001Hello, Deanna. I call this meeting to the Pearland Independent School District Board of Trustees to order. on August 12th, 2025 at 5.01 PM. Let the record show that a quorum of board members is present and that this meeting has been duly called and notice of this meeting has been posted in accordance with the Texas Open Meetings Act, Texas Government Code Chapter 551. Let the record show that Trustees Johnson, Stuckey, Carbone, Weimer, and Murphy are present. At this time, I'd like to turn the mic over to Trustee Daniel Stuckey, who will do the introductory remarks and pledges this evening. Thank you, Madam President. It's only about 30 minutes, so. You want to get started with pledges first, sir? Yep, we can. Awesome, thank you. All right, good evening. And I guess as of tomorrow, welcome to
002the start of the 2025-2026 school year. So I'd like to give a warm welcome to all those who are in attendance tonight or viewing on the live feed or will watch this recorded when it's posted later. And I'd like to start by. To our teachers and staff, thank you. Thank you for your continued dedication and commitment to our students and schools. And to our new teachers and staff, thank you for choosing to be a part of something special. And thank you for choosing to build Pearland Proud. As we begin the new year, I wanted to share a quote. You can find it on our board bios page. I had them post it, but it's something my dad gave me when I was a student at Texas A&M on a note card out of a book
003he read, and I still have that note card today. And so I still read it, and it resonated with me. So hopefully it does for a few of y'all. It says, the capacity of the individual is infinite. Limitations are largely of habit, convention, acceptance of things as they are, fear, or lack of self-confidence. And this quote reminds me, and I hope it reminds all of us, that our potential is not fixed. It is often the limits we accept that hold us back, not the ones that truly exist. In our schools, we aim to remove those barriers for our students and ourselves so that we can continue to grow, learn, and lead. Thank you again for being here tonight and let's have a great 2025, 2026 school year. Thank you very much, Trustee Stuckey. I appreciate
004those words greatly. All right, at this time, we're going to move to the public comment section of the meeting. This portion of the board meeting where the board receives input from patrons, each person who addresses the board will have three minutes to speak on his or her issue. Because of topic posting requirements of the Open Meeting Act, board members will not ask questions of the patron and will not answer any questions posed to the board by the patron. No action can be taken on any issue presented during this patron comment segment of the board meeting. Patrons addressing the board will be notified when they are approaching the last 30 seconds of their allotted time to speak. This evening, I have Dr. LaPrize Stanford to speak. Dr. Stanford, thank you for being here this evening. Good
005evening, board, superintendent. Thank you for having me here today. I came in June and I came in July because I'm usually on this side, so I didn't know if I could just introduce our company. So thank you for having me. I promise I won't be three minutes. My name is Dr. LaPreece Sanford. Our company is One by One Solutions, and we're so happy that we got the honor of being an approved vendor here. So I was waiting for that, too, before I introduced myself. Hey, Mr. Johnson. I started in education 27 years ago as a special ed instructional assistant, and I just ended my career as a director of child welfare and attendance in California. So I'm new here from Southern California. I'm in Pearland, so I thought I was Los Angeles proud until I
006got here. You guys are literally wearing green, so I'm grateful to be here. I'm a new resident, but I just wanted to shortly introduce our company. We provide family case management, social-emotional training for parents, teachers, and educators. We're really more involved in the community by bringing awareness to the parents how they can advocate for their children. Because I noticed as a coordinator of child welfare and attendance, there were a lot of discipline and social-emotional related topics and behavior. And I was solely in charge of expulsions. So I stopped doing that to consult because I said, we really need to get out here and get in the field. And the politics are a little bit different when you have your own business, but still you have to do the right thing. So God brought me here
