001[Music] do [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] do [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] do [Music] do [Music] [Applause] [Music] do [Music] [Applause] [Music] do [Music] oh [Applause] [Music] do [Music] do [Music] do [Music] do [Music] do [Music] so [Music] hmm [Music] you [Music] foreign [Music] [Laughter] [Music] foreign [Music] do [Music] [Applause] [Music] do [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] uh [Music] so [Music] this [Music] no no no no no no no no no no me [Music] um [Music] um [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] um [Music] uh [Music] so [Music] so [Music] not [Music] so [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign
002[Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] yes [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] me [Music] uh [Music] um [Music] hey [Music] so [Music] foreign [Music] so [Music] do [Music] this [Music] so [Music] this [Music] um [Music] [Applause] [Music] be [Music] uh [Music] foreign [Music] do [Music] so [Music] do [Music] bye [Music] foreign [Music] do [Music] my [Music] bye oh [Music] so [Music] uh [Music] ah [Music] foreign [Music] huh [Music] so [Music] foreign [Music] so [Music] oh [Music] foreign [Music] me [Music] blue oh [Music] so um uh [Music] so [Music] do [Music] do [Music] so [Music] so [Music] so [Music] do [Music] do [Music] so [Music] do so [Music] do [Music] bye guys okay good evening ladies and gentlemen at this time i will reconvene into open session this meeting of the arlington independent school district board
003of trustees on september 16 2021 at 7 11 pm due to health and safety concerns related to the covid19 coronavirus members of the public are encouraged to participate by watching the school board meeting online at www.aisd one more trustee may participate in this meeting via video conference call a quorum of the board of trustees will be physically present at the administration building members of the public may access this meeting via aisd website at www.aisd.net thank you all for joining us tonight our board meetings are open to the public and we welcome everyone and thank you for participating in public education while our meetings are open to the public this is a meeting and we have business to conduct disruptions will not be permitted anyone who disrupts the meeting or speaks when others are speaking may
004be asked to leave or may be escorted out by the security attending the meeting we welcome civic input but we insist that we remain respectful and civil thank you for your cooperation we will start our meeting with opening ceremony please join mr wilbanks in leading us in the pledge of allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice if everyone would please silence your cell phones and electronic devices to avoid disruptions to those around you and now if you would please join me in a moment of silence and i would just ask for everyone to say a prayer and or positive thoughts for those within the district that have passed this past week for those that are
005suffering and for everyone within our community thank you so thank you so the first item on our agenda this evening is the presentation of our student leadership advisory board and this evening dr jarko there he is we'll do our presentation dr jarko all right good evening board president mays members of the board dr cavazos tonight i have the honor of introducing our 2021-22 student leadership advisory board also known as slab i also have the honor of working with these outstanding young men and women over the course of the school year the group of students is made up of are junior class presidents from each of the six traditional high schools a member for arlington collegiate and also a member from arlington college and career high school the purpose of this group of students is for
006leaders to represent aisd students opinions and provide the voice of the students to the board of trustees and the aisd community at large slab members assist in building relationships between students the board of trustees campuses senior staff and the superintendent they are assigned a partner board member and they meet regularly as a group with the board of trustees slab members have no official voting rights regarding the official board of trustees or aisd business but they serve a very important voice and an advisory role this year their voice has already been and will continue to be influential spaces such as our citizens bond oversight committee and also our strategic plan work in arlington isd the group is led by a student who served as a slab member last year and who was elected to serve this
007year as president by the outgoing slab members this lab president for 2021 is senior redana fatoul from seguin high school [Applause] the following students are serving on this lab for the 2021 school year and i'd like each of those members to stand and stay standing as i call their name first off again our president from seguin high school reading fatul from arlington collegiate high school osonarma egmonoma [Applause] from arlington college and career lila thomas from arlington high school jack kozak from lamar high school marissa ramos from martin high school jordan brown from cm houston high school as in a you will call and from seguin high school alexis chukwunari we also have two other members that will stand here in just a moment there are 2021 student leadership members who have agreed to continue to
008engage in our work this school year there are a total of six last year they have an unprecedented year and we're going to engage them as often as possible this year all six were asked if they would want to continue to engage and benefit from the student experiences they all willingly accepted two of which are here with us tonight so from arlington collegiate high school william macphail and last but not least from bowie high school tyler brown give one more collective round of applause for this great and outstanding group young women thank you dr tj and i would like to um offer an opportunity mr hogg if you would please like to say a word who helps to put this work together and serves with liaison with dr tj mr hogg thank you president mays
009and first off thank you to dr jar crow for all the work on this and to our slab students especially our ones that were on it last year i'm glad to have you all to have the opportunity dr arco's idea was let's bring them back and keep them engaged for this year um we're probably in our ninth year tenth year of doing slab and just to let these students know um and we've talked about this a little bit but to everyone else this was formed as a way as the board was doing a strategic plan and we had really strong feedback from students and it probably helped our board on one of our major strategic plans more than anything else we've done the students were asking for rigorous rigorous and relevant information from students from
010all walks of life and so from that creation we created the student leadership advisory board we intentionally chose people that are elected by your colleagues in your school and where they're coming from to be able to represent the board because sometimes as uh as board members you hear you hear lots of adult opinions and we need a lot of student opinions and so as representatives as elected officials within your schools to help us elected officials we thank you we look forward to a great year as we tackle a new strategic plan and we thank dr jarco for all the work and guidance on this thank you president and i will say during our dinner this evening with this wonderful group of students they are very outspoken they are they have a quite initiative that is
011really exciting to hear and to see and we really are excited for the feedback information and opportunities that y'all will have to help us as we work together this year so once again thank you one more round of applause for our celebrities okay now on our agenda we come to our open forum for agenda items as stated on the posted agenda members of the public who desire to address the board regarding an item on this agenda are required to register at www.aisd.net board meeting speakers request no later than 3 pm the day of the board meeting mrs benjamin do we have any requesters registered to address the board regarding agenda items yes ma'am we have quite a few registered for agenda items and three registered for non-agent items okay so i will read this part
012and then we will go into calling names for you to come and speak at the mic this is a routine part of the school board's agenda for regularly scheduled meetings this segment of the meeting provides citizens with an opportunity to share their views with the trustees on items that are on the agenda tonight it is not intended to be a discussion or debate and trustees will not reply to the speakers derogatory comments aimed at an individual will not be tolerated personnel matters are not appropriate subjects for open form you will have two minutes to speak mrs benjamin will notify you when your time is up at that time please end your presentation so i have a list of speakers when i call your name if you would come up to the microphone and i will
013do my best to pronounce names correctly so the first name that we have is florine burkhardt is three here okay good evening members of the board how are you doing okay so we the parents demand that the aisd be required to prove the science behind mandated masking masks have been shown to create more behavioral problems more learning disorders more anxiety and depression when walking in my neighborhood by pope elementary those children had been taken outside for some sort of drill the children without mask were smiling and happy they politely smiled and waved at me as i passed by the children wearing masks however had their heads lowered and did not wave or attempt to make any eye contact the university of southern california schaefer center for health policy published an article in july this year
014it said the benefits of mass in preventing serious illness or death from covered 19 among children is infinitely small and survival rate among children with confirmed cases is approximately percent covid19 is an aerosolized virus pathogen can escape through gaps in mass the american institute of physics published a study in july on the 21st this year they found that cloth mask reduced indoor aerosols by only 10 percent and surgical mask by 12 the wall street journal published an article on august 8th this year by doctors marty mackery and h cody messner it stated children forced to wear masks sometimes suffer breathing difficulties due to breathing through their mouth they wrote that chronic and prolonged mouth breathing can alter facial development colgate describes a condition called mask mouth as a variety of oral side effects for wearing
015a mask for an extended time mask mouth might include dry mouth bad breath tooth decay and even gum disease thank you i just have one other thing to say without indisputable scientific proof mass mandating would be risking so next we have cindy calaluca [Applause] good evening president mays dr cavazos members of the board everyone in attendance virtually or in person i'm here tonight on behalf of all the students the families and the teachers and staff of arlington independent school district as i only have a few minutes to speak and that would not begin to cover the issues that we have i've already sent an email to you all with great detail um the pandemic has shaken all of our lives and put us into survival mode no one knows better than you dealing with so
016many details that it entails it has also given us the unique opportunity to reset our systems we were struggling before the pandemic now we are in crisis i'm here to ask you to allow us to meet the students where they are and rekindle their love of learning because fortunate people learn things after a couple of exposures average people need around 20 exposures and strugglers need 50 to 100 exposures i will be here at every board meeting this year pardon me every board meeting this year to keep this information fresh and allow you to internalize it and begin to use it i'm urging you to keep things simple i wanted to use the acronym kiss keep it simple but stupid you are not we're not being silly and i was worried about being sent to human
017resources if i called you sweetie um so i'd like to say keep it simple superintendent keep it simple school board whatever you feel comfortable with um and because you might not all be auditory learners i have a visual thank you ma'am thank you okay okay so our next speaker is megan plumley is megan here hi okay do i hear there we go megan can you hear me yeah i can hear you okay you may start speaking we can hear you okay i'm megan plumley i'm a senior at martin high school and i'm fed up with how the district is handling culpit i'm just fed up as a student it's ridiculous we just hit cases and we've been in school what a month it's ridiculous and me and my classmates are becoming empty chairs a senior
018that my sister graduated with heather buchanan she passed away from kova just recently and my best friend she currently has coveted so she's quarantining and i probably got it too but i'm not showing symptoms yet because i'm vaccinated your argument against virtual school is that uh seven through 12 we can get vaccinated but you can still get covered you can still spread it there is no foolproof way to prevent coving and your argument another argument you have against virtual school is that it harms uh academic uh performance but the days that we miss from being sick or being worried that we're sick that's what's harming our academic performance i'd like to stay home this week because i'm scared that i have coveted i'm spreading it to me my friends my classmates even my family but
019i can't stay home i have to go to school i have to learn because there is no online options even though most of my work is already online it's already on canvas i don't do paperwork so it's it'd be easy for virtual school to happen it's just a matter of zoom meetings and teachers i really wish that the district thank you for your time [Applause] okay next we have angel but i do not have a last name so is angel present okay next we have brady carney hi my name is brady carney i am a mother of two children who graduated from arlington high school and the grandmother of a child who is at the elementary arlington high school or arlington school the proposal of mandating an opt out mask option or anything related to
020masking at all is something this school board does not have the authority to do while i appreciate respect and admire the time put into these meetings that is not a decision which i believe that you are authorized to make as a school board you are obligated to certain tasks but within those tasks you are to make sure that the policies you implement as a local office are consistent with federal and state laws and regulations as it has happened or has it as it has been stated many times before at these meetings it should be very very simple texas state law does not require masks in school therefore you should not require a mask in school this is not political this is simply following in lines with what your duties are masking children has already been
021addressed at this board meeting or board meetings like this several times it needs to be done permanently we need to we need to actually put it on the board to do it permanently it's off the it's off the books again i am a grandmother of a child who does not wear a mask he doesn't wear a mask for the 120 hours that he's not in school right and so if he's not getting covered 120 hours outside of school without a mask is it really i mean let's think common sense wise i'm in business and i've been over open the entire time the entire time we only mask when we had to mask we dealt with the public every day thank you ma'am thank you for your time [Applause] okay next we have kim worley don't
022worry it's not mass today y'all are all safe our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter today i'm here to object to the purchase of the curriculum that y'all are currently trying to buy through character strong effective june in 2012 excuse me in june of 2021 greg abbott passed house bill which prohibits critical race theory in school taking effect september the first critical race theory is obviously not allowed in texas however character strong let me just give you a little bit of information about it it was um it was founded by houston craft and john norland and let me just give you a little bit of information about him the work we are doing as an organization around equity has taught me personally about how climate change disproportionately affects
023those in low socioeconomic situations here's another quote he said january 6 of 2021 white supremacy flying the is flying the flag of low of law and order when you feel unsafe and then trampling it when you don't get your way riots are the language of the unheard domestic terrorism like today is the language of white supremacy unchecked and agitated by those who might benefit from those actions to suggest the democratic process currently unfolding is it is illegitimate is wrong don't let misinformed desperate words divide our fragile country anti-racist school counseling what's that here's a definition from the curriculum gender refers to some some traits usually associated with one sex you can express your gender in a lot of different ways because there are a lot of different ways to be a girl a boy both
024or neither racism it is a system that historically has given and continues to give privilege to white people thank you okay so next on the list we have leslie stegmeier good evening everyone i'd like to start off by saying that aisd promotes data driven instruction i'm imploring all of you to look at the data and the number of cases between student and staff of covid19 the number of positive cases is rapidly increasing among our student population the district has amassed over 2 381 cases over a period of 23 instructional days of those positive cases seven were from visitors to the buildings 283 were staff members and 2091 were from students 2091 positive cases from students alone at the high school level there have been positive staff members and 785 student cases the junior highs have
025reported 428 student cases of covid19 and 49 cases from staff elementary school is my critical point we've had seven cases brought in by visitors 149 from staff and 877 positive covet 19 cases from children 12 and under we've let go of the safety precautions that we had in place when we had fewer cases and less of a threat to the kids the delta variant was proven to be more contagious and less forgiving to our children and wearing a mask is an effective way in mitigating the risk of transmitting the virus with little to no pediatric icu beds left in most of north texas it is past time to put safety measures back in place i want every student to be able to return to in-person learning in a safe manner and i truly feel that
