 else they thought that this was more appropriate so I apologize
8:53 about you know what I mean us not we are a familiar board with
8:57 everybody that comes here and we appreciate your time so with
8:59 that um miss uh right you have the floor oh I’m up first oh we
9:04 have to give an introductory oh yes I’m sorry I apologize you
9:08 have your time to give an introductory statement
9:10 um thank you so much uh thank you so much uh I’m honored to be
9:14 here um so I’m very pleased to be uh considered to be the next
9:18 superintendent of the microphone
9:21 is mic working um a little bit about me um you know my name is
9:25 Scott Snyder I’m a pop up can we just pause just a second I’m
9:29 not sure that your microphone is working and we want to hear you
9:32 we can hear you but
9:33 all right so um thank you again to uh board chair and uh board
9:46 members for having me here I’m I’m honored to be here um it’s it’s
9:51 uh exciting uh time for for myself but also my family so um I do
9:55 want to introduce my my lovely wife that’s here with me um over
9:59 here uh Ginger Schneider she’s um also an educator she’s been an
10:03 educator for the
10:03 21 years and I’ve been an educator for 23 years and um and I’m
10:08 grateful to have someone that that keeps me grounded all the
10:12 time uh at any given time that it seems as if I forgot what it’s
10:16 like to be in the classroom she reminds me um I have two amazing
10:20 children um Grant and Sterling and um Grant’s uh 60 or about to
10:24 be 16 I just go ahead and say 16 going on 25 but um and my
10:29 daughter is 13 they’re obviously both school age so um we’re
10:33 anxious to make sure that wherever our children continue to go
10:36 to school that it’s the best school district possible
10:38 a little bit about my um background is um I started out as a
10:42 teacher um actually a special education teacher in middle school
10:46 and then I actually met my wife there and she decided to go to
10:50 elementary school and I decided to go to high
10:52 school and it’s probably the best decision for both of us I was
10:55 fortunate enough to go through the ranks from
10:59 teacher to assistant principal and then I was principal for um
11:02 eight years at two different high needs high
11:04 schools um both of those high schools had historic success with
11:08 grad rate and also academic excellence
11:11 and so I’m very proud of what we were able to do at those two
11:14 schools
11:16 I was then asked to be region superintendent which I went from
11:19 being in charge of approximately 1,800
11:22 students to 34,000 students as region superintendent of
11:25 alternative schools and high schools
11:27 during that time we had the historic highs for graduation rates
11:33 and in my current district
11:35 and I’m very proud of what we’re able to do and then also um the
11:39 high school region has has not had less
11:42 than a c school in quite a few years so it’s been very
11:45 beneficial to the district as a whole but also
11:48 our community and when we talk about workforce readiness it’s a
11:51 key element for that for our community as
11:53 well now to my current position I’ve been a chief of schools in
11:57 in in my current district for two years
12:00 which means that now I get to make sure that the academic
12:05 excellence for all children and the safety
12:07 of all children which is approximately 125,000 students in our
12:11 district and then also the support
12:13 and retention of 13,000 employees that that is that is my sole
12:18 job at this point in time there’s a lot of
12:20 other things that come along with that as being chief of schools
12:22 anything that goes along with schools
12:24 the good the bad the ugly and you know sometimes one can outweigh
12:28 the other but that’s that falls on
12:30 me and so I’m excited for what I’m able to do I truly enjoy what
12:34 I do every day we’ve had some success
12:37 on the heels of pandemic as we all have went through we actually
12:41 had all of our SI schools or school
12:43 improvement schools all of them made a c grade or higher and so
12:47 this is the first time as a historic
12:49 achievement in our district that we have no SI schools at this
12:53 point in time and so we continue to want to
12:56 move forward a couple things about me is that first the three
12:59 things that I want everyone to walk away
13:01 with knowing about me is that first and foremost I will not talk
13:04 as much in academic excellence or
13:06 curriculum specifically because I think that the the only way
13:10 you truly have academic excellence
13:11 is actually outside of curriculum and things is actually the
13:14 teachers in the classroom so it’s it’s recruiting
13:17 retaining teachers is first and foremost for me and then
13:20 building a foundation of trust and that foundation
13:23 of trust has to be with you as the board but also all
13:26 stakeholders without a foundation of trust it’s
13:28 it’s almost impossible to move initiatives forward and then two-way
13:32 communication I’m an advocate for
13:35 two-way communication and open dialogue between all stakeholders
13:38 we can’t operate in a silo I believe we
13:40 must have all stakeholders included including our parents and in
13:44 our students for sure our parents
13:46 need to know what education their children are being provided
13:49 and know that reward public schools is
13:51 providing them the best education possible and that’s why they
13:54 should stay with us and not go to other
13:56 competition thank you awesome thank you so much for that all
14:02 right I’m up first thank you so much we’re excited that you’re
14:05 here and
14:05 uh being able to watch your video response I will say that was
14:08 very informative it was nice to to get a
14:10 feel for who you were and hear hear how you genuinely and
14:12 authentically responded to questions I appreciate
14:14 that um so we have prepared questions that we’re going to ask
14:18 you and I’m going to go first I’m up first so
14:21 my first question for you is what do you think the most
14:23 important part of a superintendent’s job is and why
14:26 well I think first and foremost um the board is is crucial by
14:32 just determining the what uh what the
14:36 district should do and as the superintendent it’s my job to
14:39 discern determine the how um and throughout
14:42 that that process of determining the how it’s really making sure
14:47 that if time allows depending upon the
14:49 situation that we include all stakeholders again we cannot work
14:54 in a silo we must include those
14:56 stakeholders in order to get buy-in and so as a superintendent I
15:00 must make sure that I bridge
15:02 that gap how are we going to actually get the work done um but
15:06 then once we decide how it’s it’s the who
15:09 we have to decide who’s going to be able to do this work and
15:13 make sure that we again get the best people
15:15 possible to do the work inside of our schools and make sure that
15:19 we are transparent throughout that
15:20 process we set expectations throughout that process we set ways
15:24 to monitor the results um without
15:26 monitoring we cannot judge whether something was successful or
15:30 not in addition to that there is
15:32 going to be a time where I think that as as as an educational
15:34 specialist I like I would like to see
15:36 myself but it is it is my duty to also speak to things that in
15:40 initiatives that I foresee that are that
15:43 would benefit our not only our community but obviously our
15:45 school district but ultimately it’s my job to
15:49 implement the the work and the choices of what the board sets
15:53 forth and to make sure I determine the
15:55 how and the who thank you all right so based on your knowledge
16:00 of our system what do you believe should
16:02 be the top two priorities of our school system again I would say
16:07 you know again referring to academic
16:11 excellence I am very familiar with um Brevard public schools
16:15 data and what that data says for when
16:17 elementary schools um on you know in looking at the discrepancies
16:22 between students with disabilities
16:25 and african-american students there’s there’s discrepancy
16:27 especially in the elementary area
16:30 but I’m not going to harp on that because I’m going to go back
16:32 to what I originally said and that is
16:34 making sure that we recruit and retain the best teachers um that
16:38 to me is the only way we can
16:41 actually move academic excellence we have to make sure we have
16:43 the best teachers in the classrooms thank
16:45 you the the other piece to that though is that you know I also
16:49 know that safety and security uh of our
16:53 employees is crucial I I’m I’m I’m abreast of some of the
16:57 research and some of the reports that have come
16:59 out from Brevard public schools and and I I echo that that our
17:03 employees must must feel safe but that
17:06 goes to me that ties into the recruitment and the retention of
17:10 those teachers so I don’t want to
17:12 overlook how important that is but I think that we have to make
17:15 sure we address that by revisiting the
17:18 code of conduct ensuring that the monitoring and implementation
17:22 of of said consequences is in
17:24 place but also proactive measures but that goes hand in hand
17:27 with that that retention that retention piece
17:29 so I um I think that’s first and foremost that’s priority I know
17:34 that sounds like a large priority but
17:36 that is the priority um all together in one nutshell for number
17:40 one priority the second priority again is
17:42 trust I think that I have to build relationships with with you
17:46 as the board but also with the community
17:50 transparency is key we have to have everybody on board we have
17:53 to have the buy-in of our parents and our
17:55 students and all of our stakeholders because any initiative that
17:58 we want to move forth
18:00 again it has to take the buy-in of all parents we need our
18:04 parents to start with early education you
18:07 know the first teacher of any child is their parents so we have
18:10 to make sure that we are transparent with
18:12 our our stakeholders including our parents and and and share our
18:15 expectations and then also bring them
18:18 in and and if we have to go out to them then that’s fine too we
18:21 have to be accessible to go out to the
18:23 community to make sure that we get the buy-in from all
18:26 stakeholders to help them feel as if they’re a
18:29 part of what we’re doing in this great district thank you how
18:32 would you ensure board members have the
18:36 information they need before being asked to make a vote on an
18:39 issue of concern i think that’s where
18:43 that relationship comes into play um i i as as the
18:46 superintendent i must have that relationship with
18:49 the board at any point in time that board members are concerned
18:53 have a concern or have want more data
18:55 that that is my job to provide it also if there was an
18:58 initiative that i was looking to try to move
19:01 forward i would obviously through board workshops or however
19:06 else we felt the need to share that
19:08 information up front i would never want to to have any board
19:13 member to be surprised and to get that
19:15 information after anyone else the board should get that
19:18 information first and we should be able to have
19:21 candid conversations about the pros and the cons of moving that
19:24 work forward thank you and describe
19:27 what you would believe to be the ideal working relationship with
19:30 the school board and
19:31 when you have an adversarial situation with a board member how
19:34 would you resolve that
19:35 i think that goes back to building those relationships you know
19:40 again my my respect for what
19:43 what you do as an elected board to to know that you are
19:46 representing constituents and to know that we do
19:49 have a common goal of student outcomes but my respect and honor
19:52 of what positions you’re in and in regards to
19:55 your areas that you represent i think that’s crucial in building
19:58 those relationships i think at that point in time
20:00 as well that i you know that i need to be responsive to needs
20:04 that you bring forth to me
20:06 um so overall that’s anything that comes forth after that i
20:11 think that we as long as we have the
20:13 relationships to be candid with one another and to have those
20:17 those conversations prior to addressing
20:21 you know an issue in isolation i think that’s crucial we must be
20:25 as united as possible i know that sometimes
20:27 we’re not going to be always on the same page but i think if we
20:30 can respect where each person comes from
20:32 so that consistency and transparency um i think is crucial for
20:35 how we move anything forth and and
20:37 respect for which where each one of us comes from again highly
20:40 respect that the board decides upon the
20:42 what and it’s my job to decide upon the how and if we disagree
20:45 on something then i just i would i
20:47 think that our relationships should be strong enough to to have
20:51 those open conversations thank you what
20:54 are the first three things that you’re going to do if you’re
20:57 hired as our superintendent
20:58 so i have a um an entry plan that i i plan on sharing tomorrow
21:03 with each of you when we have our
21:04 one-on-one time and it does lay out um the things that i i think
21:08 i would like to do or i know i would
21:10 like to do as as next superintendent of brevard public schools
21:14 and first and foremost it’s going
21:16 on a listening tour um i need to listen first um i do believe in
21:20 in the support first evaluate second
21:23 mentality which in this situation would be listen first act
21:26 second uh mentality so i needed to listen
21:29 to our stakeholders so that’s that’s first and foremost i need
21:32 to then go out to the community
21:36 i need to be accessible and so when i say i go on on a listening
21:39 tour it’s not just a listening tour
21:40 inside this internal um area but it’s also externally i need to
21:44 go out and and speak to the community
21:46 ask them and there’s i have a set of questions that all
21:50 stakeholders will be asked the same question
21:52 so this way is consistency then once we get that that
21:55 information then at that point in time we would
21:58 go into the discovery phase diving into board policies looking
22:02 at are there some things that we
22:04 recommend or as as a as a board and superintendent relationship
22:08 that we should readdress but that
22:10 discovery process would be every type of uh systemic approach
22:13 that we have our processes that we have
22:15 in the district and to see what we believe is working is and and
22:19 not working and that goes hand in hand
22:21 with the listening tour but this would go more in depth to
22:23 actually the discovery process then at after
22:26 that point then we move into involving stakeholders before we
22:30 act i want to make that clear that this
22:33 isn’t this again i don’t believe that we should isolate in a silo
22:37 i that is not my job as a superintendent
22:39 as a superintendent i think we should include all of our 8 000
22:43 employees and and we have 74 000
22:46 students with parents and guardians that should also be included
22:49 in our in our next steps so
22:50 listen first and foremost then the discovery process and then
22:54 include stakeholders to then
22:56 develop how we’re going to act okay and i have two more
22:59 questions that are not on the script but i’m going to go ahead
23:01 and ask them what’s your favorite football team
23:03 college or pro oh uh let’s go college gators okay all right all
23:09 right was that on the list of questions
23:10 we were not supposed to ask no i should have said whatever one y’all
23:13 sorry is i don’t know i’m impartial
23:16 no no i know a lot of times we’re up here and it feels a little
23:18 robotic and we’re asking these questions
23:20 and so you know just as you as a person asking a question uh and
23:23 then the other question i have for
23:25 you is uh the importance of the relationship that the
23:27 superintendent has between the school union uh
23:31 the teacher union sorry not the school union what do you feel um
23:34 that role is for you as a superintendent
23:37 i think it’s crucial um that’s actually laid out in my in my
23:39 plan as well to make sure that we have
23:41 that relationship um our union represents a great deal of
23:44 employees and so we cannot um exclude we must
23:48 include um uh their their their thoughts and and ideas so it’s
23:52 it’s absolutely instrumental especially
23:55 when you get into contract negotiations um and any labor union
23:59 negotiations it’s crucial to have that
24:01 relationship on the front end they need to know what our what
24:05 what my intentions truly are and where my
24:07 passion and heart is and then we can work through the rest okay
24:10 thank you so much i appreciate your answers
24:14 with that i’ll turn it over to miss jenkins all right um so i
24:18 have academic excellence
24:23 which we kind of touched on a little bit so i’m going to go a
24:26 little deeper
24:26 currently there’s a significant achievement gap for minority
24:31 students and students with
24:32 disabilities when compared to white and non-disabled peers what
24:36 specific steps would you take to ensure
24:38 academic success is distributed equitably across our district
24:41 thank you for the question
24:44 um so i i again i will reiterate i think it’s so important for
24:47 academic excellence that we have the same
24:50 excellent teachers regardless of what school setting that we
24:53 that that they’re in we must first and
24:56 foremost recruit retain those amazing teachers but also we need
25:01 to have a professional development if
25:04 if there’s something more that needs to be done and we feel like
25:07 our teachers perhaps are not equipped to
25:10 to do the work we must look at what professional development can
25:13 be done but before we just act
25:16 on that we need to see what’s truly happening again that would
25:19 be something that i would want to do is
25:21 is see what’s happening in our schools are we utilizing our
25:23 professional learning community time you know
25:26 adequately and then what curriculum do we have in place that
25:29 actually addresses those things
25:31 i think is crucial before i say the next thing which is actually
25:35 look at tier one and tier two
25:37 interventions one thing in my in my district that that i’ve
25:40 implemented is ensuring that tier one
25:42 interventions are embedded in curriculum as we first present the
25:46 curriculum not at a later date
25:48 which sounds simple but actually sometimes it’s a little bit
25:53 more difficult
25:54 to actually implement but to ensure that teachers understand the
25:57 importance
25:58 and then how we move from tier one interventions to tier two
26:01 interventions because when you’re talking about
26:03 students that have a significant deficit or learning gap those
26:07 tier two interventions are are instrumental
26:10 and then tier three if needed what does that look like for our
26:13 schools what does that look like for our
26:15 teachers do we have the personnel at our schools that can
26:18 actually deliver tier three interventions
26:20 as we know tier three interventions is the most aggressive
26:22 intervention that we can possibly implement
26:25 and so we would need the the help of additional personnel as
26:28 needed so that that would be my my plan to address
26:32 that but again i go back to making sure first and foremost that
26:35 we don’t have vacancies i know
26:36 that in brevard that there’s been you know approximately 80
26:40 percent turnover or 80 percent more vacancies i
26:44 should say 80 percent more vacancies now than what was just a
26:48 few years ago and so that’s that’s concerning so we
26:51 have to address the vacancies so this way we have you know
26:54 certified professional teachers in front of
26:57 every single student in every classroom across the district
26:59 thank you detail what you’ve done in
27:04 the past and what you would do to facilitate an increase in
27:06 third grade reading proficiency rates
27:08 yes so i so again first i won’t continue to say it i promise but
27:14 uh best teachers inside of inside of
27:16 those classrooms i think before you know the mindset of
27:19 elementary schools you know was that you know
27:22 we we kind of in the past looked at high schools and try to
27:25 address that but now i think everyone
27:27 realizes the importance of early literacy and so i would say to
27:31 actually to change third grade data
27:33 and in academic excellence we must first look at pre-k
27:37 information we must bring in our parents and and
27:41 make sure our parents do know that they are the first teachers
27:44 of their children and give them the
27:46 and try to make sure they have the put their resources so
27:49 through parent development courses
27:52 inside of our district to provide that to them provide them
27:55 resources books for all children that
27:57 can actually help at their level and if our parents need
28:01 educational assistance then we can step in and
28:04 assist for that as well that’s first and foremost then ensure
28:08 that our our k2 teachers are still as
28:11 excellent as any other teacher and what i mean by that is in in
28:14 the past we haven’t focused in that
28:16 area as much well now we have best standards that does goes goes
28:19 to that that k2 area and that that
28:23 accountability is there but we can’t just start with
28:25 accountability we have to start with preparing
28:27 our teachers first and foremost so to have the best third grade
28:31 data we must look at our previous grades
28:33 as well we must also have um you know robust curriculum i think
28:37 that’s the other piece that’s that’s that’s
28:40 crucial and not only have robust curriculum that that deals with
28:43 what are what has been laid out now with with
28:46 uh best standards and with um fast assessments but not just
28:49 teaching to the test we have to make sure
28:51 that we’re starting from from where our children are meet them
28:54 in the middle and then move forward
28:55 i won’t say a specific curriculum because i think there’s so
28:59 many different curriculums that are
29:00 out there so many different textbooks that are out there that i
29:03 think yes they’re important
29:04 but again it’s about how we address early learning literacy and
29:09 how we move that forth and then have
29:10 the best teachers in front of those those those students and i
29:14 cannot miss the parents because we
29:16 have to have that partnership with parents and we have to be you
29:19 know transparent and show that our
29:21 parents here’s the expectation for your child here’s what your
29:23 child is expected to do by the end of
29:25 third grade help us get there how can you help us get there and
29:28 let’s partner together to do it
29:32 thank you what do you feel is the single most important piece of
29:37 data that will drive our district forward
29:39 vacancies yeah i i mean i i i i hate to say that but it’s i do
29:48 believe that sincerely it’s vacancies we
29:50 have to you can have the best intention substitute inside that
29:55 classroom um but again that’s that’s
29:58 not going to deliver the same quality of instruction so that’s
30:00 the single most thing
30:01 sorry the light went on and off there um describe a situation
30:09 where you were clearly instrumental in
30:12 facilitating a change in the way career and college readiness
30:15 was approached in your district
30:16 how was the change meaningful and or successful and what
30:19 measures were used to determine the
30:20 success of the change initiative so i was involved um in making
30:26 sure that our we have a school choice
30:29 program um but to make sure that it’s it’s more than just uh
30:34 accelerated academic programs we have now
30:38 shifted our thought process for career and technical education
30:41 ensuring that all high schools have some
30:44 form of either a direct program or a direct line to credentials
30:49 one thing
30:50 that i do want to to i said it in my video and i’ll say it again
30:53 i think we definitely have to utilize
30:55 the florida ready to work program i think this is crucial we
30:59 know that you know approximately 90
31:01 percent of of florida employers are looking to hire individuals
31:07 but out of those you know they they
31:09 feel like 80 some odd percent of people they want to hire don’t
31:13 have the employability skills and so
31:16 what we’ve done in my current district is ensure that we’re
31:19 starting to actually we’ve moved forth on the
31:21 florida ready to work credentialing but we’ve also um expounded
31:26 upon how many career and technical
31:27 education programs we have at every school and to ensure that
31:30 they can get credentials and then be
31:33 much more marketable and for our community the actual numbers we’ve
31:37 we’ve increased for we’ll speak to
31:40 high schools um our high schools now again all of our high
31:43 schools so 100 of our high schools have some
31:45 form of career technical education path whether they actually
31:49 have a specific program or not they have
31:51 a path so whether that’s digital design whether that’s serve
31:55 safe through culinary there’s all those
31:58 other paths that we made sure we put forth in in front of them
32:01 but we realize that’s not enough we have
32:03 to start at in the middle school so now we have just started to
32:07 really become um strategic in how we
32:11 we do vertical alignment and feeder patterns with those same
32:15 programs all the way down to our elementary
32:17 schools that we’re looking at dual language programs as well so
32:20 it can’t just be at the high school level
32:22 it must be at the middle and then the elementary level so i’ve
32:24 been instrumental in pushing that that
32:26 agenda forth ensuring that our students though know what the
32:30 what that means to them and then also our
32:32 parents our parents have to know the investment that as a
32:35 district that we’re putting into their children
32:38 because those career and technical education um programs and
32:42 courses it does take it’s a financial
32:44 commitment to their child and what that means for their future i
32:47 think we also have to be proactive and
32:49 make sure our parents know that because when they start thinking
32:52 about going to a competitor they need to
32:53 realize so i can’t get these same options at any in any other uh
32:58 school inside of the the broader community of brevard
33:07 okay all right thank you uh based on what you know about our
33:15 school system what do you think is the
33:18 greatest potential for improvement and what are our greatest
33:21 opportunities
33:22 thinking building upon already you know brevard has has has a
33:28 has a robust um career technical education
33:31 system you know all your secondary schools have have career cte
33:35 courses in those schools i think what
33:38 we can do is make sure that we align them um not just seven
33:41 through 12th but actually start going
33:43 earlier on sixth grades and then continue to work down even into
33:47 elementary and again what that looks
33:49 like at elementary schools of course would look it would be a
33:51 little bit different but just getting
33:53 kids excited about perhaps different paths um so career
33:56 technical education where we can go with that
33:59 and then also the business partners and and making sure that we
34:03 we bring ourselves to those campuses as
34:06 much as possible um you know i would that would be that’s one
34:08 thing that i absolutely want to do i
34:10 want to meet with those business partners um who doesn’t want to
34:13 meet with blue origin and lockheed martin
34:15 northrick grumman i mean we have so many other places and you
34:18 know in that excitement that we can bring to
34:20 our children into our and to being able to take a course on
34:23 their their work campus if allowable
34:27 that’s that would be my goal um i know that’s a that’s a lofty
34:29 goal they they would have to have
34:31 that buy-in um from them but what that looks like can can evolve
34:35 over time maybe and initially we can
34:37 bring them to us and then have our children realize what the
34:40 potential is in their own community right
