Regular AHISD School Board Meeting - June 15, 2021

001we ask that you fill out the yellow form you saw these when you came in um please read the instructions and indicate the agenda item if any that you wish to address and we will introduce you at the appropriate time at this point i'd like to hand it over to dr frank alfaro for recognitions and delegations thank you thank you mr anderson i'm excited to kick off our first recognition tonight by asking our weber elementary teacher suzanne and searley to calm down profile of the learner now our profile of the learner is our list of skills attributes and habits of mind that we strive to instill in all of our students uh graduating from alamo it's our student-facing vision in hebrew and but part of the things that we have to do as adults is

002we have to exemplify that profile ourselves and so we help we like to spotlight of our employees that exemplify that and to do that we have a short video of uh mississippi let's watch i am engaging socially and globally [Music] how does collaboration working with others help us engage socially and globally and what does it mean when we say we rise by listing others in this classroom we engage socially and globally um the way that we uphold so in order to engage socially and globally my students start off with a mutual respect for others in our treatment agreement our treatment agreement is something that we co-created at the beginning of the year that values diversity as a strength by allowing every student to contribute what they bring to this classroom and what they need from

003this classroom in order to learn and grow while feeling safe this is how we do it [Music] your legacy is the way that you make other people feel so thank you so much for sharing every student that comes into this classroom brings a unique fund of knowledge as a teacher my job is to know those students so deeply so that they feel empowered to let that diversity shine in our classrooms all right she's my background singer that i have in my head and i need some lifting up i got the way our students understand their relationship and responsibility to society is embedded in our but also in just saying yes to kids my students are naturally curious he's just really trying to make sure everybody understands and takes risks some of these students i've had

004as second graders she wants to help everybody make a mark on the world um whether it's by yourself or would help and i think that's hair cool they have a beautiful will to see the community around them create all the science rules not just the teacher to make sure that everybody feels welcome so that we can engage with others i really just say yes to their ideas because students naturally want to make this world a better place and feel that responsibility and it is okay that you love to do that we still think you're normally [Music] and so as you noticed the different bands that scrolled through that video are all part of our profile of the learner uh there are six different domains and i see jerry over there jerry you see that's the

005principle of woodridge shout out to woodruff be the wii and our character you guys do and that suzanna exemplifies your classroom as well so uh i would like to ask you if you have anything to do with it oh sure i just want to say thank you all so much this is actually my last year here in heights and at woodridge and i went to school at cambridge woodridge junior school high school and my experience being a teacher here in stafford has been informative and i've grown so much but really it's just been the greatest honor to serve the community that gave so much to you so thank you [Applause] she got a job as an instructional coach up in the austin area so where we're mad that you're taking away whoever's taking you but

006we're happy for you thank you so much congratulations [Applause] uh before i pull up our next honorees i'd like to explain the award they're getting it's called the spotlight on excellence periodically we shine the spotlight on employees that work often behind the scenes to help contribute to our tradition of excellence and this one's actually a pretty interesting one because you'll probably if you're a campus you will recognize these folks but you will not understand what they do if i kind of explain that and so we'd like to shine our spotlight on excellence on our alamo hike isd campus day clerks and our district uh person a lot of many hats trisha cory come on down all the guys all right so when you see him yeah i've seen that person at the campus and and

007uh um and so if i thought that person answered phones and did receptionist stuff well these folks here uh let's actually have you introduce yourselves we'll go down tell us who you are and where you work and you can even tell us kind of what your title is you remember it my name is trisha corey i work for the district in the technology department and i am the technology student and management information systems analyst i'm ashley stewart i'm at woodridge elementary and i'm the data clerk slash attendance slash hi my name is and i am at the junior school and i am the data processor and secretary to the academy hi i'm michelle baird i work at the high school and i'm the registrar and data processor hi i'm frank o'choy i work at howard

008and i am the data clerk registered receptionist and ap secretary attendance clerk and receptionist and uh they just do a lot of different things and so one thing i think uh that it's really shining the spotlight behind the scenes that nobody really understands or really wants to know that uh we get our funding from the state of texas based on a bunch of data that we have to submit to them regularly and that data has to do with students enrollment where they live a whole bunch of information about students it has to do with attendance and if that's not accurate we don't get funded the right way and we get a lot of trouble and so the attention to detail uh is mind-boggling and and it's true i'm sure driving that sometimes because if you're

009trying to work and people are calling you asking hey can you deliver this lunch hey can you call somebody like yeah i'm trying to get this detail right so that my payer doesn't call me to say there's a mistake and so uh uh the notion of that's just that's a really important job and these folks are have an attention to detail and uh customer service as well to do both at the same time is mind-boggling to me now and that's at the campus level now trisha especially has an interesting role because she interfaces with all of these folks at the campus but plus she's kind of like that that liaison between what t.e.a gets and all the stuff that they turn in and this year she's just taken a whole nother step uh 180 into

010deeper into that pink world to help us um as uh well just i was gonna say as mike gets older about that so i didn't say that but so we really appreciate trisha especially but all of you guys man talk about behind the scenes um i know jamie couldn't be here tonight jamie lockland our director of technology he's at a conference but he uh sings jaws praises uh exponentially and so i know that we all do as well and so that's why we're shining a spotlight on you today congratulations make sure you take cleaning pictures after outside is there a big summer submission still um all right our next recognition i'd like to have these uh three men come up and we'd like to recognize state tennis team bronze state medal winners uh come on

011[Applause] down my name is robert huns and i just graduated high school my name is paul patel i'm going to be a senior next to you and i'm very officer tell us about this team well they're kind of an accidental double scheme let me get down here where you can see more uh their height robert was playing doubles with a the number three guy on our team ballon was playing doubles with the number four robert's partner dodging the ball in the fall fell hit the court got a concussion and went on protocol and so i had to mix up the doubles teams and uh ballon played the ad court he's got a great two-man batman robert played the deuce court and they just started beating everybody they barely lost to the team from uh am

012consolidated in the state team tennis semi-finals that went on went to state they lost six seven six six seven seven six super tired and then they beat the highland park team so in the spring was playing number one singles couldn't quite decide whether he's gonna play doubles or singles first tournament in the spring invitational season they won easily without losing a set but ballon hurt his left wrist so that kind of ended that question balton was not going to play singles so there they are by accidental team they went on to win district without losing the set when one regionals without losing set and made it to the state semifinals all to your parents for all their support to uh coach oxford uh for the great narration but also for your support larry and then

013we want to also say robert you're going off to rice in the fall correct so congratulations to you you're still here with us for another year so we're looking forward to the great year for you congratulations [Applause] um all right that concludes our recognitions for the evening we're about to turn into the business portion so if you're here just for the recognitions like these guys are going to play tennis you guys can head off right now if you'd like but if you're here for the business portion of the meeting statement so we'll give you guys a moment also to leave congratulations and take plenty of pictures outside thanks susannah yeah uh okay you guys good on yellow cards okay okay we will move on to section three citizens to be heard a couple of ground

014rules and then we'll start calling you up just in order for this to be organized and follow state law a couple of things you need to know one you'll have three minutes to speak we can't answer any questions we can't respond at all we just sit here and listen uh that doesn't mean we're not interested we are very grateful for you all taking your time to come speak to us tonight but by state law we just have to listen it's limited to three minutes per person alicia will hold up a card when there's one minute left then she'll hold up another card when time is up we ask that you stop when those three minutes are up as a courtesy to everyone else we have several speakers tonight but as a courtesy we have to

015keep you all with three minutes and i hate to be rude but if i will cut you off if we have to so please stop it three minutes um we ask that in making your presentations don't name an individual either students or district employees try and keep all of your remarks general as opposed to identifying individuals with that cliff winnings hall you will be first and then the next up will be sean capper orlando okay thank you for your time i appreciate it part of my profession is i go to a lot of work because i'm a k-12 architect so i understand what you do and thank you for your service i'm here today as a parent of a volleyball player but i want to talk about basketball and your girl's wife we are not

016understanding why both were moved to second period when they were in the last period for many years there's a couple reasons why one is you can imagine you can shoot out you can practice you continue your practice after school you're not worried about going to a class you're not worried about to other lunches how do you shower the second and more important reason they're going to miss 25 percent of their class time with this in the last period last period used to be volleyball basketball so they would miss that to travel to dribbling springs bernie and kerbero we have a far district right and so how are they going to make up that time that's a huge part of the chunk of their class time and so i just we don't understand why it was