007to Texas, and I just wanted to introduce our company. We're One by One Solutions, and we're so blessed that you guys gave us a chance. Thank you. Any questions? Thank you for being here tonight. We really appreciate your time. No problem. All right, moving right along, we're going to move into news business, moving to the consent agenda. Is anybody pulling anything from the consent agenda this evening? Yes, I would like to pull A6. All right, Murphy is pulling A6. I'll hear a motion on all the other items. So moved. Second. I have a motion by Trustee Stuckey and a second by Trustee Murphy to vote on the consent agenda items. All those in favor? Motion carries 5-0. All right, Trustee Murphy. I just. I got caught up in looking at the board stuff and I
008didn't get a chance to send this in but I just wanted clarification on what we're giving you authorization to do without our going forward with the homebound. Just something I'm not familiar with. So just clarification. Sure, Dr. Nixon will be glad to clarify but we've done this previously as well. This would be our second year to do this request. We have a homebound student who's immunocompromised, and so the homebound teacher, there's really no one that's able to enter the home, so the only way to provide instruction is virtually for this student. It's very, very rare. This is only the first student. that I know of that we've ever done this for, but it does require a waiver. The other piece, the reason that we're asking the opportunity for Dr. Berger moving forward to approve those
009is because once we have the information and we know that we're gonna start those homebound services, we wanna start them right away. If Dr. Berger doesn't have the authority to approve that waiver request, then it could be four to six weeks before we start services with the students. Is it possible, Dr. Burger, to extend that term for the board to approve like two to three years of you authorization rather than doing this every year? Would that make it more simplistic? We really need to bring the waiver back on a yearly basis. Okay. Okay. I assume that's what it was for, but I just don't recall seeing this. But I just want to make sure anytime we cede over authority to Dr. Burger that we're clear on what we're doing. Okay, motion to approve as presented.
010All right, I have a motion from Trustee Murphy and a second from Trustee Stuckey. All those in favor? Motion carries 5-0 with Trustees Scheffler and Carter absent. All right, moving on to new business. Dr. Berger, the annual review and update of board operating procedures. Yes, ma'am. This is just the board's yearly review of their own board standing rules and rules of conduct that are posted on the website under the board member meeting section. We are just asking the board, as they have already done, to review these in the open session and then to approve their own operating procedures and rule of conduct and standing rules as they currently exist. Thank you, Dr. Berger. As we have two new board members that have recently joined us, it's important that we kind of just know our own
011rules and know our own boundaries. And so I wanted to offer an opportunity to answer any questions that you guys might have. Any questions from you guys? I move motion we approve the agenda item as presented. Second. I have a motion from Trustee Murphy, a second from Trustee Weimer. Any further discussion? I would just like to highlight for our viewing audience that both board members have gone through board orientation and we had three hours of going through the procedures and policies and practices that are required of a board member. So I appreciate their dedication to learning all of that as they step into these roles. Thank you, Dr. Berger. All right, we'll call for a vote. All those in favor? Motion carries 5-0 with trustees Carter and Scheffler absent this evening. All right, moving on.
012Dr. Berger, the consideration and approval of the Pearland ISD strategic objectives and long-term outcomes. Yes, if you've been following the episodes of the board meeting, you realize that we have been doing strategic planning throughout the end of last year leading up to now. Last board meeting, we did present the final draft of the strategic plan to the board. The board did give us some feedback and some corrections, and so we are coming back to you with those corrections and changes to the strategic plan and scorecard. Each board member, you have a green folder, and in the folder, I kind of have a summary of the balance scorecard. the development of the scorecard, the calculations and the alignment. As we mentioned before, we are working to build a Pearland ISD balance scorecard for 2025 to 2029.
