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 Mayor Scholl said the problem has been that it is general knowledge that it is easy to get into the school. You show up with a piece of paper that looks like an address in Sunny Isles Beach and they will let your kid into the school. The fact is that it is an A-rated school and parents, this is near and dear to every parent's heart, they want their kids to have the best education possible, and so they will beg, borrow or steal to get their kid into an A-rated school even if they have to lie, and even if it is illegal, and then they have to ask their kid to lie which is even worse. Before the holidays he had an email with Vivian Santiestebanpardo and she committed to him that we would go through legal this month if the School Board figured out the mechanism and that we would actually start a program to deal with the District Jumpers. A few days ago he had a conversation with Iraida Mendez-Cartaya who is her boss and sits on Superintendent's Carvalho's Cabinet and Iraida confirmed that they are going to do what you are asking us to do. Mayor Scholl said his point is that is the root analysis where he thinks a lot of the traffic is coming from. When that is all said and done,whether that alleviates 100 cars,or 50 cars,or 10 cars he does not know but at least he feels like we are getting to the core of the real issue. Because the real issue is, he believes that if that school was only attended by the kids that should go to that school,the only time we would have an issue is on a rainy day. On a rainy day is when it would get backed up because parents don't want their kids to walk to school in the rain. He doesn't think we would have the issues that we have because we have the school bus handling everything else. You know the school buses,the kids that are supposed to go there,the school bus can pick them up in the morning from Eastern Shores and even from the north end of the City, they go to the Arlen House, they go to Atlantic Island, you know you can get a school bus voucher to get to that school, and so what parent would want to drive their kid to school from Arlen House and deal with that traffic when you have a school bus alternative. Mayor Scholl said and so at that point, if we genuinely have that problem solved we can mitigate it greatly. He does not believe that we are ever going to totally fix the problem because parents are always going to find ways to get their kids into school when they really want them in there but if we get the reputation that you are going to get caught and when you get caught your kid is going to be removed, it is going to be embarrassing, it is going to be difficult, it is hard on your kid. And again, he feels terrible for the kids, the last thing he wants to do is to remove a kid from a school mid-semester and take him away from his friends but unfortunately the parents put the kid into the situation by lying,and by creating a false environment and then they ask the kid to lie when they go to school. He said we were in a situation not too long ago when we were at some induction and are sitting with the kids,he is not going to mention names,and the kids wouldn't tell them where they live because they knew they were sitting with public officials and they didn't live in the area. That is terrible to put a kid through that. He just wrote a newsletter article for it, it is going to be in his State of the City address,he is making a very demonstrable public effort to tell parents, and put everybody on notice that we are doing this. We didn't tell anybody we were doing the license plate thing because we wanted to try to figure it out but the license plate situation it certainly confirmed his concerns that all of these cars are coming from spots they should not be coming from. And that gave them some evidence that the District Jumper issue is the underlying issue to all the traffic and that is the root cause of the real problem. 11