34:42 here where they live every day where they wake up the the the
34:46 personnel that look like them that walk the
34:48 same the same streets that they do that go went to the same
34:51 schools or now have moved here and walk
34:53 and go to and live in the same neighborhoods that they have
34:56 access to them to help them see where
34:58 their future could lead it’s all about building hope for our
35:02 children so i think that cte courses
35:04 absolutely brings hope to our children that might not have
35:07 normally had hope because college was not
35:10 an interest of theirs um i think that also we have room for
35:14 growth in reference to how we support our
35:16 employees and not saying that there’s not some amazing things
35:20 happening but i think we have to to
35:22 build upon um you know giving our our all of our employees a
35:27 voice so they feel value and heard you
35:30 know there’s there’s tons of research and i’m not i’m not gonna
35:33 bore you with all the research but you know
35:35 one of the things that you know whether it’s john hattie or many
35:38 additional universities across the
35:39 country have done is talked about the key MP the key pieces to
35:43 again academic excellence goes back to
35:45 the teachers but then it also talks about how do we support
35:48 teachers we think naturally that it’s the
35:51 financial piece that makes teachers not want to stay in this
35:54 profession and actually it’s it’s teachers not
35:57 feeling valued and so we have to do a job we can do a better job
36:00 every district can do a better job it’s not
36:03 not brevard in in isolation by any means but it’s how can we do
36:06 a better job and making sure our
36:08 teachers feel valued invested in and then continue to go through
36:11 i know there’s some great programs
36:12 already that that identifies teachers that want to go and and to
36:16 the next level and and identifying them
36:19 and making sure they’re successful through that program i think
36:21 we can expound upon that and then i
36:23 think those that still want us to remain teachers we need great
36:25 teachers to remain great teachers
36:27 to make sure that they still as a teacher feels valued and knows
36:31 their worth
36:35 you have any follow-up ms jenkins no i i want to keep i only
36:38 have the five so i want to keep it
36:40 consistent between every candidate but thank you so much thank
36:43 you all right yeah yeah um miss
36:47 campbell wants me to ask you what your favorite ice cream flavor
36:50 is just keep the ice breaking
36:51 throughout the last answer i gave board chair susan put his pen
36:56 down i don’t think he’s a gator fan so i
36:58 whatever board i should say that this time
37:01 you can say that for every single one of those icebreakers
37:06 my daughter ended up um i’m a long time seminole my daughter um
37:12 two years ago ended up going to the
37:14 gators i think specifically because i was a seminole so it’s
37:17 just a long-running thing with me man they’re
37:20 an amazing school and i’m very proud of them anybody in the
37:22 state of florida we should always promote
37:24 so yeah i uh i do that for fun it’s a whole thing we’ve been
37:27 doing around here for a while so thank you
37:29 for noticing that my wife is a florida state alum so there we go
37:32 that helps counter anything
37:34 anyways um thank you so much uh i had i was focused around
37:39 exceptional workforce um you’ll notice that
37:43 the majority of this board uh we’re all part of the brevard
37:46 public school system whether we were
37:48 teachers or something else and i think that um we care both
37:51 inside and out both as parents which we
37:53 all are and then we have that that piece so like when we when
37:56 you’re speaking to us we have first-hand
37:58 knowledge inside of that classroom so thank you so much for your
38:01 emphasis so far on the teacher it
38:03 means a lot to me at least and i know it does to them um what is
38:07 your my first question is what is
38:09 your immediate plan for teacher substitute and bus driver
38:13 recruitment and i know you have something
38:15 tomorrow to show to us but if you can if you have some sort of
38:18 ideas that you guys do there or something
38:20 because i think the public is wanting to know around that
38:23 because that is arguably one of our top issues
38:26 yes sir um absolutely i i well for one we know that um human
38:31 capital is is the top commodity for whether
38:34 it’s a school district or any other business across this country
38:39 right now um and so we have to be able
38:42 to showcase what we do uniquely compared to any other business
38:47 in in this community but also in the state
38:49 of florida in my in my opinion and so i think that goes back to
38:54 developing a plan that shows that that
38:56 our our personnel will have a voice and be valued and what that
39:00 looks like can evolve and so i don’t want
39:03 to specific speak on specifics but i think what the first and
39:06 foremost we need to have those bus drivers
39:08 and and come in and let’s talk to them what can we do to make
39:11 your job
39:14 more enjoyable and and and and and then the same thing with our
39:18 with our teachers and with our those
39:20 vacancies we have to make sure that they they feel valued no one
39:23 does this work because they’re going
39:26 to be rich tomorrow and so i think that’s first and foremost to
39:29 listen to them what are their their
39:31 desires when reading the reports it sounds like safety and
39:35 security for for those for actually all of
39:37 them is extremely important so what does that look like for each
39:41 one i think we need to lay it out
39:43 where it’s it’s so specific that what does it look like what
39:46 does it sound like what does it feel like
39:48 etc to be able to then say okay to make sure that they know we’ve
39:52 listened to their concerns and that
39:54 we are going to immediately and aggressively address those
39:57 concerns first and foremost and then you know
40:00 obviously negotiations and and discussions with the unions i
40:04 think that’s that’s extremely important
40:07 because they have you know firsthand knowledge as well as what
40:10 their what their employees are feeling
40:11 what they need so that’s where i would start and and then also
40:15 what other initiatives we can move
40:17 forth on in in the future so i’m sure that salaries and
40:20 compensation and things like that might be
40:24 you know something that they would want to look at um i would
40:27 need to to i’m not privy to the budget
40:29 at this point in time and see if that’s an option but i think we
40:32 need to put all things on the table
40:34 and make sure that they know we legitimately are putting all
40:36 things on the table and be vulnerable
40:38 enough to accept what their feedback is and to take it and and
40:42 also then have them have a say in what
40:44 our next steps are and what our actions would be thank you
40:48 thanks for that um how do you make sure
40:52 professional development programs initiatives have impacted the
40:55 knowledge skills and practices of educators
40:58 what metrics so in in my current role you know we we realized
41:04 that um what we put in place was not
41:08 working and what what that was is is is our walkthrough
41:11 monitoring tool we realized it wasn’t working
41:13 and the way we realized it is because we actually listened to
41:16 our teachers and our principals that said
41:18 you know what you’re coming in to measure only holds teachers
41:21 accountable it doesn’t look at the full
41:23 body of work and so i took that that information and we redeveloped
41:27 a walkthrough tool that that the
41:30 very there’s only there’s three sections the first section is
41:34 the only section that actually focuses on
41:36 what the teachers are doing or some would argue are not doing
41:40 and then the rest of it is about student
41:42 outcomes so i think that same approach would apply to whether
41:45 professional development is working or not
41:47 we cannot just focus on what the teacher is or isn’t doing it’s
41:51 about are we getting the results all
41:54 the way through to our children because all professional
41:56 development in my opinion should have a direct
41:59 impact on student learning so my challenge would be to to imp to
42:03 see what tool what walkthrough tool we
42:05 have to monitor the professional development that’s been put in
42:09 place i think it’s crucial though that we
42:11 don’t have a million different initiatives in reference to
42:13 professional development i think we need to
42:15 streamline it to make sure again we have three elements of my
42:18 current district i think that’s
42:19 extremely important that we have professional development that’s
42:23 centered around our initiatives
42:24 and our priorities of the district and that’s what we monitor
42:27 and that’s what we focus on because we
42:29 want to make sure that we’re supporting our teachers teachers
42:32 feel as if they’re being and and i’ll speak to
42:34 my current district teachers had felt as if they were being
42:37 pulled in many different directions and so when
42:40 someone came in to monitor what they were doing what they were
42:43 being monitored on was not with the
42:45 professional development they received because every department
42:48 was was presenting their own different
42:49 types of professional development and we were not aligned so i
42:52 think alignment is crucial and then
42:54 developing one true walkthrough tool that that measures what our
42:58 initiatives are and that aligns with
43:00 the true professional development that we’re giving from our
43:02 district that’s awesome thank you next question is what will any
43:06 teacher
43:07 what will any teachers organization slash union um that you have
43:11 worked with tell us about you
43:14 what would what would your staff organizations what would they
43:17 tell us if we um went up to duval and said
43:20 hey what’s this guy about what would that be um i have a great
43:23 relationship with miss brady um that’s our dtu
43:26 president in um in duval and i think she would tell you that um
43:29 we don’t always agree um but we work hard to make sure we come
43:33 to a compromise that is still benefits
43:35 not only our employees but also our students um i feel confident
43:40 in my ability to to work with people with
43:43 head that have all different beliefs and different perspectives
43:46 um i think that’s evident in my
43:48 letters of recommendation um with i have three board members
43:52 recommendations but those three board members are
43:54 are uniquely different in in many ways and but i think that
43:58 speaks to my ability to to work with all
44:02 again it’s about building relationships and and and making sure
44:05 people know your heart your intention
44:06 and your passion and then being willing to be vulnerable enough
44:10 to hear them when they tell
44:12 you that certain things are not working not just listen to them
44:15 but actually listen and hear what
44:16 they’re saying so i do believe that the the union members
44:20 members and and then also the the president
44:23 um would say that i i i am fair and and i also am consistent um
44:28 but willing to compromise and be
44:31 vulnerable enough to listen thank you for that uh next question
44:34 is what has your district done to
44:37 develop and maintain a collaborative relationship with employees
44:40 includes issues of morale communications and
44:42 team building describe your role in this so we do have the five
44:46 essential survey that’s from the university of
44:50 chicago that we put out every year that gives our our employees
44:53 the opportunity to give anonymous feedback
44:56 my my role in this is to ensure that we have percentages to that
45:01 would that are needed to actually
45:03 get a report because you have to hit you know it’s all different
45:07 depend upon parents and input
45:09 or teachers input and what levels that we need it’s different to
45:12 get a report from each area but that’s my
45:15 role but but in addition to that role of just getting it done is
45:18 actually then reviewing the data because
45:20 it can’t just be that we’re giving people a survey to take and
45:22 then when we get the results back we just
45:24 move on there’s it’s there’s there’s no point of doing that
45:27 survey there’s no point of spending that
45:29 money because it’s everything’s costly and takes away monies
45:32 from schools so what what i see by that
45:36 that actual survey it does tell us key key crucial things do i
45:40 feel safe in my school do i feel valued
45:44 in my school and do i feel like i am being invested in etc so
45:48 there’s a lot of pieces that we can take
45:50 from that five essential survey and and based upon that feedback
45:54 then we must review that feedback and
45:56 then what what my also in my current role is i task my
46:00 principals um to make sure that they review that
46:04 data and then they have an overall synopsis summary that’s given
46:08 to their faculty and staff because
46:10 the faculty and staff needs to know again that their voice was
46:13 heard and that what are we going to do
46:15 to address it they can go through their shared governance team
46:18 to to address it but it has to overall
46:20 summary has to be shared with their with their entire faculty
46:23 and staff to again share and it also forces
46:26 our administrators to be vulnerable and again listen i mean we
46:29 have in here what their what their their
46:31 community is saying because sometimes it’s easier easy for us to
46:35 dis you know discount what the community
46:38 is saying and oh well i’m doing this but when you see it in
46:41 black and white and you continue to see
46:43 that you have not you know continued to grow in certain areas
46:48 then there’s no person to look
46:49 at but yourself i’ve always been told that the world can’t be
46:53 wrong and you be right and so i think
46:55 that’s something that we talk about now with that being said we’re
46:58 there the region superintendents
47:00 myself are there to go assist that principal with some of their
47:03 their areas of weakness and areas that
47:05 need to grow and then we also celebrate those areas of success
47:08 as well and we do a share out with
47:10 all schools to be able to say well i had this great rating in
47:13 this area so what are you doing to make
47:15 your employees feel this way in this area so we can have that
47:17 that collaborative work
47:19 that’s a great thing thank you for that um next question just so
47:22 you guys know i’m going to change
47:24 it up just a little bit but i’ll keep it consistent uh because
47:26 it’s just long and it yeah you know what
47:28 i mean um basically our school district tries to uh utilize
47:31 technology in as many places as possible
47:34 and one of the problems we always have is as soon as you upgrade
47:36 technology there’s always the learning
47:38 curve and everything else right which is a massive problem for
47:41 us in that we want to move to one thing but
47:43 we find it difficult and stuff like that so describe a time when
47:46 you may have led in the implementation of a new
47:48 technology in your district what challenges and obstacles did
47:52 you encounter what was the success
47:53 of that technology and is it measurable so the the biggest i’ll
47:58 say the biggest positive impact in
48:01 technology that we’ve done in our school district um well i’ll
48:04 tell you two if you don’t mind um first
48:06 and foremost we went one-to-one in our district for for high
48:09 schools and middle schools and we’re almost
48:12 100 percent there in in our elementary schools which sounds
48:16 amazing but the the other part that we had
48:19 to realize that you know sometimes when kids get home and they
48:22 use those that those those devices in
48:25 not the the best way how are we addressing that how are we
48:28 monitoring that so there had to be this this
48:30 this curve of how we trained not only our teachers to be able to
48:34 utilize technology in their classroom
48:36 with with our different um virtual platforms because that’s that’s
48:40 that’s hard to to make sure that you
48:42 can work that into your your your classroom setting you know you’re
48:46 used to your regiments we go from math
48:49 we go to you know science to social studies etc in elementary
48:52 but how am i going to incorporate these
48:54 devices that sounds great that you gave them without it being a
48:57 scheduled day class like today we’re going
49:00 to use our laptops no it has to be a fluid process so we
49:03 definitely had to make sure that we provide
49:05 professional development but we but more than just a curriculum
49:08 we had to go in and actually model
49:10 for teachers how to use that that those that device and how to
49:13 utilize it during the classrooms set up
49:16 then we also had to train our our our students to make sure they
49:19 knew what where to go and how to do
49:21 it so we went to a single sign-on which is crucial because that
49:25 allows us to monitor things that’s one
49:27 one side of of of that of that of that piece which i would speak
49:31 more but i knew we don’t have my son so
49:34 and then the other side though i think from a district
49:37 standpoint we’ve we’ve went to a data
49:39 analysis side of things and data assessment piece that actually
49:43 includes our data dashboard so in
49:46 the past as when i was a principal we used to have to crunch
49:48 numbers and figure out you know we have
49:50 this process that’s called a four-step process where we identify
49:53 our students that have their weaknesses
49:55 once we identify the students have the greatest weaknesses we
49:57 look at the you know the areas that
49:59 we need to focus on we identify those students and we and we and
50:02 we have to utilize all different
50:04 pieces of data because it can’t be one piece of data and so we
50:06 triangulate data whether that’s achieve
50:08 3000 data whether that’s our progress monitoring data whether
50:12 that’s past data all those other elements
50:15 but it takes a lot of time to do it well now in our district we’ve
50:18 created a dashboard that has
50:20 all of that information if you want to look at you know i need
50:24 30 percent of my you know eighth graders
50:27 to be proficient in ela and that’s a low percentage just an
50:30 example but at 30 to be proficient in ela
50:33 how many students is that i can literally hit a button and it’ll
50:37 give that to me not only will it give
50:38 that to me it’ll give it to me in order of who is the closest to
50:42 achieving that that number so that
50:45 sounds great all that data being at your fingertips but if you
50:48 don’t train principals of how to utilize
50:50 this data then it means nothing and then we realize that not
50:54 only do we need to train principals because
50:56 when you train principals that sounds great but who does the
50:59 work it’s the teachers who’s who’s who the
51:01 ones that are providing that intervention the you know tier two
51:03 interventions tier three interventions
51:05 that you’re needed to address those concerns it’s the teachers
51:08 so now just this year we finally have
51:10 gotten to a place where we can roll that out to have much of
51:13 that data at the fingertips of our of our
51:15 of our teachers as well so technology can be a great thing but
51:19 you there are growing pains through that
51:21 technology through pieces we’re fortunate enough to continue to
51:26 to expand upon our broadband with and
51:28 things along those lines but how it’s implemented in schools and
51:32 how we provide that professional development
51:34 is is what i’ve been involved with it’s pretty consistent with
51:37 what we’ve seen in the implementations and
51:38 everything else thank you so much for taking that time i
51:41 remember as a teacher um one of the funny things
51:43 was is that uh we had a couple of teachers that really didn’t
51:46 utilize their emails and stuff like
51:48 that so we had secretaries that would print their emails that
51:51 were important and put it in their inboxes so
51:52 so we’ve come very far when you go to that to see where we are
51:56 today from those uh years
51:59 passed so next one i’m going to give it over to uh board member
52:01 campbell please are you familiar with
52:03 that process of having no not at all okay actually i was in
52:06 charge of the technology team so all right
52:09 good good job all right well my area you can you might be able
52:13 to tell that i don’t that we all picked
52:16 you know smoothly i think mr trent got the leftovers but we’re
52:20 all passionate about the areas we’re asking
52:21 these questions and i could absolutely say this about community
52:24 connections so you want to start me
52:26 mr susan’s all right all right what are your ideas about
52:30 engaging families who are inexperienced with
52:33 participating or who have had negative experiences with
52:36 education and how would you help your staff to
52:38 reach out to those families successfully and respectfully so it’s
52:42 accessibility right um you know we have to
52:47 make sure that we’re going out to the community so whether that’s
52:50 um whatever housing developments and
52:52 and and be part of that that community and and and even if the
52:56 two people show up the first time we keep
52:59 going back out and we make sure that we’re bringing the
53:01 information to the communities we currently um i’m
53:04 involved in developing we have a chat with the superintendent
53:08 and then also the board member that’s assigned to that
53:11 area and we do it um you know quarterly and in different regions
53:16 of our of our district and and
53:18 we market that and we make sure that we try to get as many
53:21 people as possible and we go to any and all
53:24 schools that are that you know continue to say that they need
53:26 some assistance and want to have their
53:28 voices heard so first and foremost accessibility we got to go
53:31 out to the community um i think it’s important
53:33 for so many reasons for one you know again as you spoke to
53:36 parents might not know what what education that
53:39 their children are being provided or not being provided or what
53:42 their children need but it’s
53:43 also to make sure that we can showcase what we are doing um i
53:46 think that’s that’s extremely important
53:48 right now with when you talk about you know um florida house
53:52 bill one you know that’s extremely
53:54 important to make sure that we are going out into all
53:56 communities and showcasing what we’re doing for
53:58 all students not just parts of town not just parts of the
54:01 community but for all all all all parts of the
54:04 community i think the other piece too is that you know we need
54:08 to to include them in as many events
54:11 um and sometimes that’s hard because you know we do know that
54:14 parents some parents have had negative
54:16 experiences with schools and never want to take take step on
54:19 that uh that school campus again
54:21 and we understand that um so we have to appeal to faith-based
54:26 organizations things along those lines
54:28 get in get into whatever if it’s if we have to go to church on
54:31 sunday then i’m gonna go to church on
54:33 sunday if i have to go to 10 churches on sunday i’m gonna go to
54:35 10 churches on sunday because at the
54:37 end of the day we have to go where our our constituents feel
54:40 comfortable and that’s really
54:41 what it is they’re not going to come to our schools if they don’t
54:43 feel comfortable because of negative
54:45 experiences so accessibility is crucial thank you what has been
54:50 your experience or interaction with local
54:53 business and community groups what have you specifically done to
54:56 ensure a positive working
54:58 relationship with economic development groups chamber of
55:00 commerce groups philanthropic groups so i have
55:04 a i’m in charge of faith-based organization partnerships so we
55:08 definitely have we have a large
55:11 group of faith-based partners that we work with and so much so
55:15 that that our goal is to have every
55:17 single school attached to a faith-based partner so in that
55:20 regard i’m i’m very involved in reference to
55:24 partnerships and you know i’m involved with developing
55:27 partnerships with to address to address school
55:31 needs so whether that’s a haskell that’s a business inside of
55:36 our community that has done internships
55:38 that i’ve been a part of beyond school’s walls with you know and
55:42 working with boys and girls clubs to
55:44 expand our after day programs that’s that’s also falls under my
55:49 my current position and i think that’s
55:51 crucial we we actually have a partnership currently right now
55:54 that’s working on utilizing a vacant
55:56 building that’s on a campus or near a campus to turn that into a
55:59 boys and girls club but then how
56:01 does that benefit our school that’s there and it’s in a low
56:04 socioeconomic part of town so i’m very
56:07 comfortable and accustomed to working through those sides of
56:11 things my um the other piece too is i also
56:15 know that it’s extremely important to include the jacksonville
56:19 sorry jackson chamber of commerce
56:20 where i work and then here in brevard chamber of commerce
56:23 because when we talk about recruiting and
56:25 retaining the best teachers and getting people to come we have
56:28 to showcase everything that this
56:30 community offers um and so the jackson i keep saying jackson i
56:34 apologize but the brevard chamber of
56:36 commerce is crucial to make sure that we include them to to be
56:39 able to help us what they put out is is
56:42 important we have to take our show on the road um and we have to
56:47 go to to outside of this district to
56:49 to get the people to come but we also have to go outside of our
56:53 our our home of of our school
56:55 district as well to get those community partners so i’m very
56:58 accustomed to working with multiple
57:00 different entities um not quite as much with the city council
57:04 but in every other side i’m very
57:06 accustomed to it and comfortable with it and the key is again
57:09 building relationships and making sure that
57:11 we all have a common goal and one thing i have learned is that
57:15 you can’t just go to a business
57:16 partner and say hey i need your help um i have to go to them
57:20 with a specific thing or item or initiative
57:23 that i need their help with so whether that’s internships which
57:26 again i spoke to here is is being
57:28 able to bring our show to the campuses of our our amazing
57:31 businesses we have to go to them with our
57:33 our initiative and say this is what our goal is this is how you
57:37 can help us and are you willing
57:38 to jump on board with us and if not is there something in
57:40 between that we can stay we’ll start
57:42 with great thank you we have four chambers by the way not to be
57:46 stressed but they all are nice they play
57:49 nice um so good segue actually into my next question which has
57:52 to do with elected officials so
57:54 how important is it and what specific roles have you played
57:58 personally in dealing with your uh the
58:00 legislature the congressional delegation the county and city
58:04 officials or um or any other agencies
58:06 so it we i play a pretty significant role um with any time there’s
58:12 an event at a school we make sure
58:15 that they’re included because for one if you’re ever going to go
58:18 to someone and ask for support later on
58:20 you must have them involved in things before then you know it’s
58:24 kind of like in schools before you call
58:25 a parent and tell them how bad their kid is or what their kid’s
58:28 not doing you should call them first
58:30 and foremost to tell them how great their child is and and some
58:32 of the great work they’ve done so it’s
58:35 the same thing with including our elective elected officials we
58:37 need to include them in every step of
58:39 the way the other piece too is that they’re that we need to tap
58:42 into the resources that they have
58:43 that we might not be aware of they have the knowledge to know
58:47 when certain funds are coming and how that
58:50 is going to be allocated to certain areas so in my current
58:53 district we have you know we i work closely
58:56 with kids hope alliance and make sure that also work closely