017moved what the reason is we had a group of parents that met with some leadership of the high school and we were told we'll fix it with the bus schedule i'm not sure how that's going to happen when you play at 5 15 in jupiter springs or 6 30. we were told what we'll separate freshmen jv and varsity that separates the sense of community that these girls have because they cheer each other on because a lot of people don't go to a basketball game or a volleyball game in current alberta and battle the traffic so that's another that's a concern of ours if we separate the teams for cheering for each other the other is we were told it works at other districts in san antonio it probably does because you're playing at coleman you're

018playing at hero stadium you're playing at paul taylor you have a 15 to 20 minute drive to get to those facilities you don't have to go as far as we can the other thing i want to talk about is we're not quite sure what this personalization period is we're wondering if you do too it's 180 minutes a week that our child is going to be in with either a teacher or a coach what is the agenda what's going to happen why was this put in the year after code it's a pretty big change what did you vote on did the vote on this change really look into it because we're confused about it we're not quite understanding and it's also affecting athletes athletes are getting the brunt of this how does a multi-sport athlete gonna

019be able to handle the personalization period as well and is this the right time right after a pandemic and finally my my main reason for being here is one to protect our doctors there's going to be a lot of added stress how do they figure out to get a successful practice in second period and go back to class how do they get to the games how do they cheer each other on but we're one high school district we're being compared to how other school districts do it in this city the personalization period is being compared to how it was done in san diego actually which is a client of ours they have a lot of high schools or one high school district we're supposed to be different and so there's plenty of time to fix

020this there's plenty of time before school start in august to get the girls basketball and girls volleyball team back to last period and to really take a deep look in this personalization time what's the true agenda of this what is the reason for happening again i appreciate all you do like i said i go to a lot of war meetings you're volunteering and i appreciate your time and we're just here uh i guess mr winning sauce stole my thunder but i'm gonna reiterate most of what he said i'm a parent of a volleyball player as well and i'm just here to voice my concerns about this proposed block schedule or propose i don't know if it's already set in stone but it does pose a serious concern for just generally the logistics for students parents

021teachers coaches and the shifting of how your schedule is structured this is actually the first time permanent day before yesterday that this was going to be implemented i'm really concerned about coming out coveted implementing this new schedule that's going to in my opinion adversely affect athletes specifically moving their their athletics period into the middle of the day really inhibits their ability to focus on the sport while then basically getting ready for their academics implementing this personalization period in my opinion i'm still not i've really wrapped my head around exactly what it is but by having the coaches be in charge of that while also mixing in the necessity for the students themselves to get ready for the rest of their academic day i think it's just too much to put into onto that and i

022think it's overall just adversely effective if logistically like cliff mentioned um having athletic periods that squeezed into the middle of the day not on the tail end i think is makes for a logistical nightmare if you mentioned us being a one one school district having to travel so much to for our district games multi-high school districts don't really have that issue so i think it's something that boards should take in consideration before implementing such a large change to our everyday schedule because i mean we're we're all getting back to normal and trying to acclimate to our new rv world so to have a such a drastic change like this in august and september i think it'll it'll be rough on pretty much everyone so thank you thank you haley beckel and then next will be

023helen morris i'm going to read mine i'm not as eloquent as you guys are speaking off the cuff so thank y'all for allowing us to do this we do appreciate your time and um here we go my name is haley beckel and this will be my daughter's third year as a varsity volleyball athlete i have many concerns about the new schedule at the high school specifically how it relates to jv and varsity volleyball while there are many questions about how the schedule came to be and why the schedule is being implemented after such a stressful year and the inequalities between athletes and non-athletes i will focus on a few specifics that need to be addressed first this will be the third year my daughter has had a different schedule in high school her freshman year

024was a traditional one eight schedule sophomore year was a version of blog with alternating athletic period days and now this change is difficult as we all know but it seems we are implementing unnecessary changes annually and without regard to the mental and physical health of our children in addition for the past two years the volleyball team has not had a home gym and has been forced off campus for practice and games and they did so willingly and without complaint throw in a pandemic and the disarray of rock and you have a team that has endured and persevered despite these challenges why then are we continually asking them to sacrifice in anticipation of being brought back on campus and into a home gym we are now asking these athletes to accept a new schedule that moves

025their athletic period from the end of the day to the 2-6 period this is a period that has not ever been typically assigned to athletes and for good reason during the fall semester which is volleyball season there's approximately nine away games and as you know our district of play is spread out across texas typically the team will need to leave school between 2 30 and 3 15 in order to travel to the away locations in a timely manner with the new schedule the volleyball athletes will need to leave their fourth eighth academic period in order to compete that means they will miss about nine class periods which equates to ten and a half hours of instruction which is about 27 of an academic class okay other athletes are not being asked for this sacrifice and

026so i believe this is unacceptable in addition it's my understanding that the sports that are scheduled for the end of the day are off-campus boards that do not require gym space instead of a more normal less stressful year without a pandemic and a shiny new gym we're making the volleyball athletes year more cumbersome stressful with a schedule that just doesn't make sense i beg the board to review the procedures of how the schedule came to be and to move athletics out of the 2-6 period thank you [Applause] next up is helen morris and and i appreciate obviously the time here i also appreciate that i live in a district that when i had a problem last week when i became aware of the schedule i had the privilege of meeting with the athletic director the

027assistant athletic director and the principal of the high school so first and foremost i'll say that is a privilege of living here and i appreciate the time that was put into that and we made some advances i got some questions answered but i was still left with some more questions and i know you don't have any spare time and you probably don't watch ted lasso but i'm borrowing this quote from all whitman and that is be curious not judgmental and i'm here to be curious i'm curious about where we are going with our students i'm curious why i feel as a parent of four children at every campus this year when i feel tired but two i i feel empathetic for the teachers that are going to have to deal with the schedule and the

028ramifications of the personalization beauty but more than that i feel for my children because i push them because i want them to do well and we taught profile to learn 2005 when i first gave horrific here and i don't want to get emotional but i'm here to tell you that we push them and we expect a lot out of them because we expected on and off the court and i do not feel like they are having the opportunity to thrive i feel i understand i'm an educator i work in saisd i understand that we need to serve a large portion of the population that needs attention i am all for that but i do not think it's a hugely exclusive decision i think we can serve the high performer with the local farmer we are

029almost we can do this and we can do it better than anyone else but it is going to take time and it's also going to take this camaraderie this understanding of where we're coming from in this particular instance i felt more than ever before that i was met with a shielding of the schedule because in every conversation i had it was i don't want to share this with everyone but i'm going to tell you i don't really want this to be public knowledge i'm going to tell you the reason why there's not 500 parents and they're athletes is because they don't know they think it's a simple block schedule or traditional schedule specifically i'm going to leave you the calendar for the girls volleyball i'm going to leave you one buses left for the same

030games last year traffic isn't going to change if anything is going to be worse so i think that'll be a good place to start you can realize the 12 hours of instruction 10 12 call it 15 one is too many for an advanced student to miss a class time particularly going to a block schedule where we're trying to put two classes i don't want my child who already stays up all night trying to be successful at everything she does to be penalized for being an ap student and being an athlete i don't want her to miss any time i don't want 12 hours i don't want two hours so please take a look at what we are proposing let personalization be equal if we're giving up the study hall to every student [Applause] thank you

031sarah feldman is next and then lisa fox will be after hi there thank you for the opportunity to speak to you all um i was here at the last school board meeting and i noticed that the majority of the speakers during this portion um talks about how and implied that we live in a very racist community and that really upset me and i moved here from los angeles almost nine years ago and i feel that this community does an excellent job of respecting and treating our neighbors of different races background ages and sexual orientation very fairly and on my block we have representatives of all those groups i just mentioned and we treat each other like family and i also feel this school district does a good job of this with programs like snack packs

032and pals but that being said i don't feel it's the school district's job to teach my kids social and emotional skills it's their job to teach my kids academics and i don't want teachers with different world views teaching my kids these skills social and emotional i want them to be taught not what to think but how to think both objectively and critically with room to question um i don't know if you all saw it but in the u.s news and world report recently came out and almost elmo heights high school was ranked 25th in academics in our city and this did not include private schools we're clearly taking off taking the focus off basic academics and failing our kids by doing so this brings up something else i'd really like to know how much of

033our tax dollars recently went to the equity audit performed by one world consulting this audit is very personal to me because my fifth grader was pulled out without my consent and on a zoom call that was videoed by the two founders of one world consulting this prompted me to do a little research on them and with a quick twitter search i found the following dr kelly brown professor working towards equitable outcomes for children through research and teaching racial equity okay this bothers me a little because i'm all for creating equitable opportunities but we cannot guarantee outcomes for these people she recently retweeted an article that paints critical race theory in a positive life our governor has recently made the teaching of crt illegal on may 6 she retweeted the following question when does racism show