026with proper safety protocols in place such as social distancing frequent hand washing and mask wearing um that we can return safely please take politics out of the equation think about your family my family and our community we can do better thank you next we have tammy holt good evening board members my name is tammy holt i am a aisd alumni i was a former aisd educator and i am currently an aisd parent um i have to say it's kind of funny that i'm following her because everything i have to say is an exact opposition and i just want to tell everybody perhaps tv the pcr test has already been proven to be fraudulent these cases they're not even going to use pcr tests anymore after december what are we going to do when the flu
027hits are we going to shut down schools we're going to put everybody in a mass because the flu is here i want to thank those of you who continue to vote in favor of parental rights when this continues to be brought up to the board the rest of you are on the wrong side of history you do not get to choose how i take care of my child you are not medical professionals you cannot recommend mask wearing because that is considered a medical device the masks that you are all wearing by the way it's kind of funny to me that several adults in the room walked in without a mask talked to some people without a mask but now the cameras are on gotta put the masks back on because this is all political theater
028i know it's really funny i know it's hilarious but it's actually not hilarious because children are having to pay the price why do children have to be masked to protect adults children have a 99.99 recovery rate of covid covid so why is it that we're asking babies to protect adults why why should my child who's in second grade who's trying to learn spanish have to try to learn spanish from a teacher behind a mask he can't even see her face how is this effective in our dual language schools why is it that we have to stand by and listen to fake science turn off the tv instead of real science from real scientists that are talking about the damages that masks are doing to children the emotional damage what what are we doing we're teaching
029these kids to be afraid of their bodies to be afraid of their friends to be afraid of each other to walk around with their heads down afraid to be out in the world thank you thank you okay next we have steve millerin oh can you hear me yes i can hear you you hear me all right yes thank you you may stop so um i'm steve miller and i have a 10 year old at butler elementary who is an at-risk student so we look at things a little bit differently from september the 7th to september the 16th today in the elementary school specifically we've gone from 550 cases to 877. now elementary school is different because there's no opportunity to get vaccinated when you're in elementary school there's no virtual spots available for my son
030right now and if we were to roll the dice and send it back to school without the mask mandate there's no icu beds available so right now texas is leading with child-covered deaths 59 child coveted deaths in our state as of august the 26th so i think the school district needs to find a way to do its job to be able to keep our children protected but yet stay compliant with the state of texas so i offer a different legal view look at the safe schools act from 1995 look at the recent workshops that were done even under the trump administration about keeping kids safe and you'll find that your obligation to keep children safe is a much higher obligation than complying with the governor's sketchy executive order banning you from being able to keep
031children safe so that's all i have i'll give my 33 seconds to someone else [Applause] okay next we have no thank you for asking next we have kim martinez good evening president mays members of the board and dr cavazos thank you once again for allowing me to speak you're going to get tired of seeing me and tired of hearing you because i'm going to be here at every single board meeting until something is done my question for you why the silence i have now learned that at least two staff members have passed away from covid this school year we have another beloved soccer coach from sam houston who is currently intubated he's been in the hospital since august the 29th he has been vaccinated but he's immunocompromised why the silence we have heard zero today
032when miss mays said something about saying a prayer for our teachers that have passed away that's the first i've heard of it but she didn't wasn't specific that it was kovit what's up with that we have always in the past mentioned our teachers that have passed away for various other reasons and said you know that they were an important part of our community but nothing uncovered interesting uh secondly um we know the covet cases are rising and i get it you're not brave enough to go against the governor's sketchy mandate as the other gentleman said i understand that i get it i'm not going to ask for a mass mandate i've that ship has sailed apparently even though we do know that maths are proven to at least reduce the amount of possibility that you'll
033get cozy but whatever we can do other things what about those big old thermometers that we bought that that just take people's temperatures as they walk in do you know how many kids i've sent home this year already that come to school with the fever several in just my little class of 15 and i haven't even been teaching in person for the last two weeks because i got snatched for the virtual option um you know social distancing stop in-person meetings i understand dr cavazos you don't want to tell them what to do but you need to tell the principal thank you they need to be virtual meetings okay so next on the list we have rebecca rogers okay i came prepared because i was going to speak on two um different um agenda items but
034it looks like it's all done at once in my claire is that clear like i just want to verify if it's on the agenda right now you can speak about them if it's a or c it's all together if it's on the agenda you can talk about however many you want right now um and is it two per or is it just two minutes total two minutes total okay that's what i need to know so that's going to kind of change my direction um so you guys know how i feel on the mask and parents choice i'm going to set that aside for now i want to discuss something that's more concerning to me today asisd has always touted themselves as a district that prides themselves in excellence i am here to tell you that
035your marketing scheme to convince taxpayers parents and students that the district is one of excellence is coming to a close i'm speaking to today to object to the 50 000 plus dollars that the district wants to use to approve tonight and spend on character strong curriculum that pushes seo and crt to ideology it is exhausting that we elected you in good faith that you would have the moral aptitude to make moral and honorable decisions for our children but instead you are doing an opposite of what we have elected you to do the board continues to make decisions and pushes curriculums that is divisive and immoral sel leads to crt that promotes the idea of oppressor versus oppressed it is apparent that this has been pushed in aisd for some time as brain pop and it
036was adopted at least 10 years ago and edgenuity more recently both of these curriculums has its standards associated and rooted in castle collaborative for academic social emotional learning when researching character strong they also follow castle's pedagogy standards which tells me that they are pushing the same garbage as castle the ceo for castle karen neem has come out and publicly stated the value of sel is to be a weapon to social justice and castle is committed to advancing equity and education through seo castle's transformative goals of indoctrination through seo and believes parents and school officials officials are too stupid or afraid to object later in a webinar to educators she she states that sel should be used to favor certain students over other primarily because of their race this is the type of curriculum that aisd
037wants to shove down the throats of every student in the district instead of creating unity and leaders i'm choosing choosing to divide and indoctrinate our students so next we have um corliss bunkley [Applause] corliss bunkley can you hear me corliss yes i can okay we can hear you you may start thank you dr cavazos president maison board my name is corliss bunkley and i hope to bring a balance of voices tonight after listening to miss chapa at the last meeting and seeing how our districts are using other districts are using their dress code to implement mass i'm not sure why arlington isd hasn't taken that move i've heard a lot about parent choice and freedom but if we're all honest with ourselves we know those are political buzzwords they are being used to make covet
03819 a political issue when this virus doesn't care whether you vote red blue or purple all it needs is a body to thrive in and it's attacking all types of bodies yes even children i reached out to a board member and asked how much more data was needed to be satisfied that they should vote for a mass mandate i haven't heard that and i assume it's because that question gave him or her pause there shouldn't be a magic number that says let's do everything we can as a district to protect everyone the cheapest most effective ways to stop the spread of covet 19 are mass social distancing and hand-washing having been in public education for 17 years i can assure you that most children in the age group that can't be vaccinated aren't great at
039the last two however they will do them with positive encouragement and reminders the thought of any child getting sick because someone's parent made the choice to send their child to school unmasked and sick because they wanted freedom is frustrating freedom comes at a price it requires a collective effort of all parties whose freedom is at stake sometimes it requires us to do things we don't want to because ultimately it's for the greater good i urge you to truly consider what can be done to implement more stringent covit 19 protocols some are paying a tremendous cost for the freedom of others not to wear a simple piece of cloth or paper across their face thank you [Applause] okay next we have marisol fritz we get two minutes just 20. okay um okay so let me reiterate
040that cases uh obtained via a fraudulent pcr test are not considered active infections they're not considered hospitalizations and they're certainly not considered deaths so let's start there uh secondly since some people don't believe that parents should have a choice uh to wear a mask or not wear a mask i would say that maybe all the parents that want to wear a mask maybe the parents that don't want to wear masks should start saying hey you know what these parents should we don't want anybody wearing masks around our kids so maybe we should just take the opposite approach uh so let me go ahead and get into the main thing what i want to speak about the district is getting paid millions of dollars for custodial covert protocols to be performed by janitors yet my children
041are continuously being asked or told to clean the desk with toxic chemicals i wrote all of y'all uh the email with all that information and with the pictures students are there that look to learn they're not there to be treated as paid custodial staff i have a question do you all have custodial staff at your schools or is there a shortage because my son's school has been there's out of eight restrooms there's only one available because there's urine all over one of them they closed all of them up except for one the same thing's going on at one of the other high schools uh i don't know what's going on if there's no custodial staff or what what's going on but we need to know those kinds of things in y'all's policy for covid19 uh
042it says that y'all are supposed to have custodial staff this is on the website everybody um that go in every day and clean the desk and they do it actually at night with the same disinfectant that has corrosive on there it says that if it gets in your eyes um that you need to wash your eyes out i mean it's very very toxic whatever it is so i want to know what the policy is on who's mixing it who's being taught how to use it why are children being used why are children using it how come they're not wearing gloves how come they're not wearing ppe why are we exposing our children to toxic chemicals but yet we're worried about a virus with a 99.9999 to the infinite degree of nine uh that's not gonna
043harm them thank you okay next we have heidi fritz okay next we have naomi ogle mimi hello i don't know if you can hear me yet naomi i can hear you can you hear me i can hear you okay okay um hang on one sec have i there we go um really you are better than this i am astonished on how an educated group of leaders who ran on the premise of caring for the education and safety of our children and community have completely ignored the medical profession karen county co-added and the district's own case data by choosing not to enact any type of coded safety protocols in aisd schools tonight i speak as a parent of a high school high school students you have chosen to implement zero safety protocols in our high schools
044where cases are rising drastically really our cries are falling on ears that do not hear and hence they do not take action just this week your pr person stated we will do and continue as we've done since the beginning of the pandemic everything we possibly can to put safety number one really i see no evidence of this at our local high school nothing how about provide a hybrid model for high school students and other things that i've already suggested after having expressed concern over unnecessary and crowded indoor assemblies at the high school level another one was held today at my son's school the crowded indoor event was held to sell a product really money is more important than lives this assembly had nothing to do with educating our kids please enact a no indoor super
045spreader event policy since you haven't enacted a mass policy instead utilize technology that's easy the last time the school had an assembly like this coveted cases spread among the student population and out into our community i commend and thank mr chaplain mr wilbanks and mrs mays for supporting enacting safety protocols in our schools to everyone please do something and think outside the box suggestions have been provided to you but your lack of inaction is hurting our community education and medical health care availability i would hope that all of us here could agree that some type of preventative safety measures should be enacted many suggestions have already been given to you i appreciate your time please do something now thank you something now we need your help thank you okay next we have robert gregory hello
046i have twin daughters i go to martin high school um talk about this whole ever since the beginning of all this the mask mandate no one ever defined a mask okay i worked a lot of my career in missile development so yes i am a rocket scientist i was exposed to many different chemicals there is not a mask in this room i would have worn when i was trying to keep any of those chemicals out of my body and out of my lungs because these masks do nothing they're not open if you want anything this is even when i wear when i wear a car i work on cars when i paint cars it's a rubber mask it seals on your face but this is not even designed to stop a virus this will not
047even filter a virus but it will stop particles the masculine don't even stop particles so i don't know it's just insane that we even have this discussion that oh let's wear a mask when they never defined a mask you're a masculine masculine none of those were they're doing nothing if you can feel if your air goes out nothing works it's not being filtered in any way shape or form so you know the parents have the right if they want their kids to wear mass and if they believe the maths work then put the mask on your child because you believe it works so well don't enforce it on other people i mean i i just i don't get that i mean you just you know uh isis is they do not wear masks for the
048same reason they raise it to get the water droplets out of you to not spread bacteria into people's bodies okay so and that's my speaking time so anyway we just need to this is child abuse you know i mean you got people wearing masks with beards they do not seal so you don't complain about the right things you're not complaining oh we need to have a valid mask just putting a piece of paper in front of your mouth does absolutely nothing to protect your life so hey if you want to live by your false sense of security go for it but do not put that on children children need to be free enjoy life and see facial expressions between other people and learn how to communicate not learned how to be muzzled and imprisoned that's
049all i got okay next we have aj rogers no we're not doing that aj so i'm just going to kind of piggyback off of what he said um about the whole mass thing um what's the difference between wearing um a mask in school but not wearing one when you go eat at a restaurant so i hope that i i don't i hope i don't run into anybody in a restaurant that has on a mask now uh without a mask on in a restaurant because that's that's my question what's the difference i also want to talk about this sel that y'all are wanting to implement into the schools teachers are paid by taxpayers to teach children how to read spell and add they are not counselors or therapists you leave that to the parents in high
050schools there are alarming rates of children that are reading on a fourth grade level why is that because we're spending more time on race and gender than we are on academics and that is a huge problem in the public schools and that's that is why many parents are pulling their kids out just as quick as anything and i don't blame them social emotional learning you know those cute little fancy words that they like to use to try and mask what this is really about that's only a uh kind of like a a nice way of saying critical race theory which is a huge problem not only in school but in society itself the focus on race and gender do not approve social emotional learning you will have a serious problem with parents i'm letting you
051know now thank you ma'am okay next we have angel santana angel santana okay next we have amelia schwartz sure my name's amelia shorts um asks do not work i can't breathe in a mask i cannot smile in a mask i cannot see people's beautiful smiles it scares me when people force me to put a mask on my face masks make people sick only my mom and dad can say what goes on my face i'm not a slave god is my only protector now next we have jalan schwartz hi my name is jolene schwartz my family moved here in arlington in 2013. we've been a part of arlington isd for more than eight years our children have attended short dunn jones hill gun and arlington high school we were active parents involved and plugged in always