013It's a comprehensive performance and management framework that's gonna align all of our processes, our missions, our values, our beliefs with measurable outcomes that we have worked into four priority areas, students, staff, community, and finance. And then each of those are broken down in the strategic plan. to where we have long-term goals and progress measures for every one of them. We are asking the board to approve the long-term goals, long-term outcomes for each one of the priorities and their strategic plan. I also have a document that I had provided for you previously, which was a comparison of what we presented on July 16th and then what we are presenting today. And so the changes were made on 8-1 that were sent to you. And it kind of goes through each priority to where... When we were
014presenting previously, some of the measures were very subjective in nature. They were based on survey responses, and the board asked us if we can create more index scoring to where we combine the subjective with the objective. And so we did that both in the well-being and safety of the students as well as staff. We changed some of the terms in the recruitment of quality staff as was requested, as well as long-term skill sets. We clarified issues in community engagement and finance and definition of stakeholders, which we had a discussion on. Also in here, we updated the at a look, at a glance of the scorecard. It is the green sheet. Behind the green sheet, I put on here the progress measure report schedule. so that you know as a board, as well as our community,
015once this is approved, we will put this front facing in a dashboard and you will see the progress measures. We will have nine week reports as well as semester reports on all the progress measures for each of the long term goals. Because we wanna make sure that we are accountable in this process and we bring the data forward as we look at it. And the final document in your folder is how it all finally ends up in the superintendent evaluation. that is aligned with educational leadership, staff development, student performance, the finances, and general district management that we will conduct in January. And once again, the strategic scorecard aligns with our district improvement plan, which aligns with our campus improvement plan. It supports our department metrics, and so we wanna make sure holistically as a district,
016we know where we wanna go. We know the targets we want to hit and we have a executable plan to get there and we measure it along the way and we make adjustments to make sure that we are serving the mission, belief, and values that you have set forth for Pearland ISD. So I ask for any questions that you may have and at the end I will ask for a recommendation of approval of the long-term outcomes for the strategic plan as presented. So moved. Thank You dr. Berger I have a motion on the table from trustee Murphy second a second from trustee Johnson any further questions concerns Discussion on this item. So for the audience's purposes we have been spending months talking about this document and all of the ideas thoughts and details here within
017and so Without the discussion tonight. I just wanted to point out that Please don't take the lack of discussion tonight as the fact that we haven't discussed this at all. There's been lengthy meetings about this. So all those in favor, motion carries five zero with trustee Carter and trustee Scheffler out. Congratulations, Dr. Burger and your team. This has been a lot of hard work and effort and we're excited about moving forward, game on. Game on for sure. I definitely appreciate the engagement the board put into this as well as our community, our principals and staff. We are excited to have this document to help guide us and lead us and to be able to present to you on a board basis our successes. All right, moving on to consideration and approval of House Bill 3,
018board long-term outcome goals. Thank you. This may seem a little bit redundant, but we are required by House Bill 3 that I believe was passed in the 86th legislative session to where we have to have House Bill 3 goals in the areas of early childhood literacy, third grade reading star proficiency, early childhood mathematics, third grade math star proficiency, and college, career, and military readiness. All of these items are in captured in our strategic plan and strategic scorecard, but there is a set of requirements that House Bill 3 outlines for us with goal measures for the district and then we have to break down each one of these categories by campus. And so that is presented for you for the 2025 House Bill 3 board goals. That is actually a five year goal. And so we
019present that for you and ask for your approval. All right, any questions on this item? Make a motion we approve this item as presented. I have a motion by Trustee Murphy. Second. A second by Trustee Stuckey. Any further discussion on this item? All right, hearing none, I'll call for a vote. All those in favor? Motion carries 5-0. All right, Dr. Berger, you have a superintendent report listed here. Yes, this is a new agenda item as we discussed moving forward in every board meeting after this I will have a superintendent report to where we try to hit the marks of the strategic plan. Yes, sir, Mr. Murphy, there will be a superintendent report each time. It is to make sure that we are following our plan as presented and we are providing the information for you.
