--------- the schoolboard work session begins in 2 minutes please take your seats again the schoolboard work session begins in two minutes the schoolboard work session begins in 1 minute please take your seats again the schoolboard work session begins in one
minute [Music]
good morning i now call the April 17th 2025 administrative briefing and work session of the Marian County School Board to order at 900 a.m please silence your electronic devices to avoid disturbing others mirroring and modeling how our students begin each day i ask
that you please pause with us for a moment of silence please join me thank you board member Thrower would you read our commitment statement please absolutely we are the Marian County School District Leadership Team when we come together to
work we are efficient effective and productive our three most important characteristics are to be dedicated transparent and individually responsible to work well together we must demonstrate respect confront reality and
be accountable we will always put students first and we will leave a legacy of success thank you i now ask the school board attorney to explain the rules for the public work session good morning Attorney Powers good morning and thank you ma'am this work session is a
public meeting as defined in Florida's sunshine law the board is dedicated to full transparency in its meetings and its work in compliance with the sunshine law the board has adopted uniform meeting procedures including the right for citizens to participate the board
will allow public comment regarding any work session item listed on today's agenda at the appropriate time speakers must fill out a request form located in the lobby and hand it to the board clerk after the board and superintendent have completed their discussion on a particular agenda item
the board clerk will call speaker names in the order received each speaker will have three minutes as required by the sunshine law the board must maintain orderly conduct and proper decorum throughout this meeting speakers must be careful not to violate the privacy rights of others especially students and
their family members by mentioning their names or other identifying information thank you for your attention to these important rules thank you Attorney Powers good morning Miss Gonzalez please provide the proof of publication good morning the notice for the April 17 2025 work session was
published in the Ocala Gazette on April 4th 2025 proof of publication has been attached to Boardogs under proof of publication thank you we will now begin the work session with the superintendent's administrative briefing good morning Dr gowlet good morning Madam Chair members of the board um just
really brief items this morning i'll start with uh students always and it's just as a reminder there's no school tomorrow so wish everyone a wonderful weekend um and board chair if I could I just want to provide some context to the first item on the agenda today absolutely okay perfect so uh board we
have listed the start and stop bell times first and if you see we have a pretty good audience size here today and a lot of them are amazing principles uh they are here um because the items that you see um proposed are not from
transportation per se they're really from our our amazing school leaders and have um some some background and request for uh some of these changes due to the instructional time and serving our students the best that they can in the
communities that they're serving so uh they are here if you have any questions appreciate them being here and and wanted to put them first so they could get back to their buildings as quickly as possible but just wanted to provide that that context to you and thank them for their leadership and being here all right thank you ready to start yes okay
perfect so then I will ask for Miss Kinder to come forward uh Mr frasier is also here as uh supervisors of the schools representing the requests that you see before you today thank you Miss Kinder thank you good morning board chair
Conrad board members and superintendent Dr gullet we are here today to recommend to present the recommended start stop times for the 2526 school year the start stop time scheduling committee began meeting back in February and included
elementary middle and high school principles principal supervisors and members of the transport transportation team after reviewing the ontime arrival data for our buses as well as comparing bus discipline referral data to last
school year the committee's recommendation was to continue with the three- tiered system for start stop times the 2526 school start stop times also includes the addition of our two new elementary schools School W and
School X they will start at 7:35 a.m and end the day at 2:10 p.m for students which mirrors the majority of our elementary school bell times in addition based on principal recommendation the committee adjusted Oyola Middle School's
dismissal time from 3:55 p.m to 4:11 p.m as the principal is requesting to move to a seventh period student day this request is based on principal and staff input after reviewing their student and staff needs for next school year
good morning based on principal recommendation the committee also brought forward one high school start time to be adjusted by five minutes later which is Lakewware High this will allow Lake High School teachers to have an additional five minutes to have
parent conferences before the student day starts also based on principal recommendation the committee requested Madison Street Elementary's student dismissal time be adjusted to 2:30 p.m adding 10 minutes to the student day the final recommendation for the
committee was for two middle schools have their dismissal time adjusted based on principal staff and parent feedback howard Middle and North Maran Middle are requesting to go from a seventh period day to a sixth period student day for
the next school year by granting this request the student dismissal time would change from 4:11 p.m to 3:55 we do have all three middle school principles here Miss Parker Mr corley and Miss Johnson here today as well as Mr curley principal at Madison Street if you have
any specific school-based questions that you would like to ask okay thank you Mr frasier thank you Miss Kerard board I open up for any questions or concerns dr james thank you um so it was my understanding we went to a seven period day to try and alleviate eight
and a halfers or students who are are unit deficient going into high school and so my understanding when we transitioned to essentially every middle school doing that except for Oyola and Liberty the the right Ocul Liberty right
Belleview Belleview sorry the intention there was that those schools were not having a significant issue with students who are unit deficient and the others um were and so we were going to seven period days so that essentially a student had 21 opportunities in three years to get 12 units which should be
ample so how is there a data point to now say that going to seven period days did not impact that intention because otherwise I have questions about why was that the intention for doing it in the first place
absolutely and I can let Mr kley and Miss Parker speak to that to the specifics however when we did track the data over the North Marian's been doing this for three years as we tracked the data within their their credit recovery we didn't see a significant impact on students and the amount of credits that
they were recovering okay so and that's fine with me and when we're going to sitebased budgeting in a year from now the concern is going to be and this is the concern then my next question for Oyola um adding going to seven period days um from a scheduling perspective requires additional units you cannot do
seven period days without additional units which is why we see a unit cut from um Mr corley school at North Mary because um Howard is a little bit blessed in that they're going to get more kids so they won't experience that but it it requires about two more units
to be able to do that and so what is going to be the plan then are we going to backfund Oyola in a year from now when they're on a seven period day and then those same questions I will ask for um Lake Weir and any of the other schools we have on a seven period day because they may very well not generate
enough internal FTE money to cover this the additional units um I can speak to that for Ocola Middle School um as well as some of the other middle schools Lakewware Middle that already have a seven period a day Denell and Middle um we do have um the current schools that are seventh period
a day Lakeward Middle Denell and Middle um we do have data that we are having less students retained in eighth grade because they have an opportunity during that student day with that seventh period option um being able to take those credit recovery courses um as well
as being able to advance some of the students that um wouldn't would not have an opportunity to have an elective because they are having a reading intervention and or a math intervention during a normal sixth period day um so we are having some success at certain schools um I think that's why it's
important for um the sitebased autonomy for the principal to definitely be able to happen because every school is unique and its own individual needs um to respond to your part of the question about sitebased budgeting in a year um we definitely have already been starting those conversations with principles um
schools like Lakeware High with Mr mcateerier are already piloting the sitebased budgeting um this year um so they're already starting to see that um and you know Miss Johnson and I have had many conversations about sitebased budgeting um and going into the seven period day um and they not only get FTE
funds for um students all students but um there are of course variations in their FTE funds depending on you know students with IEPs and students with individual needs um and so some of these students would be able to be supported in that seven period day um but she's already starting to look at that um for
next year and those will be some decisions that principles will all have to make based on what their data is telling them and what their return on investment is telling them for for different staff members for different staff um courses even um that they're
going to be having and offering at their schools um this will give a unique opportunity with sightbased budgeting for principles excuse me principles to really have the opportunity um to really be able to focus on their individual student needs because we all know that
every school in our district is is unique in its own way absolutely and I'm I'm a huge supporter of principal autonomy so if principles and and we see we had a leadership change at Oyola so that is the I would say the probably one of the main catalysts because the the the leadership a year ago did not want
to do a seven period day which is why they didn't do a seven period day and so I that I totally agree with that i think what my heartburn from it is as leaders move throughout our district our families shouldn't have to respond accordingly right and so I can
appreciate leadership autonomy but if the leadership were to change again in two years then then the schedule changes again in two years and then those families have to adapt those are the things that I would just like us to look at the full picture of um and then my just final thought on this um I think
that I would like to see uh better communication which I know we talk about all of the time i know as a parent of Madison Street until I actually until I was having a conversation with Miss Kiner I did not even know that this was on the agenda because I hadn't looked at board docs yet because it was uploaded
late and so I hadn't even seen it um so in my opinion a practice for this district going forward if an item is related to families the district should be sending out a sky alert that says to
all of those schools that says parents uh we are um today and um the board docs or whatever was uploaded for next week's board work session your students start stop times is up for discussion this is where you can find that information
because while many Oyola families have reached out with concerns not a single Madison Street family has reached out and maybe because they don't care 10 minutes doesn't affect my life at all um but maybe some would i imagine there's always one person who cares i think it's
because they have no idea and so if they have no idea that we're discussing it how can they then publicly participate in the communication which the workshop is supposed to be the opportunity for the public to participate and provide their feedback the board meeting is really not the opportunity i mean while
there is always public comment there the work of in the and the negotiation of sorts happens here and so I would like to see this district any item that impacts families that gets uploaded to board docs for a whole school i think that a district all call or sky alert
should go out when it is published so that no one can say they didn't know it was being discussed um and that's for and I don't know what that I can only speak to Madison Street because I'm at Madison Street um so I can't speak to whether the other schools did sky alerts or not but I would like to see that become a standard practice in this
district so those are just my thoughts but I'm in support of this is what the principles want let's rock on thank you Dr james yes Dr campbell thank you u because Dr james alluded to the conversation coming out of Oyola families uh and having spoken first of
all let me let me back up and having spoken to the principles about these changes directly and I spoke to just about all of you about these changes directly i also support the changes from the seven period to sixth period for the schools asking for them as well as the change from sixth period to 7 period for
the school asking for it additionally Madison Street being in my district speaking with Dr curley I also agree with the change that he's uh recommending there um but having spoken just a moment ago about Oyola families part of that conversation is happening i I appreciate the sentiment of
considering a sky alert but what did happen on that campus is a PTO and SAC meeting happened in advance of this meeting even in advance of this being uh published and so those families were aware of this conversation because of that uh so it wasn't a Skylert but it it
was another parent communication method that worked very effectively and so those families have been speaking out board this is going to kind of be um same bat time same bat channel this time last year I did the same advocacy that I'm about to do i would be in full
support of considering moving Oyola to a time similar to what Fort McCoy's is uh I understand the uniqueness of the campus that encompasses 8th Street and Oyola
i know that we could argue that Liberty and Hammet have similar uh because they're side by side however my difference there is the same number of students on the combined Oyola 8th
Street campus equals one of the campuses at Liberty or Hammet so it becomes a volume issue for me on that we have heard the outcry of families if you haven't I have uh and as you all know last year when this did
come before a board vote it passed 4-1 because I still believe that we need to consider our schools not just every elementary school the same every middle school the same every high school the same just as we're saying today principles have the
autonomy to make these decisions i believe if presented the option to move Oyola to an earlier start time with principal discretion that would have been the proposal today as well based on the families and community support there
at that school and Mr oanic I know I've already spok spoken with him on his day off i'm so sorry I called you on your day off uh but he is prepared to at least give a little bit more information if there is some for us to consider thank you good morning
um from a transportation standpoint I'll just say that it it will hinder us uh a pretty good bit if we start moving times again um when we start when we look at um like Fort McCoy if you move to that
start time for an Oyola Fort McCoy and zone two already has the least number of three tiered buses and part of that is because we couldn't adjust Fort McCoy's time back to an elementary time because it's a combined school um with middle school and elementary school um because
of the start times having to be where they were at 8:00 the other thing with when we start talking about moving times yes it does sound like it's going to get repealed as far as the statute but until that's signed by the governor it we we can't we can't do that um so that's
that's a concern there um as far as that goes we don't know when that will be as far as when that would be signed by the governor and if it's middle of the summer type of thing that's going to cause a a big heartache for transportation um but as far as talking
about the tiers and why why they're in place the way they are middle school has the fewest number of students that we transport and um I'll give you the numbers here real quick our middle schools we have 5,684 students that we transport for
tier three um high schools you you have 6,889 and elementary you have 8,290 um from the feedback that we get most people are probably if if they had to pick a tier the third tier is not the one that would be picked so the fewest
number of students that are impacted through from a bus transportation standpoint are middle school and I I'll kind of open up for questions um as far as I I will say the other thing I'll say we're averaging I'll say the last three weeks we've been
93% or above for our AM on time arrivals um last year those same time periods we were about 6% below that so you're talking about 1,200 students that are getting to school on time roughly compared to last year at the same period
so that that's a pretty drastic number I think in my opinion yes thank you and thank you Mr oanic i appreciate that feedback and that information uh as you and I both know that Oyola buses last year prior to
changing their start time to the third tier were already three- tier buses for the most part and so I'm curious what that would look like if we were just to go back to the same three tiers that Oyola bus drivers used to have you would you would add about 10 runs to the
elementary um time so if you have the we have the most which is the first tier the most first tier students that we transport we're adding 10 more runs okay so now so you're taking away those runs from third tier you're adding them to first tier so that's going to cause us to have to add you know we'll need more
buses and more drivers so adding the it it's not I I just want to make sure so it would be adding as opposed to just moving because the third it would kind of be reversing your third tier because we're using we're already all our pretty
much all of our buses run the first tier okay so if we got to add 10 more runs to that tier we got to figure out where are we pulling to get those 10 understandably and that that's why when you and I spoke on the phone I asked would it be better if we were to adjust an Oyola schedule if they were on the
first tier or the second tier and so that was the option that I had said if they were on a second tier what that would look like and so even whenever we had them three tiering before were they still the first tier i mean is in the
Oyola buses last year the Oyola start times last year were they were they were so first they were first they were still first start time from last year so as far as potentially moving them to the second tier which is the 8 8:30 30
start time is there any possibility of what that looks like again I am advocating for more than 50 parents I heard from i myself am an Oyola parent i understand what that's what this looks like and when you have 50 parents that reach out to you you know there are at
least hundreds more that are interested in this conversation so uh perhaps you all did not receive the same communication but I'll continue to advocate for each of the schools that are in district 1 yes ma'am i would have to take a look at the second tier on
that but I and see what our numbers are and how it matches up um before I could give you a great answer but I can tell you as far as the first tier you're looking about 10 extra runs okay i I can understand why we wouldn't want to make them at 7:35 i I can understand that that's why I was looking at more Fort
McCoy 8 o'clock but if it needed to be 8:30 I can assure you that those families um they would be appreciative of of that type of transition again it is a unique situation that we have on that specific campus um more unique than
some of the others just by volume by space uh by a lot of factors a lot of nonbus riders for elementary they only have one bus in their entire elementary school so that would be more similar to our magnet programs that don't have any transportation at all so um there there
just lots of reasons why I would love to see us explore Oyola start time being later and then that would cause less concern for them going to seven period day and so their day actually would end earlier thank you anyone else
all right board member Thor thank you and and thank you for the discussion when you change one thing it makes 50 people happy and then you affect others so it is truly a balance um I believe I
heard you say that potentially exploring the second tier option would be worth doing just that before we make a final decision and then get some feedback on that but and I would appreciate that
but what I do know is that we task this transportation department hard to better our on-time delivery and arrival so and and you guys have delivered on that and while 6% may not
sound like that much when you're talking about volume we're talking a lot of kids now getting back and forth to school on time however if you're a parent that isn't one of them you're still unhappy and after conversations um with you Mr osteon which I appreciate
um looking forward you know as new roads are being built and new schools are being built and traffic patterns are changing it sounds like you guys are monitoring that looking at making some tweaks to routing to continue to improve
so I don't see this is as being a very shortterm fix let's do this because the implications on the other side will likely put us right back to where we were with getting 50 phone calls from
another school now um obviously I think it's the goal of every board member sitting up here to have every single student arrive on time every day and get home on time every day not have their after-school activities affected not have their dinner time affected not have
anything affected uh but I don't know that that's 100% realistic what I do know is that the transportation department is a lynch pin for so many families and we need to be careful
about the adjustments that we make and why and I I think there's also a larger a larger conversation here as this community continues to grow as we add more schools there's more burden on transportation and our partners with the
county and the city I'm not sure you know what they're doing i think that would be a good topic to be discussing for I know the city is really focused on making that area walkable and and safe to be walking and it would be my goal
and desire to get as many students that are within the walk zone safely able to walk or bike or ride an electric bike or ride a scooter or whatever it is they're doing these days and get themselves to school that way
there's all kinds of great data that shows that when a student gets some good physical exercise they're able to focus better in school and that's the same for adults in our jobs so while we're continuing to tweak and work on our bus transportation I also think that we need
to be mindful of the global growth of this county and how we can partner with our uh other entities i kind of think about the the litter initiative those of you that are middle uh elementary school you know with rub rubbish the raccoon
coming around that's become a real partnership and it's better for the community that that is happening and I think it would be better for the community to partner on these walkability initiatives um it would be a lot less expensive for us I think to
find some crossing guards at critical intersections and that kind of thing and reassure parents that you know there's good safety mechanisms in place so that they feel comfortable having their kids uh walk and ride to school so I see it
as a multi-tered situation um I hope that the second tier can be investigated and explored a little more and if that's a potential fix great you know we're all about continuous improvement that's what I have thank you B yes Reverend Cummings good
morning um and thank you guys for presenting i I looked at this this schedule of school start times i support I do support as uh the principles when they say that they need to do something i do have that same
concern that Dr james have of every time a principal moves is that going to be a change for that school is there going to be a new disruption for that school um but I also want to make sure that uh we consider that have we talked to the to
the unions concerning these these changes these start stop signs where are they at with this how they feel about this we had a our committee that we had that met for the bell times um did not include um okay it it didn't include it included
principles it included um faculty members staff members district members transportation um for the committee so I I don't know that there was conversations with the union on the school start stop times that could be an issue um with the
collective bargaining units if it's going to affect them if it's within their contract like so for for Madison as to be specific for Madison they were not teaching their full um instructional minutes allocated by the contract so making the day
longer isn't isn't violating their contract so nobody's contract is being violated by the changes that are being made right now for that one particular school about for all the all these that are changing i think the teacher contract day stays the same it's just
arranging how where their their their planning periods would be and that kind of thing which would be according to the school and every school's a little different on how that is they just have to have so much contract time um you know where student contact time versus uh planning time because you know when
you move something in one place it it can affect something somewhere else and so we need to look at make sure that we're taking in consideration all those potentially moving pieces um and and with the transportation piece
if we're if we're getting to a point where we're getting better with transportation and transportation is better i I personally don't want to see us upset that the apple cart as folk like to say we need to try to keep those things in place moving forward to get better rather than to to change
something right now and then it goes backwards so um as board member Thor is saying I'm looking to the day where the kids are able to go to the schools in their neighborhood where they don't have to be bust and all those types of things but we're not there yet
so thank you okay board member Thrower thank you um I just had another thought and and board member Cummings I don't disagree about having um union representation at bell time discussions and I mean why not um the more that
people are aware of what's happening and can have some input then I don't really see a downside to that um speaking about disruption from principal moves I would like to think that when a principal comes into a new school it's much more
than arbitrary the decisions that they make as far as everything um let's face it we all want to be in an a district and we're putting our schools under tremendous pressure to get that done so if they feel from looking at their data
that certain changes need to be made that weren't made by a previous principal well they're the the new person that is now tasked with moving that school so I I do believe that it's not a blanket thing that no one has complete autonomy and and authority but
we need to be sensitive to the folks that are actually doing the work and and hearing the justifications and the rationale and then doing our our level best to support that and in I would say almost all situations so those are just a couple other things that came to my mind with the continued conversation
thank you all right thank you board member Thrower and I'll just kind of wrap us up is you know as a board we task transportation to help us get uh students to school on time um because we had we had a pretty good deficit and so you helped
us solve that problem by going to a three- tiered system because of the amount of area our school buses have to try to travel um and the amount of students they have to pick up and so speaking with the first comment about the governor you know may sign um to
relinquish that we can't get our students to school in that system and so we know the three tier system has really moved us to a better place in getting our students to school on time so I thank you for that um I'm hesitant about
the conversation about moving Oyola's start time because I think if we asked any middle school parent it is a challenge for every single one of them and this board acknowledged that when we had that conversation um initially we
know I know as a board member that that late start time is difficult and I am grateful for every single parent and bus driver that's you know helping get a family member or a cousin or a friend to school on time we know it's a challenge
but it to me is what we have to do right now um to get our kids to school on time so um I just appreciate the work that you've done um I appreciate our principles um helping make decisions that's what's best for their school and their students and I am in support of
the school start time schedule so thank you Mr eststonic yes ma'am thank you is there anything else from the board yes Dr campbell so with the comments that have been made by the board does it appear that I'm the only one that would advocate for at least exploring Oyola
going to that second tier no uh board member Thrower was in support okay do Do we have a majority to even consider that as an option before this goes before us i I know that Well I I don't want to speak for anyone who is in that calendar committee or the start time committee uh
but I know that this was a conversation that happened quite a bit in that committee uh and so I'm I'm just curious to know if there is anyone else can we get at least a majority of us that are interested in exploring the potential so we can ensure that we have done all that
we can to exhaust this topic because until we get there we're going to continue to have the outcry that we're having um I understand we had the conversation last year about moving those two campuses to a K8 uh that remedy I'll use as an interesting
word would have eliminated this conversation altogether nevertheless we are where we are and I I think that it's imperative that we at least consider looking at Oyola moving to the second tier but if there's only two of
us we can't get that done yes Reverend Cummings listen I I hear Dr um Campbell and I agree that anytime there's community outcry whether it's whether it's with Oyola Fezan reic or anything we need to take into
consideration the community input or outcry so I I I don't have an issue Dr dr camel with us exploring it further but we do need to take in consideration truly take in consideration when the community says something we need to listen and it doesn't just need to be with Oyola needs to be with any school
great that makes a that makes an outcry so I'm I'm fine with that dr dr kemp you I'll chime in um I'm only interested in looking at that data if it doesn't negatively affect any other school pickup yeah so that's where I stand dr
james well and if I can add I mean I I do feel like we really did a very thorough job a year ago discussing this and what I don't want to happen is a delay in the vote on these because one principal for sure at North Mary Middle School has a staffing decision to make
that is dependent on this vote so he is losing two units by this going from a seven period day to a sixth period day and I reiterate the timing of all of this should have happened in the winter and not right now because those two individuals missed voluntary and
involuntary transfer periods because this decision is not made yet so this all of those principles I feel confident want this decision to be made and then if another decision happens and we amend it for another school then fine but I would like to see this go before
the board as a vote that as it's intended to come if there are no other changes that the board wants and then if we have an amendment for Oyola that is advantageous to the families I can't imagine anyone's going to be upset with it coming before the board for a secondary vote at another time but I do
not want a Sorry I was looking for the more appropriate word i do not want a further investigation into a singular school to delay the work of all of the rest of the schools and what the work that they need to do thank you sure yes and I don't think I don't want to delay either i
think this needs to go forward i think what Dr campbell is asking for us to look at that particular school and not to not to delay this process but for us to continue with this process and uh have some additional conversation on that particular school so I think this
plan is is okay we need to continue to move forward as well but but we need to include Oyola as a part of this plan as presented because that principal is asking for a seven period day and is asking for the change to 411 or whatever the time is and so we need to approve
this as presented and if and if there is a change then there is a change at another time but we can't not make a decision for Oyola right now and then come back in two months because then it's even later notifying families of a potential change agreed thank you Dr
james yes board member Thrower the question is how long would it take to really find out and about the second tier up possibility for Oyola is that something that we can get information on before we vote i think I could probably get information within an hour that's
kind of what I was thinking some generalized information i mean it's not going to be you know 100% this is exactly how it would be but I can get us within a couple runs right okay so the message is we want to move forward we want to keep everybody on track you're
going to update us on what is possible with Oyola but we'll still be ready to move forward on Tuesday yes ma'am so I would you like me because I'll go make some calls and and we'll do some work would you like me to come back and as soon as I have it or I think Can
you just Can you email us yes yes ma'am we'll be here a while i mean yeah well we'll be here a while that's true we're going to be here a while you got it could we just pull that under discussion on the schoolboard meeting agenda tonight it's going to be Sure absolutely would that be easy for you Mr roanic we
pull it as a a discussion item at the school board meeting and then we can discuss and that gives you actually a little bit of time yes ma'am okay so that's what we'll plan on thank you all um for your presentation this morning we appreciate you all right thank you thank you um before we go any further I just
want to mention um we are having technical difficulties this morning so if you would like a copy of the presentation um that we're going through there are copies out in the lobby so please feel free to go grab one so you can follow along with us thank you dr
gullet are you ready for our next Oh and is there any public comment and here he comes good morning good morning my name is Mark Avery AV Rry Y and I'm the president of the Maran Education Association and I represent the instructional barting
unit yes you are correct we were not invited to any meetings in regards to this and I'm a little confused about this four years ago the district came to us and said "Hey we want to run this pilot we want to try at four middle
schools to run a seven period day and it's going to be a pilot program and we're going to see how this works." And those four schools were North Maryan Middle Lake Middle Horizon Academy and Denellan Middle they ran the pilot for two years just
ran right to the second year no feedback or anything and then last year prior to the meeting again we were contacted and said "Hey we want to expand this program we want to expand this to all the middle schools and one of the high schools." Now we have two middle schools that aren't going to do it yet but the idea
was that we're going to continue to expand this program that is what the district said um and now we have this year where two schools have decided they don't want to be part of this program anymore i will tell you specifically that at North Mary Middle once they
started this pilot program it solved their planning time issues because of their bus situation they had planning time issues for years of trying to get planning time as you mentioned that's allotted in the contract um we're not
rolling back the other schools i don't understand why it's suddenly just changing at a couple schools i understand Oyola going to seven periods because that's what the district said last year that we were going to expand this we're not expanding it to the other high schools we're only expanding to one
middle school now we're rolling two back and that doesn't make seem to make any sense um yes I agree about the staffing changes and how those are so late and that those people did not have the opportunity for to be on the displacement part to be placed prior to