58:59 with the with the mayor’s council because
59:01 all of that is geared by his by his budget and so how much
59:04 funding is going to be there how does that
59:06 impact our after school programs so it is crucial to involve our
59:10 elected officials now there is a line
59:13 right so you know we we they’re they’re specific to what they do
59:18 as in their role and we’re specific
59:20 to specialists in our role which is in education but it doesn’t
59:23 mean that we can’t collaborate and work
59:25 together because their constituents are coming to them with real
59:29 concerns and we need to be open and
59:31 and vulnerable enough to hear what those concerns are and work
59:34 together to solve it so for instance in
59:36 our district we’ve worked a great deal with many different uh
59:38 council members um to put in places for
59:42 safety such as crosswalks that we normally would have never had
59:45 approved if it wasn’t for their assistance
59:47 also if you’re looking at you know we we also were fortunate
59:50 enough to have a half penny sales tax
59:52 be supported by many council members and put on the ballot and
59:57 passed by our voters as well as as another
1:00:00 referendum just recently on the heels of that half penny sales
1:00:03 tax so those elements if you’re looking
1:00:05 at doing huge initiatives that impacts the entire community we
1:00:09 must involve our elected officials and
1:00:11 work together for a common good thank you so much all right
1:00:15 presenting information in a highly charged
1:00:18 situation into a variety of groups is a part of a superintendent’s
1:00:22 job give an example of how you
1:00:24 have encountered opposition and how you dealt with the resulting
1:00:27 situation um you know it when you’re
1:00:34 responsible for people’s uh pride and joy and their most
1:00:37 valuable possession uh you know i say possession
1:00:40 but their valuable um item that they’re charged to to to to work
1:00:45 with and ensure that are successful you’re
1:00:49 bound to face you know criticism and and it’s something that i
1:00:52 welcome to be completely honest
1:00:54 i have been successful um because of the teams i’ve been able to
1:01:00 put together i ensure that my team
1:01:03 knows that i do not want you to agree with me just for the sake
1:01:06 of agreeing with me i need you to push
1:01:08 back that’s the reason why i surround myself with professionals
1:01:11 and that they can poke holes in our
1:01:13 initiative our plans and if i ever become defensive because of
1:01:18 someone questioning my plan or questioning
1:01:21 my initiative then that means i shouldn’t be moving forward on
1:01:24 this because i must not know it as much
1:01:27 as i should i can’t if i can’t explain it multiple ways i hold
1:01:30 myself to the same accountability as i hold
1:01:33 teachers if a teacher teaches information and a student doesn’t
1:01:36 learn you can’t just teach it the same way
1:01:39 over and over and over again and expect different results and so
1:01:42 i i face the same thing and i hold
1:01:44 myself to that same level of accountability that if i can’t
1:01:47 explain it where everybody is is on board and
1:01:49 understands the the purpose and that in the rationale then that
1:01:53 means we shouldn’t be moving forward i
1:01:55 should be able to explain it multiple different ways and to
1:01:58 different stakeholders because again
1:02:00 every stakeholder has is has their their reasons why they’re
1:02:04 doing what they’re doing so if i’m talking to a
1:02:07 parent i need to make sure that it applies to a parent if i’m
1:02:09 talking to a board member i need to make
1:02:11 sure that here’s the reason why it applies to that board member
1:02:14 etc so i welcome scrutiny and criticism
1:02:16 you know we when i when i implemented the walkthrough tool got a
1:02:21 lot of criticism from from personnel
1:02:24 because they thought that it was just one more thing but when we
1:02:27 rolled it out and we were transparent
1:02:29 about the process and that actually we showed how it could
1:02:31 benefit and actually remove some of the other
1:02:34 information in the evaluation systems then i think people were
1:02:38 more willing to buy in but it’s not
1:02:39 about words it’s about actions you know you can say whatever you
1:02:43 want to say and unfortunately sometimes
1:02:45 when you’re at a in a high ranking position people don’t always
1:02:48 take your words at face value and so
1:02:50 it’s your actions that speak louder than your words and so you
1:02:53 have to be consistent and transparent so
1:02:54 that’s that’s how i would deal with criticism but i welcome it
1:02:57 and i expect it and to be honest with you
1:02:59 it shows that that people are invested in in in our district and
1:03:02 want the best for their children i do
1:03:04 i can completely understand i i am i am highly critical of
1:03:08 anyone that’s teaching my children
1:03:11 now i don’t voice that because i’m a i’m a teacher at heart so i
1:03:15 know but i sit back and i watch what
1:03:17 they’re doing and ensure that my children are heading in the
1:03:19 right direction but i welcome that
1:03:20 thank you my last question um is what have you or your district
1:03:26 done to respond to the use of drugs
1:03:29 alcohol tobacco vaping etc by students so i’ll start with the
1:03:35 vaping piece it’s new right and so it’s
1:03:38 it’s it’s a struggle because you know vaping is not like it used
1:03:41 to be it’s you know it holds if you
1:03:43 haven’t seen some of the new vaping devices it would surprise
1:03:46 you um some things that look like
1:03:48 everyday items are now vaping devices and so you know we have to
1:03:52 evolve of how we’re looking for
1:03:54 things and and how how we’re searching children randomly
1:03:58 searching children or or as we get words
1:04:00 and things along those lines how we’re dealing with that but but
1:04:03 first and foremost we really have to
1:04:04 educate our children because people especially with vaping think
1:04:08 that vaping is a safe alternative
1:04:10 to smoking or use of tobacco and things and we really have to do
1:04:14 a better job in educating our children
1:04:16 and educating our parents to educate their children our children
1:04:20 model what their parents do and what
1:04:23 they see people in the community do and so i think it’s
1:04:26 important to get out to the community and to
1:04:28 make sure that we we speak to them so that’s one of the things
1:04:30 that we’re doing in our district
1:04:32 we do have assemblies to to to talk about you know well-being
1:04:35 and health care of themselves and making
1:04:37 sure that they understand um the those pieces out in addition to
1:04:42 that we do have um we have
1:04:45 implemented evolved systems in our in our district and those
1:04:48 evolved weapons detection systems in our
1:04:51 district um so it does help a little bit more with picking up
1:04:54 devices that kids are walking through
1:04:56 so all of our uh well we’re almost there we have about 13 of our
1:04:59 high schools now that have those
1:05:01 evolved systems in place and so it does help at the high school
1:05:04 level but we are seeing that the use is
1:05:07 becoming much more widespread in in our middle schools as well
1:05:10 that’s vaping specific we also have we have
1:05:14 to look at technology so we actually have two pilot schools now
1:05:17 that have vaping detection systems
1:05:19 in their schools as well so where we know that it’s most common
1:05:23 which is in the bathrooms so we have
1:05:25 vaping detection systems there and then we also have to have
1:05:28 again continue to we talk about see safe
1:05:30 say see something say something in reference to safety but we
1:05:33 also have to have that connection with
1:05:35 our children that if they see one of their their their friends
1:05:38 that might be doing something that’s
1:05:40 dangerous to them that they could say something to us so we can
1:05:43 then address it not in a in a punitive
1:05:45 way but in a proactive um well-being way um for for the
1:05:49 additional drugs et cetera we do um we kind
1:05:53 of approach it the same way i will tell you that um our major
1:05:57 you know issue is vaping though it’s it’s actually not the use
1:06:01 of other drugs it’s not you know it’s not that you we had the
1:06:05 opioid
1:06:05 crisis and things along those lines and we’ve seen that
1:06:08 definitely taper down
1:06:09 but we do have a robust um code of conduct that addresses what
1:06:14 happens when when we do have that
1:06:15 violation we have a substance abuse course that our students and
1:06:19 their parent must attend with with
1:06:21 their with their student if they are in violation of that that
1:06:24 policy and i do think that that’s
1:06:26 significant it’s a six-week course um and unfortunately um or
1:06:30 fortunately you can look at it two different ways
1:06:33 when you inconvenience parents sometimes that has to happen and
1:06:36 in order for them to take it serious
1:06:38 to be able to help their child but that’s been very beneficial
1:06:42 in combating the use of additional
1:06:43 drugs as well thank you very much i want a remaining 56 seconds
1:06:47 what’s your favorite animal lion a lion all right
1:06:55 all right all right well now we’re at operational sustainability
1:07:05 so i know you’ve been waiting for
1:07:06 this one right i can see how excited you are yeah i am this is
1:07:10 good you got the leftovers this is
1:07:12 actually what i wanted to begin with so when we chose all right
1:07:16 so um i’ll start start with what
1:07:18 what is the most challenging operational issue in school
1:07:20 districts today and how do you approach this
1:07:23 challenge i think in most school districts it’s it’s the
1:07:28 learning environment you know so um operationally
1:07:32 how do we make sure that we bring the the best um and most
1:07:37 advanced learning environment to our schools
1:07:40 some of our schools are are considerably older and it’s just
1:07:44 enough to continue to repair those
1:07:46 buildings and to keep them in working condition so how do we
1:07:49 retrofit those schools to bring the to
1:07:52 bring the learning environment up to where it should be first
1:07:54 and foremost and then of course with that
1:07:57 where’s that funding come from so there’s a lot of financial
1:08:00 pieces that come along with that
1:08:03 but definitely the learning environment and how can we bring
1:08:07 that up to par to make sure that our teachers
1:08:09 and our students have the the most modern resources at their
1:08:13 fingertips so they’re not at a disadvantage
1:08:15 compared to other students in the state or in the country very
1:08:19 good which this one kind of leads into
1:08:23 it share us uh share with us an example of when you were
1:08:27 especially involved or innovative let’s start this
1:08:30 one over share with us an example of when you were especially
1:08:33 innovative in addressing a funding gap
1:08:36 now there’s some caveats here the situation your obstacles the
1:08:41 risk involved and then the outcome
1:08:43 so i’ll use the uh technology piece the one-to-one that was our
1:08:48 goal we we had a in our strategic
1:08:50 plan we wanted to move forward to making sure all of our
1:08:52 students had one-to-one devices um and again
1:08:54 you know they’re they’re considerably expensive because you know
1:08:58 when you when you buy
1:08:59 devices i think sometimes the public has you know well we can go
1:09:02 to a best buy or to a place and buy
1:09:05 a laptop they’re 200 but actually the laptops and devices that
1:09:09 we’re looking at are extremely
1:09:12 more expensive than that you know somewhere upwards about three
1:09:14 thousand dollars because
1:09:15 you’re trying to get commercial grade so you’re not reinvesting
1:09:18 and you know after all them get
1:09:19 broken and things dropped and the cases and all those things so
1:09:22 knowing we wanted to go to one-to-one
1:09:25 knowing the reasons why um that that was that was the the intent
1:09:28 first and what we were trying to
1:09:30 accomplish the financial obstacles became you know just that an
1:09:34 obstacle and we had to figure out a
1:09:36 way to overcome that so what we’ve done is is is we actually
1:09:39 have you know made sure we went after grants
1:09:42 so we worked with in the company of sprint to go after grants
1:09:46 for for funding for you know the additional
1:09:49 a piece to it too a device is not you cannot be utilized unless
1:09:53 you have wi-fi so we had we went
1:09:55 through them to get hot spots for our children so so there’s
1:09:58 things that we continue to uncover once
1:10:00 we got those we were looking at one-to-one devices so we had
1:10:03 that grant and they were provided you know
1:10:05 it was a it was a free grant that we went to then we also have
1:10:07 another grant because the other piece
1:10:09 too is that not only do we want one-to-one devices in schools
1:10:13 but if we don’t let those students take
1:10:15 them home or they take them home and don’t bring them back what
1:10:17 are we going to do so then we went
1:10:19 after an additional grant that we got 45 000 units for our our
1:10:24 most um low socioeconomic or disadvantaged
1:10:28 students to have a laptop at home that they don’t have to bring
1:10:31 back and forth to school so this way
1:10:34 we didn’t have to worry about our investment that they were
1:10:36 having to be able to utilize the school so
1:10:38 we had 45 000 free units there and we had approximately 10 000
1:10:42 free hot spots and i think then we got an
1:10:44 additional wave um so again all that sounds great but how you
1:10:48 distribute it how do you get it out to the
1:10:50 to the to the individuals so we had to walk through that process
1:10:54 as well so the most innovative thing
1:10:55 that we’ve done is is to provide those one-on-one devices the
1:10:59 obstacles financial obstacles we had to
1:11:02 look at other funds funding sources um and you know yes
1:11:05 eventually when when esser funds came around
1:11:08 that that was great that helped some but we know that then then
1:11:12 we’re on the esser cliff right now
1:11:14 but in addition to that then how to how to make sure that we got
1:11:17 those but then provided the ability
1:11:19 to use those at home and provided the ability to use those
1:11:22 inside the classroom so um that’s that’s
1:11:25 the biggest initiative that i’ve been a part of in reference to
1:11:27 technology but then there’s you know
1:11:30 again not to continue to go down this path but it’s just kind of
1:11:32 if you can kind of keep it in your mind of
1:11:34 what we did you know it took us years to go through this but do
1:11:38 we have enough broadband with to do it
1:11:40 and then to expand that what does that look like because
1:11:42 broadband with you know expanding that is
1:11:44 extremely expensive so the most recent initiative that we took
1:11:48 is is um actually utilizing um um
1:11:52 it’s um i want to say the right terminology i want to say it’s
1:11:57 it’s um it’s dark dark fiber um we’ve now
1:12:01 utilized dark fiber and dark fiber is that that has been laid in
1:12:04 the past that’s not utilized right now
1:12:06 but it’s free to utilize it and so we’ve actually tapped into
1:12:10 that resources so some of now we’ve we’ve
1:12:13 continued to expound upon that so we’re not locked in to one
1:12:18 provider that you know those costs can be
1:12:20 extremely expensive so a lot of those things have come into play
1:12:23 to to overcome different obstacles
1:12:25 that we uncovered along the way as well great i appreciate that
1:12:30 describe your experience with
1:12:32 strategic planning for a large organization well first and
1:12:37 foremost we we you have to you have to
1:12:42 look at data and to to evaluate what your priorities are but by
1:12:47 doing that you you have to include
1:12:49 stakeholders so again the relationship with the board and and
1:12:53 going to to you as the as the governing
1:12:56 party to talk about what is the what is the what that that you
1:13:00 are looking to see um is crucial and
1:13:03 important then we must get the input from from those around us
1:13:07 so i’ve looked at the strategic plan um for
1:13:10 here and and you know i think it’s important to make sure that
1:13:13 we continue to review it and i noticed that
1:13:15 y’all’s has been reviewed and and just re-updated so it’s in it’s
1:13:19 it’s important to look at a street
1:13:21 strategic plan often to see if you’re on the right track is this
1:13:23 still what the community needs is still
1:13:25 what our school needs i would also challenge that instead of
1:13:28 doing a four or five year strategic plan
1:13:31 that we have it’s it’s an 18-month strategic plan because so
1:13:36 much changes in in a in a span of four
1:13:39 or five years and i think it’s important yes we do need to see
1:13:42 the future we do need to plan for the
1:13:44 future but i truly believe that an 18-month plan is is not only
1:13:49 um more realistic to actually accomplish
1:13:53 but it also has you continue to focus on the the immediate
1:13:56 present in the immediate future so with that
1:13:59 all being said i think it’s important to make sure that all
1:14:01 stakeholders have a voice and that we are
1:14:04 not leaving anything out and then once we narrow those those
1:14:07 items down to what those four or five
1:14:09 elements are going to be that they also have a say and what what
1:14:12 does that look like how we’re going
1:14:14 to monitor it and then what does success look like um i think
1:14:17 oftentimes and i’ll speak in my in my
1:14:19 current situation we do not identify what success looks like we
1:14:23 don’t agree on what success looks like
1:14:25 and so then we get to a strategic plan and we have this
1:14:28 percentage in there um and yes we might have
1:14:31 met that percentage but does it mirror what we thought that it
1:14:35 was going to truly look like um you know and
1:14:38 so one example one small example of that is one of the pieces in
1:14:41 our strategic plan was uh you know our
1:14:44 pbis schools and make sure that we had we had model schools in
1:14:48 our district and so um we you know a
1:14:50 positive behavior um situate and model schools and so one of the
1:14:55 things that we we we had was like a
1:14:57 60 percent goal and that sounds great 60 percent we’re going to
1:15:00 get to 60 percent but the reality
1:15:02 was within two years we were we were over that 60 percent
1:15:06 because we started figuring out how to to
1:15:09 meet the needs the credentials of becoming a model school so did
1:15:14 it actually did that success of meeting
1:15:16 that 60 percent goal did it actually look like we intended it to
1:15:20 no it didn’t because we we didn’t
1:15:22 have a drop in discipline data we didn’t have a uh you know
1:15:25 increased in student engagement we didn’t
1:15:28 you know our early warning systems were still showing us that
1:15:30 our we were still having kids not attending
1:15:32 school so that’s what i mean by having a clear identified you
1:15:36 know area that what does success look
1:15:38 like it needs to be included in that strategic plan as well nice
1:15:41 thank you how do you ensure climate
1:15:44 assessment results results are used in school improvement
1:15:47 planning across the district
1:15:49 so that part i’m sorry i apologize climate assessment results
1:15:52 surveys so i’ll go back to our um our five
1:15:55 essentials you know i think it’s it’s absolutely instrumental we
1:15:58 we do review that with our principals
1:16:00 um we make sure that you know especially you know there’s
1:16:02 actually a climate um and culture piece in
1:16:06 there and we talk about that with our with our with our our
1:16:09 principals and they have to actually embed that
1:16:11 into their school improvement plans um so that’s that’s crucial
1:16:15 every school has to submit a school
1:16:17 improvement plan as far as for the state so that has to be a
1:16:20 part of their plan and then what they’re
1:16:22 doing to to ensure and monitor that that’s happening there’s
1:16:26 outside um things that we measure
1:16:28 obviously um as well you know that are such as vacancies of
1:16:31 teachers teachers leaving that that school
1:16:34 um and and so those are other elements that we definitely look
1:16:37 at through our human resources department
1:16:40 are we having a large number of students or or well students and
1:16:43 teachers to be honest leaving that
1:16:45 school in that area so we look at that data and then we also
1:16:48 then make sure that it’s part of the
1:16:50 school improvement plan and then we work with the you know
1:16:54 obviously the school advisory council
1:16:56 that make sure they monitor the school improvement plan to make
1:16:58 sure that things are happening in that
1:16:59 building but culture and climate is felt and so we also have to
1:17:03 be out in schools you know it’s as as a
1:17:06 superintendent and and everyone that works force for the
1:17:10 district must have the the mentality that what
1:17:13 we do is all for one goal and that’s for what we’re doing school-based
1:17:16 that’s that’s really real where
1:17:18 the rubber hits the road so we have to be inside those schools
1:17:22 to feel what culture and climate is
1:17:25 in that building and and i think that is that cannot be you know
1:17:29 left out great and to the last question
1:17:34 how would you ensure that schools located in under-resourced
1:17:37 areas receive the attention
1:17:39 and the resources they need
1:17:40 so i think first and foremost we have to identify what that what
1:17:46 they are you know what what are the
1:17:48 weaknesses or the or the gaps that that those schools have money
1:17:51 is not the is is not the end-all be-all
1:17:54 that’s not the magic bullet it is you know what what other
1:17:58 things do they need so i’ll use an example in my
1:18:01 current district we developed a curriculum and we do believe
1:18:04 that that curriculum is is amazing curriculum
1:18:06 we use educators and specialized and people in in our in our in
1:18:10 our profession to create the curriculum
1:18:13 to embed all the theory to do all these things and so we we put
1:18:17 it out there it’s the best thing since
1:18:19 sliced bread in our opinion and so we put it out there and then
1:18:23 come to find out though we didn’t get the
1:18:25 autonomy for schools to be able to do different things based
1:18:29 upon the learning gaps that their
1:18:31 children had we literally rolled it out as a one-size-fits-all
1:18:34 and come to find out obviously very
1:18:37 quickly which is actually where my world is that we go out so
1:18:40 academic services develops the curriculum
1:18:43 we have input in that of course but then our job is to go out to
1:18:46 schools and see how is that curriculum
1:18:48 impacting learning and academic excellence and we realize oh my
1:18:51 goodness in some schools it’s working
1:18:53 extremely well and in other schools it’s not and it’s not based
1:18:56 upon it’s not because the schools
1:18:57 weren’t doing what they were asked it’s because their students
1:19:01 had larger had larger learning gaps and
1:19:03 so we had to adjust that so that’s part of that we have to make
1:19:06 sure that we know first and foremost
1:19:08 where that adjustment needs to happen so of course we then gave
1:19:11 the autonomy for those schools to come to
1:19:14 to their to their principal the teachers to come to their
1:19:16 principals and say this isn’t working my
1:19:19 children don’t know this so they can’t jump to this i have to
1:19:21 meet my children where they are and so we
1:19:23 have to have that autonomy to be able to do so and so that’s
1:19:26 that’s the reason why we were able to move
1:19:28 those school those SI schools those school improvements schools
1:19:32 to the levels of success that they were
1:19:34 because we realized a flaw in our in our process so going back
1:19:38 to that your question i think that’s what we
1:19:40 have to do we have to make sure we talk to the principals and
1:19:42 the teachers of that building we
1:19:44 cannot assume we know what they need we also have to talk to the
1:19:46 students and the parents of that
1:19:48 building because they will tell us honestly what they need they
1:19:51 will tell us when their child is not
1:19:54 getting what they believe their child needs or when they
1:19:56 struggle at home for two hours at night
1:19:57 because they can’t do the work so i think that we have to first
1:20:01 start there ask them the questions
1:20:03 and then realize what resources we’re looking at and then if we
1:20:06 have business partners whether it’s
1:20:08 you know in in our district we have communities and schools we
1:20:11 have many other business part we have
1:20:13 elevate we have other business partners that that actually the
1:20:15 funding didn’t have to come from our
1:20:17 district it was coming from the community partners where they
1:20:19 put additional teachers inside the
1:20:20 classroom or additional personnel to be able to have small
1:20:24 groups inside the classroom to offset the
1:20:26 class sizes because that’s what they needed so it can be as
1:20:29 simple as that or it can be as large as
1:20:31 yes we do need to to provide more funding to make sure they have
1:20:34 the same technology as every other school
1:20:36 just as a couple of examples great i just want to thank you for
1:20:41 your candid answers and honestly there
1:20:44 so that was it for me you don’t have an icebreaker oh you don’t
1:20:47 have an icebreaker geez you used them all
1:20:49 what do you do in your spare time
1:20:55 uh i like to spend my wife’s back there so i gotta tell the
1:20:58 honest answer i love i love i love to go
1:21:01 to the gym but i also love to spend time with the family
1:21:03 appreciate it uh thank you mr schneider is
1:21:07 there anything additional information you want to share with the
1:21:09 board members about yourself
1:21:12 i think just just to know that my passion for education has has
1:21:16 has been you know since i was
1:21:18 young um been in this profession now for over 23 years and that
1:21:22 i know it’s not just my work um that
1:21:25 that is important it’s the important it’s everyone coming
1:21:28 together for one common cause i’m a servant
1:21:30 leader i believe that that that is my duty is that i’m supposed
1:21:34 to serve those around me um and not only
1:21:37 for the benefit of the community but i also will be selfish and
1:21:39 say that it’s for the benefit of my own
1:21:41 children so um that’s that’s it it’s my passion and this is what
1:21:45 i was born to do and i’m grateful
1:21:47 for every day i get to do it do you have any questions for the
1:21:49 board members what is your favorite
1:21:52 football team board chair susan um so it’s kind of weird so it’s
1:21:57 the florida state seminoles because
1:21:59 for college and then my family’s from detroit so i’m a detroit
1:22:02 lion fan which is a good time right now
1:22:04 so um you know they’re up and coming so everything else except
1:22:08 for college is up there
1:22:11 but no i i uh i really appreciate it does anybody else have
1:22:14 anything for them
1:22:15 you guys good i wanted to say thank you to ms schneider thank
1:22:19 you so much for coming um i truly
1:22:22 believe that there’s a connection between you and i know that um
1:22:24 you are the smarter in the in the
1:22:26 family because you did graduate from florida state university um
1:22:29 absolutely but i also can see that
1:22:31 connection and that’s grounding and you come from an educational
1:22:34 background and that means a lot
1:22:36 so i did want to say thank you for that thank you for all your
1:22:38 time did you have anything else you
1:22:40 wanted to finish up with before we head out i’m just grateful
1:22:43 for the opportunity thank you all so
1:22:44 much thank you so much mr schneider yeah you want to take a
1:22:49 second and break yeah oh yeah you guys okay
1:22:52 with that all right take a break yeah we’ve got i’ve been
1:22:56 watching it we were ahead on the 15 minutes so
1:23:01 we’ll take a break but the next one doesn’t start until 10 15
1:23:04 minutes
1:23:04 but the next one doesn’t start until 10 15 minutes
1:23:16 yeah
1:34:30 Thank you.
