001cohort class of 2028 we have 105 students Scholars I should say that are enrolled in Early College High School who will in four years graduate with both their high school diploma and their associate of Arts degree so it's very very exciting we actually have one of our Early College High School teachers uh James Miller here he's teaching our speech and professional communications class to our ninth grade students they are taking two college credits uh two college courses this year one in the fall one in the spring and then they swap so there's a transition College transition course that they take one semester and they take the professional speech and Communications in the second semester so by the end of their freshman year they've already earned six college credits um electives but they're awesome um and
002so just wanted to give you a brief update on that and everything that we're doing um in our Early College High School so um again we have uh 98 total students um seven in Tech and their um semester average was a 98.98% passing rate which is very very good um they earned their first three college credit hours as freshman in the fall they're all working on their second three hours in the spring 44% of them are considered College ready so they have to take What's called the TSI um test any student wanting to take a dual credit class at the high school needs to take a the the college entrance a Readiness test test but for elected courses they don't have to pass it they don't have to test College ready they just need to
003sit for the test well when we gave this test to them at the end of their eth grade year 44% of those students tested College ready in either uh Ela math or some of them were both we do have our students that are on the geometry track this year that are slated to take college algebra next year so they will have to any of them who were not College ready in math will have to take and pass that in order to advance to that college algebra class for next year um so we do also have our PTEC students and so that PTEC is under the Early College umbrella they're still getting the 60 credit hours but they're also getting an industry-based certification as a PA professional because they're interested in something in the field of
004Education coaching training something like that so that's really exciting um and that's kind of aligned with our teach program that we've had already for the past couple of years so we are partnered with St Phillips College that they've been our um our higher ed partner for several years since we've offered dual credit on our campuses and they continue to be our partner for early college so here's some uh images that you can see of pek in action in the classroom we've got a lot of our students that want to go into the field of Education or coaching and um they're competing at Taffy which is the National Organization for teachers future teachers they're earning scholarships they're getting summer internships and they can once they finish their degree here while they're in college finishing their four-year
005degree they can actually work as either a substitute teacher or a PA professional and get paid some pretty decent money for a college student while they're finishing out their degree so that's really exciting um we do have an Advisory board for our PTEC as you can see looks familiar because we were in this room when we met um but we have a a group of Advisory board members that come together from just uh industry Partners we've got uh business partners in the field of Education some from other highered um colleges and they just come to support and help us brainstorm on ways to make our program better um and to to create more opportunities for things like internships and and more work-based learning opportunities for our students in PTEC so we just just closed the
006application window on Saturday for next year's incoming freshman we've learned our lesson we're going to keep it open until after course selection for next year because we've got seven on the waiting list that said we didn't get it in but we want in so we are going to open it up for a little bit more because we can go up to 120 for next year so we have 94 students that have applied um 17 of them are PTEC so really in thinking through like growing our own teachers to come back and work for us and stay in this field I think that that's an amazing um increase from this year uh we're continuing to uh solidify our course offerings for next year but for our current freshmen um so for the incoming freshman they'll take
007those same two classes and then our current freshman next year will take an art class so their third elective and then they'll take that college algebra if they're currently in Geometry um it won't be until Junior and Senior year that really all of their core becomes dual credit at that point um and so we're retesting our students that are taking uh college algebra we're retesting them um for those that were not College ready as early as February all the way through May and so um we're really excited that we've got that many students that are wanting to join us in our second cohort so this is just going to keep going and and I'm really excited about the opportunities that we're providing for our students um do you have any questions that I could answer
008will you so our students who are in PTEC who want to become teachers they often go to Cambridge Woodridge Howard will you speak to our students who want to become coaches what is their field experience look like yes so we do actually have um one of our senior football players who has been working over at the junior school so when we first started a lot of our um students we were just at Howard and then we expanded over to the the elementary school so then we started going into Cambridge and Woodridge but now with um some of our male ptech students that are interested in the coaching field we're opening up the junior school and so one of our students in particular Jackson Moore has actually gone over there and just basically taken over a
009whole group of students during the athletic period and the coaches are grateful for him um so he's getting real hands-on experience on what it's like to be an athletic coach and um and also kind of just give back in the way that he feels like his coaches poured into him now he can pour into these Junior School kids so it's been really great for him that's awesome y you might have answered this already but is this a program that you have to start your freshman year and then continue on or can somebody opt in later on in high school to join into the program so in terms of getting the full AA degree you would need to start at the Freshman year we're looking at ways to kind of onboard potentially sophomore year if we
010can offer if we can get St Phillips to offer those two classes in the summer then we could do that for kids going into sophomore year but for the full um AA degree you would want to start your freshman year with that said all of our dual credit courses are open enrollment so if students that are not a part of PTEC wanted to take college algebra or when we are offering dual credit US history or dual credit or you know any of our on-ramps classes they can take those just like any other student can whether they're part part of early college or not so they could earn more college credits they may not get that full AA degree but they could still earn a lot of college and then these students if they go on