034up in public education answer always if you are a white person stating that your white colleagues are nice people does not preclude them or you from being an acting racist did anyone else do a quick twitter search before we hired these people um these don't seem like appropriate people to be doing an equity audit on our school they already come in knowing and thinking i'm sorry i mean carbs rice carbohydrates okay the lisa fox first all right so last time i came here there's a lot of people and they brought their posse or whoever they represent so this time i brought the people i represent my children i don't know i'm over there too all right i was a mother of four before i could legally drink this is the kind of people that live

035in the district i've been here for almost 13 years with my kids i went to cambridge i went to woodridge i went to junior school and i went to high school so during the summer start the first week starts from summer my child was like mom how can i make 375 i'm like carlos why do you need 325 she's like i want to participate at the summer programs i'm like what summer programs cost 375 dollars it was the pe the pe class that y'all already have stuff for costs 175 and then another pe class was 150 i was like that's ridiculous uh but y'all do offer scholarships for the summer programs which parents some parents don't know about but yes they do offer uh scholarships but the kids that get scholarships are only allowed to

036go to week three of the summer programs which i think is ridiculous and then they give me a call june 11 which is a week before the week three starts so most of those classes are already filled up so my child only had the option of two classes you know i think the summer programs are awesome at the alma heights i think it can introduce kids to things that they don't think they really like until they try the class so i think that with parents of my stature in this community that cannot afford to send their children to the summer programs have another option of the summer programs maybe through the kid the parents that get the free lunch like me have a different price i do not know but i think that we should

037have better opportunity for parents like me to send their kids to some programs so that they can you know get it know if they like to cook if they like to do archery if they like to do heat they like to do chests you know when i have four children and they all can go to the summer program i can't just send one because then the other one's gonna be like why can't i go so you're talking about 700 literally just for two kids for one week that is that is too much for me as a parent that does not make two hundred thousand dollars a year or a hundred thousand dollars a year so i'm just asking you guys to look into summer programs maybe create something from parents like me of my income

038base to be able to send our kids to summer programs and not be financial hardship on us just for summer programs thank you for your time is next and then tory richmond uh my name is uh carlos reyes and i live in the illinois district i just wanted to make aware of what's going on in this district in this school with bullying my children have experienced bullying and racism in this school i do want you guys to be aware that is an issue and it is a problem i understand about these other programs and studies and what they want to do and change the curriculum and whatnot i'm not for that i understand that all i really want is more understanding we are different i am a minority my children are a minority and there

039are a lot of minorities we're not allowed here but there are a lot of prank workers and they are treated unfairly they are looked at differently they are disrespected myself being a part of this community have spoken out and had people personally send me ugly messages and live in this district because i am on the app that's called i'm on that app i've had people personally change their profiles to a person pointing a gun in this picture to try to intimidate me that does not intimidate you however that makes me worried for my children their safety and the other minorities here that see that kind of disrespect here they absolutely angers me to sit here and say there is no racism that is not true it's not true no matter if it wants to be

040accepted or wants to be heard it is not true i'm not somebody who just wants to sit here and do something drastic because of it i understand people have their differences our differences is what makes us great individually i i get advantages because i'm mexican i get advantage because i'm a man those are facts there's nothing that i can do to change that i can't change the non-mexican nobody can change if you're white or black or asian we can't but what we need to do is understand each other and work better together i have talked to people at the school and not talk to them my version is i talked at them they did not listen to me they allowed me to say words and just look at me and spit out whatever they wanted

041to and disregard what i said that's all i have to say [Applause] thank you good evening thank you for listening to community members speak on issues that are important to us i'd also like to thank you for making masks optional on campus now my daughter is at summer at heights this week and i love that kids have a mask option my daughter is not wearing a mask but her best friend is and they're having a great time tonight i'd like to bring up critical race theory i am aware that governor abbott has banned his implementation in public schools but i am concerned that it will come through under a different name teaching children that they are either as oppressor or they are oppressed is unconscionable treating children equally is a much better way to model

042equality and undo whatever preconceived notions they may have getting to know different people is the best way to realize how much we all have in common being told we are different inside and out is not only false it will have long-term negative effects on our students and the communities they inhabit as adults it is 2021 i don't know anyone who cares about race sexuality or gender the more it is kept in the forefront of our kids minds the more attention will be brought to it and they may start to actually think that people who are different from them are too different it's like we are purposefully trying to dishonor martin luther king jr's dream and legacy schools should not teach our kids that skin color is more important than the content of their character in

043fact alamo heights school district teaches the eight character keys from kindergarten in order to instill goodness within our children why teach them that none of that matters now it's all that matters there is already a major focus on bullying in our district through david's legacy if we can keep focusing on bullying and not pointing out more ways to convince our children that they are different our kids our district our community will be better off in the long run thank you [Applause] thank you everyone who spoke today we are sincerely grateful that you took time and came uh we value your input we are now going to move on to item four of the agenda presentation of items for possible action the next item on the agenda is uh a four goal two ah isc profile

044of alert and we'll wait a couple minutes for there you go here you are this has been a long time coming from emily she's been asking me about this trip of course um to be getting presentation on school student trips again hi i'm emily rangel i teach culinary arts at valentine's high school um this would be my third trip with acis which is a company who alpha has been using for overseas travel for as long as i can remember um my last trip was 2019 and during that trip i planned this next trip for 2021 um typically i take a trip every other year one of the only trips that are open to any student even 8th grade that you want any great get you today there is a typical senior trip over here and

045then languages take trips with acis as well but i think i'm the only one at the high school that does whoever wants to go even parents so it's pretty neat we always have a lot of kids really interested in a lot of parents interested and this trip was planned for 2021 so it has moved to next summer um for july 11th through 19th and i typically choose july because a lot of students go to summer school in june um and this is to dublin york london and paris and the students chose this when i was with them last time so it's kind of neat that they flipped through the acis catalog and they chose this i think a lot of students would be interested in it if students themselves chose it uh there's an overnight

046flight um and then we come back on the 19th i love acis because somebody travels with us and is with us the entire time so i can really say they're from the area they speak the language it's like having a travel agent with you the entire time so i feel great about it i love acis what's super neat and sets them apart is what's included in the price is flights hotels breakfasts and dinners um and every single fun and learning event that we do while we're there and so some of the fun trips would be in dublin we have a leprechaun museum a ghost tour in new york um we board the 180 mile per hour eurostar to paris which is super cool the kids are like that we get to have the 10k lesson

047in paris as well we also get to go to the loop and cut the line um since we are a school trip cut the line and get up as close as you can get to mona lisa which is super awesome we get to see the westminster abbey what's minister abby uh saint patrick's cathedral and much more so um i have no fear that we won't get filled with this trip since kids are itching to get out as well we our goal is at least 12 and for every six student there will be adults because every six students adults can go for free so um i love that we can control the kids my first trip i had three students which was lightning the next one was 12 and again so i do have a lot

048of uh teachers that are interested in going with me that's great and i'm just ready to get the word out and start talking about it and see who you all interested do you have any questions what is she i mean i'm new to this so what are you asking about should we know through the trip yes well it's not approval anymore from the report we can change that and so it's just a presentation so you can ask questions if you have any concerns um does anyone have any questions what's great about this year is that aci has changed their protection plan so parents can pull out a thing to because of covet and things uh four days before we leave the trip and get a full refund which is the first time they've ever done

049that so that's great i know that that's going to be kind of a sticky situation with parents is the payment differently um we have a lot of time too and do we offer scholarship opportunities for this through acis there is i don't want the schools but acis and companies yeah that's great so we do just remind you that it is a school sponsored trip and so it's school's standards of expectations we are so busy throughout the day there's no room for shenanigans and so the kids are exhausted when they get there and a lot of parents are like what if they sneak out of their hotel room i'm like they're fast asleep before i am because we're exhausted every day so i don't uh again it's my third trip i've never had one problem so

050i'm really happy thanks for working this together all right thank you very much our next presentation is the trip girls golf national high school golf association invitational thank you guys for what you do uh as a result of winning the state championship we were invited to play in the national high school golf association tournament in power nurse north carolina which if you're not in the golf world that is a golf mecca that's that is one of the places that uh us opens ryder cups is quite a place and quite an honor to be invited i accept the the offer in sports and dealing with the uil there were some you have to be careful in terms of where we're funded can't accept any school money the girls can't even carry their alcohol heights bags they

051can't wear out a white shirt it's kind of kind of a thin line to walk with uil but they're also very very much in support of us going we were successful in a you know funding program which we received a lot of very generous donations fully funded myself coach burtner our assistant and then my wife will also be going she's the female piece of that chaperone group and we have six girls going all of their parents will be attending also monday uh practice around tuesday around the world round three thursday friday and back home on saturday a pretty pretty basic cut drive thing i'm looking forward to the competition i looked today at the teams attending 39 states represented i thought that was uh that's really cool so i'm excited about my girls getting that

