##VIDEO ID:ys1wgEQ3DCE## I pledge allegiance to the of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands one nation under God indivisible with liy and justice for all right I will now call to order the workshop meeting for August 28th 2024 um I want to take this time to welcome everyone and thank you for being here um I see some new faces joining us today um so if we have some some citizens here I just want to let you know that this is our Workshop time um we take questions but not comments during workshops um and there are do we have yellow cards we do on the back table on the table over here if you want to speak at any time um there will be an opportunity at the end of the workshop for um questions um and so with that we'll just jump right into our agenda uh agenda item number one is to review the draft agenda for our regular school board meeting on September 5th Mr BR I care we're going to reverse the order here we do have a guest here going to change the word before we did that have you missed I didn't say since the last time we met we've had the opening of school I'd be opening a school that never gets old each and every year to see the smile on uh young uh person's faces as they come in and you know who was smiling even more than the students parents as they dropped their child off and waved as they left and I just remember greeting a young man coming off the bus at Gro Park and I said to him hey you excited to be here he goes yes I'm excited I said you excited to learn new things he said no he was so sometimes their motivation for coming to school it's all part of the ritual of what happens in schools so we're we're really proud to start school year off I know each year we always kind of take a look at uh school systems in particular we turn everything on at one time right all the computers have to work at the exact same moment all the buses have to run at the exact same time like no other industry does it shut off and then turn back on all at one time and so when I look at that you know that uh I'm very proud of how the district has done to open that doesn't mean we have haven't had a late bus or something happened along the way but you look at the big picture you see that a lot of hard work by a lot of people and extremely proud of the start uh that happens uh in our school system this year so that in mind we got several things here today as you can see on the agenda but one of the things just to kind of tee this off we've titled it family and Community engagement presentation and so one of the things that we heard from the board and is certainly something that's actually going goal three in our strategic plan is family and Community engagement we' talked about the need for families to be more involved in the educational process uh I know we we take great deal of talk about uh parents' rights when you look at the percentage of time that students are in school versus at home it's 8614 and I always do that math problem 86% of the time with families 14% of the ti with us I've always say superintendent you got to maximize your 14% cuz 14% is very low 86% of the time they with families so we need to engage families more to be involved in the educational process I've also heard from the board uh related to things using technology like improving our website and doing uh those kinds of things um uh and so we're looking for ways to do that we're going to make a presentation here and kick it off before I do that though we've also done some other things internally to kind of promote this idea and the Strategic plan goal goal three which is uh Karen McMill where are you Karen McMillan was in school choice we moved her over to family community engagement and hired somebody different for the school choice position we also uh had a position that we left unfilled last year but now we filled with Paula Summers which some of you might know Paula Paul is kind of like music royalty yes she is if you go out to Oakleaf and there's a musical Thing a whole Summers family is there that's exactly Mike is the band director at the junior high she was the music person at OB the son is well they're all talented musicians and anytime there's an event it's like the Von trops one of the things that we looking at is different ways of Engagement through volunteerism so there's a whole volunteer program uh and that that of course leads to uh additional Safety and Security protocols related to volunteers and and all of that so all that infrastructure is going on behind the scenes uh and with that introduction I'm going to turn it over to to Terry Dennis um we we' now got a brief presentation to introduce her yes all right so Terry Dennis community relations so we were technically Communications Department and now we're going to be the community relations department and IT solutions so this is an agenda item that you will see today which button did I press okay all right so quick little introduction of what we call ourselves as a Communications Cadre so when I came into this role two years ago I realized how closely Communications and it works together so we made a point to create a codre to have monthly meetings so that everybody was on the same page with Communications and it so in our communic community relations team we have me Terry we also have Trudy boy who's our graphic designer Karen McMillan for family community engagement and Paula Summers who is working on volunteer stuff right now and I um pretty sure principal Martin was going to like slash my tires at the July uh recruitment fair when he was like you took her and she's fabulous so she has hit the ground running our its members we have Ethan Karen who's in our Cadre director of its Sabrina Thomas our supervisor of Technology services and Linda shriber who is ill today but she's our technology integration specialist and our Web Master that handles our website we also have KY watt as part of our Cadre so that we always have the superintendent leadership voice as well so part of the reason I'm talking to you today is we noticed we have four challenges when it becomes uh when it comes to our communication and it s world so I wanted to kind of preface those challenges with you guys right now so you can kind of get the backstory of what we've noticed over the past year since we've worked on goal three the Strategic plan the first one is we do not currently have a tool that allows for direct messaging for communication between teachers coaches club members and parents or even students so we just we don't we have Synergy mail and that's how we've been communicating we've had Personnel that have used uh non-approved items before like our band or remind or JoJo app and Ethan's Team Works really really hard to block those at the district level due to State Statute and safety requirements that we have when it comes to data protection of our students and public records we also know from talking to a lot of our parents most of them are working and they have their personal email linked through Synergy so they are not throughout the day able to get on their personal email to see if there is a message to communicate back and forth they also cannot sometimes just leave a meting to pick up a robo call if something is going on but they have said they have the ability to look at an app or a text message another challenge that we have right now would be our website that is something that um this board has expressed as well in previous workshops on our end with the website we do not have a way to streamline communication all synced nicely from our meta which would be something that Serena and I work on with our social media to our website which was what Linda would be doing as the Web Master so for an example if we have a hurricane and we're all sitting at the EOC and we know that school's going to close it is not as seamless as click as a button to get all of that message across 43 School Pages The District page and 43 social me social media sites and then a robo call it is definitely a divide and conquer amongst the team and so having an option with a platform to integrate all of that would be very crucial on our website in something as an emergency or School closure another thing that we always have to work through with Linda is ensuring that our website is ADA compliance and that is a lot of work when you're thinking of all the different pages of 43 websites and making sure everything works for screen readers and everything and then um as our elll population continues to grow in Clay County we have a need for language translations in our website we want to make sure that when families are coming in and relocating to Clay County that they find our website to be a welcoming place that they can understand and support their child with through language translations our other two challenges that we have would uh also be our student and staff digital safety we want a way to get out our lockdown rooc calls faster right now we do that through h a Blackboard which often times is a principle than having to go and get their laptop and recorded through that system we also want to have a way with our attendance campaign to have our attendance notifications more timely and then something that is very important to our team would be the stricter laws surrounding youth using social media so right now a lot of our schools especially our high schools do a promotion of whether it's parking details yearbook on sale homecoming tickets they put a lot of that information on their social media pages and if you're a child whose parent doesn't allow you to have social media you could feel like you have missed out on the information we've also um had a discussion with several parents where they themselves didn't see it because it's lost in their algorithm and they don't want to have to hunt down their child social media pages and if they're following the right one or a fake Community page that was made that we have to then go and work and shut down so we've definitely really had that as a concern that having promoting so much of our information on social media we realize we're losing a big part of our community who is not using social media or do not want their children to use social media and another major safety concern would be the oversight of communication between student and teacher conversations and parent and teacher conversations so as a Cadre our team would never encourage an adult a staff member to give out their cell phone number to a student can I say that 100% always happens whether it's in the coaching world or in a club World when it comes to band that is something we don't monitor because we don't have access to that but if we give a platform for that to happen then we then have oversight with that as well and it's the same thing when it comes to teachers where we would say hey teachers we don't want you giving out your personal cell phone numbers to parents when we give you another option of how you could communicate and then finally last but not least um Miss Gill you have three children so you might experien this I have two it is the um let me go back one it's the abundance of apps there's so many things that we are told you got to download this you got to follow this so we have included in the back of your packet our current communication tools it's a long list if you see all the current communication I don't know why it's still flipping don't know what's happening is it me okay we're back so the current communication tools document you guys will see at the end of of your packet and that is right now currently all of our existing technologies that our Cadre Team Works diligently to keep up and running to keep staff members trained on and looking to have a seamless integrated adopted all-inclusive communications platform would be the dream for everybody par and staff all right so as a cauer we never make decisions in a silo we value Community input and so we went ahead and did in March of 2024 a communication survey so we had over a th000 respondents uh specifically about would they use a feature like text messaging we had 60% of our teachers respond yes they would we had 76% of our athletic coaches would and 64% of our extracurricular sponsors and I would like to also point out for this Miss Kidwell that it if a teacher does not want to have an app for communication on their personal device they don't have to because there is a desktop option so Jen will talk to us about that as well so we know that could have been one of the concerns Ki represents uh us on the superintendent's advisory council with superintendent Broski so she had two presentations on two platforms that do very similar things that would be apy and parents Square they had them in April and May surveyed uh the teachers that we have on that committee and overwhelmingly of 73% we had the teachers say they would like AP another thing that we did as a Cadre is we know that when you talk to um a lot of different companies we always get like a sales pitch and we wanted to make sure that we heard it from the horse's mouth so we actually reached out to our partners or like colleagues in the district throughout the state to see what are you using how are using it what did you like so we met with the communications and instructional leaders from putham County who have been using AP for years now and have raved about it um personally made a call to Sarasota County as well they just launched AP this last spring raved about it and then we also talked to Columbia County who's been using parents Square so we made sure that we talked to people who were the actual end users of the product we wanted to know how did the roll out go in your community what were things that you would have done differently from the roll out what was it like working with the vendor what would feedback be so we made sure to go ahead and get all of that information so based on the survey results our work with the advisory Council and reaching out to our colleagues across the state our recommendation for the school board would be to utilize AP as our communication and website platform and move away from Blackboard which was acquired by final site which is who we do right now our Robo calls with and our current Google sites which right now is managed by Lind driver also our total estimated cost that we are spending right around now is $153,000 to work the communications and websites that we have going on now so you will see the cost differential in the agenda item and with AC Our Hope would be taking all of those tools that you have on that one page and consolidating it into one integrated solution for K through 12 and the person who's going to be able to take uh take you through much better than I can and hopefully this will be something she would be training us on um in the next coming months would be uh jy's Ragsdale she's our senior National Partnerships manager at apy she's all the way here from Arkansas and then when she's done I'll kind of close up with a road map and a timeline for you guys I always like to say I bring party favors sometimes it's cookies sometimes it's other things today it's just like something that you can in this day and age something can take home in your hand I think is a is a great thing where everything's zoom and digital and we don't have pictures of our children anymore or anything like that they all just live on these things so um yeah I would love to be able to talk you through a little bit about what we do and what these tools that Terry was talking about actually look like fantastic you see the phone screen up there first of all yes my name is Jen ragale um just a quick backstory on me I do work for AP in Little Rock Arkansas which is where AP was started about 10 years years ago I also happened to be one of ap's first clients I was a communications director for about 11 years so I like to think I I've been there it's kind of like a third child I've been there from day one in some capacity either working there um or as a client so really excited about what APG does I mean you know you have an amazing team thank you board superintendent brosy and and team for allowing me to be here to tell you a little bit you have an amazing team that's done a lot of great due diligence um that it's been their tenacity on Research ing other clients and talking to people has been fantastic so it's been really refreshing to work with and I love that um after does want to come in and streamline the way that your tools look on on a line item budget I know as a board that's important to you guys but our biggest vision and what sets us apart from other companies is the way that we want to engage your families in the community so you know that the fact that it's now this communication engagement team Community engagement team I love that as well so it's going to be one of those things that we want to make it easier for not just your families and parents and Guardians to be able to see all the amazing things that Clay countyy is doing but also in this day and age the community has to see that as well and sometimes that's where a little bit of a disconnect can come in and what parents can see versus what the community can see so first I'll show you this I think this will kind of bring to light one of Terry's points this is what an average parents folder for school communicating applications can look like at any given moment all great you know products all great ways to try to communicate with a school or a coach or a club sponsor or a teacher um most of these are behind a password or credentialing in and that's great we want that for student data privacy we don't want our parents to have to have a whole folder to keep up with their kids though and then God forbid they have more than one um the other part of this is that if you'll notice if it's credential and it's something geared specifically to parents then what are you not reaching you're not reaching the community so at after we try to put that kind of all in one place and I want to kind of show you an example to show you to illustrate what that looks like so for example this is the Sarasota County app that AP built so first and foremost you'll see I have a place to customize what you know notifications that I want to get what do I want to see on a regular basis I can pick my school I can pick the district I can pick everything I want to see so immediately we're allowing the parent to tailor what their view is but again now think about this I haven't logged into anything this is all public facing so members of your community even Aunts Uncles grandparents or just the taxpayers that have zero connection to the district at all can come in and see what are the great things that Klay County's doing so we build native apps why is that important a native app is important because it's not going to drive you outside of the app it's going to keep you in the native app and everything in this app is going to be in the language that the person's phone is in so translation becomes obsolete because we're meeting them where they are because it's natively built when they go into the app store they're seeing apps in their phone's language they're seeing everything in their phone's language so that's a really crucial part of a native built app also just being able to engage them and it connect and harness the power of the iOS so for example this is the District page at Sarasota if I'm wanting to come in and um go to this meeting where we select the science textbooks I can add this to my calendar directly amen I can pull up turn BYT directions now y'all I'm going to be wondering later today or tomorrow why I need to go to now I'm going to be getting on an airplane what oh I that um being able to pull up you know turn by turn directions either from your Apple Maps or your Google Maps all these things that are truly going to harness what we have become so reliant on these devices to do and that's the power of the iOS we want people to be able to see all that's going on we'll go back to this little menu we also want to be able to see how to reach out to somebody if I want to reach out to the registar and I need to let something be known now I can call directly or email directly and all this is still happening again without having to credential into anything this is all forward- facing and engaging your community but last but not least and what's always kind of my wheelhouse is what actuallyy does different is we natively build in all the positive stories that people are telling so we don't want your families or your students to have to be reliant on social media to go and see all these things and that's really what's happened in the last 5 or 10 years we've got these beautiful websites we're all building which are very hard to keep constantly up to date and keep fresh and they get stale and they get stagnant very quickly but they're able to go to social media and see all these great stories like first day school and back to school piics and a great teacher parent moment or a great teacher student moment but why does that not live anywhere else and even better why does that not live in our brand why do we have to send them out to a third party to get this a third party we don't have any control of so we're really intentional in how we build out the way to engage with the community again we haven't credentialed into anything yet so you're saying all the great things that are happening looks like a teacher got flowers on the first day of school all of these things are showing up right here in the Branded District app and if I don't ever want to step foot on social media again I don't have to I think that's a big wi so but what's really interesting is that all the things that are in this app we don't want to give one more box to check to your teams you guys have great District employees and the last thing we want to do is say hey this is a great way to reach people so let's give you one more box to check let's give you one more place to go update things and spin a plate so the way that we've designed it is that everything that shows up in this app is also showing up on the homepage of your website that we'll build out but it's also going to show up in all the social medias in case these people are married to Facebook and we all know there are those people so we want to be able to hit everything with a lack of effort just by the push of one button so now let's move on to how