011to a traditional four-year College they're kind of starting off almost as a junior or sophomore on what they're still considered firste college students um they would still need to complete it depends on what their field of study is going to be so they they may still need to complete some additional prerequisite courses that they didn't have here for their field of study um some of them may go right into you know their intended major it just depends on what the requirements are for that major right sorry my daughter is part of the program so that's why I said it depends on the college it depends on the college say that again is is one of those students oh yeah which grade is she she's a nth grade she okay so she's in the first cohort
012yes yes so is mine yeah how's it going as a parent oh I'm I'm thrilled with the way even her mindset about school cuz she went in there cuz I asked her to and I convinced her in a very different way but now she was B and told well I kind of pretty much told her you're going to have a big death this is different and and graduating before his her brother was a big incentive to because Miguel is a a sophomore yeah so it's like Oh I like that so but now her mindset it's so different like she started to think more like a college kid so that's that's me I I will say that the College transition course is an amazing course I think it's something that every student should take at some
013point in preparation for not only college but just how to be successful at school you know how to be organized how to set goals for yourself um how to figure out what it is you might be good at or interested in finding your passion so it's been really great so far I'm enjoying that part can we offer that if a kid's a freshman in college that's a great idea I'm curious uh Professor Miller what is something you feel in your communication class that has been like the big light bulb moment for kids like Corey spoke about the transition course some of those key learnings in the communication what would you say we do a survey uh towards the end it's their their mid uh midterm project where they actually think of a survey of something
014that's interesting to them they develop the uh questions that they want to ask qualitative and quantitative questions they ask then they perform the survey they then take all the data synthesize uh the data and then report on the data and all of them just watching them transform that project alone was transformative because you watch them just not wanting to go and talk to people to being able to stand in front of me and tell me what they learned about what they wanted to talk about so it it's incredible nice the last thing I'll say is that something that's very unique about our program it really sets us apart from the way that other schools do early college is we are truly a school within a school so we don't send our kids off campus to
015St Phillips to take these courses we're not currently bringing any professors from outside of our our own teachers onto campus we have really been um selective in identifying our teachers who have master's degrees that are either already credentialed or eligible to be credentialed to be adjunct professors like Mr Miller or maybe need to take some additional courses and have done that like Mr Miller to teach uh to teach the course that we'd like for them to teach so we have our staffing already planned out for the next you know for the cohort to finish all the way through which is really exciting so they that that just means that they get to um experience the traditional High School experience like every other student at aloh heid's high school because they can still take their electives
016they can still play sports they can still do Fine Arts they can still do all the things without having to leave and kind of feel like they've separated off they're just um you know part of the of the regular high school so well done well done okay can we give her a round of applause thank you well it's also Applause for all the hard work this was a multi-year process to get this rolling great experiences for our kids but it wouldn't be possible without all the core's hard work Jimmy's hard work James's hard all everybody involved has done a lot and so I'm glad to hear great stories that our kidss are benefiting from that thanks so I mentioned if you can go and switch off of this one and go to the budget one
017so this meeting has highs which is what you just experienced and it's got some lows or a low which a and I'm going to reframe it is is a challenge and so uh some of you might have heard a version of this but because it's such a big deal for us it's important that we wanted to make sure this group also has information that they need to know about our budget going forward to next year year at the next bamum which is the next two years and now this is an abbreviated version of what Dr bashera presented at the uh board meeting in January uh and I'm going to cover a few things for you and because some time has elapsed I have a a few more uh pieces of information I think is important
018for you all to know uh as parents but also as just citizens of the of Texas and so hey Joseph thanks for being here that's right coming in all right so um uh this is also one of those things that I really need you guys to be talking about with your uh other peers that aren't here that that you work with so we're in a tough budget situation and Dr Basher has been talking about this for at least a year maybe a year and a half um and so a couple of things for you to know is just historically um the state has gone through tough budget times before in the entire state was in a tough situation because of the state of the economy and you going remember back all the way back to
01908 09 right the collapse of the economy the the Great Recession so the state itself was in a deficit and so at that time we all in all the school districts in the state had to cut but that made sense to us because the state itself was in a budget deficit at that time right so in 2011 we cut 3 million we had a budget advisory Council to help us identify what we had to cut um by the way we never restored those cuts right so we kind of tightened it up at that point went through a lot of stuff and that was that time in 2019 the state legislature had a historic piece of legislation called House Bill 3 it passed unanimously in both the house and the Senate and that was a big
020deal for funding uh I think overall it was kind of an in in of about 20% at that time and it established a basic allotment uh which is how schools are funded right for each student in general uh you start with each student gets that much based on their average daily attendance right so that was 2019 it was a great celebration it was a big deal they did a lot of work well since that inflation has basically wiped all that out right and so that's really the big story inflation and a bunch of other things has and so so going into the 2023 session which is the last session they had it was a very different budget landscape whereas in 2011 the state was short money going into the last legislative session the state was