052that type of exposure nationwide and uh and i think it will also be a thing where there'll be this is a type of event that the girls can can put on a resume send to college coaches and it will be very well recognized by them so they play good they'll get some good recognition for that so i would love to answer any of your questions are there only state champions that are representing only state champions are they all our district i mean like five eight are they so actually they're going to be 180 there's there's three teams from texas uh going uh and that is uh andrews which is 418 and and they are i don't know how many state championships they wanted too much and they were they were the 4-h state champion this

053year uh hebron is the 6a state championship winner and in us so there'll be three teams from texas so if we beat both of them we've actually uh andrews attends our tournament uh here at the uh swing for the cure well good luck we're excited so i know probably dr sharon and coach redmond have probably just like nailed this down 100 times but i just want to make sure when it's a small group and we've got parents and families going it can get a little fuzzy as to why we're there and i just want to make sure that everybody knows we need to model the character and the way that we compete at tournaments for outlines absolutely plenty of times after family vacation we're going there it's a kind of liking into a bowl game

054college program you have programs that get invited to a ballgame is it's a reward and they kind of truly see it that way and then you have programs that we're in that position we need we need to go win and i think from since the last day of school until right up i've got girls coming back from national tournaments on saturday we're going to meet briefly on sunday and we leave monday so they're they've been all over the country already playing so they should be i i thought about to have practice i couldn't have had practice there all over the country playing which is that and i noticed on the itinerary you're not playing pint hurst number two so coach bergner is the only one that's going to get to go play pioneers number two

055they offered that for coaches and assistants and the girls could have played it also it was pretty expensive and then as a coach you're kind of stuck between back fact back to uh what david mentioned is is it a true reward are you going there to win well pinehurst number two is considered one of the top five hardest golf courses in the country and so do you put them on that for a practice round and and take a beat down and then go try to go try to perform at your best and and just assisting with the girls we we're going to do our practice round on one of the courses we will actually play we'll let coach well good luck congratulations appreciate you guys very much thank you [Applause] okay next up we have

056the alamo heights high school choir student trip and this is not david short he's going to stand in for david tonight thanks for being here hello my name is eric mossos and i currently serve as the director of orchestras at the high school i come to you tonight to talk to you a little bit about a trip that david short and i are planning for um march 2022. um this will be a joint combined trip with the choir and orchestra as part of the trip students will experience world class performances or museums and explore culturally and historically significant sites that are specific to new york city we both believe in student travel being a wonderful enrichment to our students elements the trip will be five nights beginning the weekend before spring break and we are

057doing this as a means for students to not miss school highlights of the trip include performances at broadway musicals and attendance at the new york philharmonic with for the orchestra a tour of the national september 11th memorial and museum liberty and ellis islands a tour of the united nations radio city music hall a workshop led by experienced broadway performers for the choir and a performance for the orchestra at st paul the apostle church um the price estimate for each student is 1900 and includes air and ground transportation hotel sightseeing most meals and all taxing gratuities prior to dakota 19 pandemic our choir and orchestra families were anticipating out of state travel to new york city in the spring of 2021 in a recent survey families of both programs enthusiastically responded with interest to with interest

058in a march 2022 trip the cost of the trip will be broken into five payment spread throughout the fall semester students will have an opportunity for fundraising at the start of the 2021-2022 school year and both mr short myself are working with a fundraising um person to to to kind of plan something that they have through their experience has been um a high profit um the price point of the tour aligns with previous out-of-state trips that the music programs at alamo heights have taken in the past each program will have at least two directors traveling with the group as well as leaves at least one chaperone for 10 students chaperones will be taken through a training on how to appropriately and effectively care for the well-being of students while traveling through the guidance of our

059teachers and our travel agency bob rogers travel bob rogers travel has been selected based on the choir's previous experience with the company on this exact trip additionally the company is working with vendors to ensure that we are following all coveted protocols set forth by airlines hotels and all involved to be secure bob rogers has also provided a trip assurance program that works with vendors to ensure participants will be refunded as much of their payment as possible which is 100 minus security deposits if our trip is cancelled due to circumstances beyond our control such as changes in the coca-19 pandemic thank you for your time and your continued support of valentine's music programs and i can answer any questions if you have any how many students typically want between the two of us we're anticipating around

06070 70 students wow yes that's awesome so we've not done a joint trip like this we've not done a joint trip like this before oh no no this would be the first time we're going together we're going together as part of the travel agency but our trips are actually um backwards so what we're saying at separate hotels we'll be doing the same thing is just my stuff at the start of the trip is his end of the trip and we'll just people popping and they will be having a broadway workshop with um experienced performers and we'll be performing in new york city that will be advertising to the public in new york so i'm excited to put alamo heights out there outside of san antonio outside of texas so this is technically a presentation for

061number three and for number five right i was gonna say this covers five too we won't make you come up and do it okay is that over the week before yeah wow spring break really that early that's what everybody said march 3rd spring break yes quick question i noticed in your letter you break down the cost and the shaky dates and all that sort of thing and all the opportunities for fundraising which i think is great and i would just encourage you all to promote the fundraising part so that certain any children aren't right discouraged because there's a price tag on there and they haven't seen a dollar amount of comment i want to make sure that everybody feels the opportunity this fundraising is for me and i can go exactly and well once we

062kind of sign our contract and all of those things um we'll have a parent presentation with the travel agent who will be on the trip with us and myself and mr short will also be able to present at that point um before using opportunities to cut the cost for parents so to clarify you're leaving march 3rd which is a thursday evening yes and so you're traveling friday saturday sunday at the spring break prior week you were giving us all we're not ready for spring break i don't know i'm ready for spring break oh not correct so just curious so we're talking 140 000 i mean muscle mass yes it is when you say you're going to fundraise would the presentation be to the families like if we raise 50 grand it's split evenly or is

063it the people that really need that 1900 will be given sure so the fundraising opportunities will be students will fundraise for themselves so um like if we're selling tumblers or their popcorn the amount of money that early amount of sales the student gets will directly get that into their personal account and their 1900 will come down so when we spread across everybody um each student will be able to work for themselves if that makes sense it does any other questions thank you very much thanks eric for the next presentation it's dr maria is going to present yes instead of rebecca marshmark okay so next we've got the alamo heights high school aces student trip to spain and we have dr maria cabello please hi i'm here on behalf of marshmallow we are going to use

064the same companies at the future um um the purpose of our trip is like to give to the students an opportunity to connect what they learn with a real life experience okay because they are going to visit in some regions in spain that we teach in class about art culture and literary we will visit cities and town in spain that have a significant importance to the story culture and heart we have studied in the classroom at each stop we will discuss the relevance of what we are visiting to what has been studied in the spanish classes also we will have a tour director with us for the entire trip we learned in madrid the itinerary will be from july 8th through july 12th she is like thinking of half life between 10 or 20 study

065students including some parents or siblings maria is it any level spanish student um she didn't tell me but i think the ap classes yeah because that they can speak spanish there and they can like they're going to understand i think so it's only open to uh students in spanish it wouldn't be like if someone else wanted to go that's not taking spanish it wouldn't be open to them any other question thank you very much all right in our last presentation we have public education in the san antonio area mr bobby block is here bobby welcome thank you and good evening both board members say it's kind of different from me on this side of the table right right not to be just sort of staying with the theme uh what i'm gonna talk about briefly

066is how you can take a trip here in san antonio before i do that just a quick background for our trustee the superintendent my staff and the republicans here this is being done by the bear county school board coalition for those who don't know the red county school board in 2005. it's only four trustees in bexar county so if you count the 15 official isds that are identified with san antonio and fair county plus five that have a portion of it so it's an organization we establish a corporation so this is its own 501c3 that's a sadness just for us to collaborate to work together and do things like i'll talk about in just a second in addition the other major part of it that i'm going to talk about is go public is actually

067under the bear county school board coalition many may not be aware that go public is a campaign it's not itself a corporation it's a very important advocacy now that we're doing menopause on the great county school of our culture so some of the recent things that we have done in the coalition itself is uh we have had an opportunity to advocate for our state and actually for our nation just give an example when we last year we're trying to figure out how to return to school and some other things the state wanted to get from the school district perspective what our thoughts were what should occur policy wise and funding wise et cetera we came together to represent san antonio to say governor this is what we think would be best okay that's an example

