001determines if they would qualify for bilingual or for esl and we would code them el as an english learner or ep as english proficient if we do determine that they're an english learner then we send out a permission to parents to indicate that they do qualify for the program and that we need their permission to be in the program so once the parent gets that letter they're able to say yes i want my kid in the program or no i want to talk about what other options are available and that's when we have those conversations with parents and either they approve or they deny services and we put that in their king folder so in order to be in a violent work esl classroom we have to have about any more and esl certified teachers
002so at howard we have a total of 17 teachers who are certified in either violin or esl cambridge and woodbridge are here which is 41 teachers with just 46. uh sorry you can't see the bottom very well uh junior school we have 31 teachers and at our high school we have 26 teachers who are certified like dr walker said unfortunately we're not able to talk about how our els did in star wars help us and help us is that test that all els take to go ahead and measure their language development in english and they are we look at their speaking their listening their reading and their writing so those are the areas we look at and tell us that we weren't able to get that data this school year but we were able to
003reclassify kiddos based on how they did on lost links so tea did give us guidelines on those kiddos who are doing very well with their english language development and still wanted to recognize those kids who could be reclassified meaning they did not need any services anymore they did not need linguistic accommodations and that's for star testing or any type of construction and so they guided us in saying that you can't administer the lost links within 30 school days of this school year to reclassify them from the previous school year and this year we were able to reclassify 11 of our els we did not reclassify in pre-k okay so that's why howard's number is zero we do want them to have those supports and those accommodations cambridge and wordridge we've had a total of three
004and we should research does show that it takes about three to five years to develop oral proficiency and five to seven years to develop academic language so if we do reclassify and we want to make sure that they are successful and not just saying you know what they don't need it anymore we want to make sure they're going to do great and elpac which is the committee does monitor them for two years after they are reclassified and an additional two years in teens so we still look to see if they're doing well academically and if they're not then we come back to the table and say what house can we help this kiddo is it still a linguistic accommodation that they're needing or is it more like a subject tonight this is my favorite part
005which is our family engagement we did a lot of great things last year we have we participate in region 20 spanish zombie every year last year we took fifth place and that's all of region 20 so that was a great accomplishment and we have our kid there with his teacher and his family and they were able to participate and go we had culture nights for the first time here in this auditorium and i think it was a lot of fun and you can see all the people that participated and came and we look forward to that every school year and just embracing all the different cultures and we've done it for five years i believe so it's been a great accomplishment last year we also did some parent trainings we have a parent advisory committee
006for our spanish-speaking families and it's a committee of five parents um one representative from each school and they bring to the table with myself and dr ruth buhanda moore who is our valuable liaison and she we meet and discuss what are the needs of our spanish-speaking families and one need that we heard loud and clear that they needed more assistance with technology as far as all the technology going on in the classroom whether it be seesaw or whether it be google classroom or hacc so we were able to get devices for them um we just asked them to bring their usernames and passwords and we were able to help them with that and it was a great turnout um that day it was one of the highlights and next i think you want to speak
007to the profile of the learner so i asked liz to let me take this last slide because i'm going to compliment her in a way that she would not do for herself that one thing that you know is poor to who we are in alma heights is our profile of the learner and many of you i think were a part of that when we were created when we created it and how we flavored over every single word and it's so much a part of who we are and what we do but we didn't have it in spanish so liz led a group that was many of our teachers working in a partnership with spanish dominance of spanish-speaking dominant parents i think i got the order wrong parents who spoke spanish most of the time and
008they came together and they took our profile of a learner and they translated it in spanish but it when you think about translating not only the words but the spirit and the meaning behind football of a learner it took a semester and the parents were amazing and were dedicated and the staff was amazing and dedicated and so now we have a brand new official profile of the learner in two pages english on the front and spanish on the back and this is what we will use going forward with all of our staff development all of our communications this two page that has that was created by parents in partnership with collaboration with our staff and i'm incredibly proud of liz i don't know if carly is still here carly was part of that as well
009we also made posters yes we have visual aids we brought we have posters that we'll be putting up at every campus so that we do have our profile of a learner in english and in spanish and this will be how we go forward when we talk about the profile so it was despite not having star or televised i would say it was an amazing banner a year last year so i have a question about that i want to know what the spanish word is [Music] a little bit but spanish there's a lot of different types of spanish and that's what we opened up with and i made it a point that we have to respect everyone's spanish and the example i used was bus so there's a lot of different words in spanish for buzz