021a wash with money based mainly on inflation because that increases oil and and gas prices which is kind of a lot of that goes into the state cers $33 billion Surplus going into last session not to mention the rainy day fund which is a whole another bucket of money uh and due to some political uh maneuvering based on private school vouches uh no additional money was uh allotted to to school districts right and so we're still operating under uh 2019 funding but the cost of everything is gone up you guys constantly have experienced that yourselves and so we had no additional dollars to adjust for inflation out of the last session that was really hard now this is just a small uh graph to show you guys all know how it impacted your community but
022just for your households but for us as a district uh fuel increased 115% uh property insurance went up I mean I know I got hit on my property insurance health insurance went up food cost in went up electricity went up and so really when you adjust for inflation what it cost in 2019 of what we were getting really should be increased like 1,300 bucks right just to kind of just to keep up that's not giving you more money that's just your spending power has decreased that much you got to get that now I'm not going to do each one of these but uh in addition to inflation there's a lot of these other things that ended up taking a hit on our budget so going from last year to this year we already had to
023make several Cuts we cut 22 position we ended up cutting I think uh the equivalent of $2.5 million through a variety of things mainly through increasing class size in attrition and so I know you high school students have felt it it class sizes are bigger the teachers have felt it class sizes are bigger Bren had 37 kids in the class last semester all right I mean I think you've addressed it that but still it's a lot of kids and all of that is because we had to uh cut back on positions to increase class size because we couldn't afford we had to cut $2.5 million going into this year okay now that's going into this year now we're prepared to start budgeting for the next B which is the way the state does it right
024they have two-year budgets and so we now have to identify an additional $5 million to tighten up because we don't want to go another year without a salary increase our teachers did not get a salary increase this year and then an economy in which prices of everything are going up that's the nowi situation for our staff right we can't afford to to keep uh to recruit and retain good folks if we can't give a salary increase so we're going to have to cut money so that we can you know funnel that back and that means uh squeezing Staffing right so we're going to have less teachers higher class sizes but that gives us a little bit of money to give salary increases it also allows us to adjust for inflationary costs and it also allows
025us to protect our fund balance because that's that's how schools uh make the uh payroll right we have to have a little money in the savings because this just the way the state uh funding Works takes a while to get back filled and so it's not it's just like like Dana's been saying this that Dr B has been saying this for a year and a half like it is a very drastic situation and so what we did like we did in 2011 we created a budget advisory committee half of it was staff half of it was parents and community and so the staff that were involved were district teachers of the years from the most recent years as well as a couple years back we had district teachers of the year on there we have
026we had teachers and staff that understand various special programs like David Stevenson who knows all the Fine Arts in the program um we had administrators from all the areas hey guys thank I told everybody that you were doing you were testing so yeah you had you had a pass um and we had parents from various all the different campus PTO executive boards on this groups and we met four times between September and November and two of those full meetings there were two-hour meetings a piece was educating everybody so they really had a working understanding of both the way funding works the way our budget works and the various programs that we're going to have to be uh uh exploring in terms of budget reductions now the key the the guiding principle was if it's not
027required by state law we had to look at it and the only thing you can't cut is something that's required by law but everything else is over and above and so We examined all of those things we did a lot of work and that group's job was to tell us well if we did reduce the budget by that what would be the impact on our parent Community what would be the impact on our staff Community they were telling us impacts they weren't deciding what's going to be cut they gave that information to the Board of Trustees and Dan Dr Basher and she worked with the trustees and they took all that together and they made some recommendations now I didn't give this to you before because I didn't want you looking at it but uh
028this is a summary of the recommendations going forward uh and as you pass those around uh when Dr bashera spoke to the staff last spring she explained everything that I explained how dire it was but she said I hope you have to hope right you can't give up hope um but uh we have a legislative session that started in January January 14th maybe and we have hope that something's going to some relief is going to come from the legislative session and so at that time we were hopeful well since then uh November elections have happened key positions have been either elected or Not Elected and various things have happened and so uh it's we now have to plan right so we have we're hopeful but now we're losing a little bit of Hope because of
029various things right so we've heard from the Senate side they think we have plenty of money they think we're fine they don't uh have any appetite to increase the basic allotment which I'm going to talk about bit more about they have published that they want to give teachers a pay raise which is great for teachers they deserve a pay raise but we can if that money is earmarked only to go there we still got to cut teachers because it's not earmarked to help us do other things so it's this weird political game they're playing which is say we want to Plate the Educators by giving them a raise but that doesn't help the bottom line and we're still going to have high class sizes we're still going to have to cut programs because all that
030money goes to a very specific spot I'll explain in a minute why that's not the best thing okay now um we don't take this lightly because all of these budget dollars are they're your kids and they're our employees these are all people they're not just dollars so it's a really big deal but we're not done uh fighting so I have another handout for you and this is going to lead to a an action plan and so I'm hoping what I want you to leave understanding is why an increase to the basic is the most highlever way that legislators can add new funding into the system It's the Most High leverage way like I mentioned if they pass a teacher pay increase which is what the Senate is proposing and it only goes for that that's
