001Good evening. I now call the public hearing regular school board meeting to training of the Cleveland ISD school school board trustees to order. Today is Monday, December 15th, and the time is 6:00 p.m. Welcome to tonight's meeting. We are here at the CISD administration boardroom. Thank you for all Thank you all for being here and for your continued support to our district and students. To begin our meeting, please join us as Winnie McNair is going to lead us in the opening remarks. Please bow your heads. Dear heavenly father, thank you for allowing us to come together and work your will on our district. We hope that we keep you and your ultimate design in mind as we make our decisions for the betterment of our students, our staff, and our community. Especially at this time
002of year when we think back on the birth of your miraculous son, we hope that we can continue to work miracles in the lives of our students for the betterment of our community as a whole. In Jesus name we pray. Amen. >> Amen. Thank you, Miss McNair. And will you please remain standing for the pledge of allegiance of the flags by our east side students. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands. One nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. >> And now for the Texas flag. >> Honor the Texas. Honor the Texas flag. I pledge for allegiance to thee, Texas. One state under God, one and indivisible. We will now begin the public hearing to present and discuss the
003district's financial integrity rating system of Texas. A first report by CFO Karen Billiesley. Good evening superintendent uh board president and board members and uh our attendees. I will start with our management report that we have to um give each year because of our first rating. just if you want to do one. Thanks. Okay. So, this uh first report is based on our school year for 2324. It is based on a prior year. And so, you will notice that um our previous superintendent is listed, not our current one because again, it was covering last year or two actually two years ago now. And then we actually have 10 board members that are listed because we overlap during the school year for board. The first part of this is the superintendent uh contract is not included in
004your report because it is uh prominently display displayed on our website. So the first part is the reimbursements received by the superintendent and the board of board members uh for the year that ended August 31st 2024. For Steven McCandless, superintendent, he received a um total of $9,190.95. Now, this includes anything that was reimbured to him or paid on his behalf, such as registrations and mileage, um meals, and travel, other travel costs. The first uh board member, Kelly Jenko Axton, received $11024. Amanda Brooks, 167.24. 24. Willie Carter received $2,394.32. Robert How received $11024. Wendy McNair received $4,253.19. Marvin Surles received $65724. Chris Wood received $110.24. Jennifer Pena received $2,51922. Bethany Porter received $2,563.18. And Shaquille Samson received $2,435.76. So, if you'll flip to the next page, we have to report any outside compensation that the superintendent
005may have received for consulting or other personal services. and upon questioning him, he received none for that year. The next section, we also have to report any gifts that were received by the superintendent or any of the board members um from vendors or such for the year ended August 31st, 2024. And upon questioning, um no guests were received. The third part or the last part is any business transactions that we may have had between any board members and uh the school district. A lot of times you may have this if we have a board member that umpires the game or anything like that and during that year there were none. So, um, so board, I gave you a packet if you want to flip to, uh, the fourth page. I've provided for you the report
006from TEA, the actual first report. And if you notice that the district this again this year received an A superior achievement rating with a district score of 96. I'm not going to go over all of these indicators because we um got all points on all of them except number 12. So if you'll turn to the next page, the question or the indicator is what is the cor correlation between future debt requirements and the district's assessed property value? That's a calculation that TEA performs every year. And um the only thing I wanted to point out is that you have to have a four or below to have a 10 rating uh to get 10 points. You have to have between a four and a seven to get eight, a seven to a 10 to get six
007points, which is what we got. And our mathematical score was an 8.0223 this year. So, um, we're really have no control over that with our, you know, we don't control the success values or u, I mean, we we have to have the debt in order to have our buildings. So, um, I don't foresee us getting a perfect score on that one anytime soon. So, but that's all I have. If you have any questions, thank you, Karen. At this time, we will receive public comments specific to the first report. Speakers are reminded that limit their comments to three minutes. We will now open the floor for all other public comments. Speakers are reminded to limit their comments to three minutes. Please remember that the board cannot elaborate or take action on matters not on the agenda,