052looking to support both our children and the teachers guiding our children my husband and i both work full-time jobs and in spite of that demand on our time we believe that isd has devolved to a point where our children are no longer safe we pulled our two younger children out in the beginning of last year after realizing that the board the teachers and the administrators were only going to continue acting in a selfish and fearful way our children were absolutely not a priority to our school leadership and decision certainly and not being made in the best interest of our children we'd still pay school taxes while we keep our children at home homeschooling them and yes we are still working two full-time jobs we are not going to allow our children to be scared psychologically
053demoralized because of this pandemic and the fearful leaders in arlington mass do not work so my children have been physically scared psychologically scared by forced mask wearing so many children suffer from respiratory issues please stop being weak stop making political decisions do the right thing stop working for special interest no mask no vaccine requirements healthy food choices no racist crt teaching we are not slaves please do the right thing and in the end god is all we need he is our ultimate protector next we have noah schwartz hello my name is noah schwartz and the way the schools have reacted to covet has really impacted my life after the lockdown i lost a lot of good friends then the schools tried to open up again and my parents did not feel comfortable with the rules
054i cannot breathe in a mask and i cannot concentrate in a mask the mask make me feel anxious god is my only protector against any illness mask do the opposite of protect okay um it is now eight o'clock we're going to take a five minute break that was the last speaker and we will return um at 806. [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] so do [Music] so [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] boom [Music] be [Music] go [Music] [Applause] you [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] so [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] foreign [Music] me [Music] so [Music] do [Music] done [Music] so [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] they're getting nervous you know i know okay we will return to our agenda um i will go back next we will be considering our administrative
055ratification appointments dr cavazos thank you for the maze i'd like to recommend that the board ratify the appointment of the individual discussed in closed session for executive director of facility services do i have a motion to approve the administrative ratification i'll make the motion you got a second so i've got a motion by mrs fowler or second by mr wilbanks is there any discussion seeing none please vote okay all present vote in the affirmative motion passes thank you president mason so our new executive director of facility services is corey robinson corey attended texas a m university commerce for bachelor of science in industrial engineering technology and most recently was our environmental and safety coordinator for arlington isd and has also been part of the texas department of transportation safety as a safety coordinator congratulations to
056corey thank you dr cavazos okay next on our agenda is our consent agenda items which consist of routine items grouped together for approval yes okay tonight is called let's skip okay so next to our agenda item yes louis did it so next on our agenda item are our action items dr cavazos thank you president mays and we bring forward a consideration for the board for the sale of real property for your consideration okay do i have a motion i moved to approve the sale of real property locally known as 2901 west barton road okay got a motion do i have a second second okay so i have a motion by miss mcmurra a second by mrs fowler is there any discussion seeing none please vote all present vote in the affirmative motion passes next on
057our agenda is discussion action item dr cavazos thank you president mason this evening we bring as we have been bringing on a regular basis our covet 19 school operations update uh this is an opportunity where uh we provide an update on uh operations of our schools related to covet 19. so dr hill will lead us through this presentation dr hill thank you dr vaso president may's board members uh good evening again we're here to just provide a brief update on uh the school operations uh for at this point so we'll start with an overview and we'll talk about uh some vaccine some testing and some mitigation efforts we'll continue with countywide uh conditions we'll look at the aisd dashboard through september 15th we'll look at some of the dashboard uh trends through the weekly transfer
058the dashboard and then some rapid testing center data and then we'll just answer any questions that we may have so the first one look at mitigation efforts uh from the vaccine uh starting tomorrow we'll have a vaccine clinic for aisd students and staff uh that is exclusively for aisd we'll have it at our food service uh department it'll be really run from 12 noon until 6 pm tomorrow they'll be administering the modern and the pfizer the first and the second doses of those two vaccines this is a partnership with the arlington fire department and they graciously accepted this and and partnered with us we also have vaccine opportunities that continue on monday through fridays from 9 00 a.m to 4 p.m at the arlington fire department uh at their 2920 south cooper location no appointments
059necessary this is the walk-up vaccine clinic at any day as far as testing we've partnered with tarrant county uh to conduct a drive-through test site with the pcr test it'll be at our athletic complex at 1000 east 1001 east division street uh that'll run tuesday through saturday we're still working on the times but we'll have some days where we'll be early morning to early afternoon and then some days we'll start a little bit later and then go later into the evening to try to make sure that we cover the gamut for those working families that want to be tested uh the results because it's a pcr test can take up to 72 hours and will look to start this clinic on the week of september 27th we will continue our aisd clinic uh the rapid
060test clinic at 604 new york and that will continue to be monday through friday from 9 00 a.m to 2 p.m and then that's by appointment only we'll report that we are getting up to speed and where we're not as far lag behind on our on our rapid testing clinic again because of the more testing uh options that are becoming available within the county speaking of that the next three slides we'll show you this is straight from the tarrant county's website the space of the uh locations and the test sites that are available throughout the county uh all over the county north south east and west to try to make sure we get good coverage and we believe that this may be the reason that some of the reasons that we are catching up uh
061with our uh on-site clinic at 604 new york but again here are more sites that are throughout the county and then again these are in more detail on the tarrant county public health website other mitigation factors that we have are efforts that we have in place that we continue to strongly encourage students to wear weather math students and staff we continue to require symptomatic individuals as both students and staff to to stay home if you're symptomatic stay home and get tested and then we'll deal with the results of those tests through the ways that we have in place uh just a little bit about uh some of the tarrant county data the focus of this slide is just to to really emphasize that again the community spread as you can see by the red bar
062there is still at a level of high as reported by the county this next slide if you'll look at it shows some vaccination data the left is by zip code that left map and the right map is by city and if you look the darker the blue the more people are vaccinated within that uh city or within that zip code and the the heavy dark blue shows that there is at least fifty percent of the elder of the eligible uh people that live in that area are vaccinated if you'll look i've got a call out on that area that highlights arlington and we're right at 52 i think 52 percent of the eligible people that have received their vaccination again this is reported directly from tarrant county's public county public health website uh aisd data
063through september 15th we've got a total of 2283 positive cases reported 273 of those are staff members 2003 of those are students and seven of those are visitors that have been reported to the campus these cases are updated each day and again this was from yesterday i didn't want to try to show that information to david being too close to the board meeting and getting some inaccurate numbers but you can get more detail about campus and and department location on the aisd uh dashboard this uh slide shows just some trend data from uh aisd cases for the each week that we've been in school as you can see you can see the cases for uh staff in the blue students in the red and visitors you can barely see because the cases are so low
064for visitors or this uh that's in the green there but as you can see the increase starting at 197 for students and it peaks at 672 i will note that on the fourth week there that's a four day week because of we were out for that monday uh two a couple of weeks ago and then the fifth week with the 266 for students reporting that is again through wednesday of this week and so that's why there's a little bit of discrepancy that i want to be fully transparent in that data and then as far as the testing that's been conducted at 604 new york we've administered 754 tests for students and staff since the school year started and 103 of those that come back positive for about somewhere around 13 positivity rate of the test
065that we've administered and we'll continue to schedule those appointments uh as they're necessary and and meet those needs we'll partner this one with the testing opportunity that's coming forward uh with the county effort so testing seems to be kind of ramping up and being more available for for those that need it and want it but at this point uh we'll be happy to take any questions or more discussion about the update at this point thank you very much dr hill do we have any trustees with questions and or comments ms mcmaura thank you for the presentation um quick question does every campus offer masks for students who wish to wear one but don't have one upon entry when they get to school yes ma'am there's plenty of masks at the campus that are available for
066them and if they don't then we've got a warehouse and the administration at the campus knows how to request additional maps from the warehouse okay thank you because we we don't ever want a situation where student arrives to school and he wishes to wear a mask he just doesn't have access to one so i appreciate that thank you mr chapa thank you president mays dr hill just some questions starting first the last meeting we discussed that there was a testing backlog there was a delay in some folks being able to get into our testing locations is that still persisting again i think with the testing opportunities increasing we we're not seeing as much of a backlog as we've been seeing what we're seeing is uh potentially uh people that have scheduled a test and are
067not showing up and so because we keep that waiting list if you schedule today and don't show up we would call somebody that could potentially be scheduled later that day and we're we're able to fill those slots and so uh we think that the testing is trying to catch up at this point okay um based on our dashboard roughly four percent it seems like if my maths were arrested but about four percent of our students have uh reported a positive coveted diagnosis to us since we've started school a month ago do we and you may not have this offhand do we know how many students reported positive cova diagnoses last year um we know but i don't have that information with me tonight it's something that we can definitely get okay do you have a
068sense of whether or not it was more or less than the number of cases we already have i i would not be confident in giving that answer right now definitely something i can get but i would sure and i noticed in your presentation tonight so usually when we have the covet updates there's um a report on tarrant county data related to the metrics that we've historically looked at really since last march that include case numbers positivity rate hospitalizations these were the really the five factors that we looked at throughout the year last year and i noticed that they were not really in the presentation tonight the the screen grab you got is from the home page of tarrant county public health which shows specimens collected in total deaths up to to a certain point but
069um do you happen to have any of the charts that show the case number positivity rate hospitalization rate because i believe they were in your last presentation and didn't see them tonight i think i do and again that that tarrant county site shows about nine different pages of data and i just periodically grabbed one or two to just put in here and always refer people back to the sure that's what we saw i think last week or two weeks ago okay yeah so this one uh is one of those nine pages and it's it's as of today and so this one shows a positivity rate of right around 22 uh for september 16th okay and is there do you have the case chart or the the number of cases uh chart as well there it
070is yes total cases okay and that that last bar is to date this week right yes okay okay go ahead and leave that up because i'm gonna come back to that in a minute um we've heard from several parents over the last few weeks that the virtual they would like a virtual or hybrid option for their high school students and we did have a student call in tonight who asked that we consider one um is that something that we are considering and and if not what are the the reasons it's leading us to conclude that it's not feasible so so yeah that at this point mr chappa that's not uh something we're considering for secondary students um there's some complexity with their coursework and their scheduling and we learned a lot last year a lot
071of lessons last year regarding secondary schools in their coursework and the best environment for them we are looking for and i don't want to confuse these two things but we are looking postcovid to look at virtual opportunities for students in secondary schools that are non-traditional opportunities so if a student wants to take a virtual course or two then we want to make those available to them in the future not health related though not related to covet but as a learning model so i'll give you another example if we want to have a blended environment where some of your time you actually spend virtually but you still come to school for some of the coursework the same coursework that you do virtually may be a requirement once a month to come to to the campus those
072are the opportunities we're exploring and i think that has a lot of promise just end up a secondary virtual option in this environment is is uh is not something we're considering right now so another question i had is i noticed the tea last week i think it was early last week maybe issued some new recommended guidance on covent protocols that dealt with quarantining are we implementing that quarantining guidance or is that something that would require board approval to do or if is that if that is something the administration's not recommending why not if we receive that uh somewhat received that guidance and we're still internalizing and trying to understand specifically what that means to us and how we could potentially implement that do you know when we're going to have an answer on that it
073came out a week and a half ago so if if you're referring to the guidance that we can allow a district to require quarantine for close contact that's not something at this point that we're looking at to require close contact non-symptomatic non-positive to stay home uh is not something we're looking at right now part of that complication is really as you try to staff a school and try to staff different departments not just the school it becomes very very difficult if not impossible to do that we learned from last year not only arlington really throughout the state country but we'll just talk about our state we did learn that of all the quarantine a small percentage actually turn out positive and i'm not i'm not minimizing that that's real but the return on mass quarantine
074for close contact is is not something that's that yields very much what we do want though is if you're not feeling well or if you need to be tested to be tested soon so that we can you know mitigate the spread and you don't come to school sick or you don't come to school positive so our efforts tonight and that's why we're we're highlighting the things that we did tonight i know you've mentioned the other screens but we're highlighting vaccination we're not requiring it it's a person's choice but we do know it's a tool we know it's a tool and and it's something that is a lever also testing is a tool it's a lever the more we can test the more we can stop the spread from that aspect doesn't solve all the problems
075so those are the things we're implementing but to require a close contact quarantine is highly disruptive and we learned a lot last year about how that return is just not not really there so is that something that tea is saying is available to districts or is that something that tea is recommending to districts as we understand it it's just another uh tool that you could use another tool that a district could require yeah it was unclear quite frankly mr chapman thanks for bringing it up it was unclear prior to that clarification whether a district could even do that and of course that you know last year we had so many different layers of protection we really don't have the counter factual where if we had not quarantined close contacts what that world would have looked
076like so i'm not necessarily persuaded that relatively low numbers of quarantined close contacts would not have led to a higher spread of the virus on our campuses because we just that's not what we followed last year and it's not what most other districts followed um speaking of that uh tea guidance the board's our board practice has been to um to to to affirmatively sign off on covet protocols as we're going along um i miss questions for dr cavazos is in the scenario where um guidance changes where the constitution continues to deteriorate um perhaps rapidly would it be helpful from your point of view if we delegated authority for you to adjust covent protocols as tea and state guidance changes instead of us having to wait to have a board meeting is that something that would