031great for teachers it doesn't have the impact on the overall programming that we offer because of the way it works okay so check out this handout if if you have any extras send them back up here cuz I need to look at one I um okay right so here's the argument here here's and I'm trying to stay away from getting too granular for you because um school funding is I would argue intentionally complex right um but here's the point right in house in 2019 when they passed house bill um uh three that legislation specifically in included the following triggers that impact the entire system any increase to the basic allotment automatically increases teacher salaries so the any increase in the basic allotment I think it's like 40% has to go to teacher salaries so teachers
032will automatically get a raise if you increase the B basic allotment the other thing that's automatic is special ed funding automatically increases uh safety funding automatically increases and get this for the those people who live in Alo Heights recapture automatically decreases it was built into that law and so that's why it was such a big deal they did a lot of work they did an interim study before they passed the law and they crafted legislation to try to help us not have a fight every two years they've just got to fund it right and this is like most of the mo a lot of the people in the house and the Senate voted for this bill they've just got it fund the bill right and so this is a little it me it's meant to
033be kind of an eye pleaser but if we can increase the basic allotment by just to adjust for inflation then at the bottom that's what that that means for us okay so yeah there's a lot of those things there but that's one like that's why you're making the point okay now I'm going to go to an action item I think all right that's that hand out um I don't want to spend time going over over what the reductions are I want you to have them I want you to know that given the Dire Straits the board already decided that everything in tier one we're going to have to make those reductions that's so we've already talked this staff everybody's prepared for that and we're getting ready for that um tier two uh we're more than
034likely going to have to make those but that that decision is going to be made in February like we're watching the legislature to see what's going on maybe we won't have to but I think I'm like 98% sure we'll have to do that and then the last tier which is tier three we'll make a final decision about that in March again based on what we're seeing in the legislature not sure just not sure the house is is a little bit behind because they picked their speaker late and you have to have the speaker to have who's on the Committees and to set up committees and last I heard they haven't even announced who's the chair of the different committees the Senate man they hit the ground running they're voting they're hearing today on a private
035school voucher Bill the Senate plans to vote tomorrow and all the indications are they're going to pass some kind of vouer Bill in the Senate well it's still got to go through the house but that's like they're still we have hope in the house is what we're hoping at any rate so here's next steps we need you we need our community to call to visit to send emails calls are more effective than emails your legislators right and so depending on where you live in the district we've got uh represented Mark lahood who visited the high school on Monday we talked to him Friday we were no last week we're visiting with him we got to educate he's a new uh representative he's got to learn about all the stuff in our district uh depending on
036where you live Barbara G Hawkins uh represents part of our district Diego bernau has a very narrow sliver of our district in the Senate uh Senator Donna Campbell who lives in New bronal she represents most of our district but also in San Antonio uh uh Senator Menendez has a sliver of our district as well uh we met with all of those guys last week who we were at the capital but here's what I need to ask you to do very specifically find out where you live and who your representative are call every week and say I'm asking you to increase the basic allotment by a, $340 and your little handout explains why that is right uh and that's just to adjust for inflation so with that message column if you have family yeah try oh
037I'm so about 10 years ago I was in college um Capital they have to mark every time you call so it is notated when you call so your call will make a difference yeah like they'll say what's your name what's your address and they use that they can look up to see what how often you vote which is fine if you do you don't but that's just that's the pro the process and it doesn't take long and somebody will answer and if you call after hours there's a voem but they will log all that stuff now your friends who don't live in Alamo Heights you got families and friends get them to call because they live in other places where there's other Representatives that maybe they have some influence on as well and it doesn't
038matter whether if they're if the representatives are Republican or democrat they all represent everybody who's in their district and so they all want to listen to people who vote right so you got to do that uh now if any is that sometimes they'll call like I talked to a parent who called Senator Campbell's office and they actually had an interaction with with this the aid and the aid said oh she's all for increasing the basic allotment keep going how much that's what you say well how much $10 ain't going to help us you know what I mean how much now be prepared for this in the preliminary budget estimates they don't think that there's uh there's just not there's literally not enough money in because there's a big Surplus now but it's being earmarked for
039a bunch of other stuff there's literally from what we've seen there's not enough money to increase that to get there I like I we just know that there's just not so if they say there's not say yeah but what can you do can you get us halfway can you get us a quarter of the way don't let them just say there's not enough money like push as much as you can there would have been enough money had they addressed it last session you know when you do something a little bit at a time you get there if you put it off too long of course there's not enough money to do the whole thing right so I've given you very easy things I got you that stuff there spread the word that we need to
040be call it uh we visited the capital last Wednesday it's a week ago wow seems like forever and we've had nine different meetings um with different offices sometimes the legislator was actually there with us like representative L Hood was there in the room with us we had eight of us there trustees we had a parent from the Elmo highight School Foundation we had two Juniors at the high school and they did a great job explaining how big their class size s and that kind of thing uh we got to speak to the senator Campbell Senator Menendez directly uh the other offices were AIDS but they were pretty high up Aid we got to meet the guy who runs the Senate Ed committee court bansky and he told us there's not money there but you know