008but we will carefully listen and take to take your concerns under advis advisement. up the comments. We will now move into the presentations. We have two presentations on tonight's agenda. We will begin with a musical performance by the East Side Elementary led by Miss Henry and the East Side students. oxygen. Good evening. Thank you board for allowing us to present to you tonight. In front of you, we have our wonderful fourth and fifth grade choir and Miss Henry is leading them. Miss Henry is new to our campus this year and she has done a fabulous job with these kiddos and um getting them ready for tonight. So, thank you >> [music] [music] >> is born to us [music] with amend. [music] Halleluah. [music] Myior [music] best. The star [music] Jesus on the [music and singing]
009head [music] >> [music] >> might be ever [music] A new [music] all [music] [music] you >> [music] >> might [music] as [music] >> [applause] [applause] [bell] [music] >> Redeer [music] shiny. [music] And if you ever [singing] say it's all of the [singing] other [music] [music] Christmas [music] reeer. >> [music] >> You go down in history. [singing] [music] You go down in history. [music] [applause] >> [applause] [applause] >> Good job. >> Thank you to our students and Miss Hearing. That was a excellent performance. Next, we'll we'll hear from the gifted and talented education update presentation by Rebecca Stout. First off, well, first off, they did amazing, and that's an extremely hard act to follow. So, thank you guys. So, every year we have to do a gifted and talented update to see where our programs at
010and what we need to do or tweak. Last year, we actually performed an audit to help us see where some of those areas were because we knew that there was some deficiencies that we needed to highlight. So, the part that we do it every year is to help the board. Thank you for letting me speak board and superintendent and joining us community. We need to make sure that the board is trained on GT the GT state plan to make sure that we're accountable within our program. And this year is our third year of our current plan. So we will need to create our new plan for next year and get it approved this year. This update's also going to go over the recent audit findings that they had found from prior. Oh, that went twice.
011The five areas that were highlighted the most were family engagement. We need to make sure that we get our families involved with GT. they understand what GT means so that they can also support and tell us where they believe that our program might be lacking. We had some under representation over some of our groups which we'll look at one of the very last slides in detail what that means but we had some sub pops that ended up being much lower represented in our GT program than others and we found a few ways that we'll talk about in a little bit that were helping support this our policy and advisory input so our input from communities from parents from a committee that had dissolved was extremely lacking last year. We know that we need input from
012different areas in the building and outside the building. We had inconsistent tools previously before everything went to digitized test. We had paperbased battery and we kept all of that stuff in folders. Those folders went in a filing cabinet and oftent times it got lost or if a kid left us the information didn't get transferred. So that was one of the areas that we were lacking on. And the last one, we had some gaps in our service. So, we're looking at our service delivery and how we can improve that upon that. And our assessment tools. We noticed our community, there's some language problems that come along with it. Some less increased language ability. So, we've included our screener is NAT 3. It's a nonverbal screener, meaning that it doesn't have them reading a whole bunch of
013content to solve their problem. They're looking at it and solving it from it. So that helped take some of that linguistic barrier out for our students. So we can see who really identified GT in our population. But these findings that they found last year let us see that there's a very clear indication that we need to be in better alignment with the Texas state plan which all of you got a copy of and it is online but anyone can reach out and I will share you a copy as well. Starting in 24-25 is when we did the program evaluation. They went with an outside consultant and they looked through the steps to see what might be an issue or a concern for us. And that's where we identified our five main causes. We noticed that