010wah is in puerto rico i did not know that so i was learning spanish with the families and it was so amazing you walked in and you saw us just that good debate of what spanish was and just making sure that it was language that we could all understand so i'm not too and phrases cannot be translated word for word because you don't capture the meaning and i know and ruth was part of that process too so she knew what it meant and we were trying to put that same meaning in all of that work so it's not just google translate it's like are we really capturing what the committee was trying to capture at that moment and she brought us back to that initial phase and we're like okay we need to rethink this
011so that was the beauty of it it wasn't just translating the words but it was trying to get that emotion as well yes so i have a question but i'll start with a compliment because i remember some of the early cultural nights and getting everybody together just just as a group and how you guys looked and y'all found an opportunity to create community around something that we just needed to do anyway and so i just love the sense of community that you're putting on so thank you so much for that when you went over the earlier numbers you said there were five families that kind of opted out or didn't want the service why do people opt out i don't understand you know kind of the choices so there's some families that may come from
012other countries um and me being like our hispanic culture in mexico they come and they say well i came here so that my kid knows english i don't want them to learn spanish they know the spanish but they're like try to talk to parents this is academic spanish and then there's a social spanish but they are very um resilient when it comes to that because their goal is for their kiddo to get an english specification so it's only an intentional reason to do that any other questions guys presentation of equity work plan overview dr jimmy walker all right so this is a really nice companion presentation to what we just did which was um we have a rich tradition in elmo heights of celebrating culture and language and so this work that we're talking about
013this year with equity work builds on a solid foundation here in omaha it's also grounded in the core of the work that we're doing with profile learners with strategic action with the board resolution from this summer on equity work um and it's also grounded in who we aspire to be and the culture we aspire to develop which is a profile of a learner so all of this sits within our belonging goal which emerged from strategic action last year there's three areas of focus for our equity work but the first one is an academic achievement and this is looking at asking ourselves do our school systems reduce or exacerbate academic inequality this is a quick snapshot of the last five six years of eoc one and if you look at those eoc scores there are absolute
014successes in student stories there has been progress made but there's also a consistent and persistent underperformance of specific student groups so our focus area number one is ensuring that we have academic systems that support progress for all students the second area of focus hinges on opportunities and participation again building on some work that has been done before and opening up ap courses open enrollment opening up dual language and this extends that work and it's asking ourselves do all students have equitable access to full participation in programs and opportunities an example of this up in the left is from a program review of our gt programs two years ago and when you look at the percentage of students in our total population by student group and you compare it to our percentage of students in the
015gifted and talented program you'll see some misalignment so we looked at our kogap which is the assessment that's given to qualify for gt services in kinder and previously students were tested for gt services based upon a teacher or a parent recommendation so when we took that away and gave kodak to everybody every single kindergarten student now you see a much a tighter alignment which just supports the idea that talent is equitably distributed but opportunity may not be so we're looking for systemic ways that we can ensure that we all kids have the access to the full programs and opportunities we have here the third area of focus is one that i think is the most essential and this is looking at the idea of identity and do our students have to give up or hide
016part of their identity to be successful in homo heights so we're looking at with profile of a learner can all of our students walk the hallway as confident and compassionate citizens we're looking at what do we need to do to support that goal we also want to ensure that all of our kids graduate with opportunities and choices so to do this work you all called for the formation of an equity council this summer little did we know how much that would resonate within our community we are in the middle of a pandemic october is a incredibly busy time of the year we put out the call for folks to volunteer to help with this work we had over a hundred people volunteer which is amazing and we need the voices and participation of that number
017of people to really do this work well so we did a little pivot as we have done all summer and fall and so we took instead of having the one equity council we have five work teams and each one's linked to a specific goal the first work team is comparably high academic achievement the second is equitable access third is equitable treatment of people fourth is opportunity to learn about equity cultural awareness and action and the fifth is about equitable distribution of resources to include money time staffing facilities and materials so we are asking folks which of those five committees they would like to be on and then we will move forward with the work the first part of which um yeah will you go back to that is your pivot that you that you were
018going to have this council and you had had so many volunteers that you did have broken the council into these five groups so the five groups were not part of sort of the original council okay yeah we were going to have one council do five areas of work and now we have five groups doing the work so it works really nicely because people are self-selecting which topic they'd like to learn more about and i want to commend you on that because that it would have been really easy to stick with this is what the this is where we're going and the other 95 of you all don't get to participate or whatever the number may be but this really brings in a lot more opportunity and and collaboration i appreciate that i'm over the moon