041we get it but we kind of pushed as well and so we did all that that was you know it was what it was I don't know if I would say promising but it was good to at least have your voice heard they took their time and they listened to us as well the house side is really probably our biggest hope the Speaker of the House gave us some time which was nice and uh he's an education proponent um and so but he's still getting all his Ducks lined up in a row about who's going to chair committees he wants to do a revised budget he fails like there needs to be more money in the basic allotment based on what the previous speaker said and then our trustees are going to continue to work
042the process of looking at the budget getting updates from Dr bashera uh about a process going forward yeah oh let me use Le Hood as an example nicest guy nothing yeah um nothing his son goes to uh the Academy he has no no idea of public education and funding Dana um toured him the other day and tried to just give him a complete analysis of what we're going through and hopefully a deeper understanding to funding um public education but um unfortunately a lot of your elected officials their kids go to private school they have no concept of public education and how funding yeah and so you're calls will educate people yeah um in regards to the calls I was I don't know this part like this action stuff of calling if it's just for our
043group or for the community at large but do you think it's possible to create or write up a script that we could both use and share with others because I find like if there's a script that says these things it makes it much I think easier for people to actually call versus having to call and not quite sure how to yeah well my intent is to that like is to have this be your SCP just like one sentence I can certainly add more language so it's more clear that this is meant to be a script but that was my intent it's go hi um I'm Chandler tedlock and I just wanted to register my request that you vote to increase the student based allotment by $1300 to bring schools up like just that one sentence
044is all we need you to say at this point like there's there's a lot of websites that have similar like a just very straight forward yeah script yeah well I can add more but right now like I just want like I'm just getting people just say that one sentence and you know and I'm not asking you to persuade them on the phone it's like register it so they can give the tally mark that says wow this is another person that's this is another person this is another person yeah so a t counts like weekly like doing it once a week from or right doing it once is not enough no right but like how often is it once a week or is it I'm asking I'm asking you to do it once a week yeah
045yeah you say it's me calling again the the beauty would be if you can get other people too to start joining they'll see that it's not just Martha it's Martha plus this other person it's Martha plus these two people and then aren aren't all public schools having this issue or are we just we're really squeezed all public schools are yeah so BR and so we often compare ourselves to e anyway um but eans they're closing the school all right that just unbelievable all the same yeah so one of the like uh when we were talking with with the legislators one of the points that we tried to make was we get it right Al Heights is a property wealthy District um and e is a property wealthy District if we're in Dire Straits something's wrong
046with the system right right and so like wake up like this is something that we got to look at the hood uh because there's a lot of competing narratives you know there's competing narratives about the money that goes to public education that is true so like uh teacher retirement system the state invest money in that right that doesn't help me the lower class size but tea is going around saying oh we give this much to public ad when it's kind of true but it doesn't help us with operation right we need money that's going to help us with operations and that's the basic a lot so don't like if they're going to say oh we're going to give money for safety that's great uh we're behind cuz we spent a lot on safety that's helpful
047but it's not for our basic operations that's what you have to it's almost of like a I was trying to think of an example like if um if I was uh like I have my basic salary and I use that to do my monthly stuff and if my you know gr an said hey I want to give you 10,000 bucks I'm like great they say but you have to spend it on trees for your your yard well yeah but I don't need trees for my yard I need to keep up with the cost of groceries well no but I'm giving you $10,000 you should be grateful for that well I am but I don't need trees I still have to you know that's kind of how how it is so I spent way too much
048time on this but is this a digital um you have an email to you guys yeah I haven't seen it seen this I've seen the cut one but I haven't seen this that yeah well that's new we just made it like last week yeah I'll send that to you guys after the meeting okay cool well thank you for letting me stay in my soap box but this is all of us and we just got to get involved right it's a it's a any questions I like the idea of the STP because like we don't live in the district but like we can talk to our neighbors yeah whoever wherever you live we can pass out like what to say like please make this one call us you know understandable background but if you have something
049even for me yeah sure I'll definitely do that thanks for that idea what's that no they do yeah but it's I've been told I've been told by folks that it just means more you because you go out of your way all right thank you I feel like you're ready you're fired up I will follow up with an email uh there's a phone number on um the uh yeah I'll send you that too I'll send you that link as well yeah where you find them um thank you so much now we're not done I'm but I am red up I'm going to shift gears to some things that are not as contentious I don't think but there are things that we have to cover given the nature of what this group is all right well hey
050I should have may me save that to the end this this talk is so invigorating but now we got to switch gears okay so you ready for the next agenda item uh and you can laugh if you want um you know one of the things I told you is that this group uh is also serves as our school health advisory Council because statute says you have to have something to talk about that you remember we talked about snacks early on right and by the way I'm still working on that so I'm going to report back to you in April we were able to add I think five more protein Rich snacks at the different snack lines which is neat and uh I'm in the process of getting a video made I'm not making it but
051and Julian working on the video about how parents can look at the nutrition of the snacks so we're kind of in process anyway uh well in that vein of us being a being uh input on health and nutritional stuff um we uh there's a requirement that we have to have a group of a committee of parents so I'm naming you it to give input on our uh menu that we offer in our cafeteras this is a a requirement from the federal government because all of our uh schools except for the high schoolers on the the free produ the the school lunch program and so um I'm honest about this being a compliance piece this is not like a big deal but if you I got room to say anything you want and it's just I