can this help your parents and your families you know the constituents that are your most um important priority here so this not this little button down here that you see at Sarasota as you can see it says rooms so this is kind of where the Paradigm Shift happens from Community engagement and public facing to direct Community to direct engagement with the families I don't have a child in Sarasota County but I do have a login here for our lovely little demo app so I can show you now what this looks like on this side of thing so as a parent logs in to Rooms they're going to be able to credential in either with their face either with a um getting a putting in their phone number and getting a password to do a two-factor authentication or just a token but they're going to only get at one time when you guys come on board with ap they're not going to have to do it every school year it's automatically going to follow their students through all of the things and when they come in every single time they're going to see however many lovely kiddos they have they're going to see all those kiddos not just classes but clubs Sports anything like like that that they're involved in so it gives all of those teachers additionally coaches Club sponsors another safe way to communicate with families that they may not have had before and might have been the ones that had to go Rogue and give out a phone number or or whatever so as a parent if I'm clicking in I'm going to check on this kiddo I'm going to I can go into one class within the class the first thing you're going to see is the stream so this is going to be kind of all the global announcements to the whole class so feel trip permission form weekly announcements what's going on picture day test coming up here's a Quizlet to study and fun things that are happening in the classroom again just a good way to kind of have good rapport positive word of mouth or what's happening but where it gets really significant is that you have the means to do the two-way communication right here within the Branded app there's full administrative oversight so these teachers don't have to worry about getting accused of saying something that they didn't say or these students don't have to worry about you know what's happening over here all of this is going to be able to be seen by high level Administration and it's got that oversight so those teachers are protected those students are protected and that's exactly the way it should be but you're able to go in you can have this group message communicate with the parents type some messages go back and forth it it like again that translation feature is going to be automatic to whatever language their phone is set to you can even go and see who the participants are so you can see who's linked as a guardian to each of these students because we all know in this day and age a same last name doesn't always guarantee somebody goes with somebody so we want to make sure the teachers always know who it is that's connected to but then they can communicate back and forth in a two-way private manner the students can't initiate conversations with other students the teachers aren't initiate conversations with other uh teachers it's all happening as a parent and teacher and student Dynamic so just so so you know how that works the other factors that are in here especially for our younger grades who might have been into the class dojo things like that they're really big on the buzz word is PBIS so positive behavior um and it's a it's a way to give points it's a way to kind of interact in the classroom and show all the different things that are happening send notes on a on a lower level like Elementary School students on how they're doing for those parents that we know tend to be a little bit more helicopter is cuz the babies are younger and they want to see how are they doing they worked hard today they tried something new they were um igniting curiosity all of those things so we've really tried to tailor it as something that can be used for you know preschool all the way up till 12th grade effectively and efficiently so that's kind of the broad overview of the things that are in here class info is going to be kind of the syllabus it can be your office hours it can kind of be your background your history anything that you as or as the teacher is wanting to put out there can be out there so so this is all going to be what the parents can see once they log in to that room side of things so we've covered both the kind of the uh Community engagement side of things and then also covered what it's going to look like for one to one communication let me get over to this screen again and I'll go to Showcase where does this come from because I know that's everyone's first question right so the back end of what the platform looks like and what makes it so great and easy to use is that everything's in one place the platform is called thrillshare I know it's a crazy name um when uh teachers are coming in to work on things this is what they're going to see on this side of things these are the classrooms that they see here's that language arts class that we were looking at how they can go in and create the messages attach the materials throw that behavior up on a shared screen in the classroom give all the little monsters little points and things like that so this can be a really interactive way that they're doing it but getting into the broad overview of what Terry was talking about and how to get things out is what I want to transition to now so this is the main part of thrillshare this is going to be more on a district type level this is called thrillshare obviously we're going to share out some Thrills um but what this looks like is when they do have something that they want to post either a great story or that you do have to get out something you know a hurricane warning a school closure a lockdown any anything like that this is what makes their lives easier because from their desktop or from their phones they can come in here and type the message one time you know school is closing now obviously we're going to have more warning than that but it can go you can go with the push of one button out to Facebook Twitter Instagram the live feed which is I mentioned is the homepage of the website and the homepage of the app they can send a push notification which actually gets through statistically faster than those SMS text so when it's an emergency we're going to get them fast on their phones but then also your text alerts your voice call which is either recorded or um your voice or superintendent brok's voice whoever's voice they know and then an email and you can do it all with the push of one button and not just districtwide but if Terry gets in there and they're like hey we've got to close every single School in so instead of having to get a hold of all the principles and wait for them all to update then she can literally go in there again from her phone or from her computer and say select all and then hit every school and District all the social media Pages homepages of websites homepages of app and everything else I'll show you a little bit here Sarasota real fast I'll pull it up because since we looked at their um pulling that up can I ask you a question absolutely as far as like the robo call or whatever that goes on there is this all included like every every button that you put out it includes the text it includes the phone so it's not additional charges yep no it's all one package yeah okay yes so you can send out as many as you want yes unlimited so the challenge now is we have to do it individually by school you can't just press one button all and I know the breakdown of like every text you sending could be money every voice call money so that's why I wanted to make sure that yeah yeah so we fill that in and we learned a long time ago when we wanted to work with districts of all sizes that if we just factored it in um with a simple per student cost then that allowed us the equity to be able to work with districts of 130,000 or I think the largest we work with in Florida is Duval County but then we have small rural districts in southern states that may even have less than 100 kids so sorry this is uh not loading exactly but um Sarasota as uh Sarah said just rolled out their website last year this is what it looks like you'll be able to see all the great things you know that that parents need to see the upcoming events and all of that the great things that are going on but if you'll notice down here this section that says good news this is that same post that's the same thing that we just saw in the app and then it's going to be the same thing parents can see on social media and everywhere else so that consistent information getting out everywhere um is what we really want to do we want to meet people wherever they go but we want want them to see all the great things that are happening so um the other factor I know that was mentioned in the in the bullet points for the things that are important to you guys is that translation mode so all of the websites are fully translatable all you have to do is come in and click on whatever language you want to translate it into and since it's running a little slow it may be a little bit of a delay but it's simply that button up at the top and then every family can transition the whole website into their native language and be able to see everything that's going on that when you say native language how many languages are you talking everything now you can tailor what you want the options to be it looks like they've chosen about nine so I mean obviously you're going to know kind of what your demographics are within your District um there's some districts on the East Coast that that drop down is 20 or 30 D you know it gets a little bit more robust so we can put as many in there as you want in there so um and then you can they can even search for more if it's just a one off or something like that but we want give that opportunity to reach everybody where they are we want to help with engaging the community and then the families as a whole and give them one place and then you as a board in a district we want to give you guys one place instead of having a bunch of different tools I have another question from a teacher perspective um Class Dojo was very popular Ethan no I know it wasn't your fault um there are times when let's say I as a teacher see something that's going on very positively in my class I see a young man helping somebody whatever and I want to click a quick picture and send it to that parent yes and give them the reason why he just scored a couple of points or whatever the case might be are pictures allowed in this as well yes so pictures are allowed in it and then the thrill share application I mentioned there is a mobile version as well so my superintendent loved to be able to walk up and down the halls and snap that quick picture of something that was happening with his phone and type in you know check out you know the third grade helpers of the week or something and then create that there is also a waiting for approval so it really opens you up to allowing people to tell the story of the district through their own lens through that lens of a teacher I used a lot of students I used my yearbook staff my publication team stuff like that because there's just nothing like seeing it through the lens of the Native Storyteller and the way thrillshare is set up it will give your community engagement team the ability to kind of lay eyes on it before it goes out forward facing um so even my dear sweet superintendent when he would create a post it still come to me for approval but if it's just between a parent and a teacher yes does it still have that pause for somebody else to if it's in that direct two-way communication then that's that's automatic you know that's that's an audience of one so but if it is something that's going to go out schoolwide or even bigger districtwide I'm thinking when the child was driving stopped off they were crying it is now 10:00 and this child has a huge grin on their face and they're happy and they're playing and click yeah Mom he's fine or she's fine yeah and she and it's very easy if they're comfortable using their personal devices which I know most are but you know then they can just pull that out snap that and be able to send it seamlessly right there with that that so well I just have to say I was a secondary teacher but yes I prayed for you and you came um I I went to the this research after I read the agenda MH and as a secondary teacher if there's someone not in your class and you knew they were supposed to be there this is for me I did Point systems for reading um readings always a real trouble spot getting kids motivated the fact that you don't just have to keep everything up on a wall and then text each parent or email each parent or the fact that it keeps track of all that and on serious issues also inviting people making parents feel more welcome in your room inviting them to your room um I mean literally I knew there had to be something out there better than what we were doing and I just want to tell you I was floored yesterday when I went to your website well I'll tell you I prayed for AP G but we didn't have the two-way classroom communication when I used it as a communications director so I must not have prayed hard enough cuz I still had to lay awake at night and worry about not necessarily the teachers but the coaches were always the thorn in my side well I coach track I mean it's an issue bless their hearts that's what we say in sou bless their hearts they were the ones coming back on a bus that's probably going to break down or they're stuck in traffic and they're the ones that had to get parents so they're the ones that would be like hey join this group text you know that I've got which brings up another question related to that um does synergy communicate then with ap so that I don't have to generate theist of students in my class correct for math science grou and so they talk the communicate they will they will generate the list of not just the parents but the GU but all of the parents yeah because yeah Mom and Dad are he mom is married to this guy and dad is married to this woman and they all have to be communicated with etc etc etc and something that would be a positive when you do a rollover assistant rollover like this is it would help us catch a lot of um those pieces in Synergy where there might be some you know outdated emails and phone numbers and start getting some more updated correct contact information what about grades this would not be for I mean I see up there though you can see the the sections mhm so it's going to sync directly with their Google classroom but we will not that's the one thing that we won't replace is that learning management system the grade system the um you know the the sis that houses all of that that that's that's not a cookie that we've wanted to to cut into um Sis's are you know that that student information system and the data that they hold there's just so there's so much there and but we do syn directly with that so whatever just all the courses yeah so this is what the teacher is going to see when she comes in and needs to be able to you know put things in for the classes it's just going to streamline their view to just see just theirs um and then like you said if they if that behavior you know the younger kiddos and stuff like that if it's something that needs to be something that they even use interactively in the classroom and share on a screen and everyone's got their little emoji and you can see what their points are and it becomes just a fun competitive kind of environment in the classroom there's nothing stopping a parent from asking why so and so has a zero I mean all of that conversation that takes place around a Synergy grade can happen in this it would happen in rooms okay and I think also if I may J real quick one of the things that I love about it from like our social media management standpoint and I know Mr brosy had told him that was one of my huge selling points is when you're looking at it on the app it looks very familiar to if you're using like a Facebook page or something the feed looks very similar but um at Sabrina and I call it it's more of like a billboard this is like when you're driving by and you see it and you're like okay I needed to know that um I didn't need to know that your books are on sale and I see a comment that the chicken nuggets today were horrible cuz that's sometimes what happens is that do we get comments on some of the things that derail the entire post of what's needed to know and so this is just a really great way um selfishly on my end to just continue to share the information that needs to be known without necessarily like if you wanted to have a comment like that that is great maybe share it through rooms with us in a different meod not everybody wants to know about the chicken yes Jen yes um it looks like a wonderful package I've got one question and call me negative Manny you're fine um tell me again who has access to this mhm capacity let's narrow that down well I worry about somebody on the outside and and I worry about security right and information we give out way too much information about where we're at every day what we're doing and that just it's something I have to ask so the things that are on the forward facing again that Community engagement side of the app before we had the credential in and the only way they can credential in is if they live in your student information system and are linked up to a student as a guardian they have no other way to see any of the direct student data unless they have that and there'll be a process as we go through the training where every Guardian that should have it will be given a token and they're able to set up that rooms for the first time which will then like I said follow the students throughout their years that forward facing side in terms of what's happening on the calendar you know what they're eating for lunch um and those positive stories that are happening anybody can see that but it's no different information than what you would already have on the homepage of your website or on one of your social media Pages for the district or a school so the only things that can be consumed by everyone are going to be the same things that are already being consumed by everyone just now in another platform and if there's some children that parents don't want their picture taken and yes so I had some of those and that was that's another really important aspect of having that approval system um when you do create something as Global as this to streamline and make lives easier it can also cause complications cuz wait now it's going everywhere at one time and you want someone to be able to lay eyes on and it may not at a campus level it may be the Principal it may be a media specialist but it's going to be somebody who would know that child can't be photographed that child but they're already assessing that again on a website on a social media level anyway I have two questions um we're still keeping par view right right cuz that is what y so all well I'm just making sure that like are we going to train our teachers that if we're going to use this communication we're we'll go to that app for for grades and stuff but if we're going to communicate can we make sure we're doing it on this app versus oh well I put it on this the parent view yeah but I'm now paying attention to this I didn't see that on parent view so is there going to be the need to reflect this CH so one of the things that that'll be uh semi of a challenge is sometimes people don't want to make change right so people don't want to give up an app that they're currently using the purpose to streamlining is to truly streamline that means you have to give something up in order to streamline this will become the uh the official communication tool of Clay County schools and not have to be communicated through policy of the board that this is the official that's what I want to make sure cuz I don't want to as a parent I don't want to be like like you said have those teach you can't just add one more thing and then say we're streamlining right and then be like here's your options and then they're like oh why I put it on Center or the parent view and I'm like but I don't check that anymore unless it's for grades or whatever but then my other question is is forms I know on parent view when you sign on you have all your forms like your clinic form your library form all that stuff is that going to go on here now or are we going to leave that on parent view no that'll stay on comp okay that's what cuz it has filter forms and stuff right here consent forms has that option filp forms would be a little different so those forms would be the ones that we are like statutorily had like registration requirement forms so that would be that piece but yes so if you are doing a field trip form for something like that we now will have a universal way of having it going out so maybe saying like class forms will go on communication and actual District form your registration type form okay um so I guess my my question I actually have a different view as a parent and as a teacher taking away a whole bunch of apps and giving us one thing is not that bad of a change like I don't think it's going to be a fight change right like we've made quite a few changes but I think this is like the best change when it comes to families going from I mean even now I'm trying to help my grandkids I can't you know it's I could it could be my age I'm just saying even now it's a struggle I was in the system I'm out of the system I have grandkids it's a struggle trying to figure that out so I think this is an easy change and a good change we we heard that universally when we talked to the uh to the teacher advisory Council that their parents also so they're like hey why is it that we're loading up on apps and everybody requires different apps as a parent I want this and then they turned around and said let's look at it as a teacher okay we want streamline too and so uh I I was just simply commenting that the class dojo lover of the year is not going to give up Dojo easily that's just the that's just the right EAS this is easier than Dojo you don't have to load everything up you