068of the activity the reason why i've been able to do that is because of very few other regions across the state that can get together and really advocate for the whole group sometimes because it does that also but that's one of the values that we have as a coalition so our latest adventure to keep this short that i want to talk about it we've been working for two years on producing this book entitled the public education in the san antonio area actually listening a little bit earlier prefer to call it this is how you do it but that's a different story but the book itself what it actually does and again this was done by the trustees as lead and we had the education service center that helped us out texas high and coordinating board

069uh district contacts such as patty has been always very helpful so it was a lot of individuals and organizations that helped out the the chapters if you haven't seen it yet they include background about accounting data we didn't do each individual district we want to show san antonio county as a whole each of the district has opportunity to do highlights about this district two or three pages in that regard the other key thing as i said two years we've got interrupted by i think we know all too well but we talk about the first 60 days of the pandemic is trying to document through pictures or this is what we had to react to the food service health etc etc and then it gives a whole history and aspects of go public too so that's

070finally documented too so that's sort of the content uh this is book number two we did one ten years ago it was then more focused on fact this one really is meant to be a marketing highlight to talk about the districts themselves so that's the the booklet we have it as you think you know on amazon and other places being attained for purchase so we encourage those that would like to do that a couple other things to let you know on friday we're actually going to be presenting we as trustees in fair county area at the tabs bsli and this will be the major focus is talking other districts how you tell your story how you work together to build that so that's at 115 that we'll be doing that part of it and then

071next week we have a go pilot next thursday i hope you all heard about that we want to get all the trustees and everybody else also involved annually we have a meeting just to update everybody and talk about the future direction thanks to a couple of folks i definitely want to thank dana she's been on the go public steering committee and has been really really uh giving a lot of feedback and helping out with the direction itself so that's my uh okay so he's a long-term serving and trustee of north side independent school district that is just a true champion for the public schools across the state but most especially in this area county and it's very unique um to have a situation an organization like this that you've led and structured and kind of

072shuttered all of us through to promote this kind of unique partnership and so i want to just make sure all of you can sign up new trustees now here you are ronnie i want to thank you for your service this past year with the coalition in particular because the value that you delivered to us as trustees was huge in terms of having to navigate so many different voices so many different concerns and trying to get touch points to a lot of different decision makers so you know i don't know that we had an opportunity to thank you and so i'm glad to you know here during our board meeting but thank you for everything you know this past year well appreciate it and we encourage all trustees you want to be a part of it

073but thanks for having me i was wondering about the book what is the target audience and whose hands are we hoping to get these books and i know you said it's on amazon you know what population would be going to be buying it are we distributing it different areas trying to persuade parents to go public what's the yeah it's actually an actual official we're going to start next week to build kickoff in the campaign but we do want parents that haven't won libraries in heaven we want legislation to happen we want folks that are coming in new to the city to have it give such a good background about our public isvs uh we want the leadership in san antonio uh to really have it so they're stating the true facts of what's occurring with

074uh within our uh our county et cetera as well as all the school districts so to be honest we sort of open any other questions all right thank you as always thank you very much all right our next item is consideration of adopting the a gisb district of innovation renewal plan for 2021 through 26 dr frank alfaro you've presented on this repeatedly this is it that's right that's right i'd like to uh uh bobby's going but i want to give him a shout out i was working with him that guy is on a lot of wars i was working with the youth orchestras of san antonio and i was asking uh what is his uh child's play and he's gone in usa is that his own personal child was playing soccer somewhere and he was

075trying to help this youth world so he's just a great public servant very humble as well um well i i'm going to actually do a little bit of a formal thing because this is actually the consideration where i'm asking you all to do and so for the general public as well uh the district of innovation is a status that the legislature passed as several legislative sessions ago that was designed to give school districts increased flexibility in a variety of different statutory mandates and the idea was that if you gave districts flexibility in certain things it allowed them to be more innovative uh based on whatever their particular community mission was and so when this first came about we actually jumped on it and um it was actually we did it in december so it was

076kind of like a mid-year thing but we developed our plan and it was approved by the trustees and we went through the exact same process that i had to follow this time so what i want to remind everybody in the public as well as the trustees is that we have already gone through uh one iteration of distributed vis of innovation the school board at that time approved that at that time and now i'm simply coming back to renew it because it's only good for five years and so the statute requires that you have to renew it for the next five years and so technically our old one isn't up until december of 2021 but because we didn't have to do it mid-year we went ahead and got ahead of it to do it now so

077now we'll be on a regular school year cycle uh next slide now uh they're very specific exemptions you can get from various statutes uh but they're all they also say he's just certain statues that you cannot get exempt from and they're what you can imagine right they're all the ones that you wish you could accept from but you can't like finance uh certain curriculum requirements state assessment accountability anything that the feds require uh things like that like district governance uh you can't get a waiver to say or it doesn't happen uh there are some very uh helpful ones that we've used over the years and i want to highlight those um i don't know if a lot of people recall this anymore but uh there is a state law that says you can't start school

078before a certain time uh well this gives us the flexibility to do that and we've done it for several years our community really appreciates being able to start school earlier than the law requires so that now the other thing is that there's a lot of red tape that we have to do with various rules and things like class size waivers and so we know typically that in spanish immersion which is a great program we've had for several years it's really important to have a critical mass of students in that all the way through so they can benefit from having critical mass of kids and so you have to build it big early on because at some point people will move out that kind of thing and you you financially plan attrition going up the ladder

079like when they get older like in the junior school in high school until you have you have to build like 25 uh lower well because we do that traditionally you have to get class size whatever we don't have to do that and that saves us a little bit of time administratively uh there you go came back uh but we all know that that's uh uh not the way we do this right every administrator on the board works with counselors and teachers to do it collaboratively and so we don't have to name one person we also have a hiding areas in some really areas where we can have the opportunity to have a great teacher who just happens not to be certified and so with this one we specify two areas and only two areas that

080we would not have a state certified teacher and the first is languages other than english and so a great example of this is somebody who moves over from france who actually taught university in france but is not certified to teach french here but is a great teacher well this allows us to have a french teacher that does that and we employ that ourselves likewise in career and technology education classes that's a prime example of somebody from the field who's not traditionally a teacher but who really has a lot to give to the students so the example there is somebody who is a wrench restaurateur a cook at a restaurant has the opportunity to teach in our culinary arts class along with emily ringhale and that person is not traditionally certified but does a really great

081job and so that flexibility we've been fortunate enough to use so i do want to underline to everyone that we only waive uh from certification in those two specific areas not in any other areas uh the next one that's been really useful for us is that there are rules about teacher contracts and if you have experience coming into the district the normal rules are that you only get one year probationary contract and then you have to determine whether that person goes on a term contract or not typically if you're a brand new teacher you get three years of probation now what's important about that is that it gives a district and a new employee time to make sure this is going to be a good fit or not full three years probation is great because

082you can work through it to see if this is going to be a good fit or not that one year quick if you've been experienced by the last eight years another public school district you only get one year of probation well with the district of innovation flexibility we can add an extra year of probation in case we need it just to make sure it's the right fit we spend a lot of time making sure we have high quality uh instructors hired into this district and this gives us an opportunity to just make sure that that's the case so we appreciate that and then the last thing that was really helpful was a loophole that some other districts were able to find and being part of this uh organization that we're part of we realized uh

083that we could take advantage of which was for districts our size way back in the day um there was only uh people uh health care providers were dropping us left and right and it was really difficult for school district rsis to find a healthcare provider and so the state scrambled at the state level and created something called trs active care which was meant to be the state of medical they partnered with blue cross i think originally went to edinburgh lacrosse but to give folks like us the opportunity to have medical insurance for your employees but at that time they said once you're in you can't get out and so we got in because that's the only person people we could get insurance with but then we were locked in with them and we had to

084compete with bigger districts like northeast north side saic they were able to get different kinds of insurance and so that's always difficult well with through a district of innovation we were able to get an alternative medical insurance for our employees this year that had a substantially lower premium now not everybody jumped over into that there are still several folks in active care but it was a great opportunity for us to provide that to our employees because year time and time again that healthcare premiums are something that's really hard for teachers and so that gave us flexibility and so the statutory process is lengthy those of you that have been around have seen this the new brokers might not have seen this but the process begins way back in march when i do a public kind

085of calling and you guys have a resolution to let the public know that we're looking into this then i meet with our district site based team which is called the district education advisory council at deac and we actually go through the exact plan same plan we had last time we just updated it with dates and everybody said yes unanimously we want to proceed with it that's the next step and then we come back to you all for more formal hearings i've had it posted on the website since april the 19th so i've met that time commitment and then after the bay board meeting i sent to the commissioner saying hey our board officially said we're interested in pursuing this that's the last part of the process now with your consideration if you all approve then