052want to give you please like just 5 minutes there's a series of short questions that just ask you like strongly agree to strongly disagree your kind of thoughts about the menu in general and at the bottom if there's anything that you want to add you can just write it in there like I think we should have Chick-fil-A even though they don't meet the guidelines right you can never you can never sell that at elementary campus but you can say whatever you want uh I want to give us five minutes to do that if you would please and then you don't have to put your name on it or anything and just pass it back up and then this will be kind of our record that you guys we got from you we're doing a similar
053thing with the student advisory Council that Dr Basher has um that's got Juniors eighth graders and fifth graders on it and so we'll put those together to give uh the chef and the F some input so as soon as the last person gets it I'm going to set my timer all right I'm setting my timer go [Music] what's Cofe cover you know what when you're done just kind of put them make a stack like in front of where you're sitting [Music] I'm heading out something for our next topic I left mine up there oh think that's right [Music] one that's that's all right minutes dep but we can also go we have that's good I appreciate it thank all right thank you for that now I'm going to shift to our next uh agenda item
054which is about nutrition as well um and you probably have been reading it which is fine but I want to explain kind of the context um as I've alluded to uh because of various federal and state regulations there are certain things that nutritionally we have to we have to follow right for what we're selling in the cafeteria there's also some rules about what you do outside of the cafeteria and then each district could also do extra stuff uh in terms of nutrition so I've been doing this a long time uh and so uh years ago um the state actually had very strict rules about what you gave kids in the classroom uh like no candy uh that kind like it literally was a state rule that you're not supposed to give they called it food
055of minimal nutritional value at that time so we knew that then uh through some changes in administration at the state level um that changed a little bit but at that time this Council called the school uh school health advisory Council we decided as a district to maintain our those kind of rules about Not Giving kids candy in the classroom because we have a pretty health conscious you know as you saw from our snack conversation we have a pretty health conscious you know parent community and we just thought it made sense to continue doing that even though the state said you didn't have to and so I think it I think it's funny funny enough at that time uh the the Department of Agriculture uh that's an elected official and Sid Miller became and so he
056famously was running around saying cupcakes are back because because his big thing was he wanted to loosen up the nutrition guidelines at in in classrooms well we didn't do that and we kept our nutrition guidelines but the point was as a district we had nutrition guidelines okay now over the years I never really revised those one because I didn't want to have that conversation all over again but two it's like I didn't need to but over time as we got new administrators I came to see that there were some areas in ntion guidelines that were just unclear and so I knew what it meant in practice but when you just read them the teacher would be like I don't know what this means and so I finally like uh we got a new administra at
057the high school and they're like I Frank this is not clear about how it applies to the high school and so I'm like oh you know what I do need to rewrite it okay so all of the red lines you see there were all the different revisions that I made but they're just based on Clarity like I'm not changing the way we do things I'm just adding Clarity to our nutition guidelines so I'm not asking you necessarily to approve it anything but I did feel like I needed to be transparent is to say I am going to revise them but I just needed you all to kind of know and see and say oh yeah Frank this does look like you're adding Clarity I'm not changing anything to the way we've normally done things does
058that make sense now the largest thing you'll notice as I put in something that was understood but not written down which is when we built the the new high school cafeteria isn't an awesome cafeteria right it's a great cafeteria much better than the one we used to have like you guys remember that for the high school well when we built that we very consciously in this group not you all but the members at that time they decided to say you know what we think it's a good idea to come off the school lunch program because that's so restricted and what you can and can't sell we have such a great cafeteria we want it to be a place where kids want to be but in order to do that you have to sell food that
059they might want to eat and we weren't able to do that under those guidelines and so at that time we decided and the board approved coming off that program just for the high school so like when you go to the high school cafeteria that's why it's so awesome is because it's different uh there's certain things like at the junior school and the elementary cafeterias that we can't sell just because we're still on the the program if that makes sense yeah and so I codified that in those guidelines now so it's much clearer now so we have new administrators new teachers they'll it'll be clearer to them about how would you think does that make sense okay so any questions about that yeah have a this is just a random question but when I was in
060high school they always sold like bean and cheese tacos or a piece of pizza between second and third period and like the organizations did it so it was a great fundraising opportunity and like I I had practice at 7 o'clock in the morning so by 10 o'clock I was kind of hungry so why why did y'all take that away did the state take that away I guess so in the in the in the current high school we literally now have a snack place for kids kids to buy stuff that's why I mean I get that it's not a fundraiser anymore there's but kids can still buy snacks yeah so in the mule stall which is a coffee shop and by the way I've eat snacks myself there they sell Kachi they have muffins yeah yeah
061yeah so we just have a different offering now yeah and I think our high school students will agree like you can get the snack just whenever in general they Clos it sometime in during during classes during classes but passing periods or during your lunch sure yeah I think before and before school yeah it's it's open yeah yeah but we had I think they lock it down so people skip class to go get a snack so I think Middle School um cuz my girls were always asking for money to buy cookies for the special ed program do they not do that anymore or is that part is that I think they do the difference cuz I worked with them now it should be the case is that at least when I worked with uh the special