019that we have this number of people who are willing and excited about helping so one other thing about our equity work as i said it's just a reflection of who we are but we also want to make sure that it does have an accountability we're doing this work with our community but we are accountable to our community for this work so we've embedded all of our goals into our community-based accountability system so that there is an annual accountability to the work that we're doing and the progress that we're making the first step in this work is an equity audit which is uncovering equity gaps is the first step in developing a framework to address them we don't want to just be busy just doing a lot of things we want to be targeted in what
020we do so that we truly address some of the inequities that we're seeing in our district and find a way to ensure like i said that every student can walk the hall confident and compassionate and everyone can graduate with opportunities and choices so this equity audit is divided into two phases the first is exploratory so this is when we're looking at some of the data we already hold and we're looking for misalignments or gaps we'll look at achievement data discipline data some surveys graduation rates attendance retentions participation in sports fine arts clubs and then we'll look at our policies as well once we've done the exploratory and we found some gaps the next step and this is essential is the explanatory so quantitative data will tell us to what degree but it won't tell us
021the why so that's when we're having focus groups and we'll talk to people we'll talk to teachers we'll talk to students we'll talk to parents to try to push at why is there a gap why are more students not participating in this so that we can get to the why with that this is participatory research which means we do have some consultants who are guiding our steps but we are doing this research ourselves so that it's not a one and done it's something we can repeat periodically to ensure we're on the right track as i mentioned we do have some consultants guiding our steps these are not new folks to alamo heights these are two researchers writers and professors who have worked with us before for professional development with our language teachers and with our
022staff they are highly regarded highly respected by our staff i think the world of them both of them and so they are helping us with our focus groups professional development with facilitating the equity council meetings and also some of the analysis yes i'll end by saying there is an urgency to do something but we know the best way to truly make long-term change is to go slow so year one is a focus on research development of systems and skills next year we'll begin piloting some small programs interventions whatever emerges from this year and then we'll learn from doing things small and then we'll scale up whatever emerges from the equity audit in year three so it's our plan that this is a three-year commitment to the work to get these changes up and going thank
023you well i want to thank you for your relentless attention and process i mean one i think i feel like one of the things is this district made a change from being a you know more or less an educational bureaucracy to a learning organization focused on continuous improvement is this commitment to rigorous process deliberate intentional and so as you said earlier this is not what it done it's like that's right because we're always going to improve always and so i really appreciate your urgency to get it right any other questions yeah so on the um with the consultants and there was um the exploratory two bullets under exploratory so is that where you the focus groups i guess they would be leading those and then i think the other one said campus walks with admin
024is that also i mean are there they can be doing some just kind of uh very objective observation as well that's right so um the campus walks is something we have not done before and so there is a they've used it in many other places it is a deliberate thing where you're walking the hall and you're looking at what are we displaying on the walls um what's our signage look like and then it's also observing interactions in places where it's within a hallway within a cafeteria within a library looking at interactions as well and they're doing it with a campus team again so that it's not someone coming in and telling us but it's guiding us to look at things that we may see every day but because we see it every day it doesn't
025capture our attention because we're not deliberately looking for some things okay i was just gonna add that um first of all i think this is there's a lot to really applaud here and i'm also really looking forward to seeing where this takes us um and for those that are at home and i don't know if they can see what's up here that they can't fight right so i just want to they can't see what dr walker is talking about with for example the gifted and talented numbers at howard but that right there is a remarkable change i mean to all across the country institutions are trying to figure out how to make your population and these different groups match up and i know dr walker that you personally were really involved in doing not just
026changing the cocad style of testing but multiple changes in the gt program to be able to help that alignment happen and for those that aren't they can't see it the alignment is is almost perfect it's right there you know those numbers are what they need to be and there's certainly room for improvement in the in the later grades as we keep doing those kinds of things but um i just want to thank you for that and for your commitment to that and having you know racial equity appear in groups like that at howard and also to point out that those changes were in process before even you know we put this resolution into place this summer um and that you know the the folks that have come to these meetings the last few months have
027been talking about racial equity and they've been sending emails and doing all these things um not only were you guys already working on that but now we have so many other great steps ahead so i kind of wanted to point out those that might be listening and following along you know a lot of this is a response to the you know the community stepping up on this so thanks to the community for doing that and thank you to you dr walker for then actually carrying it through because this is a lot of work that you can take on thank you it's exciting thank you listen you may have one the five topics for the workers how were those developed or how can you craft it so those were developed um based on from advice with