internal transfer there's also this issue of I'm going to schedule a time sk make our school day that the teachers leave five minutes after the students and that is not a good plan and that would be what will
happen at at least one of those schools and then who's going to watch students who's going to supervise students at the end of the day and to say that oh the teachers will just do it well then you automatically are asking them or expecting them to stay past their
contract time to supervise students and that shouldn't happen we shouldn't make a schedule that way we shouldn't make the schedule based on that the teachers will do the right things but we don't have to compensate them so I don't think that we should be changing this in the
way that it's listed um has nothing about transportation although I do believe that once we went to the seven periods the transportation issue at North Mar has improved rather than deteriorated at least at the end of the day i don't know about the beginning of the day um because there have not been
nearly the complaints that we used to have but they can talk to you about late buses and such and who has to stay and and watch those i I'm not there to do that um but I don't think that this is a good plan moving forward i don't think this is what the district envisioned
this is not what the district said last year so I'm very confused and disappointed that we were not involved in this process up until this point thank you thank you Mr avery as always we appreciate your input all right Dr go we ready for our next
item yes ma'am we are so I'm going to have Miss Barnes come forward and we're going to be sharing information the compliance report from safe schools as a reminder board you do not have a document on board docs due to the nature of the items in Miss Barnes is going to share with you and she'll share some
more information thank you thank you Dr golet good morning good morning Conrad chair members of the board and superintendent Dr gullet florida State Statute 101.212 212 required the Department of Education's Office of Safe Schools to develop and adopt a Florida
school safety compliance inspection report to document compliance or non-compliance with school safety requirements mandated by law or rule and adherence to established school safety best practices to evaluate the safety security and emergency response of the
school the office of safe school complete completes the report while conducting unannounced inspections of all public and charter schools while school is in session and investigate reports of non-compliance with school safety requirements at the end of each
quarter the office of safe schools provide a report to the district school superintendent and school safety specialist identifying the number and percentage of schools including charter schools inspected or reinspected during that quarter and the number and percentage of schools that had no school
safety requirement deficiencies the compliance inspections contain confidential information therefore to maintain the safety and security of the district the report does not contain detailed information the
2024 2025 third quarter report contains the following for Maring County Public Schools the number of schools inspected or reinspected 14 percentage of schools inspected or reinspected 25.45% the number of inspected schools
with no school safety required deficiencies was 11 the percentage of inspected schools with no school safety requirement deficiencies for this quarter was 78.7 and that concludes your
report thank you for your time thank you board yes Dr um I I I know last time we did this Dr campbell asked this question she probably wants to ask it again but can we have a shade session on the three that didn't pass yes ma'am we can thank you i'm sorry Dr james
could you repeat that i I would like a shade session for the three in schools that were not in compliance okay thank you that's good is that what you had she just asked it last time so I that's all I remember yeah all right anything else
from the board okay thank you very much Miss Barnes we appreciate you being here this morning you're welcome is there any public comment okay seeing none Dr glet we'll turn it back over to you thank you Madam Chair so moving on to our student
progression plan we will begin the conversation today uh kicked off by Dr brewer thank you okay good morning Chair Conrad board members and Superintendent Dr gullet we are here there he is we are here today
to provide you with part one of our recommendations for revisions to the 2025 2026 student progression plan the committee included representatives from the academic services team such as mental health school choice career
technical education and student pathways and assessments administrators teachers and parents were also included in the committee i have the privilege of welcoming Mr mark Ingram he is the curriculum coordinator for K12 he will present the committee's work to you and
at the end of the presentation the Mrs deborah Rele and I will also be available for questions thank you Dr brewer good morning Mr ingram thank you good morning uh board chair board members Dr gullet thank you for having me and yeah I'm here to share
our updates for the student progression plan uh I'm here on behalf of Dr brewer and Mrs rle um my directors in secondary and elementary curriculum and I am Mark Ingram a coordinator of K12 curriculum uh the purpose of the progression plan we are required to
create one uh by legislature and it is to provide students parents schools everybody a document they can go to to see how students progress from grade level to grade level toward graduation our revision process is based first on legislation then on board policy and
then finally on what what we can refine and work with with our committee and our team members but we also have the understanding that legislation and statute take precedence and then board policy and then our input comes last uh
so I'm going to go ahead and start with the revisions at this point it's a pretty straightforward set we do we do have to wait on legislation we're still in the middle of a legislative session uh there are a few things that are pending that could change this whole policy or this whole plan but most of them would be pretty straightforward and
pretty easy to embed in this um we would just need further approval so the first shift is just including contact information for uh Donnie Tucker and Stan Jacobs as far as home education students wanting to participate in uh extracurricular
activities there are a lot of things that can change in that so we want them to know to contact the right people in order to participate in those things because things can shift um that's why contact info is in there um for that as far as school schedules um that is just
a section where we outline our resiliency education and uh our caring school community curriculum we just want to make it clear that we are using up-to-date language there and it's been updated in other spots in the document as well not not a major change just something where we're being clear about
what we're doing the next update is uh to elementary grading scales now this was separate from the progression plan committee but it is reflected in the progression plan we did work on grading committees where we brought in teachers we brought in union representation we
brought in administrators uh to work on our grading skills and our grading procedures and that that was a whole separate process but what effective the progression plan is coming in here um and one of the big changes is to elementary grading we're going to a
unified K5 grading scale using language reflective of the uh Florida best benchmarks so as you can see all students K5 will get an A through F letter grade and it's got that language of the benchmarks this is really for for the purpose of clarity across the grade
levels um thinking about things like third grade retention where parents have seen satisfactory grades throughout and now a student suddenly isn't on grade level now we are using that language throughout um and this you know our teacher committee came to us with this and they they were all on board uh but
this lets us be more consistent and more accurate as far as secondary we're we're proposing or the committee proposed a shift in grading categories where we once had a separate homework category a separate test projects and there's going to be two categories in addition to end
of course exams which is uh required by the state there's going to be two categories one for assignments or classwork which could include homework and one for assessments and larger projects that really gives the teachers and schools more flexibility as to what to put in there because having homework
be its own category we know not every course necessarily lends itself to homework but having it as its own category implies there should be some homework and now the teachers ultimately have that that final say um probably the the the biggest changes here are are just a a frequent
topic of discussion that's promotion from 8th grade to 9th grade um one change has has already uh it's already taken place in practice but it's just something we've been doing for a while we wanted to make sure we were we were doing clearly and straightforward and in line with what statute says um so you
see the green language marked on that slide we have uh as a practice if a student comes to us from outside of the Florida public education system as in they've never been enrolled in a Florida public school we handle their transcripts from wherever they're coming
from at face value and we verify those transcripts based on their performance in our schools what we've done in the past is we have awarded students credits or units in middle school for things that they have missed and we decided that statute doesn't tell us that we are
we should award them units it tells us that we should forgive them units so that's it's a real it's a it's it's a fine clarification but essentially we're not awarding units for stuff students didn't earn with us in our schools but we are forgiving them say if they come
to us in sixth grade and they and they are halfway through the semester and we know they need to start through semester 2 so that's just a clarification on how we handle paperwork doesn't functionally change what the students are doing and it puts us in line with with statute um another another frequent
concern is what we do with our 8.5 students we talked about having opportunities for them with seven period day um one of the things we decided to do was to read a a timeline as far as how long those students have the students earning their units but they're
still stuck in middle school at the beginning of the year or the beginning of the semester they're going to have 10 days to earn those required units to move on to high school uh and then at second semester to move on to high school they will need to have earned high school credits a half credit each
in in their core classes of algebra English and environmental science because that's what they would earn in the school uh and that's a solution just to make sure that we are not setting up students to fail by moving them up mid year and starting their their counting clock of four years towards graduation a half a year behind also gives them
something to work towards once they're still at that middle school and they are left there but but are able to earn units for high school or credits for high school speaking of high school credit we um we just removed some language that was unclear and not statutoily defined
students enrolled and not attend in attendance for instruction for the minimum hourly requirements may not be awarded credit we still have that but it's outlined elsewhere it's a student in attendance for fewer than 20 days does not have to receive a grade on the report card for that grading period so that's when we would include an Igrade
but but we just didn't want to have that absolute there when that's not what we do in practice and not what statute tells us to do uh a positive note is we've added the state added the the ability for us to add a seal of fine arts to students is a is a designation uh similar to the
industry scholar the seal of bi literacy and it's students who have met the criteria of college level uh fine arts courses um volunteer hours they have to they have to participate in jured events they have to create a portfolio but they get that seal which is which is a great
diploma booster for them a couple of other things um our uh articulation agreement with the college of central Florida we just want to make sure it was clear that if the students had taken any course including IB courses or Cambridge courses or AP
courses uh to cover their their core English college credit that they would be able to be exempted from that in their enrollment at CF um so that's outlined there and then uh my last note is for Marian virtual uh school
enrollments and it's just just a reminder to parents that if they want their school or their student on a standard schedule through Marian virtual they have to meet enrollment deadlines so that they can line up with testing and graduation dates and with enrollment at whatever future school they want to go to
um so with that our next step dates again like like everybody else we're waiting for the end of this legislative session to see what what passes and what may or may not change um we have an additional work session after that if needed and then our final public hearing is June 10th okay thank you Mr ingram board do
you have any um comments or concerns you'd like to ask yes Dr campbell it's not a a question it's just a comment uh thank you Mr inger for your presentation and as a board member of the Florida School Music Association I'm grateful we are enshrining the Florida Seal of Fine
Arts in our progression plan so thank you that is so cool so happy that kids get that opportunity that is exciting we are very appreciative yes Dr james thank you i just have four quick questions um I know we discussed this I believe last year um with maybe a different set of
emails but on slide four we indicate two specific emails for individual people um if I remember correctly Dr campbell and I both discussed the desire to have generic emails for departments that forward to individuals because um as individuals I I sure hope these two
people spend until their last possible day working in public education with Marian County Public Schools but in the effort that they were to leave in September and a parent goes to look at this what then and so I would be an a big supporter of um Mr benudi and our IT
department creating standard emails so like for this it would be extracurricular activities at Marian whatever um and just coming up with some standard emails that then can forward to whatever staff member this is a unique example but we've discussed it in other capacities throughout our progressive plan and probably our code of conduct as
well um so I'm going to maintain that request I think that that would be helpful for all families um for us to continue to have more productive communication um because if a family goes here and they actually find this which is already a pretty big feat to find the progressive plan and find this and then you email the person and it
says this user is no longer available it makes you just want to throw your computer so um that would be my request for that um number six slide six rather um I really appreciate this this um transition to letter grades for elementary i am my concern stems from
how we will communicate it to families because if you have a second grader who is a um I'm thinking of a few students I know specifically who are not achieving to standard but maybe you have a really kind second grade teacher and then that
transition to third grade occurs and as we are seeing parents are shocked by oh what do you mean my kid is getting D's and Fs right so how are we communicating not only to our primary families that there's going to be a transition but how are we communicating to our primary
educators because this is going to be a significant transition for primary educators who are check pluses or check minuses kinds of graders as a primary educator myself that was how that's how and as a I I am I receive primary grades home because I have a kindergarter and a
second grader and they get a lot of check check pluses some of the stuff they do is graded and more so in second grade but kindergarten all of it's pretty much a check check plus and so transitioning I'm sure Chair Conrad knows right and so transitioning from a
check check plus kind of quick grading to now I'm going to have to put a numerical grade on things is going to be a practice transition for our primary educators that I'm hopeful we have a plan for how we're going to deliver that to them so I'll pause there yeah yeah and I can speak to we we plan to create
a document for families to see that transition how it takes place but I think I think Jamie's going to speak to how we're going to translate that for teachers or Miss RLE yeah that's okay i here go ahead this is JB Brazington good morning elementary good morning so this
committee we talked about um some guidelines and and giving administ teachers and administrators guidelines to transition and some recommendations for qualifying entries and how to grade all of the assignments that we put in our grade book okay we probably will do
that during district inservice day as we work with teachers and then throughout the year and and they probably won't put everything in the grade book right the check pluses are just going to keep being check pluses and they're not gradable assignments so I just want to make sure that we do a thorough job of really priming up our educators and our families so that no one is shocked when
their second graders all of a sudden failing second grade when they've really been an underachiever consistently but now there's a C or a D or F attached to it instead of just a um like a U or an N right so that's just my concern with that and I just want to make sure we're
doing a quality job with that um so slide nine um is my next question um so my question is first are the eight and a halfers receiving these credits on Marian
virtual or egeneuity it's it that can be up to the school because they may have to pay for it differently with the sitebased budgeting but it's up to the school but it is available for both um okay uh so let's let's say that we have an eighth grader who does doesn't
have their units they go to summer school or don't go to summer school and they show back up on Denella Middle School's campus next August they have to finish their eighth grade units before they can start their high school units or they can do them at the same time is that a correct statement
at at Dunellan Middle School yes that's just an example but you can potentially work on both and our schools because uh high school credit can work as a middle school unit our schools do like to have students work and it if they have to do a wholly original course because you can't to do credit recovery you have to
have failed the course first so a wholly original course if they're starting from scratch missing something they'd rather put them in nth grade English so they can double dip with that understood so then if the site doesn't have the funds for egeneuity that we have egeneuity
provided for them that's okay that's that's what costs money then you said sitebased budgeting marrying virtual marrying virtual so if it's the parents preference though that their child do marrying virtual then what then I think the site will probably let them do marrying virtual okay and if the child does not finish the coursework by the
10th day of semester 2 then what then they're going to be at the middle school earning uh hopefully high school units sereneuity marin virtual whatever avenue or in in courses okay and where is that child sitting all
day while they're on egeneuity so I can't speak to how the schools all schedule but they do try to break it up and have electives and things like that but there is there is usually a good bit amount of time in the egeneuity classroom because of that credit recovery lab basically okay um so my my
primary concern is and we've seen this historically kids get sent up in spring break i mean I'm aware of a kid Dr brewer and I have discussed this it was about a year ago at Lake Ware High the kid showed up like after spring break as an eight and a halfer and didn't have even what they really needed at Lake
High and so again they'd miss so this is not bad my concern though is the then what because we know there will be kids who do not get it done and then what and so I would just love to see maybe an additional statement or
something that clarifies the then what so that it is crystal clear to families if your child does not get the the credits outlined then they will remain on middle school campus until the the conclusion of that year and then what
then if what if they don't get the credits at the end of that year do they then be an eight and a halfer again like I would just like to I would like it to be crystal clear so that we then as a board member can back up staff when they are following the progressive plan
clearly yeah no I I appreciate that and because the reality is you can't move to high school until you get all those units that's that's hardcoded in statutes absolutely and I fully support that so I just want it to be very crystal clear so then no one is confused when their kid is not leaving the middle
school campus because they haven't done what they're supposed to do that's just my that's just my personal request and you know maybe we don't move forward in that direction but I would love to see it very crystal clear i could craft some language to add to this section absolutely and then my last statement would be um on slide 13
um so this says students must adhere to district reg um registration deadlines in order to qualify for full-time virtual what if I'm expelled March 2nd and decide to do Mary virtual they're still able to do it they just may not do
the state testing they're still eligible for the program but it may not be the full consistent program at that point well I think it needs to be clear because what this says is students adhere to district registration deadlines students to me is all students
and so if we're making exceptions for classes of students or types of students then we should have that very clear students enrolling in full-time yeah we can but those students who are expelled are enrolling in full-time virtual yeah true i mean because they're expelled for a year they're expelled for 12 months so
now we we may say this is not in your best interest you should do egeneuity or you should do this or that because we all know how semester works with Marian Virtual but if a parent decides to enroll in Marian Virtual full-time and start the semester over they're enrolling whenever we expel their child
from Maring County Public Schools so I would just like that to be clear as well because it it seems like we're then excluding a class of students who would be eligible for use of the service so those are just my statements other than that I appreciate the work um and thank you guys for bringing it forward thank
you thank you anything else members okay I'll go um one I want to say I really appreciate the way this presentation is laid out it makes it very easy for me to see what the changes
are you know and and how they um affect the plan so thank you for the way um it's organized and I just have um one clarifying um question and it is from slide seven I believe no okay yeah it's slide seven
slide six in the presentation but seven online um so just again it's about the communication piece and I know that it should be logical if this is the information the way things are being worded from their fast assessment and it
aligning with their report card I think is fantastic but just making sure that when that first report card goes out that we have a letter of some kind of explanation you know showing um the equality of each piece and so that would
just be my request so that you know most parents are following along but we have some that are not and so when they don't see that A or that C and they've got um this diff different language um place there I just would encourage that would hopefully help clear up some confusion
for our principles and our teachers as those come back with questions yeah we're going to we want to share out a one pager that our schools can send out with that first report card to help under parents understand and maybe they could share it out back to school as well so they know what they're they're seeing throughout the year okay all
right thank you very much is there anything else from the board oh yes board member Thrower thanks what you shared just made me think of it um and also some previous comments most parents are not going to delve into the student progression plan um and the students
that that we're talking about you know got into these situations for a reason and so I 100% agree that any kind of one pager any kind of forward communication that is simple and direct maybe starting in kindergarten the best thing you can do is be a partner with us to ensure
that your kid doesn't arrive at 8.5 and get stuck there because there really aren't good solutions there really isn't i mean to I think to myself taking high school courses when let's face it they they didn't pass middle school for a reason so they have all that lost
knowledge and do that in 10 days uh if they were that motivated they wouldn't be 8.5s so we just need to keep capturing these kids early keep rocketing them up in kindergarten readiness and onward and so forth so that these become just a very small
handful of students in unique situations uh there's been you know masses of these kids sadly you know more and more and we know that um so that's just some points I wanted to make i think that the communication needs to start way earlier about you know if you're missing two
days of school this is what it can transfer to by first grade by second grade you know show the timeline and show the separation of what happens to your child that's all I got agreed okay
all right thank you Mr ringer we sure do appreciate you thank you S is there any public comment uh I I'm just asked to clarify do you think we're going to need the second session the second work session or will we be able to go forward depends on the legislator
yeah it depends on legislator yeah it does depend on depend on legislation okay right thank you all right thank you i'm sorry for clarity Madam Chair that's that's no unless there are changes with legislation yes okay i just want to make sure we're clear thank you thank you and
I'll ask one more time any public comment okay seeing none Dr glet I'll turn it over to you hey very good thank you Madam Chair we're moving on to instructional materials today so we have Miss Reedle here with her team to to kick off this discussion and
presentation thank you all right good morning um today we present to you recommended uh instructional materials for adoption and I would like to call up Reagan Hughes coordinator of media related instructional services to share the
process and recommendations thank you Miss RELE good morning Chair Conrad Superintendent Dr gullet and board members the 242 25 state adoption timeline for the first time included intervention materials for K3 ELA and K4
mathematics these new intervention materials will be made available for the 2526 school year to meet the needs of all of our students and teachers the adoption process always begins with the call to publisher submissions the call for publishers
opened on January 6th publishers submitted responses and required documentation via Google forms the response from publishers was positive and we have had many of the publishers that bid the state also bid for Marian County Public
Schools after the intent to adopt letters were sent out to publishers district evaluation committees were formed to assist with the first phase overview the district evaluation committee included personnel from elementary curriculum and instruction ESSE ESOL and
technology the review process of submitted proposals took place from January 22nd through February 19th the district evaluation committees reviewed materials of all submitted proposals to ensure that the publishers
selected followed both state and federal statute the district evaluation team then convened discussed findings using the core questions rubric provided by the state and selected the top three choices for K3 ELA and K4 mathematics
intervention materials keeping in mind our teachers and students that will implement and use these programs in our classrooms for K3 ELA intervention materials the district evaluation team selected Amira Learning and Menum Exact Path Reading and Lexia Core
5 for K4 mathematics intervention materials the district evaluation committee selected Discovery at Dreambox Edenum Exact Path Mathematics and H Hotton Mifflin Hardcourt Florida Waggle Math the review committee is made up of 12
members and those members included community members community members are those that have been appointed by a school school board member and I appreciate your contributions you made to our committees parent members as well as teacher members complete a district application
process the timeline for adoption which as you can see a lot has passed but our reviewers have had the opportunity to come and see the print resources that were made available for all for the purpose of review along with the print materials all publishers also provided
digital access information for both the student and teacher experience reviewers window opened on February 20th through March 28th on March 27th the community and administrator review evening took place we collected recommendations and
comments that were left and that information was shared with the teacher parent and community committees during discussion before final votes were taken on March 31st the teacher parent and community committees met in person at MTI these committees were broken down
by subject area during this discussion committee members review data collected from the core questions rubric provided by the state as well as community and administrator notes and recommendations when the discussion concluded each committee member submitted a
vote the committee recommendation process begins with the review of the materials and feedback by the committee members committee members share feedback individually as well as as a group for the review of the data and feedback collected during this process all
stakeholders are invited to participate from the vote those recommendations are then provided to our superintendent Dr gullet policy 2521 is the policy that allows the superintendent to make these recommendations i am excited to share
that the recommendations of the superintendent are as follows for K3 ELA intervention materials the recommended program is Lexia core 5 reading and the alternate program selected was edmentum exact path reading for K4 mathematics
intervention materials the recommended program was HMH Waggle Math and the alternate program selected is Edenum Exact Path Math the adoption process has many steps and takes several months the next steps after today community members will have
access for 20 days of the recommended titles this information will be posted to the MCPS homepage on May 13th there will be a public hearing for the 2425 instructional materials for adoption this will be public comment with no
vote on May 27th will be the vote there will be two votes each subject has a single action line item this will also open the formal 30-day objection window on July 8th with a hearing officer if needed otherwise hearing none after 30
days ordering will begin with the overall goal of having access to materials accessible for this first day of school public access to the recommended titles will be posted on the MCPS homepage today on the MCPS homepage the public will find the login
information as well as login instructions for each of the recommended publishers materials are also available for review at the professional library located in building 20 thank you okay thank you very much board i'll open
it up to you any questions or concerns no nothing anything down here okay i just have a couple of quick quick clarifying things um for you on the timeline for the instructional
materials i think it's slide 11 um we are preparing orders July 9th yes yes so how does that look at our staff getting materials before school starts so luckily each of the programs that moved forward were digital so it won't be ordering of any physical materials which
I think is positive okay um and we already work with Lexia as well as HMH so we have um we have accessibility to their trainers already okay all right and then my other question is if you could remind me what
remediation programs we're using now and how long we've been using them now that we're switching um to something new sure i'm going to have Jamie come in all right thank you absolutely thank you good morning again so Lexia is just going to be one of the programs that we
use it's we still will have multiple programs that we use because intervention as you know always um work we work with where the students deficit is so we will Lexia will be a part of the intervention continuums that we offer we currently offer SIPs and we've
been using that for I believe three years we we currently use Lexia right now we've been using that for three years um UFly foundations we use as an intervention and then in fourth and fifth grade we use um read 180 okay thank you for that i appreciate it i
would like to see as we um move forward in this discussion data on um you know how these programs have helped our students improve so that we have some data to support um investing in these systems yes and that that's all I have
is anything else okay all right thank you very much for your presentation this morning is there any public comment okay seeing none we'll move on to our next item
thank you Madam Chair and Mr s is making his way to the podium to provide the annual report um from our charter schools thank you good morning Mr ayes good morning good morning Madam Chair pastor co-chair board members Dr gullet Attorney
Powers today um the charter schools sponsored by the Maring County Public Schools will present their annual reports this is a requirement of state statute 102.3 and state statute also provides the requirements for the report
the reports as well as the current demographics of the schools were uploaded to board docs for your review we have the we do not we do not we're we are the technology is down all right so I know some of my charter schools had
powerpoints that were posted on the thing so we're going to pivot and just do their presentations as they are so at this time I would like to introduce Miss Michelle Axom is the principal of Marian
Charter School thank you good morning good morning board chair board members Dr gullet Miss Just one moment i'm able to access the PowerPoints from our laptop on the individual laptops we just can't we can't um you know project it
right um so uh that's that would obviously make it difficult for her to present anything down there but we we're able to access it and see it so want to make sure you know that yep thank you so we'll be following along on our laptop even though it's not up on the screen so thank you for that we'll let you get
started all right well good morning uh board chair Conrad board members Dr gullet Miss Gonzalez Attorney Powers um we are Marian Charter School home of the Sharks and Shark stands for smart high
achieving responsible kind students and this is our 24th year in operations so in August um we'll be in our 25th year um our school mission um is that we strive to guide students to
be respectful citizens successful problem solvers and lifelong learners who value themselves and others we celebrate diversity and we strive to instill integrity compassion and confidence in each and every child and
we give each child support and encouragement to become his or her own unique self currently we have 224 students um as you see on our student population we have a diverse population
um and currently 56% of our students are on free or reduced lunch we have 12% ESSE um almost 6% ELLL and almost 5% of our population um is
considered gifted our personnel data we have 15 instructional units that's 13 classrooms a PE teacher and our ESC gifted RTI teacher um all of our
teachers but one hold a professional certification um one is finishing up their temporary certification um our salary ranges uh varies from 27,000 to
96,000 um we do provide basic health insurance to all of our employees um and we also all of our employees are in the Florida retirement system currently uh we own our own property um we are looking into getting
funding for building a new school soon so we're excited about that um based on last year's audit our audit showed our total expenses as being 2,400,000 and our revenues were
3,300,000 which resulted in an increase of 9117,000 currently our property including the land and the buildings that are on there is currently valued at 1,479,882 for our instructional delivery method we continue to implement a
schoolwide intervention block first thing in the morning from 8:00 to 8:30 um during this time um our tier three students go with a reading endorsed teacher our uh tier 2 students um receive their remediation interventions
and other students receive enrichment support um all students who are tier three again they go to our reading endorsed teacher currently we have eight reading endorsed teachers out of 13 um so we're proud of that