062ed students who who sold those back then we made sure that they were worked with the uh our food nutrition guys to make sure that what they sold meets the nutritional guidelines you can't just go sell like pberry cookies but you can still sell cookies they just have to be made from the right do okay yeah but I don't know if they still do that they used to is that what you have you have a whole section here on exception for fundraisers is some of that where uh six days there you can have some exception days and yeah well technically that's me because it's a that's actually from the from the the state rules is that that's to be like a onetime fundraiser not an ongoing because you only have six days so that's like
063a candy sales or whatever you sell it on that day you don't even have to worry about it because it's an exception but you can't sell candy every day yeah yeah thanks for asking okay if there's not any other discussion or questions then I'm just going to proceed I'm not going to they'll be for next year but I'll start talking to the campus administrators and let them know and that kind of thing so I appreciate you letting me go off on that lung tangent it's one of those things that not a lot of people it doesn't matter to a lot of people until it does and so I appreciate your time all right I'm ready to hand it off to something I think was more fun well it's the math portion of the meeting that's
064fun right um er is in the house yes Erica is in the house so um this is I think this meeting's been interesting because we've been walking through a lot of compliance stuff and this is another compliance part so every year in December January every school gets something called taper Texas Academic performance record and it is a I think it's 46 pages of information data about the district and there is a required posting of it and presentation so I'm going to go over some of this data but I think it's interesting in the spirit of what we've been talking about um I don't have a lot of Hope in some of our elected officials but I choose to live life and hope and optimism and I have hope and optimism in our community and with
065our staff so as I track the numbers of what this community is able to accomplish and our teachers and our students despite limited funding despite overwhelming uh rules and regulations that we have to comply with I think it's impressive so I'm going to walk you through this Texas Academic performance record and just highlight some of the things on there I am not going to read 46 pages of data to you but I did give you a hand Dandy carry away that you can also use as a fan um all right here's the so this is required we have to talk about student achievement which will be last year's star results college career military Readiness which again we just got this report in December and it's data from 2223 so it's not brand new information but
066it's nice the way that it's compiled we'll talk about attendance graduation rates and then just the demographics of our teachers and our students so we'll start with star in the Texas Academic performance record it includes third through e8th grade star from last year high school end of course exams and then here's what's unique so Erica right now is teaching High School Al algebra to eighth grade students that's about half of our kids in 8th grade kids who take a high school end of course exam they sat or ACT score stands in lie of a math score in high school so this does include a little bit of ACT SAT it also is only inclusive of kids who were with us in October and May so if a student doesn't move in until January they aren't
067included in our accountability group and we'll look at some achievement and some progress data all right I'm going to explain this because the same chart's going to show up on the next few slides so this is star again from last year all subjects the percentage of kids that approached which means they passed the test our goal is we want 90% of our kids and we want a half the gap between the scores of all students compared with the scores of students identified as economically disadvantaged so this goes back to where we were in 2019 here's the year there was covid we didn't even take STAR they changed the test here and then blue green is our goal blue is all kids orange is economically disadvantaged so overall Statewide star scores did go down specifically in
068math and science and I'll show you that but what I want to show is in 2021 our gap between all and students identified as economically disadvantaged was 22 points last year we got it to 18 so there's still work to be done but in that direction we're headed that's a nice positive this is just English again goal is 90% And to half the Gap our English scores I would say were pretty much flat last year even though it's de across Texas they did Decline and again the Gap was 23 points now it's at 15 and this also one of the things that came into play when we changed the star test is before kids were only evaluated on their writing in fourth grade 8th grade and then high school now every grade is writing an
069essay and it's graded so that has really changed the test I argue that it is a good thing that we're looking at writing every grade level um but that did mean you can't really compare these scores to those scores because it's a very different test but very proud of our English teachers here looking at maap y'all scores across Texas just huge Decline and alal Heights didn't have didn't see the same decline across the state but we absolutely saw a decline in our math scores but we also saw again that same trend of closing the gap between all students and students identified as economically disadvantaged science same scores declined specifically y this was in fifth and eth grade our biology scores exceptionally High um Gap closing social studies was different that is the only area that
070our scores went up last year and likewise we saw the Gap close so still work to be done this is another this is not just how well did kids do on the test but did they make a Year's worth of progress in a year's time I would argue this is the more important of the two and so here's an Alamo Heights across all grades all subjects well math and reading 69% of our kids made a full whole Year's worth of progress in a year's time compared to Texas which was 64 so our kids are outperforming peers in Texas and their growth is as well I still want to see that get higher because we want to see 100% of our kids making a Year's worth of growth this accelerated instruction this is kids who failed
071star one year that then go on to pass the next year we put in additional tutoring additional small group so had 35% of our kids who didn't fail one year go on to pass the next that's outperforming Texas this is still an area for us especially in lower grades because if we can get kids on track third grade and fourth grade it's harder to get a child who has not passed third grade fourth grade fifth grade sixth grade seventh grade to all of a sudden catch up in high school so this is a lot of early intervention here all right all right I'm going to turn now to uh college career military Readiness our goal here is that by the time our kids cross the stage everyone is either employed enlisted or enrolled in college
072one of those they got a plan and this looks at our percentage of kids that have met uh adequate testing scores on ACT SAT or that TSI that Cory was talking about made a three or higher on an AP test uh took dual credit an onramps which is another dual credit option we have in physics earned an industry certification or for special education students there's some uh specific Provisions there but if they can do one of those things they're considered ready for college so on this uh blue is Alm Heights the black is State and this is economically disadvantage and so if you look at our almal Heights line we were 70% of our kids ccmr 74 66 74 66 65 and last year 79 that's really strong progress in one year still have a
