001[Music] all right this is the special meeting of the on june 29 2021 of the montgomery independent school district board of trustees i'd like to call this meeting to order please join me in the pledge of one allegiance under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all honor the texas flag i pledge allegiance to thee texas one state under god one individual all right we've got a couple of really interesting things going on tonight first is the hearing for citizens president to address the board about the budget and proposed tax rate are there any comments to be made on this miss whitaker hearing none uh we will move forward with that are there any public comments in general hearing none we'll move forward with that as well all right we are now to the consent
002agenda um as presented is there anyone that would like to motion that the consent agenda um be approved or is there an item you'd like to pull i'll move to uh approved consent agenda as presented all right is there a second miss portland thank you uh all those in favor aye aye opposed and abstain the consent agenda uh passes we're now on to action items item 6a consider approval of vendor to conduct stakeholder engagement and satisfaction survey dr morrison thank you dr fuller we throughout the process of developing the strategic plan and the accompanying balance scorecard that will be a vibrant part of our board meetings in the upcoming year i've constantly talked about the need to populate that uh that with authentic data data that uh is not being provided by the district but
003is being provided by third parties and much of that balanced scorecard rests with survey data and so the decision of securing a group that would do comprehensive surveys that would give our employees and our community a sense of confidence that uh we're going to be benefited by their wisdom and their thoughts even if we don't necessarily like what they have to say to us the data is what is important uh and so justin moreno is going to go through our process of selecting a vendor to do those surveys and to give you a little of insight in terms of who we are recommending for your approval tonight yes good evening board and dr morris and this really was a month months long process that started with the strategic plan as as we worked through our
004key performance indicators we realized that we needed uh baseline data to really set where we where we're starting and to identify how we how we want to grow in various areas like it's to customer satisfaction with the district departments and percentage of parents students and staff who feel safe at school for example and it was important for us as we uh worked through this process to identify a third party to conduct this to conduct the surveying as uh in the past um we we heard through our discussions with uh task force committee members for the strategic plan that um and internal surveys conducted in the past were sometimes viewed as potentially bias and potentially results being doctored and information shared by staff members wasn't always kept confidential and over the years we have staff members
005that are now hesitant to respond to surveys and we certainly moving forward don't want to have that perception any longer which is why what we felt it was so important to move forward with a third party we want to instill a psychological safety that staff can share honest and authentic feedback to us in and really build greater participation in these surveys so we opened this was an open process we issued an rfp earlier this month it was posted on the district website for the required number of days closed on june 23rd we notified 11 possible vendors of the opportunity we ultimately received responses from three national companies and after scoring the responses we are recommending partnering with k-12 insight to think to conduct the surveying we got input from members of the communications task force
006committee as i said this was something that was discussed over several months during the development of the strategic plan k-12 insight is a national public education consulting firm that specializes in improving customer service and stakeholder engagement with between stakeholders and school districts they work they work with over 500 school districts across the country including several in texas kdisd hayes consolidated isd and leander isd for example so if you do if you do accept our recommendation our baseline survey uh would can be conducted in september the group would work with us on crafting the survey questions to get the answers and the responses that that we're seeking to identify for the strategic plan and then moving forward the survey would be captured in may of 22 23 and 24 as we progress monitor the strategic plan
007board members how are they going to arrive at this data like what kind of sampling methods are going to be used um we would look at the kpis that require baseline survey the strategic plan we'd uh model questions for parents staff community members students where where we're measuring and then we would look at the percentage of responses so more than just staff as being yes understood so mr mourinho they are not just providing us with an off-the-shelf solution they're kind of catering a solution for us yes i mean this is making this is what this is what they specialize in partnering in with school districts and um in improving and enhancing stakeholder engagement right one of the things dr fuller that will be exciting is where obviously we have our kpis and we'll say this
008is the target we're trying to reach did we reach it do we not but because of their work nationally we'll also be able to say well is that an appropriate target and how are other districts responding and you know is there a district that is outperforming us in terms of uh do employees uh recommend that as this organization is a great place to work or another school district that has a higher percentage of staff and students who feel safe at school and you know you have to be humble in this work you don't get to be premiered by thinking you have the answers so if there's other districts who are asking similar types of data and their data is more robust and positive than ours then we're going to go learn but when you ask
009questions at board meeting well should we be excited about this data even if we're hitting our targets we'll be able to have a little bit more of a national scope to be able to answer those questions uh looking at the um the pricing tabulations uh it says on the motion 40 000 not to exceed 40 000 is there some variable cost in there i mean i'm looking it's got it broken out pretty well so i'm guessing if we recommend or want them to come by for an extra day or another group that's just an extra cost okay yes the first year because we're doing two two surveys um there will be an additional cost for the second survey but moving forward it would be roughly half the price okay and the other part too that