014our parent and teacher observation tools. They used to be paper. They made them in a new observation tool. They're all digitized and included in our platform. So, as soon as a parent fills it out or as soon as a teacher fills it out, it goes into the students profile so that we're able to see how they were rated in this way. Going into this school year, we had a timeline set out for our students for the different annual GT events that happened during the year. The universal screener was not just kinder, which is recommended and required by the Texas State Plan, but we also included second grade. So any of those kids we might have missed originally based on linguistic needs, maybe they weren't developed enough, we could see if we can catch them once
015they've hit second. We're also reestablishing our advisory committee which is to be built of educators, of community members, of teachers, and at the very end of this presentation, I do have a QR code. So if you're wanting to join community, family, parents, this committee, you can scan the code and fill out the form and it'll send it to me. Okay. And then we had our advanced evaluation tools which are more tailored to our student needs. One of them being the NNAT 3, but we are looking at any and all evaluation tools to make sure we have those that fit our kids the most. For our five-year plan, because we want to make sure that we're planning out for where we're going, not where we are. In our five-year plan, we're looking at curriculum expansion. what
016with secondary options and enrichment for our kiddos. So when they get to that secondary level, it doesn't just stop. Um we're looking at annual product evaluations. So typically our elementary students, they make a project during the year. They're they make going to make a few, but at the very end they do a gala and they present it to the community. We're going to go through and look at those projects to make sure did what we were doing with our kids support our GT learners. Did their product at the end show that they grew? We're going to [clears throat] increase our family and community engagement and part of that being with our advisory committee. That committee, we're going to decide ways that we can pull the community in, we can better educate, we can get everyone
017involved so that we can grow our program. And by the end, we want in 2829, we would like for our GT program to be in the exemplary program status. Meaning in the state documentation, they have the bare minimum, what you need to do to make sure you hit state guidelines. And then they have exemplary. One of the areas in there talks about the minimum is one time a year that you're going to evaluate your kids. Moving over to exemplary, they said for at least high school, we also included elementary because we know that kids grow over time and those teachers might notice something in the spring semester that they didn't notice in the fall semester. So, we made sure that we move from one to two times a year. We want to make sure all
018of our areas move in that same pathway by 2829. This is a brief overview. It goes over the different things that we've already discussed about the program. The main thing it adds is it gives in the counts for our referrals. The main reason this year is different is remember we're halfway through the year. So we have our fall window and we have the number of kids that our K2 screener grabbed, but we still have our spring window which will be opening in January. This was what I was talking about with the representation index. So I know it looks like a lot. So, I highlighted some areas so it'll be a little bit easier to see. Under our gifted and talented total percentage, that highlighted number of four is our district's percentage as a whole of
019who is qualified GT. The state average is seven. So, these different things that we're putting into place are in an effort to grow that number. We need to be seven or higher. We know our kids have what it takes to be pushed further. In this last column, I know that looks extremely confusing. You're trying to get as close to a one as you can. The one means your population is represented. So, we highlighted the ones that were significantly lower. If you look all the way down with sped in 504 21 and point 21 and 27. So that's one of the areas that we're going to target to make sure that whatever we're using for evaluation, for screening, for program imputation afterwards can support those learners, too. The next steps for the board would be continuing
020to learn about the GT state plan. I sent you guys a copy and I'm going to look through it and make sure I make some notes so I can see what do we need to do together and as a community that'll help us get our numbers where they need to be. We need our kids to be just as represented in GT as they are in sped 504 extracurricular activities. These kids deserve to be able to have the services that we aren't quite there yet on providing. The very bottom is the link which I hope I see some phones come up. This will be for joining our advisory committee. We need of the people that have already submitted. We have some teachers. We have a few parents. We don't have as many community members and we