077be helpful from your perspective so um i'll answer it a couple of ways one is it there is so much and we've seen in other situations there is so much on board approved protocols that are either challenged or upheld and things like that and and why is because it's a board action right and so uh i would in in making sure that we have a consistency in the implementation of our protocols i would rather that the board continue to review and approve protocols because i don't see that there's a protocol that won't then be thrown into question by ta that i would have that you could delegate authority to me uh that would be a one day or a one week turnaround that we couldn't have a board meeting to actually put it in place
078the only one that comes to mind that we've changed is is that notification and and that was timely and so no i don't i don't necessarily think delegating that right now only because what i would not want to happen is that i would implement something that's been delegated to me and then it'd be overturned not by the board but by ta or somebody that says hey that had to have gone through the board and it sometimes seems like they make up those rules as they go along uh so i'd rather you know the the standard has been taken to the board by ta and and i think that's an appropriate standard and that makes sense i i just questioned whether or not you know if the quarantining was something that we did think was helpful
079and would have wanted to implement it it did seem like it would have been appropriate for that to be if because tea did sign off on that to implement it immediately if we were going to instead of waiting 10 days for another board meeting or or i guess we could have had one on a shorter schedule but um the adverseness to having emergency board meetings you know for one for one protocol sure yeah and but that's a that would be the one you're describing is a big protocol because it's very disruptive in our schools uh with so many people that would potentially be forced to to stay home for 10 days and so i think to your point i would ask ms mays and work with miss mace to call a board meeting if i
080was ever in the in the situation where i thought hey we we've got to pull that lever uh because it is complicated and it's disruptive and it's important for every one of us to have the whole picture it's not as simple as saying okay tomorrow we'll do 10 days of quarantine for everybody that's a close contact that has many many ramifications okay i have two questions that are pretty interrelated i've noticed from our dashboard that we have a handful of campuses that are either exceeding or approaching the five percent uh the number of students on the campus that have had a positive code diagnosis since school started approaching five percent we have a handful getting into the eight to ten percent range have we looked at all i've seen some other districts using a phased
081sort of green yellow red scale where once a campus hits five percent or more cases than there are additional mitigation efforts put in if we looked at anything like that we actually have um and and i'm not gonna point out districts that have done that but um their mitigation efforts are very um minor and things that we do already quite frankly um and so we have the authority and and the option to limit staff meetings for example that's been brought up before um there there isn't really another mitigation effort once you reach that percentage and that percentage will change over time as you know based on the cases and recovery um so we don't want to necessarily provide another you know kind of complication that that suggests something is happening because we're at five percent
082when in reality it's it's very small in terms of of a change um so just that that would be our take right now all right and you know some of the protocols that those districts are using when they get to the red category include things like modifications to lunch procedures that were in place last year so students aren't quite so closely packed when they eat lunch i can understand why we wouldn't want to do that on a cake you know at a campus that has a a low case count but we do have some campuses that appear to be clustered outbreaks of of covid um or have been experiencing that so i'm i do think it would make sense if it's something that the administration is open to considering for the campuses where there's sort
083of a documented issue with the spread um considering something other than plowing ahead as business as usual it seems like that would be a prudent thing to do and on that note there was a discussion last year and i don't know if this is still in place so this is my question at one point there was some back and forth between the attorney general and the governor and the counties over whether public health authorities had the ability to essentially force districts to close or go into virtual learning and what came out of that was sort of a non-binding letter from the attorney general that said public health authorities only had the ability to implement public protocols at from their level on at a campus specific in a campus-specific way if there were campuses that were
084identified as having an outbreak of the virus is that guidance still in place does the public health authority still have that authority as we understand that they don't have that authority specifically they have an authority to to evaluate what's happening at a site and let's let's talk about unrelated to covet for a minute health authority has authority to affect us in in different ways if there are certain things that they see that we're out of compliance and things like that but the notion and it came up i think today in the call as well the notion of you're going to send students home or you're going to close or you're going to you know there aren't very many tools for that for there just aren't you there's no virtual funding for that because all of
085it rests and we were reinforced that today pretty strongly with ta because that question keeps coming up all of it rests on you have to have face-to-face instruction available for anybody who wants it so even under situations and last year was different we could have you know you could send groups of students home and classes and all that but um you still today that's the foundation is you have to have face-to-face instruction and you have to operate the school uh and that's the that's the dilemma with with some of the health guidance from last year that the health authority could help you and say okay well you should close the school today they can't really do that functionally because we would have to still offer face-to-face instruction is the requirement so is that how you
086understood dr hill that's correct okay just to make sure i'm clear on that so the new position which is different from last year is even if we have a campus where we in tarrant county public health have identified is a coveted hot spot we have to staff that building on a daily basis we can't send kids home you can't close it [Music] okay is our understanding mr chap as you know because we've had many discussions as you know the these these rules and these clarifications even today look look at when you know the commissioner's talking about it today is is because there's some clarification that needs to happen so as it stands today that's our understanding even of whatever three o'clock we had that call yeah okay so is there any you know i notice
087and this is we've been talking about this now for since before the since beginning of august really so the as i understand it as well as i view it um the covid protocols that we adopted weeks before school started are essentially the protocols that we're operating under now and we haven't changed them in response to other than a more nuanced notification system we've not made any changes in response to the data that we have in front of us is there anything practical that we are considering doing that we think you think would actually make a difference in the amount of spread that we're seeing on some of our campuses yes and that's what the and it may have gotten lost because we do a normal presentation here but that is the focus of this presentation
088that tools that we have the biggest tools the strongest tools we have in our in our schools and really everywhere is testing availability because if you test and you know you have and you're sick and et cetera you stay home that the way it's described by even ta is keeping the virus out of the school should be a priority first and i agree with that is test understand where we are understand where you are as a student or parent etc staff member and the second for those who want it is the vaccination that's the other big tool to mitigate the spread and third which we said tonight is to encourage masking in our schools where there's a lot of people and students and students who don't have opportunity to get vaccinated and not to go
089off on a tangent but the first two are the big ones which is why we're surfacing and we're diligent and these are not and i thank you mike dr hillite and thank you ahead of time but these are not easy things to surface in partnership because we know that testing works and when we get backlogged we know what that causes mr job and to your point of what can we do well that's the lever so we stand up now hopefully in a week we're going to stand up the county testing in our athletics complex that allows mass testing because again you want to keep the the virus out of the school as best as possible and really if you're not if you're not getting testing you're not you're not going to be able to determine
090that and then vaccine clinics for people who want it staff that want it access to the vaccine i think is still an issue and and it's not the only issue it's not the only barrier but access is important which is why we want to bring it to our site and make it available so i would i would clarify that and say you know what we're doing beyond the protocols are the biggest tools we have which is mass testing vaccination and encouraging mass when you're in our schools specifically when kids can't get vaccinated well it still seems like i mean the test the testing is critical and i'm glad that we're increasing capacity on that front i'm glad the county has been able to do that i think i think you can see from the data
091that they've showed in the last week or two that that increasing testing capacity has made a a big difference in in getting a sense of the situation on the ground with the virus because if we had a bottleneck in our testing capacity our data would certainly at some point be static and that that's not helpful either um i do wish that we could you know and i'm i'm not prepared to offer any helpful suggestions uh except to say i wish there was something we could do that is a bit more proactive testing is a little reactive and of course getting the students tested and knowing that they're positive and getting them from spreading it to their classmates is always is a very good tool but um it just seems like in my mind we were
092in this situation now where the data is approaching a point where we're almost as bad as we were during the winter surge and during all of last school year including that time one reason we were able to keep our campuses open um is because we had this multi-layered approach which i understand the state has tied our hands and we don't have access to a lot of those tools now but we're getting back to that point we had all these tools last year it seems like we have almost none this year and then when cases were in retrospect it seemed like at the time it seemed like a big deal but in retrospect the summer wave last summer the situation right now is a lot worse than it was last summer and we didn't open schools
093last year except in august we opened for to serve some special education students and then we had a hybrid phased hybrid opening and so it just seems to me incongruous that we have those two extremes to look at in our experience and this is much closer to the most serious situation that we saw last year and yet we have almost another tools available to us that we used to mitigate the spread last year and quite successfully i think it's sort of and i've said this before it's such an odd thing to me to see our success in mitigating spread on our campuses last year used as a weapon to say that we shouldn't have protocols in place this year um to point at those low numbers when the reason that the numbers last year i
094think were as good as they were even despite the situation is because we had a multi-layered approach in place that we just don't have access to now and so you know when i see things like the number of cases in tarrant county doubling last week from the week before almost i am worried that we get into a situation where we have some of these clusters all of a sudden reach a point where we are looking at at closing a class closing a grade um and it it sounds like that would be almost impossible under state guidelines at this point and so i guess my question would be have we been in a situation are we are there any circumstances that you've run into this school year to date where if we had the protocols in
095place last year we would have closed a class or a grade level or a campus for a few days i don't think that we've gotten to that level at this point or at any point this year yeah i don't and i'll tell you transparently why there's there's this is a complicated you know this and and so uh you bring up different points but i guess the simple way to say it is because we are not requiring and mandating quarantine so last year when we had to send had to because we were requiring close contact yeah the whole grade level would go all the teachers in the certain grade level therefore no teachers no students can come to school we'd have to do those things we haven't faced that now i'm not saying it's not challenging
096it is challenging to cover classrooms we do pay teachers who cover classrooms and teacher assistants who cover classrooms we're pretty unique in as a district doing that um where we pay individuals to cover classrooms or to combine classrooms you get more kids you get paid extra as a teacher and i think that's important it is challenging to cover classrooms right now but the reason i think we haven't gotten to a point quite frankly where we had to send the whole grade level or two or half the you know k through three and all that is because there's not a requirement to quarantine closed contacts and and so you can operate so what i what i hear is that the answer is probably yes only we can't require closed contacts to quarantine so we are essentially
097getting by by allowing close contacts to continue to come to the building you know what i was suggesting and maybe i wasn't clear what i'm suggesting is we have to close because we have uh quarantine close contacts i think we're saying sort of the same thing well in other words when we had to send all the teachers home we had to you know in a certain grade level then all the kids had to go home even though maybe some of them were in close contact that's a reality and and that's that was the connection they were dependent on each other so something that we've been careful to talk about here and many of my colleagues have brought this up it's a concern of all of ours as student achievement this year and and trying to
098do what we can to give kids an appropriate um you know is is not only appropriate but the best education we can under the circumstances given what happened last year so what is the magnitude you mentioned there are challenges what is the magnitude of that challenge that you are encountering because in my mind if we have lots of teachers having to do double duty and cover multiple classes that's directly impacting the education your kids are receiving and if if that is a significant challenge what what can we do to as a board to help you mitigate that because if it's a common occurrence i do think that's a problem for our kids and it's it's the degree of the problem it would be much a much different problem if we had to send kids home
099without instruction or with asynchronous that would be an achievement problem and we know that so a teacher covering and assuming more students in their class still having that certified teacher is is the gold standard if you will and so while it's not optimal it is still very effective relative to sending a class or two or grade level home because we can't staff it um so it's a degree of complication and i guess of of a challenge i'd rather have none of this quite frankly with colbert okay but i'd rather have a combined class with a certified teacher than a class being sent home with asynchronous or a packet and saying we'll see in 10 days thank you for answering my questions and i appreciate the presentation dr hill and and dr cavazos i don't don't
100mean to cross-examine you um i can't oh it happens every day i can't help it sometimes it's just part of who i am at this point um but i do have i mean i have and i have had i continue to have lots of concerns about the situation it is extremely frustrating to me the extent to which folks who in other scenarios and other years say they believe in local control to have so um callously recklessly affected our ability to deal with that in our communities the situation that we're seeing here is not what many communities in this state are seeing there are 1100 school districts in this state and the governor's approach is probably appropriate in most of them i don't think it's appropriate here um so that you know some things that i
101continue to have issues with the data that dr hill put up and dr hill if you could go back to the last slide the one right before this i mean these these you can see the trends i mean i i don't know what else to say you either believe the state or you don't um but if you're somebody who's open-minded to looking at the data our positivity rate almost as high as it was in in the winter it started to go back up that's the top left corner we have not during the entire pandemic had a sustained positivity rate this high which means that we're actually under reporting the cases that are in our community on the right-hand side the number of hospital visits that are attributable to covid cases this is directly from the
102hospitals it's still much higher than it was last summer not quite back to the winter but sustained the peak of hospitalizations for coveted cases almost at the winter peak much higher than last summer the cases per 100 000 in the community um well over 500 when the the the recommended threshold is somewhere around 50. so we're 10 times higher than the recommended threshold even though we were well under it during the summer that's where we are and what what we have in in is an inability to seemingly do much if anything about it i mean if you were to put up the state health department statistics they would confirm the same thing the number of cases continues to increase the death rate continues to increase maybe has plateaued probable cases are on almost on a
