LAKELAND Incoming Polk County Public Schools Superintendent Frederick Heid was on the job Wednesday afternoon as he transitions into the position after the School Board voted 5-1 Tuesday night to approve his contract.
School Board member Lynn Wilson did not attend the meeting because he is self-quarantining with COVID-19 symptoms. Kay Fields was the lone dissenting vote.
Her opposition, she said, was not against Heid she successfully lobbied her colleagues to vote unanimously for him but that his $255,000 salary is $17,000 more than outgoing Superintendent Jacqueline Byrd’s $238,000 salary.
“I believe wholeheartedly in gender equity,” Fields said. “It sends a very poor message in my part of the world to have an incoming male making more than a departing female.”
BARTOW The Polk County School Board, along with district staff, have a message for voters: “Thank you for renewing the half-cent sales tax in November 2018!”
Without the 15-year tax, they say the school district could not afford to build new schools, modernize old ones and do much-needed improvements on others. The initiative passed 68% to 32%.
As part of the district’s plan to keep people apprised of what the tax is paying for, on Tuesday, Assistant Superintendent for Facilities and Operations Angela Usher, along with Robert Kincart, founder and president of A-C-T Environmental & Infrastructure and a member of the Sales Tax citizens oversight committee, told the School Board what they have been able to accomplish in the past two years.
LAKELAND Frederick Heid is ready to bolt from the gate once he begins his tenure as the new Polk County Public Schools superintendent after being unanimously selected Tuesday night by the School Board.
One of his first priorities, he said, is to figure out who to hire for his executive leadership board – one that currently has several openings.
“I need to understand the vacancies and why those vacancies exist,” Heid said in an early morning telephone interview a little more than 12 hours after the Polk County School Board voted 7-0 to hire him. “I’m a big proponent of homegrown talent.
School Board members expressed some reservations about several things in the agreement
IDEA Public Schools is one of five charter school companies designated as a “School of Hope” in Florida
LAKELAND Texas-based IDEA Public Schools has approval to open a kindergarten-through-12th-grade school in Lakeland in 2023 after the Polk County School Board unanimously passed the non-profit education company’s performance-based agreement Tuesday evening.
“The last time we were before you, we were working out a couple of details,” said Brian Warren, Polk County Public Schools senior director of acceleration and innovation, which oversees the district’s charter schools. “We have reached a resolution on those.”
LAKELAND Polk County Public Schools are in negotiations with the Florida Department of Health’s Polk County office to put school district employees who are 65 or older near the front of the vaccination line.
“We did have some brief conversations about rolling out shots,” Deputy Superintendent John Hill said at Tuesday s School Board workshop in response to a question from School Board member Sarah Fortney. Hill said that he and Associate Superintendent for Human Resources Teddra Porteous were planning to reach out to Polk County s Department of Health Director Dr. Joy Jackson to negotiate a shot schedule for district employees.