028our consultants and the work that has been done successfully in other places and how they divided up the work groups or how they divided the work into five different topics okay so they've done this at other districts and i would just say it correlates um strongly with the equity audit data that we're going to be looking at and so it's kind of based off that as a starting point is the entry point for us to dig into the work it also correlates really nicely with what we already have in place with our community-based accountability so there's a really nice merging of work and efforts and accountability yeah just one last thing i just want to point out because although this was spurred by racial equity issues equity and inclusion goes across a spectrum of other
029populations of students and everything we're doing here is equally applicable to gender identity you know inclusion is everyone so although we're focused on racial really this is a revamping of our system for every student right absolutely i appreciate that i'm also going to say that your suggestion about looking at counseling data we have pulled that as well so that's another piece when we talk about equitable access to services with our students who are seeing both our wellness and our alpha counselors we pull that data as well thanks for letting me crash the party all right uh i wouldn't actually frame this not it's not just about the calendar uh it's about being in a pandemic and so uh we heard from we heard ben keenan today we saw it on the video we heard from
030him about and we know this we've heard this from teachers it's difficult it is difficult to run uh any kind of school in the pandemic much less two platforms which we've also heard from a variety of folks today we're running a remote platform and we're running a face-to-face platform and if we do that going in when you guys heard umpteen presentations about how we planned to come back we heard our hard work that the custodians and the paintings guys are doing to help stand up all the stuff that we're uh having to do like you heard from that we added just a little staff to do that we have an extra nurse to help the nurses for doing an outstanding job to make sure that the environment in which the teachers have to do these
031amazing incredible things is being handled on that end from the beginning when we came to brief you all we knew and we said that we would make plans but once you make plans and you start to live the plans out you start to learn and adjust as you need to we've done various adjustments along the way uh as jimmy pointed out your equity stuff you adjust as you see things change uh well as we started uh so in may we came to you all and uh we asked to add some days to the calendar because we didn't quite know uh what it was gonna let come back to what we knew it might be helpful to have more days in case we had for whatever reason as we started the school year now and you
032get to experience being in the dual platforms and all the work it takes in working with our staff all of the campus administrators are doing all they can to help support teachers to make sure that they uh have what they need to get through this and it doesn't make it any less hard if it's still hard and so one of the things we noticed is that just the intensity of work that it takes was more than anyone anticipated and so as we thought about what else we could do to support teachers we realized that we do have some excess time that if we built in some student holidays so that teachers can just work and catch a breath every once in a while uh that would be helpful and so we talked to principals about
033that they thought it was a great idea they talked to some of their leadership they thought it would be a great idea and so what we did then is we looked at the rest of the calendar and we saw that we have three more 90 weeks left we have enough of excused overage in terms of the required minutes to instructions that they have to go then we could actually have three student holidays and make those staff work days so that people can catch the breath and do the work that they've been doing along the way now so after that i didn't make sense i went to our deac subcommittee as we were talking about next year's talent we talked about this a little bit that made sense but then we went back to staff briefed
034you all in committee last week and there's one change from what we were kicking around so we thought it says if you space it out equidistantly we would do one monday december the 7th monday or february the 8th and then last week in committee i suggested may the 10th because we thought we needed to breathe it right before we start wrapping stuff as i talked to staff everybody pointed out that may is so packed you can't even have a holiday and so so i went back to saturn and kicked around we're best to put it and so our proposal now is for the third uh student holiday slash staff work day would be april the 26th really positioned to take a deep breath before you get into finals and more state testing and all that
035kind of stuff going back to the end and so we feel like december 7th i think the eighth february and april the 26th would be great times to add in those staff workdays uh it's just one more thing you can do to support our staff during this challenging time and so that's what i would ask for in the consideration of trustees to make that change for this year's calendar [Music] and i do want to say i appreciate y'all from the get-go on the calendar making sure that we had room to have a lot of flexibility and now that we're understanding how things are going to be able to give people a little bit more room so i appreciate you staying on this so do i have emotions unless there's questions do i have a motion
036to approve the revision to the 2020-21 school calendar do i have a second all in favor all right you opposed for you all the gratitude that i have because from the very beginning the conversations that we've had starting back in june around what this year was going to look like i told you that along the way i was going to come to you and ask you for some flexibility we didn't know what that was going to look like but every time that i've come to you and asked you for flexibility for our staff you have stepped up you have questioned you've asked you've understood the rationale behind it i came to you and asked you for flexibility around our lead policies for our teachers um building in an extra layer of support for them as