021have like three parents. So, it would be amazing if you guys would also want to join us to make this program what it really needs to be. Again, I'm Rebecca Stout. I'm the data coordinator, also the GT coordinator and assistant district testing coordinator. And I thank you for allowing me to speak to you tonight. Do you have any questions for me? If you do, my email is rebecca periodstout clevelandisd.org. Thank you guys. Thank you, ma'am, for that information. Next, we will go into any superintendent reports by Dr. Barnes. >> Uh, good evening. Uh, thank you guys for being in attendance at our board meeting this evening. I want to start off with our student enrollment attendance uh rate data. Our current student enrollment is 12,649 students. Uh, that number has stayed uh relatively even uh
022throughout the first semester. Uh the attendance rate is 92.03%. A little uh under our goal where we're uh trying to get to, but we know that that winter sickness is upon us, but we we're fighting through for the good fight. Um board, I'd also like to share with you um on your desk a written report of personnel hired under the superintendent uh designated hiring authority. Um, also, uh, reminder, our Christmas holidays are from December 22nd through January 5th. Uh, staff will return on January the 6th, uh, for staff development, and then our students return on January the 7th. Uh, our financial reports are provided. Our CFO, Miss Karen Billy, is here uh, as present to answer any questions you may have. And we also have our campus and department reports are included in the board
023book as well. Thank you, Dr. Barnes. Next, we'll go into the information items. No formal action is required on these items during this meeting. Item A, proposed requisition for Microsoft Office licensing renewal. Item B, proposed requisition for custodial cleaning equipment. Item C, proposed requisition for custodial washer and dryer equipment. Item D, proposed future award for RFP for kitchen cafeteria equipment. Item E, proposed requisition for band uniforms. Item F, proposed addition to behavior RTI FTEES. Item G, future budget amendment for band uniforms. The board members will excuse me. The next section of the consent agenda items. All items listed under the consent agenda consider routine and will be enacted as one motion unless a board member requests that an item be removed for separate discussion. Approve bills and payroll. Approve the minutes for the regular meeting
024of November 17, 2025. Do I have a motion? >> Motion by Miss Porter. >> Second by Coles. All in favor? Motion passes 70. We will now address action items. Item A, consider of the 2026, 2027 high school and 2026, 2027 middle school core selection guides. Do I have a motion? >> Motion by Sos. Second by Pena. All in favor? Motion passes 70. consider approval for the 2025 2026 district and campus improvement plans. Do I have a motion? >> Motion. >> A motion by Miss Allen, second by Miss Johnson. All in favor? >> Uh, pardon me. I'd actually like to make a motion that we accept the campus and district improvement plans with the exception of Cleveland Middle School and Cottonwood Elementary. table and she needs a Board member has board member Porter has motion to
025table the item B. Do I have a second? >> Second by Miss Pena. All in favor? >> Motion passes 60. Item C, consider approval of library materials acquisition list state bill 13 compliance. Do I have a motion? Motion. Motion by Miss Pena. >> Second by Miss Porter. All in favor. Motion passes 70. Item D. Consider approval to award request for proposal RFP number 26-02 master scheduling staff planning software and related items. Do I have a motion? >> Motion by Miss Johnson. >> Second by Miss Pion. All in favor? Motion passes 70. Item E, consider approval of district requisitions for purchases above 50,000 as per CH local policy. Consider approval for project requisition for contract agreement to communities and school of East Texas Incorporated with funding source title title one fund 211. Do I have a
026motion? Motion >> a motion by Miss Johnson, second by Miss Porter. All in favor motion passes 70. Consider approval for project requisition for service contract with the stepping stones group for speech and occupational therapy services with funding source general funds special education aotment. Do I have a motion? >> Motion by Miss Allen. >> Second. Second by Miss Pñena. All in favor? >> Is the person I'm so sorry. >> Yes. >> Yeah. >> Coach Charles has some questions. >> I just need to know what it what it is. Steph. It's actually a contract company that deals with therapist such as speech therapist, occupational therapist, therapist, but it's a cont. >> No, ma'am. Thank you. We had a motion by Miss Allen and a second by Miss Ping. All those in favor. Motion passes 70 consider approval