and each grade level continues to share an aid who helps with remediation and enrichment support as well as working with the teacher to provide daily academic instruction um also we provide a schedule that's designed so that each
grade level has a consecutive hour of planning time every single day and the teachers use this time for grade level uh meetings data review um meetings with myself and the admin team regarding
student growth and for PMP meetings if you look at our student achievement data um over the uh most recent five years we are currently a B school um our teachers work so hard with
our uh students to make sure that they receive uh what they need to be successful looking at our 202 um 4 and 25 current data um looking at star ELA PM2 data you can see that for
kindergarten first and second grade we are right there with the district or above um and for star math K through two again we are uh right there with the district or above and then for our third fourth and
fifth grade students for ELA PM2 um for third fourth and fifth grade we are um currently above the district and that is the same for uh third fourth and fifth grade fast math PM2
scores um for our district progress monitoring assessments um for uh DMPA 2 again our third graders are above the district um our fourth graders didn't have their information in
time um when I presented uh our PowerPoint and our fifth grade is above the district our goals for this year is to continue working on closing the learning gaps
again by providing daily remediation to all students in reading math and science um again both of our teachers and parents work with our students to review and retach uh key standards and lessons that were taught previously
we are continuing to ensure that all of our students are continuing to excel in all academic areas and we're continuing to focus on increasing our overall reading and math scores especially with our lowest 25 percentile students as
well as continuing to provide support to our fourth grade teachers who were new um we do have eight teachers who tutor before and after school so that they can meet their struggling students um needs
and receive um extra support so again progress to towards our goal uh we are continuing to pro provide intense reading and math remediation and enrichment activities and opportunities to our students on a daily basis uh we
also provide our teachers and pair professionals with professional de development opportunities through in-house and as well as um the district and services and we continue to implement steam activities into our
daily lessons with great success um we continue to implement um the state district um assessments we also use success maker and I ready assessment and then we disseminate that data so that we continue to meet our students academic
needs as we always say the success of our school is like the three-legged table our staff students parents and families so you see the PowerPoint of our staff i cannot praise our staff
enough they play a vital role in our success they work diligently to provide robust hands-on learning experiences for our students and then we have our students our students continue to work
hard to achieve greatness when they're faced with challenges they work hard to overcome them and we use a lot of cooperative learning opportunities throughout the day and so there uh you see a slide of our students who did a
escape room and they had to work together to solve those problems and last our parent support is so vital for our students success and we provide several opportunities for parents to come in and spend quality
time doing educational activities with their students one of them is literacy night and um what we do is around um Dr seuss's birthday each child gets a age
appropriate Dr seuss book and that grade level does an activity where the parents come in in the evening and the families do those activities together and we have had such success and the parents enjoy having that opportunity to come in and
actually spend quality time with their students doing fun activities in the school setting um and so you see a couple of slides of the success that we have with that and then we also have what we call math
night at Publix u so thank you to Publix for allowing us to do that and this is where uh families come in and they they sign in and they get age appropriate math questions and they have to do a scavenger hunt throughout Publix to
solve those math problems and so the students get real world um knowledge and experience so that was another activity that we had and then last we had the full steam
head um PowerPoint basically I love going into the classrooms and seeing all of these activities that the students do for example in kindergarten when they were doing force and motion the students in
kindergarten created an indoor putt putt um course and so they were actually getting to build it and use it um to reinforce force and motion first grade uh they had a pumpkin and they um
scooped out the pumpkins and they counted the pumpkin seeds and then what they did is after that they took the pumpkin outside so that they could watch it decompose um decomposition of it and then they actually see that now it's a new plant and so they're out there um
each week using you know measurements and and um all of their skills to look at their new plant third grade does what we call a book tasting where they incorporate reading activities into a fun um
activity for their students and then our fifth graders they do their water b bottle rocket launches every year so again we use a lot of steam activities here at our school but I want to say thank you for
letting us share our school with you today you're always invited to come out and visit with our wonderful staff students and families and I want to say thank you to the district for such a positive working relationship because it truly takes a village to educate our
students so thank you thank you um I just want to say Miss Axom your enthusiasm and love uh and passion for what you're doing really shines through when you're talking about the programs at your school so thank you for what you
do each and every day to lead your team to success and with that I'll open it up to the board yes board member Thrower good morning um Principal Axen and it's just always a pleasure to have you here um congratulations on your upcoming 25th
anniversary thank you time does fly it does and and I concur with Chairwoman Conrad you know you come here every year and just prove all over again that you guys are out there just quietly doing a consistently great job
i'm sure the teachers appreciate having one consecutive hour of planning time every day and then offering the before and after school tutoring and having that first thing in the morning block for the uh intervention and and enrichment it just
seems like you know you're you're in a great pattern and your success is is showing that and it just also I think kind of goes to show that it's it's not about the the the one big grand intervention it's about consistently
doing the right work over time so thank you for continuing to invest your time and and your passion thank you partnership with us i appreciate it board members oh yes Dr campbell sure i just wanted to say a picture paints a thousand words
and I love the pictures you incorporated here it's not so much that you just shared with us what each of the background of the pictures was but to see the smiling faces not only on the students and the teachers but also the parents and the activities that they had the ability to participate in so thank you so much Miss Axon always grateful to
have you come and share the exciting things you have and I can't wait for your groundbreaking whenever that comes i'm sure you'll make sure all of us are invited oh yes ma'am definitely wonderful thank you so much for all you do thank you all right thank you so much
welcome back Mr ays so next I want to introduce Mr david Freedellander he's the principal of Macintosh Area School and I know he has administrator and board members with him i'll let him do those introductions thank you good morning Dr goat members of the
school board it's a pleasure to be here this morning to present our annual report on Macintosh Area School um throughout this year we've continued to maintain our focus on um the financial status of our school as far as
our academic rigor and as far as our marketing strategy so those are the three focuses uh we have presented to you and we'll just highlight some of those things that we've done this year i'd like to introduce Mrs colleen Beals who's our curriculum coordinator with the school as well as Mr jonathan Ward
who is uh one of our board members uh this year we implemented strategic cost cutting measures and restructured educational resources to maintain a quality academic and social learning environment without increasing
costs um we recognize the area is is that we're in and therefore we have to take those steps in order to maintain fiscal responsibility however we certainly do not want to compromise our educational uh responsibilities to our students and our families we reduced
expenses while maintaining competitive salaries uh ex expertise benefits and standards of our staff our current enrollment is 44 which has increased from the previous two years however our goal still remains to return back to the
baseline of 65 which was done prior to CO our VPK program is in its second year and is highly successful 88% of our current VPK students have already registered for our kindergarten program for the 2526 school year and the early
learning coalition partnership that we've established um has been wonderful but also been a big boon to our uh marketing strategies up in the northern region of the county as far as our academic rigor uh focus uh
that remains one of our highest priorities while also providing an enriching um collaborative learning experience that requires our students to be challenged based on their individual abilities and needs we intend to achieve a school grade of a
C this year and this stems from evaluating current student performance upon enrolling new to MA Macintosh area school combined with those students that are returning to us and this year's data as well as learning gains in the overall score scoring
calculations moving forward over the next two years we intend to we strive to achieve that A for the for the 26 27 school year our academic performance and growth data so far indicates schoolwide academic gains reinforcing our
departmentalization and co-eing structures we've implemented we continue our afterchool tutoring sessions for students who require additional academic intervention and support we monitor our kindergarten first and
second grade uh progress and they continue to follow an upward trend using data collection from STAR and progress learning grades three through five with data denotes similar upward trends and learning gains as they continue to work
with uh the our Macintosh model students will have domains scaffolded strengthening their skills for our first goal was for 50% of our K through2 students to achieve a score of 50th percentile at least or higher on the star early lit reading and
math currently students in K through2 based on the latest star reading early lit assessment depicts 45% of students scoring in that 50th percentile or higher additionally students in our K through2
um program based on the latest STAR math assessments have depicted 48% of our students progressing um in a positive trend with a high likelihood of meeting the projected level of 50% of students in grades K K
through two scoring in the 50% or higher students in our grades three through five are working towards their goals demonstrating a high likelihood that 38% or more will achieve a level three or higher and 45% of eligible students obtaining a learning
gain with our VPK children uh they mastered they come in and they have mastered already the uh Maring County Star early literacy assessment benchmark and we anticipate by the end of the school year VPK students will have mastered the necessary pre kindergarten
skills and will be ready to enter kindergarten in August of 2025 we are promoting our K through school K through5 school program within our VPK program and are including all families with opportunities to participate in school in a community and community-
based events we are developing joint activities that will provide a smooth transition between our K through5 and our VPK programs as part of our title one family engagement component Macintosh has strengthened communication by providing parents both physical and
virtual opportunities to conference with their teachers and to obtain information about their child in addition we provide our parents with individual conferences to review their child's academic performance and growth for PM1 and PM2 data assessments to make sure that they
fully understand where their child is and where their learning gains are and what areas we can uh help supporting them at home surveys have been sent out to our parents to solicit their input on establishing various after-school programs as well as in addition to our
existing afterare program that broadens their children's overall academic and cultural experience beyond the academic day in addition for some of these retention recruitment and marketing goals we have increased our afterchool tutoring sessions for students who require additional academic intervention
and support and we continue to enhance our website and social media platforms to extend our marketing campaign and provide easier access and detailed information to existing and potential new families as many of you know where we are located um it's a very um rural
um and in some cases um technology um lacking uh location um but we are doing our best to make sure that all our families and the community um understands and is aware fully aware
where Macintosh is as well as what Macintosh is does to support the community we continue to operate our runners club program which meets weekly to provide all interested students the opportunity to engage in an organized
outdoor fitness activity parent volunteers and our board members assist with this after-school activity we continue to or offer an after-school art club which meets one day a week and is a very popular activity with children at all grade levels we continue to operate
our afterare program that provides our working families with a safe and nurturing afterchool option usda approved snack and guided homework time if needed in addition uh as far as our building relationships with our community
Macintosh continues to collaborate with the uh town of Macintosh and the Macintosh Seedling and Garden Club um and participating in variety of community activities and events um this relationship has only strengthened over
the last several years and has been promoted within Macintosh and is supported widely throughout the community we are uh developing in the process now the nature where we are located we have 10 acres of land behind our school which um we now have through
the help of the Macintosh Garden Seedling Club um have developed that into a nature trail not just for the school but also for the community so we promote that um and this year as a new adventure we always try to do something
new for the students and for the community uh we established a partnership with the Boy Scouts of America and formed a Cub Scout pack for boys and girls in kindergarten through fifth grade up at the school this group meets weekly at Macintosh and is open to all children living in this area not
just the school students but also the any student that's interested that's eligible boy or girl um that's interested in this type of activity the interest is there um and certainly as a new program we have tried to provide uh
meet the needs of what community is seeking we continue to work with our local churches in our effort to recruit new students and promote awareness of our school each of these marketing marketing activities has helped to improve community awareness and to
encourage parents to enroll their child into their neighborhood school some of the plans for enrollment uh to increase enrollment and um realizing that this is not an easy challenge we have successfully operated our second
year of our VPK program this year and continue to be listed as a VPK provider on the early learning coalition website which brings attention to our school this program has definitely lived up to the expectations as a feeder program for new kindergarten students as well as
promoting our school programs and enhancing our marketing and recruitment efforts within the within the community we definitely intend to improve our student performance and proficiency ratings in order to achieve a collective school grade of at least a C
we are currently planning for our third summer enrichment program that offers enrichment activities for students geared towards topics not traditionally offered during the school year we will continue to explore the resources and options to establish transportation for our students as you
know um transportation has been a very big obstacle and challenge for us and for our families up in the uh that area um but we haven't given up um hope or nor have we given up the the effort to try to to do that we continue to pursue
new strategies to promote our school throughout the surrounding communities recruit new students in summary um I just want to highlight as you can see from what we've mentioned in the report every stakeholder of the Macintosh area school um community
including the board administration staff families and community members remain 100% committed and invested into the future growth and success of Macintosh Area School we will continue to be a contributing asset and active participant with the community and
continue continue to provide a service to our families in the northern portion of Marian County with that I want to thank you for the opportunity and open it up to any questions you might have thank you very much board i'll open it
up to you for conversation and questions nothing okay yes board member Thrower thank you and thank you very much for coming uh again today and providing the the presentation and I continue to uh agree
with you that that my hope and and along with your intention and hope is to somehow be able to get transportation i think that that's a barrier that you've obviously heard that we struggle with uh it's just the size of our county and
accessibility um and also as well I continue to believe that these smaller microtype schools do really uh fill a need and I appreciate the the hard work that it takes to keep your school open and get the grades and everything that's
required uh to stay solvent and successful so I wish you the best thank you all right thank you i too I I appreciate uh your presentation this morning i'm excited to see um hear about all of your partnerships within your community and the churches that's
exciting to me and and I hope they help you move your program forward so if there are no further questions uh from the board or comments thank you for your presentation thank you very much yes hold on reverend Cummings is going I just need to look at their data again at
number five um student achievement data they do have a error there that they need to correct before it goes any further on the year that year after co there's a I which one was it student achievement
data five you have an error there on that year after 2019 2020 look at that says 2010 2021 Oh
please don't send that up at least that's an easy correction yes okay thank you very much good good eyes Reverend Cummings thank you very much is there any public comment okay seeing none Mr we'll turn it back
over to you i'll work with Mr freedellander to get that updated and we'll update it back all right next I would like to um introduce Miss Vanessa Baxley she's the principal of ina academy good morning Miss Baxley good morning Dr
glet Chair Conrad and Marian County Public School Board it gives me a great pleasure to be representing a colon academy as we are wrapping up year three um wow a year has gone very quickly it seems like I was just standing here um
and we are still uh in many ways feeling very new but that family and community atmosphere of our school um is definitely sinking in so excited to be here thank you so much for having me um again I I think that you can follow along and hopefully you can see our
PowerPoint and our vision at a academy is to educate the hearts and minds of students and families in an environment where everyone belongs works together and thrives we are really focused on building a community amongst our campus and that's not just with our students
and our staff but with our families and our community members we invite community members into campus all the time so as much as we love to expose our students to what's going on outside of the walls of the school through field trips and activities we really welcome
people to come in and visit our campus and I invite each of you to visit soon if you would like our mission is to cultivate passionate learners in an inclusive school community in which individuality and diversity are valued and students develop understanding and
empathy for others through collaborative and active learning i will talk a little bit about our projectbased learning focus and of course our social and emotional learning um that we are continue to continuing to improve upon um each and every year because we feel
like that is so important for students of all ages the next slide shows our growth since year 1 year one we began in 2022 with 214 students opening with a K to
sixth grade year two we rolled those students up to seventh grade with 436 students and this year we are at our cap for grade levels K to 8th grade with 546 students our projections for next year
are growing to 582 students um growing in two grade levels and we currently have 785 students on our waiting list for the 2526 school year our motto is sharp minds kind hearts and I've provided a
couple of snapshots of our students because that's our reminder for what we do each and every day getting out on that campus and seeing what's happening in the classrooms and in our common learning spaces is what keeps us going
uh you can see our core values include inclusiveness family involvement constructivist approach and social responsibility our project-based learning is really taking off and that is something that not every teacher has had training in so
we've made a commitment to that professional development um slowly each year so so teachers didn't get feel overwhelmed but it's not exactly the what they're presenting it's the how and we are helping them with that professional development groups of our
grade levels have been working collaboratively to do presentations to the staff and next year we will have very specific project-based learning goals within each [Applause] classroom after evaluating our um data
especially after PM2 we um address student needs in a number of different ways we have MTSS we do have onetoone devices for first through 8th grade we have ESSE support facilitation for all grade levels small groupoup
facilitation curriculum support and interventions using benchmark data from assessments to create student learning goals individual small group and class afterchool tutoring with our teachers which has shown very successfully and
our volunteers we are proud that for the second year in a row we received a grade of an A for our school and we are continuing development of our team and our staff that is the reason that this is possible
our teachers are incredibly dedicated creative and hardworking and as we've grown we've had more opportunities for collaboration um in in grade levels and across grade levels we are committed to that collaborative planning time for our teachers so we structure our schedule so
that they have time to talk about their grade level goals taking a look at our testing uh first our STAR testing for grades K through two you can see this year's uh percentages in our STAR early literacy
for levels three four and five we had a 20% uh improvement from PM1 to PM2 for those students scoring three to five for star reading we had 15% growth for levels three through five and for our
star math we had 26% growth for those students scoring level three four or five our fast scores um I included last year's scores since we were able to include PM3 and you can see the
incredible growth from PM2 to PM3 for our students last school year so we are looking at those gains again for PM3 this year our PM1 to PM2 you can see that for reading grade levels 3 through
8 we had a 14% increase and for um math we had a 25% increase for level three or higher we are focused on whole student development and that means including activities outside of the classroom as
well it's been great because so many of our staff members have stepped up to offer instead of um being asked to volunteer but to offer to participate and to host afterchool programs and learning opportunities for our students so I wanted to highlight some of those
in the area of student life we have student ambassadors for um our seventh and eighth graders this year we have safety patrols like many schools and that is a great leadership opportunity that one of those first leadership opportunities for students happy to
continue our show choir uh we were continue to grow a little bit in athletics with basketball flag football cheer and this year we had a volleyball club and we're hoping to be competitive in that area next year participating with Marian County Public Middle Schools
we have an after-school book club for our third graders which um one of our teachers stepped up and was excited to host and that's been very successful new to us this year we had our inaugural spelling bee which was a lot of fun and one of my favorite moments was one of
the students who didn't win in his class and did not participate in the spelling bee but came up to me last week and said please miss Baxley can we please have the spelling be again so I think he has a summer goal of working on his words and I really love that we have for our middle school
Future Farmers of America which um has one of our students going to compete at the regional level for uh public speaking we added our national junior honor society since we are up through 8th grade now we have middle school band that was something that we were able to
offer as an elective for our students but it's off also an afterchool activity and they will be having their spring concert on May 5th we added American Sign Language Club and it was very popular um an afterchool activity we had to offer two sections of
it because so many students wanted to participate we added the bass fishing club which is a lot of fun and they're just learning but there are competitions available for the future and we have an acting class that we were just hoping we added to our schedule this year it was a
um student initiated request that we have that class and we had no idea that they would really be able to pull together a performance this year but they did and so in December we had the first semester performance and in the spring um we will be having a performance at the end of this semester
so that was something very exciting our students um have received the Daughters of the American Revolution citizenship and essay awards this year which was um exciting and we have that great opportunity to collaborate with fans
they have supported our garden beds and our new greenhouse on campus with the addition of agriculture as a middle school elective um it's thriving so that's something that we are excited and hoping to grow in that area middle
school growth adding eighth grade this year um has been a pretty big deal for us we created a seven- period schedule to include all core classes plus electives and advanced classes we are creating important development opportunities for students student input
and growing electives is very important last year we pulled our students and their top two electives were agriculture and acting and I'm so delighted to say you can't always find the right staff members to teach the right things um agriculture was our first hire for this
school year and she's doing a phenomenal job of growing that program and we had a teacher who amazingly incredibly trained in English history but also acting and so we were excited to be able to offer our students their first two choices
their very successful electives for us our high school preview sessions with local Maring County Public Schools has given us the opportunity to expose our eighth graders to what our community has to offer for them um our students have been on tours of different high school
campuses and we've invited different high schools in to share their programs with our students we are offering the PSAT to our eighth graders next week and we're really excited to have the opportunity um to give them some information about their preparedness for high school and areas
of focus for them our eighth grade honor classes that we are offering for high school credit include English one algebra 1 physical science honors Spanish and next year we will be offering aggrocience foundations
the last slide there you can see um again sharp minds kind hearts and you might even see Dr allison Campbell who um came to speak to our student ambassadors about what it's like to represent and communicate on behalf of
an organization so thank you so much for visiting with our students that day um you offered a lot of great information and I thought they had a lot of great questions to ask and I think it really helped them understand what you do as a board so it was very informational for
them as well that's all okay all right thank you very much i have to say I'm feeling a little tired just listening to all the opportunities that the students have um at your school and so with that I'll open it up to the board for um any
comments anyone yes Dr campbell sure and thank you Miss Baxley for your presentation and it's always a pleasure to uh be with your students and be at your school there are great things happening at INA and just appreciate the partnership um I uh had someone tell me recently you know all of the charter
schools that are here today if you didn't exist then we would have to be finding more places to put students that we don't currently have available at all so grateful for the partnership that um this school relatively new to our community uh has been able to offer for
students and just continued success you right thank you Dr campbell anything else yes board member Thrower i just want to make sure I heard you right at the first thank you for the great presentation and and it really sounds like Ana Colon is firing on all
cylinders and and just growing and very innovative did I hear you say that there's almost 800 students on your waiting list that is correct correct gosh isn't that a testament to success we are grateful uh we are grateful for your support we're grateful for the
community support and I have to give all of the credit to um our staff and our teachers they show up every day to work hard they're truly committed uh we are grateful for their work um they're tireless and and we just appreciate it so we're we're grateful to be here and a
growing part of the community well we are grateful to have you and I heard loud and clear about your student ambassadors and it just got me thinking that you know we have our student board representatives which I'm sure board member Campbell shared with the kids and we have so many wonderful middle
schoolers that definitely have the maturity and the vast intelligence to be able to take in what we do up here so I'm just glad that that's being conveyed you know um to the the lower grades and of course it has me thinking hm how could we incorporate some of them up
here because that civic responsibility the earlier it starts the better it is so I I would love to send some your way i welcome you to come out for a visit it doesn't even need to be a scheduled tour we're doing great things every day so I welcome um you out to um introduce you
to our students in our classrooms thank you all right thank you very much all right our um our last two charter schools are Ocali Charter Middle and Ocali Charter High at this time I'm going to introduce Miss TC Matthews she's the executive director over Okali
Charter Middle and High and she'll introduce her two principles to do their presentations thank you Mr heirs good morning Chairperson Conrad good morning board members Superintendent Gullet always a pleasure to be in front of you and to share with you the great things that are
happening at Ocali you've already heard from me this year so I thought it would be really important to bring in front of you our academic and instructional leaders uh from each school ocali Charter Middle School has been in existence over 10 years now and it is a
very special place to be so as we look at growth and what we're doing within that school uh Mr post the pres uh principal at Ocali Charter Middle and myself we're at the point now where we're tweaking it to make it even better
and one of the things that we focus on is to ensure that when our teachers arrive every day they're happy to be at work because happy teachers create successful students and that is to the credit of Mr post as well as his administrative team and the wonderful
staff that we have at Okali Charter Middle so today he's going to share with you a lot of the tweaking that we have uh begun to do to make Ocali Turner Middle School even better mr post good morning uh morning Chair Conrad uh
the school board and uh Superintendent Dr gullet thank you for having me here this morning um it's a pleasure to come and talk to you about the great things that our team is doing and when I say team I mean both instruction instructional team and non-instructional
team they are tireless they are relentless and they're touching the lives of all our students every single day and uh I have to give credit to them uh and I appreciate them dearly um so as you can look at the data our
year-to-year progress we've been a C for the last uh seven years we've been consistent c for consistency but we're working so hard to achieve that B and each year we've been making tweaks and
changes to try to uh get to that next level possibly a B or an A and uh what the C's don't communicate are the progress that we've made in proficiency and you can see those numbers right in front of you especially what I'm very
proud of is the bottom quartile percents and the learning gains that our bottom quartile have made uh which is significant uh yes we want proficiency that's always the goal but really when you have students about 50% of our
population that enroll uh are come in as non-proficient or not on grade level so really the goal is growth and eventually growth will lead to that proficiency but the data also shows that if you look at our science it is
probably our it is our uh the area that we struggle with the most even though we've made a 16% uh gain in proficiency in science it is a struggle uh finding and hiring a certified science teacher has become as you all probably know uh increasingly
difficult and this year we we did accomplish that but as as I will discuss there there were some definitely challenges um so our first goal was to improve the mastery of the science standards are and the way we did that is
well everyone in one form or another teaches science in whether it's using science vocabulary within the classroom whether it's teaching them how to read graphs because so much of that science
NGSS is how to read the information that they give you and that's what our students struggle with they don't know how to read graphs or they don't want to so pointing that out in every single class has been a mission for every single teacher uh that teaches at our
school we also have a research class and the teacher in that research class collaborates with the science teachers and they look at which standards the majority of the student population uh did not master or struggle with and she
goes back and finds ways to uh even going back to the sixth and seventh grade standards because after all the assessment tests all three years and so much of that information gets lost uh and students forget amnesia and so they
go back and they look at those standards and she finds interactive engaging handson ways to reinforce or review those standards that the students struggle with uh we do utilize science because there's a great instructional
component to that and our goal was to hire a certified science teacher we already have one we wanted a second one for that seventh and eighth grade group so working towards that we were starting to see improvements in mastering those
uh standards and we did acquire a certified science teacher but they relocated in January so we're now once again uh looking for a competent certified science teacher we have one but we definitely we need two uh okay
our second goal actually was I I had I had this goal last year as well but it was such a relevant goal and that's in increasing uh through every progress monitoring increasing proficiency by 10% in each
grade level in each for math and ELA and the way we did that is we made a deliberate effort to look at uh how our students how our how are our students learning some of the students are auditory learners some of them are
visual learners uh anywhere between intra and inter uh personal learning preferences not everyone wants to work in a group some kids excel in a group so our teachers are really differentiating their classrooms so that those students can learn in the way that
they they best can uh we still have intensive reading and fundamental math last year I shared with you that uh I made the decision the administrative team made the decision that every student on our campus will