103linear trajectory um hospital beds co you know cooks children's this week shared that they don't even have enough hospital beds for the general patients because of they don't have the ability to handle a surge in any sort of cases because they have so many beds being utilized and i just got a notification when we were on break that cooks today announced that they're diverting patients to other hospitals because they just can't serve people anymore um you know if i if my kid were in serious straits uh health-wise i would take my kids to cooks and i would listen to what those doctors had to say but we as a state and the community don't be you know that seemingly aren't listening to them when they're crying out for help now tea has said that the
104legal situation is so uncertain that tea is not enforcing the the strictures that have been put on it reportedly by the state about enforcing mass requirements court cases do continue to be mixed there are many parts of the state tonight where districts are protected by injunctions against the governor's order and there are areas of the state where it's not uh those districts are not uh the legal situation is in flux on an issue that should be you would expect courts to come out to the same way reading the same statute that reportedly um people say is so clear we've got courts all over the state reading it differently i've said before that the governor's executive order in my opinion as a trustee and and frankly my opinion is as an attorney is is just wrong
105um the governor cannot declare an emergency pandemic over an 18-month period and then justify that emergency uh to invoke his powers to override state and local rules and regulations that in the governor's opinion inhibit his ability to address the emergency he's using his executive authority to affirmatively prevent us from addressing the emergency in our communities and if you care about freedom i think that that is a huge huge issue and even though it is expedient to rely on the executive order at this moment many of the same folks were against the executive order last year that governor abbott issued when it was issued to help us mitigate spread in our communities when it affected people in a different way to me it's much more risky from a governmental standpoint that the governor can continue to
106declare an emergency then pretend that the emergency doesn't exist but use that emergency authority to override local control that's a problem and that's the whatever your position on mass is that is a much more fundamental assault on freedom in my view than whether or not i think kids should wear one of these and i think that hope wherever we fall on the spectrum we take that lesson going forward um i i could go on i know i've been asking a lot of questions i've been saying a lot of things but i do want to take a moment and talk to my colleagues we have had many discussions about this issue over the last several weeks really over the last 18 months everybody in here is trying to do what they think is best and and
107i think sincerely have whether i disagree with them or not sincerely held beliefs and and based on the discussions that we have had um it it is clear to me that that we have a fundamental disagreement i think on the board on how to approach this situation and that's okay that's what this is about as we come out here and sometimes we debate issues and we take votes and they fall different ways and to that end i am not tonight going to reurge any motions that i've made before because i think my colleagues respectfully have been clear in their positions and i there is no reason for me to go through the exercise of doing that again not because i i think that the i would lose the vote i think it would um but
108i think it's because i my colleagues have made clear their viewpoints and i respect those viewpoints and so president mays i have no motions uh to make tonight and thank you dr cabasos and dr hill for letting me speak and ask questions thank you mr chapa for those comments i do not see any other lights on um i will say dr hill thank you very much for giving us this presentation um i do feel that as long as there are still cases rising as long as there is still this very contagious disease that is undisputably impacting and taking lives and getting people sick we need to continue to have the conversations on how to make sure that the teachers and the students that are still showing up to school every single day whether it's in
109person or whether it's virtual are as safe as we can make them be if there's not an appetite for the mask mandate i will continue to advocate and i hope my other colleagues will as well continue to advocate for making sure that everyone is as safe as possible making sure that our protocols are as strong as they can be so with that a couple of questions that i do have is the hand sanitizers that we had all installed around all the schools are they still there and are they continuously yes full of hand sanitizer yes they are plenty of in the warehouse and in the campuses that's a part of the custodian's daily routine to check those and fill them in okay and um do teachers still have hand sanitizer provided to them by the
110district in each of their classrooms it is accessible to them yes okay um mask sizes do we have masks that are the size for children to wear for the younger smaller faces that choose to wear a mask we do yes we do okay do they have to ask for those or those available at every campus they're available at every campus okay thank you um dr kovacis i believe um last board meeting you discussed that at each of the local schools the principal had the autonomy of determining whether in person meeting for teachers if there was going to be a you know a high volume of teachers needing to meet yes and i'll say it again so we sent guidance actually dr hill helped produce this guidance but we send guidance that indicates and again this
111is we want to be clear if you can meet the objectives of your meeting virtually then meet virtually if for some reason your objectives cannot be met and it's better met in person we don't want to prohibit in-person meetings and that's that's a balance between what we're trying to accomplish in education and instructing our students and training our teachers etc uh versus um versus a strong mandate of everything has to be virtual we have virtual tools many people take advantage of the virtual tools and i'm we've learned a lot that's one of the pluses with last year was that we learned about virtual and being able to conduct business et cetera but if you have an objective you need to meet that requires an in-person meeting and it's better we want to have that autonomy
112to do that as well okay thank you would that same autonomy apply for um large student gatherings as well so yeah so they could the campuses could make different decisions on large student gatherings um i i i will just again these we can get real uh technical in this i'll try not to but the the reporting that we get on positivity is not necessarily coming from the large sites or the large groupings or passing periods i know we talked about passing periods remember the close contact should be um 15 minutes less than six feet i think dr hill make sure i'm saying that that's correct and so passing periods the volume is yeah and and we know passing periods also beginning of the school year was our freshmen also trying to figure out their classes
113and so once all that settles down the volume of passing period begins to settle down also but we do have situations where we want to have students dismissed a little earlier so that the lunch period traffic is not so heavy so yes they have that autonomy as well i don't know if you want to describe anything else doctor that's some of the autonomy that that administrators are exercising staggered release at lunch is some that i've heard uh and again to dr vasos point uh really this year we've had in some cases at our high schools two sets of freshmen because the current sophomores weren't there for a full year so that first couple of weeks was just trying to figure out the building half of your school trying to figure out what's where and so
114that caused a lot of congestion and uncertainty but now a couple of weeks in six four weeks in that seems to have been resolved okay and i guess also i was kind of referring to assemblies not really passing periods and so forth but those large gatherings for more than 15 minutes stack on top of each other do the campuses still have that local autonomy to make that decision that either whatever is happening on that campus during that period of time to make the choice to say we just don't feel comfortable right now having those large in-house gatherings yeah so i'll give you the short answer is yes they do but then there's the reality too right so similar to the staff meeting objectives um you know you can't meet a pep rally objective or just
115be clear on virtual right so they're they're gonna have a pep rally just to be clear i mean these are things that that activities that are happening so i don't want to set a different expectation up here i want to make sure we're clear they are having large groups settings and things like that because the activities warrants that we have games we have activities we have gatherings i don't know if you want to expand on that dr hill but let's say we had an orientation and it could be done virtually well then we want them absolutely virtually but i don't want to leave an impression like they're they're not having large gatherings because they're having pep rallies and things like that do you want to add anything to them that's correct it's it's we still
116want to try to provide the opportunity for kids at school and that's the balance uh and so when we can do things virtual principles are taking advantage of it certain situations they are just you know carrying on yeah so my question really is do they have an option so they always have that option but i want to be clear that they're probably not exercising that very much because some of those activities are being gathered because that's the way to meet the objective so i just want to make sure i'm clear but yes you are very clear i appreciate that okay um okay so really appreciate the arlington fire department partnering with us we really appreciate tarrant county partnering with us as we continue to watch the trend look at the dashboards um personally the way
117i see it aren't really just statistics they're people's lives so it's not just a number so i really do appreciate getting support from those organizations to partner with us to once again find additional ways to help mitigate which as dr cavazos eloquently said is testing and given the option for people to be vaccinated so for that i do um thank the arlington fire department in tarrant county as well as the school district yes mr hogg thank you president mays fine questions and thank you to my colleague um comments and so dr hill let me ask a question and we've all heard this and we've seen this crate you know as miss mays post a question about sanitizer and i started thinking of washing hands we've heard all this stuff about this tick tock crazy tray
118craze that's what's going on let me i do want clarification bathrooms are not being closed unless they're vandalized by students correct that's correct restrooms are closed when they become a safety hazard and we get that hazard mitigated as soon as possible and we get the restrooms and listen we've dealt with how do i say this politely crazy other crazy social media things that students have done and this is one that i even commend tick tock i know they just banned i can't remember what it's called they just banned this thing that they were posing because it does create criminal mischief um with that and so we are you know once they're repaired we're not just closing them for preventative measures we're closing them because they've been vandalized that's correct is correct and then are we
119monitoring them or what are we doing to get us through this week long because students have to go to the bathroom and then also students we do want to make sure they're going in the bathroom they are able to wash their hands and so i had conversation with some of most of our high school principals today about that and uh it's continuous monitoring uh getting them back online as soon as possible uh we've even alerted crime stoppers tips at some schools to try to get you know figure out who's doing it so that we can address them appropriately and then we even had a conversation with our security staff about being more vigilant and more visible throughout the schools and monitoring kids and if we did find a student i know it's i guess it's
120off tick tock but there's probably three 20 other social media things that i'm not familiar with if we do find those we could prosecute those are prosecute or send them through our discipline program correct okay thank you that's the question i had i appreciate it thank you mr hogg okay the next thing on our agenda is now we will address the consent agenda items which consist of routine items grouped together for approval as one item unless removed from the consent agenda these items will be acted on at one time with no discussion trustees are there any requests for items to be withdrawn from the consent agenda for further discussion mr hogg yeah thank you miss and i posed a question earlier and i'd just like staff to clarify a little bit on it but i
121would like to remove 2109 16013 and 2909.16016. okay okay so do i have a motion to accept the consent agenda with the removal of 2109-16013 and 2109.06016. mr wilbanks are you making a motion a second okay so you have a motion by mr wilbanks a second by mr hogg at this time we will vote to accept the consent agenda minus 2109 16013 and 2109.06016 you may vote okay i'll present vote in the affirmative now we will discuss item 2109 and 2109.6016 mr hawt yeah thank you president madison dr crossos i sent an email about this and you gave us a pretty good clarification and this is items from social emotional learning character strong and social motion learning and and is i just like a little clarification because i asked the question of is this crt
122curriculum and i think you're we're very clearly stating an email back that it's not and and the state does require us to teach character traits and personal skills like this is not something that's just optional it's something that's required so you know and then we heard some comments of some drastic things that could be included with these two items are those things included and help me understand what these do because as i looked up these two programs you know there's some benefits to them but if there are drastic things i think those are up for consideration thank you mr hogg and i'll i'll start answering that question and if it gets really technical i'm going to invite uh some of my friends up to the podium but yeah they're looking down but um but what
123i would say is that we'll start with just this i think it's good for for public also of how we even get to selecting material that we use in our classrooms first and foremost no it doesn't include crt and we don't teach it that's we i said that in the email and we've said it i don't know how many times but the selection of instructional material is actually a pretty involved process right because we are required to have alignment with state requirements and state standards so the material you see is is also been through that one process first is is this something that we're required to do by the state which i think uh interestingly enough as people kind of understand more about state requirements there are many state requirements every grade level has essential
124knowledge and skills that says exactly what must be taught at this great level and i see some teachers shaking their head as well but but at this great level in that great level how it has to be taught and so uh and by the way texas has not met a skill set they don't like so it's a lot of stuff in there that has to be taught right at every grade level um so we make sure that it's aligned to that mr hogg i think is the first big standard but specifically to this we do we are required to also have education on character traits and that has been around for a long time and so a lot of this is aligned to the character traits uh that we're required to teach by law again
125there are many requirements so i don't want to just say like everything's character traits because but that is one of the components and so that's the process our staff uses to select this material and recommend this material so that it's in alignment for that and supports an environment that um that that supports the state standards we often get questions about the state standards and who you know well i have this opportunity mr hogg thank you for because this is an important topic sometimes people ask me well you know who who makes these standards well it's this this body here this board does not make the standards those standards are by the state board of education and the texas education agency it's a whole different group that determines our biology or science or math or kinder
126or reading all these things and so those standards are then given to the districts and said you must teach these standards right um so i think that's an important clarification as well so the short answer is alignment to state standards is something that we look for in material and dr vasos i know many things have to be approved by the state on approval learning are these approved learning items from the state so so that's there are some materials and i'm can't point to exactly the ones but there's some material that are state approved and some material that are aligned to and that's our task is to make sure that it's aligned to the state standards so i guess another way to answer not everything is quote unquote state approved textbooks are so the big kind
127of mainstay of the of the classroom but when you talk about supplemental material such as star support or star tutorials or things like that you just have to make sure that they're aligned to the state standards they're not endorsers uh approved if you will there's there's some material that that that doesn't fall into into that standard textbooks do by the way and dr vasso's seeing this if we as a board or any you know we don't normally review each little detail of those if we wanted to review that or for parent one to review that would they be able to absolutely yeah yeah and that's true of of a lot of the material that we use and most of the material in fact when we adopt textbooks this is getting into mr fox's their uh
128area but as we adopt textbooks because every year there's a cycle of textbook adoptions that happens in our school district right and by the way this this is helpful because we we have parent participation in the textbook adoption and we struggle to get people involved because you can review them you can take them home you can talk to the vendors you can to to finally make a recommendation to which textbook we want to use teachers are involved in that process exactly uh so yes by all means we would we would welcome uh participation in those reviews and and we cycle those through they'll come to the board when those cycles are are appropriate and dr ross says i'm here you know i've heard claims of things that are in there and i haven't seen anything