037they went through times of quarantine times of um possible family needs possible family illness and you've accepted that and you said yes to that you allowed for flexibility during that first three weeks of remote learning our teachers were able to choose to be at home if that was the best place for them and to work and to roll out um learning through that remote platform um when i came to you and asked you for additional staffing in our custodian custodial staff but also in our nursing staff you supported that and then again tonight just for the additional way that we can offer just a little bit of decompression during the nine weeks time where our folks need support in work time more than anything else and so there's been so much that you have um
038supported along the way and i appreciate that thank you for all you guys being so building today can i make it once come and since we weren't allowed to speak during the citizens we heard but we had a couple of teachers come and mr cruz i see you're still here i don't know if miss howard is still here and one of the things you asked for was listen to the teachers and we just want you to know we can't speak back at that time but we're listening and our administration is listening and we are doing everything we can and we are so grateful for all that you're doing when people speak up and say our teachers are doing an incredible job we're hearing it in the community and we know it too so thank you
039very much and when we can do something like this it's a no-brainer you saw that this didn't take much discussion at all but thank you for all that you're doing all right frank thanks buddy moving on to item 4b one public carry on first rating it's that time of year again for the first rating this is your 17th uh first ratings and i'll although one year we've been uh ranked uh superior basically there's 15 uh questions on this year's actually there's 14 questions this year on the first rating uh the first four are eso's we need it for the live stream um most of them have to deal with the audit and all this information is from the prior year so 2018 2019 or two years ago is where this rate comes from on the
040next 10 questions they're based on basically the audit and the ratios you support perfect of scores on all except three and uh cash on hand uh to get a purpose where you got it at nine you get 87 days of cash on hand on the debt coverage uh the ratio is 1.2 to get full we were 1.18 the one that we've had issues with in the past and the board knows we're dealing with it is the long-term debt associated with assets basically when we we have bonds and we're purchasing items that aren't uh on our fixed asset it gives us some issues so that's one of the reasons we have that we're going to talk about earlier hour later it's on the variable rate that we can there is some disclosures that we have to
041make what is on the super kids contract can you get it posted on the uh her website and i think it's on now there you go and then we have to give reimbursements for superintendent board members and those are detailed about and notice the names are added on those aren't the names necessarily associated so uh just remember this is two years ago so i know one of those things is not correct uh well maybe it is but those are the reversal rates uh then there's any gifts given to the superintendent or board members or if there are any transactions business transactions between the district and board members the one that had probably the biggest thing was that racial long-term liability and that that's really designed to try to keep people from floating bonds to get
042a bunch of rapidly depreciating stuff for their schools and mike can you just this is not you this doesn't have any effect on like our ratings to get bonds or anything like that just to repeat that for the public right and we did get rated uh by movies again in the double a1 which is the top for us and so mike all right thank you thank you all right we'll move on to section five the consent agenda these are items that are considered retained by the board or have been previously reviewed and discussed in prior meetings take a look is there anything that anyone would like to remove i would love to point out the 77 000 of donations um particularly from the school foundation and i also know that we have another generous just
043people in the community buying gift cards for hebs so that we can help out those in need and that is very generous and very well received anything you may like to pull up right there being no i'm squad do i wish to approve the consent agenda all in favor please say i'm back to the opposed motion carriers all right section six board member committee reports so i think we're going first with the school foundation um yeah we had a zoo meeting yesterday and um they were trying to make it kind of brief because we have early dismissal this week so it was fast and furious but um the main thing they were talking about was um of course they talked a little bit about financials which are somewhat effective this year but i think i
044mentioned last time they sent the players out a little later they're not real concerned about that the biggest thing being greater heights tonight is a huge fundraiser the number one fundraiser for foundation and um they're still hopeful that they're actually their underwriting is on par to last year and their um the teacher fund is actually up this year the money coming into the teacher fund but they're down a little bit on ticket sales which is to be expected it's a different experience obviously people would be doing it at home there's three different levels of baskets you could purchase as opposed to different level seats around the table and so they're they're kind of hoping that those will go up a little bit they're trying to get it talked up in the community they have some
045really fun items they have puppies that they're part of the live auction there's two labradoodle puppies that are actually going to be at central office on sunday sunday from korea 5 for visitation if you want to tease your family with puppies take them by there and they really have some great items on the live auction so i'm hoping that if the ticket sales are down they may make up for it with some of the the uh amazing items that they have in the in the live in the style auction um dana did a yeah i think it went live uh there was an email that went out today about ticket sales and also the webpage to look at all the packages that are out there so i don't know who all that goes to anybody