2:57:28 as the deputy in st lucy so got to start there kept it going as
2:57:18 indian river as a superintendent
2:57:21 then locally like i said here at coco beach um definitely tuned
2:57:25 in with the mayor of city mayor
2:57:27 of the city of coco beach for canaveral also talked to
2:57:30 representative soroy on a couple things
2:57:32 because he represents our area and with the aqua science program
2:57:36 that we’re launching
2:57:37 you know there’s going to be some state funds associated with
2:57:41 that
2:57:43 great thank you um presenting information in a highly charged
2:57:48 situation into a variety of groups
2:57:50 is a part of a superintendent’s job give an example of how you
2:57:53 have encountered opposition
2:57:55 and how you dealt with the resulting situation
2:57:57 i think a highly charged situation i can go back to um when i
2:58:08 was superintendent indian river we had
2:58:13 feldsmore elementary there was a classroom that had some mold in
2:58:16 it because a window was leaking and
2:58:19 hadn’t been repaired properly so the first thing that everybody
2:58:23 thinks is that now you have a sixth
2:58:25 school and so they don’t want to send their kids there so we had
2:58:30 some you know environmental engineers
2:58:33 come out and assess the situation and draft a report and then we
2:58:36 held a meeting with the community you
2:58:39 you know at the school to allay their fears on whether the
2:58:43 school building was safe to return to or not
2:58:45 one of the things that paid big dividends there was we went to
2:58:50 the school and had the meeting in the
2:58:52 school and we had the environmental engineers there feldsmere
2:58:56 has a large hispanic community
2:58:59 so we had you know some trusted members of the community that
2:59:03 could speak you know spanish and
2:59:06 and were recognized by the community as someone they could trust
2:59:10 at the meeting so these were community
2:59:12 members that we had you know met with and shown them all the
2:59:16 data and stuff like that and that allayed
2:59:20 their fears and we didn’t have you know any high absentee or
2:59:23 anything like that absence rates or
2:59:25 anything like that and we continued to um follow up with air
2:59:30 quality tests you know for days and weeks
2:59:32 and months to make sure everybody knew that the building was
2:59:35 safe you know but it was one classroom
2:59:37 with one leaky window that wasn’t repaired properly got some
2:59:41 mold and so you know when the rumor is you got
2:59:43 it then go squash the rumor and those allay those allegations
2:59:47 basically had a similar thing happen a
2:59:49 year or two later at another elementary school they did some hvac
2:59:53 work over the summer didn’t seal some
2:59:55 things properly when they were getting ready to come back for
2:59:58 teacher pre or teacher pre-planning it was
3:00:01 mold so we had to remediate that and we did the same all the
3:00:03 same protocols had the same parent meetings
3:00:06 and everybody was you know all their fears were allayed so i don’t
3:00:09 know if that’s a highly charged enough
3:00:11 situation for you but you know that’s something that we that i
3:00:15 dealt with that’ll work thank you
3:00:16 uh to another highly charged situation um what have you uh or
3:00:21 your previous districts done
3:00:24 to respond to the use of drugs alcohol tobacco vaping etc by
3:00:29 students yeah so education for one thing
3:00:33 you need to educate them on on the pitfalls the negatives of of
3:00:38 of doing that of getting involved in
3:00:40 that um the other thing is also though consistent enforcement of
3:00:43 policy you need to make sure that
3:00:45 if you have policies on the books to deal with those things you
3:00:48 need to enforce those
3:00:49 but the education is is probably the key you know it’s kind of
3:00:53 like those commercials that we had when
3:00:55 we were growing up this is your mind on drugs or whatever they
3:00:58 need to see that stuff they need to
3:00:59 understand that this is not this is serious stuff this is not a
3:01:03 joke so education is the first part of it
3:01:06 making sure they understand that this is not good for your
3:01:09 health not good for your future not good
3:01:11 for any of that but then you need to consistently enforce the
3:01:14 policies i think one of the things
3:01:15 that we need to do a better job of now is the support after the
3:01:19 fact so if we do find someone who is
3:01:22 vaping or using thc or something like that what support do we
3:01:27 provide to them after to kind of
3:01:30 break them from that cycle and that kind of thing so i know
3:01:34 student services is tasked with a lot but i
3:01:39 think that’s something that we need to look at you know what are
3:01:41 we doing for our students who have
3:01:43 made some poor choices how do we support them going forward to
3:01:46 make sure that they don’t do that again
3:01:48 you know fall further down you know the the abyss or whatever of
3:01:52 the the chain of that type of stuff so
3:01:54 i guess going back to education ahead of time trying to show
3:01:57 them that this is not you don’t want to
3:01:59 be doing this and then but consistently enforcing your rules and
3:02:02 then maybe providing better support after
3:02:04 all right and for the record i quote that and this is your brain
3:02:08 on drugs all the with the egg
3:02:10 that comes to my mind all the time that one stuck with me for
3:02:13 some reason all right so my fun
3:02:15 question is what’s your favorite animal yeah i if i could be an
3:02:19 animal it would be a dolphin
3:02:21 because i love the i love the ocean and love being in the ocean
3:02:25 and it seems like they got the best
3:02:27 gig on the planet you know they’re sleek they’re fast they get
3:02:31 to play in the water all day yeah good gig
3:02:33 all right thank you mr trepp all right well thank you very much
3:02:39 yes so now we get to the exciting
3:02:41 questions all right so my area is operational sustainability and
3:02:50 i will start with what is
3:02:52 the most challenging operational issue in school districts today
3:02:55 and how do you approach this challenge
3:02:57 i don’t know if this is operational but it’s staffing and
3:03:04 staffing is the number one challenge
3:03:07 and it it impacts operations obviously because we we haven’t had
3:03:11 a full custodial staff at cogo beach
3:03:13 since i’ve been there yeah it’s not due to lack of trying you
3:03:15 know we we are constantly hiring new
3:03:19 custodial staff and sometimes they leave us for better paying
3:03:21 opportunities and things like that
3:03:23 it’s an organizational structure issue you know at all levels i
3:03:28 mean obviously our transportation
3:03:30 operations are affected because we don’t seem to have you can’t
3:03:32 seem to find enough bus drivers
3:03:34 obviously our instruction in the classroom is affected if we can’t
3:03:38 find high quality teachers and employ them
3:03:40 in every classroom perfect all right so secondly share with us
3:03:46 an example of when you were especially
3:03:49 innovative in addressing a funding gap and they they’re asked
3:03:54 what’s the situation the obstacles risks
3:03:58 involved and then um lastly the outcome
3:04:00 so i’ll use the citrus bowl example so um the football stadium
3:04:08 at vero beach high school is called
3:04:09 the citrus bowl so it’s not sister bowl in orlando but it’s the
3:04:12 vero beach high school football stadium
3:04:14 it is akin to fenway park in vero beach it is the stadium it is
3:04:20 the place
3:04:22 for all activities it is a hallmark of that school the home
3:04:27 stands at one point seated 3 000 people
3:04:29 it is quite the structure so midway through the football season
3:04:35 i believe it’s my second year as
3:04:37 superintendent a structural engineer and so to paint the picture
3:04:41 for you the home stands were concrete
3:04:43 bleachers so concrete vertical supports and then the bleachers
3:04:48 were actually long slabs of concrete
3:04:52 and they’d been in there about 50 years and so about halfway
3:04:56 through uh the football season again
3:04:59 i think my second year a structural engineer came by and inspected
3:05:02 the stadium and we did this annually
3:05:05 and said the structure is cracking and no longer safe to use
3:05:09 this is in the middle of the football season
3:05:11 now real beach high school is a football powerhouse they usually
3:05:16 host about eight home games a year
3:05:20 they pay the other teams to come and play at their school
3:05:23 because they fill the stadium and they get
3:05:25 a lot of money so we had a home side that was not going to be
3:05:31 able to be used if unless we were to
3:05:33 ignore the structural engineer which we weren’t going to do and
3:05:37 so we had to figure out okay how do we
3:05:40 fix this you know when can we how soon can we fix it where do we
3:05:42 find the money and that kind of thing
3:05:45 and sue hand is incredible and a shout out to sue hand for doing
3:05:49 what she’s doing right now by the way
3:05:51 but even sue hand can’t work magic you know so we had a homes
3:05:56 the home stands of the football field that
3:05:59 we could no longer use and we still had half the season to go
3:06:02 never mind the fact that we then had
3:06:04 soccer season in the winter and never mind the fact that we then
3:06:07 had um lacrosse in the spring because
3:06:11 they’re very big in lacrosse and uh never mind the fact that it’s
3:06:16 a marching band
3:06:18 school and uh they host crown jewel which is a large marching
3:06:22 band competition
3:06:23 and they host graduation in the ceremony in in in the stadium so
3:06:27 we had to find a way to fix the stadium pronto and we had to
3:06:31 find the money to fix the stadium pronto
3:06:36 so we never we never missed a home contest we moved we brought
3:06:41 in additional bleachers at the end zones
3:06:44 and we moved the home stands to the visitor side you know for
3:06:47 for home games and all that kind of stuff
3:06:49 but the work of funding sorry to get back to the question the
3:06:53 work of financing so we sat down with
3:06:55 the uh cfo and talked about how can we come up with millions of
3:06:59 dollars right away to start this project
3:07:04 one of the things that we learned as we were figuring this out
3:07:06 was the structural engineer said that the
3:07:09 vertical concrete supports were fine they could last for another
3:07:14 50 years they were poured differently
3:07:17 a different mechanism how they did it but it was the horizontal
3:07:20 bleachers that you actually sat on that
3:07:22 had to go so the first thing we learned was we could take the
3:07:26 concrete bleachers off and just put new
3:07:29 bleachers on top of the existing structure so we could put
3:07:31 aluminum on top aluminum bleachers on top
3:07:34 so we costed that out 1.2 million dollars so first thing is we
3:07:38 got to find 1.2 million dollars but
3:07:40 once you touch a structure you have to bring it up to current
3:07:46 ada requirements so once we touched that
3:07:49 structure there were other things we needed to do some of them
3:07:53 were really good they only had a handful
3:07:55 of bathrooms on the home side 3 000 seats but only a handful of
3:08:00 bathrooms so whenever you touch the stadium
3:08:03 you know a stadium like that there’s a certain number of
3:08:05 required bathrooms for how many seats you have
3:08:07 in it so we had some estimates done by some firms so to bring
3:08:12 the entire facility up to code was going
3:08:15 to be about five million dollars where do we find 1.2 if all we
3:08:20 wanted to do was do the aluminum seats but
3:08:22 that’s not enough where do you find total total package of five
3:08:26 million dollars so i don’t know
3:08:29 if you’re familiar with certificates of participation
3:08:31 certificates of participation but we had some
3:08:34 certificates of participation and we refinance so to speak those
3:08:38 certificates of participation we re-issued
3:08:41 them luckily for us at that time interest rates were very low
3:08:46 much lower than when we had issued those cop’s
3:08:50 years before so in layman’s terms we refinanced the cop’s at a
3:08:56 lower interest rate and added in
3:08:59 the money for the citrus bowl the five point whatever million
3:09:02 dollars the savings that we actually
3:09:06 incurred by the conversion was 5.9 million so we were actually
3:09:10 800 000 to the good and we did not extend
3:09:14 the cop’s like a lot of times when you refinance your house it’s
3:09:17 because the same concept yeah like
3:09:19 refinancing your mortgage a lot of times when you refinance your
3:09:21 mortgage you extend the term
3:09:22 and we didn’t do that we kept the same term just lower interest
3:09:27 rate and refinanced it and we’re able to
3:09:30 have the money in time to start work on the citrus bowl and so
3:09:34 we never missed a game that season we
3:09:37 still held graduation there the following year the stands were
3:09:42 replaced we held all of our games and
3:09:44 everything there and then by the third season or second season
3:09:48 after the um everything was done but it was
3:09:53 one of the things that you know when we were having this
3:09:54 discussion with the board about
3:09:57 why do why is there a sense of urgency and i looked at it from
3:10:00 the student perspective
3:10:01 you know if i’m a senior and i’m planning on playing my last
3:10:05 senior soccer game in the stadium
3:10:07 if i’m a senior football player i’m planning on playing that
3:10:10 last senior game in my stadium that
3:10:11 i’ve been you know working my butt off all these times if if i’m
3:10:15 a lacrosse player and again lacrosse is
3:10:17 very big there um i want to play my playoff games in the stadium
3:10:20 and stuff like that so the idea was
3:10:23 we had to find a way to find the money to get this done and we
3:10:27 did um you can google it and there’s
3:10:30 newspaper articles about it that probably explained the
3:10:32 financing better than what i just did but
3:10:34 basically by refinancing a mortgage we were able to find funds
3:10:39 quickly to do to do this citrus bowl
3:10:41 great all right describe your experience with strategic planning
3:10:47 for a large organization yeah i think i
3:10:50 shared with with the board last time that um when i arrived in
3:10:53 any river county as superintendent they
3:10:55 did not have a strategic plan so we set about creating a
3:10:58 strategic plan so we talked with the
3:11:02 community about you know how they could help us craft a
3:11:06 strategic plan we hired a firm that helped us do
3:11:10 all this you know that held the meetings and gathered the data
3:11:13 put the website up to get input and stuff like
3:11:15 that we assigned different aspects of the strategic plan to
3:11:19 different cabinet level staff members very
3:11:22 similar to the work that you all have engaged in a board member
3:11:26 picked an area to work on and that’s
3:11:28 why there’s five areas of their strategic plan because there’s
3:11:31 five board members and uh so went through
3:11:34 the whole process from organizing you know how we were going to
3:11:37 do it to then marshalling it through
3:11:40 um and you know the big thing about that strategic plan i think
3:11:43 i mentioned before was
3:11:44 we filled it with a lot of measurables a lot of ways to track
3:11:51 our progress that was what was really
3:11:54 really important you know as we asked the community for their
3:11:57 input we asked staff to spend so much time
3:12:00 crafting the strategic plan we didn’t want it to be a three-ring
3:12:04 binder on the shelf you know we wanted it to be
3:12:08 something that we visited often that drove our really your
3:12:11 strategic plan is supposed to drive your
3:12:14 decisions you know that’s what you that’s like your guiding
3:12:16 document it’s supposed to be like what
3:12:18 you’re all about and what you want to be and so that was we
3:12:22 built in a lot of metrics that some of them
3:12:25 we were already measuring but others we needed to measure and so
3:12:29 you know when we built a plan that’s
3:12:31 what we did um one of the other things is that we did an annual
3:12:34 update every summer you know so an
3:12:37 annual update every summer to the community not just the board
3:12:40 but to the community kind of like the
3:12:42 state of the schools state of the district um and i think that’s
3:12:45 what i gave you last time in your
3:12:47 in your binder was a copy of the one-year update so done from
3:12:52 soups and nuts i’ve done a strategic plan
3:12:55 perfect okay turn this back on how do you ensure climate
3:13:02 assessment there we go i thought it was
3:13:04 there we go how do you ensure climate assessment results are
3:13:08 used in school improvement planning
3:13:10 across the district yeah you look for it so we’re supposed to be
3:13:14 checking the school improvement plans
3:13:16 we’re supposed to be seeing like are they using their youth
3:13:18 truth survey data are they using their
3:13:20 parent survey data um you know that’s one of the things that i
3:13:23 miss about our parent survey right
3:13:26 now there’s a couple questions that we used to have that we don’t
3:13:28 have um like what letter grade would
3:13:31 you give your school that used to be on our survey um i’d like
3:13:35 to know how my parents you know feel
3:13:37 about my school you know i’d like to know how they feel about
3:13:40 the district you know we used to grade the
3:13:41 schools in grade the district so but going back to the question
3:13:45 like how does how do you ensure that that
3:13:47 it is in implemented you know you look for it in the plan but
3:13:51 then you follow it up with measurables
3:13:54 okay so you know are you doing the things you say you’re going
3:13:58 to do in your in your school improvement
3:13:59 plan you know um are you taking a look at this at the data you
3:14:03 through survey data is pretty important
3:14:06 because it’s coming straight from the kids you know i wish the
3:14:09 survey was a little shorter as they tend
3:14:11 to lose their attention towards the end but um you know anytime
3:14:16 you can get input from the stakeholders
3:14:18 again like the parent survey data you need to take a look at
3:14:21 that and see what you’re doing you know
3:14:22 what you can do differently insight survey data i am always
3:14:27 upset if my insight survey data is not as
3:14:30 strong as i want it to be if my staff is not you know singing
3:14:34 our praises as much as i want because
3:14:36 i want you know them to be i want it to be like that so you know
3:14:39 just look for it in different places
3:14:42 all right well we’re to the last question on my category here
3:14:48 how would you ensure that schools
3:14:50 located in under-resourced areas receive the attention and the
3:14:54 resources they need
3:14:56 yeah so you know there’s that quote where your treasury is your
3:15:00 heart is also you we need to go
3:15:02 and support those schools that we use a tiered system of
3:15:04 supports here so
3:15:05 how what supports are we providing those under performing
3:15:09 schools and is it being is it effective
3:15:11 i mean i think that’s the follow-up part you know we can say we’re
3:15:14 going to provide them
3:15:15 extra literacy coaches or extra units or this or that okay well
3:15:18 what are those extra units being used
3:15:20 for and is it effective like you know so the proof is in the
3:15:23 pudding somehow you know it could be
3:15:26 student performance data but also again going out and visiting
3:15:30 those schools and seeing what the
3:15:31 climate is like most most of us that have been doing this for a
3:15:36 while can walk onto a campus and
3:15:39 know pretty quick what what the climate is like you know whether
3:15:43 it’s a safe secure place whether it’s
3:15:45 an orderly place whether there’s a joy of learning in the hallways
3:15:49 in the classrooms and stuff you
3:15:51 you might not find joy of learning at a high school but but the
3:15:54 idea is you you can sense the campus you
3:15:57 can sense the environment so one of the ways to make sure that
3:16:00 those underserved schools or or
3:16:03 underperforming schools are receiving the support is data but
3:16:06 the other part is being out there
3:16:08 going out there you know being being visible and talking to
3:16:11 teachers when you go there visit
3:16:13 classrooms talk to teachers talk to kids you know get input from
3:16:16 the people doing the work you know one of the
3:16:19 things that when i was the deputy in st lucie um different
3:16:22 assistant superintendents had different
3:16:25 schools to supervise but they also had other responsibilities so
3:16:28 like this assistant superintendent
3:16:30 had these areas of responsibility and then these 10 schools to
3:16:33 supervise they’d spend more time on
3:16:36 their area of responsibility and less time in their schools and
3:16:40 so we we reorganized the support structure
3:16:42 there so we had just principal supervisors so all they did was
3:16:46 go visit schools that’s their job was
3:16:49 to supervise those schools and so they were in those schools all
3:16:52 the time and they could come back and
3:16:54 say this is working this is not working this money we’re
3:16:57 spending over here man it’s doing great things
3:16:59 this is really good stuff we need to do more of it this money
3:17:02 over here is a waste why are we doing this
3:17:03 you know the teachers don’t like it the kids don’t like it it’s
3:17:06 not being effective you know so we have to be in our
3:17:10 schools more the leadership here has to be in the schools more
3:17:13 to see if these things are happening