010will be exciting is we'll get district level data but then we'll also be able to disaggregate it and break it down for the schools and so there be an opportunity for a principal to be able to say okay that's how the district did but how do i compare to my peers in the district and again the best place to learn is right here at home and so we're excited about the ability to disaggregate the data by campuses any other questions all right is there a motion on this matter i'll make a motion to approve k-12 insight as the district vendor to conduct stakeholder engagement and satisfaction surveying services and a second second all right mr denison thank you uh all those in favor aye aye opposed and abstain that motion carries thank you mr marina
011all right next consider approval of budget amendment number five mr lynn good evening yes this is our final budget amendment for the 2020 2021 fiscal year and so it's laid out for you in your board packet we just ask for your approval board members are there any questions assuming no audit adjustments this will be the final presented numbers this is the final amended budget but obviously as we go through the audit process there will be some adjustments to that all right are there any motions if there are no further questions any motions i'll make a motion when i find it as written i move to approve budget number five as presented all right thank you thank you all right all those in favor aye aye oppose and abstain that motion carries thank you and last
012but not least on our action items consider and adopt the 2021-2022 general operating budget and other budgets yeah dr fuller before i pass it over my friend and colleague chris lynn this is in some ways both the most boring thing that we should be presenting to you this year and the most exciting it's most exciting because it's the budget it reflects our priorities it reflects how we are being entrusted by the community to use the resources on behalf of our students and staff that's extremely exciting it should be the most boring thing because there should be absolutely nothing that you have not seen heard had an opportunity to provide input for and quite frankly anyone in the community has had multiple opportunities and and that is by design we it's much like we've talked about
013with evaluations an evaluation is not an event it's a process and by the time you're sitting down to talk to someone about their evaluation there should be no surprises because if it's good they should know it's going to be good if there's a challenge they should know that ahead of time and the budget process is much that way i want to compliment chris lynn because i have a desire for transparency as you well know and lots of public engagement and i've had to sometimes convince uh ceos and cfos of the wisdom of that uh and that did not need any convincing with chris as we started to talk we realized our shared philosophies about wanting to engage wanting to get that public transparency it makes the work harder but ultimately as we're presenting a budget
014to our board tonight i think more rewarding and i just want to thank chris because there's a lot of cfos across the country who would say i can we take a shortcut here can we not do that and every step along the way chris has not only been uh absolutely supportive of this approach but um leading it so mr lynn all right well thank you dr morrison um as he said there's nothing new tonight we're going to continue to hear exactly what we heard last time and so as he talked about budget plays a huge role throughout the district obviously it's a major focus of our strategic plan that was adopted last meeting and so goal three finance and operations specifically performance objective two utilizing a transparent collaborative budget process culminating in the adoption of
015a balanced budget and we'll get there in just a minute as he talked about this is a process not a single event so this is the most boring event of the process throughout this process we've collected a lot of data we've shared a lot of data with you we've given you salary comparisons to neighboring districts we did a third party staffing review we involved our principles senior leadership in every decision that was made going into this budget we've had a comprehensive communication plan we've two community budget town hall meetings we've had budget road show meetings at the campuses individual meetings and then obviously we've had budget workshops with the board of trustees once again i just like to educate as we go through this process and so the reason we're here tonight is because our
016fiscal year begins on thursday july the 1st and goes through june 30th as i told you last time the budget must be prepared by june 19th which it was and tonight you were legally required to adopt three funds the general fund child nutrition and debt service fund and so here are those three proposed budgets as we start on the left general fund that is once again the general maintenance and operation funds of the district that's what allows us to to do our daily activities we are asking you to adopt revenues of 79.5 million dollars and expenditures of 79.3 million dollars and so we do have net revenue exceeding our expenditures of 284 000 so you do have a balanced budget being presented to you this evening student nutrition once again 4.7 million in revenues compared
017to 4.6 million in expenditures excess revenue of 103 000 debt service 24.1 million as opposed to 23.6 million in expenditures once again another balanced budget as we look at the revenues for the general fund once again just to try and help educate we get revenues from three general sources in our general fund local sources state sources and federal the in montgomery isd local sources make up about 84.5 percent of all revenues and once again that's made up through property taxes tuition and fees other local revenues and athletic activities mr long can we stay on that one for a second just um again having shared philosophies that we have plus i think the direction that this board is set um did we maximize the overall uh estimate of enrollment in other words did we bet high