don't have to do it but I mean this is a better platform for rewarding and behavior all agree with that I think it's his point is just the thought of at the beginning of the school year having to learn one more thing when I already know this app I think that's the what you're going to have to brings up the question when when would this I think that's a great segue a great segue yeah let me me comment one thing and then I'll get Terry to come up she's got a great timeline and then there's a timeline in your handouts I will clarify and kind of expound on so to try to streamline the way that parents do Embrace and engage something new as I mentioned we build the apps l so we're not building a shell that's just driving you know parents to 100 different places but when it does come to those um sis or when it does come to a parent portal like that to simplify the message that you're sending to parents we want to give you this branded resource so we want you to be able to tell families no matter what if you pick up your phone if if they want to do this you go to the Clay County District app because what you can do and I pulled up Deval real fast as an example they will drive everyone to the dbal county app but if you'll notice they've linked because it's a native built app and we can build it however you want it we can put your portal into this app so you can still streamline the way that you position it to families of this is your one- stock shop and this is within your brand you don't have to go download anything from the App Store except your brand Clay County schools and then they can come in here here and we can get them over to the places that they need to go and credential in and the ways that they need to credential in as seamlessly as we can we'll try to remove as many steps and clicks and barriers as as humanly possible so if that makes sense kind of on that we still want to try to give parents one source of Truth and we love it when it's in your brand and then the website is built with the district Personnel like all together yes they they'll work with us and figuring out what you want and don't y y yeah I'll pull you back up ser you can and then I'll head on one thing too um this yeah that you mentioned that is kind of like a behind the scenes of what we do in our Cadre but we worked really really hard um each summer during our Leadership Institute with training our principles and assistant principles um about personal identifiable information with our students so we've had trainings about like the type of pictures we should be taking making sure we're not putting students full names um not putting students birthdays in the past sometimes people would do things where they would like sell a birthday shout out on social media and Ethan and I were like having a little panic attack so we I mean even handwriting a child's handwriting with their name on a piece of paper is technically pii so we've worked really really hard these past two summers um in our Leadership Institute to make sure that when we post pictures we absolutely want to showcase the great things that are happening in our classrooms but we want to make sure that we are mindful to First protect a child so that's big big uh big thing in our department all right so real quick a road map to Next Step we are here at the board workshop with um my gosh our last week of August is already this week with next week being September 5th with this presented as hopefully an approval vote and with that would be a build out of first the websites from September to December which would be us working directly with the app team to get all 43 school websites and the district website up and running for a launch with our app and the websites in January like a happy new year new look new app for you to download mod um they are great with helping with the marketing the video and everything on that end as well and so we would really then spend the spring time getting people accustomed with the look and the feel of the app doing some training with our principles on how to use the app we will not bring on rooms though right at the same time the reasoning for that is halfway through the year you already have teachers that have a you know however their jve is going with their Communications right now and we don't want to stop in January and be like no no no no pull away from that we don't want you to we don't want you to do that anymore so we're going to just ride with if you've been using Synergy mail um we would like to not ride if you've been using a non-approved district app though umil and then we will take the time over the summer to train our staff on rooms also that gives us the spring as a Cadre to work with you guys on a policy to work with um Miss K we want to talk about like best practices for teachers because we do know we want teachers to feel like they have office hours and at 8:00 at night they're not answering back and forth a two-way text message we want to really protect also people's contractual hours but still communicate effectively and efficiently and then our goal would be to launch rooms for our parents and Guardians in August of 2025 and I know um as a parent you get hit with all those things in the beginning of the year to sign so this would literally be you have been using now the app by this time for almost 8 to nine months as a parent so the only thing you're going to see different is the little toggle on the bottom to Rooms you're going to get the signin code from your child's teacher and you'll be able to start two-way communication and have a is this CVA too virtual school yes it's we do have I believe CVA in there as well okay and this replaces Google Classroom you as a teacher you could still use some Google Classroom because you could do some working and presentation with it but as like a parent having to go in and answer and respond to things through Google Classroom yes you would do it through room students may still need to class yes it will sync for the yes for the te because we do know sometimes there's um oh it syncs to Google Classroom the teachers if they've already got things out there that are created that they're just duplicating and using from year to year it's going to sink on the teacher side all I ask and and I know several parents well even teachers sometimes which I know even after the principls communicate they still have no idea why we do what we do sometimes especially parents um cuz I know that if the the new uh systems that are going in the high schools right now even teachers were like what why do we waste our money on this you know what I mean but they don't understand why we're doing what we're doing how it's an all-in-one system so all I ask as a board member and maybe you guys agree or don't don't agree but from January on or even before if you felt like it could we send out flyers um maybe maybe some of these communications that we already use like Peach jar all that stuff say hey parents just preparing you um we are going to have um a new communication device that will replace all of your other apps just educating them on we're trying to make your life easier this is how we're going to do it um just like three little bullet points whatever nothing crazy nothing long and extravagant but um and preparation so they they understand it's an all-in-one system we're replacing it making their lives easier everything will sink and Link and that um they're just aware and maybe hit them like two or three times oh yeah so that they get the message that hey this is what's coming and this is why we're doing what we're doing and why we spent taxpayer dollars du to this yes 100% And I know we work with Jen as well like a lot of those documents we do with peach jar they have one minute videos that are like very helpful that are like here's where you go and download the app here's how you put your preferences here's how you do this and it's very very instructional so those are things that we will also be including um on our social media we'll be able to send that out through all the school social media through Peach draw we do robo calls where it's Mr Broski's voice as well because they have this roll out plan I'm sure oh it is it is great and they brand it for us and everything yeah because as a two of two in our little branding section here I was like oh my gosh how do I have that by December and just without you we have a great marketing team and they want to make they want to make it the best roll out in best launch is humanly possible um and we've done it over 4,500 times now that's how many districts across the us we work with so as far as platforms go that you can access this app on um say like can you can a parent or a student access it on a laptop or is it does it have to be a mobile device there is a for teachers they can get for teachers they for teachers and administrators but I mean there's nothing really that um I mean a parent could get in on the room side so student could get it on the room side let's say they got grounded from their phone they're going to be able to log in and look at that on their desktop they're not going to be able to say I didn't get a message teacher because I right so if they don't have access to device all of it can be done on the platform as well now in terms of some of the stories and sharing and stuff like that then you would just go to the website or something different like that but in terms of the communication tools yes that you can actually would they go to Thrill share on the um edgy rooms is the entire rooms platform okay um thrill share is just going to be something that your um teachers and administrators see the other thing that the really big thing about branding and how we want them to be recognizing just Clay County your parents will never know what thrill share is your parents will never see thrillshare your parents will never have to download a thrillshare app everything your parents engage with is just going to be Clay County okay so if they go to the Klay County District website on a laptop like like the instance child gets the phone taken away they go to the Clay County website how do they access the classroom from that website they'll uh their token that they're given at the beginning of the year to sign in and get the app they'll also be able to go and log in with that same information through the yeah all right yeah any other questions all right so let me attempt to bring it all back so so let's start two years ago we we surveyed our all of our community we had three Community meetings State all kinds of input we decided that there's five goals our strategic plan it's got to set up something later on in the the morning goal three family and Community engagement nine months ago right this is there there's some intentional strategy behind there a group of people the Cadre sounds like the Mafia That's the they got together we're looking at a variety of things and one of the one of the goals was to streamline communication because we were hearing from teachers as well as families that this was a challenge that needs to be we researched all of that two major competitors did the due diligence the team favored um apy and and Jen and the product that you see here you see the timeline for that the only other thing that I would kind of point out is that we would be reducing the cost of the existing communication tools if you're looking at the net increase which would be a good question you're looking at a net increase of 75 but you also get the websites the rooms and all the other features that are involved there when it comes to the communication tool so wanted to kind of present it like hey this is like this actually started 2 years ago and when we decided family community engagement will be one of our divised strategic plan goals then 9 months ago with the Cadre forming and then down to the point where it is now seems like the plan is pretty realistic in the time frame and so they've done a great job so any other questions because Jen you're you're welcome to stay to hear about reading and if you like I mean you know you can hang out if you want but I believe you can also so we'll give you the option so thank you so much for being here today that's awesome okay let's segr my favorite topic reading okay so one of the things that happened in the last um uh board meeting was you know one of the things that happened was board members said hey there was some discussion about vocabulary some discussion about reading practices the board members said hey we'd like to learn more information so a lot of thought went into that we're like okay let's do a presentation I'll read it the challenge is that presentation should really be about two to three days I say on reading and then we said okay we got 30 minutes so in 30 minutes time what are you going to say about reading related to that so just to kind of set it up you know I can I can say this uh very passionately one of the things that I'm most proud of in my time in this position is what we've done in the area of literacy literacy is the very Foundation of all learning and therefore it takes a you know goes a notch up when it comes to importance and I know the science people are going to you know probably have for people but it really is the foundation of all learning so uh one of the things that amazed me becoming superintendent is that we really had no support system in place when it came to promoting uh literacy across the district previously we had one person in all of Clay County schools that represented reeden in that position was eliminated uh prior uh and so when I became superintendent I said okay let's let's talk to the literacy folks and everyone just kind of looked at one another like who are you talking to like who are you talking about like there is nobody in literacy and and through the leadership of of of uh Heather Cheeto and others we said okay we need to we need to really look at supports like what are we doing with the very Foundation of learning is the ability to read right so from there several things happened over the years but I thought um I would just kind of point out to you that kind of a simplistic way of looking at reading and what makes a effective reading program is a variety of supports that have to take place and the example that I think we can all relate to is if you if you were making a pie and that pie had five ingredients in the pie if you take away one of those ingredients it ain't the same pie that might sound really simplistic but you're going to see through the presentation how there's a strategic plan to deal with literacy in which all five of those ingredients are necessary in order to have success in literacy so I don't mind saying when you look at success in literacy we went from in the 20s to 12 to now currently 8th in the State of Florida that would mean that 59 other districts across the state would love to have the data that Clay County has so when you also look at at that you cannot deny that uh there's room for growth I mean that's the beauty of of assessment is you're never you've never reached Nana you're never ever there and so you have to continually work to make things better for that so I'm going to turn it over to to Melanie first right and Melanie is going to kind of lead us through this but you can see we have a bunch of other guests here cuz now this is literacy in place count these are all the people involved now and they're all going to give you their their best couple minutes I he said I'm mie mckyer um I'm proud and privileged to be the supervisor of reading and we were very excited to be um invited to come today and we have many hours that we could spend talking about literacy around people that are just as passionate about literacy as we are but we've tried to hone it in to show some of the supports that we have in literacy currently in CL County so our topics that we thought we would focus on today are what's the progression of literacy like in Clay County over the past several years what are some of the guiding factors for decision- making what are our core literacy supports and then what are our strategic literacy supports so we are under the leadership of Heather Tito and uh we have the team here today to introduce different aspects of literacy for each department so we have Lorraine mcdal who is a VPK specialist Dana Sao is Ela Elementary specialist Kelsey Ivy is the ELA Ray School specialist Michelle s is intensive reading specialist and Rebecca bilot is the secondary Ela specialist and we have Cynthia Broadwell our administrative support who really keeps the back engine working so that we can all do the things that we need to do I never point so as Mr brosi spoke in 2021 2022 is when we really under his leadership formed that cohesive reading department and then this is Al the year that k 2 adopted the best standards but 3 through 12 were still under the previous standards as they were still being assessed with FSA on those standards then the next year oops I went two years ahead then the next year kada 12 adopted then the district literacy team started to meet to become more strategic about what are the priorities what are the goals and what are the needs of literacy in the district and we also defined our multi-tiered system of support as we are all operating in a multi-tiered system of support then the next year is my most exciting year because this was my first year as the supervisor of reading and we really this year really honed in on intensive reading in secondary and wanting to make it more diagnostic for students students were placed based on their needs and the curriculum was there to support those needs based on that and then here we are in this year and we're going to go through some of our priorities for this year so what is decision making like for literacy in Clay County honestly it starts in this room it's really taking the priorities the goals that we want to make as a community towards literacy and then it always starts with this for us our best standards and you can tell I mean it's a well-loved book of information and then what are the state statutes and administrative code requiring making sure that we align with that Florida's formula for reading success the six components plus the four types of assessment plus instruction at tier one tier 2 and tier three this is a guideline to help us inform decisions and of course the science of reading we can't talk about literacy without that these days and I know scarber's rope is not the science of reading but it is a visual that we use because it's well known to remind us about being grounded in that it's also part of State Statute and we can't make decisions without teachers and students what is the data what are the feedback we have surveys that go out professional learning surveys with teachers surveys that students answer and that's the same that's true for families what are families telling us principal share things with us all the time sack me me sack meetings are held and they share what their goals are and then we have those surveys that go home as well another factor for decision making is structured literacy now the science of reading is the why we do things structured literacy is the what what are we teaching and the how are we going to teach it so direct and systematic Master oriented making sure that we have the data to drive instructional choices and really all of that is linked back to forward's formula for reading success you'll find all of those words in those instructional practices so we take all of this together and then what does it look like in the classroom and I know we all talk about scaros rope so much but really how is it related to everything that we just talked about for decision- making well honestly when you look at your standards each of the strands of the Rope is a standard each of those strands are also a component in the six components so then we take that information along with structured literacy and we determine what are the tools that best meet the needs for teachers for instruction and students for that instructional form of information information in order to strengthen that Strand and the same is true on the language side it is all tied to our best standards and language is one of the components and again it is aligning the resources that best meet the needs of those strands and you have to get the most effective form for that strand to really strengthen it and like you said this is all part of that recipe right so if I take any part out if I remove the standard or if I remove the tool then am I really doing Justice to that strand because the goal is to build those strands together to create that skilled learner so that's Elementary it is still true for secondary it is still foundational skills are tied to the standards are tied to um the tools that we Cho choose and this would be for intensive reading and our Ela classes so really looking at all of those strands and what do we need and what do we have in order to strengthen those and looking at our data to determine are these tools working do we need to adjust anything so another aspect is very we're very passionate about is professional learning through literacy and making sure that we have the courses required for statute right now two of our top ones that you would hear about are micro credentials which is offered through UF lassinger it's an online platform last year teachers were able to earn ,000 stiped for completing this um online learning and it also meets the require requirement for reading 40 for recertification and then letters which is that 300 hours of in-depth learning that meets the reading endorsement requirements and really it is transformational learning you you go through letters and you mourn a little bit about your first years of teaching you're going if I had only known this and we have our district professional learning where we take our district initi iives and make sure that everyone has um professional learning around that this summer we were really excited to light up literacy and we had um one day of light up literacy from K to 12 with 15 different opportunities and the feedback was phenomenal and they'd like for us to continue that next year and we can't talk about literacy without talking about family supports um I was really excited to hear all that this morning with the family supports because this is an area that we