086i will now send another thing to the to the commissioner say that our board has voted to re-up for another five years and then it becomes official after that are there any questions about the distribution um and we have heard about this a few times now so most of it i think i know but um on on things like the class size waiver and in certification i think you're more specific about that say class size waiver what we're voting on today when we approve this plan the class size waiver is specific to spanish immersion right i mean four years you wouldn't be able to use our district innovation status to up the class sizes on other areas does it mean is that correct what we're voting that is that is not correct let me specify

087okay so the what the state law says is that every class of fourth grade and under if you exceed 22 you have to submit paperwork to the state to say we need a waiver from that rule about 22. so it's important to know before we even did this that this is all throughout the state of texas uh every district that had a class fourth grader below that was uh over 22 had to submit the paperwork to the state it didn't stop anybody from doing it they didn't you just had to submit stuff so they had a record of how many classes below fourth grader below were over 22. typically in our situation uh we uh [Music] with the only ones we built to be over 22 explicitly were spanish immersion but it doesn't mean we

088couldn't somehow now i want to remind everybody what we build our class sciences on so at kinder we go 18-1 first grade is 19-1 second grade is 20-1 third grade is 21-1 and fourth grade is and so we already built in below that 22 anyway and so it would be an odd instance in which anything would go over that that thank you that does answer so the plan what we're giving permission for is broader than what you intend that is correct to use it for but we are we are giving approval for something that you know it gives it it would give you that opportunity okay that means what about their secondary that doesn't no they don't this yeah statute is only about fourth and below got it like in other words say so uh

089so the statute says yeah after fourth grade there's no limits so the district innovation plan does not have anything to do with class size waivers for older okay yeah class size waivers do not exist beyond fourth grade there's not a class size mandate yeah beyond fourth grade so historically we have only used this provision for our immersion classes but like frank's saying you know down the road if we had one go over we wouldn't have to go through the paperwork trail but we haven't used that the intent of it is to use it for language programs that all of that answers the questions were there any comments since posting any comments from parents of the public or anything since okay do i have a motion to approve the resolution to renew district of innovation status

090sir david do i have a second carry all in favor we meet the two thirds we passed thank you well done frank i'll send it over to what i'm saying yeah i mean finally okay next we are going to move on to item number five the consent agenda these are items that are considered routine by the board or have been previously reviewed and discussed in prior meetings and that we therefore enact in one motion is there anything that any of the board members would like to remove from the consent agenda to consider as an item on the regular agenda nope okay um i will let you know before we move from the consent is that you have an updated region 20 commitment form that was missing our co-op um counselor services so in your original

091board book you had everything except for the counseling service co-op that's added there for your review so that's something we've used in the past it supports our counselors with professional development so okay and one thing worth noting is we have a total of sixty thousand more than sixty thousand dollars in donations and in particular two of them 37 000 donation from edward hart for the alamo heights high school baseball team as a result of baseball derby that's a pretty outstanding fundraising and also we want to acknowledge the donation from the alamo heights junior school pto uh nearly twenty thousand dollars for curriculum grants that kind of support support is much needed and very very much appreciated anything else anyone want to pull anything okay do i have a motion to approve the consent agenda lisa

092ii brian all in favor opposed passes we've got the board member committee report but it's not on here so we don't have to do that there are no business recommendations to address so we are up to section 8 calendar review okay then alicia is going to project the calendar for you um coming up next week we have our second lunch and learn for our new trustees um as part of orientation and so that's on tuesday june 22nd and lisa will be there for that and we'll talk about the work that we've done with grading kind of bring everybody up to speed um wednesday all trustees are invited to come to morning meeting where we go through invited you like that invited you i like that we just need some more focused time with you all

093about budget prior typically we don't have that meeting we wait until august to do it but we need to especially look at some salary considerations then as well okay i got stumped there what was the july 1st special called board meeting on july 1st is the pinky that's the personnel yeah we always hold that in july it seems early to me but um we always hold it prior to the last the date for resignation so we get our final swoop of hires in and so that will be a 20-minute meeting it will just be but i need to make sure most most trustees we just need four of you so i'd love do we have four people i will not be here i won't day we're good we've that's pretty much how we roll on

094that july meeting because it's just to let people in and out of there so we close y'all our offices close for a whole week out of the year you know we didn't do that last year so i don't think we should continue that yeah no no most of us worked most of us kept working all right and we host our third lunch and learn for our new trustees on tuesday august 3rd and that's um we're going to go over community-based accountability and stacy you're still able to be there okay um gnp this is early y'all remember that we moved up the the typical flow of our morning meeting and our regular called meeting because we need to make the decision about calling for the tre the tax ratification election by that i think it's the

09512th or 12th so we had to move up the regular board meeting so we moved up the gmp so just make sure i'll continue to shoot you those dates in the updates um regular board meeting on the 12th so we're gonna have a lot we're gonna see each other a lot but yeah is there time on the 23rd to go snoop around at the other facility the the june 23rd it may be too long maybe i'm just talking about that we could i wanted to tour you the um the athletic complex yeah do you all want to do that that day that's the day i mean i have to cut out that's the day i told you i'll i'll be there yes just it may only be an hour okay let me see which day

096we're talking about the 23rd well i just throw that out there so if we don't do it then carrie we will do it on august 11th at the board team building that's what we did last year as we kind of have a tour on the 23rd with the mule so i don't even know my wife told me about it is that not the same thing i don't have a tour down so you're in a special touring group okay and then finally y'all bobby mentioned i want to make sure you've got this in your folder last wednesday but go public is sponsoring another breakfast for trustees and communication and that's next that's june 24th at 8 o'clock at northside and so if you feel like you can attend with me would you please email alicia and

097so it's june 24th 8 a.m it'll be 8 to 9 30. you've attended with me in the past some of you have been able to those are cool it's at the it's a north side i don't have the specific but i will send it to you once you use it but all i have to say about that meaning if it's in the same place it was last time get there early because it's a hike that was judson do you remember oh it was so far from the parking lot to the thing but i missed part of it so it's not there this time it's not there okay june 20th june 24th 8 am if you can go you're going to email alicia if you would like to we can meet at central office and i

098can drive us oh yeah i could let you grab my car that would be better okay any questions about calendar okay that sounds good all right section 9. you need a disconnect there you go 90 88. thank you sir so believe it or not there's a lot that has taken place since we've met last in may there's a lot of june updates that i have for you every meeting that we have had together since we opened our schools we spent time going over our progress indicators and i'm not going to get into many of the details around this but i do want to highlight for you some areas of academic focus that we are looking at as part of our comprehensive needs assessment and so you all know that we've tracked active cases we've been

099open summer school last two weeks and we have not had any active cases it's great news we track our zip code data we track our teachers and their vaccination we had a partnership tonight with the national guard and we had great turnout for people in the community that wanted to come and get vaccinated so that's exciting and you know we tracked the number of students that were in heights at home versus face-to-face attract attendance over the whole year had great attendance because of the way we were able to provide families with some flexibility in submitting forms and engaging on google classroom this just tracked the abs and forms the absentee forums but i do want to sit in the student achievement piece because it sets us up for our goal setting and intervention needs for

100next year and so we have tracked over the course of of the year all of the um the failure rates both the junior school and high school and you can see that those failure rates are higher than they've been before but they have decreased over the course of the year you can also see the comparison that we've tracked between students who were not making academic progress in the heights and home setting versus face to face so again just you know put that in context we had fewer and fewer students in heights at home as the year progressed but you can see that the failure rate maintained was pretty stable and when you say failure right failing one or more courses so that's the percentage of students who failed one or more courses so like 16

101of our students failed one or more courses at the end of the first nine weeks so didn't tell the course failed that you know they were failing right at the time right okay um we also got just recently preliminary um star scores now i'm again i'm sharing all of this with you just to say like this is the entry point that we start getting all the data from the year so that we can make those academic goals um as we walk through those campus checkups for next year and so you can see i wondered how large that was obviously just the percentage of students based on 2019 versus 2021 because you remember we didn't have star data last year and so um this is the percentage of students at approaches or higher and approaches is

102meeting standard wow so you can see that you know there's some gaps but there are surprisingly non gaps as well and so and then yes this is elementary it's elementary right yes oh elementary school elementary school reading yep junior school math junior school reading the junior school math like wow that's surprising isn't that surprising i'm so surprised by that what's the orange 19. the orange is 19. blue is 20 21 this year algebra one which kind of struggled a little bit then bio so algebra one you all know it's been something we've been talking about um over time now that i'm continuing to be hopeful that that block schedule is going to help us fix because we can double block kids into that course who need that acceleration so what's the difference between a real

