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Welcome to Mondays with Maria, brought to you by the Foundation for Orange County Public Schools. Here's OCPS Superintendent, Dr. Maria Vazquez.
Dr. Maria Vazquez: Hi everyone. Bri MacNaught from our Communications division is back with me to talk about my town hall meetings. They're back, we've held seven so far this school year and we will have seven more in person with an additional six that will be virtual. I appreciate everyone who has taken the time to come out.
Bri MacNaught: Last year you had 44 town halls, a very aggressive schedule. Have the questions so far been similar this year as to where they were last year?
Dr. Maria Vazquez: So, no, they're completely different. Last year the goal was to listen to what was going well, what were concerns, and how we were communicating. This year, we are just answering questions that they might have so they have a better understanding of Orange County Public Schools. And we also are doing a short presentation that shares some statistics about Orange County and also talks about what changes we made as a result of the town halls that we held last year.
Bri MacNaught: Have there been any trending topics or anything that has surprised you?
Dr. Maria Vazquez: So there've been two topics that have come up at each of the town halls. The first one dealing with teacher shortages and I'm not surprised about that. It's a national problem and we are working hard to continue to recruit, but also retain the teachers that we currently have. The other topic which was not a surprise, has to do with transportation. Again a national problem and I'm being very honest and forthright with the members of our community are there that I don't see that that's going to get better anytime soon. We continue to have bus driver shortages. We compete with Disney and Universal and so it, it is a problem that we are still looking for possible solutions, but that's not one that's going to have an easy fix.
Bri MacNaught: Is the format of the meetings the same?
Dr. Maria Vazquez: It's very similar. We are continuing to use Thought Exchange as a tool for our families to be able to input their questions and then we rank them to make sure that we get the ones that are most important to the people that are attending. One thing that has been different, it's not a change to the format, but we have seen many more students that are attending and I love, love that because they're part of our community and we need to hear what they have to say.
Bri MacNaught: You took swift action on some of the hot topic issues last year. Are you planning to do the same this year?
Dr. Maria Vazquez: So we haven't seen the same trend with hot topics like we did last year that warranted that swift action, but if that starts to happen and we see a pattern of things that need to be addressed right away, certainly we will take ]swift action again.
Bri MacNaught: Well, that sounds like a lot of great information. Of course we will come back and visit this again once all of the town halls are wrapped up.
Dr. Maria Vazquez: Sounds like a good idea. Thank you all for watching. If you haven't already, you will be getting an invitation to a town hall near you very soon. Stay tuned for another Mondays with Maria next week.
Mondays with Maria has been brought to you by the Foundation for Orange County Public Schools. Investing in our children today to strengthen our community tomorrow. For more OCPS news and information, visit theslice.Ocps.net.