073gap here still have a gap of making sure that we make our kids who are economically disadvantaged that we are getting them ready for whatever their next step is after they leave us all right attendance and Dropout one thing Frank when he was talking about funding our schools it is based on attendance so we still have to pay a teacher whether there's 10 kids in school that day or there's 37 um but we only get funded for the kids who are in school so this is Alamo Heights historically has had a really high attendance rate it was 96% 96% 96% 96 96 96.2 this year this is the covid year we didn't even take attendance the last quarter of the year so that's why this is kind of a wonky here then we this year
074we had remember we had remote instruction and we had sub kids who were online so there was attendance but they weren't really in school so that's kind of a fuzzy number I would say too last year that attendance rate 93.8 and it doesn't seem like that's a big amount from 96 to9 3 but every day a child is absent we lose $75 so that adds up really quickly in 2223 that went up to 94.7 and first semester of this year we're at 95.1 so we're still not fully back to our historic 96% attendance rate but we're on the right track and I think all the conversations we had as we walked through Co about if you're six day home if you're six stay home that is good um but we need to and come back
075um and we also have and you guys just in our Alamo Heights we also have conversations with our parents about please don't go to Disney World in October like there's a little bit of just talking about the importance of having kids in school and making conscious decisions about when you're removing kids from school and if you do take them take them after 10:00 cuz they're kind of um this also is a new metric they started tracking about kids who were absent more than 10 days again these two years I think are kind of fuzzy numbers but we were at 17.8 and we've dropped to 12.8 so that's another positive to look at and our attendance rate um not attendance but graduation rate is Rock Solid there all right we'll look at just some demographics for
076students this uh looks like kind of you anyone remember that show prices right price okay that's kind of what this looks like here but this is our overall enrollment in our district so our kind of average number was about 4,800 you know we have some little ups and downs we had one year 1920 we were up at 4,900 kids and then co co co co uh and now we're back at 4774 and so this is that's a nice jump from last year 4714 to 4774 I think a lot of efforts we've made about we've in I don't know if you know but we offer a prek tuition program because you have to qualify with State guidelines to come to prek in a public school but we offer you can pay tuition and start your kids
077here early and that's because we know where families start is where they choose to stay and so we have grown our prek enrollment we have really knocked it out of the park is anyone hear from Howard with if anyone's gone to some of our Kinder preview days like they are phenomenal they're so good and just helping our community see some of the things we do because if you see Howard from the outside you have no idea the magic that goes on inside and so really attracting more kindergarteners we've done a lot of partners for the profile we have a grand mules event where we're bringing people into our schools to see the magic that happens I'll our communication director it's our fourth year Frank uh third third third she's done some really nice work just
078promoting on social media the things that are happening in our schools just so that people we can attract people parents have a choice and there are a lot of great schools in San Antonio almah Heights is the best one and we want people to become familiar with what we're doing and I think we're seeing evidence of that our demographics here uh this is again you can see just Trend over time this is interesting economically disadvantaged last year was 21% this year it's just slly lower at 19.5 but notice what do you notice about our bilingual population here's where it is right now and our special ed population yeah we've seen an increase this special ed is a little um a little distorted because now students who are identified with dyslexia are categorized under special education
079so we are seeing more students identified and that's compounded because we're also taking kids out of 504 and putting them under special ed but we are seeing an increase in services that are needed our GT population is fairly stable we have changed the way that we qualify kids we don't allow outside testing and so we've seen this kind of stabilize a little bit right now it's at 18.7 Statewide average is 7% as students identified as GT last is Educators just the number of Educators even though our enrollment stay the same our number of teachers has gone up slightly that's because we needed more special education teachers uh you can see the percent of teachers in the state of Texas with a higher degree compared to alal Heights the percent of teachers who have more than
080five years experience State Alamo Heights and you can see our salary is about $100 above the state average so that's we have got Rock Solid incredibly talented teachers so in summary I just showed you a bunch of data that they just gave us in December for a test your kids took back in May so you have to know it's helpful to see a Texas comparison but the river keeps flowing and Texas is under two separate lawsuits for having um some problems with their State Testing system so it's not it's interesting information it's not the most valuable information we've ever shared with you star scores attendance and enrollment both are on the rise but we can't take foot off the gas in terms of our communication about getting kids to school ccmr great improvements again we
081can't take our foot off the gas there because we want to get up so that all of our kids are well prepared and have a plan when they leave us faculty we continue to have and attract incredible teachers that's part of all of this budget work is doing what we can to maintain them and because of our growing number of emergent bilinguals in special ed we are having to look at continuing to provide additional resources and support for those kids and teachers that's it all right I just summarized 46 pages of data in 8 minutes so any questions or anything you'd like to know more about hey Ty you get to hear all that again next week yay you yeah well uh can we give Jimmy a round of applause I know I always feel
082like we're in good hands when it comes to curriculum and instruction and data so thanks Jimmy absolutely and thank you for being here I'm going to follow up with some emails thanks for the great suggestions uh give me a day or two um but otherwise we're done all right thanks enjoy your little flapper that Jimmy gave you FL all right I'll see you yeah how many kids are you talking about well some