103score or preliminaries um they uh it only includes the on well no here it comes down to online administration so it's just kids that took it online there are kids that were able to take it off not online um but pay for pencil because of accommodations and so this is just the online testing it's like the early votes it is but i'm going to tell you that's fun those are so minimal in our district that there's not going to be that much change yeah and then just a quick glance at some preliminary college career military readiness scores they look at sat now our our data will not come to us until august so this is 2020 sat exam data and you can just see that we are above and we have been above the state

104about the national mean score and above the benchmark score this is a bit of a celebration here i'm going to try to zoom into this but our mean score our composite mean score on act is just trending continues to trend upwards which is a celebration especially with some of the challenges that we're facing and then you can also see this psat score so how does how did those psat and sat roughly compare to past years so do you have that i don't have that tonight i don't but um we definitely look at that as part of that pillar one when we're setting our goals around student achievement in cvas that's something we look at every year um i'm not going to go through college but i do want you to look at this because this

105kind of shows some of the needs that we feel like a we're addressing right now in summer school by offering more students opportunity to remediation in summer school but also needs as we move forward into next year as far as the screen or data beginning middle and end of year and so this is incorrect here this we're gonna get we can give jimmy walker you know a hard time for not being here tonight and making one mistake in her life this is 1920 data um but as you look at it beginning of your literacy and math middle of year literacy and math and end of year literacy and math um and so we just have some targeted areas of need that you see highlighted here in yellow that we will meet through intervention so with

106that 1920 meaning while everyone was shut down at home they were doing that much higher than they are a year later maybe because everybody i can see jimmy i mean she wouldn't have given i can see her giving us the last normal year there and that's that would be you know what stacy i have to be on record loud and clear on the microphone he did not make him make a mistake you're totally right because here's what happened beginning you tweeted out to her she's in mexico you let her know i said i'm live nice because she and i go round and round about not wanting to admit mistakes so i'll go ahead and learn it um we did that year of closure we did beginning of the year assessments and we did the middle

107of the year assessments but we never came back around at the end of the year so this is a different comparison so again just kind of helps us position for what intervention needs that we have and so i didn't want to have a superintendent update and not review all the data that we're looking at but again that just situates us as part of that district improvement planning process and so we have targeted areas of focus at the district level but the campus is looking at as well moving forward with their with district improvement plans and campus improvement plans and you know we shared this graphic with you all a couple months ago just to help frame the fact that the profile of the learner anchors all of our our vision work right we move next

108into the accountability piece which is our sea bass our seven pillars for community-based accountability there are key questions that help us target our improvement efforts around those different pillars and that's that third column there's a strategic lens that's laid over top of that but those four goal areas we have our areas of focus for district improvement plan and our campuses we'll work on that we'll present that um in july that is always part of the um learning walks that we take you on we have them kind of highlight what their areas of focus are academically in each one of those pillar areas that kind of brings those work in the accountability piece for that so um so we have work to do where we are rolling up our sleeves we have a leadership summit that

109takes place at the very end of july where we share out the work that's taking place for the campus and the goal areas moving forward um just some continued updates we are engaged in working through some drafts of our sr3 fund plans you all know that we had to post um the opportunity for public comment on our website we've done that we have gotten some feedback back on that just what areas of prioritization our community would like us to consider and we did spend some time with our district education advisory council a sub group who meets about federal funds and and they met to provide some funding and so we've got a draft plan in place and and shared you know one iteration with you all but the plan is a four-year plan so it's

110how we're going to use this money from 2020 to 2024. understanding that that money goes away after 2024. so whatever we you know put into place is not necessarily something that's going to be sustainable and so there is a priority in our plan um to reimburse expenses for us to open our doors this past year and so there will be a chunk of that money that that off the top goes to reimbursement and academic intervention summer academic programs student wellness so my plan at this point is to have that plan ready for presentation to you all at our august meeting so continue to work through that um summer school is up and running we're in week two i am celebrating high attendance at our summer school i had a superintendent meeting this morning and we

111all compared notes about how well summer school is being attended everywhere and i'm going to tell you we're we're in the 90 percent um at all levels our credit recovery at the high school is not as high um it's about 70 right now but still when i heard the comparison where other people are getting kids re-engaged in schools i'm celebrating so we have 175 students who are in our early spanish literacy grades k1 and 2. you all know that we went to continuous learning our language program students were at a disadvantage because they didn't have the exposure to spanish language throughout the day and so we knew we anticipated that that was going to be a big area of focus and so we invited all of them to spanish literacy summer school we have 160

112students in remediation enrichment and our pre-k through five and you all remember that we are only required to offer the bilingual summer school but we always have offered the pre-k through five and so it is going to be nice to offset some of that with the esser funds because again we're including more kids we have 100 students um here at the junior school for credit recovery remediation 50 at the high school for credit recovery 49 um in end of course preparations and we have 270 students who are taking um we call it acceleration but they're getting high school credit you know during the summer so we have a lot going on summer school-wise um we are all teeing up i mean right now rolling up our sleeves into just the planning for next year you

113all know that this is the big hiring time for us i'm excited to talk to you about personnel tonight that we've got some great hires coming on board but our principals are pretty consumed with that right now just because of that july deadline for resignations we're working hard to get people in place we have a big commitment around professional development for our teachers i shared carly's the only one in the audience here but i shared with our trustees all of the pd that we stand up as a district our teacher leaders stand up our administrators stand up and we've got lots of participation in that but i thought it would be interesting for me to share with you some of the requirements that the state dictates for our teachers there's over seven hours of required

114training that our teachers have to go through in the summer week well and they don't have to do in the summer they have to do it on their own times they could do it on a weekend um they could do it after contract time but we've uh frank stanich has worked to stand up an online platform where they're taking classes like bloodborne pathogens bullying common illness prevention conflict management student-to-student cyberbullying cybersecurity training health emergency seizures human trafficking title ix compliance suicide trauma informed approach part one and part two and our alma heights isd employee handbook so i just think it's important that you all know how much our teachers do in the summer as far as their professional development efforts all right um we also are continuing to work through registrations on all of our

115campuses class placements schedules at our junior school and our high school and we did come to you all last week and share just that targeted communication plan that that we're trying to stand up once the schedule planning is done and once back to school fine-tuned details are done we are planning on a three-week communication um blitz what i'm calling it where we come from the district side and we have some videos that are going out and we offer campus coffee chats with principals to kind of follow up on what that translates into on the campuses and so we're planning on that that very last week of july and then into august those next two weeks and our principals will host an update at our next board meeting about the finalized plans around the block schedule

116for you as well so now we get into legislative update and there's a lot here and so what i share with you as far as at this point you know the session has closed and there's a ton of bills that have been promoted and there are some that have not so i'm going to try to just highlight those that are on my radar for that will have implications for us in the district it goes to the governor right and then after that it goes to ta for some regulations and some implementation and then it goes to tasby and tasby then turns it to us for recommended policy so we got a ways to go as far as the timeline for all of this but um at some point aren't we supposed to go to training

117on it isn't there a required training for us there is a required legislative yeah so there's we can you know do let you do that online you can do it through summer leadership institute you could do it at tasby next year you've got a way to go before you can get yeah so just some of the bills that were passed that are on my radar um the first of which is the house bill 3 cleanup bill and um it guarantees the funding of house bill 3 and so that's good news for us it does restore the gifted and talented allotment that was taken away it's it's a decreased allotment than what it had always been but it does reinstate that it also allows for adjustments to dyslexia grants and trainings it modifies the cte allotment

118for small and mid-sized districts which is good for us and it does promote a higher weight for a higher level of cte courses and so you know that we've been working hard to kind of grow and align our pathways through cte to allow those higher level courses and and we would get funding for that um and the big celebration is that it does allow the tuition allotment to continue and so i i it's all amended i'm sorry they didn't limit it at one point you were afraid they were gonna yeah so it we had great conversations about it on the house side when it went to the senate side um i wasn't being we were not gaining any traction as far as conversation around that um stacy and carrie both engaged um with senator campbell

119around it and i actually got some some good conversation time with her i think as a result of that and celebration all around on that so and the next one is the house bill 4545 which is the accountability bill and so this just um for us it does not require us um it i'm sorry if a student does not pass an assessment in grade three through eight they're entitled to um a committee meeting um in a certain level of teacher designation and so they're entitled to a teacher and a teacher incentive allotment or they're able to choose their teacher that they would want to have so they're able to have choice in this we'll see how that all pans out teachers able to say i think this teacher would be better um yeah yeah so