129like that that's in there if those were in there is there outs in our contract to be able to remove those from yeah there's always outs in these in the supplemental material um the easiest out is not use them at some point right and so uh but yeah i would ask barry and he's shaking his head if there's ways and he's at a safe distance but he's shaking his head uh that there are ways to do that so okay i appreciate that's all the questions i have thank you mr hogg okay i see no other discussion so is there a motion to accept concentrate consent agenda item 2109-16013 and consent agenda item 2109-16016 do i have a motion thank you mr wilbanks do i have a second thank you i have a motion by mr
130wilbanks a second by mrs fowler any discussion seeing none please vote all present vote in the affirmative consent agenda items passed the next thing on our agenda is discussion item teacher incentive allotment overview dr cavazos the much anticipated presentation we weren't able to do it last time but uh this time we're gonna do the teacher incentive allotment and i'll just frame it because it is shifting gears completely with some of our topics of tonight uh this is an opportunity that the state of texas the dea and actually house bill 3 has afforded school districts uh to be able to have what you see up there which is an incentive allotment for teachers and educators that meet certain standards and and this opportunity exists already in the state and the district can pursue this opportunity right
131and it is not as short process and it's not an easy process you'll hear all that by ms johnson here in a minute but um but it is an opportunity and we want to bring this as really just information tonight it's not a decision point tonight um it is just information but this topic gets really kind of into a lot of detail that we want to make sure we provide multiple opportunities for the board to uh to understand the topic and things like that um i'll tell you it's an opportunity for teachers but it comes with a lot of different complexities uh for for educators as well and the big opportunity is to differentiate pay in other words provide more pay for teachers who reach this standard right and you'll see some of that last
132thing i'll say and then i'm sure there'll be a lot of questions last thing i'll say is that this whole process as we get into the details of it just keep in mind because we're going to mention it that this is a stakeholder driven process so these are teachers involvement that has to be part of this process so this is just an information and you'll see the progression uh if we go down this road it would be with a lot of input from teachers and quite frankly a lot of guidance from educators we want them to guide this because this ultimately is for them it's for teachers and their uh opportunity to differentiate pay so with that set up i'm gonna then uh turn it over to somebody you probably haven't met uh in this
133podium but uh dollar signs and she's our director of human resources employee relations and development and and you're wondering why does this fall in her area well she volunteered i'm kidding she didn't volunteer no she didn't volunteer she she's like no way i didn't volunteer but uh but actually it does fall into the hr perspective because it is funding and it is about differentiated pay and things like that i will tell you and then i said it was the last thing but this will be the last thing this is not owned only by hr this would be a district effort curriculum teachers school leadership etc dollars happens to be the one presenting tonight but this is really it would impact the entire district so miss johnson with that welcome and take us through this presentation
134thank you dr cavazos good evening president mays and members of the school board as dr cavazos mentioned this evening we're going to go through a high level overview of the teacher incentive allotment we're going to discuss the requirements put in place by tea to create what they call local designation systems we'll discuss the components of the system and we'll briefly go over potential timelines the teacher incentive allotment is a key part of house bill 3 dedicated to recruiting supporting and retaining highly effective teachers in all schools with a particular emphasis on high needs schools districts that choose to participate are charged with developing local teacher designation systems that measure effectiveness based at a minimum on both teacher observation and student growth data these systems must be submitted to tea for approval and undergo data validation
135process which is conducted by texas tech university tiaa is also available to all teachers through the national board certification house bill 3 established three designation levels recognize exemplary and master teachers can earn a designation in two ways the first is by obtaining a national board certification which may qualify a teacher for a recognized designation the second is through a school systems approved local designation system these designations are valid for five years designations can generate allotment funding for the employee schools employing school system each designation starts with the base amount for recognize it is 3k for exemplary it starts at 6k and for master it is 12k the allotment funding increases depending on a school's social economic need only certified teachers are eligible for designation and a teacher's designation is not tied to a particular grade
136level content area or teaching assignment there's also no limit to the number of teachers that can earn a designation so why is there a range the program incentivizes teachers to go where school districts need them the most so tiaa and national board certified teachers national board certification is a rigorous process that takes most candidates to three years to obtain there are two ways that the tia benefits national board certified teachers first they can earn that recognized designation and if eligible it would generate an allotment amount the second benefit is fee reimbursement national board certification can cost up to nineteen hundred dollars districts may now request reimbursement of eligible fees paid for certification for national board certified teachers who certified or renewed after the passage of house bill 3. districts may choose to cover some or
137all national board candidacy costs fees for each candidate are eligible for reimbursement through tia once they achieve the certification districts who do not choose to sponsor a local tia designation system may still choose to support teachers pursuing national board certification including the reimbursement should arlington isd decide to pursue tiaa the district would receive a general allotment funding and is required to spend the funds meeting the state statute the statute states that at least 90 percent must be used for compensation of teachers employed at the campus where the designated teacher works and up to 10 percent can be used for costs associated with supporting a local designation system or to support teachers in obtaining designation so what data are used to determine teacher effectiveness and impact in the designation system tea is asking districts who desire
138to create a local designation system to consider three big questions who can earn a designation which campuses or teaching assignments would be eligible and if not all teachers would that expand in the future how would the district designate teachers how do we evaluate teacher observations student growth measures and are there other components that could be considered and the last question how and when would arlington isd compensate teachers [Music] the state is giving a lot of local flexibility when it comes to determining a local designation system but at a minimum the designation system must include both a teacher observation component and a student growth component teacher observation based on t-tests for arlington isd the district's application must show evidence of validity and reliability and then the student growth measures would be determined by the district this
139can include pre and post test value-added measures student learning objectives or portfolios again the district's application would have to show evidence of reliability and validity so this slide just shows you the two big buckets that are required to apply for tia but there are other factors that can also be considered teacher leadership responsibilities teacher mentorship responsibilities family surveys and even contributions to the broader school community taking a deeper look at teacher observations and what is required by tia this slide just shows the basics to measure teachers effectiveness fairly we must evaluate the teaching practices accurately so following the process for applying for tiaa will identify areas of strength and opportunities in aisd's teacher observation system so as indicated on this particular slide a standard rubric is required in arlington that would be t-test appraiser certification
140when applying for tiaa the district must have a clear plan to train and certify appraisers every three years this is something the district does very well calibration when applying to participate in cia the district would have to show that they have a clear plan to recertify appraisers to the rubric each and every other year this is an area of opportunity for the district the graphic at the bottom of the slide with the green and orange boxes shows a sample calibration calendar so the bottom line for t-test as it relates to tia looking at validity does our teacher observation tool accurately measure teacher effectiveness and in reliability will a teacher be rated in the same way no matter who their appraiser is or where they teach taking a look at student growth the graphic here just
141shows the life cycle of pre and post tests as it relates to reaching full readiness to apply for tiaa tea is requiring there be a valid and reliable student growth measure included as a part of a teacher's annual effectiveness rating so student growth can be measured by comparing students performance on a pre and post test to reach full readiness to apply to tiaa the district must have a clear rationale explaining why each student growth measure was selected for each eligible teaching assignment student learning objectives student learning objectives are currently a part of our our system this slide just shows the gold standard for slo as it relates to tia it also shows what components have been added so the district would be compliant with tia what they're requiring is to increase the accuracy of the
142current and previous slo district practices so some key elements of using slos as a valid and reliable student growth measure would include first planning and creating the slo and determining the student's preparedness levels then monitoring progress by building a body of evidence of student work that demonstrates progress toward mastery of the slo and then determining end-of-year skill levels based on that body of evidence that can be compared to the beginning of the preparedness levels in order to determine student growth this slide shows a comparison of our current slo system and the slo tia framing and taking a look at where we are and what is required by tia in regards to slos our current construct would require substantial additional development to meet tia standard measurements a possible solution to measuring student growth could be a
143pilot project rollout rolling out tia in phases year one looking at elementary school campuses star-tested areas grades three through six what was the growth of the students in those classes and then the next year it would include junior high in addition to your elementary campuses final year three it would include grades three through twelve depending on when the student was taking the eoc the data that could be used in this model would be t-test evaluation scores for domains two and three taking a look at how are teachers performing in those domains in correlation to the value-added model which is going to take into account student growth in the classroom if these two things are correlated the district would be more likely to get approval from texas tech university the why the use of the star
144in a pilot rollout may level a playing field for teachers it would not be about the standards but more about student growth implementing the tia effectively would support teacher growth retain the most effective teachers and strengthen the current teacher evaluation system this would also allow arlington to remain competitive in the current labor market there are several surveys that will require teacher input and stakeholder input the first survey is a teacher buy-in survey that will be administered mid to late spring as a part of the application process this is now a required survey starting with the school systems who apply for cohort d then survey number two is called a designation process survey this is recommended by tea this would also be administered to teachers and the goal of the survey is to measure the teacher's
145perception of the fairness of the designation process survey number three is an annual tia evaluation survey this is also a requirement now if the district decided to apply for tia this survey evaluates and the goal is to improve the local designation system so the teacher buy-in surveys would be sent to all teachers and not just teachers who are involved in the planning process how would aisd get started the graphic that you're looking looking at here is a timeline for what the state defines as cohort e step one includes planning tea recommends one to two years of planning this time would be used for developing the local designation system getting that feedback from the key stakeholders this time would also be used for identifying the student growth measures the teacher observation components that would determine which
146teachers are eligible to be designated taking a look at step two step two is where aisd would submit the application this would occur around mid-spring and cohort e on april 15th of 2022. step 3 is what they define as a data capture year once arlington isd would receive an approval of the application the district would begin capturing teacher observation and student growth data then moving to step four the data will be submitted to texas tech university for validation and the final steps include approval of the application looking at cohort e this would occur in february of 2024 the next slide just shows the same exact graphic looking at cohort f so it pushes the timeline back starting with the planning stage starting in spring of 2022 and then spring going to spring of 2023 the
147application submission would be april 13 the next few slides take a deeper look into what it would look like for arlington isd to apply and the steps that are needed the very first step that dr cabaso has mentioned that's a very important step in the process is the stakeholder engagement piece this is an ongoing cycle of learning sharing information collecting feedback to revise and improve the designation system stakeholders throughout the process are informed they're involved and they're valued throughout the development and execution so as he said it's really important that the district would get this right a great stakeholder engagement process would develop a more sustainable designation system so stakeholders would include our communities our families key stakeholders teachers and even some district supports from some of the leaders who are in the room this
148slide shows the application component it's step two in the process the application includes short answers narratives drop down menus and there are also opportunities to upload they upload data and documents taking a look at step three and four the data capture year in submission the district would be required to submit teacher observation data and the teacher student growth rubric rating in return tea would communicate back to the district and share whether the data whether there may be more data needed to be a part of the review process and approval and then text tech would review and the data provide the data provided and verify the validity and reliability of that data so there's also a timeline for the approval process this slide gives approval process for cohort e and cohort f so there are multiple
149steps that have to take place before arlington isd would receive any funds from the state participating in aspiring districts there are currently 82 districts statewide that are either in process or have completed the process of having their local designation system approved in our current system we actually have three designated teachers the average stipend amount is five thousand seven hundred ninety four dollars allotments are based on assignment and school social demographics with 82 districts currently in process of having an approval it's expected that we will continue to hire teachers who have a designation on their certification some next steps considerations and alternatives the district could choose to pursue tiaa designations through cohort enf or choose only to participate in tiaa as a district through support of the teacher national board certification or the district could not
150could choose not to participate in cia at all that's her last slide thank you miss johnson for that presentation thank you very much do i have any trustees that have questions and or comments mrs fowler president mays that was a very very good presentation thank you so much and i apologize if i asked these questions if they were answered but i was just writing things down as as i thought of it so did i understand that all teachers and all schools will be eligible i know you mentioned something about uh maybe the the title schools that that might be the ones the ones that need the the best and brightest teachers but will all teachers and schools be eligible so good eye contact so um to help in this in this understanding so i'll start
151with framing this whole presentation with a lot of detail is simply at some point do we as a district want to designate teachers and i know that sounds really simple like okay we'll designate the teachers but you have to have a system that distinguishes performance to designate so that's where it gets complicated but to answer your question it depends how we set up the structure so if we set up the structure with all you know i'm going to make something up here as an example all star tested areas well that doesn't include all the teachers they don't all have a star tested area right you have other electives and things like that or you could set up the system all teachers but the the the second question you asked ms father is an important one
152which is where the money grows it does depend on the the school so you can be designated as a teacher get the stipend at a school but if there's a high poverty school somewhere else and you go there you're going to get more money and that's the way the state has designed it so that's not part of our design but it depends how you set up the system as to which teachers are eligible if you want to include all teachers then there has to be all of this method of distinguishing performance with measures and metrics and all that for every teacher so it just depends how we set up the structure if we even go down this road well i think it's a good program and i would hate to see some teachers left out