046who's signed up for the district emails um i was losing i didn't have great audio on the one part was there something i missed in there that's pretty much it no i'm just going through the copy just yeah and then i'm going to look at it if there's anything else dana did a great job very very quickly you know what's going on tell her that she's on a time crunch it's pretty impressive thank you lisa uh building committee bonnie yes we did have a brief building committee meeting last wednesday and um so really everything's going well and on schedule natatorium is still looking at december january completion they're still working on some grading over at howard which is not yet up to par the good news is that the stadium lights are working and the
047bleachers will be here soon and it's going to take a couple of months to probably get those installed so that'll be a big visual change for us to see there and the stadium is still on target for next august and we just talked a little bit about imaginings what's next for the for our future in terms of the phase two that we talked about but not just imaginings so on to the next thing on to the next thing okay yeah that was pretty much it oh and i wanted to mention you said there's some good uh photos that will be going up on the website so they're already on the website okay they're already look at that and i'll send it to you all through the weekly update too yeah so check out the website
048very good all right ryan district design design team all right i was tied up with paranormal on your behalf i've given frank to bill i can't so we did have a big picture overview of the equity work from the entire district design team we are going to send the work of our strategic action goals into the design team riding teams and so we broke up into writing teams and we looked at our goal areas and we went through the schlectty system capacity standards to assess where the entry point in that work at the district level is going to be and so part of my update in the mobile is going to be about just where we are with the 2020 vision strategic work and so i'll talk a little bit more about that but it
049was a great session kind of framed the work and frank is our new chair this year the district design team so can i get back on it [Music] all right very good so we'll move on to section seven business recommendations uh so seven a consideration of approval do i have to read this whole thing all right thank you yes you do but they can approach you all come up while i'm reading the program consideration of approval of an order by the board of trustees of the omaha temple school district authorizing the issuance of alamo heights independent school district unlimited tax school funding school building and refunding bond series 2020 a levying and continuing direct annual ad warm tax for payment bonds delegating the authority to certain members of the board of trustees and district staff
050to execute certain documents related to the sale of bonds authorizing the execution of any necessary engagement agreements with the district's financial advisors and providing an effective date presenter mike haeger dwayne westerman take it away dwyane is here and i think he's got a presentation oh that's right the many president members of the board dr sharp here um we wanted to go over a quick recap of what the district outstanding debt issues are so we have these you see from series 2013-14 we've done some refundings or refinancings as well as new money along the way what this chart does tell us and what keys us into is the call feature which is when bonds can be have their option or their ability to be paid off or refunded and we have two issues coming up in
0512022 and then the green at the top and then it's 2025 26 27 i'm going to skip the one and move for just a moment and then and then one in 28. the series 2018 b bond for those of uh i think most of you were involved with that we did that portion of the issue in this variable rate soft foot mode which allows us to have that issue be callable or come up for option within three years because we were trying to fill the dates as mike mentioned where we have some opportunities to pay off that early when we can help that ratio that y'all are dealing with so that issue is coming up for call date for call feature february 1 of 21. so we're going to look at that refinancing tonight as
052well as the issuance of the remaining 20 million dollars in authorization from the 2017 bondish go to the next page this probably hard to read with all the numbers up there it's the same information it's each of the series of bonds that we have with their maturity dates and the interest rates that are associated with those maturities when they're shaded in blue that's the portions that are called okay here's again it's the same information but it's just a graphical illustration so we have the the debt we're talking about in 2021 that's callable we're going to talk about tonight then we have two issues in 22 then we have that gap in 23 and 24 and so what uh we're going to show you tonight is a way that we can put some of the new
053issue bond into this variable rate option so that we can access those in probably 24 but it could be 23 or 24 and we've been working with mike to design this plan so that we keep that access available values go up and your ins revenues are generating enough funds we can go ahead and use that at that time and start paying off principal predominantly picking off the longer term principle and get that paid off early okay just a reminder from uh over the past years the district has considered different refinancing opportunities uh this goes back to 2003 and through those activities the district's been able to save over 24 million 300 000 in debt service savings uh with this anticipated 2020 a issue uh we could add another two million dollars to that for a
054total of 26 million in savings over these years so the game plan we're you have two different agenda items tonight one for the unlimited tax school building and refunding mod series 2028 and then we're going to have the variable rate unlimited tax school building bond series 2020 b so the 2028 is going to do the refunding of that series 2018 b and we're going to include with that seven and a half million out of that 20 million of new proceeds that we're looking to get and we're using both of those in the in a shorter term this will all be paid off between now and 2031. and this issue also will be able to put a call feature in their option in 2028 or 2029 most likely right now we project that the true interest