take fundamental math not just our non-proficient students and the reason being that we notice that even our uh algebra 1 and honor students still struggle with basic math concepts it's you know it it just happens they they're used to doing such high level math that
they forget the basics and we continue doing that this year but this time we also tripled down on math because we felt that uh the math exposure is essential when most of the school days focused on reading and math is only a
50-minute period we felt that we needed to uh work with math a little bit more so in our critical thinking class we have an emphasis on financial literacy where we're actually focusing on math applications uh through finances and though it
doesn't cover every math standard it definitely reinforces their mathematical thinking to see those numbers in re in in a real world setting okay uh the other thing that we've been doing is and we continue to do is reinforce
and incentivize all uh fast math learning gains within the progress monitoring uh that is there's a huge motivation piece i know that there are students out there that can demonstrate mastery but they just don't feel like it
so uh providing incentives is key uh the other thing is letting them understand what these numbers mean we keep throwing out numbers you have a two you have a three you have a four we actually did an entire instructional workshop where they looked at the scale scores so they
understood wait if I get two more points I get I'm a three i don't have to take intensive reading anymore uh so letting them understand what those numbers mean and how close they really are to achieving those goals has given students
the ownership yes that my exceptional team is guiding them to that but letting students own their own numbers is is really essential for them to even caring and as you can see through
through the slides um out of six categories we've made gains in the the 10% goal gains in four out of the six i do want to highlight though the the eighth grade math that group uh that percentage is extremely low but that is
because that is our nonproficient group of eighth graders because all of our level threes fours and fives are in algebra or geometry so we're working at that i really believe again that this is a motivation issue i don't believe that
there are three kids that are at this point non-proficient so I mean time will tell in the next few weeks when we take the next assessment so the third goal and probably the most that I'm the one that I'm most proud of is our shift in
school culture because everything that I've listed now and everything that we'll mention everything ties to culture because uh if students don't like the environment they don't like their school they're not going to be as receptive to
learn and we've done a couple of things and they may seem elementary but we've learned quickly that students are receptive to them uh we started our sort tickets uh our expectations are to be safe organized attentive respectful and
when students demonstrate those characteristics they get a ticket and they get their picture taken and we put that in one of the slides uh it actually shows that we put that ticket wall up on the wall uh up on the board uh and they're proud of that and initially I
didn't think they would be but it has been a hot item they want their sort ticket they they get uh some kind of extrinsic reward whether it's a bag of chips or a mini Gatorade and it's something that students are taking uh taking well we've also for the first
time started club day on our early release days and club day comes with a caveat uh that caveat is that you must be current with all of your assignments and you cannot be failing any class and what that did was over time it
didn't happen the first quarter but we noticed with each quarter students were more current with their assignments and students we had we have less and less FS by quarter three we we had probably half the Fs that we normally would have and
that's because the reputation and the the excitement of club day has kind of trickled through the whole campus people like taking part of chess club not no uh no bait club graphic design club world culture math art and uh photography club
so everyone wanted to be a part of that and our numbers in Fs are being reduced our course failures are going down which also means that those students that need credit recovery at the end of the year will be far less than what we had before
uh monthly student of the recognition I know that that was also an elementary thing but student of the month it has been a hot item and uh again they've received those for demonstrating good character traits uh we also have other
social events i mean we have not had a school dance since co and uh we were at capacity uh and that was amazing and again it was tied to behavior and academics we are uniform school so uh a
carrot is having a no uniform pass again motivating students to make good choices uh we know that making good choices and being at school directly uh impacts learning if you actually look at the data uh our first of all our attendance
rate for Wednesdays has gone up which is great and that's partly due to the opportunities that we we're giving them uh but it also you know the overall attendance has gone up 2.5% year to date but if you look at the discipline data
that has really been the most impactful our referrals are down 155 for uh for the year 88 for semester 1 and currently 60 67 for semester 2 if you're not at
school you can't learn if you're misbehaving and you wind up getting yourself in trouble and you wind up being in the student services manage uh student services manager's office then you're not in the classroom learning so reducing these numbers and
increasing attendance is key to moving our school and with all the upward the upward trend in data that we have uh I just feel that the team has done an exceptional job and we were going to continue flourishing and
serving this community uh of course with your support which is greatly appreciated that's all thank you um what a great presentation board i'll open it up for comments yes Dr james just one do you do you guys have the numbers on how many of your students are doing a bit of
a direct connect from the middle school to a Cali Charter High is there a pretty good flow from your eighth grade up or is there and and you have the numbers i have the He's like "Where?" Yeah about 38% at this point in time okay and to be
honest um Dr james we understand and believe with all our heart that the Marian County School District is doing an exceptional job with high schools and so we believe there is a population of our middle school students who will be very well served at the traditional high
schools um but we also feel that there's a population of our middle school students who quite honestly are going to excel more in a small learning community um where they can get that individualized attention that a Cali High can do so at this point in time
we're pushing 40% okay that I was just kind of that was more of a inquiry than anything else just kind of curious minds um I I think you guys are doing a wonderful job serving middle school which is just I mean when you find someone who
enjoys middle school and we've talked about this they're like a gem you're like man you can't ever leave middle school because middle school is such a unique time for students and adults and it's not an easy job and you guys are really making it look easy so keep up
the good work one thing that he did not share that if I may there have been several awards this year that have um been awarded to our middle school students uh we did receive first second and third place from D i'm doing this from memory so
forgive me um what it means to be an American I think is what it was um and so that was to our middle school students our financial literacy program had first place in a was it a statewide poster contest um and so it's so
exciting to see our students really kind of stretching out and having the opportunities to show what they're learning and um so I I'll brag on you guys a little bit for that great good job you're doing a great job i sorry oh sorry i just my final thought
would be I would what you all are offering is so so unique and and needed i would love for you guys to eventually find yourself in a single standing building where you're able to really because the way you I mean you do it
with such grace but the way you have to navigate class change and just all of it and carline I you you've you're just doing such a wonderful job and being in a freestanding building being able to serve your families um I just feel like
it would if there was a room to excel that's what it would allow so I just I felt compelled to share that little thought thank you thank you yes board members over thank you and and speaking of brag alerts I think you guys got an attendance award as well did you we did
in the first quarter yes yes big banner big banner it was great to get that recognition because we work hard to try to get parents to understand that you need to bring your child to school so it's uh foundational absolutely thank you really appreciate and I'm very
grateful for what you do thank you Dr camp i just echo the sentiments that you've heard thus far thank you Mr post thank you uh Miss Matthews for the wonderful presentation i absolutely appreciate the model that you are offering and as I said previously with
other charter schools we don't have room for the folks that we would need to take in if you were not offering what you do so uh and certainly look forward to the day that you might be able to be in a different space to be a bit more conducive to what I know you all want to
accomplish and you're already accomplishing so much in the space that you're in so um thank you again to all your work that you guys are doing appreciate it thank you for your support and I just reiterate that but I want to tell you I did love um when you made the statement about
uh reviewing the student scores and sharing with them you know you only have to get two more questions you know to make that bump up to the next level is just so exciting um you know and that realization that you've been pounding in there you know all year where the
students kind of get the aha we're getting close and and they're making progress so I just I really love that that part of um giving the students the power empowering them um you know to move forward and understand their progress so thank you we appreciate the
presentation and you're staying with us for the next next portion or is that this it do you have another piece he's leaving i'm staying okay you're staying all right thank you and and board my plan is that we'll take um a break um after this presentation
perfect as you can see the middle school is to a point now where we're really focusing and hounding in on that which is good right we're focusing on the positives and we're building that positive um
energy behind the school uh one of the things I always like to share with you guys is our people through your organization who have represented you so well and so if you would allow me that moment before I introduce our high school principal because you really have
some exceptional team members who who show us what exceptionality or not exceptionality but exceptional uh work ethic and the willingness to give and to support is um and that is without a doubt your safe schools team they have
really stepped up and they are really giving everything they've got and we are part um we're never looked at as an added piece were always looked at as an equal because we're a place that um is educating children of Marian County so I
just want to thank Dennis McFaten oh and there he is and his entire team and I'm sure the other charter schools feel the exact same way um we're just grateful cynthia Barnes Corey Taylor Kenny Singleary and um Larry Delk they've done
a really lovely job and they represent each and every one of you every single day when they go out into our schools to make our schools a safer place so that's my thank you for this year with that though the tweaks that are happening at the middle school it's a little different at the high school we're
building at the high school and it's exciting every single day to go and watch these students be an integral part of the building of what is yet to come when it comes to Ocali Charter High School so without further ado allow me
to introduce you to the principal of Ocali Charter High School Miss Elizabeth Brown good morning good morning school board chairman vice chair members and superintendent let me welcome you to Ocali Charter High School where every day our mission is to build
relationships and break down barriers so that all students can succeed you'll notice in our packet and I will just quickly go through our slide presentation um that we will be talking about our academic progress as well as our school culture which we are still
building in year two so we have only been open this is our second year um as the Olli Charter High School Eagles we currently have eight instructional staff three support staff one guidance counselor one dean of students and of course the principal me and I'm very
blessed to be the principal you will notice that our first school grade last year was a D we decided to determine that as our baseline data that we only go up from and so we know after that school grade and kind of the wonkiness
of the math that goes into our formula for school grade is a new school that did not have a graduating class for graduation rate or acceleration did not receive points for our lowest 25% learning gain excuse me and did not
receive any proficiency points for US history last year um the math formula is very different from your traditional high schools that had a full house in a few moments we'll go over what components we will receive this year so as we are reaching towards our 10%
increase in reading and math scores we have quite a few strategies that we are following and these are on a daily basis this is not hit or miss this is who and what we are when we walk through the door every morning ready to serve our students the cross-curricular collaboration between our English
language arts department and reading departments is literally daily i moved classrooms for proximity use so that conversations can even happen spontaneously in between classroom um settings whenever we are in transition changes so all of those departments are
now in one hallway and they meet specifically we go student by student with the latest data most of that obviously is the progress monitoring data or the DPMA data but we also look at daily data and we line up our lesson
plans as well so that we are teaching the same strategies across the board between reading and ELA we have a whole school buyin for growth in fact every day you will see if you walked into the school right now you would see a big piece of paper on every
student on every teacher's door that says 100% we are all in for growth and that is our la las las las las las las las las las las las las las las las las las las las las las las las las las las las las las las las las las las las las las las las laser foc foc focus they will come in they see that on their door they remember that today we are 100% growing our eagles towards academic
success and postsecary readiness highly qualified veteran teachers in reading math and ELA um our teachers in all three of those classrooms do have a significant amount of experience not only with teaching but
with teaching the concepts necessary for post-secary readiness as well as state assessment preparedness we have monthly whole staff data digs that are focused on growth of all of our subgroups we just had one yesterday afternoon during our early
release time we literally get together as a staff and we go student by student it is one of the luxuries of having a small school and we talk about where they are performing where they still need improvement and what they have not achieved yet we subscribe to the concept
of yet we do not believe that they will not achieve it they just we believe that they need the support to get there and we are close to that mark we also implemented this year an adopt a student program i have had this uh program before in um other high
schools that I have served as principal in that particular venue we were only able to target our lowest 25% because of our small um school student body every student on our campus has been adopted by an adult on campus they have daily check-ins with that adult um
motivational sayings even a candy bar here and there quite frankly um and that is their adult to go to on our campus so that they know that they have a champion every day on that campus that is 100% there for whatever they may need and
then we have a schoolwide focus on test taking strategies and casually surveying our students after PM1 several of the students said if I could just learn how to take the test I have the knowledge to pass it and we have heard that cry from many of our students so we have
implemented a schoolwide test taking strategy we have one skill that is implemented in every classroom including PE across the board per week or twoeek period and we have our beginning bell ringer our starting of class that is focused 100% on that test taking
strategy so that all students are hearing it repetitively and are gaining that knowledge you then see some of our data coming in for our ELA 9 and 10 um PM1 and PM2s obviously 10th grade is a major focus for us this is a time that our
denominator kind of works against us i'll be honest 10th grade is our smallest population class right now so as opposed to a larger school if you have certain a certain number of students that do not do well that particular day on the test you may see
some wavering in percentages with our number you have one student that doesn't do well that day on the test and you do see a significant drop while that number works in our favor for serving our students sometimes the math is not in our favor with that hence us not
receiving any proficiency points for US history last year we had nine students you must have 10 and so we did not receive um that achievement um from them we celebrated with them personally but it did not go towards our school grade you will also see our DPMA algebra and
geometry data please know that we DPMA are algebra 1A students that is not always the case um so your algebra 1A students obviously you're familiar with they are splitting algebra into two years algebra 1 A and 1B but we went
ahead for the third DPMA and administered that particular assessment to them because we had had a personnel change and the teacher coming in just wanted some benchmarking information to be able to pick up with those students so you do see that we have some work to
do and that is why we are laser focused on growth every single day in our ELA and math um classes we talk about growth the students are very aware of their personal data where they have fallen for the different benchmark assessments and
what their goals are in fact in our ELA classes um just this week they have participated in data chats to see where they are according to their goal and what they are hoping to reach on the state assessment but more so than that in achieving the credit for that class
so that they can progress naturally through their coursework at the high school level you will see that we're very strong in United States history and biology um biology specifically has been a pinpoint for us we do have some very large biology and biology honors classes this
year and we have been very focused on making sure that they have the information that they need to progress on to chemistry or physical science or whatever their next steps are so we are pretty laser focused on that i did feel it was necessary to include our school grade components for this year and this
will actually be for this year and next year while we do have a small graduating senior class this year um we do not have enough that we will have acceleration or grad rate lagging data for next year either so it will actually be two years from now that we will see our grad rate
add in and our acceleration data add in so for the next two years we will rest um quietly with growth in reading proficiency reading learning gains reading learning gains of the lowest 25% math proficiency math learning gains
biology and US history we are desperately hoping to have the math learning gains from the lowest 25% added to the school grade formula for next year so as you can see our entire school grade is based 100% on st state assessment scores we do not have the
luxury of rolling in the hard work with graduation rate that our students put in to make sure that they receive their diploma or the hard work through AP um accelerated classes or industry certifications we are working in those areas but we just don't have the numbers
yet so this will be our school grade components for the next two years we also have a goal of building our school uh culture um we are reaching out daily weekly and monthly to each
other with myself and Mr post building the school culture that is the OALI charter oath and it is an oath that has been been designed for both of our schools to subscribe to um things like truth speak truth with kindness always
giving your best and making sure that we are working handinand to build a school culture that also builds our school path you'll see that we have implemented implemented excuse me positive behavior supports at the high school with our Eagle Pride Awards those are monthly
given by each teacher to a student we have talk about kindness that is through our school counseling um venue that is anytime that we see a student doing something kind they actually uh get a gift card to Taco Bell that has been donated to us one of the coupons and
believe it or not our kids really like Taco Bell quite a bit um we do have themed dress days we actually have one today that is just for our staff because we want to keep staff morale up as well and we actually have Kona Ice coming to the campus this afternoon you wouldn't believe how much high schoolers still
like their snow cones um and this was based on attendance so from the beginning of the fourth nine weeks and we take it in very small chunks we saw um a vast improvement in attendance so that they can get a snow cone today we have over 50% of our students that have
had perfect attendance for the past four weeks at the high school level that means that they have not checked in late they have not checked out early and they have not been tardy to a single class so they have received um an opportunity during sixth period today to go out and
have Kona ice snow cones and just kind of hang out with their friends for a few minutes we do uh have multiple social events i need to brag for just a few moments we just had prom last Friday evening we did do our prom on a Friday evening so that our students could also
attend public school proms if they were invited um whereas public schools you normally see a pretty big financial commitment to prom to create an experience for students we did not have that level of finances so our students
handmade all of our prom decorations and we found a venue with Silver Spring Shores Community Center that was willing for us to come in at a reasonable cost and um used one of our business partners for dinner and our students decorated our prom and they took great pride in
that um even down to the point of one of our students crocheting her own dress to be able to go to prom so that was a new experience for me we did do Satie Hawkins in the fall homecoming in January instead of during football season um we do have an end of the year
schoolwide field trip coming in and we have a major focus on social media recognitions for those Eagle Pride Awards and talk about kindness we have also noticed that one of our most at risk um groups of students is our African-American males as far as male
mentorship in their lives most of our um young men stated that they do not consider a male to be the most important mentor in their life because they don't have someone in that capacity and so through our school counselor we are working with school community um between
the school and community leaders to get mentorship programs in their um in our school building just coming to eat lunch with them talk to them about their future where we've had two assemblies that were just geared towards our young men students um that were all about
being a young man and having integrity we also meet our female um demographic needs um we have noticed that our females tend to report to the school counselor more often for mental health assistance and so we have started a girls group that meets monthly they
are going through a state um approved curriculum i believe that the Marian County School Board schools use it as well just to lead some conversations about healthy living healthy decision- makingaking you will notice on the next page that our school counselor is um
highly involved with our students we in an effort to prepare them for post-secary oper um opportunities each student on our campus has their very own future file they have it that they carry with them and every year we build on the materials in that file so as opposed to
your ninth grade year where we're talking about good decision- making choosing your courses wisely if you want to go through some of our accelerated learning programs what that will look like to our seniors they have all of the scholarship information they have information for um federal financial aid
as well as local financial aid they have all of their dreams and goals written in there they have their acceptance letters their essays that they have written and all of that type of material in their future files so each student at our school has one of those files and there are monthly meetings with the students
sometimes whole group sometimes individual to keep building those files after surveying our parents they explained us that some virtual parent meetings would be really well appreciated so in addition to our five school advisory council meetings on
campus um we also host five virtual meetings these meetings are focused towards trends within raising teenagers we have done um social media awareness we have talked about self-motivation we have talked about test preparation and
we do hold those virtually so that parents in fact we have one parent that every time she joins she's at another athletic field whether it's baseball football whatever so that they can be a part of that particular meeting without having to rearrange their
schedule as always we have a direct pipeline to the administrative team for any student or parent my door is always open our school counselor's door is always open and our dean of students is always open and we are entrenched um with those students every single day
because we are just a secondyear school I want to brag on my students for a few minutes we have four graduating seniors this year of the four one will be attending MTC Maring Technical College two will be attending the College of Central Florida and one has been
accepted to the University of Northwestern Ohio and so they are on track to be able to jump into their post-secary goals and move forward and we are excited for them we also had one of our entrepreneurship students that was chosen as a top 12 finalist for the
project that she created for the southeast region of Nifty that includes Florida Georgia and North Carolina there were over 500 entries she was chosen as one of the top 12 from there I went to a social media campaign and I'm happy to let you know that even though we are a
small school we have a heavy social media presence and we were up against schools as large as 3,500 students and she was ranked number eight in the southeast region when it was all said and done so we recently were considered our entrepreneurship two students were
selected as finalist in the C's 11th annual youth business plan since publication of this PowerPoint they have gone to that um particular competition and they won second place in Marian County so and I know that they may be watching this but our kids are very
excited that they beat Belleview Man Vanguard and North Marian that they only lost to Westport so there were 29 entries most schools put in multiple entries we had one and um that particular entry won second place and I want to share with you the product one
of the entrepreneurs um brother is on the autism spectrum and this came this particular product came out of her um literally saying he drives me crazy every time we have to go on a road trip and so she took something that looks like a Rubik's cube but it is a sensory
cube and you can have them ordered and custom made where each side has a different sensory specific to that child's needs and it is considered a fidget and that is actually the product that her and her team put together that won the second place she's also the student that was ranked top
12 we participated in the Red Ribbon Week um contest for the public schools and we won first place for the high school we also have two 10th grade students that were nominated have been accepted to attend the Hugh O'Brien uh youth leadership conference at Florida
State University this summer and they will be going on scholarship money um donated by members of our faculty so that they may be able to attend um we added two more business partners rob Harrison Realy has been a business partner since we opened and now we also have Jeremiah's Ice Cream and the
breakfast station and then we have built this is one of our proudest moments we are obviously in walking distance of forom um learning academy so we have built a very strong relationship with the administrative team there we went over and sang carols with their students
at lunch but right before Christmas and now we take a group of students monthly over for reading buddies um the visit that we will do in May is superhero day so our students will be dressed as superheroes and you will see in the packet of pictures that we sent one of
our students actually reading with one of the forom students we are happy to open next year with a full house of 9th 10th and 11th and 12th graders we have added digital video production is another CT opportunity this year they
only did a dailies new show next year they will move into competing at the district level with that we have increased our course offerings and also we have several students that are qualified to go for dual enrollment at College of Central Florida next year and
so having said all of that moving forward we remain committed to our original mission of building relationships and breaking down barriers so that students can be successful and healthy so thank you for the the time to
talk to you about Okeali Charter High School and I'm open to any questions as is Miss Matthews thank you Miss Brown that was a wonderful presentation i have to share the Taco Bell is must be a high school theme because my mentee is that's what she requests weekly is lunch from
Taco Bell so I I share and I'll say the suffering um for lunch but with that I open it up to the board for other conversations yes board member Thrower thank you Principal Brown great presentation always it's clear that you're that you're not only uh building
but you're growing and and just in so many positive ways two things really jumped out to me the future file i just think that that is so important for it kind of goes along with some other discussion earlier today that if kids don't have tangible understanding of
what they're doing where they're going and what it means it it's something gets lost in the translation so that's just really cool and the mentorships it's just something we hear about more and more and more that you know one one person in a kid's life can make all the difference hopefully it's the parents
but if if it's not then hope it's one of us sometimes so that was wonderful and then the last thing is I was thinking about your proximity to forom and just really hoping that that there was already a partnership which clearly there is and that that can grow in the future as well maybe there's some
aspiring educators in your midst so thank you thank you yes board member Campbell sure a great piggyback i was I too was going to say thank you for already working that partnership with Forom uh when my children had the ability to be in a K4 program where they
were older students also on the same campus it was such a benefit we have little Christmas ornaments that we still have with their pictures with their book buddies and so uh that'll be a wonderful keepsake opportunity for for folks to continue and the only other thing that
stood out to me just as glowing I'm so happy you have your students involved in Hugh O'Brien youth leadership as an alum of a program many many many years ago in Tennessee that's a really cool opportunity for students and so I'm grateful that you've introduced that to your student body as well uh just
looking forward to continued great things and I appreciate that your baseline grade is just your baseline and you're going to move up from there thank you thank you Dr campbell any anyone else okay all right we're wrapping it up thank you again Miss Brown thank you
Miss Matthews for being here this morning we appreciate both of you and the opportunities you provide for our students board with that um I'd like to take a 30 minute break um and oh hold on public
comment okay seeing none we'll take a 30-minut break when we come when we return um we have a presentation by Miss Boston Ellis and it is about 37 slides and then we will be into the interim conversation inter interim superintendent conversation so just for
everybody's awareness that's where we are in the agenda for today all right thank you we'll recess at 11:44 see you back here at 12:15 good afternoon and welcome back from recess it is 12:17 and we're going to
pick up on our presentation dr gullet if you'll introduce um our next presentation certainly well thank you Madam Chair members of the board pleased to have Miss Boston Ellis come forward who she is going to provide the financial update for the 2024 2025
school year thank you good morning Chair Conrad board members and Superintendent Dr gullet um I think Mr christian is going to catch up with me but we'll go ahead and get started if that's okay with you you should have a
PowerPoint in front of you that says 2024 2025 financial update and even though it is 37 slides it won't take that long i promise you we will be cutting across the
field as one board member said to me so on on slide one this is just a synopsis of what I'm going to talk about uh but it was brought to our attention that we did not include something with the
capital projects and we'll pause and provide all the information that we are aware of at this time in terms of revenue that we have received from impact fees as well as uh the sales tax so the largest amount of our funding for
general operations as you are aware comes from the Florida Educational Finance Program which we call FEFP this uh projection is based on the actual October count as well as an estimate for
the February count so there's five different times when uh revenue is uh allocated to us so the first is the conference report and we are waiting with baited breath uh to see what our legislators are going to provide uh to
school districts for the 26 20 25 26 year uh and that'll be the conference report so that's the first one the second one is in July and that is when we get uh all of our local tax information and that is what we build
the original budget on uh the third calc is what we're going to discuss with you today as it compares to the October account versus uh the original one uh in July
so as you can see uh when we look at the basis of our funding components from the second count to the third count there was an increase of 11.8 $8 million and before we get really really excited
thinking that we've gotten uh additional funds I want to point out to you that that equates to 1,400 unweighted FTE which is transferred into 2,211 weighted
FTE and the majority of that actually all of that uh belongs to the family empowerment scholarship so there was no increase in terms of going from the second calculation to the third calculation for the Marian uh public
school system so the the other adjustments are also based on uh various uh items it's our uh mental health allocation the ESSE uh guaranteed allocation and you can see
that there was some increases and some decreases so after all of that is brought into the formula our total FEFP is $33
million at least that is the $13 million increase from the second to the third calculation um on this slide that 13 million difference is carried over and then uh we back out
the required local effort and also we look at all the state adjustments that occur whether it's class size or the educational enrollment stabilization and what that is is that if our funds uh per unweighted
FTE are less less than the state average there is additional money provided uh to the district also we have a prior year adjustment and that was to the tune of $2 million basically what they look at as
our fourth calculation versus the final calculation and determine whether or not we had less fewer FTE and so because we did uh that is a reduction we always uh reserve between$1 and $2 million in fund
balance to cover what we think may be adjustments that have to be made also you might have noticed that the appropriation was lower than what the school districts earned so instead
of pro providing additional revenue to the school districts uh whatever that reduction is prrated between all school districts and our proration to appropriation was $3.8 million the state funded discretionary
supplement that goes to the family empowerment scholarship uh there was an estimate at the second calc of 7.3 million third count it's 8.5 million so that was an additional 1.2 million but
