School Board hires rezoning consultant, approves RFP process to select a search firm for a new Superintendent

BY JENNIFER CABRERA

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — At the School Board of Alachua County meeting on November 4, the board ratified a contract with employees, approved a contract with a rezoning consultant, and voted to issue an RFP to select a firm to conduct a search for a new Superintendent.

Principals of the Year

Director of Evaluation, Accountability and Analytics David Shelnutt announced the Principals of the Year, nominated and voted on by their peers: Littlewood Elementary Principal Justin Russell and Glen Springs Elementary Assistant Principal Heather Lowry. 

Public comment

During the public comment period for non-agenda items, seven people criticized the district’s policy on interacting with ICE, five people objected to a teacher being placed on administrative leave for using the title “Mx,” four people objected to Superintendent Kamela Patton’s new initiatives for teachers, three people spoke in support of keeping Patton through the 2026-27 school year, one person said the board needed to perform an annual evaluation of Patton, and one person complained about late and canceled buses. 

During the public comment period for agenda items, six people spoke in favor of hiring a new Superintendent as quickly as possible, two people spoke about the increased workload for teachers, and one person supported keeping Patton through the 2026-27 school year. 

Evelyn Foxx from the Alachua County branch of the NAACP urged the board to launch a Superintendent search as soon as possible: “After hearing these teachers come up here tonight, we have no other choice but to move forward to get a strong, courageous leader to take us forward. Things aren’t getting any better. The teachers are stressed, and with everything going on with our district, the children is rarely being mentioned… There are some good candidates out there, and I think we don’t need to wait any longer.”

Employee contract

Assistant Superintendent for Human Resources Debbie Terry said this year’s contract for employees was completed in record time and was ratified with 2,085 “yes” votes and 26 “no” votes. The agreement includes the standard step increase plus a 3% raise. 

Member Tina Certain made a motion to approve the salary schedules and collective bargaining agreements, and Member Leanetta McNealy seconded the motion.

Certain praised Patton for the budget cuts and staff reductions she made for this year’s budget, which “positioned us to have funding to be able to provide raises for this current year.” She said the staff reductions were a “very unpopular decision, and they were hurtful,… but in the face of not being able to have it all, we had to position ourselves that way.” She acknowledged that the district did not meet the state’s deadline of September 30 for ratifying the contract, “but we are way closer than what we were in the last school year.”

Member Thomas Vu praised Terry for her work in Human Resources: “We’re following statutes like we’re supposed to, and we’re valuing people like we’re supposed to, and I just hope we do more and more of that.”

The motion passed unanimously.

Contract with rezoning (“consolidation”) consultant

Director of FTE and State Reporting Kim Neal introduced a contract with J. Brown Professional Group (JBPro) that the agenda described as a “data-driven consolidation plan designed to ensure balanced school enrollment, efficient facility use, and alignment with educational priorities and community values.” The contract runs from November 2025 through March 2026, with the goal of having revised school attendance boundaries for the 2026-27 school year. The contract value is $175,000.

Neal said, “The plan will ensure our schools are efficiently utilized, equitably zoned, and aligned with educational priorities and community needs… JBPro’s approach centers on transparency and collaboration, including up to 16 community open houses, 16 student discussions, two principal workshops, 10 board member briefings, and 37 school site banners with QR codes linking to project updates.”

Certain made a motion to approve the contract, and Vu seconded the motion.

McNealy said she “cannot agree with that amount of money when we have experts right here… I have many reservations… Are we talking about rezoning here? If we’re talking about rezoning, how many instructional personnel will be involved? How many parents will be involved?… I don’t have enough information.” She suggested discussing the contract in more depth at a workshop. 

Vu said the consolidation of buildings “needed to happen a long time ago… We have way too big of a footprint.” He said that having fewer schools would mean less overhead, which would mean more money to pay teachers and more resources for students. He added, “I think we need to start it now… There’s always going to be a reason to wait… We no longer have the ability to do this in-house in this district, so we really have no choice, in my opinion, but to contract it out.” He said the money would come out of the half-cent sales tax, not the General Fund. 

Certain said she was leaning on the Superintendent’s recommendation “because this is under her purview and it’s something that we need to have done… It’s really, really imperative that we become more efficient… We can either spend [our] money supporting a lot of half-full schools, or we can get efficient and offer more services to students in fewer spaces.”

McNealy: “Are we going to close Lake Forest? Are we going to close Shell? Are we going to close Williams? Are we going to close Idylwild, Rawlings, Metcalfe?… I wish I could have all of the community from East Gainesville sitting in here listening to me, because I know what’s going to happen.”

McNealy said the majority of schools in her district are under-enrolled, “so guess what’s going to happen?… Think about what the community and the folk who live on this quadrant of Alachua County, how they feel about it… Are we going to close Lake Forest? Are we going to close Shell? Are we going to close Williams? Are we going to close Idylwild, Rawlings, Metcalfe?… We know that people [on the] west [side of the county],… they aren’t coming on [the east] side… Everyone knows it… I wish I could have all of the community from East Gainesville sitting in here listening to me, because I know what’s going to happen.”

Member Janine Plavac said, “I get it; I understand completely.” She said that, in her opinion, “the timeline… doesn’t even leave one day to miss to get to the end of that proposal in March. And there’s other things on the agenda, maybe a Superintendent search.” She said, however, that the State’s Schools of Hope initiative “really brought this to a head” because now charter schools can co-locate in unused parts of district schools. She continued, “Yes, we do have a lot of empty schools, and we have to do something, but I’m not sure if this is something that we should do… I mean, why this company?… I’m really caught between a rock and a hard place on this.”