027for project requisition for chronic absentism and truency software for Rai Incorporated with funding source general fund. We have a motion. >> Motion by Miss Allen. Second. >> Second by Soros. All those in favor? Motion passes. 70. Tazby policy update item A, second reading and final approval of TASBY policy update 126. Board members, we have a second reading for of TAZBY policy update 126, which includes the revision of several policies. Do I have a motion to approve the second reading and final adoption of TASBY policy 126 as presented? >> Motion by Miss Pion. >> Second by Miss Porter. All in favor? Motion passes 70. And before we go into executive session, Coach Seros has a word. Okay, I just want to uh make sure. Can you hear me fine? Okay. Uh I just want to iterate
028uh some of the things that was on my mind today. Uh I know we go day by day and I was just reminiscing because I've been in the position some of you are in. Um we had a band that was the best in the state of Texas. And we didn't get any news media. When something go bad in Cleveland, you can't move for the news media. So to make a long story short, I just want to commend you and appreciate you and tell you the job that you're doing. You're important. I'm not. Y'all keep the ship afloat. All executive directors, directors, uh, child nutrition, transportation, police, force, counselors, secretaries, everyone that's involved in CISD, y'all keep it afloat. And I know sometime you don't hear it enough. Um, the job you do, sometimes it's negotism
029and sometime it's not. Sure, we had a football team going in 10, but if you went to some of the games, those kids never quit and it's hard week after week after week and and I hear so much negativism about them. Um, but then you go to some of the games, you know, they never quit for 48 minutes. We was out of class, true enough. And the projection for next year, it's going to be tough again. If we get in the district, Tasa, Summer Creek, Kingwood, Humble, if we get in that district, it's tough again. But those kids never quit. And I just want to tell you, keep doing what you're doing if it's positive. I know sometime, you know, you get that inner feeling that, oh boy, what am I doing? Y'all y'all doing
030a good job. So, keep doing. We going to get to where we we should be, where we want to be. Things may look dim now, but I promise you, we going to get there. We got love for one another. And I I I I know like I say I've been there sometime we we get down on ourselves but I just want to tell you I appreciate you. I appreciate what you're doing. We got the right combination. We got the superintendent. We got the right combination to get where we should be. So, if your head is down, which I know some of you might be a little if you're out there listening and and and the ones who are here, you're doing a great job. I just want to tell you, it was on my mind
031all day. I thought about the band. I said, "Now, we got the best band in the state of Texas." And we didn't have not one news media to come around. But soon as something go bad, you can't move from them. So I want to tell you I appreciate you. I'm not important. You are. I can't do your job. I wouldn't attempt to. But X's and O's on the football field, I can do that. But I can't do what you doing. Keep doing what we doing. I promise you, we going to get to where we need to be. We got the right individual for a superintendent. We got We going to get there. It might look dim. And like I say, everybody that's affiliated with CISG, I might have missed some. You know, I don't I
032don't like to call certain departments always miss some. Transportation, police force. We're on top our game. Sure, we had bus accidents, but what district doesn't the size of a district as large as ours? You know, I hear negative stuff every time I turn. Uh what's wrong with y'all bus drivers? A district this size, you're going to have accidents whether you believe it or not. So, let's keep doing what we doing. I appreciate you. I love you to death. all. We are all in this together. It's not about me. I'm right here. I'm I'm not important. I'm I'm It's about you. I just want you to know I appreciate you. And I want each and every one of you to have a merry Christmas and a prosperous new year. And we come back next year 2026.
033Let's hit the ground running. Thank you, coach. The board will now go into executive session to delaborate on the following matters. Personnel matters to deliberate the discipline and dismissal of public officer or employee specific spec specifically sorry discussing the superintendent's recommendations regarding the proposed termination for good cause of probation area contract employee Kaden Douglas. We will discuss also discuss superintendent appraisal materials delaboration regarding purchases exchange lease or value in real property discussion regarding safety devices security personnel and security audit consolation with a board attorney regarding all matters as authorized by law. The board is now going to exe executive session at 6:40