055cost or effective rate on this issue is probably end up being between 1.1 and 1.2 so the market's very favorable then we look at the series 2020 b which is the action item following this one and that is just going to be the remaining 12 and a half million of proceeds so between the seven and a half and the twelve and a half we'll get all all 20 million and finish out the authorization for and we're taking the longer half of what we had anticipated amortizing that bond issue so from 2032 out to 2043 and we're going to put it with this variable rate structure which will allow us to issue the debt that look at the very low rates for the short term level and also give us the opportunity to start paying off
056that principle earlier if all things goes we hope for planning uh we would expect even we would expect that the the effective rate on this issue because that amortization does go out to but blending that with the call or the term variable rate part of it that the effective rate on that will be around 1.6 to 1.7 okay so this is just a real quick look at the refunding portion the the yellow highlighted column is the the savings from that we're anticipating off this refunding of that 2018 c about 260 000 a year for a total of 2 million and here's where we put it all together so the left hand side is your current principal and interest requirements then we take the next column which is the the refunded debt service so the debt
057service from the 2018 v we're getting rid of and then we add in the 2028 and the 2020 b series and get to our new total annual debt service requirements and your debt service tax rate this year at 22 cents uh we we just projected forward of 1 growth in values uh just relatively conservative there and lower tax collections with the cohoot and everything going on just plugging in there and with that you know we should be able to uh generate with that 22 cents going forward enough dollars that we can have funds that we can pay off some of that other debt quicker once it comes along okay so tonight the two different authorizations are really the same thing i'm going to combine the two together so what you're doing is authorizing the issuance
058of both of these series of bonds through the two actions the maximum size of the issue is 32 million which that's 20 million of new money that you have authorized from the voters and 12 of it is the refunding of the series 2018b we're not issuing more debt we can't issue more debt and we cannot on the refunding port we're not extending that any any uh farther than it is we're going to pay it off as it was or quicker [Music] the maximum maturity is 2043 and that includes the new money portion and then a maximum interest rate of five percent so these parameters are established so if you vote to authorize the issuance of these two series of bonds we follow these parameters and dr bashar and mr hager can can give the final
059sign on the final terms of the sale of the two bonds when we get to that point and we've used this method in the past on the bond issues and as we develop that we'll work with with mike to get that structure right that what he's looking for as far as being able to manage that absolutely appropriately so that's a lot of information uh happy to answer any questions you might have so and i appreciate you guys staying on top of this to identify opportunities to keep saving money on our pay down i know we've done this well i've been on the board before and i appreciate the opportunity to do it again uh refresh my memory like the justification for the variable rate structure is to give us that flexibility to go refinance or
060refund it earlier it's twofold so actually going back to we saw that we had nothing callable in 2021 and so we set it up so that would come this year and then we thought that we'd have that it could roll over again to 2023 or 2024 where that next gap was um as we have the new money and the timing when we want to sell the rest of it now the rest of the new money uh we realized we get better bang for the buck if we refund that into a traditional and use the longer maturing new money to use as a new soft foot to hit that 23 or 24 2023 or 24 maturity so number one it gives us access to it to pay it off quicker and number two it's going to
061give us the ability to borrow that money that's scheduled for the you know to be paid off up to 20 years out at a three or four year interest rate and if there's any risk to a variable rate note i mean it's what is that risk that rate coming up unforeseen or something like that there there is um we'll have to look at you know when it will roll up in in two or three years or four years and yes if if rates have gone sky high it may not have been the the best thing but you could roll it over into a one year and normally those rates in the one to four year on tax exempt rates have always been very low so we feel very comfortable that we will be that's not
062going to be an issue i know there's a pretty strong commitment to keep rates low period for a couple years so yeah so i appreciate that any other questions when you i have a couple when you uh presented all the savings does that include or where all these transaction costs when we're reissuing and stuff are they removed before are you taking that out or is that included where does that fit so all those settings are net of any costs associated with any of those transactions those are net clear savings and then my other question has to do with i don't know as i was looking through this in the board book with the way the laws that have changed the way school funding is done did that have any impact or could that have any
063impact on bonds and how we i mean could the could the state decide to tap into our bond money and then with robin hood do you know what i'm saying like is is that window cracked now does that make sense what i'm saying it does make sense and the bond side of it is as up to this point in time been been left as a separate angle which originally no it wasn't when recapture first came into place it was on the tunnels tax rate you know it was okay and after about two sessions uh then they took then service out that's why we didn't go out for bonds in the mid 90s because it would be recaptured we have to go out we don't go out for twice as much just to get that money