018on enrollment no sir we took a conservative approach to our enrollment projections did we um bet high or low on anticipated state revenue uh once again we are conservative in our approach and in terms of our local funding sources we take a high approach to estimated revenue from local property tax or did we take a more conservative report no sir we took a more conservative approach i feel like i'm in court so there's every reason to believe we're kind of right for the public opinion uh so there's every reason to believe that actually there will be more revenue coming in as we go through the budget process next year than we are currently showing here and that is our anticipation yes sir why is that because we went conservative very good i want to say
019thank you all for taking that philosophy that helps us a little bit with being able to plan things out and you know gives us a picture of the overall health of our district is improving and so i want to say thank you all for taking that approach but also i know there's been a lot of hard discussions and decisions so thank you and so as we drill down on the expenditures just a little bit once again to try and help educate i think it's important to understand that roughly 80 percent of the district budget goes to support salary and benefits of employees and once again that is common um across districts throughout this state so that that's a very common number followed by professional and contracted services and then to get down just to another
020level as you look at the programmatic levels of the district basic educational services career and technology special education you can see how each one of those different programs are funded throughout the district as well so once again no new information tonight next steps obviously here in a few minutes i'm going to ask for you to adopt these three budgets so that we can continue with our work starting july 1. but after tonight we have a couple of upcoming steps tax rate adoption obviously that's an important item and that will occur either in august or september and at the august meeting we will be having a discussion with you about esser funding there's a number of esser funding sources sr2 sr3 and we've been fortunate enough to receive some esser supplemental funding and so we'll lay
021out that funding plan for you at the august board meeting all right gang is there any are there any questions over the budget and uh not just tonight but the months of discussions we've had i say that because i want anyone that watches the video to know that we didn't just sit down and say oh it sounds like a good plan to pass a budget tonight we've been working on this for for many months mr lin's been working on it for many months and so hearing no questions i'd ask is there a motion i'll move to adopt 21-22 general operating child nutrition and debt service budget as presented by mr lynn in any seconds a second it's important all right all those in favor opposed and abstain that motion carries congratulations thank you thank you
022thank you all right so now we're moving on to information items uh first up we have item 7a update for the 2122 school year uh so dr fuller as i just said this was one of our more boring presentations in terms of budget but i think this is one of more exciting presentations about looking ahead to the 2021-2022 school year not that the 2020-2021 school year was boring but as i think back to about this time last year our conversations were around where we're going to even have school was it going to all have to be virtual uh were our students and staff ever going to come together mask mandates covid contact tracing that dominated our discussions and it was what was needed i could not be prouder of our district and how we weathered
023those and educated the vast majority of our students for in-person learning uh but as we look ahead to the 2021-2022 school year uh we're excited tonight to present to you some uh of our plans for uh opening up school in a much different way than we had to last year so with that i'd like to present dr amy busby yes and i have a memories of all those planning that we did we were not doing those plans in june that was some last minute planning that we were doing so we're very excited to be able to talk about plans for 2122 in june so that we are well prepared for the opening of school so first let's talk about remote learning that was a big challenge that we had to face and i think we
024did a pretty great job addressing those challenges this year we were fortunate that the state did fund options for remote learning so that we were able to provide that service however this year during the recent legislative session there was no new bills that were passed that allows for that funding to be continued so therefore in the 21 22 school year there will not be any remote learning options offered and we'll be more than happy to welcome all of those students back to in-person learning and so we did end the year with 94 percent in person so we feel like that was a very high number ending the year and hopefully over the summer we'll have that remaining number that we're ready to come back other things we wanted to talk about health protocols we did
025a lot of discussion about that last year there are some things that will continue we will continue to ask people to screen be thinking about do you have any of those symptoms like fever loss of taste or smell cough difficulty breathing those same things and just you know if you do have those things you know stay home under those conditions don't enter a school building or transportation we also want to continue good hygiene practices that help protect themselves and others from not only covet but any infectious diseases so that would be the hand washing your respiratory etiquette use of hand sanitizer stations all of those things and we do want to encourage that with our employees students and visitors to follow those health protocols math so there was a governor's order that said school systems
026cannot require students or staffs to wear a mask in the future and i don't think that was the intent of our district or the board anyways we it does say for school systems should allow those who want to wear a mask and the ability to do that and of course we fully support that in our district we really want to build that culture of of choice if you want to wear one and that's what you feel comfortable with we're going to make sure that there are no issues with you walking into a building or a classroom if you choose to wear the mask so wear the mask or not that's up to the individual going forward uh confirmed cases of covid19 so tea is still requiring us to report this so if we are notified