3:17:15 so to measure whether the support we’re giving those under
3:17:19 performing schools is working we need
3:17:22 to go out there and see it great thank you for those responses
3:17:27 if your candidate responses
3:17:30 uh i think my what was your random question my random question
3:17:34 was uh in your vast amount of free
3:17:37 time what do you enjoy doing so i actually like watching live
3:17:41 sport events so anytime i can go to
3:17:43 a live sporting event i like to do that baseball game softball
3:17:46 game heidi was an athlete and uh so she
3:17:49 doesn’t mind going to athletic contest she likes it you know so
3:17:54 yeah if if there is free time usually
3:17:56 trying to find some some support great all right thank you thank
3:18:00 you so much all good is there any
3:18:02 additional information you would you’d like to share with the
3:18:04 board members so i’m going to leave you guys
3:18:06 with a notebook like i did before um i’m going to talk about the
3:18:09 notebook and then give it to you and then
3:18:11 you can read it tonight in your leisure or not and then maybe
3:18:14 tomorrow in our individuals we can talk about it
3:18:16 um the first section is an action plan um a lot of times uh a
3:18:21 superintendent candidate will give you
3:18:23 an entry plan or a 90-day plan or something like that um this is
3:18:26 an action plan this is a description
3:18:28 of what i would do if i was selected a superintendent right away
3:18:31 these are the things i would focus on
3:18:34 right away so we talked about three of them already relationship
3:18:37 building academic progress check
3:18:39 and the organizational structure evaluation the other thing we
3:18:42 just talked about the strategic plan
3:18:45 i know you guys got an update back in september i think from mr
3:18:49 wilson i don’t know that the community
3:18:51 gets an update on the strategic plan other than it’s presented
3:18:55 at a workshop and i don’t know that our
3:18:57 staff building level staff and in particular get a strategic
3:19:02 plan update or review and then it’s right here
3:19:07 so we’ve already printed it out an inventory of our tiered
3:19:10 support so what types of resources are we
3:19:13 providing to different schools and um is it effective and then
3:19:18 so so the first part of this is the action
3:19:20 plan and then the second part is um somebody told me that last
3:19:25 time i didn’t share with you guys enough
3:19:29 all the crazy innovative out of the box things that i’ve been a
3:19:34 part of so the 3gis is in here
3:19:37 so there’s a section sorry there’s a section on out of the box
3:19:40 ideas so these are things that i’ve done
3:19:41 or been a part of or things that i would do so the 3gis is in
3:19:46 there that’s a third grade interventionist
3:19:49 it’s also a section on school report cards so when i took over
3:19:53 in indian river i wanted to know how
3:19:56 our schools were doing and we get a letter grade from the state
3:19:59 but that’s it it’s a letter grade
3:20:01 it’s based on student performance data on state assessments and
3:20:04 except for the high schools it’s
3:20:05 pretty much pretty much it in high schools you’ve got graduation
3:20:08 rates ccr and some other stuff but
3:20:10 it’s mostly how we’re doing on standardized tests and that’s not
3:20:13 always the most accurate
3:20:15 picture of a school especially a school that’s showing
3:20:17 improvement so we created a report card
3:20:20 in indian river for all of our schools and it has several
3:20:23 different areas of measure one is the
3:20:25 state report card grade we own that not going to walk away from
3:20:29 it the other one was a parent grade
3:20:31 what grade did the parents give the school and some questions on
3:20:35 the parent survey were listed in
3:20:37 there and then student attendance student discipline rate
3:20:41 certain standardized tests were tied on those
3:20:44 reports so for example for all the elementary schools third
3:20:47 grade reading was a separate measure are you
3:20:49 doing are you meeting you know your target for that and then
3:20:52 high schools it was graduation rate ccr
3:20:54 some other stuff and then one of the other measures is staff
3:20:57 attendance i don’t know if there’s a perfect
3:21:01 way to measure morale but high absentee rate in any employee in
3:21:07 any company a high absentee rate by your
3:21:10 employers is usually a signal that the culture is not good so we
3:21:14 had staff attendance as part of the report
3:21:18 card and you know and that was with the union’s blessing by the
3:21:22 way they think that that was good they
3:21:24 thought it was idea a good idea so yeah and then um a couple
3:21:28 other things in any river we converted a couple
3:21:32 school buses to mobile feeding cafes and the idea was to use
3:21:36 those uh in the summertime originally to go out
3:21:40 to impoverished communities because a lot of times we offer free
3:21:43 food at our schools you can come and get
3:21:45 food in the summer but people don’t have transportation so we
3:21:48 converted these three school buses they were
3:21:51 being decommissioned you know surplused and we converted them to
3:21:54 mobile feeding stations and um
3:21:57 they actually proved to be very very very beneficial in the
3:22:00 hurricane aftermath so when our schools were
3:22:02 still closed after hurricanes we used them and then when
3:22:05 hurricane michael went through the panhandle
3:22:07 we sent all three of our buses up there our mobile cafes up
3:22:11 there and they were used for weeks as that
3:22:14 area recovered and so that’s in there there’s a couple others um
3:22:19 crazy good ideas one is a cte job fair i think
3:22:22 we need to do we have all these students graduating with
3:22:26 certificates i think it was almost 4 000
3:22:29 certificates last year our students garnered and so they’re
3:22:33 ready to work they’re ready to enter the
3:22:35 workforce we need to have a job fair yeah we need to invite all
3:22:39 of our local employers to a job fair
3:22:41 so they can hire our cnas they can hire our culinary arts kids
3:22:45 who have a surf safe certification they can
3:22:48 hire our auto tech kids they can hire the tech design one two
3:22:52 and three kids um i it’s in there and then
3:22:55 i’ll stop is um this is all based off a conversation i had i was
3:22:59 at a chamber meeting and there was a guy
3:23:02 that works in one of the um space related industries support
3:23:06 industry and he said they were having trouble
3:23:10 finding people that had computer software skills like solidworks
3:23:16 and autocad we have kids that are
3:23:19 graduating with solidworks and autocad certification he didn’t
3:23:23 know that so i think we need to have a cte
3:23:25 job fair every spring where we bring all of our seniors that are
3:23:28 graduating maybe even juniors who
3:23:30 want to do a summer job and we bring our employers together and
3:23:34 match them up we we have that so
3:23:39 and there’s some other crazy good ideas in there too but we’ll
3:23:41 save them for later thank you i uh
3:23:45 does any other board members wish to say anything back to mr endell
3:23:48 we’re good thank you thank you so
3:23:51 much for coming i’m excited to read your book i like crazy good
3:23:54 ideas and thank you for humoring our
3:23:55 icebreaker questions all right no it’s fun thank you for the
3:23:59 opportunity today i think we’re good thank
3:24:02 you thank you so much for that and the one thing you did miss
3:24:05 was the uh uh as a teacher at coco beach
3:24:07 uh uh mr we missed out on uh or i’m missing out on friday snacks
3:24:12 that yeah again we want to make the
3:24:15 place enjoyable snack so every friday afternoon we go around
3:24:18 with a snack and drink cart to all the
3:24:19 teachers classrooms and uh if we don’t we hear about it so so we
3:24:26 do yeah you do yeah well i i uh i really
3:24:30 appreciate it i did want to say that there is one thing that i
3:24:33 feel is a negative and that um the
3:24:35 citrus bowl is where i ended uh two of my state runs in in high
3:24:39 school football and many people don’t
3:24:41 know why it’s called the citrus bowl it’s because it’s
3:24:45 surrounded by citrus and in many times of the
3:24:48 year you drive by vero and you can smell the citrus blooms but
3:24:52 the unique opportunity that you were
3:24:53 talking about those stands was giving me heart palpitations
3:24:56 because not many people understand when you go play a game
3:24:59 at vero back in the day before they had sebastian they used to
3:25:02 take up half the visitor’s side too
3:25:04 so you would be over there and they would take up half the
3:25:06 visitor’s side and then not only that
3:25:08 but they would wheel over bullhorns and the bullhorns were they
3:25:12 weren’t like they were the truck horns
3:25:14 times six of them it is actually a trained horn it’s yeah they
3:25:19 lovely so i was out and the first year we
3:25:22 missed a field goal and um i don’t think that kicker ever made
3:25:25 his way back into our program and then the second year
3:25:28 you guys came to us but um quality program i think there was 5
3:25:31 000 kids in that school like the years
3:25:33 that i was playing because it was just yeah there was no sebastian
3:25:36 river correct yeah before they had
3:25:37 sebastian river but that uh gave me some heart palpitations
3:25:40 because i remember those stands and
3:25:41 i remember those games so um thank you so much for your time i
3:25:44 really appreciate it and uh we appreciate
3:25:46 all of it thank you thank you thank you guys anybody okay we’re
3:25:56 good take a break
3:25:59 um
3:26:12 you
3:29:10 You
3:29:23 you
3:30:55 You
3:32:38 Transcription by CastingWords
4:22:38 Thank you.
4:33:38 I’m Megan Wright.
4:33:40 I represent the north end of Brevard County.
4:33:48 And I’m Gene Trent.
4:33:48 Thank you so much for coming and being a part of this process.
4:33:52 Thank you.
4:35:26 Yeah.
4:35:54 challenge from there up to currently serving as deputy
4:35:57 superintendent. I’m very fortunate to have
4:36:00 incredible colleagues. I want to thank my current superintendent,
4:36:04 Sarita Beeman, and Chairman Krause
4:36:06 and the other members of the Seminole County Board for being
4:36:11 supportive of my candidacy here.
4:36:13 I live currently in Lake Mary with my wife, Nicole. She’s in the
4:36:18 audience. We’ve been married 19 years,
4:36:22 so we’ll celebrate the 20th anniversary in July. If you get to
4:36:25 talk with her, she’ll tell you she
4:36:27 actually gets credit for 27 years because we met in high school,
4:36:33 and we have one son who is in
4:36:35 elementary school, which adds a lot of depth to the work when
4:36:39 you’re building initiatives and then
4:36:41 your own student gets to participate in the things that you and
4:36:44 your teams have worked on. It adds
4:36:48 dimension and even greater appreciation for the teachers in
4:36:53 schools who are doing tremendous work
4:36:56 every day with our students. So again, I’m very thankful to be
4:36:58 here, and I look forward to your
4:37:00 questions. Thank you. With that. All right. I am up first. Thank
4:37:06 you so much for giving us the brief
4:37:08 history about yourself. Congratulations on your upcoming
4:37:11 anniversary that is happening. I’m going to
4:37:13 be asking questions today that pertain to the board and the
4:37:15 superintendent relationship. So I have five
4:37:18 questions that I have picked out to ask, and I will start with
4:37:21 the first one. What is the most
4:37:23 important part of the superintendent’s job and why? Thank you,
4:37:27 Vice Chair. That’s a great question to
4:37:31 start on. The superintendent role is so multifaceted and
4:37:38 certainly important from a visibility in the
4:37:43 community role. From a policy perspective, the board sets policy
4:37:50 and then it’s the superintendent’s job to
4:37:53 implement it and to get the staff behind it and executing those
4:37:57 plans so that we’re moving forward
4:38:01 as a district. In many ways, the superintendent is the communicator
4:38:05 in chief. They’re the person that’s
4:38:07 often invited to get out in front of groups and carry the
4:38:11 message of the district. And that message really
4:38:15 should be embedded in the strategic plan. The board has a
4:38:18 strategic plan and it’s the superintendent’s job
4:38:22 to put the pieces in place to execute that plan and achieve
4:38:25 those metrics. So I think that’s the
4:38:29 kind of external visibility piece of the superintendent role.
4:38:32 And then, of course, there’s the myriad of
4:38:34 responsibilities daily that a superintendent is dealing with
4:38:38 internally. And I think over the last three or
4:38:41 four years, especially with regards to retention and recruitment
4:38:45 of staff, and if you look back at my
4:38:47 application materials, we often say recruitment and retention,
4:38:51 but right now it’s about retention and
4:38:53 recruitment. And so I think the superintendent plays that key
4:38:58 role in carrying the message and trying to
4:39:01 keep the district moving forward to the benefit of all students.
4:39:04 Thank you. Based on your knowledge of
4:39:07 Brevard’s system, our system, what do you believe should be the
4:39:11 top two priorities of our school system?
4:39:13 So the first is that academic outcomes are why we are here. We
4:39:22 can get a lot of things done as a
4:39:25 school district, as a community lever, but we have to deliver on
4:39:31 student learning first in order to do
4:39:34 all of those other things. Brevard has a long history of
4:39:38 academic excellence and certainly the
4:39:40 the pandemic and the challenges of the last three years have
4:39:45 have caused all districts to kind of
4:39:48 bobble a little bit. And so now we have a standards transition
4:39:52 and new instructional materials, new
4:39:53 assessments, and this is really the time to focus on sustaining
4:39:58 that academic achievement. Because with that
4:40:01 a school grade with that academically high performing school
4:40:05 district status from the department of education
4:40:08 with those things in place with learning growth happening,
4:40:12 then we talk about you know the the other kind of key pieces
4:40:17 with the school district in a community
4:40:21 and and and all of the good things that are that are done.
4:40:25 But the learning has to be there and that’s even more important
4:40:28 now in the area of competition.
4:40:30 I think the second priority for Brevard and I saw this
4:40:34 extensively on the tour this morning
4:40:36 is the is the growth that you’re experiencing in in one part of
4:40:40 the district which is really exciting
4:40:42 and you’ve got new construction. Everybody loves that new
4:40:45 schools opening
4:40:48 and then you but you also have to be sure that you’re sustaining
4:40:51 the excellence and the excitement and all of the other regions
4:40:55 of the county as well. And so
4:40:57 that becomes a bit of a balancing act
4:41:00 as you look at new programs, new opportunities, and how you’re
4:41:05 spreading that out so that the entire
4:41:07 county is benefiting
4:41:09 from growth, from prosperity, from academic excellence, and not
4:41:13 that any one part is moving faster than the others.
4:41:16 Thank you.
4:41:18 How do you ensure that board members have the information that
4:41:21 they need before being asked
4:41:22 to make a vote on an issue of concern?
4:41:25 That’s a great question and
4:41:28 the superintendent is responsible for the communication to each
4:41:34 board member and
4:41:36 I’ve been brought up in a system where we’ve been taught that
4:41:40 each board member should get the same
4:41:42 information and questions should be answered but each person on
4:41:48 the on the board needs to have
4:41:51 the same data, the same access to answers so that when the board
4:41:56 comes together as a whole,
4:41:58 there aren’t surprises and everybody can move on the same page.
4:42:03 There’s certainly a lot that goes
4:42:05 into prep for each board workshop and each meeting. The consent
4:42:12 agenda is a
4:42:13 powerful and efficient tool for getting work done but each board
4:42:18 member needs to be confident
4:42:20 in the items on that consent agenda and what they’re approving
4:42:25 and when the staff,
4:42:26 the superintendent staff do a good job with board meeting
4:42:30 preparation and when the board is able to
4:42:33 approve a consent agenda 5-0 or make a hard decision but get to
4:42:39 the same place,
4:42:40 it matters. It makes a difference to the staff, the principals
4:42:47 see it,
4:42:47 the district leadership sees it, that when the board is moving
4:42:52 together in the same direction,
4:42:56 you build momentum and the key to that is no surprises to each
4:43:00 board member and really good prep work
4:43:03 before each meeting to be sure that each board member is
4:43:06 comfortable. That doesn’t mean that everyone’s
4:43:08 always going to agree but it means that everyone feels like they
4:43:12 have the information to make the decision.
4:43:15 Thank you. Describe what you believe to be the ideal working
4:43:20 relationship with the school board and when you have an
4:43:22 adversarial situation with a board member, how would you resolve
4:43:25 that?
4:43:27 So, again, I’ve spent the last 10 years in a school district
4:43:33 office being taught how to do this and then the last three years
4:43:38 in an executive director and deputy role working almost daily
4:43:43 with school board members and I think the,
4:43:47 again, the key is open, honest communication, the news will not
4:43:53 always be good, right? There will be,
4:43:55 there will be bad news sometimes but are we communicating that
4:44:01 again to each board member and are we
4:44:03 communicating it clearly and providing, you know, all of the
4:44:07 information? I think in terms of,
4:44:10 you know, the superintendent’s relationship with each board
4:44:14 member, there has to be comfort that frequency
4:44:19 of communication is good and again, each board member, each of
4:44:23 you has, as elected officials,
4:44:26 different professional and personal lives and so people work at
4:44:29 different times of the day and
4:44:31 the superintendent and the senior leadership team have to adapt
4:44:34 to that to make sure that each board
4:44:37 member has the information they need. I think, you know, nothing
4:44:42 substitutes for a good sit down,
4:44:44 face-to-face meeting, a conversation, an acknowledgement that
4:44:48 there, that there, there may be
4:44:51 differences of opinion but, you know, how do we work together to
4:44:55 get to, you know, a good place?
4:44:58 And again, even if ultimately a board member feels like I have
4:45:01 to vote no on this,
4:45:05 if it’s a, if it’s just a legitimate difference of viewpoint, um,
4:45:09 that’s okay. What, you know,
4:45:12 what, what’s not okay is, is when, is when the board doesn’t
4:45:16 feel like they have all of the
4:45:17 information they need to make that decision. Thank you for that
4:45:20 answer. Um, what are the first three
4:45:23 things that you are going to do if you’re hired as our
4:45:26 superintendent?
4:45:32 So acknowledging that, um, an external candidate always has a, a
4:45:37 different kind of entry plan than,
4:45:40 than perhaps an internal candidate. Um, I think the, the, the
4:45:44 first piece of anything is, is listening
4:45:47 and, and getting out and, and really, um, engaging with as many
4:45:51 stakeholders as possible. And I think
4:45:54 each board member has a role to play there. You have the
4:45:57 existing community and, and, and business
4:46:00 connections. Um, you know, um, the history of, of, of, of how
4:46:07 things unfold and, and a superintendent coming
4:46:11 in from the outside is going to need that support to say, this
4:46:14 is, you know, kind of, this is the lay
4:46:17 of the land. So I think initially it’s talking with each board
4:46:20 member and kind of mapping out,
4:46:22 you know, that engagement strategy. And, and then it’s getting
4:46:25 out and, and actually listening.
4:46:27 Um, I, I think that’s the second key piece. And then, you know,
4:46:32 the, in terms of the timeline here,
4:46:35 I think the third piece, um, is making sure that we are ready to
4:46:41 go, um, for the, the, the 23, 24 school
4:46:44 year. And you have an experienced leadership team who’s already
4:46:49 looking down the road at all of that. But,
4:46:51 um, coming in and, and just working department by department to
4:46:55 be sure that the short-term priorities,
4:46:58 um, have been addressed, um, and are moving along and then
4:47:01 really listening to, um, to each department
4:47:06 head, each member of the cabinet about what those long-term
4:47:09 plans they have are, how they align to the
4:47:11 strategic plan, how they support the, the district’s vision. Um,
4:47:15 and then from there, I think as a new
4:47:17 superintendent, you’re trying to synthesize all of that, um, and,
4:47:22 and get some clarity around,
4:47:23 um, you know, what are the things that, that, that need to be
4:47:27 addressed first beyond
4:47:29 August 10th and, and, and having students in ready to go for the
4:47:32 school year.
4:47:33 Thank you for those answers. Um, one of the things that we’ve
4:47:36 been doing is we’ve been asking a funny
4:47:38 icebreaker because this feels a little bit like a hearing. And
4:47:41 so just to kind of break it up,
4:47:42 uh, my icebreaker question to you is what is your favorite
4:47:45 football team?
4:47:46 Um, at the college level, I support the Gators. I’m a University
4:47:51 of Florida graduate.
4:47:52 All right.
4:47:53 Um, I don’t know if that’s the right answer or not.
4:47:54 There’s no right or wrong answer here.
4:47:56 That’s good.