120if a student does not pass assessment in grades three through eight they're entitled to a teacher who's at a the teacher incentive allotment as a recommended teacher or they're allowed to choose the teacher that they'd like to be in their classes which is a celebration is that there there was no bonuses added to star achievement for schools you know that was something that we spoke about against statewide as being detrimental to the whole process um in curriculum and instruction um highlighted here is that house bill 3979 the anti-critical race theory um bill and so there's going to be a lot of details that come down the pike from that but it does say that they're requiring um some additional details in the teks um related to certain subjects it does say that teachers will not

121be compelled to discuss current events and if they do they should present multiple points of view without giving difference to any one perspective and employees can opt out of trainings that are connected to racial sexual superiority which is not critical race theory we'll see how that all racial sexual superiority those are the words in here from bear bear county education well and dana while you're covering that is still listening i mean having reviewed our policy on you know we have policies about dealing with controversial topics in the classroom and and you can remind us of the exact language but almo heights already had a policy in place that if you're covering a controversial topic you are required to share both sides and invite conversation on both sides so just we're going to be dealing with

122that specific bill but in our district we had a pretty you know a pretty clear policy in place on how to handle topics like that i appreciate you bringing that up yeah and aren't we doing some special professional development on teaching and handling well it's not the training is all around the public training right just refresh folks what yeah so we're ahead of the legislation oh of course what ryan's referring to is that's exactly what they're working on is is sort of the training the policy exists and there has been training in the past but trying to kind of re-up or tweak the training to work with the teachers on how to follow the policy because it's definitely not clear for any human being that deals with the controversial topic how you do that well

123right and so i think you all are working on that so it's kind of twofold as far as the accountability piece you know it requires a parent coming forward and letting us know if there's something that's being covered in the class that they feel like is outside that lane so administrator can follow up on it and it also requires our administrators to be present in the classroom right and present for planning conversations and curriculum departments meet so but yes we did that for everyone on that um april 24th uh professional development day and so two other areas of focus under curriculum and instruction is the house bill 1468 which does not allow us to offer a remote option we knew that already and i will tell you there's conversation that in the special session they

124might revisit that um we had two students two families who said that they would like to have that um option provided to them and so we're going to work through some accommodations through 504 because of their health considerations and then finally this is a big one that i went on the radar because you're going to hear talk about it but it's house bill 547 which allows uil i'm sorry yes uil participation for home school students it passed but it gives us the discretion of allowing it or not allowing it and so um i will tell you the conversation with the superintendents all around the board this morning was that not one district in our bear county is going to do that and so that's nice to have that yeah seven foot three and fifty three

125right so i do have up there and just crossing the microphone didn't we already uh i don't know if it was a formal policy but didn't we already announced publicly and agree that our position on home school to the extent we had it was that they were not going to be interested in uil i mean that's what jimmy shared in her presentation so you're talking about heights at home we said that any of our heights at home so this is home school this is home school but we don't even get any money right kids are at the house and you're teaching you get your kids inside the kitchen i was in the school sports and well in my mind i was thinking okay is given the grade too right there's great eligibility right for participation

126and so the parents given the grade parents determining eligibility oh gosh and so this this took some i don't know got some traction so it is interesting just to look at what did not pass because a lot of this is celebration and so the i came to you frustrated about the sr-3 restrictions as far as needing to reserve some of it for fund balance um that did not pass the virtual instruction i explained that transgender sports participation restrictions you know got a lot of traction a lot of talk and that did not pass fund balance restrictions i was i came to you frustrated about that at one point asked to engage um assessment based funding reduction and required assessments there was a big push to reduce the number of state assessments and that did not

127pass vouchers and and a celebration is this taxpayer-funded lobby limitation because as you all know we partner very closely with christie rome texas school coalition she was very instrumental in getting us the audience that we needed to get with senator campbell um also bear county education coalition julia grizzard works for us as well and so um tasa works on our behalf on behalf of public schools and so there was a lot of worry that that was going to pass thanks so just some celebrations to highlight for you all um since may we had a great celebration yesterday that our the class of 2020's rocket was clear for launch so we had students who are in college right now came back to unveil their rocket yesterday and it was a not yesterday it was on monday

128and that's a huge celebration um two of our campuses earned a national promising practices award from character.org cambridge and the high school for a couple different initiatives that are taking place there our spurs dance team earned awards at their um their officer camp they earned most spirited the team of the day and most disciplined team um we had 15 participants actually i'm wrong i think we had 12 participants at the martha spore writer workshop that was held this past week and that's always a celebration partner with the foundation on that and get to celebrate on friday evening their work from the week and then a last celebration y'all we have 308 athletes at the high school enrolled and participate in mit and we have 156 at the junior school so we got a lot going

129on i feel like it feels good kind of feels back to normal in their real life everybody's smiling it's so great that's right that smiles two questions yes so one of the speakers tonight part of the ap report and i believe dr walker the ranking was due more to a lack of focus on education on social emotional as she completed her review of kind of that remember the deeper dive what really getting statistics about how that report or how they did their statistics on initial glance it's based on um low and of course percentage can so that's kind of the nitty-gritty of it but we'll have her talk to you when she does that a lot i would love to have a good answer yeah i don't know the answer to it i thought there's

130also something about the ap scores our ap scores are really good but our end of course scores are not good in the way us and the end of course count 30 yeah and it wouldn't also like socioeconomically disadvantaged there was a there may have been brian let me have her do a little bit more digging about that just yeah i think there's more to it yeah but it it's also a big area of improvement because we need to figure out you know like top dancing how broadly are we asking for their input is it like hey how do you want to suspend this five million dollars yeah it's pretty much and we have had um over 100 responses in there that jimmy's kind of tracking and you know she'll thematically look at that and um

131she'll spend some time in there so i was only jumping to say that whenever jimmy shares with us about that i know she has some in the past but um she could give us the historical look because uh someone was saying that we had dropped and i didn't i don't know i just would like to see that it should be dropping or is it just that we've always been at that range of recalculation right statistics the same their grading criteria are the same right i think their weighting had changed of the various things but yeah i mean a google search didn't answer the question for me so if jimmy has better access than i do i would appreciate it i thought there was something about our eighth graders taking ap algebra and that not getting

132calculated yeah but i when i look at that i think that's interesting so that happens at beans too and ames isn't at the same place we are you know so i i don't know that that's what hanging our hat on but it's work i'll have you take a little bit more on it yeah well and since you also mentioned dana the master schedule and the principal's working on that and since we obviously had some comments on that today too um you know i know you guys are i know you've been speaking these parents i've spoken to some of them but you know they raised some really good specific data points especially about the missed class time in those last periods so since you brought up the topic i know that you all can go back

133to this and maybe re analyze it as needed if there needs to be some shuffling done um you know it just raises the question whether one team needs to bear that friend maybe the football team should be second and six then you know the volleyball teams don't need to travel you have to travel farther or you know which teams can better do that or can they all be together so i'm not gonna why can't we all just be at the end of the day i mean why can't all athletics be the end of the day like i know because of the facility use the gym sharing like if it rains outside you have to pull it you have to stagger that product period so um but i will i'll i mean we are definitely listening

134and making tweaks on that it's interesting because you know there weren't decisions necessarily that have been made to this point that we've been able to communicate out which is frustrating you know but but it this takes every year when you do a straight eight it takes us until mid july to get the schedule set so it's hard when people are jumping to conclusions when we're still in the process but yeah we did that all summer some of those parents started with one understanding but they have spoken to us over the administration and now they have a better understanding i think what they were saying wasn't inaccurate it's just that you know they're it's it's a it's a hard thing to figure out the logistics and the principles i know are working on that um and

135there's the question of you know whether we want you know we are losing some academic time in exchange for extra athletic time every week and so is that the exchange we want to make right now and is that you know there's there's things that it seems like we're making progress on the conversation and i'm hopeful that we can address all this in committee because i feel like we're kind of winding off yeah communication but they're very valid concerns gotta talk about but just stick to where we are that was probably my role my goodness uh put it down you're in the last seat okay well yeah i i agree so we don't need to get but but we were talking about the teachers on the slides and what they're doing in the summer and so

136my only concern or question would have been because i think you mentioned seven hours of training for blood work pathogens and blah blah at what point are they going to get a real good refresher course about the block schedule and how to teach to it is it going to be on the fly after we start school or is there a set aside time to do that yes so some do it naturally better than others already we know that um there are some that need um summer attention and have had conversations with um so all of the professional development that takes place in the summer is through a goal-setting process at the end of third year evaluation and so those that need to walk through that are walking through that this summer but there will also

137be a reset for everybody when we get back in august as well we have a whole week at the time so but they know this is coming and you know they they're planning and prepping for it so that's a good question all right thanks danny all right before we move into our next items if there are no objections we will take a short break before entering into executive session as per texas government code section 551.00