153that only certain ones would be eligible i don't i don't think that would be a good system i think there'd be some jealousy and some some kickback on that and so i don't i don't think that's a good idea i think if we're going to offer it we need to offer it to all teachers and then how how do we know if progress has been made are we going to set standards i mean we're going to use star what are we going to use yeah so that's part of the development of this if we pursue this we have to determine which metric or which instrument we're going to use to to measure progress so just as an example you could use star test and growth not start test passing or not passing because that that's
154not the standard the standard is that you make any growth as a student or you could use another instrument another criteria reference instrument or etc so that's part of this all of this development is we would have to determine to your point which tests would we use or how would we gather this information and then just to kind of keep it keep it in a summary format then it has to be then approved so let's say we select certain measures and instruments and all that and we think these are great it still has to go through an approval process before we're able to pay this money out and that's really important because it sounds like that's just the bureaucratic step but it's not you can set up an entire system and if it doesn't get
155approved uh then you're back to square one and the reason it wouldn't get approved not to be in the pessimistic side but uh is because it's not rigorous enough that that's why and it tells us in the guidance your system your measures your exams your instruments using have to be rigorous in order for them to get approved so you can't you can't just say well we select these and we're gonna this is how we're gonna designate so it's that's why it's such a long process because we have to practice first we have to select and gather the data and then practice and then submit it for approval and then ultimately if we get approval then you can start designating teachers and uh and paying them okay thank you and i've never made it a secret
156my dislike of star so i don't think we should use that as a measurement plus if we use the star they're going to be teachers that their areas aren't tested and they'll be left out of the the process so i don't think that's a good way to go i hope we'll figure out a better way to measure and then and i like the idea of starting maybe in in 23 or further out i don't think now is the time our students and teachers have so much catching up to do that this would not be the time to start any kind of measurement i think we need time to get back into the rigmarole of school and kind of catch our students up and i don't think teachers need this added pressure of wanting to to
157be a part of this and having to worry about their students catching up so i don't think that would be a good idea um and then this may be more of a question for uh darla moss how in the world do we budget for something like this so i'll answer that one unless the ones who come over the state provides the funding okay okay all right all right potentially free to us all right so i guess my points are just i want to make sure that that all teachers in all schools are eligible for this i don't think it would be a good idea to pick and choose and i don't think we need to use star as the measurement uh not only because i don't think star tells us much but the teachers that
158those subjects aren't tested would be left out and i don't think that would be fair thank you so much thank you mrs fowler mr welbanks thank you president mays and um thank you to my two colleagues i'm going to defer to your superpowers on this one as you guys are the experts on this and um having read through and seen the presentations from tea on this um it it sounds complicated but i think the idea is very noble in that we know that our student performance is highly correlated to the number of economically disadvantaged students and it's oftentimes hard to put your best teachers where the greatest need is and i think this is the way that basically comes in tells the state hey this is what we're going to do and it can significantly
159increase a teacher's salary just for example here in arlington i was looking at the schedule of the maximum uh allotment in our that teachers could get and one of or two of our elementary schools if you meet the masters would be thirty thousand dollars not quite 32 which is the maximum but right there and we've got a lot of high need schools here where i think this would do a good job of incentivizing our teachers and instead of performance based pay i kind of think of it as more of a stipend for them to go where they're needed most and use their superpowers where it does the most good [Applause] so i am curious um i think it is critical and that teachers are in integrally involved in the input and the guidance and the
160development of the plan as one of our educators here stated that i don't think you know i'd want to be as inclusive as possible in using stars problematic from that standpoint i think also the way to cut scores on stars and we just have to look these last two years to see how unreliable that would be as a measure as opposed to another national norm reference test that does provide reliable measures from year to year like like the nwea map and also i think it should be focused on student growth and using a tool that will allow within the same year accurate consistent reliable data from pre pre-assessments beginning of the year assessments mid-year so we can measure growth throughout not only for this plan but to be able to give more touch points to
161the teacher who's going for the certification that they're on target to reach it so yes um i think also it's a way for us to be competitive as a district um um if we are offering it broadly to our teachers but it's got to be a kind of the go goldilocks principle here we can can't make it too easy that it's meaningless or would not be um accepted by texas tech although i probably could make some comment about our colleagues in lubbock but i'll i'll refrain but uh yeah if we if we i definitely could use it to attract teachers where they're needed most here if they know that hey at arlington they're going to pay for my what is the national board certification which i didn't realize was nineteen hundred dollars but then now
162that becomes reimbursed so that's the other key thing to realize is you know but if we have a teacher with masters and they go to one of our elementary schools where they can make an additional 30 000 the state gives us that thirty thousand uh so that's basically not now we can choose you you know so for the reimbursement we can choose to reimburse the teacher completely or we can use that to cover some of our cost my preference would be to put as much of that money back in that teacher's pocket as possible the same with the allotment that each teacher gives we have to give a minimum of 90 to the teachers is that correct but if we wanted to we could give 100. also some districts i know it's kind of vaguely
163worded in hb3 that it's um 90 of it has to go to that campus but i think everyone knows that it's really meant for those teachers and and if we went down this path i would want to make sure that again as much of this essentially free money that we're getting from the state goes in the pocket of the teachers who deserve it and who worked hard to get those distinctions and are making um and um making the leap to help out those campuses where we need them the most um so that's all my comments i think it's definitely something worth pursuing and yes include the teachers the teachers are integral to developing this plan and i'm looking forward to hearing more about thank you mr wilbanks mrs mcmurray thank you for the presentation ms
164johnson um i know we're really early on in the discussion and this is a lot to take in um as of right now my early thoughts are the options that we're presented with um i think that the national board certification tiaa would be a wonderful opportunity that's something that teachers can control that's something that teachers can pursue and that's something that they can earn a very substantial reward for um of course this is how i've always felt and i i'll just be completely honest this is how i always will feel as an educator basing incentives on assessment student assessment whether it's student performance student growth but standardized assessments of any sort um it gives me heartburn and from what i understand this is something that if we pursue something outside of the national board certification
165we would have to tie it somehow to assessment is that correct am i understanding well somehow to student performance i think is a better way of saying that and and you could by default translate some of that to student performance in their in their testing right um remember that and keep in mind that um that so back to the stakeholder input it's required that we get teacher input and all that so that's that's why it's a long journey uh but but the rigor of distinguishing performance of students and their growth is required as well so that to your point yes there are other ways but quite frankly it has to be student performance absolutely and you know we might not even go with star for this assessment it could be any assessment you know comprehensive
166assessment we look at a pre-test and a post-test but i just i've got to be honest my early thoughts and questions that i had were how much more emphasis do we as a district want a place on testing beyond what we are already doing um would i want my own child to attend class with the teacher who is dependent on his growth on assessments to earn their maximum salary allotment is that what the teacher would want what would this mean for our primary grade teachers special ed homebound fine arts and non-tested teachers and i know that that's there's a lot of gray area there and with that gray area comes a lot of uneasy uneasiness in my initial thoughts and again we're very early in the discussion but i can't help but to come back
167to those questions and i know that as a district and having taught here for 12 years one of our areas of growth in years past has been consulting staff on decisions that directly affect their job we've seen that in surveys and i think that the teacher incentive allotment would be a big one this is an opportunity for us as a district um and as everyone has stated and as dr c has reiterated i want to hear from teachers on this we have to listen to our teachers as you guys mentioned this needs to be educator guided and i do not under any circumstances want to deviate from that this is the teacher incentive allotment and we need to listen to our teachers we really do these are very trying times we're dealing with unfinished learning
168we are really neat not just wanting but needing to attract and retain talented dedicated educators and to be honest some of my best years of teaching i haven't seen quite the student growth that i was expecting if my students if i had a cohort of students who came in with a high baseline they might not have shown the rate of growth that i my students have shown other years and so even though student growth is you know a little bit less controversial than just student performance on a star assessment it's still something that is beyond the teacher's control in many cases and those are my initial thoughts i'm always willing to listen but again we need to listen to our teachers thank you thank you mrs mcmaura mr hogg yeah thank you president mays well
169said miss memorial i fully agree and i appreciate staff and ms johnson you did such a good job presenting you better be careful you're going to get asked to do this a lot more thank you i see mr kale back there looking going she's going to present a lot right now so no thank you thank you this is not an easy task to to present and look at and miss murrow and dr process i think y'all said it right like you know years ago we explored how do you do incentive pay and it is messy and very difficult to do right this is not easy and it's almost like i to go off with this viral thing i was thinking it it's almost like i mean do i think we should explore this 100 but
170it's almost like the decision should be coming from the teachers to the board not the board saying hey here's what we're doing for the teachers because i do want the teachers to buy them but but i do think also if there's anything to supplement to go with what miss fowler said and miss romero how do we bring others into that that may be something we have to look at from a longer term i i do know you know you know dallas is the only one really somewhat doing this right now um and it's supposedly they're in good stages and it's you hear some positive we have three that received it the designation so there there is some need for it and there can be some good so i don't think i would sit there if
171you're looking at options just to jump to it and we start looking early on the cohort to get our staff going quickly and our teacher feedback and work on that would be my official thought on that but but i think my colleagues said it exactly right of what are we doing to really let the teachers say working with our teacher organizations working with those that aren't in any organizations any of them that are out there and also i think across broad spectrums so that those that may not be fully designated under this can see hey here's what happens and then staff may have another way of things we can supplement or other things we can do but i appreciate this presentation looking at this and exploring this to move forward thank you mr hogg mr
172choppa thank you president mays i um this is a discussion item and there's options up there and i'm i really appreciate the comments my colleagues have made and they've made some really salient points and i have my own thoughts as a former teacher and um and that guides my thinking a little bit but i do have a few questions i think before i can say which option i like at this point um so on your slide that says designation system components standards there's a sort of a teacher observation student growth there's boxes underneath them and there's an important phrase on each one of those that says evidence of validity and reliability what does that look like so we've heard dallas is already doing it but what things has texas tech or anybody else has anybody
173just determined what is evidence of ability or reliability yet what's what are they looking at for that so yes and the short answer and it's not to bring up star again but and it's not the only tool but so use any tool you want there has to be reliability that the performance that is achieved um can be attributed back to the instructions and and and there are ways to do that i'm not suggesting they're easy ways or but there are ways that systems have implemented that that indicator i would say so if you think of uh baseline as ms mcmurrow said where students come into a teacher's classroom and then you measure frequently and ultimately measure what's their growth in their performance or achievement then that could be an indicator it could be as clear-cut
174as that uh star has that built into it the growth allegedly yeah and others do too but just to be clear that there are some growth measures already built into some of these assessments that tell you if there's actual progress being made so it's beyond star do we have any specific examples of what that could be so pre-post curriculum assessment or or just unrelated to star any type of assessment because it's really not about the instrument it's an assessment that will give you a view of whether there has been improvement and not only marginal improvement but statistically significant improvement that's probably the easiest way to to address that that that it has to and that's not us saying that that's where this and david may or mr wool banks made a reference to texas tech
175but they're the ones who are contracted to approve your system so any system we design and we say well we've seen growth between pre and post or beginning middle and end and we can attribute that back statistically uh back to a performance of instruction then we would have to present that and that would have to be approved and validated that's what that those statements mean because i'm torn right so you know the tough nut to crack with this type of program whether it was merit pay which we've been talking about i think for 25 years now or anything built around performance the the hard thing to get to is there's so many confounding variables how do we trace what these students did to that teacher especially when they've had you know by the time they
176get to high school how many teachers have they had when they get to junior high in high school how many teachers a day do they have and there's just so many things at play it's hard to draw that out but at the same time i i was a teacher a lot of teachers were friends of friends family who are teachers and sometimes you you just have a like you kind of know right like you kind of know that the teachers who are day in and day out they've got the good stuff and they seem to have the magic thing that works for their kids every year year in and year out and there are some teachers who quite frankly don't and i i mean that i'm not you know like spilling any big secrets here
177i think everybody agrees with that so where i'm torn is is kind of working backwards if we could develop a system that could reliably and validly trace student performance consistently to what the teacher is doing and that's consistent from year over year it's two things why wouldn't we want to give that teach you know reward that teacher for doing a great job i mean this is how it works in in most other industries and i understand that there's a narrower gap i think in teacher performance than maybe we used to tolerate but if we could crack that nut and we could trace it back what could we do with it and beyond just pay if we could actually do that we could figure out levers to help instruct the other teachers who otherwise we might
178think aren't making the grade frankly um or maybe a bad metaphor but we could use instruction with them and and targeted professional development to bring them up to the other standards so they would be eligible for this extra money because if it's valid and reliable it's replicable and then i don't think people would be left out in the long term um so i'm torn because it seems like this is this is something that looks like it could be good but no one's actually i mean i don't feel like we've reliably and validly been able to do it before and in a few instances where it seems like it's working somewhere in the country it really hasn't been replicable so that's where i'm torn so i think if all of those things can be done i'm