4:47:56 Okay. Well, on college football for some people, there is. Um, I,
4:48:00 uh, however, I, I grew up from
4:48:02 Miami. I grew up in Miami, um, went to lots of Hurricanes games,
4:48:07 um, uh, as a kid. So our, our,
4:48:09 our families, um, support a lot of the Florida teams.
4:48:12 Okay. Awesome. Thank you so much for your answers to your
4:48:14 questions.
4:48:15 Thank you, vice chair, Mr. Jenkins.
4:48:16 Makes you feel any better. I don’t watch football, so you could
4:48:24 say whatever you want.
4:48:25 Good to know.
4:48:28 Okay. Um, and so my area is academic excellence. So currently
4:48:33 there is a significant achievement
4:48:35 gap for minority students and students with disabilities when
4:48:38 compared to white and non-disabled
4:48:39 peers. So what specific steps would you take to ensure academic
4:48:42 success is distributed equitably
4:48:44 across our district? That’s a great question. And that’s the, um,
4:48:48 that’s the ultimate challenge
4:48:50 that nearly all school districts across the country are facing.
4:48:54 The achievement gap is
4:48:55 not an easy problem. It’s, it’s a gritty problem. It’s a long-term
4:49:00 problem. And, um,
4:49:03 again, if it, if it were simple to solve, it would have been
4:49:06 done already. And so I think, um, you know,
4:49:09 the first step is to really understand, um, the data, not, not
4:49:15 just at the, not just at the surface level,
4:49:18 but you’ve got to get into schools where your achievement gaps
4:49:23 are larger and say,
4:49:25 what’s the difference. So what, what’s happening that things are
4:49:29 a little more narrow at school A
4:49:32 than at school B. Um, and, and those root causes are complex and,
4:49:37 and they interact in,
4:49:38 in different ways. So I think, you know, really pushing into
4:49:41 that data. And then it’s all about,
4:49:43 um, action planning around evidence-based practice. There are,
4:49:49 um, you know, there is research about how
4:49:53 to do this, but the key is not to start and stop. It’s a, it’s a
4:49:57 long game problem. It’s not something
4:50:00 that, that you’re going to fix in one or two or three years. Um,
4:50:04 so much of what we do, um, in public
4:50:07 education is, is driven in shorter cycles, right? We have a, we
4:50:10 have a legislative session every year.
4:50:12 Um, we have, um, we have, um, you know, board member terms at
4:50:18 four years, typically strategic
4:50:20 plans are at five years. Um, for the last 20 years, we’ve had a
4:50:24 lot of changes in accountability systems,
4:50:27 and you’re always kind of resetting that data. So I think
4:50:30 figuring out, um, how to build a long term
4:50:33 strategy, um, and then executing it so that you get that, that
4:50:37 gradual gap closure. And a lot of that is
4:50:40 about, um, building a, a cadre of, of principals and assistant
4:50:46 principals, um, um, um, who, you know,
4:50:50 who can, who can have resilience around the problem because you’re,
4:50:53 you’re going to have up and,
4:50:55 up and down years. Um, but then also that there’s not just one
4:50:58 or two people who know how to do it,
4:51:00 that there are lots of people. And what you often see in school
4:51:04 districts is you have a principal
4:51:06 that takes a school from a, from a, a low grade, a C or a D or
4:51:11 an F up to an A. And then what happens,
4:51:13 everybody goes, that’s amazing. And then that person gets pulled
4:51:16 to the district. And three years later,
4:51:18 that school’s right back where you started. Um, and so again, it’s
4:51:22 not about having one superhero to do
4:51:25 the work. You’ve got to figure out how to build, um, high skill,
4:51:31 um, across the entire talented, um,
4:51:34 principal core, and then how to sustain that gradual growth so
4:51:37 that eventually, um, you do that, get
4:51:39 that gap. ESC is, uh, um, is another, um, uh, another issue
4:51:45 completely. And, um, um, if, if there’s more
4:51:49 time, maybe we, we, we can talk more about that. Um, but again,
4:51:52 it’s another issue that I think all of
4:51:54 our districts are struggling with.
4:51:55 Thank you. I appreciate that so much.
4:51:59 Do you tell what you’ve done in the past and what you would do
4:52:02 to facilitate an increase in third grade
4:52:04 reading proficiency rates? So what we’ve been working to do in,
4:52:11 in Seminole over the last couple of years,
4:52:15 particularly with the, the standards change, um, is to use that
4:52:19 as an opportunity to, uh, to identify and,
4:52:24 uh, surplus or purge, if you will, older practices that, that
4:52:31 really aren’t aligned with the research.
4:52:33 And so we’ve, um, we’ve used a combination of instructional
4:52:36 materials funds and ESSER funds,
4:52:39 um, to really listen to teachers about what they, what they say
4:52:43 they need, and then providing those
4:52:47 needs, but really going to the research to be sure that we’re
4:52:51 selecting materials, um, that, that are
4:52:54 evidence-based. Um, teachers are incredibly creative and
4:52:58 resourceful, and, um, we, we just want to
4:53:02 be sure, um, that when we’re selecting activities, selecting
4:53:06 materials for use in classrooms, um,
4:53:09 that, that there’s an evidence base to them and that the time
4:53:12 that they have with students is, is using
4:53:16 those high, those highest quality materials. I think the other,
4:53:20 um, investment of time, um,
4:53:22 has been in professional learning communities, um, and, and in
4:53:25 districts where there’s a deep commitment
4:53:28 to getting just past the grade level team and into that, um,
4:53:33 into that notion of all of us
4:53:35 who are on the second grade team, we own all of the second
4:53:39 graders and we design intervention and
4:53:42 share students. And we’re not afraid to put our data on the
4:53:45 table and, and say, how are you getting
4:53:49 those results because, because for whatever reason my students
4:53:53 aren’t getting there and, and how do we
4:53:55 exchange that information? So the more we have deep teacher
4:53:59 collaboration, I think, um, the, the better
4:54:02 opportunity we have to, to differentiate and, and support
4:54:05 students because really when you’re talking
4:54:07 about third grade reading, um, as we get toward the end of third
4:54:10 grade, it really is about each student
4:54:13 and what do you have to do differently, um, um, um, to, um,
4:54:18 illuminate that, that love of reading, um,
4:54:21 and that persistence, um, with complex text. Um, so I think
4:54:25 again, it’s, it’s, it’s about the materials,
4:54:28 uh, that you’re, that you’re giving teachers to use and then, um,
4:54:33 the, the time you’re giving them
4:54:35 for, for authentic collaboration. Describe a situation where you
4:54:44 were clearly instrumental
4:54:45 in facilitating a change in the way career and college readiness
4:54:48 was approached in your district.
4:54:50 How was the change meaningful and or successful and what
4:54:53 measures were used to determine the success
4:54:55 of the change initiative? Sure. So this is a, a, a passion, uh,
4:55:00 area of mine and my, my background
4:55:02 is academic. I’m a high school social studies teacher, uh, by
4:55:06 training. Um, but in 2013, my former
4:55:09 superintendent, um, um, tasked me with, um, taking on a new
4:55:16 group that he branded education pathways or
4:55:19 e-pathways. Um, and the first step in, in the process, um, was
4:55:24 to substantially increase career and technical
4:55:28 education in Seminole County, which historically was a college
4:55:32 and university prep district. Um,
4:55:34 and, and in response to, um, you know, changing student
4:55:38 interests, changing family needs,
4:55:40 there was a need to, to significantly, um, scale up CTE. So with
4:55:45 the help of funding from a, um, a voter
4:55:49 approved millage, um, we, we got in the, we got into the CTE
4:55:54 game very, very quickly and, um, and it was
4:55:58 very metric driven. Um, so we looked at expanding the number of
4:56:02 career and professional education academies
4:56:05 that met those kind of DOE gold standards. Um, we looked at, um,
4:56:10 expanding the number of industry
4:56:12 certifications earned, um, first at high school and, and then
4:56:16 down into middle school. Um, when the
4:56:18 legislature approved the digital tool certificates, um, which
4:56:22 was, um, technically K through eight,
4:56:24 but targeted at middle school. Um, um, we, we jumped into that
4:56:29 very, very quickly. Uh, and, um, with the
4:56:32 help of, of some middle school principals who were really
4:56:35 excited, um, about kind of energizing their
4:56:38 technology electives and some of their other non core courses.
4:56:42 Um, we, we scaled up digital, um,
4:56:45 tool certificates, um, really in, in about a year’s time and,
4:56:48 and had thousands of those earned and,
4:56:50 and that’s all sustained. So, um, all of that then translates
4:56:54 the industry certs and the digital tool
4:56:56 certificates, um, into, um, supplemental funding that’s coming
4:57:01 into programs and into the district
4:57:03 from the FEFP. And then you use that money to reinvest in those
4:57:06 programs. And so,
4:57:08 you know, we were able to open, um, advanced manufacturing and
4:57:12 modeling and simulation and, um,
4:57:14 bioscience research, um, as well as expanding, you know,
4:57:18 culinary, uh, and some of the, the digital
4:57:21 arts. And again, many of those programs, um, are in Brevard and
4:57:26 it’s just about continuously, um,
4:57:28 upgrading them for Seminole. It was a, it was a substantial
4:57:32 expansion. And of course, the best part was,
4:57:34 that students and families really responded,
4:57:39 and those have become very popular programs.
4:57:42 So despite starting with an academic background,
4:57:48 I certainly enjoy the career in tech world
4:57:52 and the value that it adds to our students and families.
4:57:56 What do you feel is the single most important piece of data
4:58:02 that will drive our district forward?
4:58:04 I think as we move back into the full accountability system with
4:58:13 FAST,
4:58:14 we want to start going back to the low quartile ELA and math
4:58:21 results.
4:58:23 So the percentage of students in the lowest 25% who are making
4:58:27 learning gains.
4:58:29 And once upon a time in the Florida accountability system,
4:58:33 if you didn’t hit that 50% at your school, there was a penalty
4:58:39 of a letter grade.
4:58:40 It was, we called it the trap door, that even if you had enough
4:58:43 points to get an A,
4:58:44 if half of your lowest quartile was not making learning gains,
4:58:50 you took that letter grade penalty.
4:58:52 We don’t know exactly all the contours of next year’s
4:58:55 accountability system.
4:58:58 But that’s a key metric because if you’re doing well in that
4:59:01 area, if you’re doing well with your,
4:59:03 if your lowest 25% of learners are making learning gains,
4:59:06 chances are your highest 75% of learners are making the learning
4:59:12 gains as well.
4:59:13 And then Mrs. Jenkins, that gets back to that achievement gap
4:59:17 closure.
4:59:17 If you’re moving that lowest 25%, your achievement gap closure
4:59:22 is happening because you tend to see your students with
4:59:26 disabilities,
4:59:27 your English language learners, your struggling readers sitting
4:59:30 in that group.
4:59:31 So I think it’s going to be very important to refocus on that
4:59:35 metric next year,
4:59:36 especially for districts that are looking to either get back to
4:59:40 or hold their A grade.
4:59:45 Based on what you know of our school system,
4:59:56 what do you think is the greatest potential for improvement and
4:59:58 where are our greatest opportunities?
5:00:00 Well, the greatest opportunity is leveraging the dynamic Space
5:00:09 Coast to go even further than you have already.
5:00:13 This is such a unique county and community and the revitalization
5:00:18 of aerospace and engineering.
5:00:21 The opportunities for students here are boundless.
5:00:26 And so, so again, CTE is already a strength in Brevard.
5:00:31 But I think you, you have the opportunity with the growth of, of
5:00:36 some of the companies that,
5:00:38 that are either moving into the area or expanding.
5:00:40 You have that opportunity to build on that.
5:00:43 The talent of the professionals who work in this community is
5:00:48 such an asset to the school district.
5:00:51 From a, from a volunteer perspective, from, from classroom
5:00:56 expertise, from mentoring and internships.
5:01:00 And again, I know that all of that is already in place.
5:01:03 So I think it’s, it’s, how do you create a multiplier effect?
5:01:06 How do you scale it up?
5:01:07 Thank you.
5:01:10 That’s your ice cream.
5:01:12 Oh, I’m sorry.
5:01:13 What’s your favorite ice cream?
5:01:15 Favorite ice cream.
5:01:17 They’re all good.
5:01:20 Good answer.
5:01:21 It’s my, it’s my, it’s my, it’s, yes, it’s, it’s, it’s
5:01:24 definitely my vice.
5:01:25 But yeah, anything with any kind of combination of chocolate is
5:01:29 great.
5:01:30 Thank you, Jason.
5:01:33 I just wanted to say my, my area is the exceptional workforce.
5:01:36 And there’s a couple of questions in here wrapped around some of
5:01:39 the things that are important to me.
5:01:41 So the first question we have is what is your immediate plan for
5:01:44 teacher substitute and bus driver recruitment?
5:01:46 Another big issue, right, that, that, that’s, you know, facing,
5:01:52 um, all districts and, um, your, um, your voters, your, your
5:01:58 taxpayers have already given you a, an incredible tool with the
5:02:03 millage, um, and the opportunity to, um, to be more competitive
5:02:08 with salaries than you, you would typically be.
5:02:11 Or be able to be, or be able to be in a school district given
5:02:12 the budget.
5:02:13 And so, um, I, you know, I, I, I think that’s, um, I think that’s
5:02:17 important, um, particularly the, the, the, the percentage of the
5:02:20 millage that has been allocated, um, you know, to, to, to
5:02:24 support employee compensation.
5:02:26 So that’s a, that’s a very, very powerful, um, messaging tool,
5:02:30 um, and there are lots of districts that, that, that, that don’t
5:02:35 have that opportunity.
5:02:37 Um, so I think, uh, so that’s one part of it.
5:02:40 I think another part of it is, um, continuing to talk about
5:02:44 quality of life in a school district.
5:02:46 Um, there are lots of advantages and I think that’s why you see
5:02:50 sometimes, in fact, I met, uh, uh, met a new teacher, uh, this
5:02:54 morning who had, um, made a transition, um, um, into public
5:02:58 education from other parts of the workforce.
5:03:01 And, um, um, I think we have to continue to message, um, um, um,
5:03:05 all of the, um, all of the advantages of working for a school
5:03:09 district.
5:03:10 Um, you know, both the, both kind of the, the, the, the
5:03:13 structure of the day, um, but also the intangibles of, of truly
5:03:17 making a difference for children.
5:03:19 And, um, um, I, I, I think we have to highlight, you know, those
5:03:23 examples more, you know, so that, so that people, you know, you
5:03:27 know, really take a look at it and understand the options.
5:03:30 And then finally, and I, again, I think all districts are
5:03:33 heading in this direction, um, the importance of grow our own,
5:03:37 right?
5:03:38 That we have a captive audience, uh, of high school students in
5:03:42 our schools and we should be talking to them about career
5:03:45 pathways, whether they stay in Brevard or college or, or for
5:03:49 college or, or they go somewhere else.
5:03:51 Um, we, we should be, um, talking with them as early as possible
5:03:56 about all of the opportunities that, that Brevard public schools
5:04:00 have.
5:04:00 And again, I think, I, I don’t think that’s a unique strategy.
5:04:05 I think all of the districts are looking at, at, at, at programs
5:04:08 and pathways, um, to bring graduates back to their schools.
5:04:12 Um, the other piece is that when that happens, um, when you’re
5:04:16 bringing former students graduates back in four years later, you
5:04:20 know, as teachers or, or paraprofessionals or, or, or in
5:04:23 whatever role, that’s tremendously gratifying to the people who
5:04:26 are already here, right?
5:04:28 To the longterm teachers who help produce those graduates in it.
5:04:31 Um, and it’s exciting to see one of your former students working
5:04:35 in a classroom.
5:04:36 And so I think the, the more that, that we do grow your own, um,
5:04:41 the more, the more gratifying it is for longer term employees,
5:04:48 um, it, it helps cement that retention.
5:04:51 Thank you.
5:04:53 Next question is how do you make sure professional development
5:04:56 programs slash initiatives have impacted the knowledge, skills,
5:05:00 and practices of educators?
5:05:01 Well, the, I think chair, where we have to start with that is we
5:05:06 have to be sure that we’re talking to our educators about what
5:05:11 they believe they need.
5:05:13 Um, and, um, often when, uh, in, in, in, in my district, when we
5:05:17 do focus groups with teachers, the number one request is for
5:05:21 time, right?
5:05:22 And, and, and, and that’s the, um, that’s the hardest thing to
5:05:25 grant because they’re, because the structure of public education
5:05:29 is just set up a certain way.
5:05:31 Um, and we’re all, um, and we’re all, we’re all struggling to
5:05:33 find more time.
5:05:34 Um, but I think where, where you free up time, making sure that,
5:05:39 um, that it’s being used efficiently and that it’s focused, um,
5:05:43 and that, that we’re addressing what teachers need.
5:05:46 The second part of that is that we’re hearing them and we’re
5:05:50 adapting our professional development offerings, um, so that, um,
5:05:54 so that, uh, there are, are, are dynamic opportunities.
5:05:57 One thing, uh, that we did, uh, in Seminole last summer and we’ll
5:06:02 repeat this summer was we used, um, our ESSER funding to create
5:06:07 a, um, summer educator conference.
5:06:10 We called it the best summer ever and, um, really targeted
5:06:14 around learning loss and, and academic recovery.
5:06:18 Um, and so we offered every teacher the opportunity to spend an
5:06:21 extra five days, not at their own school, um, but, um, um, but,
5:06:26 but at a host school working with members of their PLC, um, to
5:06:30 dive deeper into the academic standards, to get into the new ELA
5:06:35 and mathematics materials that had been purchased, um, so that
5:06:39 they were going into the first day of school, um, with an
5:06:42 understanding of the curriculum framework.
5:06:44 Um, with a deeper, um, with a deeper, uh, knowledge and comfort
5:06:47 with the standards and with time to work through new materials.
5:06:51 And so our teachers who took advantage of that reported that
5:06:54 they were really able to hit the ground running this year.
5:06:57 And, um, and again, we, we got so much positive feedback on that,
5:07:01 that we’re going to repeat that same opportunity this summer, um,
5:07:05 two years into the, to the new standards.
5:07:07 Um, so that teachers have that, that opportunity to deepen.
5:07:10 So, so I think it’s a bit, again, about talking to teachers
5:07:13 about their needs, creating, um, opportunities that are
5:07:17 attractive to them and then going out and, and monitoring what
5:07:21 you’re seeing in schools to say, are we seeing any evidence that,
5:07:26 that what we’ve provided, um, and what we’ve practiced in a PD
5:07:30 environment is now being implemented.
5:07:33 And if not, we’ve got to go back and say, okay, where, where,
5:07:36 where’s the gap and what do we have to do to fix it?
5:07:39 No, I appreciate that.
5:07:41 Following up.
5:07:42 The next question I have is what will any teachers organization
5:07:46 slash union that you have worked with tell us about you?
5:07:49 What will support staff organizations say the same?
5:07:54 Good question.
5:07:55 So I am a, I am a member of the bargaining team, um, as a, in
5:07:59 the deputy role.
5:08:01 So I, I get to, to observe all of that.
5:08:04 We, um, our structure, um, we try to be a bit more formal in
5:08:08 terms of our, our, our chief negotiator is our spokesman.
5:08:12 And so, you know, we, we, we wait to, uh, to answer questions.
5:08:16 And so I, I’m there if there’s an, you know, an instructional,
5:08:20 uh, question emerges and, and there’s that kind of back and
5:08:23 forth.
5:08:24 Um, informally, again, I, I’ve been in the same district, um, as
5:08:28 a school administrator and, and, and then as a district
5:08:31 administrator.
5:08:32 And generally the, the relationship with the union has been
5:08:36 positive, um, in just in terms of, of our being open to
5:08:41 listening, you know, to, to, to challenges even outside of
5:08:45 bargaining.
5:08:46 Um, so that we’re addressing issues before they, you know, boil
5:08:50 up to the level, uh, of a grievance.
5:08:53 So I, I’ve been involved where, where there are questions about,
5:08:56 you know, instruction or whatever.
5:08:58 And, and really the goal is, um, to, um, you know, when there
5:09:03 are changes, when there are mandates, um, to try to implement
5:09:07 them with, with teacher time and convenience in mind.
5:09:12 And so for example, the, you know, instructional materials
5:09:15 changes, the cataloging of classroom libraries, all, all, all of
5:09:18 that impacts teachers.
5:09:20 And so, you know, are we giving them, you know, tools to be able
5:09:23 to do that quickly and efficiently so that those complaints
5:09:27 either are minimized or, or, or, or don’t kind of boil over.
5:09:30 Thank you for that.
5:09:32 What has your district done to develop and maintain a
5:09:35 collaborative relationship with employees include issues of
5:09:38 morale, communication, team building, describe your role in this.
5:09:43 What do you do to make it fun?
5:09:45 Sure.
5:09:47 Absolutely.
5:09:48 Um, so, uh, one of my favorite activities, and it’s been a, a, a
5:09:52 long standing tradition in, in Seminole is that the senior
5:09:57 leaders spend the first day of school at about 5:30 at the bus
5:10:02 depot, greeting and, and waving to the drivers as they head out.
5:10:06 Um, and that’s a, a, a, an easy gesture, right?
5:10:09 It’s, it’s, it’s just getting up early and getting out there.
5:10:12 Um, but it says we’re all in this together.
5:10:14 Um, and then the last couple of years, there’ve been, um, random
5:10:18 follow up meals served out at transportation.
5:10:21 And regardless of, you know, who’s doing that organization, it’s
5:10:24 about the senior leadership team showing up, saying thank you,
5:10:28 being present.
5:10:30 And that, that goes a long way, or has gone a long way, um, with
5:10:34 our transportation department, with, with facilities, with
5:10:39 maintenance.
5:10:40 Um, I think we’ve used a lot of different techniques, you know,
5:10:44 over the years to, um, um, to, uh, to celebrate teachers and
5:10:49 employees.
5:10:50 Um, we do a, uh, we do a veteran recognition at each board
5:10:54 meeting.
