2016-0114 Special City Commission Meeting

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Summary Minutes:Special City Commission Meeting January 14,2016 City of Sunny Isles Beach,Florida found that there are hundreds of cars coming to school every morning from out of the area. Now, like he said to the School Board,it is not actionable to remove people from the school, but it sure tells us where the genesis of our traffic problem is coming from. Mayor Scholl said the fact is that we have a huge traffic problem there because there are a lot of people going to that school who do not come from our community, and we even discounted the ones that came from Eastern Shores or Golden Beach because we know that they belong here, they are legally in the school. He is talking about people from out of the County. Then the argument is that there are divorced parents and maybe they are staying with the father in Hollywood that week, but the fact of the matter is if he was a divorced parent and he has got to deal with that traffic every morning he would let the kids stay with his Mother during the week and walk to school. But the fact is that we have a tremendous amount of people in that school that don't belong there. Mayor Scholl said because the Administration was remised on making sure that the folks that deserve to go to that school are the ones that are going there, we took it to the next step and wrote a letter to the School Board. We said we understand you need a school expansion but we don't want to create an expanded environment without dealing with the root cause of the problem which is what we call District Jumpers, which means kids from out of the area. That is the technical terms if you are a School Board official,District Jumpers. Frankly,they blew us off at the beginning. Mayor Scholl said about two months ago he wrote a stronger letter that basically said,we are looking at planning the school but we would be remiss if we took taxpayer money and we invested it in another school without dealing with the District Jumper issue. We could not build enough schools as the schools are so well regarded they would fill up immediately every time and be overcrowded. And so the fact is at that point we started to get a dialogue going with the School Board Officials. About six (6) weeks ago, he and the City Manager had a meeting with the higher ups of the School Board. The way our school works is we have our Principal and then there is a Regional person,and then an Assistant Superintendent, and then the Cabinet member,and then the Superintendent of Schools,Alberto M.Carvalho. Just before the holidays, we started to deal with the No. 2 and the No. 3 people in the chain. One is Vivian Santiestebanpardo,Region Superintendent,and one is Iraida Mendez-Cartaya, Associate Superintendent. Just before he went on vacation he had a meeting with Vivian Santiestebanpardo, who is really a primary decision maker in this whole thing. Basically he and Vivian came to a meeting of the minds where he just said I am not doing this unless we come up with a mechanism to basically deal with all the existing kids in the school,and then deal with the intake. His position was, there are 2,000 kids in the school, we can look at every one of them, let's hire a temporary staff, you tell us what the rules are, what you can and can't do and there are privacy issues, and they have got their own constraints but let's hire a temporary staff and lets go through every kid in the school. And then when we have to go to Winston Towers 300 because there are 20 kids that live there we can send a Police Officer over there with a School official and basically verify that the kids actually live there. It is not perfection but at least we are going to take the problem head on and then we are going to have a mechanism for basically dealing with it. And then going forward we are going to be much more rigorous about when somebody applies to get into the school. 10