020Each time I will now do all the talking in the future if we're doing academics, Dr. Allen and his team will come up if we're doing staff, Dr. Dahlkamp and her team will come up if we're doing communication. so on and so forth, they will come up and present on those. But I'm going to take the liberty now for back to school. I'd like to talk about what is happening for us. On enrollment, we had a budgeted enrollment when we present our budget and base everything on the number of 20,668. That's what we built our budget on. Our current enrollment as of this morning was 20,579, and we have 271 students in the new student enrollment category. So if you put all that together and all of them show up to school, we will have
02120,000. So we will actually exceed our enrollment projections. That could happen on the first day, it could happen after the holiday, but I feel pretty good about our enrollment numbers and that we will hit our projected enrollment and meet the budget need. HR has worked with Ms. Keller to make sure that our elementary schools are balanced and sometimes in elementary school, you have to move teachers. Not always the greatest thing you wanna do because they've set up their classroom on one school, but because the numbers aren't there, they need to move to a school where the numbers are. That has taken place. We will continue to watch grade levels and class size for any. additional personnel. We would bring that forward in September. I do want to also highlight as always, special education is a
022concern, mostly due to PEARS and dyslexia. There has been some changes in the rules of dyslexia that we are monitoring and due to that if we can't provide the services as required, we may have to come in September and talk to the board about a need for additional dyslexia personnel and that is strictly due to the rule changes. the amount of time that we have to serve the students and the size of the groups. And so we are trying to work through that internally without asking for additional personnel, but I do want to prep you for that. First day of school transportation. If you are driving to school tomorrow, please be safe. Please make sure and pay attention to those that are crossing the street. Please make sure that you are aware of the school
023zones. Also watch for those big yellow buses. It's amazing how many people miss those. But we have 9,700 students that are scheduled for the first day of school bus transportation. Anybody that has not finished online verification, which is required, or you are a new student that is enrolling, there will be a slight delay to get you on that route. We want to make sure everybody's safe. So of those that are late, there's a possible 2,000 more students that will be riding transportation. So we will have over 11,000 students on our buses for the school year. And I just want to give a shout out. If you had the opportunity to watch our convocation video, we had a pretty good time to kick off the school year. Game on. Our communication department put that on. Absolutely
024amazing. Our director, Ms. Wynn, is sitting over there. Kudos to her team and what they did. It really set the standard for what can happen in Pearland ISD. And if you haven't watched the video, it's a lot of fun. Something a little bit more serious, legislative updates. If you have not heard, we have House Bill 1481. Your student's personal electronic device cannot be out during the school day. Regardless of what you heard or what you've seen, that is not the Board of Trustees making this rule. The state of Texas. passed a law and we have to be compliant in that law. So what that means is your student's personal communication device, whether it's their cell phone, their iPad, their laptop, their connected devices, whether they're smartwatch or smart glasses, must be off and stored during
025the school day. They cannot access it. We have a legislative update page. If you have questions, please go to that. We will work through the process. I do want you to know, like everything, when we go back to school, these first three days, We are teaching the rules. We are re-engaging kids in the process of what it means to come to school. So day one, we are not going to be collecting phones. We are going to be reminding students of the new rule. Put that away. Don't have that out. There will be consequences. We want to make sure that everyone is aware. We will enforce everything very strictly. Monday, the second week of school. So we are using the first three days to train and teach all of our staff and all our kids about
026these new rules. I do want to talk about the consequences a little bit. The first consequence is that your phone will be confiscated, meaning we will take it up and hold it. And students in the past, you used to go to the office and get it. That's not the case anymore. Parents or guardians will be required to come to campus and get the phone on the first offense. student will be warned. Second offense, student will receive detention of some version, the phone will be confiscated, and the parents will have to come get it. Third offense is where there is a consequence of in-school suspension. Three times you violated this law, this rule, this policy, that's where you will get ISS, in-school suspension, the phone will be confiscated, and the parents will have to come get
027it. There is no longer a charge in Paralan ISD of $15 as there used to be in the past. But your phone will be taken up. Please do not fight or argue on this because there will be additional consequences for that. Just follow the rule. Turn the phone off, store it, and engage in the process of learning. That is all we're asking. Some other things. Senate Bill 12. This is a very dense bill. There's lots of things in Senate Bill 12. Some of the requirements of Senate Bill 12 have to be done before the first day of school. Even though we have not received policy guidance from TEA or from TASB on this, we are expecting that in late August, but school starts tomorrow. So I want parents to be aware that there is parental