179all for doing as soon as we can um but if we can't do that then you know i might have to take a closer look at it i do agree with ms mcmurrow that the the national board certification i think is probably a good idea regardless of which way we go and then my last question is on there's a table that you have that says current aisd slo slotia state framing measuring student growth student learning objectives and it looks like from this that we did some sort of assessment or analysis of the way that we we do slo and looking at teachers in our district it from what's written here it seems like we learned some lessons from that do you want to ex like go through maybe what we've learned that even if we
180say no to tia period what we've learned here that we're going to use going forward the only thing and then try to summarize some of the because that there's some points you made that i think we could clarify on the on the how do you develop a system that does that that's the task on and you would control for those other things control for i have six teachers in a day so how does it come back to me as a teacher um you control for those things quite frankly is the more you control for those things the more narrow it gets and the more narrow it gets it's when you start to feel like is it really that or we're measuring you know every little step that's the challenge so i'll just reflect on on
181that that you said based on slos the the reason they're described that way is for this purpose these slos are not at the level it's not the slos aren't useful right now and things like that or we're doing them wrong or lessons learned and all that it's it's if you want to try to tie it to this purpose uh we're not there yet and quite frankly many districts are not for this purpose but it is the way it maybe it's just the way it's written so when i read that that our current slo is once a teacher uploads an initial skills profile there aren't any required check-ins it seems like checking in promotes the over a period of time promotes development promotes feedback and so and maybe i'm misunderstanding what is actually described here but
182it seems like whether we do tr or tia or not you know growth check-ins are probably a good thing um they are but if under this frame it's really important to emphasize under this frame you'd have to do this i think what uh because they've worked on this presentation for a long time what we're trying to describe here is that it can't just be your standard slo slos are pretty common and if you try to do it the standard it's not it's not even going to pass the first test right okay those are all the questions i have thank you mr chapa dr reich thank you president mays i appreciate my colleagues comments i don't disagree with anything uh mr chapa in a a different way i think what you're describing is the secret sauce
183how do we figure that out right uh been a conversation long before any of us got on on the board um so i have a couple questions uh to dr cavazos i remember distinctly you and i having conversation right after this became a law and discussing this and at that time you said that yeah this it's an interesting idea but not enough dollars not enough anything there to really pursue it complex which this presentation shows the complexity so what what has changed to say okay we're at least gonna think about it yeah i think what eventually got clarified was that this designation you carry with you and so it's it's way beyond just a district decision like just internal in the district it's really statewide so if you get designated by arlington isd and you
184go to another district you're going to take the funding with you in other words you're going to get funded differently as a teacher that's one that made this different the other quite frankly is that it's a designation lasts for five years there really is no recertification which is another interesting twist to this but um so for five years you have this designation and it is a significant amount of money and household three has funded a large portion of this a couple of those those things made it different then the last point i think is it's it's such a process to get even approval and keep in mind that i think one of the slides i don't remember which one it's 25 before 2025 before you pay out that's that's a long process because it is
185complex and it does get to mr tapa's question there's miss mcmorrow et cetera um that has changed the equation the fact that teachers can actually carry this around from district to district i will say i know you're not asking this but i think it's important to clarify this board has been very forward about making salaries competitive for teachers over and over and i think we'll be you know um ranked really high as that data comes out in our teachers pay and so making sure that that's not lost in this so the good news is that this board is very uh forward in making sure teachers pay is competitive so this is just like on top of that so when we talk about this would be good because it helps the competitive market the board's already
186taken a lot of that action and quite frankly that the number designated is not everybody when i want to make sure we clarify one thing everybody eligible doesn't mean everybody's designated right so that's the two different things right so even if we go every teacher can be eligible doesn't mean that everybody gets designated because the whole point of this system is to be able to designate otherwise it's not going to get approved if you can't distinguish performance um so those are some of my thoughts yeah yeah i appreciate it um and whether it's you whoever can answer so to to clarify these dollar ranges are they specific to the teacher or are they specific to the campus and if there's a distinction so are the teachers i know originally it was well the teachers that
187that's allotted for the teacher you know let's say it's six thousand dollars total that the teacher doesn't get the whole six thousand certain portion goes to the campus not to the teacher's salary um and i don't know if that's way off if it's all to the teacher no in essence there's there's only one big distinction and i think you can get into more detail but it's the 90 percent and right 10 can be held back for a variety of purposes so we won't necessarily go into all that detail but for administrative and other tasks associated to this ninety percent has to go to the teacher right specific to that teacher that is correct or or campus right you said or campus well it depends what you use that 10 for so i don't want to
188get i'm talking about the 90. the 90 has to go to the teacher to the teacher right okay okay just making sure but the other point dr rice that's important is that a district can choose to make it a hundred percent sure right and so that's that's the other part of making this competitive uh among districts yeah so is there um at this point is there something where this is going to be sunsetted at the state level as far as the funding for this that's a great question that's a great question we have been down this path in many different you know career ladder you can just go down the list dr rice you know all these but we have been down this path where at some point the funding stops and in fact and
189just not to compare to other districts but other districts that had this system we're running out of money locally to pay for it which is where the lobby came in to have the state funded so that it can sustain because it's very expensive so the state has to provide the funding will the state change that perhaps yeah okay yeah that's uh that's always then the magic hat uh and so with that i mean i know there's a there's a dollar allotment now that it's still in it it's in its infancy throughout the state so i don't i don't see any pressures at the state level getting close to that uh quote-unquote cap is there any any limitations at this point for the a number of teachers that are could be eligible at any campus at
190any district at this point it's wide open all right that is correct there is no limit to the number of teachers that can earn a designation yeah yeah okay yeah i i appreciate all the detail that is in this presentation uh it is it is a lot i absolutely agree that no matter what this should be ultimately the the teachers saying yeah we like this idea and we like everything about this this whatever that is as far as tying to performance i personally think star is easy low hanging fruit and also the most controversial and not necessarily technically valid to me so i i would encourage the district to look whether it's dallas whoever has a different uh formula that they're utilizing what they're doing assuming it's a successful start there is it does is
191it deemed a success quantitatively or qualitatively and then look at what they're doing how they're doing those measures so that we can then take that back to our teachers here and say hey here's here's some ideas uh because i don't know uh star seems yeah it's kind of logical but it's also i think a good way to make this thing implode uh if it's even worth uh going forward so i i do appreciate everything i don't have any additional questions look forward to seeing how this progresses i do agree kicking it out uh taking the time as we've there's way too many things on the plate right now so thank you very much thank you thank you dr reich mrs fowler thank you president mays as a teacher i like anything that's going to give
192teachers more money so i love this idea the thing that that that disturbs me a little is i cannot imagine what kind of an instrument we could use to measure that could be used for a math and an english teacher as well as a choir and an art teacher and like i said i don't want anyone left out but i can't imagine what kind of what kind of tool we could use that would measure everything yeah so so that's part of developing the system we would have to have their instrument for acquire their instrument for pe it wouldn't be the same instrument no we'd have to find an instrument or a way to measure what's happening in the electives and other places okay so they'd all have to have a different one just don't anyone
193left out thank you thank you very much that was a very rich discussion and i look forward to additional discussions and definitely input from our teachers on how they would like to see this uh miss johnson thank you very much for your presentation thank you this evening okay next on our agenda is open forum for non-agenda items mrs benjamin do we have any requesters registered to address the board regarding non-agenda items yes ma'am we do they're on your list okay um so this second open form segment of the meeting provides citizens with an opportunity to address the trustees on any subject except personnel this is not intended to be a discussion or debate and trustees will not reply to the speakers derogatory comments aimed at an individual will not be tolerated you will have two
194minutes to speak mrs benjamin will notify you when your time is up and please end your presentation at that time on my list i have mr ryan holt mexico man in short one mass mandates or nothing have nothing to do with the public health uh number two all board members were elected here not appointed number three the power of the board is derived from the the consent of the governed number four consent can be revoked at any time number five self-aggrandizing your academic achievements does not signify moral superiority number seven or i'm sorry that was number six uh number let's go to number five involuntary actions are inherently immoral regardless of the authority or its intention number seven using national socialist german workers party phrases like greater good implies that there is an object that
195any objector is a greater evil uh people who believe that those who object should not be sitting on this board or those that object are inherently evil shouldn't be sitting on this board nor do i want them as a community leader uh number nine all public health entities and those in power of them are not infallible and no there is no such thing as good faith in tyranny uh just unmitigated immoral authority spreading like a cancer promising to heal itself once it's allowed to infect the entire host that said the board just passed something because they got an out that the contract doesn't let them or doesn't mandate them to use the materials that doesn't bother you that's immoral oh well it's not going to affect us it might do it later but we're not
196liable for it right now that's a load of crap an absolute load of crap and the numbers you put up on the board 1.22 of those numbers were death you said to believe in the data you're using data that's not even inside your jurisdiction that's manipulative period no and ifs or buts about it you want to believe the data then use all of the data not just the stuff that helps you fear monker y'all have a good day next i have a stefan pow drill today i come with some concerns firstly as of now virtual schooling is only extended to k through sixth grade i appreciate this resource for families but i do think that it should be expanded to all grade levels i can't help but to worry about students with adhd or other
197childhood neurodevelopmental disorders that inhibit their learning virtual schooling is not going to be easy for these students who may or may not have support from home adhd mid-elementary and middle school students exhibit some of the worst symptoms and need some extra support so when developing the formats for virtual classes please take into consideration ways to support kids with adhd during remote learning secondly covet cases are still on the rise and our schools are not being protected mass are the biggest tool in slowing the spread but since that's not the vibe asd is feeling please take into consideration some other ways to mitigate the spread such as staggered periods as ms fowler stated last meeting lastly when it comes to leadership in the city aisd has the biggest budget but it has a reputation of being
198decades behind this board and other leadership needs to do more to be more accessible to parents and students and others in this community operations need to be made as convenient as possible for constituents and not for members of this board that applies to things such as election process outreach to diverse communities and speaking and participating in these meetings thank you and i'll email you the things i was talking about about adhd students and ways to support them thank you okay next on the agenda is school board reports dr cavazos thank you president mays and share a couple of information items uh this week so you'll see them here on the on the screen here in just a minute but saturday morning school volunteers and community volunteers and board members travel throughout our district to get
199students to re-enroll and come back to school as part of our annual operation graduation effort i'd like to thank everyone who participated in that uh you see some familiar faces there that participate in that to get our students connected back and it's hard to believe that we've been doing this now for 11 years and had that opportunity to connect with our students i think as much as everything else we learn a lot about our community our students the needs that they have so thank you to all the volunteers thank you to tarrant area food bank for providing the resources for us to have a food pickup wednesday night at the dan diaper career and technical center because of their support we're able to provide food that include everything from fresh vegetables to peanut butter for
200up to 250 families this is another outreach by turn area food bank that we thank you and thank you kelly i didn't realize that you were out there but that's that's fantastic thank you for helping wednesday marks our first day of hispanic heritage month throughout the school district we have different events planned such as wimbish world language got this month going by having a mariachi band show up and we've all had experience with mariachi bands we won't go into that today but we look forward to highlighting stories uh of of of our heritage uh hispanic heritage across the district and learning more about the music and the roots of that music as an example here at wimbish so thank you for for their efforts there this week we continued our process to our strategic planning
201sessions hosting four community summits at these summits our community members heard from students about what's important to them so we talk a lot about listening to our students and getting their feedback and they did an outstanding job they were able to interact with groups as we work towards our new strategic plan and i'd like to thank everyone for their participation thank this board again for the efforts and all the time spent on developing our next strategic plan as we move into this fall semester i also like to remind everyone tomorrow night is the arlington isd education celebration at six flags over texas tickets are still available uh for anybody who wants to attend or donate to the arlington isd school of your choice event runs from 6 p.m to 11 and you can find more
202information on our website so that concludes my report thank you dr cavazos mr wilbanks thank you president and um sorry about that but uh i do want to tag on to what dr crossov said about our strategic plan i set in last night on one of the [Music] the focus groups and our students who are participating provided great feedback i was so proud of our students they were very articulate and they knew they were contributing in having very meaningful uh discussions and dialogue about what it means to be a student and what our priorities should be for them and i think that's where our focus should be so thank you to all those who coordinated that and insisted on giving a voice to those students thank you mr wilbanks i see no other lights i
203will just also like to echo that this is the time where we do celebrate hispanic heritage month for the next 30 days um heritage as much starts hispanic heritage month starts on the 15th and so my fact is why did it start in the 15th versus the beginning of the month and the reason why that is is is because the anniversaries of the national independence for a number of latin american countries which included costa rica el salvador guatemala honduras and nicaragua is they all recognized that as september 15th so the date of their independence was celebrated for september 15th while mexico's independence was celebrated september 16th and chile was celebrated september 18th therefore they tried to get the mix in there to celebrate all of hispanic heritage month so my quote is persevation persevation of
204one's own culture does not require contempt or disrespect for other cultures so i look forward to participating in some of these celebrations throughout our schools okay next on our agenda is miss secretary do we have any items consider okay we to it is 10 24 and we will now move to a closed meeting pursuant to sections 551.071 through 551.084 the texas government code in accordance with the texas open meetings act for the topic set forth on our agenda you