5:10:55 That’s, that’s proved to be, um, very positive.
5:10:58 Um, and, um, just, you know, just as much, you know, gratitude
5:11:02 to teachers, uh, and staff as possible.
5:11:05 And, um, when it’s specific and it’s genuine, it goes a long way.
5:11:10 Thank you for that.
5:11:11 Um, next question’s wrapped around new technology.
5:11:14 Describe a time when you led the implementation of a new
5:11:16 technology in your district.
5:11:18 If you can talk about, uh, what technology it was, what did you
5:11:22 learn about the technology?
5:11:23 What challenges, obstacles did you have?
5:11:25 What success was the technology and how did you measure the
5:11:28 results of that?
5:11:29 Just basically, we implemented X, here’s what it did.
5:11:33 Sure.
5:11:34 So, um, going back a few years, uh, my, my first, um, job at the
5:11:39 district office in Seminole
5:11:41 was, um, administering, uh, our race to the top programs.
5:11:45 That was in 2011.
5:11:47 That was an Obama administration initiative.
5:11:50 Um, federal funding coming to districts at a time when, when the
5:11:53 economy was tough.
5:11:55 Um, and, and, and, um, the, um, infusion of money allowed
5:11:59 certain projects to keep going.
5:12:01 Um, there were, um, um, um, specific requirements.
5:12:05 It wasn’t, you know, do with it whatever you want.
5:12:07 So, there were some specific requirements around what at the
5:12:10 time was called the local instructional
5:12:12 improvement system.
5:12:14 And one of the things that we put into place was a, a student
5:12:17 performance data management system.
5:12:19 Um, which is, you know, where you’re housing, um, really all of
5:12:22 your student analytics.
5:12:24 It, it takes you a step beyond the student information system.
5:12:28 And what was unique here is that we ended up, um, selecting a
5:12:32 vendor that was new to Florida.
5:12:35 Um, and that, that frankly submitted a low bid in order to get
5:12:39 into a high performing district in Florida.
5:12:42 And, and what I enjoyed about that was that because it was a
5:12:47 newer product and because it was new to Florida, we had
5:12:50 tremendous influence over the customization.
5:12:53 Um, and so my very small team and I got to map out what the RTI
5:12:58 now MTSS module looked like.
5:13:01 Um, and, and, and so we did all of the storyboarding and then
5:13:05 the programmers came in and, and, and, um, made it look right
5:13:10 and made it operate correctly.
5:13:12 Um, and so, um, what didn’t work right on the, on the functional
5:13:16 end, we owned that, right?
5:13:18 What didn’t work right on the technical, the programming end,
5:13:21 they had to fix.
5:13:22 Um, and, um, 10, 10, 12 years later, we still use the same
5:13:26 system.
5:13:27 And, um, we’ve built lots of little enhancements.
5:13:30 There’s a, um, a risk scoring algorithm in there to help us with
5:13:33 early warning even earlier than some of the metrics that are in,
5:13:37 uh, statute.
5:13:38 And so, um, that’s a system, um, that, um, that I definitely got
5:13:42 to implement, um, pieces of and that continues to be used today,
5:13:46 you know, for a variety of purposes.
5:13:49 Um, more recently, um, a lot of technology, uh, was put in as a
5:13:53 result of the, um, again, the CTE upgrades.
5:13:56 Um, and so, you know, when you’re, when you’re putting in, you
5:14:00 know,
5:14:00 um, an advanced manufacturing lab, um, you start, uh, learning a
5:14:04 lot about CNC machining, um, and, and, and, um, you know, all of
5:14:09 those specialty products.
5:14:11 Um, and again, as the, as the person managing the work, you’ve
5:14:14 got to understand it, but you’re also relying on your teacher
5:14:18 experts, um, and, and, you know, you know, different
5:14:22 organizations, um, to try to use that money as best you can.
5:14:25 So, you know, both kind of a data example and then a more
5:14:28 practical student equipment example.
5:14:31 No, I appreciate that.
5:14:32 That concludes my questions.
5:14:33 Um, Ms. Campbell, you have the next round.
5:14:36 Thank you.
5:14:39 I haven’t had one since the beginning.
5:14:40 I just didn’t start one.
5:14:41 So whatever.
5:14:42 So we can’t start one now.
5:14:43 Can’t do it because everything has to be the same.
5:14:44 We have to do it the exact same way for every person.
5:14:46 So I have to tell you that we all picked areas of our passion,
5:14:50 except for Mr. Trent, because he got the leftovers.
5:14:54 So, so my area of passion and questions is community connections.
5:15:01 So, um, first of all, what are your ideas about engaging
5:15:06 families who are inexperienced with participating or who have
5:15:10 negative experiences with education?
5:15:12 And how would you help your staff to reach out to such families
5:15:15 successfully and respectfully?
5:15:17 That, that’s a great question.
5:15:19 And it, and it becomes even more important, right, in the HB1
5:15:22 environment because families do have more choices than ever.
5:15:26 And, um, I, I think the challenge for school districts in
5:15:30 Florida is going to be, how do we leverage the scale advantage
5:15:37 that we have by, by being a, a, a large district?
5:15:40 But how do you make it feel like it’s not?
5:15:43 How do you make every family, every school, um, you know, feel
5:15:48 like an N of one?
5:15:50 Um, and, um, that, that requires a, you know, a lot of thinking,
5:15:54 a lot of customized approaches.
5:15:57 Um, I think all of us who are educators retrained into
5:16:00 leadership are also going to, we’re going to need to rely more
5:16:04 on, on help from, from folks who have expertise in strategic
5:16:08 communication and marketing, um, to kind of fine tune those,
5:16:12 those messages and, um, and really understand, um, um, how to do
5:16:17 that work.
5:16:18 Um, I think in, in Brevard specifically, the, the, the
5:16:22 geographic uniqueness, right?
5:16:25 The, the 72 miles north to south creates, although it’s one
5:16:29 county, you’ve got a lot of different communities.
5:16:32 And so that message is going to have to be, um, more, more
5:16:37 narrowly tailored, um, to, to specific schools, um, and then,
5:16:42 and then down to specific families.
5:16:46 In terms of, of, of engaging communities that, um, um, or
5:16:50 families that may, as you said, weren’t successful in school
5:16:53 themselves.
5:16:54 I think that’s the important of, of the importance of trying to
5:16:57 go out into the community and not just doing everything from a
5:17:01 district office or, you know, from a headquarters building.
5:17:05 Uh, and, um, again, just, you know, just being at, at, at McNair
5:17:11 this morning, um, very important community school, um, and, um,
5:17:17 and, and your staff, you know, at each school has to know the
5:17:21 history of the area and how it’s evolved.
5:17:24 Um, and, and, and, and how to utilize that as an asset in, in,
5:17:28 in, in talking with families.
5:17:31 Thank you.
5:17:32 What has been your experience or interaction with local business
5:17:35 and community groups?
5:17:37 What have you specifically done to ensure a positive working
5:17:40 relationship with economic development groups or chambers or, uh,
5:17:44 local, uh, philanthropic groups?
5:17:46 Sure.
5:17:47 Thank you.
5:17:48 Uh, so I, I think the first part of that is, is showing up.
5:17:53 Right.
5:17:54 And, and that’s challenging because there are a lot of different
5:17:58 groups kind of all working, you know, at the same issues.
5:18:02 So how do you, um, you know, um, you get invitations to, to
5:18:07 different, um, you know, to, to different events or, or
5:18:11 different opportunities.
5:18:13 And, and it’s about going out and doing those things and then,
5:18:15 and then following up with the people that you meet.
5:18:18 Um, certainly in the, um, career in tech world, the, the program
5:18:23 advisory, um, committees that are, that are required, um, are a
5:18:27 good way to, um, engage with a lot of different partners in a,
5:18:32 in, in an organized fashion.
5:18:34 Um, but then I think it’s about really working, um, um, to
5:18:39 understand what each business partner can do and, and what each
5:18:43 business partner is interested in doing and, and how that aligns
5:18:48 to the district goals.
5:18:49 You know, so for example, um, both Brevard and Seminole do a lot
5:18:53 of work around student internships.
5:18:56 Um, and you, you have to, you have to put some parameters in
5:19:01 place.
5:19:02 Um, but then you also want to, um, you, you want to be able to
5:19:08 adapt to each particular, um, um, um, businesses either limits
5:19:13 or, or, or, or, or, or preferences, right?
5:19:15 So, you know, and there are some businesses where you’re, you’re
5:19:19 not going to be able to, you know, do an internship for a
5:19:22 student under the age of 18.
5:19:24 But you might be able, you know, to do a, a job shadow or, uh,
5:19:28 um, or a bring the business into the school.
5:19:32 So, I, I, again, I think it’s about kind of each partner’s
5:19:35 unique needs and then staying engaged with them.
5:19:38 And that’s really, it’s important that the, the, the, the
5:19:42 district leadership team, you know, be, um, be available.
5:19:46 It can’t just be a single person, but that lots of people are,
5:19:49 are going out and, and hopefully the same people repeatedly
5:19:53 repeatedly to the same organizations.
5:19:55 I certainly, um, in Seminole have gotten to serve on some
5:19:57 economic development committees, you know, within chambers, um,
5:20:02 and, and do some of that work.
5:20:03 And, and the key pieces, making the meetings, making the
5:20:06 contacts.
5:20:07 And then when those folks have, uh, when they have a need, um,
5:20:11 or a request from the district, um, that, that we follow up on
5:20:16 that, um, and, and that we provide it.
5:20:18 So, for example, in the, in the economic development world,
5:20:22 sometimes you have a, um, you know, you, you have a group trying
5:20:26 to bring a business to a community.
5:20:29 And one of the decisions or one of the factors in that business
5:20:34 is relocation is what schools are the children of my employees
5:20:39 going to attend.
5:20:40 Um, and so often they’ve got, they’ve got specific questions and
5:20:44 you’ve got to attend to those in order to be a good partner to
5:20:47 the group that’s trying to bring them in.
5:20:49 And so I think that responsiveness is really important.
5:20:52 Thank you.
5:20:53 How important is it and what specific roles have you played
5:20:57 personally in dealing with, uh, your, the legislature, uh,
5:21:01 congressional delegations and county and city officials?
5:21:05 Um, uh, you know, that’s an area that when I, um, when I started
5:21:10 my service at the district office, I, I, I didn’t, I, I didn’t
5:21:14 realize coming from a school administration role.
5:21:17 How critical all of that was going to be.
5:21:20 Um, so I, you know, I, I’ll give you a couple of examples.
5:21:24 Um, I have, um, twice gone to Tallahassee to testify on, on, or
5:21:30 not testify, but present, um, to, um, uh, house, uh, and Senate
5:21:34 subcommittees.
5:21:36 Um, that’s a, an incredible opportunity because you have
5:21:40 legislators sitting on, on these education, um, committees and
5:21:44 they’re interested in, they’re interested in,
5:21:46 they’re interested in the policy area, but, but most of them,
5:21:50 not all of them, but most of them haven’t worked in a school
5:21:52 district or haven’t been a classroom teacher.
5:21:54 Um, uh, and, um, you know, chair Susan, as you know, it, it’s
5:21:59 different when you, when you have classroom teaching experience
5:22:01 and you’re trying to communicate the complexity of different
5:22:05 issues.
5:22:06 So, so I’ve had a couple of those opportunities, um, to go up
5:22:09 and talk to, you know, legislators formally.
5:22:12 Um, like Brevard Seminole has had success with specific
5:22:16 legislative appropriations, um, to enhance programs.
5:22:21 Um, and, um, I’ve had different roles there.
5:22:25 In some cases, I’m the person writing the request.
5:22:28 Um, I have been up to Tallahassee then to, to talk with
5:22:31 legislators, you know, and educate them, you know, on those, um,
5:22:36 on those issues.
5:22:37 Um, I, uh, work closely with our current superintendent as we
5:22:41 kind of draft the legislative platform each year in response to
5:22:45 what our board members are telling us.
5:22:47 And there’s an art to crafting, um, that legislative platform
5:22:50 because you have to capture complexity, but you also have to do
5:22:54 it succinctly.
5:22:55 And so, again, um, there’s often one page documents.
5:22:59 A lot of work goes into that one page because you’re trying to
5:23:02 get the, the, the message right.
5:23:04 Um, in terms of, um, you know, in terms of local leaders, again,
5:23:09 I think both the kind of formal and informal connections are
5:23:13 really important.
5:23:14 And again, each of you as board members already has those
5:23:17 existing connections.
5:23:19 Um, and so sometimes the, the role of the superintendent is
5:23:22 making sure that you have the information you need.
5:23:25 When a colleague from another board calls you and asks you for
5:23:28 information or, or a question or says, Hey, I heard that this
5:23:32 was going on.
5:23:33 Um, you know, and, and you need that quick response from the
5:23:37 superintendent, um, or the senior staff.
5:23:40 Um, so that, um, so that you can respond to that and have that
5:23:43 productive relationship with your elected colleague.
5:23:46 Um, and so I think that’s another, um, um, important role, um,
5:23:50 that the, the superintendent, the senior leadership team needs
5:23:54 to play.
5:23:55 Thank you. I appreciate that. Uh, presenting information in a
5:23:59 highly charged situation and to a variety of groups as a part of
5:24:04 a superintendent’s job.
5:24:05 Give an example of how you have encountered opposition and how
5:24:08 you dealt with the resulting situation.
5:24:11 Great question. Um, again, going back a few years, um, I had the
5:24:23 opportunity to participate, um, in a rezoning process, uh,
5:24:29 within Seminole.
5:24:30 Um, our former superintendent, um, Dr. Walt Griffin, um, uh,
5:24:36 came into his superintendency and within the first year,
5:24:40 looked at growth patterns and said, we really need to address
5:24:43 some things.
5:24:44 And so there ended up being a, um, um, uh, a three, uh, uh, a
5:24:49 rezoning of three different areas geographically, um, which were
5:24:54 then kind of split up and, and staffed, um, by, um, by, uh, two,
5:25:02 uh, two members of the leadership team.
5:25:05 And at that point I was the junior member of the team, and it
5:25:07 was a great learning experience for me.
5:25:09 But at that time in Seminole, we actually had a process where,
5:25:13 um, citizens could submit, um, their own map proposals, which
5:25:17 then had to be kind of, um, analyzed at the district level and
5:25:22 then communicated back.
5:25:24 Um, so, so I’ve had, uh, and, and certainly, um, there’s nothing
5:25:27 more polarizing than attendance boundary changes, right?
5:25:31 Because, because very few people are happy and, and, and lots of
5:25:34 people are unhappy.
5:25:36 It’s just hard work.
5:25:37 Um, and it’s, it’s really about trying to address people’s
5:25:42 specific concerns, but then also trying to appeal to the greater
5:25:46 good, which doesn’t work for everyone.
5:25:49 Um, but some people do understand.
5:25:52 Um, and so I think, you know, and, and I’m sure there are other,
5:25:56 you know, certainly other controversial issues that we’ve, you
5:25:59 know, dealt with, um, over the last year.
5:26:00 Um, but, but it’s about trying to be clear in the messaging,
5:26:05 particularly formal presentations, right?
5:26:10 That you make sure that everybody on that team is, is, is on the
5:26:14 same page and move in the same direction.
5:26:17 Um, because when we’re not, people sense that, um, and, and, and
5:26:21 it becomes a, it becomes an issue.
5:26:23 Um, and, and, and then, and then the second part of that is, is
5:26:26 being as transparent as possible in answering people’s questions
5:26:29 and acknowledging that you’re not going to make everyone happy,
5:26:33 but you’re trying to make the best decision that you can for
5:26:37 students.
5:26:39 Uh, and, um, and, and trying to, to manage all of the complexity.
5:26:43 Thank you.
5:26:44 All right.
5:26:45 I’ve got one more.
5:26:46 Sorry.
5:26:47 I’m a note taker.
5:26:48 All right.
5:26:49 What have you and your district done to respond to the use of
5:26:54 drugs, alcohol, tobacco, vaping, et cetera, by students?
5:27:01 I, I, I, I, I, you’re, you’re, you’re, you’re exactly right.
5:27:05 Another problem that, that, um, that, um, that we all face and,
5:27:08 you know, um, I think, you know, with vaping, um, we, we hear
5:27:14 about it from some schools, um, more than others, um, in terms
5:27:20 of principals saying this is a, this is a, a, a bigger issue
5:27:25 here.
5:27:25 And then, and then other principals saying, I think, I, I think,
5:27:28 I think we have that more under control.
5:27:30 Um, and so, you know, sometimes you’re, you’re, you’re dealing
5:27:34 with, you know, more specific behaviors at, at different
5:27:37 campuses.
5:27:38 Um, first of all, um, my personal belief, um, is that your code
5:27:43 of conduct should reflect what you’re willing to enforce.
5:27:49 So sometimes we write things and then the folks who have to do
5:27:54 the work, we’re talking about the, the, the deans and the
5:27:57 behavior support people and, and the assistant principals, um,
5:28:01 look at that and say, that’s, that’s impractical and, and, and
5:28:04 here’s why.
5:28:05 And so I, I think we have to be careful about having a written
5:28:09 message that, um, that sounds nice on paper, but doesn’t reflect
5:28:13 what we’re actually, you know, willing to do.
5:28:18 Um, and then I think the, the, the second part of that, going
5:28:21 back to something we talked about earlier, is the issue of time.
5:28:25 Right?
5:28:26 So you can, you can more heavily increase supervision, but you
5:28:31 have to look at that campus supervision plan and you also have
5:28:35 to say, what’s the opportunity cost of doing that?
5:28:39 What are we giving up?
5:28:40 Um, so if, you know, if, if all of our, you know, assistant
5:28:45 principals and deans are standing in front of bathrooms all day,
5:28:50 then we’re not monitoring instructional quality.
5:28:52 Um, and so I think that’s the other, um, and again, there, there,
5:28:55 if it was an easy answer, it would already be fixed.
5:28:57 Right?
5:28:58 But I think, but I think that’s the, you know, when you decide,
5:29:01 okay, we, we really want to, we, we really want to eliminate
5:29:06 this problem.
5:29:08 Um, then our actions have to match the words that are on paper
5:29:12 and we have to acknowledge what we’re giving up in order to do
5:29:16 that.
5:29:17 And I, I think, you know, to, to give another example, the dress
5:29:21 code, um, comes up now and then in different districts and, and
5:29:25 it kind of ebbs and flows.
5:29:27 And now we want to have really strict enforcement.
5:29:29 And, and again, you can do that.
5:29:31 Um, but you, but you have to weigh the cost too.
5:29:36 Um, certainly alcohol, drugs, vaping, um, that has to be taken
5:29:41 seriously.
5:29:42 You can’t say, you know, not our issue.
5:29:44 Um, but I, I do think you have to be intentional about, you know,
5:29:48 what’s our messaging to families?
5:29:50 How are we, how are we helping students?
5:29:53 Um, how are we enforcing, um, and, and tying all of that
5:29:56 together?
5:29:57 And of course with students, consistency is really important too.
5:30:01 So again, making sure that, you know, again, if a school
5:30:04 leadership team has decided to plant a flag on a certain hill
5:30:08 and say, this is, we’re, we’re not going to tolerate this, that
5:30:12 everybody on that team is on board and saying the same thing.
5:30:15 Thank you.
5:30:16 I appreciate it.
5:30:17 And my, um, fun question is what is your favorite animal?
5:30:20 Favorite animal.
5:30:21 Um, my, uh, my elementary school son is, is quite fond of the,
5:30:29 um, clouded leopard.
5:30:32 And so we, we hear about that, uh, uh, uh, a lot in our house.
5:30:36 And so I think that’s just become, um, one of our favorites.
5:30:39 All right.
5:30:40 Thank you.
5:30:41 I have to look that up.
5:30:44 Um, go ahead, Mr. Trent.
5:30:45 All right.
5:30:46 So again, thank you for, uh, for being here and my, uh, uh, my
5:30:50 area is operational sustainability.
5:30:53 So I know you’ve been waiting all day for this.
5:30:56 So here we go.
5:30:57 I’m ready, Mr. Trent.
5:30:58 All right.
5:30:59 What is the most challenging operational issue in school
5:31:01 districts today?
5:31:02 And how do you approach this challenge?
5:31:05 I really do.
5:31:06 I think it’s important.
5:31:08 That’s huge.
5:31:09 Um, so I, um, thinking back to, uh, an earlier question as well.
5:31:15 I think right now, nearly every school district is, um,
5:31:19 challenged by transportation, right?
5:31:21 And by meeting our obligations, um, with the staff that we, that
5:31:28 we have.
5:31:30 Um, everyone’s dealing with, um, driver and monitor shortages.
5:31:35 Um, you’ve got, you know, you’ve got the, the wage pressures in
5:31:39 there.
5:31:40 And then, and then you just have logistics and, and you, you
5:31:43 couple that with the fact
5:31:44 that, you know, when we talk about operations, there aren’t a
5:31:48 lot of people who pick up the
5:31:49 phone and call transportation and say, I’m thrilled that the bus
5:31:54 has been on time every
5:31:56 day for the last three weeks.
5:31:58 Thank you.
5:31:59 Right.
5:32:00 Nobody does that.
5:32:01 Um, and so, um, so it’s, um, uh, that, that transportation
5:32:06 department, um, has challenges every single day.
5:32:09 Um, and so, um, you know, I think that’s an area that, that a
5:32:12 lot of districts are looking at.
5:32:14 It looks like there’s some innovation perhaps coming out of the
5:32:17 legislature, um, and some opportunities
5:32:19 to, to, you know, to, to, you know, to, to look at, you know,
5:32:23 ways to supplement your, your traditional
5:32:26 kind of school bus and routing.
5:32:28 Um, but, um, um, but I definitely think that’s right now an area
5:32:33 of significant, um, challenge.
5:32:35 And, and it is, it’s a very, um, customer facing area.
5:32:38 So when those buses are late through, through no fault of the,
5:32:41 you know, the, the, the district
5:32:44 or, or, or transportation or whatever, parents do see that.