028rights versions or requirements in Senate Bill 12. One of the parental rights is for the mental, emotional, physical health decisions, meaning you have every right to know what schools provide, and you have every right to approve or to not deny any of those services that we give. While we await for TASB policy and TEA final guidance, we have complied with the new requirements of Senate Bill 12 by placing in the student handbook and on our webpage in the back-to-school section what it means for written parental consent. for any of these services that we provide. But I want you to know that they're common services. They're visits to the nurse's office, they're monitoring of medical issues, they are not outlandish or uncommon procedures. It includes direct care for illness or injuries, management of chronic health conditions,
029administration of medications and treatments, monitoring communicable diseases, resources of health-related services, our health screenings of vision, hearing, and scoliosis. health and wellness education, prevention education, school counseling services, crisis response and trauma-informed care, and referrals to community-based health providers upon request. The reason I am reading this out and the reason why I put it in the handbook and the reason why it's online is because we have to inform all of our community of this before the first day of school. That's what we're trying to do. We want to make sure that you know we are trying to take care of the wellness and health, but you as the right of a parent can refuse any of these at any time. And so that is in the student handbook, and you can look at this online. And
030if you have concerns with this, please contact the campus administration or anybody up here. The other part of that is for Senate Bill 12 is clubs. You as a parent now have to approve your child to participate in any club before they can be in the club. So let's say that they're after school and they want to walk into the chess club or they want to walk into robotics or they want to walk into whatever club that may be on the campus that we try to provide for extracurricular activities for our students. They cannot unless you give us approval that they can be in there. So in the student handbook, we have that consent that explains that. We also, for each campus, list every club we have on campus. So when you sign the student
031handbook, you are giving approval to say my child can participate in these approved school clubs that align with Senate Bill 12. If you do not wish to do that, please contact the administration and say I don't want my child in clubs. And we will make sure that they are not. but we wanna make sure that we are following this guidance before the policy comes out. I know that's a lot that I said about Senate Bill 12. I didn't know if the board had any questions. I have one question, Dr. Burger. The Senate Bill 12, does it limit the way that teachers can now communicate with parents or students? Does it limit it? Like I've heard the rumors are that we're no longer allowing teachers to text message with parents, for example. That really is not
032related to Senate Bill 12. That's related to best practices and make sure that we are keeping everything above board. Sometimes we get convenient. We get lax. We get complacent. Coaches will be texting athletes and club sponsors will be texting athletes or teachers will be texting students. When you have that unmonitored, unfiltered, direct communication between an adult and a student, sometimes bad things can happen. As a school district, we want to do everything possible to protect our employees, but more importantly, to protect our students from any inappropriate communication. So what we are requiring for our employees is that you can communicate with a student if they're in your program or you're doing tutoring or you're in athletics or fine arts, but we need to make sure that the parents are included in that communication. So we
033have... approved applications that do that. You may know of SportsU or GroupMe or any of those to where you can communicate whole to all of the teams or participants or you can direct communicate to the parent and the student. What we want to eliminate is that communication that is not monitored between an employee and a student. So an employee to a parent text message or email or phone is the only options? Well, yes, you can email and our emails are monitored. Students have emails and they are monitored through our system, so that is fine. But what we don't want is text messaging or direct communication from an employee to a student that is not inclusive of either being monitored by our protective software that we have or the parent is inclusive of that communication. Okay,
034thank you. Does Teams have the capability of sending messages as a text? where you could text a student through Teams? It does, but the cost becomes prohibitive. I actually had a meeting about it today. There's a lot of FCC and other guidance that kind of prevent it from this specific use, unfortunately, and I had high hopes until about 12.30 today. And that is one thing we are looking for because Teams is becoming kind of our application. We're trying to figure out ways because it is important to have that communication. It is important to build those relationships. We just want to make sure those relationships are built in an appropriate and supervised environment. Thank you, Dr. Berger. The other thing I just want to make sure everyone knows is that safety and security, we are implementing