that was attributed to the Florida Empowerment Scholarships so the difference in our state funding is 10.6 million uh then again we have to add back in what our local funding is which totals uh 142
million uh so our state funding for the third calc is 312 million our local funding is 142 million then of course we have to back out the family empowerment scholarships be although that revenue is
recorded in our revenue uh we will not see that it's not it's not even like a charter school where we get the funds and then we pass them through so it's just recorded in our financials but we never see those dollars
so when you back out the family empowerment scholarships uh our revenue is $43.3 million so you will notice that our revenue reduction is
$93,000 and that is the pure reduction from second count to third count for Marian County Public Schools we actually had from the second count to the third count uh we lost 18 unweighted
FTE so I keep talking about the family empowerment scholarship and we want to look at that and the impact that it has on our school district so you will notice in 2223 that amount was about 21 uh.9
million the house bill one ex expanded the school choice options so it eliminated the financial eligibility and it also eliminated the cap on the uh fees um options and it
also increased the annual cap for family empowerment scholarships with students with unique abilities so basically it was opened up so that more families could take advantage of the scholarship um I think one of the things that Kayla
pointed out to me is there was like an 81% increase from the 23 24 year to the 2425 year so that was that's pretty large going from one year to the next in terms of increasing uh the total
adjustment that we will have to make in our revenues so pause there if we want to talk about family empowerment if not we'll move on and talk about our budget yes Dr campbell it's just a statement Miss Boston because you and I have
spoken about this for a couple of years now and um I don't want to say I'm shocked i I am I am surprised though i because as we consider what that looks like in our community the seats haven't become more available so we have a
certain number of private school options that or I guess now that homeschool is also a part of this there are more options that way but it's not that those seats have just become we we haven't had three new schools open or or that kind of scenario but what this says to me is
that more people are taking advantage of it so uh with they most of these schools still are maintaining the same enrollment that they always have they're just now being funded differently so uh that that honestly is is a bit
surprising to me i I hadn't considered you and I have talked about this i had I hadn't considered that piece of the impact as strongly as you're being able to show it to us today so thank you for the information but it it is different than what I anticipated
i agree knowing the number of private schools that we have but as you said as they have relieved the number of restrictions that were on those dollars more families became eligible and I think that's what we did not anticipate
uh so yes a lot of families are are taking advantage of that and um I think there is uh they're going to start looking at the students that receive family empowerment scholarships because
we have received some of those students in our system or if they left they're back and we we did not receive any of the funding and sister uh just submitted information to DOE so they can analyze
what we potentially may have lost in the 2425 year because some of those students reentered our our system or they actually came over to uh public school and right now they're um estimating it's
about $8,900 per student so even if you're at a private school I think it probably costs a little bit more than that but if you're putting your student in a private school that's a big help in terms of paying for tuition and chair if I could add real quick just
to that exact point I think the really unfortunate part that I have seen in the community as well is some of the private schools in our community have increased their tuition so because many of the students who were participating in the private school experience were financially wellendowed and so um the
step up is simply like this superseding cash flow to the school now because those parents are still responsible for for a pretty significant portion of the tuition because the tuition price is increased and so um there's a what I would say is a manipulation of the
system um from some of the private schools to generate essentially more revenue because the parents are still private paying a significant portion so it's unfortunate it is yes board member Thrower thank you doing Miss Bosnis this
is just a a question that is a prediction really um that I'm asking from you but do you anticipate based on conversations that there may be an opportunity to recapture um the funds that we have lost from the
scenario that you just described i know that they're talking about adding student numbers to every student to help with that but it doesn't help us with the funding that we've already lost i think it's important that we participate
in that discussion and I believe because they are requesting school districts to provide information on students and in my mind they're going to match and see where we might need to be reimbursed
they still have two more uh uh calculations so we still have the fourth calc and we still have the final calc so my hope is that it will shore up and there will be some funding for us but because there is no way that we know you
know who's in those schools uh in the beginning we had to put the students in our system but then they went away from that so we really don't know how many uh specifically that might have been here
the October count and and also February count so I'm hoping if we're going through that exercise there will be an opportunity but I I do not know okay thank you appreciate the update and information okay thank you i think we're ready for
the next part Miss Ellis thank you so our original budget all funds $1.3 billion um has been revised down to 1.3 billion uh a total of about $27 million
reduction and the majority of that has to do with the family empowerment scholarship um of of course we have to record them in the revenue um we just you know we have to record it because our total
revenue has to agree with what the department of education says it is which includes charter schools um and also the family empowerment scholarship so on the third count we find out how much actually um the uh fees is so we have
like I would say a holding uh estimate that we put in our expenditures what we think it will be and then when we finally know the number we reduce our revenue but we also reduce the expenditures of what we believe that
estimate would be we look at the general operating again there is a decrease in the revenue and that is tied mostly to the family empowerment scholarship we did have an uptick from the state of about 35,000
and then of course our local always goes up because that's sort of a miscellaneous revenue it could be from loss uh insurance recovery and of course we have that sale of property behind the central warehouse so that's being held
in uh miscellaneous until there is a termination on what to do with that this slide just shows you the percentage of revenue that we've collected and it's pretty much in line uh with this particular time of the year and I did not mention that we typically
do this at midyear so it would have been information based on uh as of December but because we did not receive the third count we had to wait for that so this includes u information up through the month of
February so this is pretty consistent when we look at the um budgeted expenditures again uh most of that is in purchase services and that's where we record what our estimate of what we think the family empower empowerment
scholarships will be again this is pretty in line with this time of year uh actual expenditures are 267 million and you can see the uh actual expenditures versus what is
remaining to be spent i if we spent all of what is budgeted and then fund balance our original projection of fund balance was 39.4 million and we had met all the criteria
um and more right now it's 38.1 million or 8.78% of revenue we have to set aside uh what we think an estimate is for inventory and non-spendables like prepaids um and then the committed that
was a new a new new category that we implemented uh last year uh about 14.9 million and if we need to change that for any reason we'll have to come back to you because that is in policy uh
before we can do that and then our unassigned um and assigned fund balance includes what is required by the department of education and also basically any remaining amount in fund balance what is
interesting is that um the folks that we borrow funds from and our auditors they look at that financial condition and it's 5.12% so we're right there in terms of budgeting where we need to be in
terms of reserving funds uh now we'll move on to the adult ed program uh they had an original budget of 10.3 and um it is now a revised budgeted revenue of
10.7 um this includes some CAPE funds uh that were not in the original budget so that increase is due to the CAPE funds again we're consistent in terms of what has been collected for our adult ed
program there are some federal funds but they also receive the workforce dollars that are in that state category and then the local dollars is basically fees from the students that are attending that when we look at the budgeted
expenditures for adult ed uh the original budget was 11.6 and the revised budget is 13.3 and 1.6 six uh of that increases basically due to the additional
construction uh that they're working on now again their actual expenditures are in line for this time of year uh and they are at 46 million actual expenditures and if we assume that every
dollar will be spent they will there uh also are in line with uh remaining expenditures the general fund for the adult ed program uh the ending fund balance is originally
2.4 million and now it's down to 1.2 million but again it is because they are doing some refurbishing at MTC and also there is a student assistant grant as well so I think everything is pretty
much in line with general operating fund with with the exception of the family empowerment and definitely with the alternative uh the adult ed program when we look at the referendum the original budget was 33.3
million uh the revised budget is 37.3 million you know that is calculated based on uh one mills on the value there are two or three times of a year where
uh we look at the taxable value and uh I believe we have someone on the board that sits on that um that value adjustment board so uh whenever those adjustments are made then we have to reduce or increase what the revenue
would be we are in line with uh collecting the revenue you may recall it starts in November and goes through the end of the year and that's based on when property tax owners paid their their
taxes so this slide basically basically provides the budgeted expenditures of 43 uh.2 million that's the revised the original was 43 million uh we did uh get
an increase or we had to increase our expenditures uh some of you may be aware that charter schools um there was some settlement going on and attorney Powers could probably explain it better than me but there was a period of time when they
did not receive uh any of the additional funds like the 1.5 mil but there was an agreement with one of the school districts and so uh the rule the law was or the statute was changed and so we had
to pay them uh some some additional revenue from prior years and I believe that was probably about $100,000 so uh that's all settled up and they have all received those
dollars and the only other thing I'd add for this slide that um it says class size reduction it's really our par as you may recall that you requested us to move all of the uh teachers to the general fund and then we had to move
some of the other um library media PE to this particular fund the referendum fund and but where it says class size that's really our kindergarten paris okay next slide uh is showing the percent of
budget that's expensed uh the only one that caught my eye was um professional development and school safety uh professional development they tend to pay the mentors uh towards the end of the year after all of the um I guess all
of the the procedures or or all of the interaction between the mentor teachers and our new teachers when that's concluded they pay a stipen to the mentors uh then school safety uh you
will see something coming up really soon i believe the next board meeting uh where we are we have a pretty large expenditure and it has to do with safety on the school bus but we also pay for a portion of the
SRO's out of that but I think uh the rest of the waiting to be spent has to do with that that pretty large amount that's due for the safety in the school buses so the referendum as you know
whatever is left at the end of the year we carry over for the next year and we use those dollars to pay for expens expenditures until we get to uh November December when we start receiving
proceeds uh from the next tax year uh this one did decrease 305,000 uh some of that has to do with um additional staff uh and then there was a quaver music uh the final taxable
value as well as that charter school prior year settlement that we had to pay and according to this it was $102 $102,000 special revenue other the only reason we have this in here is because
ESSER went through September so where you see the original budget was 80 million and then it increased to 82 million a lot of that budget is due to ESR projects that we have already spent
down um so next year when you see special revenue fund it'll be down to the the normal entitlements which include title one title two hopefully um so but for right now this includes those
budgets as well as uh a piece of the remaining ESSER funds again you'll see that we have uh percentages of revenue collected um for most of our entitlements we
request the money after we've spent it so or we're very close because they will only allow us to keep funds so many days uh without spending so our it has been our posture in the school district to
spend the dollars and then reimburse ask for reimbursement which is pretty fast it takes them maybe one to two days again our revised budgeted expenditures are 82.7 million but our original budget was 80.1 million so that
was an increase of 2.6 6 million and it again it in uh it includes esser grants it includ carry forwards from other grants that we did not have the information at the beginning of the year fiscal
year uh this is actual uh percentage of budgeted expenditures in relationship to the actual expenditures so 50.5 million actual expenditures and again this is pretty much in line with this this time
of the year so we'll pause right now and uh if Kayla Johnson will come up talk a little bit about impact fees and sales tax thank you good afternoon um Chair Conrad Dr gollet um and board members i'm just
going to give a brief update on where we're at on the collection of impact fees and sales tax as you know this is um very preliminary right now as we don't have a lot of data to go off of so as you guys are aware um we had budgeted
originally $15 million for impact fees and that was based on projections that we were given by the growth management department when they were still here um currently we've only received about 6.5 million of these and that would leave us short about 8.5 million
and if you guys recall from our budget presentations that $15 million was going to be used to pay the debt service for the um certificates of participation that we issued so any funds we don't
receive in those impact fees there that are eligible to pay that debt service we are going to have to look to other funding areas such as the 1.5 mills to be able to make those debt service payments um the sales tax um the information we had from Department of
Revenue that was provided anticipated about $40 million over a whole year but if you guys know that in the sales tax didn't go into effect until January so we'd be looking at an estimate of approximately $20
million for this year we did receive our first payment in March and it was 2.4 million so currently we're about $17.5 million short of what you guys what we had anticipated collecting at this point
in time we are um did look at um sales tax that had been collected by the the board of county commissioners because they have had a penny sales tax in effect um for many years and based on those we are estimating that this year
we could possibly receive $17 million in sales tax however that is just an estimate based on their collections so we don't have any definite numbers right now of what we will be receiving for those so if you guys have any other
questions on that I can answer but if not I'll give it back to Miss Boston Ellis thank you board any questions okay thank you and we always end um on the note of what are our budget challenges and you may
recall these are some of the challenges that we've faced for many many years um I did add tariffs under the supply chain inflation and tariffs you may recall during COVID we had to do shorter uh
bids six to nine months and the prices were sometimes escalating uh best based on the time so uh we have our eye out for that um Dr gullet asked me to have a conversation with Rick and he's talked
to uh different purchasing uh directors and no one really knows now but um everybody is anticipating uh price increases uh the the other item that um
I think I added was uh charter school allocation of capital referendum and and now we will be sharing sales tax as well uh with the charter schools and um based on um based on what
we um have seen from the second cal to the third cal I think we are going to have to start really paying attention to the family empowerment scholarships and how that's going to fall out uh because there's a potential there to uh maybe
lose additional funds to uh that without without it leveling because I don't think we could handle in the next two three years these large increases of funds being shifted from the the
traditional school to uh private schools because as as I stated earlier the 2324 to the 2425 five year it was an 81% increase in that so I think we're going to have to pay a lot more
attention to that and um ask more questions of the Department of Education and um be uh really uh I guess really really following um that whole train of funding
you probably have also seen on the news um and also in different articles that the traditional school will look different in uh two to three years and so th that's another thing that we have
to pay attention to and and be ready and be ready to pivot for those kinds of changes because because what drives our funding is our student I'm not used to it being this quiet but Dr colet I'll turn it back to you uh for
your comments and if we can answer any more questions I'll be happy to i just want to say thank you Miss Boston i mean board I think you know we've been having a lot of budgeting conversations we're still doing budget meetings for central staff i know that people are anxious to
know what that looks like we are too to be frank um I think we're all watching and waiting to see i had a great conversation with Mr avery even earlier about the landscape and and we're going to do our best always to protect our our classrooms where our students are and and work backwards from there but
there's going to be some continue to have some tough conversations um I want to make sure as I exit um my role that I leave this district in the most um conservative costefficient manner I can that's my responsibility and commitment to this district um and as a
member of the community so um we're still we're still working through that we just don't have all the answers um but we're really diligently working through um what we do know and how we can continue to set this district up for success thank you Dr garlet Ford i'll open it up
to you Dr campbell thank you uh two comments one specifically well first of all thank you thank you Miss Boston um thank you for I thank you too thank you passing on information to us it has
helped uh it has helped us brooach the questions we need to ask of the Department of Education as well as our lobbyists that has helped us a lot thank you sure um yes so a statement that has
been made in prior years of sorts and as we continue to see in our weekly superintendent updates the decreases in our instructional vacancy rate which is exactly the direction we want to go we
want to get to that zero vacancy you know that we have no vacancies in our instructional units however the statement that's been made for years as we get closer to that is that we're living off our savings and we've been able to balance our budget because we've
had vacancies so could you speak a bit to that without putting you on the spot entirely but we know that a significant portion of our dollars go to salary and benefits and we certainly know that the
best way we can be successful we're here for the students and having certified wonderful highly effective teachers in classrooms is what we need to be focused on regardless of anything else but how we end up being able to fund that while
funding everything else this district currently has in place could you speak to that just a bit and if that is also a budget concern that you have absolutely because you can recall three years ago we had ESSER and then when ESSER went
away basically uh last year a lot of the number of staff were put into other funding sources and um particularly title one they had a carryover about 5
million so a lot of those um positions were funded out of title one this year and they are not projecting to have that large carryover um also we have and so all of
those default to the general fund also we are hearing that title two may go away in 2627 we are hearing that the federal funds will be cut we don't know by how
much but we have to be mindful of that and you also know that we do have staff in those positions so yes there are programs that we were able to pay say software programs that support the
classroom we were able to pay for those for three years so in three years those costs are going to come back and um so there was some shifting and realigning resources because we heard you loud and
clear we did not want we did not want to lose one employee we wanted everyone employed because we did have that large vacancy number not just in teachers but also our non-instructional as well and
then balancing that with raises because we want to be as fair as we can with our employees balancing that against that which is a recurring cost so that's also been a challenge um and and the funds
that we are provided for teacher raises you've also uh made a commitment to do better than what's because last year it was like a 1% but you made a commitment to your teachers to do better so again all of those are recurring costs that we
have to face every year um if there is going to be an increase in health insurance I believe there is a projected increase in uh retirement and you shared that with me as well and that is a burden
it's it's a good burden for those of us who are nearing retirement but um the board is challenged with also in picking up more costs in retirement if either one of the
proposal proposals in the House or the Senate pass so thank you for that Miss Boston Ellis know I I I think it's just important for us to keep those kinds of conversations top of mind as we see the need for tightening the belt uh and and
it's going to get even greater potentially with funding sources going away or being reallocated uh the other statement it's not necessarily a question for you it's just kind of a comment for the board it's also not lost on me that more than $43 million of this conversation today
is on a voted in referendum that we'll need to have serious conversation about because that comes up for renewal or replacement or whatever we choose to do in a little more than a year from now
and we will need to have in less than a year from now very serious conversations about what that ballot initiative might look like simultaneously having conversations with our local delegation in Tallahassee last week that there is a
push from the governor's office to put a ballot initiative in 2026 to do away with property taxes and if in fact that were to even remotely come to fruition then a voted on millillage is going to be pointless
if you don't have millage rates at all so those are just top of- mind conversations uh that I'm having right now and and just thoughts as we continue to see the the budget i'm just grateful for your knowledge base and all that
you've been able to help us with and help us understand and uh we have some tough conversations ahead board thank you thank you Dr campbell yes Dr james that was um Dr campbell did a great uh segue there for me i want to understand uh I
have not been on the board when we have asked for a renewal of a referendum so this is my first go at it what is the timeline to get that taken care of and is the board going to have a discussion about an 8-year instead of four-year or
is that not available to us and um what what does that look like i know the last year of the current one will be 2627 so I would assume that we'd have to have a discussion next year so well it
needs to be on the ballot for for 2026 26 yes so when do we have to submit it for the ballot it um it doesn't have to be answered today but I would like someone from staff or legal to be able to provide us a timeline maybe the timeline we followed last time um and I
would like to have a workshop to discuss um length of a a referendum as well potentially um it is every four years it's it's hard to forecast um which is why you saw the county go out for a 20-year sales tax right now they can
really do some real planning because they know they have 20 years and so um I'm just looking forward to a future workshop where we can have a collaborative understanding conversation for those of us that have not done this before that's my personal request thank you Dr james yes an information sheet
that has all that information that'd be great and you may have something else but I just wanted to speak to that okay really quickly I I completely agree i think it would be very important for us to have a conversation sooner rather than later but at least wait until maybe
July 1 and after because there's lots of legislation that's floating right now that may be passing that will impact the length of time even on the one we have that just got voted in so we'll have some conver we'll need to have a lot of tough conversations so I I do recommend though maybe in the early fall as soon
as school starts that we could jump in with both feet and talk about what that looks like because if I'm not mistaken the timeline does begin in January or February when we need to have something talked about at least because it has to go to the county and the supervisor and
all of that needs to be done I think before Juneish or something if I'm not mistaken so yes and I mean we're looking at a superintendent transition anyways so um they may the new superintendent may have a thought pattern on it that would be new to us as well so I just I would like that to be on our calendar so
that we can make sure that we address it timely thank you thank you anyone else yes board member Thrower i could feel you you were thinking about something a lot of it I'll save for a future
conversation but you know looking at the the writing on the wall and the direction that public education appears to be going uh in Florida anyway uh maybe it would be worth um considering renaming ourselves
Marian County Private Schools Incorporated we could probably get a lot more funding it's kind of a joke kind of not um you know the landscape in the field is
changing and I'm pretty sure that with our funding referendums I believe and I know Attorney Powers will clarify this I believe they're only allowed to be four years at a time right yeah so and that in itself is a
hardship because of what board member James just said you know not to mention the fact that we're looking they're looking at reducing property taxes or eventually getting rid of them altogether that is a stated goal of you know our local at least one of our local
delegation members and I think the biggest mistake that that anyone in leadership can make is not seeing the whole field and and we have that confronting reality the reality is is that it is
very different the way things are unfolding now than what they've ever been in the past and if private schools is where they're at and we need more of them maybe we can just become the biggest private one make our own rules and generate a lot of
money so maybe I just let the cat out of the bag and they're going to figure out a way not to let us do that but as I sat here and listened I was like hm might be a way to neatly turn the tables on this one and continue to be able to provide the things that we know our community
needs so just musings we um really really in truth thank you Miss Boss for the presentation um this should not be a shock to any of us surprise um the the D has been cast for
a while and we knew it was coming and we know we were going to have some tough decisions and some tough conversations so um time to put the seat belt on and get ready for the ride on or hop in the driver's seat or drive
the bus thank you Reverend Cummings thank you Miss Bosnellis i do have one question which is probably not for today it's something you you can share later but as I as I'm looking at our budget and and I've known this but since since things are getting challenging
um our salaries and our benefits you know use up so much of our budget and so I would just be interested in knowing the ratio between the adults we employ um to our to the students and is that um
are we in the range with other districts of this size um as I listen to the staff that um you know salaries and benefit benefits we pay and then I hear conversation of rolling people out of
ESSER into title one and paying for that and now we're talking about rolling them out of title one and they're going to have to come into general budget i would just like to know even an average of you know are we right on track are we below average are we above average with how
many adults we are employing um in relationship or in ratio to our students so so adults per students or students yes and I know that's tricky as as there's an ESE comp you know there's different levels but let's just narrow
it down yes let's narrow it down to general I'll say lack of a better word general population so general classrooms regular size okay i think it's important for our community to remember as the school district goes
there goes our community right at 6,400 employees yes I agree we need and we need the support of our community i agree thank you so much Miss Boston Ellis and please say thank you to your team as well okay Miss Thrower's raising
her hand one more time yes this one really isn't for Miss Boston House i think it's more for Dr gullet for confirmation while we're talking about the ratio of of adults to students and just adults in general because we all of us at some level have a connection to
kids or we shouldn't be here um but again it comes up all the time that our we have too many administrators and that you know our are we're we're way over uh on that and that that is really
creating a lot of our overhead and I think the last I was informed we are just kind of right in the middle of size elects in terms of administrative costs is that still does anyone have any updated information off the cuff and if not it would be good to find that number
again so that we can be clear when we're having conversations in the community about cuts and and what might be considered topheavy you know those kinds of conversations and just just to clarify I wasn't insinuating that in any
way i'm just just talking about Yeah just talking about in general um where we sit uh you know with staff and how we're managing them so thank you very much okay is there any Yes quick comment to um Miss Boston that was that was
really a nice path you cut across the field thank you thank you okay is there any public comment okay seeing none we are going to
move on uh to item 10.1 interim superintendent results um and at this time I'd like to ask um Mr carile to come to the podium and before he uh begins sharing information I just um want to say a brief thank you uh to all
of our candidates that applied we had seven qualified candidates that to apply and I can honestly say that I enjoyed each and every conversation and I think Marian County is very fortunate uh to have the applicants that we did so uh
looking forward to this conversation and Mr carlile I'll turn it over to you thank you for waiting on us today absolutely my pleasure uh good afternoon board chair Conrad schoolboard members as a brief recap of this process to date back on Friday April 4th an advertisement for the interim
superintendent position was emailed districtwide and posted on the MCPS website candidates were invited to apply and submit their resume and three references by Thursday April 10th board members were provided with this information for the seven candidates that met the minimum minimum
requirements of the superintendent job description you all have had an opportunity to individually review and vet the seven candidates and were asked to submit your top three choices yesterday human resources department compiled each of your top three choices into an overall top three and Miss Moran
emailed you all that information last night you've also been provided with a hard copy of that uh the top three choices based on your individual top choices are Dr danielle Brewer as your overall first choice with 11 points Mrs melissa Kynard as your
overall second choice with nine points and Miss Donna Crest and Dr robert Craig Ham tied as your overall third choice with four points each once the board has select the interim superintendent I will reach out to the selected candidate on behalf of the employment services division to
initiate the onboarding process and Chair Conrad and attorney powers will finalize the contractor with a selected candidate at this time I will turn it over to Chair Conrad to facilitate your continued discussion and I'll be here for any questions thank you all right
thank you Mr kylo um I I was um happy to see that the board was very um almost unanimous in looking at someone local uh joining and replacing you know for the interim superintendent
um so I did I just want to give every board member the opportunity um to comment or share um you know on their choices and then at the end um we'll have final discussion so I'll start start with Dr james okay thank you um I
I did have the opportunity to have what I called a conversation with all seven candidates um about 30 minutes long um in person for the four people who live within Marian County and um via teams for the individuals who are outside of Marian County i enjoyed the opportunity
to discourse and and just ask some some questions about what I have found that people are focused on um as we progress forward um and I I want to share that with all of the candidates I encourage them if they
didn't land in our top position that they still are incredibly qualified and I would enjoy them being a part of what we do in Marian County and as our district with any any change um and every year we have changes in our
organizational chart slightly but any top change generally creates some level of shift in an organizational chart and I have really I would I would be encouraged to see these individuals apply for other jobs within our district because I do believe they all had unique
thought patterns and value to add to Maring County Public Schools um varying experiences and um credentials that I think would add benefit to the work that we're doing i am also to reiterate Chair
Conrad's thought pattern grateful that it appears the board really did prioritize internal candidates i do believe fundamentally they just are most aware of what is going on right now and in this integral season of shift they
have the best pulse on where we are and where we need to go and how our community of teachers and leaders and staff members and students and families want to see things um move to so uh I
support Dr brewer's um top pick um and and think that she will do a good job in the interim to represent the needs of the school district thank you Dr james re Cummings thank you Madam Chair
um this is um this process was um relatively quick let me say that first um I I I kind of want to explain my process how I I did this i I actually interviewed I wanted the playing field
to be equal i didn't want there to be any um unlevelness in this process at all um I interviewed all seven seven candidates i did all of my interviews um virtually
via Zoom i asked all the candidates the same questions because I wanted to make sure that there was nothing um nothing inequitable in how we did this um I chose to not I know there were some
local candidates that we I could have saw them in person but I felt that that wouldn't have been fair considering we had folk out of town so I did everyone the same way so that there wouldn't be any anything
Um as I looked at the scores of the rankings that came in last night um it was pretty consistent across the board um where we all were thinking I guess pretty consistent that um we were
looking at local people um we all of us have some value with the person being local um makes no difference which one of us all of us had some value with the person being local and then some had more value with the person being candidate being internal um