5:32:47 Right.
5:32:48 And, and, and some are going to be understanding and some are
5:32:49 not.
5:32:50 Um, and so again, particularly in this area of more choice, more
5:32:54 competition, efficiency
5:32:55 of transportation, um, is even more important at a time when,
5:33:00 when the labor, um, shortage is
5:33:02 a real problem.
5:33:03 So I think that’s our, probably our greatest challenge just
5:33:06 about in any district.
5:33:07 Okay.
5:33:08 Thanks for that answer.
5:33:09 Uh, share with us an example of when you were especially
5:33:12 innovative in addressing a funding
5:33:15 gap, such as the situation, the obstacles you account
5:33:18 encountered, uh, the risk involved,
5:33:21 and then lastly, the outcome of that.
5:33:22 So a funding gap.
5:33:23 Funding gap.
5:33:25 So I guess there are a couple of, a couple of things I’d say.
5:33:30 Um, I think, um, one thing in Seminole over the years has been,
5:33:40 um, that as budgets are tight,
5:33:43 you want to keep your, your, your central office pretty compact,
5:33:47 right?
5:33:48 We, we, we put our funding in the schools.
5:33:51 And so you have a, you have a, compared to other districts,
5:33:54 perhaps a, a relatively flat
5:33:56 organization.
5:33:57 And you’re trying to, to do all of this.
5:33:59 Um, one thing that, that we currently do on all of the teams
5:34:03 that, that I lead is every
5:34:05 time there’s a vacancy, we stop and say, do we need to post that
5:34:10 right now?
5:34:11 Is that, does, does, does, does, does, is that still the most
5:34:16 important need?
5:34:18 Or is this a job that needs to be shifted?
5:34:23 Um, or, or, or responsibilities revised?
5:34:28 And, and, and often when you do that exercise, the answer is yes,
5:34:31 we absolutely do need this.
5:34:32 And let’s go ahead and post, but, but we, we have done some,
5:34:36 some repurposing.
5:34:38 Um, my, um, recently, um, we lost one of our curriculum
5:34:43 specialists to a, a, a private
5:34:45 industry job and my director of teaching and learning and I sat
5:34:48 and, and looked at it.
5:34:50 And, um, um, we really felt like, um, um, not surprisingly that,
5:34:56 um, media centers, um, we’re
5:34:59 taking up a lot more time, right?
5:35:00 The cataloging of all of these libraries, the approval of every
5:35:03 book in a library.
5:35:04 And so we made a hard decision to shift from, from that
5:35:07 curriculum specialist role to, you
5:35:09 know, adding a teacher on assignment over in the media area.
5:35:13 And then, you know, the work of that other person was who had
5:35:16 departed was still important.
5:35:17 And so it had to be, um, divided up and distributed differently
5:35:21 among the rest of the team.
5:35:23 Um, but the point is we, we addressed a need without needing
5:35:27 more funding.
5:35:28 Um, but it requires, again, a lot of time and analysis.
5:35:33 Typically you have a vacancy.
5:35:34 You want to get it up there.
5:35:35 You want to get somebody replaced.
5:35:36 But in, in, in, in times of scarcity, sometimes you have to make,
5:35:40 you know, hard choices.
5:35:42 Um, you know, in order to shift.
5:35:44 The other thing I’ll, I’ll say, Mr. Trent, is, um, um, federal
5:35:50 funding, um, you know, is, is divided among multiple grants.
5:35:56 And one thing that you want to see in a school district is that
5:35:59 all of your federal grant administrators are talking to each
5:36:03 other because the scope of those grants often overlap.
5:36:07 And although you can’t supplant from the general fund, um,
5:36:12 sometimes what you can do is get more efficiency out of your
5:36:16 federal grants, you know, by pooling, by pooling and, and, and,
5:36:21 and dividing how, how you fund things.
5:36:23 So, for example, um, this year our federal projects
5:36:26 administrators, um, selected some grants and we went through a
5:36:30 zero base budgeting exercise on, on grants that were very mature.
5:36:35 Um, and, um, we all sat in a conference room together and we
5:36:39 went line by line, um, and everybody kind of let down their
5:36:43 guard and, and said, this is, this is what I’m paying for out of
5:36:47 my grant.
5:36:48 And, and we went through and talked about, um, is this aligned
5:36:51 to the strategic plan?
5:36:53 Um, is this, um, something that still adds value every single
5:36:57 year?
5:36:58 Or is this something that has lost its luster and either needs
5:37:01 to be redesigned or abandoned?
5:37:03 Um, and in the course of doing that, you end up with grant
5:37:06 administrators going that, that really belongs over here with me
5:37:12 and you should be taking this or, oh, there’s a way for us to
5:37:17 split fund, you know, a position or an initiative.
5:37:20 And so again, that’s about, um, building trust among, among
5:37:23 district leaders, among grant administrators and, and sitting
5:37:26 down and, and having those honest conversations.
5:37:29 Well, thank you for that answer.
5:37:32 Um, describe your experience with strategic planning for a large
5:37:36 organization.
5:37:37 Sure.
5:37:38 So, so currently as, as deputy superintendent, one of my job
5:37:42 duties is to steward the district’s strategic plan.
5:37:46 And again, it, it is absolutely the board’s strategic plan.
5:37:49 Um, we have a, a five year plan that gets reviewed and can be
5:37:53 adjusted by the board each year.
5:37:56 Um, some years there are minor adjustments in there because of
5:37:59 accountability changes.
5:38:01 Um, uh, and then, um, in other years, um, um, we might rework an
5:38:07 entire system initiative.
5:38:09 You, you have four, um, you have four goals in your current
5:38:12 strategic plan.
5:38:13 Um, ours is structured a little differently.
5:38:15 We have eight strategic initiatives that we’re working on.
5:38:18 Um, there’s a lot of language overlap actually between our two
5:38:21 districts’ plans.
5:38:22 They’re just organized differently.
5:38:24 Um, so my role currently, um, um, is to, um, you know, maintain
5:38:31 that document.
5:38:33 Um, and then each year, um, oversee the, uh, results reporting,
5:38:39 um, the, uh, reporting of
5:38:42 the key performance indicators to the board, um, and then to
5:38:46 work with the initiative owners
5:38:49 on what they’re seeing in the data, what they’re going to report
5:38:52 back to the board and whether
5:38:54 they have suggestions, you know, for adjustments.
5:38:57 And obviously I’m working very closely with, with our
5:39:00 superintendent on that.
5:39:02 Um, but part of my job is to, um, get the coordination among
5:39:07 departments right so that we’re moving
5:39:10 forward as a group so that we’re not overwhelming the board with
5:39:13 too many changes at once and that
5:39:16 we’re kind of crystallizing around what, what really are, are
5:39:19 the, the, the key, uh, priorities.
5:39:22 And, and again, um, I’m surrounded by a great team of people, um,
5:39:26 and, and we work at it together.
5:39:28 Um, but I run kind of point on management of the, of the
5:39:33 processes beyond that in prior roles.
5:39:36 Um, I, um, I wrote what we call our system initiative C, which
5:39:41 is our, our innovation for college careers
5:39:43 and citizenship.
5:39:44 Again, as part of that education pathways initiative.
5:39:47 Um, and I was the, um, the owner, meaning the person responsible
5:39:52 for the outcomes of those key performance indicators.
5:39:54 And, and, and, and, you know, one of the things I’ve learned
5:39:57 about strategic planning is we have to make sure
5:39:59 that we’re talking about the strategic plan to all employee
5:40:02 groups.
5:40:03 Um, and in the day-to-day work of running schools, it’s easy for
5:40:07 that document to get lost.
5:40:09 Um, and, and, and, and, and, and people are doing the work
5:40:14 toward the attainment of the plan.
5:40:17 But we have to make the, the links explicit.
5:40:19 Um, the other piece is that sometimes when you’re making
5:40:22 decisions as a district leadership team,
5:40:24 um, others may not understand why you’re doing things a certain
5:40:29 way.
5:40:29 And the answer is often because we’re carrying out the plan and
5:40:33 you have, and that’s why it’s important
5:40:36 for all stakeholders to know what’s in that plan.
5:40:39 Great.
5:40:41 Thank you for that.
5:40:42 How do you assure ensure climate assessment results are used in
5:40:47 school improvement planning across the district?
5:40:50 So, um, in Seminole, um, we have a, a, a total of, of three
5:40:59 surveys that go out to stakeholders.
5:41:02 And, um, some of those are built internally.
5:41:05 Some of them are externally validated.
5:41:07 Um, and, and those result, this is actually the time of year
5:41:10 that, that those results are coming in.
5:41:12 Um, and that principals are asked to reflect and our assistant
5:41:16 superintendents are reading those
5:41:18 and, and having conversations with principals about, um, about
5:41:22 what, uh, what’s in that feedback.
5:41:25 And then what you want to do is you want to take that feedback
5:41:28 directly into your school improvement planning process,
5:41:33 your, your development of your SIP.
5:41:35 Um, in, uh, certainly you have some schools that are filling out
5:41:38 state required documents.
5:41:40 In Seminole, we’ve continued to have all schools go through a
5:41:44 formal school improvement plan process
5:41:47 and, and presentation of that plan back to their school advisory
5:41:51 council.
5:41:52 And, um, as a district leadership team, we’re looking at each of
5:41:55 those SIPs, um, to be sure that that, that, that, that feedback
5:42:00 data is making it into the action plans, uh, within those school
5:42:04 improvement plans.
5:42:05 So I think it’s about, you know, make, connecting those dots,
5:42:08 taking the time to monitor, uh, and, um, um, and then, you know,
5:42:14 continuing those surveys.
5:42:15 Ideally, you want, um, you want really longitudinal data.
5:42:19 You don’t want to make too many adjustments, um, because,
5:42:22 because then it gets disconnected from year to year.
5:42:25 Great.
5:42:26 And our last question here is, how would you ensure that schools
5:42:30 located in under resourced areas receive the attention and
5:42:33 resources they deserve?
5:42:35 Indeed.
5:42:36 Great, great question.
5:42:39 Um, and, um, you know, the term equity, um, is being used in a
5:42:45 lot of different ways now.
5:42:47 Um, again, where, where I’ve been trained in Seminole, um, going
5:42:52 all the way back to, um, to the, um, desegregation process and
5:42:57 the achievement of unitary status.
5:42:59 Um, we’ve all been, been trained that there are always two
5:43:02 priorities.
5:43:03 One is excellence, right?
5:43:05 Performance at the highest standard possible.
5:43:07 Um, and, and the other is equity.
5:43:11 That, that all groups, um, are, uh, all groups, all schools are
5:43:16 having the same opportunity and outcome related to excellence.
5:43:21 And that, and that no one is falling behind.
5:43:23 Um, I think with, you know, with regards to, um, uh, with
5:43:28 regards to facilities, certainly there are lots of data metrics
5:43:33 that you can, that you can take a look at.
5:43:35 And, and of course you’re going to see, you have to build new
5:43:39 schools in your, in your new growth areas.
5:43:42 Um, and, and, and you can’t replace every school, every, you
5:43:47 know, X number of years.
5:43:49 So even in schools that are older, the question becomes what’s
5:43:54 happening on the inside of those schools, right?
5:43:57 What programs are being placed at schools that are relevant and
5:44:01 exciting to kids?
5:44:02 Um, what’s happening at each school so that it’s building its
5:44:07 own identity so that the community is excited about it,
5:44:10 even if it doesn’t have the freshest coat of paint on the
5:44:13 outside walls.
5:44:14 Then the other part of that goes back, I think, to Mrs. Jenkins
5:44:18 question earlier about achievement gaps and doing all of that
5:44:22 data and instructional leadership work.
5:44:25 Because if the data shows that, um, that, that your gaps are
5:44:30 closing, that student performance is improving,
5:44:32 then, then, then you know that your experience is becoming more
5:44:35 uniform and that you’re, you’re reducing, you know, variance, um,
5:44:39 in terms of, um, student experience and outcomes.
5:44:45 Great. Thank you for that. And one of the most important
5:44:48 questions is, what do you find yourself doing in your spare time?
5:44:51 Um, great question. Um, uh, Nicole and I certainly enjoy the
5:44:59 opportunity to travel.
5:45:01 There’s been less of it, um, uh, the last three years more
5:45:04 because of, of work than, than anything else.
5:45:07 Um, we also find that, um, as our, our son gets a little older,
5:45:12 his social calendar becomes our social calendar, right?
5:45:15 That, that, that the, the, the chauffeuring requirements, um,
5:45:18 increase, um, and so, um, I, the free time that we have ends up
5:45:23 at, at, at little league and, um, you know, lots of, you know,
5:45:28 you know, lots of those, um, kinds of opportunities.
5:45:31 Um, certainly beyond that, uh, the, the opportunity to do a
5:45:34 little reading, not in education is, is always a nice thing.
5:45:38 Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
5:45:42 Thank you, Dr. Rossong. Is there any additional information that
5:45:45 you would like to share with the board members?
5:45:47 Well, um, thank you, Chair Susan. Um, you know, again, I, I’ve
5:45:52 been, um, really privileged, um, to, to serve in, in Seminole
5:45:56 County, um, you know, for the last 15 years.
5:45:59 Um, um, lots of leaders, you know, move around for advancement
5:46:03 or, or to get that next experience.
5:46:06 I, I’ve been the, the beneficiary of a system that understands
5:46:11 leadership development and succession planning and, and, and the
5:46:15 power of that.
5:46:16 And when my, um, you know, when, when my colleagues and, and
5:46:20 direct reports, um, either were informed or discovered that,
5:46:24 that I was looking at, at, at a superintendent opportunity, um,
5:46:28 it, it’s interesting because we haven’t in our history had a lot
5:46:31 of, um, candidates looking externally for superintendent.
5:46:35 Certainly for superintendent jobs, people tend to stay a really
5:46:38 long time, but that’s because I think, you know, we’ve all been
5:46:42 given new opportunities and, and, and, and, and, um, um,
5:46:47 continuous challenge.
5:46:48 In Seminole, I’ve worked, um, for three superintendents.
5:46:52 Um, Dr. Vogel, um, was our superintendent, um, when I, uh, when
5:46:57 I was at, uh, when I was at a high school as an assistant
5:47:00 principal and then, um, the, um, the, the very, um, the very
5:47:05 first part of my district office career.
5:47:07 Then, uh, Walt Griffin, uh, was, uh, was, uh, was promoted
5:47:11 internally to superintendent and, um, served, I believe, nine
5:47:15 years.
5:47:16 And now Sarita Beeman, who was our board attorney, um, and made
5:47:19 the transition to superintendents.
5:47:21 I served three superintendents all very different, um, in their
5:47:25 leadership styles and their approaches, um, but all extremely
5:47:30 dedicated to students.
5:47:32 Um, and all doing a lot of work behind the scenes, um, whether
5:47:36 it’s for an individual student, for a, uh, uh, for a, uh, uh,
5:47:40 you know, for a school that, that, um, has extra needs.
5:47:44 And, um, that’s the, you know, that, that’s the, um, environment
5:47:48 that, that I’ve been brought up in.
5:47:51 Um, Brevard Public Schools, um, is a district that, that I have
5:47:55 watched for years.
5:47:57 Um, when we would go early in my administrative career to, um,
5:48:01 to, uh, leadership conferences, Dr. Vogel would talk about Brevard
5:48:06 and Dr. DiPatri’s leadership and the systems that were being put
5:48:09 in place.
5:48:10 We benchmark ourselves, um, academically.
5:48:14 And so, um, you know, Brevard, um, is always a system that I’ve
5:48:17 watched when I first, uh, got career and technical education.
5:48:21 And, and I said, this is completely different from, from, from
5:48:24 running academic instruction.
5:48:26 Everyone said, anytime you have a question, you call Janice Shulls
5:48:29 in Brevard.
5:48:30 Um, and so, uh, and, and the first time I called her, she said,
5:48:33 come over and spend the day.
5:48:35 And so my, my first trip to Brevard was to meet her and, and
5:48:38 spend the day with her.
5:48:39 And, um, so Brevard’s always been a, a great school district.
5:48:43 Uh, and, um, and, um, I would be, I would be honored should you
5:48:47 choose to select me as your superintendent.
5:48:50 I appreciate your time today.
5:48:52 Look forward to talking with you individually tomorrow.
5:48:54 Thank you.
5:48:55 Anybody else have any other questions?
5:48:57 No, no.
5:48:58 Thank you.
5:48:59 Thank you so much for, for coming and participating.
5:49:00 I know this is a, an awkward setting as far as us asking
5:49:02 questions.
5:49:03 And, you know, I, I said earlier, I wish we were kind of a round
5:49:06 table where it was more of a discussion, but I really appreciate
5:49:08 your answers to the questions.
5:49:09 So thank you.
5:49:10 Yes.
5:49:11 Thank you.
5:49:12 Do you have any questions for us?
5:49:14 I, um, I think the one question, if we have time, I think the
5:49:23 one question I’d like to ask, I know, um, many of you have, have
5:49:29 been here, um, in, in the community for a long time and I’d love
5:49:32 to know what you love most about this community.
5:49:35 Hmm, only one thing.
5:49:39 I can go first.
5:49:40 Um, so you had brought it up about how Brevard is a long,
5:49:48 diverse county with many different communities within it.
5:49:53 But I will say the one thing that transcends through every
5:49:55 single one of those communities, and it might be a little bit of
5:49:57 a different nuance inside of each of them.
5:49:59 But is this real pride, uh, from being from the Space Coast.
5:50:05 Mm-hmm.
5:50:06 That’s really important to everybody who lives here.
5:50:08 It’s, you know, again, everyone has a little different piece as
5:50:10 to why that’s important to them or how it’s important to them.
5:50:13 Um, but that pride of being on the Space Coast is, I, what I
5:50:16 find unique, um, especially coming from New York City, um, with,
5:50:20 you know, you don’t really get that tiny, small community feel.
5:50:25 Um, and being such an expansive county, I still feel like it has
5:50:28 that feeling and that vibe and that unity.
5:50:31 That’s wonderful.
5:50:32 Thank you.
5:50:33 I don’t know if I pick one thing that’s the best.
5:50:37 I, I am a Texan.
5:50:38 Um, and so, you know, it’s, you know, we’re very proud of our
5:50:41 home state and I still am proud of my home state.
5:50:44 But I have to say, as a growing up in a big city, thinking that
5:50:47 I’d be going over to Orlando all the time, I have to say what I
5:50:50 love about Brevard is everything that I need is here somewhere
5:50:53 in the borders of our county.
5:50:54 You know, unless I need to fly to Texas, in which case I have to
5:50:58 go to Orlando.
5:50:59 But everything else that I need is right here in this county.
5:51:02 Thank you.
5:51:03 You could connect.
5:51:04 I am, I might be the only one.
5:51:07 Were you born in?
5:51:08 Boy, where you go there.
5:51:09 No, I just found out today I was the, like, oldest school board
5:51:12 member.
5:51:13 Uh, no, I, I am born and raised Brevard County residents.
5:51:17 So I’ve been here my entire life and hands down, it’s the people.
5:51:20 It is the community.
5:51:21 So we have community here that is like no other.
5:51:23 Uh, and I just, I absolutely have a heart for our community and
5:51:27 our people.
5:51:28 Thank you.
5:51:30 Like a few of our board members here, I was not born and raised
5:51:34 here in Brevard.
5:51:36 Um, and unlike Ms. Campbell, I, I’m from a state where we’re, we’re
5:51:40 not always proud of where
5:51:41 we’re at.
5:51:42 Uh, so it’s, it’s nice to be in Brevard here where it, it’s a
5:51:45 very large county.
5:51:47 Uh, but no matter where you’re at in that 72 mile stretch, uh,
5:51:51 what Ms. Jenkins says,
5:51:52 the pride of, uh, of being a part of Brevard, it stretches from
5:51:56 one end to the, to the other.
5:51:58 So that is, uh, that’s refreshing.
5:52:00 So, yeah.
5:52:01 Absolutely.
5:52:02 Thank you.
5:52:03 So for me, um, I call it the small big.
5:52:06 And what that is, is that like you have, you will be, the thing
5:52:10 about Brevard is, is that you
5:52:12 will go to eat lunch somewhere and there’s a guy sitting next to
5:52:15 you with holy shorts and a torn up shirt.
5:52:18 And you think that he had just gotten off the turnip truck or
5:52:20 something.
5:52:21 And you find out that he’s the lead engineer for the launch
5:52:24 systems outside.
5:52:26 And what we have is, is this difference between this is that we
5:52:31 here in Brevard.
5:52:32 Don’t try to show off too much.
5:52:33 As far as what you look like and everything else.
5:52:35 We don’t wear a lot of ties here.
5:52:37 All right.
5:52:38 We, uh, we have a lot of, um, but a lot of the people here will
5:52:41 wear polo shirts, will wear t-shirts.
5:52:43 And that’s who we are.
5:52:45 And the other thing is, is that as big as we are, we’re small.
5:52:48 So like, I know the mayors up north, but then I also know family
5:52:52 members and other individuals all the way up
5:52:55 from Mims to Mikko and you have everybody’s connected, even
5:52:58 though we’re, we’re, we’re big enough, but we’re small enough to
5:53:01 where we still are all those little communities.
5:53:03 So we are all space coast.
5:53:05 We all do want to be a part of that.
5:53:07 But the thing is, is that there’s a difference in Brevard.
5:53:09 I do a lot of business around the state of Florida.
5:53:11 And I will tell you that Brevard is a special kind of county.
5:53:14 And the reason is, is that we’re real here and, um, we’re real
5:53:18 politics.
5:53:19 We’re real people.
5:53:20 And, and, uh, that’s what I love about it.
5:53:22 So thank you.
5:53:23 Real politics, real people.
5:53:25 Thank you.
5:53:27 Anybody else?
5:53:28 We’re good.
5:53:29 Yeah, we’re going to go do this.
5:53:30 Thank you very much.
5:53:32 Thank you.