035our armed guards. Jet Security is our partner in that, and they have been onboarding, and they will begin in our elementary and middle schools. So if you see armed guards on campuses that do not look like SROs, they are approved to be there. Mr. Palumbo has been working with that company. We're very excited about what they bring forward to us to make sure that all our campuses are taken care of. Just some key operational updates. We do have two facilities, Jamison and East, that the roofs are being worked on. So if you see that taking place, we do have those roof replacements. Thank you for voting for the bond. Those are two projects that were approved through that. And I also want you to know that we have another thing that we're doing is the
036contracted grounds. So if you see non-Pairland ISD vehicles mowing the grounds at a school, they are approved. And the first impressions is they're doing a really good job. We're really proud of what they're taking place and making our schools look better. Ask a question on that front dr. Berger the city when they have contracted vehicles They have magnets that go on the sides of the vehicles to just let them let people know they're like city contracted vendors Will we in the future if we stick with these vendors have something like that with these? To be honest, we haven't thought about that, but that's definitely something we could look into. Wait, everybody knows that they're kind of safe and because safety and security is top of mind all the time, just letting people know that we
037know that they're on campus by saying board approved or Pearland ISD approved vendor or whatever. Oh, 100%. I think it's a great idea. I'm sure Mr. Palumbo shook his head. We can definitely look into that. And I'd like to do some scoreboard data while we are not updating the strategic scorecard. We will get star ratings for the first time tomorrow internally, and they will be published for the community on Friday. I'm gonna take the gamble and I'm gonna say that tomorrow we are going to receive verification that Pearland ISD is once again an A school district. And so I'm just very excited about that, the work that has been put into that. And I believe when it is posted for each individual campus, every campus that had an A retained their A and every campus
038that did not have an A in their previous ratings improved. We did not have any campuses that regressed. in their overall rating of their campus or our district. So kudos to our teachers, our hard work, but most importantly to our students. And speaking of students, AP results also come in. We continue to shine in our AP course enrollments increased while also AP participation in the test and performance increased. That doesn't always happen, but it seems like a broken record for us. We continue to say that. Participation goes up, performance goes up. Almost 500 more tests were taken with 80% of the test increased performance of a three or better. I'm sorry, 80 test increased performance. So we are very proud that the more students are trying to do and challenge themselves academically, our students are
039preparing them to be successful. So we are very proud of our AP performance and participation. And lastly, for our business services, they have preliminarily been told that we are retaining our first rating of an A for another year. So just kudos, just that's kind of the updates that we have. Dr. Burger, I'd also like to point out one more accolade that you didn't talk about today that we've talked about. At new teacher orientation, we saw the smallest class of new teachers coming into the district because our retention rates were so high this year. And so I wanted to give you an opportunity to talk about that. We'll never want to correct the board member. Our retention rates were so wonderful. And we had a turnover rate of 9. One, we haven't been below double digits
040in a while. So the fact that our performance is up, the fact that our students are achieving at great levels, business services is running well, and we're keeping our staff, that means that you as the board are doing a wonderful job of leading this district because people want to work here, they want to perform here, and they're building Pearland Proud. Game on Dr. Berger. Let's do this. All right. So at this point. Can I ask a question? Dr. Berger, going back to House Bill 1481 real quick. Parents, guardians have to pick those devices up. What are the hours that they can pick it up? Bell to bell? So I think that's going to be something that parents are going to want to know is when can they come and pick up those devices? Yes, sir.
041Thank you for highlighting that, Mr. Johnson. We have it in the FAQs and what it is, it's Monday through Friday. It's 30 minutes before the first bell and 30 minutes after the dismissal bell. So you can pick it up during the school day or you can come 30 minutes before or 30 minutes after. We're about to adjourn into closed session, but I just want to make sure there's no other questions or concerns about other administrative reports listed here. All right, hearing none, we will, the Board of Trustees of the Pearland Independent School District will now convene into closed meeting to discuss the following items posted on our agenda this evening as allowed by Title V, Chapter 551, Texas Government Code. and education code. The superintendent will present for the board's consideration or discussion of the
042following matters. Section 551.071, 072, 074, 076. No voting will take place in closed meeting. Any action the board wishes to take as a result of discussions in closed session will take place after the board reconvenes in the open meeting. It is now 534 and anyone that's not needed an exec session is free to go home. Was taken in closed session. This meeting is adjourned. I'm sorry. Yes. No, we need a motion. Motion. My apologies, sir. Thank you. Yes. And did anybody bring that piece of paper out? No, it's the motion to approve. Motion to approve personnel as presented during executive session? Yes. I have a motion by Trustee Johnson. Second. A second by Trustee Murphy. Any further discussion? Hearing none, I'll call for a vote. All those in favor? Motion carries 5-0. And now this
043meeting is adjourned at 6.20 p.m.