027of a test confirmed case that has been in the school setting we do have to report that to our local health department but also to the texas department of health services as well changes they are no longer requiring us to do the contact tracing remember that was kind of the piece that really kind of put us in a difficult situation at the end of the year um and then there's also no longer requiring the quarantine practices once someone is confirmed you treat it like any other illness if you're sick you go home until you feel better and then also as a result of that we no longer have the need to continue our rapid testing clinic for which is that's where we had provided the free testing for our students in the district so that
028will no longer continue as well it finally returned returning to normal so we're looking forward to returning to normal but however throughout this process there were several things that we put into place that we decided we liked there were some things that we learned and that we'd like to continue so for example our pre-k kindergarten sixth grade and ninth grade they really got creative with their back to school transitioning for those groups of students so our principals are looking at creative ways of continuing to provide some kind of opportunity to welcome them back um in a special way um also they want to look at continuing some of the optimized transitions and these were things like directional hallways that really worked for some campuses maybe different ways of doing schedules at lunches maybe different ways
029of releasing students instead of holding them all in the cafeteria for a long length they realize that releasing them in phases back to homeroom or first period was actually optimal for their classrooms so those kinds of things they want to continue to put in practice we also learned a lot about remote options for meetings and communication and parent engagement so while we're not going to throw that all completely out we're going to continue to use those to increase the engagement in all of those areas we learned a lot about digital tools so new instructional tools that we can use in the classroom and to support instruction we'll continue to support and use some of those tools and then the standard health protocols like we've discussed we learn things that can just decrease the spread of
030any infectious disease and we'll continue to have those good health practices so dr busby just as i did with mr lynn on put you on the court masks are not required in montgomery isd next year that's correct and if an individual staff or student chooses to wear a mask we'll make sure it's a comfortable environment absolutely and any positive cases of covid will be treated as any other infectious disease correct and therefore we will not be doing contact tracing or quarantining next year that is correct but we still ask everyone to do what they always should do which is if you're not feeling well where should they stay yes if you make sure if you're not feeling well stay home so that you don't spread it whatever you have very good thank you thank you
031dr buzzfeed and we did want to give a brief legislative update the legislature recently adjourned sinai die on memorial day and it feels like just yesterday we were here adopting a legislative agenda the 140 days certainly flew by most notably sb1 was the state biennial budget if you recall our top priority in this year's legislative platform was uh to advocate for uh for public education funding at existing levels that were adopted in 2019 and we should be proud that that did occur this year house bill 1525 this was a school finance cleanup bill that quickly turned into a christmas tree bill in that several items were adopted to it as it moved in the process most notably 430 430 000 were allocated to montgomery isd through esther allocation this there was monies put into the
032bill for school districts that received little to no benefit from esser 2 and sr3 we were the beneficiary of that um house bill 3979 this bill has made some recent local and national media which is the ban of critical race theory uh this bill does not impact montgomery isd because we followed texas essential knowledge standards the teks we do not teach critical race theory in our district house bill 4545 establishes some new requirements on star assessment there is the elimination of retention in grades five and eight and accelerated learning committees to develop individualized education plans um there will be a special session starting on july 6. the governor made this announcement last week the agenda there's widespread speculation what will be on it but is not yet announced it's speculated that the governor will make
033the announcement on his agenda shortly before the session starts on july 6th all right all right so now can i put mr mourinho on the court so yeah i i want to go back to a topic that i'm getting a lot of questions about and that's a critical race theory and maybe dr weatherly as well you said that montgomery does not have elements of that in our curriculum we don't teach that um why and and is that something where does that come from great question we follow the the teks um which is the texas standards uh and that does not include critical race theory so i just want to kind of reiterate underscore that again i'm getting a lot of questions that is not a part of our curriculum never has been we have not
034had those elements in our in our curriculum because we follow the teaks and so i kind of want to put that to out there to the community to hear as well um so that we can kind of address those concerns and i think it is appropriate that we will be introducing our new uh executive director of curriculum and instruction a new position because we want to make sure that our curriculum is robust and challenging and meets level of rigor that our parents expect and demand in montgomery isd but we do focus on making sure that it covers fatigues and when we make changes to curriculum it's to do things like embracing local history so doing things like the history walk tours with brenda bevins those are things that we certainly support but we're excited about
035having this new position and so dr weatherly well thank you very much thank you mr marino as a parent of three graduates of misd i also uh did well in the project with brenda bevins and we all passed texas history together so i learned a lot about montgomery texas back in the day when my kids were going through that but just to give you a kind of an update of what we're looking at for next year uh one of the things that never changed last year uh once we passed the operations of how we're going to get kids in school safely how are we going to get them in the cafeteria safely off the bus and the bus rides together academics still stay true through all of that and that is one thing that's never