really need to be able to INF parents about so family literacy nights schools have family literacy nights but as a district we host one that coincides with Florida's um literacy week in January goes along with their theme it's a really great time last year was a butterfly book and we had butterflies running around it was wonderful with all of the activities we also have a read at home plan this is for K to five and it really hits on each of the components of reading for every grade level and it'll have parent information articles videos and then it'll have activities for students um to be able to do at home and currently it's available on our website it will start being pushed out for families and school newsletters online all of those places that would be great to hit one button and get it out to everybody and anytime in front of anybody I love to talk about the new world's reading initiative it is through UF lassinger in a partnership with the state and every student VPK to 5 could qualify for a free book delivered to your house you know how kids love to get mail or I did as a child I wanted to receive mail um they get a free book every month so you just have to score a level one or two on any fast progress monitoring so if I'm a kindergartener coming in that first time I have not had kindergarten yet I take my fast pm1 I'm not proficient a three or above yet I could qualif I would qualify for the new world's book now if I become proficient by the end of the year I still receive the books all the way through fifth grade and then online they have activities and videos for families and things for the children to do at home with the books so I love to talk about new worlds sorry so that's kind of the overview about decision- making and some of the tools that we have but what are those core supports that we have for teachers and and um students and we're going to start with our our youngest Learners right they're just coming in our VPK students and lurine D is going to come up and talk about VPK good morning morning so our VPK program is provided at 19 elementary schools and five high schools there's 32 teachers and 51 assistants this year the teachers are implementing the new Frog Street curriculum that was funded through a grant that I applied for through Episcopal children's services and it aligns with the Florida Early Learning and developmental standards bpk is also monitored by the state through a class observation tool VPK is all about play students learn through play students are developing their oral language their vocabulary their critical thinking skills problem solving and understanding community in our schools we also send home a lovely parent letter every week which would also go well with the new thing they were just talking about next please okay this is really I'm proud of this one so B K has to take the fast three times a year at the beginning of the year we had 64 students below the Benchmark at the end of the year we had 11 students that were below the Benchmark so now these students are better prepared when they go into kindergarten this is a state law that parents have to sign and agree to when they enroll their students into the VPK program and once again if they fall below any of the benchmarks they get to do the world's new world new worlds initiative and then can continue all the way to fifth grade and now I'll will turn it over to Dana who's our Ela K to 5 specialist I have a question just because you said this out loud actually how well do they do it like I mean like how does do you have to help them take this test no you can't so you have the very first year that fast came out for bpk the students were required to take the test on a touchscreen device so Epal Children's Services gave us two devices per classroom now the state has changed it where they can either use touchscreen or audio so what the students have to do is they sit there it tells them out loud and they have to hit a little button we really prefer for the students to hit the button because most students know how to play on an iPad it's it's of to say that but they do so that is how they do their little star set they can't have any testing matter of fact the state just made a requirement for our teachers to sign paperwork like 3 through 6 used to saying you're not going to do this this and this so now we have to do that and I upload all of that information into a state portal to prove we're following the requirements how great is that to have this information this data I mean it really does help prepare us for those kid when they're getting ready to transition to kindergarten we know where they're coming into kindergarten so it really is I mean it's a different snap shot of the of the child but that's the kids who are in VPK yes there are so many children still who are not in VPK so we have other ways to for those you know we have kindergarten Camp kickoffs and kindergarten screeners so there is a screener an aadience is what we're using as a universal screener that does give you that information from where they're starting and and you have to I mean before technology people were doing this one-on-one individually testing and trying to get this data it was a nightmare to do that they had this is beautiful it's still oneon-one in some of the Gres yes they do still oneon-one and it's still a nightmare because you're dealing oneon-one with a child while the other 18 are possibly 20 depending on the school depending on the classroom sorry I'll stop but everybody takes fast testing now right yes everybody does bpk to 12th grade also add to that Mrs baa that we do add a robust support system in our bpk classrooms that all of our bpk classrooms have two assistance right right okay okay good to so moving into kindergarten so this is your Elementary support team these are my coaches so my amazing three coaches we've assigned we all support 28 elementary schools so that is 932 teachers who we um support so small But Mighty team um but these are our Ela um initiatives for this school year you do have a copy of this in the folder that we handed out to you we use data um to make priorities for our team specifically on what teachers and students need for the upcoming year these are our priorities for the year all of our professional learning and initiatives comes from these priorities um as Melanie mentioned earlier we do provide a lot of professional learning for our teachers during the summer one thing that's kind of new for this year last year we did a quarterly cohort for all of our third grade teachers there was great success from that we had a lot of feedback from them saying that getting together and building new assessments together really had a positive impact on the learning in their classroom so this year we're going to be doing those quarterly cohorts for kindergarten through fifth grade teachers as well as well Okay so we've updated the K through five curriculum guides and we really like to look at a teacher's curriculum guide as their toolbox right so just as a a skilled Builder would go in to build a home you're not going to want to be having to oh wait I forgot my saw let me go to this place to get it or oh wait I forgot that just having everything there prepared that is adopted that is vetted and that is most powerful resources that they can use so we put those all together for teachers this year um some of the things that we've added have been books from the best text list um we've encouraged teachers to use those in their instruction and our team has also purchased those for teachers so we're not saying you should use this book hope you have it you know so purchase it for them um some other things that we've added are books from the civic's literacy list because we know that that's very important for building that background knowledge for students um to be Civic minded um so yeah it's like a One-Stop shop because teachers just have way too much to do um and way too many resources to sort through so we tried to make it easier for them this is also located in their curriculum guide it is a resource page um and it's just as it sounds but we've taken everything from their benchmarks there are supports here for students in all um areas of the mtss process so if you're tier one tier 2 or tier three teachers can go here to get resources assessment data um we've Incorporated some new Benchmark um snapshot cards which you'll see in just a second and some writing snapshot cards as well so again we're we're all about service and support for our teachers and our students and just making that easier for them but also making sure that they have available the correct resources that they need to be using so it's not going out and searching for different things that might not be aligned to the science of reading or vetted um so this is one other new tool we've given teachers this year um we worked with a teacher who actually created these Benchmark um common visuals K through five um they're aligned to our benchmarks we've also given them a learning Target and success criteria as an example to use in the classroom so this really keeps teachers and students honed in on that goal of their learning Target it also gives an opportunity for students to seek feedback from their teacher they know exactly where the learning Target is or what their learning goal is so they'll know if they need support in getting to that and have that every standard and Benchmark all 13 assessed benchmarks in kindergarten through fifth grade so as a fifth grade reading teacher I could print this off and maybe make it a larger print put it up and then I don't have to fill in my whiteboard or whatever with everything that oh wow yes ma'am we tried to uh make it a little bit easier we've also offered um purchasing through Staples as um if an administrator wanted to use say Title One funds or something like that to purchase these through Staples for their whole faculty we've had some administrators do that we've had others um one big thing especially in fourth and fifth grade we've seen teachers print it in a smaller format and give it to the students to put in their Journal because their learning goal is right there for them so um and we just love the way they look too the success criteria that success criteria is probably the best part if you're a first year teacher and you that and they don't know it you know right ex we're really working with teachers um we give them this as a starting point right but we work with them if they want to tweak it to directly align to the task that they're doing in their classroom so a lot of the work we do with teachers is around that okay so one other thing is a foundations page for kindergarten through 2 grade again there's so many resources out there that teachers were going all over the place so for example if I'm teaching um short eye this week all of the um adopted resources and everything that aligns to the science of reading that I need as a a primary teacher to teach short I are linked right there for me you can also go back to it and use it for small group if necessary um so just another thing to kind of lighten the load of teachers this is the last resource I wanted to talk to you about I think I'm over my T I'm apologize um but you do have in your folder it's something that we call the um literacy instructional supports and resource it's a big thick packet and I think yours at the a fifth grade example if I'm not mistaken um but we were just thinking we have so many things that teachers need to look at to be aware of their benchmarks stay benchmarks aligned how can we um promote that strong instruction so we just everything's available in their curriculum guide but we just printed it all together like a little packet for them like this is what you go to to teach this is where you know we're going to start with our standards so they have those snapshot cards that I talked about if you wanted to look over those in your spare time um we give them a lesson plan template template it's not saying you have to use this but if you need something and we have also given them um just a little brief overview of all of their um anchor chart so you do have a copy of that that'll be printed for all kindergarten through fifth grade teachers as a resource for instruction I really love how it's so focused on benchmarks because I I taught reading from fourth grade up to 11th and if teachers don't do every Benchmark the Gap from year to year becom so significant it's almost impossible to fix and so if every teacher every year is teaching the Benchmark needed to be successful in the next year that's why this is so critical and I appreciate the work that has gone into something like this thank you we've even included for then what was supposed to be mastered in the prior year so it might not have been right so you might have to start there start where the students are so at least teachers would know that prior knowledge that they need those prerequisites um before starting on what's to master in their grade band and this is huge change in the last few years and there's a lot of a lot of work I can recognize went into this yes yes thank you wonderful okay very impressive good morning um just like my counterparts here I really appreciate the opportunity to be here today and to speak with you and kind of showcase what we're doing in six 12 Ela um I'm very passionate about our students in clay um the their literacy and achieving proficiency um in graduating so um this is my team I have a team of uh two additional coaches we support 42 schools um 214 teachers and over 20,000 students um this is really aligns I I live by this quote it aligns with my educational philosophy I know you've heard a lot about intentionality today but I believe that every student deserves a great teacher not by chance but by Design and um that speaks to what we've been talking about here today um the intentionality of Benchmark aligned curriculum the intentionality of showing teacher or giving teachers resources to um having a One-Stop shop where they can intentionally teach our benchmarks um so these are our priorities every year um my team sits down we come up with what are our priorities for the year we look at data um we talk with our teachers um we are the boots on the ground we are in the classrooms we are talking to the teachers we are in there seeing instruction and supporting our teachers needs um so um we're looking at the data we're um also um really focused this year on intentionally intentionally engaging students and evidence-based literacy practices um and really intentionally choosing those practices to go along with our benchmarks all right so um as as we've talked a little bit about the fast and I am really proud of this data so for 2223 um we've got our 13 benchmarks here and um that was our first year of a fast assessment um for our 610 students and for all students but um you can see we um had at at the end of our 22 23 year we had 20 benchmarks across 610 that were either at near or below the grade level standard and I'm proud to say that we have flipped many of these to Green um this past year in 2324 we reduced that number to 11 but our work is not said we will not be satisfied um so as you can see as Circle right here we've got our reading across genres and vocabulary category um we've got um morphology context and connotation that really work in um conjunction with interpreting figurative language um so this is the data that we use and talked with our district literacy team that we really need some more supports in vocabulary um and so one of the ways was through through vocabulary.com by giving students extra practice with um vocabulary um but that's not all that we're doing is using vocabulary.com we are um going to be launching that this year to give students the opportunity to practice um but our vocabulary is taught in context in the context of the text that we are teaching um so I wanted to um share with what what we are doing what we are training and That explicit vocabulary routine is in your um folders um this is what we're training our secondary students our secondary teachers to do um is to use this routine um carefully selecting words in context to be taught um and going through this four-step routine so we launched this in July and then we are um repeating this training several times this semester so that all of our 6 12th teachers have the opportunity to get this training um and one thing that you'll see in here is um in step two guiding students and analyzing the meaningful parts of the word so that morphology Benchmark right here we are really intentionally working on lifting that um and as Melanie mentioned we've got we we just live by our best benchmarks book so we've got lists in here that um give us a starting point for that morphology but it's not the only place that we go to to teach morphology so we are really intentional about lifting that vocabulary area all right I wanted you guys to see what students have to do where do we get this data this is what students have to be able to perform on benchmarks um so that we get the data um so these questions are are challenging um for our 6 through 10 students but I'm going to show you in a minute they are performing and they're outperforming State um so just they have a variety of different ways that they assess it can be through these charts can through these two-part questions so this first question select two Universal themes that are developed throughout the poem and then how does the author develop themes in part A so a student would need to get three answers correct to get one point okay so the infamous part B the part B teachers sit around sometimes and talk about what one of those are right yeah so we we are very transparent I've had the opportunity to um serve on state committees so I am very knowledgeable about the fast assessment and I bring that back to the teachers and share um with the teachers what what I am allowed to share on the fast assessment so our teachers are very well trained um right now in understanding the different ways that our students are assessed um and I put a vocabulary um example here as well but it's not the only way here's a couple more how does an omniscient narrator narrator develop irony in the passage so this isn't what color is Mr brasky's shirt they are very these are very complex questions all right so that's where the data comes from when we're looking at level ones twos threes that's that's how they have to perform um so how do we meet the benchmarks how do our 612 ELA teachers all of the all of our curricular guides are designed in the same way and just as um is for elementary it's a One-Stop shop we've got text resource folders um we have the benchmarks that are explicitely taught each quarter we have our best book list text that are embedded into the curriculum um we have Civics literacy texts that are embedded so in the seventh grade example here um they're doing a su Susan be Anthony speech um we have a writing Focus each quarter um whole group text we have retach and practice and then of course we have the vocabulary words that are to be taught in context all right so how are our students performing in clay in sixth grade um we are outperforming the state in proficiency by 11% in seventh grade 7% 8th grade 8% 9th grade 9% and 10th grade 10% and um this past year we increased um Proficiency in all of our grade levels and as I stated out performing this date very well and proficiency right so turn it back to ear so these are kind of our core supports that we have happening right now um and it has been very transformational trying to make sure that we keep all the parts of the recipe and we put it someplace where you can actually find it right so when we look at the data we also know that there are needs for strategic support not all schools are performing where you know we would want them all to be so being able to be strategic in what we offer those schools or those students or those teachers when we look at the data to determine that is something that's very important to us and that's why um we have the the positions that were added last year with Kelsey ivy for Ray schools and Michelle s for that intensive reading those are those strategic supports that we have to make sure that we layer in so I'm going to have Kelsey come up to share with you some of those strategics of thank you bring my owl with me right so good morning my name is Kelsey Ivy and I am our K through 5 Elementary raise School specialist going into year two of this work so as we begin to discuss tier two supports for our schools I give that additional layer of support to our schools designated by the Florida Department of Education as our reading achievement initiative of Scholastic Excellence so our raise schools so as Melanie mentioned after carefully looking at data and Trends we determined some of our raise schools needed not an additional tool but a different tool to support our Learners at the most foundational level and for those schools that tool has been foundations a structured literacy approach to those foundational skills where learning how to read truly begins so these images I'm super proud of this these images are our Clay County students from the past year and paint a picture of what literacy looks like within these schools using foundations we are truly changing the face of literacy within clay as we speak and I'm honored to help support lead that work so Melanie also mentioned the importance of structured literacy so what does that look like it's multisensory so these students right up here they're first skywriting their high frequency words these students are working with a partner to form the diagraph CK and um another student over here is marking their words to map those rules for spelling for long-term memory and then of course we're putting it all together with decodables and you have those decodables an example of one of those those are like the training wheels of reading that give kids the confidence to apply those skills and those learning or those reading patterns into a book that they can read and so all of our Ray schools this past year have received a classroom set of decodables one of my most favorite um strategies that foundations has equipped our students with is called the Wilson tapping Tech technique and as a teacher my go-to with struggling students was always sound it