2011-0809 City Commission Workshop

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Summary Minutes:City Commission Workshop August 9.201 I City of Sunny Isles Beach.Florida Schools from South Point to Sunny Isles Beach,Aventura,North Miami,North Miami Beach, and part of Miami Gardens. When all the schools that have its own reputations, virtually every one of them has an issue with out of area students that find ways,sometimes legal ways, and many times illegal ways, of getting their children into the schools. It is very difficult for the schools themselves because they don't have the personnel to knock at every door of every student that registers at the school. Now, Sunny Isles Beach has some resources available that some other schools do not. The City is providing Police Officers, and he knows that they have gone out and conducted home visits to the extent they can within the City of Sunny Isles Beach because they don't have jurisdiction to go into Hallandale or other areas outside their jurisdiction. It is a problem and he knows that Dr. Annette Weissman has been very vigilant about doing everything within the bounds that the School Board allows, to be able to verify addresses that are provided in the information that is authentic, people that come in actually do live within the boundaries of the school. We have been adamant about denying student transfers even for siblings because what we did a couple of years ago was a very gradual kind of implementation of a boundary change which started with students that had not been at the school, and directing them to another one of our excellent schools. We are still in the early stages of that, and so you haven't seen the proof of that. Mr. Greenfeld said there is a Task Force that was started by our Superintendent to look at strategies to amending the School Board rule to allow other types of verifications that are not currently allowed by Home Rule. A study has been done of every other district virtually every major district in the State of Florida, tools they utilize to verify parents addresses, that the child is actually living with the parent, we don't accept things like they are living with Grandma or cousins, etc., and we verify if the parent has turned over legal custody of their child. We get into the legal issues, we get into many issues that are very problematic at such schools as this, Aventura Waterways,Alonzo and Tracy Mourning Senior High School. Just to give you a hypothetical at how far a parent will go, we had a parent that applied for a transfer to Alonzo and Tracy Mourning Senior High School and was denied due to overcrowding, the parent rented an apartment in the area, and somebody went out from the school to verify that they were living there. There were clothes in the closet but do we really believe the child is living there, no, but based on those rules that we are currently governed by, so people with financial means may be renting places and doing things that, and as there are vacancies in some of these high rises that are open to rentals, people will do that just to get their child into that school, they are committing fraud but it is very hard to enforce that. And so, do I believe that there are any children at Sunny Isles Beach that do not belong there,yes he does. How do we identify them, and how do we get them out is an ongoing issue. Vice Mayor Thaler said was there not a special meeting held where the rules were supposedly being changed,and Mr. Greenfeld said that there has been a series of those meetings,and Dr. Martin Karp our Board Member representing this area, has been very involved in that, in fact he actually brought forth the initiative to start that Task Force, and Mr. Greenfeld serves on that Task Force, we did have a meeting towards the end of last fiscal year, and some final things were going to be proffered to our Superintendent but another meeting has not been called and so he was not privy to what was determined or still underway to make some final recommendations that would go to the entire school. 2