064so i don't know why just the way that they've changed school finance and funding i thought is this did that put us in a situation where we could be at risk of with our ins tax rate of having to give some of it back to the state at some point in the future right now i hear no yeah i hear that but the state can do whatever they want yeah yeah okay those are my two questions to answer your question earlier you have the the district got upgraded to double lane one four years ago in 2016. so we're going to do two motions i think you might need to clarify that we're also considering that second item b and you don't need to read if you read the first part of that that gets through
065the series 2020 b or whatever that's that's sad that's probably fine because all the rest is what we have to do anyway okay so we'll do we'll do this first consideration do i have a motion to move the motion the board of trustees adopting order authorizing the issuance of alabama heights independent school district unlimited tax school building and refunding bonds series 2028 pursuant to a delegated sale do i have a second thank you all in favor aye any opposed the motion carries so now we will consider we will consider the approval of an order by the board of trustees of the animal heights independent school district authorizing the issuance of illinois heights independent school district variable rate unlimited tax school building bonds series 2020 we've already discussed all of this in the original presentation so
066do i have a motion that the board of trustees is adopting or authorizing the issuance of alan white's in a good school district variable rate unlimited tax school building bond series 2020 b pursuant to a delegated sale thank you lisa do you have a second sorry thanks brian all in favor please say hi all right the opposed the motion carries dwayne mike thank you all for going through that with us and thank you for staying on top of all this as the markets are changing for our benefit thank you all right we'll move on to section 8 calendar review okay so emma's put together a calendar review that's inside your folder that highlights just some of the edit volleyball football games and to have those on your radar next week y'all is homecoming it's our
067homecoming thursday night we do have a little area that's reserved for our administrative team and we had a strategy session long meeting on the calendar that we strapped instead we're going to do a little team building so if so all the veterans day celebrations november 19th the regularly scheduled board meeting will have a tour beforehand at five o'clock at the natatorium so you could just put those out of dates on your calendar all right section 9 superintendent's communication 2020 vision update all right so one year ago this month we convened our original what we call the discovery group of about 60 participants students staff members community members and parents to help have our initial conversations around strategic action work moving forward one year ago y'all and we worked really hard with that discovery routine over
068the course of a handful of meetings um we surveyed our community at that time we had multiple focus group meetings with our staff members with parents all around the district and we handed over the findings from that discovery group and also from the findings of the serving the focus group to a core team that worked from november all the way through january um in february of last year we launched to our staff the four strategic goal areas and through our february pd efforts and those were again communication social emotional learning belonging and equity and resources and relationships and then we pushed pause because we were hit by a pandemic and so there was so much work so much important work that went into the articulation of those goal areas and just the connection back to
069our vision and our mission our work back um in 2008 around our original strategic action work that led to the profile of learner and now again into what we're calling 2020 vision and so i'm excited just to report tonight that we have recommitted to that work in a big way uh this month and it feels so good y'all to stop paddling frantically like we have been for the last four months to try to figure out how we're going to best open schools and instead be able to focus and make our heads above water a little bit and think about the important work that's going to result from that initial work that took place a year ago and so that's my big announcement we're just recommitting to that or like i said through the district design
070team we did ask our administrators to think throughout the summer of ways to integrate that work um in their campus improvement planning and so we did pulse check with them in august about their planning for the year and we're going to roll out their work to you all monthly through our meetings and so in november susan perry will kick it off and she'll come and report where we are at howard with the work around um continuous improvement and work around the focus around those four goal areas specifically in howard and then we'll move in every month to hearing from the campus and like i alluded to with the district design team report we are tagging the work of the district to the district design team so those five those four writing teams will be reporting
071out to you with what the efforts look like at the district level and so what i will say is that you know that work hasn't necessarily set stagnant you see tonight the work of the equity um team and kind of how that ball has been rolling um i would say that we have established a process to form that district equity council the team that's now a large group that's going to roll up their sleeves and do that work with us we created a procedure for dealing with student discrimination and harassment issues we presented that to you a few months ago we also implemented a new mental health care concierge service we presented that to you as well with the care solace work and so we've not sat stagnant in the goals that we've set but
072it but we are fishing yeah reset and we are going to see some nice momentum with that so again in november we'll start rolling out our campus reports to you district design team will work and we've sent out communication to that discovery team last week just letting them know where we are what the plan is and what the promise of reconnecting with them in april to just update them earlier any questions it's refreshing to hear you and the other staff just talk about actually doing the work for our kids so appreciate all that work keeping us on track okay uh before moving to our next two items there are no objections we'll take a short break before entering into executive sessions for texas government code section 551.2 thank you for being here and we'll take
073a quick break