out however even um more powerful is what our teachers are saying right now tap it out so each sound in a word gets a tap adding in again that multi sensory technique so can I demonstrate it with you guys now okay all right so this is Echo and so when I hold up Echo this comes with foundations um I'd like you to tap it with me so we're going to tap the word map so watch me first M app map your turn perfect much better than just saying the words you added that multi-sensory piece to it very good you guys are ready for first grade so the best part is our students are independently applying this strategy outside of quote unquote foundations time so these students were caught tapping it out during independent reading time and working with a teacher one-onone and although these moves like the letter tiles that we saw in the first um the first slide and the tapping and that multi-sensory piece they're all um embedded within the foundation curriculum they can be used with any curriculum and we're excited to share with all teachers across clay some of these strategies to use with their Learners during ing our quarterly cohorts so foundations looks nice and it sounds nice but how did these schools implementing foundations compare across the district last year so just a quick snapshot two of our four schools specifically chosen to implement foundations scored within the top four of our district on the kindergarten star assessment last year so again those are were two of our schools that were specifically Chosen and when introducing a new curriculum sometimes we expect what's called that curriculum or implementation dip we expect scores to fall the first year as teachers and students are navigating a new curriculum but at our two most targeted schools that could not have been farther from the truth and these games at Charles E benett and Grove Park Elementary just proved how much of a difference equipping students with the right tools can be wow 29% yeah so I want to end on a personal note and I feel like I can do that since we all tapped it out together so I'm a parent of a Clay County kindergartener and um we were at a private school for our preschool years and while nothing is cuter than a 5-year-old in a uniform I truly believed our school district was the best place for her to learn how to read I have invested interest in the work that we are doing my heart is in what we are doing because my whole heart my little girl goes to school within our district so thank you for your time and for your supportive literacy now that we're all in a little I don't I don't want to follow her I'm Michelle s and I'm I was one of the people who Mrs Tito brought on board to this literacy team and I am thrilled to be a part of such a passionate knowledgeable team and um there was work that was put into place before I came on board that helped our secondary students do a fantastic job this past year if you see um this graphic when you get a copy of this slide deck you'll be able to click into this and see the detailed planning intentional detailed planning that went behind that but what this shows you is we have um corrective reading decoding we're using with our students um just a little bit of background on that they are placement tested before they go into any of these so every one of our in uh intensive reading students last year was placement tested by someone like me or a reading teacher who know knows what they're doing and that was beautiful so they all got to where they needed to be level a works really well if they know nothing really about language and so we had a lot of our English language Learners use that but most of our students fell within the this band where um and and you can see I won't take up your time but you can see later if you if you care to the different profiles that are addressed here so we had our students moving through this B1 takes one semester when they finish that and graduate or matriculate to the next level they move into B2 um and then that's another semester and then when they move into decoding C this is where they're going to start getting some more comprehension strategies and it it gets them ready to the point where they would be on a five to seventh grade um level now I taught High School reading and I had I had a lot of kids who were on a second or third grade reading level so yeah what do I do with that now I have this great program and that's thanks to people who came before me and and you'll see in a minute how that has really really worked and it moves them up two to three grade levels in one year so we are moving the dial and that's why we are at Clay County standing out in Florida as this work that's been put are you scheduling around this yes intentionally scheduling 100% yes ma'am brilliant is that yeah they're not just placed in classrooms by Bo we didn't we used to just put intensive reading kids into like a section not by KN so it's that's incredible yeah so then just to kind of finish up the track um the this step is what I like to call our Lexia power up and then morphology study remember we we had spilling through morphographs which is a wonderful piece to this program but when we were adding the vocabulary.com that you all agreed to last time we talked that now it amps up the rigor for them so that when they are matriculating out of decoding and they're moving into this Lexia does that a diagnostic piece again so now we know where are the little those little gaps that might still remain what didn't they get the first time so Lexia will work on closing that and then this morphograph will give them that background knowledge all those things that Rebecca really focused in on with our data so we're working together as a team you know I'm secondary reading Rebecca is secondary Ela we work hand inand so that we all come together and give our kids everything that they need this is talking about learning we want our teachers to learn everything that they can so that they can be better teachers of how children learn to read I I was very vulnerable with you when I stood before you the last time and um I didn't know all these things I didn't know what I didn't know and since um being in this position I've been afforded the opportunity to learn so much about what it takes for us to learn to read and now I'm passing that on to our reading teachers so I have about 58 reading teachers and they're learning all these things and it's changing their mindset because they you know they're they're kind of in a in a place where they didn't know all the things either right so the more that I learn I can get to them then they are seeing that data and they're like yeah I believe in this and they want they want to know all the things that we can know this is just a piece of what I've done with our intensive reading teachers when we were this is our uh portable Lorraine and I work at portable 9 in uh middleberg High School this is our our uh bulletin board and this is scarb Bar's rope that Melanie referenced before each strand has to come together to get to reading comprehension so the blue pieces are the word recognition that you get out that decoding that you saw on the previous slide and the red pieces are language comprehension so that's where we um work with the Lexia the vocabulary.com Etc what the teachers did is they took a lesson right out of decoding c um this was out of decoding C they had red flags and blue flags the red flags they worked as shoulder Partners to say okay well where where does this come from the rope and as they worked through the lesson every single strand is represented by a red or a blue flag in the lesson so every lesson that they get every day addresses each strand on the reading rope that is huge not only for our children but our teachers to know that what we're doing although it's scripted and it may sound like very basic that's exactly what our students need and so they that's an eye opening moment for them and then you see this purple flag right here and you're kind of like well Michelle that's not red or blue well we know when we mix red and blue together we get purple and so in our little Cadre there's a new word for us we are going going for the purple this year we want to get them to comprehension so that's that represents fluency and and comprehension and everything that we want for our students so this is my um last moment with you I just want to say that in 6 to 12 intensive reading we are going for the purple we're closing gaps for students and we're moving towards proficient literacy what we did in this past year is we took level ones in 7 through 10 they decreased on an average of 10% we we reduced our level ones by 10% in one year those are kids who are now getting words off the pages gives me chills thank you for your time we appreciate it so like we say that is our goal the closing of the gaps we just want to end with this is where we are currently in literacy and clay and really it's never we're never there we never reach nirvana we're never you know we're always striving for what's the next because honestly no one says it better than Dr Seuss the more you read the more you'll know the more you learn the more Places You'll Go I probably mess that up but really that is the goal for all of us is we want to make Literacy for everyone because that's what opens doors you know building the literate citizens that's what creates opportunities for all and that is what our passion is as your literacy Department um there were so many things that we left out of this so we would love to talk to you anytime about ly come on I have one question do you remember when we started sips first kindergarten then we moved to K1 then we bought whatever I did Kindergarten whatever came after that was like second grade K in some schools I think it went on to fourth grade there was supposed to be a residual effect so like if you started in kindergarten each year you started closing gaps right so so a kid who starts in kindergarten and goes to 12th I'm hoping that with this exceptional design plan that you carry it for so many years that those results pick up every year and you have have less and less struggle so if we can stay consistently with something that's working um I've been around a long enough to see a gazillion things go in and a gazillion things go out but I feel like this is yes we don't I don't like pendulum I I feel like this is actually the path we needed all along so I just wanted to tell you that I appreciate that and that's really that is our goal is to be very Diagnostic in what a student need needs and not just go one one layer of okay that's going to fix everything for for that layer of student it's really not every student is different and being very Diagnostic in that and understanding that the instructional practices that you use with those students matter the tools that you use matter so I appreciate that absolutely so we're always available okay so all right let me try to bring it home first of all I want to thank the te you know I'd be remiss I didn't say that the couple things that I wanted to presentation ready you guys are up go the challenge really is the thing I want to emphasize is that there's good people that are strategically making decisions related to reading and structure but those are the people that you saw today and I also emphasize that that those those strategies need to happen right so when I was talking about building a pie or baking a pie you know the people involved right I can't imagine our progress in Reading if we didn't invest in having some of those supports to make that happen all of those things you saw would not be happening in Clay County Schools if we chose to not invest in that so they always say the old is you have to spend money to make money yeah you're going to have to spend money but there's nothing more worth spending money on than those things that were just mentioned to you because it leads ultimately to the success of students another little take away from that was you know the science of reading they talk about the science of reading but there's also kind of a science or a prescription to how to strategically engage in a plan that will be productive over time that takes a couple of years to build and I kind of feel like we're at almost that peak time frame once you've implemented something it's taken 3 years to get there right but now we're at that point so much so that you see statistically we're e in the state fifth when you get to the upper levels which is amazing as a high school principal I just tell you you know going to see that which is amazing so much so we've been recognized by um fcrr which is Florida Center for reading research I'm actually believe I'm not giving a presentation of the 27th of September for the rest of the state related to reading reading research and the practices in Clay County I'm extremely proud of the work that that team has done now that doesn't mean that there's not more work to be done there's a lot of work to be done you can see that statistically we're on the right path this is a great team they did a great job presenting today a lot more complicated that that was the easy version but they tried to give it to you in in less than an hour so pretty impressive so thank you thank you so much for what you guys did any other reading comments yeah I'm going to speed things up the Strategic plan right each year we we formed our strategic plan there's five goals in it we spent a year doing this to go with our five strategic goals each year you update that so we're at the end of year one year one of the five strategic goals inside the booklet is an update why don't we just look through it real quick just so you can see the format of it you can see uh once you get to goal one some good pictures there guys are looking good and then you can see go one and then on the back it gives you a points of progress how we're doing on that goal so one of the things you should do in good strategic goal uh planning is you should have metrics of success like how you measuring this and then what progress points have you had so I'm not going to take the time to read this to you but you can see that we made progress on every single one one of those goals and that's what really guides the work like the presentation that you first saw on family and Community engagement was designed right after we formed the Strategic plan okay what are we going to do about this 9 months of research to get us to the point where you saw that today so there's a lot of work happening behind the scenes I'm not going to bore you at going over every single goal but I think you understand the point so each year at the next summer get year to like where are we on this as we form U our five strategic goals just a quick on that Mr Brasi when I remember on goal two the retention of qualified teachers and the opportunity to train qu to train teachers and with a number of features that we're getting in that are new that are not necessarily graduating from education programs the work that we just ex that was just exhibited to us is is is crucial being able to go into a program and have all of the standard I mean yeah you could you could go online say okay here are the standards I'm going to pull them from this one and I'm going to pull some ideas from books from this one and then going to pull some ideas from this one and to have it all right there is a phenomenal step to helping our teachers at at any level it's a better service to our students not sure if the board recogniz this but there's so many you guys know this there's so many forms of communication right there's so much information out there that if I'm a teacher and I'm I'm left to my own resources to go out there and look it you will pick something inevitably that is not aligned to the curriculum and you're actually probably doing more harm I would make the argument you're doing more harm than good so here we are we give you a map and we say all you have to do is follow this map so no more Teachers Pay Teachers is that what i' said that still make bulletin boards I said that for years but I think I think a few slip through the cracks here there AB I can't guarantee it okay all right so on to the board uh agenda and I'm going to go quick really quickly through this and only highlight a couple that I think you'll be interested in one is um D3 is the public hearing to advertise the Safety and Security policies so just a reminder to the board we we adopted an emergency policy last time but we also advertised last time now this makes it official but I'll give you one c as we're working through the yearlong progress for Neola this will be Rewritten again right so emergency policy put us in instant compliance we advertised at the same time now this takes us because the under an emergency policy you have to adopt another policy within 90 days by Statute this puts us in appes for that but this will be Rewritten again as we go through Neola okay so just a little point of clarification there and that puts us in compliance uh the minutes I don't believe there's any questions on that uh there's a contract um extension with uh the Douglas Law Firm you know that one of the things we're doing is our our treny program and we're excited to get that up and going attendance itself is a whole thing right so here's a little bit of statistics there's 6,000 students that at 18 or more days absent last year 6,000 of the city but that's both excused and unexcused right we do have students that are ill right right so that's an excused absence so my 18 plus the statute says unexcused absences right so there is a whole series of mechanisms to whittle that down to the truly uh deserving um of TR and see being involved so we're thankful for the dougas law firm and the work being done there and that's what that item is for uh community relations and IT solutions that's the presentation that you just saw this morning the Personnel consent agenda uh Kelly Services that's that's an uh pricing uh clarification for long-term subs for self-contained classrooms long term sub for self-contained class uh proud of this how about this uh we have tentatively agreed to the ratification of our CCA contract last night that's a that's a major that's a major thing so much I think the first session miss tropman was to almost to midnight the text was 11:45 mhm so I don't I don't know what time you got we start actually started in May but yeah the 22nd was a long one yeah I commend both sides because I have been complaining about this going to December thing for many many years and I have to give some com you know commending that we're talking like that in August thank you lot a lot of work went into it we're extremely proud the boards being extremely proud this is this is one of the um the highest uh compensation packages in District history that's fact can you rep one of the highest compensation packages in history and also uh does what the board wanted to do which was to uh recognize the contributions of our veteran teachers so uh a lot of kudos to be given uh to both cca's team and the and the district team for that you know it's going to be the contract itself will be on the board agenda for the board to approve uh I think CCA is looking to uh do their ratification vote on September um 17th is my understanding what my note says here uh and again could be more proud the district's effort the district also um you know picked up the the C the insurance um tab so that employees wouldn't have to do that that's huge Rel that I also wanted to say Mr Broski that I know I've been on the board two years but not going back in the past but the deficit that was created was not only ridiculous but huge you can't make that up in one year and I'm proud of this board for recognizing that if we keep at it 5 years from now it be in a really pretty place so yeah you can't you can't overcome the deficit in in such a short period of time like so the total amount not that I keep track of this but a threee total is 44 million additional for compensation for all three employee groups plus the additional here and of course we're still bargaining with with our sespa unit now so I really can't talk about it public but it would be the highest four years ever in the history of Cl gy schools and so I'm very very proud of that very very protective of our employees because really we're in people business and people really make Clay County Schools we should always uh strive to honor the work of our employees and I know this boy feels the same way and so very proud of that and that doesn't mean there's a money tree out back folks drct will tell you the money tree has been shock as much as much as it can be right so but I would also add to this it's not growing anymore to give docs and Kudos there's there's a lot of uh financial management that happens behind the scenes to have the ability to do that right so you know what I would ask for the board is consideration and decision making process in which we we vote on items such as curriculum pieces and all of that don't think for a second that all of that isn't factored into the big picture of Clay County schools and we're bringing forth what we believe to be best for students for hate to say this because of the adults in the room students are the first priority in what we do in play Downy schools but we recognize that teachers are the vehicles by which that happens and our other employees that are related to that so board you know the board should take a Victory lap and so should everyone else because we've done better in this time frame than any other fouryear period in the history play school since 1857 so so you should really celebrate that so enough Grand standing on that one okay so the so the next one is a revision to the surf plan and essentially uh we were missing the amount of funding that actually went to our charter school so you can see on the one piece of paper you can see that is is $444,000 there uh and the sum of the total in there that's the only change is that Ser the money we have to that we are by law required to give to Charter Schools yes yes so that's just an update of what we needed to be doing yes okay we we're already doing that but on the document submitted it wasn't on okay all right that's my only question was okay next is kind of fun see these two big binders here these are School Improvement plans I'm going to make this as