I think right now we have to uh one one thing that kept jumping out in all of the interviews that bothered me was um a sense that we didn't get a lot of candidates because of a arbitrary timeline that we kind of put in place
that made them feel that there was going to be a February one day that this thing was shut down no matter what and I think that we could have hurt ourselves by putting that out there in in in the atmosphere but I'm fine with the
rankings that came out um I think uh Dr brewer ended up being the top ranked person i I I'm confident that she can do the job i'm confident that even Miss Connor could do the job either one could do the job those were our top two
there's a big gap between two two and three so I'm confident that one or two is going to be the best candidate for the position um I thank all the candidates for applying i really do because um in listening to those
interviews there were some things that all of them them had value every last one of them had some great things that they've done their credentials were impeccable uh as far as um their um their career u work and some have done
some innovative things and what they've offered in their careers so it was it was it was quite refreshing to know that there are some some people out there so even when when we do advertise this thing there's some people out there that has some great minds that we may have
end up getting a great great superintendent because there's some innovative things that's happening that are moving districts and moving school systems along the way so I am confident that our top choice based on this
ranking is going to be okay um and it will get us through this season till we get to where we need to be in selecting the superintendent so I'm fine with this thank you Reverend Cummings board member Thrower thank you and um if I think that we
needed to move uh pretty quickly once it became clear that Dr gullet was going to be moving on um to make sure that the the community is reassured you know I don't think it's something that I felt like we
were we were prompt yet deliberate with the process and my process was after uh talking with so many members both within the school community and and outside in the community and and my own lived
experience with Marian County Public Schools my screener was um has worked or is currently working at Marian County Public Schools so those were the candidates that I interviewed i met with all of them in person and I asked them
all the same questions and so I will say that all of them were very complimementaryary of the progress we've made so far uh wanting to maintain the momentum uh continue to take it forward
understanding of the tremendous challenges uh under no illusions which I felt was was really important and so with that being said uh I'm comfortable with the way it has
turned out and I'm ready to move forward uh we are still getting inquiries or at least maybe all of you got the same email yes of people expressing interest in coming and working for us as an interim superintendent so so that's a good feeling uh I also believe and this
is something I know the board will discuss and and make a decision on moving forward but probably again the sooner the better of what type of search we are going to do because if we end up doing a wide search then that takes some
time to select a a search firm and begin to put those pieces in place if nothing else people are certainly paying attention they want answers they want reassurance and they want to move forward so that's where I am with this thank you board member Thrower dr
campbell thank you i'll I'll start with uh where board member Thrower was leaving off um my first question and comment that I believe that our community is looking for is when we are going to determine what the permanent superintendent search
firm looks like and what that process looks like i'm I'm hearing that from significant members of the community that are interested in uh in that process and so I chair I implore you uh to please bring Mr collins forth to have us have a work session very soon about
what that RFP needs to look like so we can begin that process uh I I think that's that's imperative and as receiving this information last evening uh and thinking and pondering about it all this morning
before the work session and kind of am reminded of the Shannon Weaver communications model so bear with me just a moment as I do a communication theory lesson with everybody so in the Shannon Weaver model you have the encoder and the decoder and you've got like essentially the speaker and the listener and and that dialogue that's
happening between them and you're going to have a communication channel that they're communicating with uh and and the medium they're using so similar to other board members I chose the medium of phone calls and I wanted them to all
be on the phone all be for 30 minutes uh not have and I had a timer on one phone and talking on the other so when the timer went off we heard it and we knew it and asked them all the same nine to 10 questions i also took handwritten notes that I then um subsequently sent
to attorney power so all of those are a part of the public record if anybody wants to see what the questions were and the responses I received from them so that's the communication channel aspect of it and then the noise potentially is that everything else that's happening in
the atmosphere during that time but also in this model you have to understand that both the encoder and the decoder are coming from frames of reference and so whenever I took this on not only did I choose a specific communication
channel to level the playing field for everyone I also came about this process from a little bit different thought because I also had sat down with only 28 thus far of the principles within our district asking them what they're
looking for in a permanent superintendent so I had this big large frame of reference from all the stakeholders that I believe are the most important again not getting to all 50 plus but I I had gotten to 28 before we had to jump into this quickly
and so I had that kind of in my frame of reference as well um understanding the direction that we have tried to go uh with this strategic plan and my view of what this person this candidate would be
is more of a a gap filler uh because we're going to have a gap from Dr gullet to a permanent superintendent and also understanding that the person needed to have a very large scope and a very broad perspective
of what all this district has to off excuse me has to has to offer um I I asked questions about potential challenges that each person saw that could potentially handicap the success
of the leadership team and the relationship between the board and the superintendent those responses were interesting uh I I I asked about the three qualities personally and professionally that they thought they brought to the table and why they were
qualified and so all of all of the things that I framed this in I was I as I saw the results come in I think I was coming from a different perspective than my fellow board members i I think I I came in with a different frame of reference um and so because of that my
results are different than than everybody else's and you can see that i'll just blatantly obviously tell you I'm the one that's different on the screen um when I chose first of all the process was quick i said that last week
or whenever we knew this was coming process was really quick so much so that we didn't have a rubric we didn't have a matrix we didn't know that we were going to be ranking them in order i once I did send a ranking I chose to only submit
two i did not choose a third because I I didn't know this was going to be the process we were going to use because that was never something the board discussed exactly it's fine i mean clearly I was the only one that was the outsider here but I still think that the perspectives that I learn from
candidates and the perspectives that I bring to the thought process I think are still valuable even if I'm not classified in the same areas as the other board members are so again my frame of reference was quite a bit different i I'm seeing the need for
someone who can stabilize but yet someone who will be a bold uh thinker and someone who wants to really continue to propel
us forward with the background knowledge to help us get there um so I understand we have to reach consensus today or this doesn't come to us for a special meeting vote i I would appreciate additional
conversation about the two top candidates if we're not going to entertain any others and the only reason I asked that is because I didn't score a third candidate and that would make the scores even closer potentially and so um if if we're not going to entertain any
of the others in consideration and we're only talking about the top two then I would just request we have additional conversation about them thank you Dr campbell and um I'll wrap up with uh my process i did um interview
every candidate um all the candidates that were local uh I met with in person uh that is my preference when possible um particularly just for the reason of my hearing disability so um I do better with uh a onetoone um interview uh I met
with everybody for almost an hour um I'm impressed all of you that got it done in 30 minutes i was like "Oh my gosh." Yeah it took me about an hour with each candidate um I thoroughly enjoyed the process i thoroughly enjoyed um meeting with each candidate i agree with Reverend Cummings every single person
that I visited with brought something new or different to the table um so um my choices aligned with the rest of the board um I'm comfortable with the
ranking um that we came up with and I was glad that there was a little bit of a natural split uh between candidate two and three it made the discussion just a little bit easier for um us here at the board table uh having
discussed everything so publicly that is something um that is challenging as we look at discussing internal staff members community members um and then those that are outside of the district um board if if you don't mind and um attorney powers is it if it's okay
before we go any further in our our discussion can I ask for public comment before we move into finalizing our discussion yes well I just because I went first you guys said other things that about what you did that I didn't say that I just
wanted to make sure that I put on record that I did okay that's okay because I miss Lauder has been here a long time and I want to hear what she has to say before we round up uh you know our conversation so I just wanted to make sure that was okay yes that's within the Okay thank you so Dr james well I just
wanted to say I asked the same five questions to everyone um they were in the same order they were the same um I know you guys mentioned that so I just wanted to say that and um and for me too I'm very much a um I I felt like a team's interview while there is a screen i think we all grew to accommodate that
during COVID and so I really wanted that face tof face interaction um that was that was big for me and so that's why I went about that way but I did ask the same five questions to um five or six though if they're not here i asked them if they would relocate but that was the only six question for the people who don't live here so and I will have mine
available it's going to Mr powers um after the meeting so that it will be a part of a public record if needed thank you for allowing me to say that yes and I I also ask all the same questions um to my you know to each interview um Miss Slaughter would you like to come forward
you've been waiting us on us all day so we're glad to see you good afternoon um I am here on behalf of teachers community members other people who didn't want to sit here all day like I have um and the consensus that I have
gotten from everyone is Dr brewer um without question the consensus that I've got from everyone especially teachers is that if you want teachers to invest in Marian County you need to invest in them
and you they need to know that if they start out as a teacher as Melissa Kiner and Dr brewer did in this this area and you work hard and you get your masters or you get your PhD that we're going to reward that we're going to consider you for the highest position in Marian
County public schools because that's how you get people to come in from other areas and and be teachers here because you can tell a teacher that is graduating from college if you come to Marian County we will consider you for the top position we will give you the opportunity to run Marian County Public
Schools because you've invested in us also the parents who've had problems and I brought problems to and I'm trying to bring a solution as Dr james said um my solution is to have somebody who is a problem solver who has dealt with every time I've been here that there's been a
problem go see Dr brewer that's where the parents were sent they were sent to her to solve the problem and she has solved the problem if you look at discipline she has solved that as well she initiated the get the students to do well and they get to come back early
from a suspension let's reintegrate them back in the school let them buy in to say look if you do really well you can come back into the schools she was spearheading that program and Melissa Kinard is is a great person as well and a would be great assets to this school
but if we're going to give builders a preference for being local we need to give educators and supervisors and superintendent a preference for being local because it's not fair to do it the other way around it's not fair to say if you're local you get a preference to build a school but you don't get a
preference to run a school and I would advise the board to put an interim superintendent and a deputy superintendent in place right now okay and then evaluate them in a year and in a year if they're doing a great job make
them permanent and if they're not then do a search okay because if you're talking about budget restrictions and budget cuts and you hire a search committee and spend God knows how much money to try to find somebody that doesn't live here and didn't have their
schools their kids went to school here both the top two their kids went to school here their grandkids are going to school here they are invested in Marian County and we as a community want somebody that has as much at stake as we do
that's all I have thank you thank you very much Mrs slaughter i agree all right any other public comment okay with that being said oh she's coming back when I speak I don't want to violate the rules all right there we go thank you
sir you know where to find you Miss Slaughter that's right we can hunt you down thank you yes thank you Miss Slaughter for being here and thank you for advocating for the families that you have represented today so well I just want to make a note for everybody listening that all four of our local
candidates all started as classroom teachers in Mary County and they all moved up to various positions so all four of those local candidates would match exactly what you've just said thank you thank you um board at this time I am hearing that um we do have
consensus um on a candidate that we can bring forward to our board meeting on the our special board meeting on the 29th so I just want to one more time uh make sure that we are all in agreeance and moving that name forward
i think Chair Conrad yes I think um I think you're appropriate to do that i do think um Dr campbell did ask about some further discussion um I I'm fine with moving forward i I just have some more questions about the next steps after that once we
get through with this so and and I I agree i mean I said how I feel and and that's um the candidate that I I feel like I'd like to go in the direction of personally um I would not like to publicly weigh out strengths and
weaknesses of two top leaders in this district um I I just I really don't want to do that i don't want I don't I feel like that personally for me would and I I had this conversation because I said I don't know how it'll go um and I I pray that I won't have to digress into
strengths and weaknesses publicly because I um I think that I personally find that to be disrespectful to the amazing work that they're doing every day right here in this district i think if they were not current employees of this district I would feel differently
um but they're they're working right now doing something and they're all on the same team and everyone is so supportive of of however this goes the conversations I had collectively over the last month or so I guess is
everyone's on the same team and everyone is supporting each other and however the board chooses for this to go and so a after thorough thought pattern I landed where I landed and I maintain that but I really do not want to digress into strengths or weaknesses personally okay
I will if I have to but it's not it's not my preference it was a concern of mine Mr for Kyle Island uh and Miss Morant and Attorney Powers there was quite a bit of time um discussing on how to move forward um with providing the
most respectful environment for all candidates um which is one of the reasons um we did a short list um for that discussion and so I agree both of those people are leading um teams right now um doing the
work of the district and so um I think we owe them that respect yes and I agree with everything that's been said the only uh little bit of concern that I have is
because of how the the rankings came out um it is clear that at least one of us didn't rank everyone that was on here and so I guess I I I do worry a little
bit about that loose end i am not interested in debating the strengths and weaknesses of two top candidates either uh I mean I guess I would if I had to but maybe there's merit in now that we
all know what this ranking system looks like how would it hurt to rank off our our two top contenders anonymously like we did before that would be my only suggestion to ensure the integrity of the process
and maybe that's what No I I as always I appreciate um your input board member thrower my uh my challenge is is when we receive the email the request was to submit submit three names one first second and third and so my feel is that
that board member chose not to submit a third name and so you know we're closing out this portion i feel uh of the scoring session um that if that board member had someone they wanted to move forward as a as a
third choice um they would have done it originally because they interviewed all people we all we all interviewed yes madam Chair um I think this is not something that we need to be on a long time i do agree
um we can see where the numbers lie i don't I'm not I'm not in favor of having a a public conversation either to discuss strengths or weaknesses because I see more damage coming out of that i see more division be coming out coming
out of that because and and I'll say this this way because there's some that's going to like one there's some within our district that like one more than the other and we don't want that division to come across this board or to perpetuate that throughout the district
by having that conversation um it is the numbers are what they are um there are two great candidates um one one out one points over it so as a board we have to
um we this this is our decisions these are these are the numbers that we put forth so um rather than create division we need to be putting together the the the district because we're in some difficult turmoil times right now that we can already go through let's put this
behind us and move on and start working on the next step versus weighing a conversation about and I don't get me wrong I completely understand the request but I also see the more I see more damage or division divisiveness coming out of this that
could that could span across our entire district by having by doing that thank you um board member uh Cummings I appreciate that um because I think it's very valuable and I appreciate the word
uh that you use division uh we want definitely want to set the person um up for success as they uh move forward to lead the de um lead the district so I think that's an important um component of this conversation board member Thrower thank you and and you do raise a
good point chair that um even though the the this the scores came through to us you know fairly late last night um we were asked to share our top three um so there was the opportunity I guess you would say just wanted to make sure that you know nothing was left no stone was
left unturned it's important to all of us obviously to get this right and be really clear on what we did how we did it and what the outcome is so thank you very much uh Mr carlilele I believe we have consensus um to move uh Dr brewer
into place and be put on the agenda for April 29th my understanding is that legally we can begin uh working on a contract and all of those things that have to be prepared um that legally attorney powers that is okay uh to
prepare that before the vote yes and I have uh already drafted uh an interim agreement an interim um superintendent employment agreement um I have also given that to Miss Morant for her to review and she and I will finalize that
uh based on the pay scale that was outlined we'll finalize that and we will move forward um in prep preparing the final edit and bring it for closure okay thank you very much Dr james a question I've been asked in the community um is
how are we navigating we've we've we've thrown a lot of terms out there superintendent on assignment interim superintendent and so um who who is going to hold the keys to the castle on April 30th i don't know that I I don't know that I
can answer that question um understood Dr g's more than willing to work handinand with Dr brewer or whoever we were choosing so I'm just trying to understand legally it was a question asked to me by a community member who's going to hold the keys to the castle um
because you can only have one superintendent so on April 30th are we then or April 29th I guess if that's the vote are we then making Dr g do we need to vote for her to be a superintendent on assignment or um is is Dr brewer than an interim superintendent on assignment
or I I don't care about any of the logistics i just would like clarification on the specifics okay yes Reverend Cummings um typically in a situation where you still have a person in a position and you're waiting for
someone to come in that new person is the elect so I would say that if you got to put some terms to it that's the interim superintendent elect once Dr gullet's this is this is Cummings once Dr gullet's contract is up that elect
becomes the superintendent at that point i don't think we got to create a new wheel or anything like that but it's it's just it's a it's a easy movement and whatever the whatever whatever um uh job uh uh criteria things that she need
to do we that's going to be in the contract anyway correct well and that's that's a question that I'm going to have for you is what now that we have a person from whom you've given consensus here um you know the the start date for
that could be June 12th or the start date could be I'm sorry July 12th or the start date for that could be earlier but you don't that person isn't needed as an interim until that point so that person is currently employed with the district
and should probably maintain that employment with the district and then beginning of this contract would begin on the day the superintendent leaves that would be my understanding and that'd be the way that I would draft it so that's I want clarity from the board
though so I don't end up reinventing the wheel well um go ahead Dr james well and and I think the key factor here and we just heard it from a community member we need a deputy and the superintendent has said she is not going to hire a deputy and the only person who can appoint a
deputy is the superintendent is the way I understand the way of work so again whatever logistically needs to occur so that the interim superintendent can appoint a deputy so that we can begin that transition needs to occur so if the
interim superintendent needs to have some level of classification so that that can occur then that needs to occur because the superintendent has maintained that she is not going to appoint or hire a sup a deputy superintendent dr campbell has her hand
up um yes that was my concern also is that um I visualized and this is just one board member um the work beginning a little sooner than July 11th and so I I don't know in in my interviews with each
candidate um they expressed a willingness um you know 100% for this to be a a team as there's transition and so um I don't I don't necessarily see Dr brewer staying in her current role um I
feel like she needs to be you know in tandem with Dr gullet as as we move into the next month or so month and a half um board would anybody else like to chime in dr campbell thank you uh I concur
with what attorney P's expectation was that the interim superintendent would officially go into place on July 12th i believe since today's conversation has resulted in an internal candidate who already has duties and responsibilities
I believe knowing Dr gullet as we do that she will now include Dr brewer in many of those meetings where decisions are being made that Dr brewer is not already in i mean she's already in all these meetings so I I know that Dr glet has diligently been working on lists of
things that she wants to ensure that her successor whether it be interimm or permanent has information on uh but she is in place until July 11th there is no such position as a superintendent on assignment there is no job description
for a super all we have done so far legally and by contract is we had if a superintendent and now we've named an interim superintendent using that same job description there is no job description for what was being asked for so I think I don't want us to get out of
our own compliance i I think that if understanding what we've done today again the interim superintendent can be given as many duties as our existing superintendent wants to assign there will be opportunities to actually be at graduations when we have them on the same day there'll be opportunities that
she can essentially assume as a deputy and I believe together they can make a decision about appointing a deputy i mean we're in a different position now i understand Dr james that you said Dr glet says she's not doing it i haven't heard those words completely out of her
mouth now that she's resigned and we have a completely different system coming i know that you said you have I have not heard those words out of her mouth so I believe now that we're having this conversation now that we're landing on a position to move forward that there will be opportunities for the potential
of positions being appointed earlier than July 1 or positions just eliminated before July i mean I I I think that that's where we are i stay put on the interim superintendent's contract officially beginning on the day after
our existing superintendent uh is no longer in our district yes Robin Cummings one final thing um throughout the tenure um Dr because tenure here as our superintendent she has always been one that has been
willing to work with the board and um and one of the things that that that she's always said whatever the pleasure of the board is I think if this the pleasure of the board that she works with the interim um to appoint a deputy
I think that will happen um and I think that would be a good move that we we the board lets her know lets the superintendent current superintendent know that we are we do want a appointed um deputy superintendent and in tandem
uh Dr gullin and Dr could come to um finding that person and I think that's well within our authority that's well within the authority of the superintendent that's not telling them who to hire but that's giving them the discretion of the the the authority to
go ahead and do it doesn't violate anything that would also raise the question as to the person who will serve as the deputy interim deputy superintendent is that person going to have the title of interim deputy superintendent given the
fact that there is going to be there may be a superintendent change a permanent superintendent that comes on in February if that's the case and there's an existing deputy that has permanency status then that number one keeps the
interim from becoming the deputy and number two it means that the deputy has a a sense of permanency that the new superintendent may wish to appoint on their own assuming that not if it's not the interim so I think that you may want
to consider the board may want to consider whether they want the interim superintendent to on July 11th bring in their interim deputy or is there some other structure the board wants again I
seek clarity because the question will come up again so um I agree i'm going to go back to um the position of interim superintendent and uh something that's concerning to me asking our asking the interim
superintendent um to be working with Dr gullet in this transitional period um Dr brewer's plate is extremely full not only is she doing her job she's doing a big lift for um Dr hemp who is no longer
with us and so um I feel confident that Dr gullet um and Dr brewer can work that out but I just want to remind the board that Dr brewer already has a heavily heavy lift so saying that she can just hop into meetings and participate in
things that Dr gullet um is doing um I think that's naive i I there's not enough hours in the day and I know they're both already working sun up to sun down so I I just I just want to mention that um Attorney Powers I'd like to circle back um not today but I'd like
to circle back soon on the discussion of deputy superintendent i personally am not ready um to have that conversation i know there's um there are some challenges with that having an interim superintendent and then job security for who wants to apply and who would be willing to apply if the deputy
superintendent um is also uh interim position so I need I need to do some thinking and some research on that before we discuss that um as a board dr james um and so we're I guess we're in a bit of a pickle other than the fact that
we have a board meeting next Tuesday and so maybe in theory in in her briefing or in your briefing chair you could provide an update but we don't have another opportunity to discuss this before the contract is coming before us and the
contract will have a date on it so I I am in agreement with Chair Conrad that to ask Dr brewer to take on anything else is in my opinion insanity she essentially assumed
most of Dr hembrook's job when Dr hembbrook left so and sorry to interrupt you but just acknowledging that's a huge undertaking discipline is a huge undertaking but furthermore because it is the season we are in and she is the
secondary curriculum person the parents and Mr carlile being a former high school principal I'm sure would understand this too the number of parent phone calls from senior parents who just remembered that their kid is not graduating is nauseating it happens all
day every day and when they don't like that Mr carile says you're not going to graduate they then call Dr brewer so there is not a chance that she can continue to do that job of customer service to all of those families that
are calling her and also be a part of every meeting that Dr glet is a part of so again I maintain I don't care what we call it but I do think that there has to be some level of transition immediately if our expectation is for them to be
able to work together because she cannot take on anything else she cannot and if we need an interim superintendent JD that duplicates the superintendent JD for the board meeting on the 28th then then that that's what we do i mean that's fine with me i I I may be able to
help you solve this what with the drafting that we've got so far um I can't bring it up to share with everybody but the drafting I've got so far is uh that the person if they are to start immediately because we looked at
it two ways then the period of blank whatever date chosen by the board to July 11th 2025 shall be a transition period Dr dr diane Gullet will remain in control of the operations of Marian County Public Schools during the
transition period through July 11th 2025 then separately during the transition period the job duties of the interim superintendent shall interim superintendent shall devote his or her full-time and best efforts to studying
the conditions and matters pertinent to the district and shall develop plans for continued operations and improvement thereof he or she shall have the authority to recommend through the then current superintendent to the board his or her nominee to fill open positions of
employment in the district as of July 11th 2025 that person shall become the interim superintendent with all lawful authority so that would solve all of those problems if you we just have to pick the date you have to pick the date
that you want the person name in this case Dr brewer to to release her current duties and assume the title of interim superintendent even though the job duties of interim superintendent are not
fully super they're essentially a shadow and what I'd like to do is I'd like to ask Dr brewer if there's a natural you know a a a time that would be good for her um in the work that she's currently doing and beginning something new um
board member Thrower thank you and along those lines uh yes and finding out I think we need to be focusing on finding some one to replace the position that she's doing now because she's the one that's been our contact for graduations
and and all kinds of things and we have the end of school in May and then until July 11th so very good yes Dr campbell thank you so I appreciate the conversation for certain and the fact that we're respecting our employees time and and what their dut duties and
responsibilities are it's not on us to determine who the person is that takes on those duties and so now that we have determined that we're going to have an interim superintendent that is an internal candidate that has multiple existing opportunities discipline all
the things secondary athletics JOTC all the things that she does i appreciate that Dr glet and Dr brewer will work together on who can take those responsibilities off of Dr brewer's plate that is not our position to choose
that at all so I I appreciate that we're concerned about that but that's not our job so we've determined who she's going to be we've determined we're going to vote on it and they can work out what they're taking off her plate between now and then
so the only answer I need from the board is when do you want the transition period to begin transition period is blank to July 11th and with the drafting that I've placed there I I'd like to speak with Dr brewer i mean that's that's what I'd like to see and
personally this board member would like to give the discretion to the chair and Dr brewer and Dr gullet to come up with the with the date if Dr brewer and Dr gullet have a date that they agree upon I would like to do what Dr brewer and Dr gullet think is best so I mean and I give the chair the discretion to
make that decision for the contract for the 29th meeting personally then we get to vote on the contract because then we're voting on the contract yes yes and I like that idea too because they're the ones that are going to be working together and through this transition and and be the ones doing the work and I
agree that's operational it is okay all right okay mr car do you have any other questions for us i do i just want to just want to clarify so will you provide us with the start date so that we can prepare that for Tuesday yes for for for
personnel items yes sir i will get with it attorney well it's not going on this Tuesday i mean this coming Tuesday i apologize yeah for for the the 29th I believe yes okay all right um one thing I I know Dr james is the is the rest of the board okay working with that the
chair is working with Dr gallet and Dr brewer that's okay with you okay all right i'll be in touch thank you all right thank you very much Mr carlile madam Chair yes um and again um
it may not be today but I do believe that we have to as a board clear up this confusion about this February 1 date because that date is just out there well what does the contract say when does the
end when is the termination of the contract as it as it's written right now because I don't think it says February 1st because pull it up and I I I hope it doesn't say February 1 because when and board member Thorough is here with me we
were on the board this process is not something to be rushed um of of getting us a super superintendent the process of getting the company that's going to deal with it it take two or three months the process of once we get the company they figuring out what we want as a board
that's two or three months them uh uh coming in and doing the community um interviews and stuff like that that's two or three months i those that's we're at the end of the year already and then to say that we would rush the process and and it hasn't even been advertised
yet and to say the rush will process we'll have someone in place by February 1 is really r pushing it so I want us to be cognizant of not putting a arbitrary date out there saying that it ends February 1 because that hurt us in the
process of getting candidates right current currently it's listed as a blank because of the fact that what we were going to do is try to put it in as long as we reasonably anticipate and then allow for termination with 30 days notice okay for
anything and I can I can reddraft and tweak back and forth between myself and uh and um Miss Morant and Mr carile and I personally appreciate that i think that's reasonable like until position filled with 30-day notice of cancellation I think is fine with me