Chair Sarah Rockwell said, “First, this has to happen. It’s not just the Schools of Hope.” She said the most important reason is declining student enrollment, which means “schools are going to close, and none of us wants the school that our kids went to, that we taught at, that we attended, to be the one that gets closed.” She said the contract was a “middle ground” between the previous failed rezoning effort, which required a lot of work from staff, and a later proposal from a different company to do the rezoning for $250,000. 

The contract was approved 3-2, with McNealy and Plavac in dissent.

Superintendent search

Terry introduced the agenda item for the Superintendent search and gave the board three options:

• Enter into a direct contract with one experienced, qualified firm ($48,000-$55,000);
• Put out a Request for Information (RFI) with multiple qualified firms ($48,000-$55,000);
• Put out a Request for Proposal (RFP) to invite proposals from firms.

Under the RFI option, the board would identify multiple search firms, the firms would make presentations to the board, and the board would select one of them.

Under the RFP option, the cost would be about the same but could be higher, Terry said. The RFP process takes about 6-8 weeks and involves advertising the RFP and receiving proposals from all interested search firms; after the deadline for proposals has passed, a Proposal Evaluation Committee will review them individually, which takes one or two weeks, and then will hold a meeting to score the proposals and develop a short list. The firms on the short list can make presentations to the board, and then the board will select one of them. Once the firm is selected, the search for the new Superintendent will begin.

Vu made a motion to direct staff to issue an RFP for a nationwide Superintendent search, and Certain seconded the motion.

McNealy: “To extend Dr. Patton’s contract until 2027 is not acceptable to me.”

McNealy disagreed: “To extend Dr. Patton’s contract until 2027 is not acceptable to me. Launching a Superintendent search shows that we’re taking deliberate, responsible steps to ensure strong, stable leadership.”

Certain: “I’m not going to vote to do a search right now.”

Certain said, “I’m not going to vote to do a search right now… because that is not going to position this organization to be successful for students… When we were in the workshop, the consensus was moving towards extending her contract beyond June of 2026; we didn’t say a date…. I’m not committing to doing a search immediately.”

Plavac said a contract extension for the Superintendent was originally on the meeting agenda for approval, but it was removed before the meeting. She was reluctant to vote on the process without a timeline.

RFP process would select a search firm, not a Superintendent

Rockwell said there seemed to be “just a little bit of confusion” because the RFP would start the process of selecting a search firm, not selecting a Superintendent. 

Vu called the question, and Certain seconded it. The vote on calling the question was 3-2 with McNealy and Plavac in dissent, and Rockwell said the motion did not carry because it needed four votes.

Timeline “is completely undetermined”

Purchasing Manager Jeff Garcia said the timeline “is completely undetermined.” He said that if they proceeded with the RFP process, the contract would likely not be awarded to a search firm until January 2026; at that point, they could specify a start date of July 2026, but that would not give the search firm much time. He continued, “I don’t want there to be any misconception that if you guys vote to move forward with any of these processes, that means Dr. Patton’s out, no matter what, July 1 of 2026; none of that’s been decided. This is for the process.”

Rockwell: “We are actually having a reduction in staff attrition since Dr. Patton. That’s just the data.”

Rockwell said she supported keeping Patton for a “real transition period” after a new Superintendent arrives, and she added, “I know that Dr. Patton has made a lot of substantial changes, and that’s been hard on staff, and she and I have had some discussions on how to alleviate some of the burden on staff, and we don’t always see eye to eye on that, but I did ask her to direct Ms. Terry to pull some data on separations from service, and I wanted to compare July 1 to the end of October last year to this year. So last year, — that was before Dr Patton arrived — compared to this year, separations and service by ESPs are down 27%, separations of service for instructional staff are down 18%, so we are actually having a reduction in staff attrition since Dr. Patton. That’s just the data… I do think that we need to work to reduce the burden on teachers… We need to implement things in a way where teachers feel supported and appreciated and not overwhelmed, but the data speaks to a reduction in attrition.”

The motion to proceed with an RFP process passed unanimously.

Teachers’ union update

During the Alachua County Education Association update, President Carmen Ward thanked the board for ratifying the contracts for employees and said she hoped it was the “beginning of a really respectful partnership.” 

She continued, “One thing that keeps coming to my attention is safety — student safety, teacher safety, Education Support Professionals’ safety. I’m talking about bus drivers, bus aides, and paraprofessionals. Violence has no place in our public school system, and I know all of you agree with that, but we must enforce our Code of Conduct. We must continue to expect no violence in classrooms, no violence in our schools, or on our buses. And we have a lot of violence — violence against adults, violence against other children — and it needs to be addressed in a severe and radical way.”

Ward also criticized the district’s policy on cooperating with ICE: “Our policy does not reflect our community’s values, and so we need to do better with our ICE policy… There are a lot more conservative districts in this state that are doing much better than we are, in just saying there needs to be a judicial warrant for someone to obtain a child… I expect that we also will support and have a safe learning environment for all of our LGBTQ+ students, and it will be a safe LGBTQ+ environment for employees to work, because we do have Title VII rights. Those are federal rights, and I think many people from Talbot spoke up today about what has been done in this district to us by the Attorney General, by the Commissioner of Education, unwarranted, no due process, treating people like they are guilty of something when they’ve done nothing wrong. And I absolutely know that the union will have their backs, because we are the majority, and we are defending legally any member that is eligible for legal services, and there are a lot of them that are currently with union lawyers and being defended. And so we will continue to do that. We will continue to fight for justice and fight for fairness and fight for the employees.”