quick as possible so by state statutes you only have to do maybe I shouldn't say this out loud everybody's listening out there but only schools that meet certain criteria are required by Statute to do a school Improvement plan every school in Clay County does a school Improvement plan it's an important part of what you do right so I know we we spend some time talking about the successes of play County School the real work the meat potatoes of improvement occurs through these plans so some of the things that you probably didn't realize I would encourage the board to maybe just look at one I don't expect read 12200 Pages look at one to see the format of it because in it you'll see the goals their educational uh goals in both math and reading as well as cultural goals like School culture and climate you'll also see early warning signs you know how many students meet those criteria uh that would lead to potential non-success in schools so then what is what does the district do about that that's a whole another couple days of mtss and how that all works but there is a system in place to make those Improvement so every school every charter school every DJJ School in Clay County everyone does line and that's just kind of the way you do things in Play We believe is important and a really a great time to put together can't can't miss that part I I'm I'm not going there okay the next one is uh overnight travel the assessment calendar is pretty standard the affiliation agreement with St Petersburg College for interns our clinical Factory um our clinical fac faculty agreement with UNF I don't know if you realize that that you should to be called Sprint teachers we pay half of the salaries the university pays the half it's a great Rel relationship that we have with UNF as a partner in this process next is Baker Health um which is a a dead to Street program for students the renewal of that contract next is our Flagler Health are um uh they added a website link as reference for parents and then we have to bring the contract back because they added that this only the only thing this does is increase communication with those people that need servic and so that's why that's on the agenda then there's the the Walden University School of counseling are inter terms there next is an inter inter agency agreement regarding treny so this kind of spells out what DJJ DCF and school Bo to Clay County is the same agreement that all in this area we've seen a lot of uh robust work from uh DJJ and Eric Hall is the new Chancellor of that and we're seeing a lot of collaboration with with that so when you look at treny and DJJ it's all interconnected and so part of that is we agree to share um information between those three agencies in order to coordinate services for students kind of thing you'll see the same contract in every Northeast County within our our circuit sub Mr Ras as we're going through this process is it possible for us to be looking at the treny policy at the same time uh sure I mean I think we're going to do that through the Neola policy there well I don't know we we haven't had any meeting since the first one so I didn't know when that we can certainly provide what bch that one was going to be in yeah we're meeting with them tomorrow the the whole the whole point that I would kind of make by truy now is we've had two meetings with the court system in CL very excited judge forbis is going to be our our judge J very very very supportive you know of bringing the process back uh what what the court wanted from the school system meaning the district folks would be um a way of screening truly the players from The Pretenders right if you have 6,000 people that are absent 18 or more days the first step we took was every one of them got a letter from me this summer with my name on it and um I heard all kinds of reasons and rationals all kinds of emails and phone calls and got some got some love mail all kinds of things happen when you send out 6,000 letters you never know what you're going to get right for people but one of the things that has to happen is you need to call attention to this sometimes by just telling people hey did you know everybody should go to school that's a thing what that does is that takes from the 6,000 it takes the people that are on the fence that maybe just weren't really paying attention to it into the importance of that so maybe maybe the uh family cruise can occur on spring break and not during the middle of of the school year because going to school is important I can say that superintendent right so uh a lot of great conversations had the other part of this is that school should be a place where kids want to go right that's that's a thing too right so we we're working on it from multiple angles treny is the last ditch effort for those that don't comply right so we're doing everything we can to remove barriers get them to school make it the kind of place where people want to go keeping parents informed but if you don't do all of those things and we have a three tier process that we go through then it goes to uh to true and sa so that's kind of where we are next we have proposed allocation changes then you have required by Statute did superintendent's annual financial report annual cost report item that's followed by budget amendments these are pretty routine business Affair items deletion of um items report then you have the bid award awarding to um for ground maintenance and landscaping services this is a change in companies from previous years related to this service I got a question yes ma'am that's why I was looking at you okay are the principales going to have to set their own grass in between this still so so what we yeah I believe it's there still option for elementary they don't have as many custodians on their property to have an additional if they would like to have them come back out so I guess my question would be what is that the only difference between this company and cuz I know I mean it was a universal complaint across the board Elementary High School um with the companies in the past so I just this they would complain it theyd have to content they'd come out and then they'd have to literally redo everything that they did or or touch yeah and this is a new company so we have the ability to set you know new expectations and um and new guidelines way to help them serve us us better now there are sections um in the bid that if they do want additional Services above and beyond um they do offer Landscaping um that can opt in to pay for addition I think I think too I think uh interpr is important I know we've had conversations I certainly uh spoken to the principal in fact it kind of interesting I've had more people talk to me about cutting the lawn recently than I've had ever in my career so so I think sometimes paying more attention to it realizing that that's important um you know creates more angst or more uh effort put into that so they recognize that it's new company see what happens and I assume being a new company that we've got performance calls in there one of the things also with grass cutting that I have learned over the years because oh my gosh we used to get all sorts of complaints I had a guy who used to call and say the grass around this pond at this school is now encroaching on my yard and I haven't gotten any calls from him at least seriously the last three years I almost called him to find out if he was still around but but with the last company they had a special robot mower that could literally mow around a p that one of the things that I also learned through all of this though is that we do have rain and boy oh boy those big grass mowers get stuck in the mud make divits can get screwed up and when you've got a schedule of okay we're going to do this quadrant of Clay County schools and you have two days of rain or you cut in the morning and in the afternoon you're in the middle of a lightning storm that grass doesn't get cut sometimes for another and that is ugly and I yeah we've been hearing about it for years part of that you know right before school started we had hurricane right that came through and Rain um which that the mo company behind right and so they're having to catch up they'll go to the site they'll start to mow and they'll say oh it's too wet right here they mow around and do as much as they can but you know yeah it doesn't look that great but they're doing what they can I can tell you I live on a 6 Acre Farm four different kinds of mowing apparatuses big tractors small tractors small mowers five kinds of weed eaters grass is a Fickle thing and sometimes my own grass gets to be that tall because it's too wet so I get that I just we've got little kids that play around little areas and they're next to fs and you have teachers getting out there with weers and and making sure that the prek4 kids aren't getting eat up by snakes and stuff like that so they can see I just want to make sure that we're we got the people if we're going to pay somebody to do the job we're just making sure we follow up so that that's not another thing that we're asking teachers and principls to do I so I would say this as a principle I can tell you that even if there was a company that was doing it it's still my campus and um there's going to be some we're going to put some sweat anity into it I don't care who else is involved yeah you know I'm going to make that happen that's right okay next we have the Florida state schools ass assessment acceptance letter this is just a letter by me saying that we're going to do the meeting that we're going to have after this related to fsat as well as it's going to be brought to a public meeting at school board meeting also about ours so the change order for ES Jennings fire alarm you tell are working on that Charles E Bennett security lighting off is really busy this time doctor's Inlet security lighting there's also the clay high school parking lot which by the way looks magnificent where we got through there quite the quite the Improvement uh substantial completion of their parking lot and redesign middleberg High School restroom Renovations there's the gym in Clay High is another um um project being worked on and it looks beautiful yes very nice uh prequalification of contractors Lakeside Elementary uh School restroom Renovations Lakeside junior high restroom and locker room Renovations so this is all part of the half sales uh sales tax as well as under funding sources Orange Park Elementary School restroom and Renovations there by the way I think was it 95 years old orang Park Elementary is 1927 1927 mhm so we're coming 97 years old my husband's 80-year-old Uncle went there so yeah I don't know about you guys as things stuff breaks down stuff needs to be repaired it's it happens next is the spot survey for a a ride out Elementary future expansion there R High's air conditioning middleberg High's single key initiative wilon Junior High firearm replacement HVAC and windows at Green Co you can see the options really bu try to renovate our buildings and get them um up to snow so that takes care of the that takes care of the agenda fast forward agenda so uh our next item questions from the audience we have none um Mr Bros has anything further you wanted to add I do I got two items actually uh board member asked for an update on um um book appeal B policy related to appeals and so we put together a little five minute like where we're at with that Mr bailing I out of the Wings out of the Wings ah can you give us a brief update on book challenges appeals and process the stuff you you've all heard before it seems like many times uh not much has changed but there are some updates that maybe Pro you may find interesting this is a nor m going to the uh the next slide so we had moved as you are aware um the access to the to the library media materials for parents onto to one page and the response has been immense been tremendous and been overwhelmingly V to my to my knowledge exclusively positive uh Mrs go to the next slide please uh this just as a brief recap were the levels of access you have seen this several times it has not changed so General unlimited limited no access and the daily uh emails you remember Mrs Collins presented that part back in the spring so at this point you know when the last time we spoke about it we didn't know what the uh numbers were going to be this next slide we'll give you some interesting data points there's two of them this was as of August 88th I'm going to give you the latest one in the next slide and you can take a look it's broken down by grade level and if you and so I put the percentages there of the at that point it was uh 22,000 respondents on the next slide if you will please this here were up to 28,000 respondents which is pushing close to 80% of parents have made a decision relative to the access and what I'd like to point out to you really is that the the all and I put this Bullet at the bottom 99% of clay County's parents have selected unlimited or general 66 or 65 64 what it's been fluctuating those numbers throughout as as I've been monitoring it have chosen Unlimited in other words I think what they're saying is thank you very much for your concern but we don't need any community members or members of this organization to tell them how to parent their children that they are fully capable of doing that on their own with conversations around their family's Valu so that would include I would imagine and I'm just saying this from my wife and I cuz I have a high school student too is there are books that we don't want him to read there's movies we don't want him to see there's music we don't want him to listen to there's conversations we don't want him to partake in in the bus cafeteria locker room but we have but we know we can't wrap him in bubble wrap and send him out in the world that way so we have to have conversations it's called parenting and as a as a longtime member of the Clay County Community I came to Klay County to raise my children here my wife was was raised year and I've worked with thousands of students and parents uh over the many years and Clay County parents know how to parent their children and here that's what I think they are saying 99% have elected to go with what we're offering and again 64% saying they're okay they'll have the conversations they'll they'll they'll guide their children on this so I think that is a I've never seen a data point like that that's as as a resounding a landslide um shouting from the rooftops we got this thank you I will say they are appreciative and very much so uh of the opportunity to weigh in and select these for yourself so I credit the board and and your wisdom for bringing this forward to empower parents I said last time in in last month's meeting no District in the United States of America has done more to turn over parent choice to the parents than this district has that's a fact uh and I challenge anyone to find someone else who's done as much and I hope we can be the model for other districts and empowering parents but here the parents have decided what they want to do and they show a level of comfort I still have some concerns around how we get into uh purchasing at the high school level to make it congruent with policy and statute but we can have that discussion as we go along with Elementary and Junior I feel I feel much more comfortable completely comfortable in Elementary uh so that's that's the update we'll continue to update that at you know I'd like to push to toward 100% it's hard to get that with with everyone but this is a massive sample and so we hear monthly from uh a few folks that that you know have a very different view on this but you know there's 225,000 or so people in Clay County and and the people that we serve uh see this resoundingly in this me Mr Dy can you explain the difference real quick between General and unlimited sure I love the me you can get anything so the books that were flagged you can walk in the ones in the the um young adult or advisor advisory section so unlimited means all of the books anything you want and then general means everything but that you'd have to getent commiss but the one little section yes ma'am so and then you know you can see here so parents were making choices I mean they were yeah and and you obviously the people that see this differently are loud and they put stuff in your inbox and in my inbox and in the governor's inbox and then the Pope's inbox and all that kind of stuff but but this is these are parents these people don't show up at board meetings because they're satisfied with what's going on and there's a lot of them I I mean that that that that fill up a small stadium right and so they have said this is what we do because they they were well informed on this at this point it's not a secret it's out there we put we made a very transparent you've asked for that we we've delivered I'm not a math guy I don't know what that 02 but it's like one in thousands is what that number is and so there are you know what and for these folks that have reserv I'm proud that we've been able to provide them the option to do their parenting in their way it's not how I do my parenting but I respect their right to be a parent in that way and at this point we we really don't require a single individual or a small group of individuals to superimpose their parenting Styles and values on others this provides everyone to choose the path that suits them the best but it's pretty impressive I mean we have 8,380 parents who said I have faith in your library I just don't want them going to the few books over in that section right they clearly understood the difference and made choices based on that difference and I am actually surprised at how many parents actually really delved into that and made those decisions for their kids yeah I I would say that I feel and I and I'm I'm glad we're at this point but I feel like Clay County parents have always been you know generally F I mean this is a great place to raise children it's a great place to send your your children to school and our families know how to raise their children and they raise respectful children generally speaking right who who become contributing citizens they they're patriotic they're you they're good people that's why we live here that's why all of us live here and for that reason more than any other otherwise I'd live somewhere else and so would many of you and so yeah this doesn't surprise me at all I think that you know and and I don't I don't read this as hey I want my kid to go to read every book I read it as just like you know you you you would hear a song on the radio or a movie coming out are we going to are we going to go see that movie what's the rating what's on you know it's I just think that that's parenting it's it's I'm involved I'm looking at it we're having conversations about what's appropriate for our children and what's appropriate for other children and I have served different communities over the course of my career where pockets of the community see parenting differently than my wife and I do and I had to learn that okay that doesn't mean they're a bad parent I wouldn't do it that way but we're coming from different places and so this allows them remember these aren't books that are hoisted on anybody right this is this is this is no one is compulsory in terms of having to look at these books these are for kids to go and check out if they so choose to do so and their parents have the opportunity to elect for the for the daily email and all those things so this is going swimmingly I credit the board uh for for getting that done I thank Dr Johnson and and Susie G our Librarians for their leadership on this as well but we have a little bit more if we can go to the next one Mr I appreciate it we can go through this just as a quick review um made a board member request to look at this again this is the graphic um but but it might be easier for me to just explain on the bullet point for the sake of time on the next slide please you guys can go back and look at that if you'd like so the challenge comes in and we look at we look at it right away and we sit down to determine first and this is a painstaking laborious and timec consuming process um but we've got it down to to a science at this point because we've done more than well anyone else um Mr Dy this is reflecting how you're supporting the policy directly yes ma'am I think that was the request was was to Pro to go over this again and so when the when the uh when the when the complaint comes in we look at that and the first thing we do is we compare to the Florida statute statute Trump's policy we look at statute first if it if it's a violation of the of the statute it gets removed if it's not one of these other things happen or step three but but then next before we go any further we look at the board approves Community standards and all anything statute policy language all of that is always to a certain degree subjective so there is a little wiggle room in here very tiny crevit for that I'll I'll share that in just a second but most of the time we're looking for what I would call A strict in interpretation or strict construction of the statute or policy language and that has allowed us to navigate this without incurring lawsuits because we've been we've been adherent to that from the beginning this is an emotional topic it's less emotional here now than it was we're creeping up on three years be three years in the beginning of November since this issue came to our doorstep the first year was fast and furious and it was the most unpleasant year of my professional career and then it died down and for the last two years other than a single individual in our community in the occasional board member request I have not had a phone call or email on this topic for two years other than that I don't think that that individual will go away but but I think our community has has spoken on that previous data point which is why I put it there so we here we received these these complaints and then we look to do we reject the complaint as it has no merit those are few and far between we've had some but we haven't had a lot of those I'd say that's the smaller category the second one is it gets removed because it violates the law only it can only gets removed if it violates the law there's no other way it can get removed if it violates the law