because I if we're working hard towards a date and then we miss the date then then what then what right what I would likely do is whether we call it February or March or whatever um allow for um 30-day extensions and 30-day termination
at a time or can we just but can we put until filled until superintendent you need a you need a terminal okay so um but those can be easily um you know if you know you're going to need another 30 days or another 60 days you can I mean
an amendment takes no time i just didn't want us to lock ourselves into something or pigeon hole ourselves into something where we're trying to make a rush decision because we want that firm if we go if we go that route that firm has to have time to actually advertise and and
then once you advertise you still got to break it down to two or three candidates and then even that once you get the person you still got to negotiate that person's contract so it's not going to be that fast like people thinking it it if if we do it a certain way it's going
to take some time it's a lot more complicated than this process we just did exactly yes it is board member Thrower thank you you've been waiting patiently thank you and and board if if you recall the same as me we talked about February 1st in the spirit of best
positioning whoever the new superintendent ends up being coming into the budget cycle and and all of those things uh it still is only April and we're talking February so the next
conversation maybe not for today but the next conversation for soon probably needs to go on the next work session is to talk about our plan for the permanent superintendent search we've heard from one member of the community how she would like to see it done but that's you
know and who has a good pulse on the community i'm not discounting that at all and thank you Miss Solder for always you know being engaged but we need to hear from a lot of other people too because she did raise some valid points certainly be a lot cheaper um to not have to do a nationwide search but we also sat here and said that we had some
great candidates from outside and yet we felt for this immediate term that the local was was better so you know there there's there's valid points on both sides of that and I think that I would put our local people up against anybody um that would rise to the top and be
very competitive if we did a n even if we did a nationwide search so that would could be a conversation for another day okay all right with that I think we'll w wind up our conversation on the interim superintendent uh quickly want to say
congratulations to u Dr brewer and we look forward to finalizing that conversation um on April 29th uh board the next school board meeting is scheduled for April 22nd 2025 at 5:30m there's a special school board meeting
on April 29th 2025 at 5:30 p.m there's a special another school board meeting on May 8th 2025 at 7 a.m and the next administrative briefing and work session is scheduled for May 8th 2025 at 9:00 a.m board I do need to ask your
availability for April 29th um that is already a a school board meeting at 5:30 would you be available at 3:30 to have a sade shade session why so much before do we need two hours um that is what that
is what the superintendent requested i don't know i don't know the time i'm sorry what was the time you were asking 3:30 i am not available at 3:30 yeah i mean I I would I could do like 4:30 i can do 4:30 i cannot do 3:30 mr mcfaden shaking his head yes 4:30 is fine doc Mr
fed okay i just like 2 hours before and then if is a long time i agree i agree reverend Cummings april 29th at 4:30 okay all right mr mcfaten we are set um
for that and with with that we'll go into um board comments miss Gonzalez i'm all good Madam Chair thank you thank you and thank you for joining us for today it was a long one uh Attorney Powers thank you yes I do have something um
wanted to let everyone know that we have scheduled a school capital outlays or tax oversight committee meeting um and that is for um May 6th Tuesday uh at 4 p.m that is not one for the board to attend that's just for the board chair
and myself to get them started with their new bylaws and get them uh electing their officers and uh giving them instructions and moving forward so um each of your candidates have been have received an invite and we'll be
attending that meeting and then from there we'll set up according to their bylaws future meetings and future business other than that I don't have anything else at the moment all right thank you Attorney Powers dr james thank
you i I will try to be brief um we had had previous conversation about the reic parcel and a survey and I believe where we ended that conversation with regard to the basketball courts that are being unused was we were going to have a further work session i believe
um board member Thrower had made that recommendation and we were moving forward but I I don't know where that we landed on a scheduling a work session chair so if it's possible to try and figure out where that is um the community brought it back up to me so I I wanted to make sure that we were getting it on a work session
agenda um something that the budget conversation triggered for me today um and we've had lots of conversation throughout the district that there are tons of people having lots of budget conversations um one of the budgets that now two and a half years in I've never
actually seen is the schoolboard budget so the school board members have a budget um and that budget pays for our dues um hotel stays for our conferences comp fees for our conferences and um in an effort our travel um and so in our
mileage and so in an effort to be aware I would love to know what our budget is and then if if other if other budgets across the district are all getting cut by 10 or 20% this board member would like to at least acknowledge that I would be okay
with cutting ours 20% and if that means that we are not participating in certain things or we are cutting some of what we're doing I'm personally okay with that because if we're having to cut from all other parts of the district I would like to participate in that conservative
effort and so at a minimum this board member would like to see what our budget is because I've never actually seen how much we're allocated and how it's spent um but I would love to um be a participating factor to cuts if
necessary and if that means you know we do conferences differently or maybe we stay at less expensive hotels or I I don't know what that looks like but I would like to at least be aware so that I could make a diligent effort personally um so maybe if finance could
provide that to us um at some point once budgets are finalized I would appreciate that um the schoolboard meeting for next Tuesday was not published until Wednesday um which is yesterday and what I'm looking what I'm looking
for is the board to give discretion to our clerk to have the authority to either one of two things publish when she's supposed to publish regardless
or call staff who haven't done what they're supposed to do so that she can publish on time but our clerk in my experience feels because she is a confidential executive secretary does
not have the authority to call senior executive directors and say you haven't turned in your item yet to board docs or you haven't pushed publish yet so she didn't publish the board meeting
yesterday or rather Tuesday because a critical component wasn't wasn't ready but it was ready it just a button hadn't been pushed but she didn't do anything because I I don't want to say above her
pay grade but you know it's it's that level of disrespect to should I really be calling a senior executive director telling her what to do and so I would love if this board if not today in the near future comes up with a common directive for what we want to do because
you guys all know that publishing timelines and putting on is very important to me when we're talking about transparency and seven days and all of those components and so I would just like for us to get a very clear understanding of what our clerk has the leverage to do in her position to ensure
that we are properly advertising and publishing items for publication so Dr james I have a question sure but isn't there we we shouldn't have to and the reason I say that is because we've already had
clearly established deadlines that everybody's supposed to have their stuff in and if the person hasn't met every time every every time and I'm and and let me just clarify i'm going to go back a little bit to the statement I made a a little bit ago everybody's doing the job
of three people so um I think that I just want to say for our staff that are busting it every day I think that they're honest mistakes but Elena ends up holding the bag for people that have not turned in their work my vote would
be she goheads she publishes when she's supposed to i that is also my vote so what would have to happen after that is simply that in order to get permission to because we're not talking about the publication for the for the newspaper because that's a separate issue about the publication of the agenda and if
somebody's missed something on the agenda because they didn't get it in by the deadline then at that point that that department or that person has got to go to the board chair and seek permission to add it to the agenda which
is happening weekly anyway so correct then it will just at least the majority of the agenda will be published for the public and what that does that brings about accountability correct because after a while as the chair you're going to get tired of hearing the same people
coming back week after week after week saying the same thing and and that's accountability so I I'm I'm and that's my personal opinion the if we have a timeline and you're supposed to have it in by 9:00 a.m for a 12:00 a.m uh 12
9:00 a.m for a 12:00 p.m publication then if you email it at 11:59 the deadline was 9:00 a.m you missed the 9:00 a.m deadline it is being published and you now have to go to the chair for permission for late publication um because I think if we start having quote
unquote consequences for because it's all it's all addressed in agenda review the day before so I just I'm finding that Miss Martinez winds up being the one who takes the hit when and not
intentionally i don't think anyone's intentionally blaming her but she's the one who pushes the button to go and so she waited because she's like "Well this is a critical student item i I can't publish and not have it on there and no one gave her the direction to or not and she didn't ask either so I just I wish
we had clear direction which I agree with you chair mine would say if we publish at 12 on Tuesdays we publish at 12 on Tuesdays there you go board me i'll weigh in on this a little bit um just because I've been chair twice and in the best world under the best of
circumstances with a welloiled machine you have no problems um if you start noticing patterns of the same department or people that requires a different conversation the board also needs to keep in mind that we don't supervise
this person um if there is a continued issue then I think that respectfully we need to let Miss Martinez's supervisor advocate thank you for bringing it up board member James but I think now we need to give her supervisor a chance to
to take it forward um what I do know is that there has been things that have truly been you know if we get a very important contract late that that we need for kids uh it becomes way too easy to say yes at it because that's who
we're here for and there is that fine line as you said between you know maybe just not getting to it so and it's pretty hard to tease out not being in the position at this moment and I think you would be best positioned to have the conversation with attorney powers and
and get this figured out because it has been an issue from time to time and if it's someone's job to do the publishing then it just in my mind if that were me I would be calling them i don't care if
they're the president to say it's my job to push the button so where is it well and but maybe some people need to feel more empowered and and that they'll be backed for that and board sometimes there's there's other issues like last week there was a technical issue the internet
was down so one department sent something in but it didn't it didn't make it but it took a little bit to figure that out so um just know that there's lots of challenges i think um attorney powers and I can get this worked out you know our goal is to be as transparent and efficient as we can uh
so the public has access to the information at the right time so um thank you board member James and I just had one more item for my comments um I wanted to bring back up comments and concerns that were shared last Tuesday evening um from the communities that
participated in our board meeting about followup from the North End community meetings that occurred um I want to thank Mr for Griffith because the website is now up with some frequently asked questions and some data that was shared in those meetings however the four town halls at the four elementary
schools there are no dates that have been brought forward um on Monday afternoon I sent an email to Dr gullet and other related staff members as well as the principles of those four schools to share what I thought could be next steps i absolutely concur that if we go
back into the community and present the same data that is a um catalyst for not productive meetings because no one wants to come to a meeting again and hear us say the same thing we already said so I shared my recommendations and what as a board
member and community member I would want to see for those meetings which included cost to operate the schools annually the amount of FTE and other funds that are generated from the schools the total operating budget and are they breaking even are the schools losing money if they were on sitebased budgeting would
they be able to cover their expenses and then cost to expand sites etc but we have to come with some solutions and then we need the community to generate solutions with us and those solutions in my opinion need to come to the board so we can settle this we need
to have a solutions-based conversation as a board and then determine what we're going to do next um but doing nothing is not okay with me especially when the community is coming to every single meeting sharing that they want the next steps to occur so we
can move to a conclusion um so I'm not quite sure what else this board member can do to get those community meetings scheduled um I did even share in my email if if if staff seems to want the board to take over this initiative and and I'm the one that lives in that
district then that's fine but I do not think it's appropriate for me to go and represent the whole board when we have varying thought patterns on it so um but I'm I'm trying to find solutions to continue this conversation and I'm truly at a loss board um other than Mr
griffith sharing you know I sent this email on Monday other than Dr gullet acknowledging it and Mr griffith sharing the link for the website I received no other thoughts so I would like to see dates scheduled for these meetings before the end of the school year um and so I'm going to chime in here um during
agenda review there was some discussion on this topic and we are facing some challenges i agree with a lot of what you said Dr james but the challenge is it's going to be um and Mr griffith is going to is supposed to be reaching out um to each board member uh because
that's what I asked because um Miss Boston Ellis you know is waiting on a lot of budget items and for us to have an honest conversation um about what our challenges are going to be financially moving forward um they're waiting on some of that data
to come in um so that we can give upto-date answers um on on what our budget is going to look like and um what our shortfalls are going to be respectfully though we have I think
five schools doing sitebased budgeting next year that all have budgets for next year so we came up with those numbers somehow because East Marian and North Marian North Marian High and and Lakewear High and Oyola um all have a
budget for next year so hearing what you say as truth I agree we somehow were still able to creatively come up with a budget for these schools at sitebased budgeting so I find it hard i find it hard that we can't somehow
come up with our our very close best guess since we're already doing that for other schools that are at sitebased budgeting okay I understand your frustration Dr james i just completely and and wholeheartedly feel that Miss Boston Ellis is is sharing her honest concern
um another another thing that I did ask in agenda review was I asked for Miss Usher to go through um the priority list that was presented to us a year or so ago to make sure that that act that information is still accurate and um
forthcoming so um Dr james what do you want as next steps i want four community meetings scheduled at the four elementary schools on the north end that are a part of this conversation because that is what the community wants to see happen next and I
want those new those meetings to have new information if we schedule those meetings and do not provide new information and solutionsbased concerns that three board members have all consistently shared concerns about they will not be productive and I agree with you what I'm
saying is if we don't have new information to share at this point how are we going to schedule those meetings i maintain I find it hard to believe that we have sitebased budgeting at at East Marian Elementary and we can come up with a budget for East Marian for
next year but we can't come up with a budget for Anthony Fezden's Bar and Reic okay mr griffith do you have do you have any updated information to share with us no you're shaking your Okay he doesn't okay i I will ask further um does other
board members have anything to chime chime in on this topic that concludes my comments thank you Dr james board member Thrower well okay just go online okay all right reverend Cummings um I I hear Dr james i hear what she's
asking for i understand what she's asking for i um that community those communities deserve to have um good information going forward i don't think we all just have a meeting to not to give the same old information again but
I also don't think that we can give them any inaccurate information so we need to make sure that whatever Miss Boston Ellis is going to provide um and she she does a tremendous job of of giving us what we need um I think we need to get that information then schedule those
meetings accordingly um to rush those meetings without the proper information is going to do us more damage agreed um than anything so we need the correct information um I I
I sometimes get get dismayed with some of the conversations I hear when we talk about certain um schools certain communities because I'll hear a I'll hear a priority in one place and a non-priority in another place and it's
the same conversation about schools and so um I kind of heard that today in some of the things that we were talking about um I won't get into detail on it but if you guys go back and listen to the tape it's it's how it's it's different when more affluent communities take precedent
in the conversation and you have the same conversation about a less affluent community and it's it's like just contradictory so I I want I want to encourage my board members to please go back and listen to the to the to the meeting this morning and maybe you
didn't hear it because maybe you said it um but listen to the conversations because I heard something different when we talked about Oyola and A Street and then but a few weeks ago I heard something different when we were talking about uh Fes Anthony Reic and Spar so I
I I like us to be on the same playing field i like of course your audio is muted okay check check check okay no nope she left you got a quum
well good because I still have one question to ask i'm glad to leave it [Music] thank y'all for hanging with me not leaving me so Okay welcome back we had to take a brief
recess at 2:22 due to some audio um trouble but we are back at 2:29 and we are finishing up board comments so Reverend Cummings you were evidently getting ready to say something very important anyway uh thank you thank you Chair i
was just stating that um when we have conversations about schools um it makes no difference where that school is whether it's in in the forest whether it's in uh north part of the county whether it's in uh the most affluent
parts of our district the conversation should have the same tenor um and equity in uh equity is a bad word I guess nowadays but they should have the same be on the same playing field when we're having those conversation um we can't um openly
or or privately um have a a a certain level of conversation about certain school because they're in affluent uh neighborhoods versus having that same conversation when they're not in as affluent neighborhoods so that that
bothers me but again I encourage our board members to go back and listen to the conversations this morning and um maybe my ear is just a little bit tuned differently but I I'm sure I heard what I heard and finally um tomorrow is Good
Friday um we we don't have any school tomorrow that came about because of this board as as a matter of fact where we had community members that that um saw the need and the importance of us not being in school on the Good Friday as a kid growing up here in Maring County we
never went to school on Good Friday it was just not it was unheard of that you would go to school on Good Friday um that was a time to reflect um and to refresh as well as to understand that um um this this holiday weekend represents
a newness and represents hope and represents um uh new possibilities and new things so I'm glad that we're not going to be here so Sunday is is resurrection Sunday some folk call it Easter i don't call it Easter call it resurrection Sunday because that's what
we'll be celebrating so I hope everyone have a good resurrection weekend thank you Reverend Cummings board member Thrower thank you and um just circling back around to the the Reddit conversation and getting some
things scheduled uh we all like to keep things moving and I respect that in this situation there's some potential legislature you know legislator legislation going on that is important
for us to know how that shakes out uh I am very concerned about the continued low enrollment at Reic as we all are and I hope that we can shift the
focus to that particular school for multiple reasons the first one is is that if we don't keep it at the front of our radar there is a solid chance that some decisions are going to get made for us when it comes to charter school access
uh land access acquisition things like that with the way this community is growing um more slowly uh in the northern side right now but I think it's really important to
hold on to what we have and involve the community in coming up with creative and and unique programs to to fill up that school again um for that reason I I I do think that we need to have a work
session item on on REIC as we had said that we wanted to do but I think that the timing of that needs to be after session ends so that we know what we're actually truly needing to be talking about and the implications of any
decisions that we make including carving out any piece of property or or anything else um and at some point at sooner than later I I think that it is going to be of huge
benefit as part of that conversation to for this board to make a decision on Feezond in perpetuity that is and I may be wrong
oyola may be on the National Register of Historic Places i'm not sure and if it if it is that gives even more credence to the lot of money that we're about to be asked as a board to put into Oyola to shore it up because a
hundred-y old buildings have a hundred-y old problems and in terms of equality and just honoring that the history that we have it's important if we're going to do it one place we need to find the way to do it other places um
Bezendon is super unique in it in its history and and not every county has that so it would be my goal and and intention before I come off this board to have Fezington and be
protected in perpetuity there's just so much opportunity for that campus um including a a resolution of some sort that we want to keep that school a school as it was intended and so
hopefully the board after more conversation about these other moving pieces will join me in in really considering that there's a lot of land there um there's a lot of opportunity there and it's so important as a
community to to cherish the gems that are still left my understanding is there used to be a beautiful courthouse and no one was happy I don't think but it's gone and and so we can't do anything about it these are two buildings Oyola and Fezidin that that we can do
something about and also Anthony but the the the designation is already there for Fezen and I'll need to look back and research if it's also there for for Oyola which may also open up some funding sources and things like that and I'm not saying we should continue to you know there's parts of Fresno that are
more historic than others you know that that main building others were you know add-ons so there's but I think if we just commit to keeping it at school first then the rest of the conversation becomes easier because otherwise the people are going to keep coming back they're going to keep coming back and
and they want answers and they want reassurance so that would be kind of my step one step two step three and ultimately protecting these historic gems um speaking about uh trying to save
money I'm proud of this board for how we have been fiscally responsible as board members we stopped going because we just really didn't see the value of going up during the legislative days because it's just so busy there's really you really
don't get ear time that that we need so we've made that adjustment and we go up when rooms are a lot cheaper in October and have real conversations so I think it's just important for the community to know uh and that also we have a very active legislative liaison and and board
member Campbell there's been multiple times now where she's gone up and not all of us and it has been at the uh permission to speak you know on behalf of the board and and that has helped us save money too there's value in being a
certified school board member um FSBA has been around since the 30s so being part an active part of that organization uh is also very valuable and then then there's also some of us that uh really took uh an
opportunity to be serving on the Marian County School Board for a lot less money than what they were earning before they got on here so every situation is is different but I felt it was important for the community know to know how the school board over many years now has
made adjustments to be as fiscally responsible in our board activities as we are asking others to be you know in in their activities uh so I just also want to say have a good Friday and I'm proud of our instructional calendar
committee for going deep with the data to come to the conclusion that when it comes right down to it that is a day where there's also a lot of absences anyway so let's go ahead and and take care of our community the way they seem to be asking us to do that and it's it
was a pleasure uh and that's all I have thank you board member Thrower and I just have a few quick things um the first several are thank yous um first thank you Reverend Cummings for covering for me last Tuesday when I had a prior engagement i appreciate you um and I I
know it was an endeavor for you to get here also wasn't wasn't easy he was in Orlando so thank you for that kevin I want to thank you um the media festival last Friday was absolutely amazing um it's one of those events that you will leave and you think "Oh that just can't
get any better." and it gets better every year and so just really uh enjoyed the opportunity to participate in a small way um in the Jim Harbon Media Festival i think every student um really and faculty member that was here truly
um enjoyed the experience i just it's so rewarding um the other question I have board May 1st is the national day of prayer um there is a uh community gathering
um at the veterans park in the morning of the 1st I think at 9 8:00 a.m and then there's also something on the on the square that evening at 5:00 p.m i just wanted to know if you were interested in a proclamation for the day
of prayer um there's only three of us here so we have to see if that's if you all are interested then we can bring it back before the whole board okay Reverend Cummings is nodding his head yes board member Thor is looking at her yeah I can't attend on on May 1st
which is really a bummer but I would definitely be willing to participate okay so attorney Powers were interested in at least bringing that to the board he's going to prepare something and then bring it to us to look at um and last but not least I I just want to say thank
you u Mr carlilele has left uh Miss Morant Attorney Powers uh Miss Brown there was a lot of behind the-scenes work um in working through the process of the inter interim superintendent and they were the heavy lifters um for that
and so I just want to thank each of you for your help um repeatedly helping uh making the process as smooth as we we could and so thank you all uh for your help in getting that accomplished and with that board
um there being no further business we will adjourn at 2:41 p.m thank you [Music] Part: 2
[Music] all right we will go ahead and start off by standing for the pledge i pledge algiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the
republic for which it stands one nation under God indivisible with liberty and justice for all good afternoon everyone uh first I' like to say uh you know like to welcome the members uh we have here today the guests
that are out there uh the superintendent Dr gullet uh is also here with us today and the school board members and to all of you that uh the department heads all of you that are part of this meeting uh thank you for taking the time to uh join us today we know that's important and we
know uh you have extremely busy schedules so thank you for taking the time to join us uh we're going to start off the meeting uh with a roll call miss Melanie okay um so I do not have a list to go on so I would ask um Miss Jenny
Edgars to go ahead and start us off and then I'll record for the minutes uh Jennifer Edgars Angie Lester yes your name your name
bobby Gun floyd Magwood Diana Williams Melanie Lyster all right so it looks like we have a
quorum we're good to go so the next thing we're going to do now is acceptance of the minutes uh from the last meeting i believe everyone uh received an email of that and if there are no corrections or changes I would accept a motion to approve the minutes
from the last meeting motion to approve second all right any any further discussion all right all in favor of of approving the minutes say I i any opposed motion
carries all right next is the district overview and that's uh from Dr uh Gullet hardly use a teacher voice i can use my teacher voice pretty well i'm I'm married to one so she There you go all right well good
afternoon uh chair members of the IICRO committee i'll be very brief um I was reminded when I was on my way over here today that this is my last Irock committee so I wanted to take a moment to thank all of you thank you for your
service in your roles thank you for serving in an oversight capacity to ensure that our students have what they need i also want to thank the team behind me because they're the ones that put all the work together to present this information to you that's just a
small glimpse of the great work happening in Marian County Public Schools my last day with the district will be July 11th and I think did I see Dr dr brewer come in dr brewer was um was um selected today by the board to serve as the interim superintendent so
you'll get to see Dr brewer she's a fantastic member of my leadership team and so I'm really excited about the future for Marian County Public Schools but just wanted to take a moment to thank you on behalf of our students and staff i appreciate all the work that you're doing in a voluntary capacity uh
to ensure that their needs are being met and it's been a pleasure to serve so thank you so much same here we thank you for all the hard work you put in thank you all right next we have the uh review of
the budget uh from a CFO uh Miss Teresa good evening uh you you called my name but there's a whole cast of people behind me that are very very important in putting together this information but the presenters
tonight uh in addition to me uh or Charity Cornelius Katherine Audi Regan Hughes Brook Huau Michelle Cino and Dennis McFaten so this is the uh what we would call the
third quarter report so July through March um and this is cumulative but this particular worksheet provides you a summary of all the funds uh that have
been collected and spent over the years again this is this is uh one mill adorum property tax the voters approved it on November 8th and uh this was the second
renewal and uh it's effective from July 1 2023 through June 30 2027 so this is the second renewal i do want to step back a little bit and tell you what you have you should have
something that looks like this it says 2023 2024 updated final i believe there was an ask for the final uh referendum report so it it's in red so that separates it from the one that that we
are presenting today you should also have a referendum funded units spreadsheet and also you should have examples of expenditures by program i think that was a request uh from one of
the IRO committees membership as well and then uh uh there is also a summary sheet that Mr osley had requested and that prepares or pro provides to you the
um summary of expenditures general fund charter schools and then the total so if you don't have any of those let us know we'll get that to you so I'll go back to the slide number
two so the actual through 2324 was 199 million in collections of revenue uh the budget for 2425 is 37.2
million so cumulative including the budget for 2425 the re revenue should be 236.2 million in terms of expenditures the actual expenditures through the 2324
year total to 186.8 million and the budgeted expenditures for the 2425 year are 43.3 million to remind you the alliable use of funds include art music media uh library
vocational programs meeting class size retaining state certified teachers par profofessionals and school safety our revenue for the 2425 year we've collected
90.94% um and based on our budget we still have about $3.4 million to collect we have spent to date 57.34% and based on our budget we still
have about uh $18.5 million to spend i'd like to remind you every time that our revenue starts November through the end of the year based on tax proceeds uh
so we need to have a fund balance at the end of the year to carry us through until um November of the next year so our budgeted expenditures for the referendum total 43.3 million and
this is a a picture of how those dollars are budgeted uh physical education is close to the highest 22.5 that includes the physical education teachers as well as the PES uh technicians the
next highest is safe school safety uh at about 23% of that total and then the rest of them uh the kindergarten paris are 14.2% and then the rest of the categories are pretty much in line uh
between 5.5 through 12.2% with professional development uh about 1.8% of the total and this is all and that means I'm we are including the charter schools in this particular
slide this slide gives you the actual expenditures based on the program uh the 2425 is actually the expenditures from July through March and where you see
class size for the 2425 year that is now kindergarten Paris excuse me could I ask a quick question absolutely i see on the prior report that there was class size reduction was the category and we changed that to
kindergarten pair of professionals it it was class size reduction but it was uh the teachers and the pair of professionals uh our board made a decision at the beginning of the budget period for the current year to move all
of the class-sized teachers to the general fund operating and so now uh what is left in that category are the kindergarten pairs thank you uh this this slide details our fund
balance the beginning fund balance at 2425 uh was $11.8 million keeping in mind whatever is not spent it's rolled over to the next year in this category we
budgeted $37.3 million in revenue and budgeted $43.3 million in expenditures so we are projecting an ending fund balance for 2425 uh about
$5.7 million and that is if we spend everything that was budgeted you will notice from year to year that number tends to be higher than what was projected because we don't spend all the money we don't fill all the positions but again whatever is not spent is
rolled over to the next year i do have a question Miss Boston Ellis um are we comfortable with that $5.7 million to get us a jump start on the 2526 year yes is that a pretty standard number left over i only say that because it was
there was 11.8 in the beginning and that's what I meant when I said we know that we won't spend every penny that is budgeted so we don't fill all the positions or we don't spend all the money for other expenditures so
typically it grows u by the end of the year uh the next group of numbers will be related to the general fund and it's excluding charter schools uh you may recall that uh the statute changed and
