Lazaro Aleman
ECB Publishing, Inc.
Jefferson County School District administrators have now developed a transition plan for taking back the schools in 2022, a draft of which they shared with the school board and members of the public last week.
The plan, which School Superintendent Eydie Tricquet and transition Principal Jackie Pons presented to the board on Monday evening, Oct. 11, is very much a preliminary document, a point that the two repeatedly underscored.
The plan is divided into four quarters: July through September 2021; October through December 2021; January through March 2022; and April through June 2022.
Listed under each quarter are a series of activities and tasks to be accomplished, the very last in Quarter 4 being a planned celebration of the reopening of the schools under the administration of the Jefferson County School District.
Meanwhile, a professional team from the Florida Department of Education (FDOE), which was supposed to be at the Oct. 11 meeting, cancelled at the last minute because the chancellor was reportedly out of state.
It was the second time in recent weeks that the FDOE team, which is supposed to be helping guide the district through the development of the transition plan, canceled a workshop with the board at the last minute.
The FDOE team is now scheduled to come before the school board on Monday, Oct. 25. Despite its cancellations, however, the group has reportedly been meeting with Tricquet, Pons and others from the district.
“They’ve been meeting with us on a fairly regular basis,” Tricquet told the school board on Monday, referring to the FDOE team.
Pons in his presentation, like Tricquet, emphasized the preliminary nature of the transition plan, calling it work in progress that was subject to change upon input from the board and others. He likewise emphasized that the project was a team effort and communications crucial for its success.
“We’ve never had a transition in Florida going from a charter school back to a school district,” Pons said. “This is a pretty big undertaking. We want to have a relationship with this board to review and add to this document.”
He noted that most of the activities in the first quarter had been completed and the team was beginning to focus on the activities and tasks in the second quarter, which he called fairly ambitious.
Pons proceeded to go through several of the cited activities in each of the quarters, expounding on a few of them.
One of the directives from the board, he said, had been to take stock of the inventory on the campus, particularly relating to technology.
“What I’ve noticed on campus is that there is a lot of technology,” Pons said. “We’ll have a permanent inventory as we develop our own technology offerings.”
He said they had asked the FDOE if the district could enter articulation agreements with institutions of higher learning such as Tallahassee Community College and North Florida College going forward.
Another important issue, he said, was to inform current employees of the district’s different rules and policies and ensure that all personnel were correctly certified.
“I will try to meet individually with every employee so that they know when to apply for positions,” Pons said.
He said one of his goals was to get students who had left the district to attend school elsewhere to return.
“We have some 300 students attending schools outside the district,” Pons said. “If we can welcome back 100 students, the impact on the budget would be significant.”
Others of the goals that Pons mentioned included revitalizing the athletic program and extracurricular activities, developing a master schedule and ensuring that all employees were treated the same, and petitioning the FDOE to release its financial oversight of the district.
“There are some ambitious goals here but I think that they are doable,” Pons said
Finally, he praised the high school campus for its beauty and cited the state-of-art status of the school’s vocational training programs, such as automotive mechanics and culinary arts.
“Communications will be very important during this process,” Pons emphasized again lastly.
Pons, a longtime educator and former Leon County school superintendent, was hired as the transition principal in July to help drive the transition process.