there was in the in the beginning a lot of misconceptions about what the law said how the law read you know people conflated this house bill with that Senate bill with this and and they and they weren't the same and so we stuck to it there were boards in then this state that became emotional and presented with some of the evidence on the board fors and made and made decisions In the Heat of the Moment because it was an emotional moment that ended up coming back to haunt them in the forms of lawsuits and things like that we stayed the course and stuck to the law period there were books that we retained that I personally did not like there were books that we removed that I personally loveed based on the law and only the law the law would guide us I don't make the law I don't write the law so for clarification when you say the only thing we remove is the law my my impression of our board approved Community standards would mean there would in certain occasions could be removable based on our standards as well no ma'am the way that you all brought that forward it would be flagged the only one that would get removed would be based on the law if if there was no there was no piece of that policy that allowed for the removal of a book unless it violated the law it only was that it would get flagged so there would that parents would be notified that there was something in it that while it didn't violate the law may be problematic for for their parenting style and values and that's that's the parent parental section or remember we use the example heroin over and over and over and over again that it didn't violate the law but it was inappropriate for our kids so we flagged it no I I understand I'm I'm asking questions for clarification because I'm actually not the one that wants the answers no no I know but I'm I'm saying out loud that that is the example we used over and over and over again where the person who need that's that's exactly right and so the the the board approved Community standards which and I give credit to miss Hansen for taking we've not removed anything based on board Community standards correct nor nor nor could there be so again we're following a strict interpretation of those things so that we're letting law and policy guide us and not in motion on this time again it's emotional topic for me but I have a question what the board approv Community standards that is also what we are basing our future purchases off that correct well that hasn't been codified and that's where I I said earlier that I have some concerns about how to go forward with that and and you know I would I would like guidance on that because there is differences of opinion on how that on that how that should be done my concern this and I don't want to go sort of tangentially here but is my concern with this and I haven't I've never maybe someone in the room is seen I've never seen a situation where one individual in the organization can make an independent decision that other individuals would be on the hook for right so let me give you an example if I'm the library media specialist and I attest that this book that I'm going to purchase meets the community standard and the law and then I purchase it and it does not the statute also names the principal mhm and the school board board members so then are you potentially in the crosshairs of lawsuits and all this type of thing because another individual made a decision that you knew nothing about but the way I read the law is that law says that that the media specialist the principal and the school board are responsible that's why I I stood hat on that legislation allowed for board Community standards because every county in the state of Florida is different so the the community standards were way for districts to codify what their District what their communities um wanted so what I was trying to clarify was you're saying your interpretation is that as of right now we're not really sure to use them when we're buying because Miss Skipper asked that we're not using them to remove books that maybe don't break the law but certainly shouldn't have been there to begin with so I guess this is this is so we can actually I'm going to call to have some kind of a meeting about this because we definitely are going to have to work out because the no legislator sat down and said every county is going to do this this this and this they left the opportunity for districts to make these decisions through board Community standards and so this is an area I did talk to Mr blocker about when this comes back up with niola there are areas that I think we never really discussed our community standards to begin with I think this is one of those areas that we're going to need some clarification I would love some clarification from the board and to have those conversations Mr buer yeah yes ma'am if I can respond so I think completely understand that I think what's important is what Mr Dy is saying and he's correct is that the when we per when when you use that criteria to purchase future books the way the statute reads is yall as a board are responsible if there's a violation so I think what Mr Daly is saying as we spoke prior to this is we need the staff needs direction from the board because yall are on the hook going forward if that is ultimately the standard yall come up with y'all are on the hook so that's why he needs clear my recommendation is the staff needs clarification from y'all we don't want to create a legal issue for y'all specifically that's also why in y'all's policy the policy Flags I want to give you credit u Mrs Hy all of yall is the board you work very hard on this it Flags the books and removes it because under the statute books of i46 said half of you rem you can set up a community standard which all have done which by the way is an excellent Community standard I had some other comments I was going to read when it came to my term but let me highlight that great work on that however that that allows for flagging of those books not not removal because that would potentially create some other issues so I think what Mr Dy needs some dire for Mr Dy is fature guidance from yall or how youall want to move forward the purchasing is that correct yes sir respond said I don't see this as as something we need to rush into it's not a front burner issue I assure you that the shelves of our libraries in high school are not empty you know there's not a long line of I wish they I wish they were right we all wish that that that kids were reading more we have hundreds of thousands of titles available so I think that we can we can be deliberate and purposeful about what you know coming up with something that protects the entire organization my goal from the beginning is make sure that we protect our our media specialist our principles and our board and and we've done that and and and that was the goal from the beginning sometimes that moves slower than people like but it was a deliberate and painstaking process to make sure that we didn't we didn't mess it up and I think that going forward you know there needs to be conversations because that is tricky the the tricky part being who's going to read and verify that that an entire me an entire book well I'm going to order 40 books you read all 40 books so I think I think that needs to shift there there was the way they did it before each individual did it they would like to do it that way I think that creates a lot of problems because you have a lot of cooks in the kitchen and if you're going to do that with this situation there's going to be some oversight required I'll allow you to think about that and guide me at the appropriate time and and at that point we can try to come construct something that will allow us to do that again I'm not worried about elementary at all I think normally Junior High they don't they're not keeping any of the flag books so I'm not wor about that uh nearly as much either but the high school but but the high school readership really tumbles too so I don't I don't feel like this Rises to the level of urgency yes it's a passionate topic for some people who want it dealt with a certain way right now but in terms of all the things we have to do I think we had 109 legislative actions that related to education this past session so there's many many things to to punch out this just becomes a controversial Hot Topic so you know can be a flash point but I think that we can move on this deliberately as we go forward but but to your point uh I think the board did a tremendous job of EO what what our attorney said the board approved Community there's no there's not going to be any a community standard that's perfect that pleases everyone but I will tell you this it helped us tremendously it helped us with the appeals because we went retroactively over the summer and reapplied that to every single appeal that was that took I don't know several hundred hours by the way to get that done but I but we got it done accurately that helped and it while while it doesn't answer every single question in your wisdom you gave us the opportunity to call other people into the room if we got into a hazy situation we haven't had that yet um but it will occur at some point and but we have every opportunity now to uh to do this correctly go we have the process down down path um can we look at the next yeah my my that's main my question is I wanted myself to understand the appeals process because when we vote we vote on that the procedures and policy were followed not the content of these books and so this is like the one area that I wanted to make sure that I or the board has clarification on what we're voting on I would imagine I would and I'm glad I'm not an elected official but I would imagine that there are people when they're unhappy they don't get the outcome that they want that they would push back on you as an elected official and point their finger and W wag it sanctimoniously and say you haven't done a good job shame on you I didn't but but but did you follow the law you know that's the question and remember on the appeal you're voting that to the best of your knowledge and your knowledge would be necessarily limited right as a school board member you know a little about a lot but you don't know everything about everything no no one could so in this we the petitioner can appeal our petitioner appeals at them all um so appeal is is is submitted to the board it comes in to us if if you know we can look at the next slide Mr nor and so this was this was the appeal summer we have all those appeals sort of sitting there for a while because we weren't sure quite how to go through with especially with the volume so we went through it with once we had the board Community standard that allowed us to proceed and take action and we went back and slogged through all of those things in chunks and we went from the very beginning now I'm going to give you a little history lesson on this just because it's been a while a lot has happened in the beginning of this these were farmed out to committees that had principles sit on it and community members and other and while I have very much from the bottom of my heart appreciated their time and effort volunteering and and because that's he I got to go read a a book some of those books weren't very fun to read to be honest and then they were doing this sort of month after month everyone says they want to volunteer to do that we had like three people right and then the principls were like pulled out of their building again pulled out of their building but what happened was we had inconsistent rulings that made us vulnerable they were inconsistent because this those principles and those volunteers very understandably aren't immersed in the Nuance of law statute and policy they only look at it in that moment all of those committees leaned on the side of I don't want to restrict or ban a book even the most the most conservative person I don't say that politically conservative but the but people that lean that like I I can't take this I don't I don't feel American censoring and V I heard that a lot that type of thing don't want to censor the book what else can we do and so what was happening was when they were making the rulings we would go back and look at it retroactively and they have allowed books to remain that absolutely violated the law so that that presented exposure for our media Specialists our principles and for you ladies and so when you this was the spring of the previous year of 20123 made some adjustment to the process we were able to go in then and form a smaller committee that deals with this all day all the time our lenses were calibrated we sat down with the with the procedure we didn't have that attachment to emotion it became very objective uh and we were able to to go through this and deal with it more CLE having said that these appeals from those early ones were still sitting there yeah so what we did now once we had this new policy we were able to go back in and retroactively apply it and you can see what what the outcomes were here this is all public knowledge is on the website for folks to see and so these were the various outcomes from all of those Mr Dy where is your log that's what I was wanting a a copy uh Dr Johnson houses that log she's is it people can where is on the website uh yes it's all the stuff is on the website but Dr Johnson could share with you specifically if you want well I think it's important that people can go and just see the results of our policy there's four people that go look at that you know yeah you're right we're required to put it up you don't know because no one we don't know we don't know who would ever look at it well I know one person that looks at it and because he emails me all the time but um but I I think in general again this goes back to the slide we had at get where our parents 99% of them are saying we're good we got this well for me it doesn't matter if it's one person 10 people or 100 people it should just be available for public for the public to see that's all yes it is yeah just next slide please so this was the final piece and I was just alluding to this is once we were able to shift from having a revolving door of people whose lenses weren't calibrated together um and and in my opinion we're very understandably considering this emotionally um this is what what happened we had a calibrated nuanced application of Law and policy we understand the work deeply I was I was flattered when when Mrs Hansen referred to me as an expert on this I never thought I'd seek expertise in this area but there it happened um so but this is to protect the district uh not to protect anyl political Viewpoint or anything like that or or or an emotional quoti but just to protect the district the school board members principles and media specialist through consistency in the rulings which was was what we've had our data point with zero losses this point I think demonstrates that more clearly than anything uh it's a quick and efficient process maybe not quick enough for some but we're doing it much quicker than we were in the beginning because we know what we're doing cost is at zero we don't have to purchase books for people to read and other materials and things so fiscally conservative for our taxpayers and helped with the review process this summer which I just covered so that's where we are right now I feel like like where we are right now we will obviously we'll have as long as there are a few folks in our community that carry a torch for this I expect challenges to come in uh and then we will deal with them and apply the community standards one at a time as needed but I feel very comfortable that this is now an extremely manageable thing moving from this day forward Mr daily when we're talking about this let's say a grandma and I challenge a book and you say no no the book is fine and we're going to put it back on the Shelf I make an appeal is it the same people it's like the same court making that decision about that same Book on a challenge and on an appeal well yeah but the if if well so she if she challenged the book and the book doesn't violate the law doesn't matter who it's appealed well I'm I'm asking about the the appeal from this day forward I know we had to go through a big huge back and that was great work but from this day forward it the same people that the challenge goes to is it going to be the same group of people the appeal goes to yeah and is that if you like someone else to look at it I would be happy to no I'm saying that qualifies as I thought in statute this this was the whole part no I understand so so I think I understand what you're getting at help figure out mind right we can we can talk more there's a appeal this made ultimately the the the pellet body here is ultimately Ys the board however but it's just like if if a request is made to a judge to recuse themselves the actual judge hears hears that and has to apply the law and the standard so there's a standard that this committee is reviewing these these different efforts and we're going to have uh just from from time Immortal we're going to have uh one or two individuals that are going to make ongoing appeals every decision is made we're going to have we we just know we're prepared they're going to be ongoing Appeals goes back to the committee if there's a further appeal that comes to yall as the board what y'all are reviewing is making sure the committee has followed the procedures that they've taken it they've inter you know they've taken what the community standards are which you all have created and that they're applying it so does matter of two groups looked at it as long as we're following our procedures and cores correct and I think that the importance of that is what's important I think Mr Dy pointed out which is a good point you can have different just like me they say if you have five voyers in a room you have six opinions right so you you you need to have a train group of people who are familiar with the standards that know how to apply it if they're not applying if they're just without even doing it then that's when the appeal would come to y'all and y'all may find there are times when the committee has not applied the standard correct not the content but it applied the standard correctly um if it m Jer if it was I was going to make some comments later during but if I could make some comments now I just want to I just want to highlight a couple of things I think it's important first of all y'all as a board have done an incredible job creating this this took a lot of work and it took a lot of effort and there other school boards you know attorneys are reaching out trying to figure out the work that yall did because yall have avoided a lot of the legal challenges that some of these other communities have gone through uh one of the communities I live in is is going through a very difficult time because they took a very different approach but I think it's important that as we kind of go through this you know these uh these changes of Florida statute 47 well really there were some recent changes that really implemented to stop this process from being abused and weaponized I think that's important for y'all to understand that and part of that is to make sure that the legal definition of a parent or a guardian is in place so I understand that we've had some questions about that what is a legal guardian what is a um what is uh a parent we don't have to guess about this we don't have to kind of you know it's very clear in Florida statute what is a guardian what is is a parent and we really my recommendation y'all is to adhere to that because when y'all is a board try to go through a different standard is going to create challenges it's going to create legal challenges that that ultimately you know create problems for us and this is important because you yall as a district um you know you have potential actors out there that have different agendas than than what youall are required by law to follow whether it's you getting media attention or pushing a political agenda uh but you the days of just random citizens walking out with 700 B you know those days are are over and that's okay you all can take a hard line in that I will advise yall as your attorney if yall receiving criticism that criticism is unwarranted you everyone has an opinion y'all can cure cancer tomorrow and someone will criticize you for not curing alimer so that's just just the way it is but y'all are here to do a job y'all have come up with a great standard you're fing the law you're doing it so some of the criticism that's been forwarded to me is unwarranted in my opinion certainly not legally sufficient um so I would encourage youall to continue to follow that and really take take confidence in and what yall have done legally um but you know we have one individual in particular I won't name him you know who is not a parent is not a guardian does not mean the legal definition of that has walked up with hundreds of the change in the law was specifically designed to stop that from happening to stop bogging down the process so I understand different opinions can matter Run for the legislature if you disagree Run for the state legislature change the law but y'all are here trying to implement a very difficult task very challenging it's very challenging for staff very challenging for all all the men and women who work behind the scenes to serve the children and very difficult for y all and again a lot of this criticism is not based on the law it's not based on court precedent it's not based on case law it's based purely on opinions that are not grounded in substance and if I can just inter what you're saying when we look at the data for the number of parents who are truly troubled by this versus how many of those parents do you think are truly troubled by the number of students who aren't reading on grade level do you know what I mean like our staff needs to focus their time and attention on the things that actually make a difference in our community and it frustrates me when we allow a minor issue to eat so much of their time as a board that's what we're here for to to engage with the community but we're also here to protect what these guys are doing every day to move education forward in this County so I just want to make sure that we don't occupy time that really should be spent