whereas several years ago we did not include the charter schools uh uh but now there's Florida statute that says the charter schools have to be included uh in the referendum calculation as well as the millillage dollars and now with
the sales tax they have to be included in that as well so we've chosen to reflect this showing you what the district is doing with the funds and then the last few pages will show you what the charter schools are doing with their
funds so again ch uh the we have the kindergarten pair professionals and this is a picture of why we're here and why we do what we do some beautiful
faces so the kindergarten Paris we have a total budget of $6.1 million we've spent $4.6 million and remaining about $1.5 million um we have 169 filled
positions and we have eight vacancies so what will happen if those vacancies aren't filled or if they are filled later in the year what happens is that builds up the fund balance that's an example of what would happen and the
total spent to date is $4.6 million so now we'll move on to physical education and Miss Cornelius son will be here good afternoon thank you again for taking your time to be here and hear all of the things that we don't get to share
all that often so it's nice to let someone hear it uh this year all of the MCPS physical educators proudly partnered with Ocala Mayor Ben Marciano to promote his platform of health and wellness across Marian County schools
over the course of the last 10 weeks K through2 physical educators engaged students in the mayor's fitness challenge a weekly video series designed to inspire movement teamwork and healthy habits more than
27,900 students in over 30 schools participated in the weekly challenge that's a pretty big number creating a countywide culture of wellness and excitement around physical activity the challenge videos featured zone fitness physical education or physical trainer
Joe Adcock and Clinton Hart a former NFL player and local fitness club owner their energy and expertise and the connection to the community made a powerful impact on students and staff alike each week learners and educators looked forward to the challenge creating a positive momentum that extended far
beyond the gym the impact was truly phenomenal and normally I would share with you information about our elementary track meet however weather pushed that to May so I'm going to share with you something that I feel is is pretty important and something I don't get to do very often we know educators
arrive to their positions now in a lot of different ways very different than five 10 15 years ago and I just want to spotlight a couple of those that come from very different pathways to arrive where they are but are equally very
effective two of our coaches at Belleview Santos Elementary is who I would like to spotlight everett Nelson a proud Ocala native and University of Florida graduate brings over a decade of experience to Marian County schools he's currently serving as a physical educator
at Belleview Elementary Belleview Santos Elementary everett is known for launching innovative programs like cardio drumming which he introduced across local schools as well as with MCPS administrators over the summer his leadership helped earn the 2023 2024
powerhouse physical education program award as recognized by the fitness and nutrition in schools program beyond the classroom he shares his expertise at countywide events advocating for active engaging physical education for all learners his partner Jeffrey Koviaak has
a very different pathway to where he arrived he is a US Marine Corps veteran and Michigan State University graduate he transitioned from a successful career in IT to join Belleview Santos's elementary program as a coach now in his
second year Jeffrey brings passion structure and heart to the role quickly earning a rookie teacher of the year nom nomination from his co-workers together with Everett he co-leads Belleview Santos's PE program creating long
lasting impact through fitness teamwork and community connection thank you so much for your time thank you so our total budget for physical education is $9.6 million it includes PE teachers as well
as PE technicians uh there are two vacancies in the PE teachers category and the PE technicians 100% filled uh for this quarter we've spent 6.2 million
and 3.4 million is remaining to be spent uh you may recall we have the PE teachers PE techs and we also provide uh $2 per uh student at each one of the elementary schools so that they can purchase materials and supplies and some
equipment with those funds so now we'll move on to uh vocational programs uh with Miss Kathy Audi good afternoon so we offer 40 different CTE pathways that encompass 14 clusters that serve over 15,000 students
in CTE this year or during quarter 3 I have some exciting data to share with you we have 748 seniors who will be graduating with the ability to earn career pathways articulated credit that means these seniors completed three courses within a specific CTE pathway
and maintain a 3.0 average in those courses students with that distinction are able to obtain free college credit if they continue that CTE pathway into one of our local colleges we also had 973 seniors that qualified as program completers that
means they completed three courses within a pathway and these students may qualify for the Gold Seal Bright Future Scholarship we recently had students from both Belleview High Robotics Automation and Design Program and the Westport High Engineering Program compete alongside
UCF engineering students at the UCF NASA Capstone Competition this project required all of those students to spend 12 Saturdays um at Belleview High School preparing students and building models of solarp powered systems for space habitats
they complete um they just recently completed and I'm excited to share that Belleview High School students took first place uh they actually beat out UCF engineering students at that competition lake High School construction academy students just completed a joint project with Reic Collier Elementary during the third
quarter students in the construction program designed and built an ecoin fencing structure for Reic Collier Elementary School reick's going to be using this facility to introduce their students to ecoin careers and to begin the feeder program on our pathway up to the North Marian High Equin
Academy oh and I'll just go back that picture there are the Belleview High students preparing for the solar power competition now I'd like to share some of our recent business and industry connections we've had in our programs this is just some of the activities that took place during the third quarter
belleview High School hosted the regional health occupation students of America competition often referred to as HOSA we had 472 students compete in that competition and that required 114 members of the medical industry to support and come
judge that event for us so we're really excited about that we also recently had criminal justice students from Forest High attend law days where they're able to sit in on trials and ask questions about the proceedings to the judge afterwards we also had 150 students from Belleview
Denellan Lakew Weir and Westport High attend construction career days students um during this learned about the construction industry and got to participate in hands-on learning you can see them in the picture getting to actually see some of the equipment and we also completed career fairs at all
seven high schools on site for all juniors and seniors you can see there the picture of the career fair from Lakewware High School thank you as you can imagine the vocational programs are pretty robust and they
require uh a little bit additional funds but their total budget uh is $2.4 million they've spent to date 1.5 million and they have a little under a million dollars left to spend uh with a
total of 20 teachers they they have one vacancy and um their budget is a little bit different we we do provide funding for their salary and benefits but they also use some of their funding for capital
outlay materials and supplies and where it says um utilities that's just fuel for uh field trips as well as purchase services and um so this is a really robust program and uh we're really proud of the things that
referendum is providing so next we will go on to library media and we have Miss Braen Hughes here today good afternoon afternoon throughout this school year our media specialists work
hard to meet the needs of each of their campuses each campus provides a different experience based on the needs of the students they serve from providing lessons focused on reading B benchmarks or supporting literacy initiatives our media specialists are
always busy we have 49 certified media specialists who helped plan and implement this year's Justread Florida Celebrate Literacy Week constructing the foundation for success media specialists supported this theme in many ways from campus to
campus some use Legos as a way to support building literacy or had students read about construction or careers in construction in the library students had the opportunity to learn how literacy is the foundation to constructing a successful future for
themselves each month I host early early release sessions with our media specialists during these sessions our media specialists learn more about the platforms that they have access to learning more about their different platforms support daily media services as well as efficiency
these sessions also provide an opportunity to collaborate with their colleagues as media specialists a lot of the work that they do every day on their campuses is done in isolation one of Excuse me one of the many ways our media specialists work one
of the many tasks our media specialists work on throughout the school year is the student media festival from campus to campus the organization of student projects may vary but the outcome of these projects is always fascinating and provides a creative outlet for all those involved
throughout the school year many of our media specialists support students in the process of planning creating and submitting submissions for the media festival last Friday on April 11th the media department recognized the hard work of students across the county at
the Marian County Student Media Festival this year 213 entries were received which included 863 students seven elementary schools four middle schools and four high school projects were recognized for the hard work and dedication to this project and their
submissions i want to congratulate all of the winners from this year's submissions the work and dedication each of our media specialists does each day does not go unrecognized throughout this quarter our media specialists have helped make sure that all students have access to books with
161,753 book checkouts and 194 checkouts digital checkouts on each of our campuses beanstack reading challenges continue to encourage reading on each of our campuses with 3,780 of our students logging in and engaging with reading
using this digital reading log platform students earned 31,793 badges logged 10,830 books and an amazing 878,290 minutes logged i look forward to
seeing how this number continues to increase throughout the fourth quarter of the year and finally Gail Enterprises is a digital encyclopedia that all students in Marian County have access to using Gail students have access to vetting to vetted and approved text on
topics of their interest this year with the help and training of our media specialists students have successfully searched 129,325 times topics ranging from the Holocaust the scientific method and voting just to name a few of our
students top searches this is an increase of over 18% from last year our media specialists appreciate their jobs and their security that they have on their campuses and without the referendum dollars it wouldn't be possible so they appreciate it
thank you so with library media there's a budget of $4 million they've spent to date 2.6 million and all 48 positions are filled as of this quarter um again
salaries and benefits are spent and $2 per elementary student are allocated to the schools for supplies and equipment and dues and fees next we'll have Brooke Hutto she's the coordinator of visual and performing
arts and she will handle the fine arts as well as the performing arts and then I'll come back with the expenditures that um and and budget from those two areas good afternoon it is always my
privilege to come and share the amazing things that our music visual arts dance and theater programs are doing in the county um on the screen now you'll see some information from our visual arts programs um on the lefth hand side we have an image from our kids tag art ceremony open to all fifth graders in
Marian County kids tag art is a collaboration with the Marian County Tax Collectors Office and our fifth grade art programs this program inspires students to design their own specialty license plate while also learning about the practical application of license plate art each school has two winners selected and from those representatives
the sponsors choose an additional award of distinction for their sponsorship this year 58 of our students were selected as the top two entries for their schools and from those winners 18 awards of distinction were selected by the sponsorship donors our awards ceremony was held here in the MTI
auditorium on Saturday February 8th and then all the winning students and their families were invited to see their work on display at the Appleton Museum in their education wing we're always very thankful for our partnerships with our local communities like the Appleton Museum um on Friday March 28th 37 of our senior art students of Westport High
School's Mecca program held their senior show at the Marrying Cultural Alliance also known as the brick together they displayed 196 pieces of art the show was entirely curated and planned by the seniors down to the food that was served that evening this is an amazing opportunity for our students to have
their art and display for the community and they also get to speak to their art and their passion for their art as well moving to our performing arts in January 100 of our elementary students from 18 schools participated in the 11th annual elementary honor choir concert
held at the Riley Arts Center these students were selected by their teachers back in October based on their musical talent and aptitude as well as their behavior to be members of this very select choir this is a unique opportunity for students to come together from all over the county they work together with a renowned clinician who shares their talent and passion with
our students and then they put on an incredible program after only working together for about eight hours of rehearsal time and then in celebration of music in our schools month we hosted our 11th annual Charlie Dixon Memorial Elementary music festival at First Baptist Church of Okala on Thursday
March 6th with 25 of our schools participating this event is a unique collaboration between elementary music programs showcasing their talents from singing to dancing to playing instruments the finale then features two songs sung by over 700 students and it
is always a sight to behold every year watching all of those kids sing on stage the amazing MCPS dance programs from Belleview High School Madison Street Academy Sunrise Elementary Vanguard High School and Westport High School presented the 4th annual Spring Dance Festival in February featuring
approximately 200 students these talented students performed routines in varying styles including ballet tap jazz and contemporary and it was a pretty amazing show to watch um our theater programs from Horizon Academy Belleview Forest Vanguard and Westport high
schools participated in their district thespians competition in December with Vanguard and Westport then moving on to state competition in Tampa last month vanguard took home two superior ratings from both of their students who were actually both freshman this year um who participated and Westport received one
excellent and three superior ratings including a top honors award which indicates a perfect score for their category which was awarded to senior Hannah Talby in the category of makeup design in March we had two of our high school color guard programs Belleview High School and Forest High School
compete at the state FFCC Championships in Daytona Beach forest High School took fifth place in their division and Belleview High School took home silver medal for their division and then finally on Saturday March 29th 180 middle and high school students from 11 schools participated in our secondary
allcount choir this 3-day event was held at CF for rehearsals and First Baptist for their performance and we are so thrilled to have two amazing clinicians there from Gainesville and Orlando to work with our students they presented a highly diverse program with music from around the world including France Africa
and Brazil as always I would like to thank the voters of Marian County for their continued support of the arts through the referendum and to all of you for your continued service on the board thank you so much thank you so what do all these programs cost we'll start with the fine arts
uh performing they had a budget of 4 or they have a budget of 4.8 8 million and have spent to date 3.1 million um there are 52 positions that are filled and we
have two vacancies uh there is a 0.5 energetic coordinator and also we have 11.5 filled positions for pair pair professionals and uh.5 vacancy again uh
in addition to salaries and benefits they are uh provided at $2 per student and you can see those items that they are choosing to purchase with those dollars and that's the art and now for the music
um they have a budget of 5.2 million and they've spent 3.3 million uh we have 57 music teachers and a.5 coordinator 11.5 pair professionals that that's filled
and a.5 that is not filled and again in addition to salary and benefits the $2 covers uh utility fees or just fuel for field trips materials and supplies some equipment and dues and fees and purchase
services to support the program now we'll move on to professional leadership and learning and we have a new person in that area Michelle Cino who is the coordinator of professional leadership and learning and she will
introduce um the presenter for today good afternoon and it's lovely to be here thank you all so much for your support and I will be talking to you today about our professional leadership and learning induction and mentoring
program the new teacher academy hosted three sessions during semester 2 educators with less than three years of experience are invited to register for this course each session included a mini lesson on a specific topic followed by
breakout sessions led by veteran teachers in the participants subject area mentors and leads continue to attend professional learning opportunities to build skills for supporting novice and early career educators each sitebased mentors host
professional learning for early career educators at their campus the program specialists were able to visit multiple sites and see these meetings take place each site learning meets the needs of the participants at each school topics
from engaging students to dealing with disruptions to lesson planning are covered participants are given a strategy or task to try and then share how it went and receive feedback referendum funds allocated to the professional leadership and learning
department support induction and mentoring for educators in their first three years our goal is to ensure that every educator feels valued and equipped to help students succeed most funds are distributed at the end of the fiscal year for mentor and lead mentor
supplements with hours tracked through monthly surveys by both mentors and novice educators novice teachers with less than six months of experience each receive a one-to-one mentor with
$233 of these as currently assigned mentors provide about 30 hours of support which allows them to earn a supplement of $1,100 lead mentors appointed by school administration support early career educators with two to three years of
experience through monthly meetings and professional learning sessions and they earn a $2,200 supplement for providing 60 hours of support thank you so much for all you do and I am thrilled to be new to the professional leadership and learning
department and working with you all you Thank you the total budget for professional development is $628,000 um they've spent about $6500 so far and remaining
621,000 and as Miss Cino stated uh most of the funds that they uh used come to fruition towards the end of the school year and it's the mentor uh stipens that support our new
teachers next we'll have Dennis McFaten and he'll talk about safe schools what's going on in that area i had a quick question on while we're on this subject you may or may not have this but I was just curious what is the
what's the retention rate of of teachers that would have to be something that I'd have to ask someone else okay unless there's someone here that can talk about it nope we'll have to get that answer for you did someone say they had that
information okay all right we'll get it for you appreciate it okay good afternoon and thank you again for being here and for what you do for uh us for the school system safe schools uh it
has been another successful school year so far marked by continuous pro progress in implementing new ideas and making strategic investments to enhance the safety of our schools we recognize that the safety of our students staff and
visitors doesn't start or end on our campuses but in many cases the moment our students board a school bus so with that being said with over 22,000 students registered to ride the bus we partnered with the Maring County Public Schools Transportation Department to
install the Gateway camera systems on our school buses this system provides reliable real-time video recording of both the bus interior and selected exterior areas to clarify this is not the stop armed cameras technology that
you often see that captures footage of vehicles that illegally pass stop school buses but this is the gate as a gateway system which is vital addition to our school safety protocols enhancing student and staff safety supporting the
investigations of traffic incidents assisting with liability claims monitoring student behavior and documenting other potential violations this is a muchneeded upgrade to our current system onampus safety remains a top
priority school officials and school resource officers supported by other personnel are authorized to conduct administrative searches of students their belongings vehicles and storage areas in order to identify firearms
control substances and other prohibited or illegal items handheld metal detectors play a key role in this process offering a quick and non- evvasive method to help ensure our campuses remain weapons-free each student will uh each school will receive
two handheld metal detectors to use during administrative searches and other incidents that may require a search several important safety projects will continue into the next school year driven by state mandates and best
practices a cornerstone of these efforts is our school resource officer program partially funded through the referendum this initiative is one of the four options that meet the state requirement for having a safe schools officer on every campus the presence of a uniform
officer is a visible deterrent and plays a vital role in maintaining the safety of our school environment another critical tool is the Raptor visitor visitor volunteer accountability and reunification platform the visitor management system
digitally verifies a visitor's identity against their governmentissued ID screening them against two key databases the first database is the registered sex offender database maintained and regularly updated across all 50 US
states and terrorists and territories so basically what happens is when you go onto a school campus you show your ID they put it into the Raptor system and if you are a registered sex offender it's going to pop up and it'll deny obviously the school will have to take
extra precautions to allow that person on the campus um the next database is the customs school created database which may include banned or restricted visitors individuals with custody or restraining order issues and other
flagged persons so a lot of times we do have visitors that may come on to campus that may have custody issues with with the child we're able to put that information into the system so that we don't have an unauthorized parent take possession of a child over a court order
again if a match is detected the system automatically alerts the staff similarly the volunteer management system uses the same sex offender database screening but also includes a full background check for arrest uh once the person volunteers
they do it online and my staff has to personally look at everyone that's received that's been arrested to make sure that that arrest is not something that would cause a concern that'll bring a safety concern to our students for instance child abuse uh uh unfortunately
if individual get arrested for child abuse and they want to come on our campus and volunteer we just don't allow that murder terrorism and a lot of those other type of um arrests um as of July 1st 2024 over 12,000 volunteer
applications have been submitted for approval through the Raptor volunteer management platform reflecting the strong community support for our schools finally we understand that the school safety doesn't end when the final bell rings to enhance after hours security
we've collaborated with the Marian after school program which is MAPS to install doorbells at facility entrances these doorbells alert staff when a parent arrives ensuring a secure and monitored environment even after the school day
ends uh what we working with them we realize that after the end of the school day uh parents have to go to maybe the back of a campus to get into the school to get their kids out of uh the Marion after school program um but there was no way to notify the MAP staff that
somebody was at the door and so somebody would have to just stand there physically at the door so what we done we put up gates um special gates for our map areas and we put doorbells on them so now when the parent come to the back door they ring the doorbell the staff comes out and they let them in to get
their child for the maths program so overall we are making great strides and enhancing the safety of our students staff and visitors but be prepared as we roll into this next quarter to see other technological innovations alongside our ongoing
physical security measures in the coming months thank you mr mcfaten I do have a question you touched on this a little bit and I'm not sure if that would fall under your department or transportation but is there any type of coordination with um local law enforcements for the
school bus violations of people automobiles and vehicles passing passing by schools with school buses with their signs out how's that how is that taken care of so we are having discussions about that um there's a lot
that comes with it uh for instance if that's something that we decide to do in conjunction with law enforcement we have to have a uh really a big media blitz campaign for so many days to warn the public of what's going on um we have to
set up to follow the law i'm sorry say I said we have to warn them to follow the law yes that's and it's actually that's was exactly in the statute we have to warn them for 30 days um that the fir for the first 30 days is
like a warning preparing the public for this uh implementation of this program and when I say it's very um strategic in how it's done so that it it beats all of the challenges that may
come up in court but in addition to that uh we have to have the law enforcement agencies uh be willing to review every single video that's a violation and confirm and check off that that was a
violation based on the uh video so it's a lot to it there's some equipment that has to be purchased but this is a conversation that we've had and we're looking into now I have heard that not only are these cameras uh could potentially put be put on school buses
but also school zones you know for instance um they're picking up some districts are doing it and for us there's been some legal challenges so we're sitting back watching because this is like the second time that they've
tried to introduce this type of legislation and sometimes it just fails and it just stops they have to start and and rethink this whole thing again so we're monitoring it but we've also got um we do an annual study of the
transportation department does annual study of how many um buses or cars go around buses on the driver side as well as the passenger side so we do that annually as a way to gauge if this is something that we really we really need
because um and it's not about the money it's really about the safety so but there is a cost associated with it that um for those citations that are issued a certain amount of it goes back to law enforcement a certain amount come back
to the district the school district and we can use those funds for training or other safety measures but we don't want to do something for the sake of trying to make money that's not the purpose of it it would be strictly for uh if there's a need because there is a a real
issue and concern about passing the stop arms on the buses okay thank you yes ma'am anybody else thank y'all so much thank you um safe schools budget uh is $9.7 million you may recall that safety was
added it was not in the original um four years when uh the referendum was amended in terms of the language safety was added uh to that um I'd like to remind you that we get probably between
three and four million from the state for safe schools so there is a real need to have another funding source for safe schools uh just to pay for the SRO's and you've seen through the last few years
all the equipment whether it's fencing or anything like um cameras that we've had to purchase or upgrade uh to meet the Marjorie Stoneman Act and this continues uh to be a concern of ours
because most of the equipment that is purchased uh it's it's basically a recurring cost camera is only going to last so many years and you have to replace it um so uh this is very important to the school district uh the
referendum is they've spent to date about 31.52% um it does cover the cost of some guardians um and the capital outlay uh that Mr mcfaten was talking about the cameras on the bus uh that goes before
the board to approve very soon and then they'll make that purchase so you'll see that that remaining balance will be eaten up pretty quickly before the end of the year so we've talked about um the
referendum as it pertains to Marian County Public Schools and this will be really quick i just want to um show you what the charter schools are doing with this funding they pretty much are following the same format as the school
district as you can see um 848,000 was their budgeted expenditures uh we have several charter schools uh I think it's about six of them for five five charter schools that participate in
this program and as I stated earlier um legislation occurred a couple of years ago that requires these dollars to be shared with charter schools the actual expenditures total
699,000 and they also include an amount that we had to pay for prior years and it was the $102,000 that were owed to them from prior years after the legislation was passed
oh yes do we do we know how many Can you hear me okay yes do we know how many students are represented in these charter school numbers roundabout trying to think out loud maybe about 500 kids in the charter schools no one wants
to commit but there there's quite a few i think about Colon has K um I think they have K8 um Macintosh has K5
um Ocali has middle school and they also have high school and then Mary and Charter so I I would say in excess of 500 kids but I can also get that information to you as well do they receive per per student yes the funds
are per student yes we'll get that information to you as well they did their annual presentation today um again they used physical education they use a referendum for
that um also art and music again as I stated they typically are following what the um Marian County is doing as well and they've spent also
um 152,000 on professional development and they use uh their funds for safe schools as well and that is the end of the presentation if you have any additional questions for any of us uh we are
willing and eager to answer and if we don't have the answer we'll go get the answer and um send it via email uh to Mr osley so that he can disseminate it to all of you okay i have one I have a question um and this goes back to the beginning and I
I'm I apologize if it was clarified but is the um the rollover amount is that just put into like like the whole big picture and it goes to you know divided by percentage it doesn't go back to that area of study or it goes into our fund
balance pot we call it okay and then each um program will submit another budget for the next year um we typically budget the um salaries and benefits and what they want to purchase in terms of
materials supplies or the like they submit that based on the budget that they have for that year so it does not go back to them but referendum if all the money isn't spent it goes back to the referendum fund okay
gotcha thank you does that make sense okay good question yes sir any any other questions one probably for Dr glet not about the current budget but about future
a question for Dr glet for Dr gullet dr it okay question for you Dr i couldn't really hear you i'm sorry it's okay is that better is that Sure first of all thank you for your years of service we appreciate you very welcome
this is a bill and Tallahassee question so um I know that we have some things working their way through committees and in session right now that we're all very fearful of um depending on what happens I know they it's not a referendum dollar
bill but will it affect our referendum dollars and if yes will we look next year to reallocate some of these funds going forward to make sure we keep our great programs of PE it's a great question um what I would say is it it's
I would liken all of it to a big puzzle right there are different funding streams that come from different places the simple answer is will it affect if we have reduction um of funding stream yes that's the simple answer does it directly impact
this not necessarily but it's all part of the same puzzle how we get the work accomplished how we support what we need has to be prioritized we just uh did a did a funding update today at the work session and I shared uh with the board
and public that we're working really really hard and our our budget meetings are how long have we been doing this now for several weeks looking at central office but the whole entirety because there's a lot of um information we don't
yet have but the anticipation of less funding is very real and my commitment I shared with the board and the public is to leave this district in the best place possible we are going to have to get tighter and tighter esser is gone we
knew that was coming but also looking at the federal landscape of those dollars in addition to what's happening at the state level with some of the areas that are near and dear to our heart and we actually that's why if you get the one-page document that I had the team create it wasn't about lobbying it was
about sharing the data that represents the work that happens in Marian County Public Schools for our students and the work that our teachers do so if you don't have that we'll make sure you get a copy um but it tells our story because it's about the data and it it directly impacts our students so it's all part of
the landscape if you will and I think it's going to they're going to have to be tougher and tougher conversations certainly and that's a kind of a short answer and a long answer but it all has an impact it does so it comes down to priorities does that answer your
question somewhat i'll keep We'll keep watch that have to keep Well that's what we know i mean literally I was I was flipping through my emails as we were sitting here just making sure there wasn't any update we're watching round the clock i was up late watching things
reading uh we're watching very very closely it's It's good that you're preparing for for that possibility there it's good instead of waiting until it happens so good job on that well thank you precisely what I tell the team all the time right Miss Boston Ellis i I
mean I'm literally telling the team and we have budget meetings again tomorrow starting at 8 um we have to plan on the worst case scenario because I don't want the district to be in a position six months from now for example saying wait
a minute we need to regroup right so I don't want those those reactions to come later we we don't know but we just like we would do with our own finances we we plan accordingly uh hope for the best but but we plan for the worst and I just mind I'm very very mindful of people in
positions Um but priorities are always going to be students and those surrounding students and we work backwards from there tough times planning for that thank you absolutely thank you any other
questions anyone great uh great meeting our next meeting July the 17th good okay so that's what we have on that
july the 17th is the next meeting uh do we have any other matters anything to bring up anything I miss i know this year is going by really fast so I'm sure I can end up missing something i It's gonna be Christmas
tomorrow you know seems like it it seems like it right uh all right so we will if there is nothing else to bring up um do we have a motion to uh end the
meeting all right the motion carries thank you everyone thank you [Music]