036changed and so i think the two top priorities for any school district we start talking about will always be safety and academic achievement and so that's really what we're looking at next year and just maintaining that focus on our academic and social needs as a result of that pandemic and the learning loss and so uh through that our new curriculum department that's being developed and we're still going through that but i stand here as a result of that and so thank you very much we have three secondary content specialists you probably will wonder what is that i thought we had coaches we're changing those over the specialists to differentiate between that and coaches because at the elementary level we do have six uh coaches those people are staying the same we've we've had two we're
037adding a third one through our extra funds but their specialists are content specialists because they're not necessarily assigned a campus where our elementary folks are assigned to campus so that's kind of the differentiation if you're wondering what that might be and then also this year we're adding a reading academic academy instructional specialist to the to the fray as well and also as you know that you voted upon we have a new director of community services that will also help the social emotional learning which is one thing that we really learned about through the pandemic is the need for that uh one of the things the the state still said that you're going to do last year and and that did not go away was the star and so uh just to kind of give you
038a just a brief update of where we stand across the state and misd they drop significantly and especially in areas with high numbers higher numbers of remote learners montgomery had a high percentage of people that were coming to school still at 94 percent and so that helps us out whenever kids around and when we can see them directly you never lose that that personal touch when they're in front of you and we know there are some learners who do well but for the most part we believe that kids do better when they're in front of a teacher and in a classroom and learning from their peers and so one of the things that we found out that math was impacted more than other subjects across the state we have received our preliminary results and as
039mr moreno talked a while ago about house bill 4545 there's going to be some requirements for some interventions for the students who did not perform well as a result of the covet loss our slide as it's being dubbed and so we're going to make sure that we have a plan coming out for that through the curriculum department to make sure that we're helping our teachers supporting them who are supporting our students and currently we're still disaggregating that data for misd and starting to whittle down our individual students and where they stand and helping our campuses get through all that and understand those results and how we can better support them and again just uh re-emphasize there's a lot of things that you'll be hearing over the next week or two about state results uh and
040as uh mark said there were significant drops across the state especially around math as we're disaggregating our data and engaging our principles we will present those data to you we actually see some signs that are pretty encouraging to us especially around the masters that are things that we actually feel pretty excited about i think one of the things that we're still digging into and well it's a little bit i think under reported at this time but uh the more students who take any test uh traditionally test scores will not be as robust as if you limit the pool and because of the differences of star testing across the state this year many students did not actually take the star test if those are students who tended to struggle and they were in a higher percentage
041of students who did not take the test then it might artificially inflate a district or school's performance i think we're going to get a little bit more authentic snapshot of what our data looks like because we did not see a drop of test takers like many districts across the state did i think dr buzzbee was about 91 percent of test takers so again that's still a you know almost 10 of our students who didn't take it so we're look through all that that's why we still need to disaggregate the data but we look forward to presenting it to you but um again what we can't speak to is the state release of data which shows that there was in fact a substantive loss of learning with the quote-unquote covet slide thank you any questions i
042would like to say thank you dr whaley weatherly your first presentation to the board so welcome to team montgomery officially now um i do have one just kind of reflection i'm really proud of the work that you've done dr busby you opened with things that you've learned and so i think that shows that we're we're adopting a culture of being a learning organization that takes these things in strides learns from them i'm also proud of the town um you know we have not always agreed the town has not seen eye to eye on masks and and all sorts of amazing things that we've had to deal with this past year and so um i'm ready to get on to the next school year and what y'all presented tonight just makes me more excited so and
043dr fuller we will be sending out a letter to our parents to let them know some of the things we talked about tonight so to remind them masks optional no longer doing contact tracing no longer doing quarantining some of the legislative updates and we'll be sending that letter out this week all right thank you all right next information item we have a first reading of board policy update 117. it affects a variety of local policies related to purchasing facilities construction compensation anything you want to say about that no dr fulares is uh you know these are recommended from tasby in terms of changing our local policies so we're required to do a first reading and then we'll come back for your vote and the next board meeting on august the 17th all right so board
044members y'all will likely see that in consent agenda so just know to look for that in the future at this time there are no other information items no other action items so the board will go into closed meeting as authorized by the open meetings act we will be back shortly just hang in there all right we are returning from closed session at 6 10 pm there are no action items there's nothing to do to take action on from closed session so i will call this meeting adjourned at 6 10 pm