elsewhere it it will be the last time I ever talk about it unless it comes up on a policy review or something and as a board we decide we need to do something differently however clarification of that part is essential if we're following our policy because our policy specifically says we understand the process so Madam and you know to to the point you made about the pellet process we've been through more challenges than youone in the country hundreds hundreds and hundreds and we haven't aired um I'm not saying I'm not capable of making a mistake there I absolutely could but there's only a small sliver of subjectivity in any of these and we have a process that you wisely put in place where we can punt that to someone else and get more Minds in the room but we've done that to protect the district and protect you and I can I can assure you you will remain protected there's no task I in my entire career that I would rather get rid of than this one who passes someone else I also believe and I can't believe I'm saying this I'm the best one to do the job for you and so I will hold on to it if you wish to continue to protect you and the district um because that's that's my goal and I think we manage it and do so in a way that is collaborative and collegial we're never going to please everyone but I will say we've come out of this tough situation like playay County Schools always does in a better situation than we were before so we've made you know lemonade out of lemons and I'm proud of that and and I do think that this that this policy that that you ladies have brought forward is as good as it's going to get right now so I appreciate you very much for that thanks for your clarification about the appeals process yes thank you for the opportunity we appreciate you okay I got one other I said I had two here's my second one you know one of the things that I I really try to do is when the board brings things up I try to focus on those things I think that's evident from the family engagement piece of that from the literacy piece of that one of the topics that's brought up is an internal auditor right and so I wanted to provide some information today cuz I feel like all what's the next step and the board will eventually ask me and say how we doing with that right so here's my understanding of where we're at uh the board uh had discussions two previous times workshop for meting kind of agreed hey we should we should use a firm in order to do that work so uh I had staff take a look at okay what does that look like how do we do that like what's our next action step as a board to make this happen so in doing that here's what this and and I didn't want to give this to you head time I just want to explain what this is you can read it right and provide you information so if you're going to hire a firm you can hire the firm in three different ways so at the top you see three columns you can do an RFP right through the formal RFP process you can advertise interview and establish a contract with a with a firm that's the the sample would be how we did it with the U with the Douglas law per that process or you could direct contract with a firm that does this work we have three options to use the leftand column that is just the uh RFP process so if you want to learn more about how rfps work I tried to get it down to a single page a very complicated process right but RFP you would have a committee the committee would then uh Define the scope of work you would then advertise the committee would then meet score based on that etc etc the right hand piece of the paper is a sample advertisement like if we were going to advertise this back out again then what would an advertisement look like so that's a sample advertisement then on the back uh if you skip down put this in a different order to the firms that provide auditing Services you can kind of see a list of firms that do that one of the questions that came up was uh about an internal auditing committee like the idea of the committee right so you'll notice there's two blue uh portions there there's the sample Le Count audit committee and then you see Lee County Board policy the Neola policy for an auditor selection committee because there's two committees and I want to make sure you're not confused so the middle one the auditor selection committee is is only needed if you're actually doing an RFP I believe the discussion that went to the auditing um committee itself the internal auditing committee was the committee that then would be formed to define the scope of work for for the audit right so that's that's another thing so when I looked at the Lee County uh auditing committee application you can see that it has some some boted points there related to it and their example was this is just Lee counties uh 11 person committee seven voting Four Non voting members of the committee and then it says Uh there's is superintendent Chief Financial Officer school board and board uh lay is on and then each board member selects individuals to serve on the committee via an application process uh all of the members should be citizens of Lee County they should all um be on no other advisory committee in other words you've got multiple committees you're dedicated to the auditing have to have a a background in certified public accounting an attorney or certified internal auditor like it would be important that somebody that's on the committee actually knows that work yeah like you can't just pick somebody that's not involved in that because they would truly understand the work and not um just be another figure on on the committee so that that's what that section is there because we'll have to give thought to who would be on the committee like and and how to do that and then at the bottom there's a series of firms that do this in the in the middle of the series of firms you can see there's kind of like a um a top portion and a bottom portion the top portion are the five firms in Florida that do the most work in this area and the bottom are other ones that when we looked up the uh the ficpa those are other ones that do the work in in in in Florida okay but the ones at the top are ones that are that do the most work in our state you can see RSM is a company out there that does aola Bia Maran Lee caller Bard Miami Dave they seem to be the leader in that across the State of Florida that you could see uh the second one does St John St Lucy and Collier and you can see who do Vol uses so I guess if I had a general question now and I don't know if the board wants time to think or have discussion or whatever is of the three areas or the three ways of doing this how does the Bo want to proceed in order to move the ball forward what'll happen is you'll come back to me in another couple meetings and you'll say we haven't done anything right so this is me telling you I've done something this is what I've done and now well you did a lot I actually like the idea that we have free choices and now I'm giving it to you so I did appreciate when we were able to CH choose our our Law Firm we had great discussions we did our research so as you know I'm going to leave here shortly but I wanted to say that I would appreciate that opportunity again and then the chair would be the one you know like you did before the same way we did it with the so you want to advertise of the so the three options are you saying you'd like to advertise interview and contract CU I'm kind of in favor of a direct contract I was leaning that just because of the fact that help me understand how why that would be better I I actually don't know much about this so so the direct contract is we skip the interview process and we don't have to do an RFP process either so we just choose a firm and directly contract with that firm and the reason I'm in favor of that is because there's one that is a clear leader in the work so and that's really an easier R but also if you're looking at the one that's clear also approv and R exactly exactly I think it streamlines the process and doesn't over complicate it um so really I feel like the board um we just need a policy that establishes the audit committee and I I like what Lee County has I don't think we need to reinvent the wheel there I think as well people who have experience help us to direct um the focus of the audit but we get to pick them right yeah which board member selects if you look at the we don't have to pick a firm today right we can just oh no we we can't decide I don't think that would have TOA right so but if we want to go ahead uh well we I think we would need to establish the committee so what would be the steps then if we did a direct um we would just put it on an agenda on a regular board meeting agenda and um establish a contract that way and at the same time would we be um establishing the committee or the formation of the committee yeah I don't have to be done before or no so so my so my understanding is some are only required if you're actually going through the RFP process so if you're doing so I think so I think the board can can go ahead and and and kind of look at so the RSM we I've got some feedback from some of the other school districts as well just from the attorneys involved well respected great customer service I think they would work well so let's say that's I'm not precluding I'm saying that's there's interest in that the Su y could author as a superintendent staff to start some initial you know see what their fees are start some initial then we would work on a direct contract to bring it back to the board for approval so do you guys want to put that on September's agenda to direct contract with RSM because I know that I've heard of this company and I think um so I'm about to pack up and leave but I am with the direct as you said I actually have no of this firm and what whatever you guys decide maybe I think it's a good idea to gather us the information so that we could move forward okay so you're comfortable if we vote on on pursuing a direct contract I like because it's uncomplicated that way okay me too but I just want to make sure that we have the final say on who's on that committee and the actual auditing or audit yeah we do but so if you look at the third bullet point under where it says Lee County School Board audit committee over each board member shall select an individual to serve on the committee so each board member appoints one person to that committe and the person that you appoint should have this background so that they because the point is that none of well with the exception of Miss Clark none of us have a background accounting to direct these other ones cuz there's multiple people on this committee right you're looking at the second one you're looking right here at the top so the there would be with seven voting members and four non- voting so in Lee County I'm assuming they have seven school board members we have five so we would have five voting members and they would each be appointed by each of us each of us would appoint one and then there's four non voting and I would keep that too the chief financial Financial Officer the Schoolboard attorney the superintendent and one board liaison and we don't vote on that committee but we advise does that make sense yeah but there's just underneath it different on okay but we're not going to vote on a firm or these people next we're just voting on Direct contract no I think if we're going to authorize direct contract we need to know who we're direct Contracting with right that's what I'm saying so you don't want to pursue RSN well I mean shouldn't we ask if Belia or Marian or Lee or Coler or Bard or Miami day actually like those people and they don't want to get out of contract with them I just want to make sure that we talk to well we we don't have to contract we can give it if you want time to research it we can punt it to October M Mrs Skipper I think one of the things that we can do is we don't know what their prices are we've reached out to some of the other counties and talked to them yall as board members should reach out as well to your counterparts there what I'm suggesting is if y'all are interested maybe that top company we can reach out to them have staff to the superintendent find out what their pricing is for a district our size get that PL no decision has been made just just explore the relationship come up with a draft contract we can move in a different direction if y'all talk to your counterparts and say look that's not the best fit for us but we have to start somewhere with Gathering the information no no no that's completely fine I just don't want to be voting next week on RSM and then we don't even have price we don't even have any of that we wouldn't be able to CU we'd have to right we well that's what I'm asking but you keep saying that so I don't know I'm confused that what are we actually we can move we can move the vote back to another time we can even do a special meeting before the next Workshop if we wanted to speak the timeline uh forward I think that the direct hiring approach saves a lot of time in the process because the RFP processes is four to six months which is what I agree with but what I'm saying is I don't want to vote on all the details so all you be voting for is giving direction to explore that's all you're voting on that's all I need but try to different well you you need to well I would recommend giving direction to like voting to give direction like right now you're not voting this is a workshop is give give direction to the superintendent to explore a relationship with that with that company but it's not a there's no final contract to vote on you not voting any final documents that's what I want to make sure I want to make sure that we're not next week voting on this company when let's just say within a week and a half that we find out that this is not how we want to go with no just need guidance and Direction CU we have a whole list so could it be like I'm not cuz I'm going but this remember when we did this um with the law firm would we got information on each Law Firm we were given a packet we could do our own research I'm assuming you could get the information for us so that we could do our research so here's what I'm saying if we're just asking for information about these companies I don't think we need to vote to ask for information but but I think what what what we would do is reach out them and and get information for a direct contract they we're asking them to provide us information that's more than cuz cuz there's information here y'all can go to the websites to read up on it but this is more we need information so we can prepare a contract that y'all can say yes or no to y'all can say no so we still have a choice ultimately we're deciding on the direction nothing else ma is Direction that's what I want to clear it cuz that's not what was said and we're directing the superintendent to bring additional information no that's all I wanted to know she was saying something different than what I was comprehending and I wanted to make sure that I was I'm done okay thank you Mr Rosy so um School Board attorney comments I'm just gonna ask Mrs miles to give up about treny sure I just wanted to update you guys on treny we met with the uh chief judge again at the beginning of this month it was a great meeting um we are scheduled to go October the 9th to go and View putam County Trent SE Court I think that will be of great help for our efforts and myself and Jeremiah are going to get a jump start on that and go ahead down there September the 25th I believe to putham County truancy to View Court as well on that day the boers can go a bit more to as well right I would have to find out if the board members would come because it is closed if there's any interest in the board members or staff just let us know we we have to give them a list of who's coming then if y'all want to come observe and see or anything just for informational purposes so to be clear we're in full swing with truy we're in full swing with treny um the school district should have been implementing the their side of things we are working on the actual Court part of it now okay CU I had some people asking so so so just to be clear treny treny is very truncated from 6,000 people down to uh very few people now you get that to that point but then there's legal procedures so if you're at the meeting with with the with the uh judge it kind of went like this I explained all the things the school system does to improve attendance and all of that then when it reaches the point where I say hey I can't I'm done there's nothing else I can do then at least it takes over with the court documents right it's a whole legal procedure which would involve the clerk of courts the recording of information the judges that's why we need legal assistance with that school system um truncates it all the way down to that point but then we need legal help because it's a legal no I comprehend that I just want to make sure that we were started and if I may ask when it gets to truancy Court yes ma'am what's happening in the court proceedings in the past we used to hear if your child is truant you as a parent could be sent to jail or you as a parent could be charged because of your child's treny is that still sort of the way it goes or not so so I like to break it down into two parts is the Civil proceedings in court and then if that doesn't work then it turns over we then send that case to the state attorney's office and that's why we have the state attorney's office involved in all of this so they're also attending all of these meetings with the chief judge they're also um organized to come with us to view um truancy Court in putam County because they want to be there at all of these Court proceeding civil what we're doing so if um that case if that parent and child are still not following orders from even judge then we send that case over to the state attorney's office and then the first time a first time case is a second degree misdemeanor which is punishable by up to 60 days in the county jail or 6 months of Probation and the Jud just the judge is going to be judged for this we Partners at the state attorney's office he has a great demeanor he's a criminal judge as well so we'll get to obviously the judge will be involved in different points but this is a last resort we don't expect a lot of these you know parents to be going to jail you know this is you know multiple opportunities to fix the process before we get to that point do we have any guesstimate as to how many children would have come up for tourcy last year what what was the number do you remember do you know no cuz it's important recognize right the the statistic that I mentioned of 6,000 with 18 more when you start to filter out unexcused from excused and most of my fan mail over the summer was by people explaining me all of the reasons why they the school right once you do all of that remember our primary focus is to remove barriers to encourage people to come to school so the school system is a helping organization we're not a punishing organization but we realize that even though you you attempt to help people sometimes people don't take the help correct and those are the people that go in that direction so I don't have a the answer to the question I don't have a number that I can wi but I can't imagine being more near 6,000 yeah abely that would be smaller group of smaller group which is what it was in the past in the and that's how many did we have do you know so so it was about 15 per month okay that was historically how long ago has that been said was eight years what is what the judge said so I don't remember it hon I remember it more as a teacher than as a and I mean even within the school there were maybe like two yeah like one family which included like three students you know what I mean so just stay wide it's about 5 to 8% of of of of of of the population that's true and ends up going into that process so it's a small it's a small but you have to have the mechanism in place to hold parents accountable but it's about 5 to 8% let's say 10% round it up requiring them to be parents there you go well I think this also gives us the opportunity to find um those I say that a loud but those that actually need help in different areas so that like you said we so we can find those who truly need help you know Grandma's taking care of kids and doesn't have transportation that's right anything further from your office all right uh School Board member comments did you guys have anything you wanted to add no just keeping in mind you have another meeting more I just wanted to for us to keep in mind the student that was hit on the bicycle and also the person I just want to thank the reading team I'm living early literacy right now so it's joy we do watching it was a great first day of school thank you thank you for welcoming my son as well was my chauffer it was so he was my chauffer because I couldn't I still can't drive um but his eyes were open and his eyes were open to a lot of the activities I mean he graduated in the early 2000s and just seeing the growth in all of the different programs at high school and seeing the growth and just how schools operate was eye opening it was a fun it was a fun experience most definitely I had to tell you guys I was at play high for um freshman orientation and uh was talking with Dr halter who told me that they were having like the first week of school like 30 kids a day show up to register so the growth you know in the Lake Asbury green Co Springs area really has an impact on the schools in those areas I would imagine Spring Park Elementary probably had some of the same sort of Statistics but um so just kudos to our staff members I know everybody's probably exhausted patient absolutely well even at Grove Park I mean I'm you know we we see people lining up to register their kids the first day of school and it's sort of like well it's a little late even Chris walked away from that saying who would think about doing this I was like Christopher there are all sorts of situations in the world and all sorts of situations in these families but I did see a former student who was enrolling her fifth and sixth grade children so that like student from W chry there you go well all the new shoes were awesome yes everybody had new shoes all right well this meeting is adjourned and we move on to our next