Arlington ISD Board of Trustees Meeting 06/17/2021

001[Music] good [Music] um [Music] foreign [Music] so [Music] foreign [Music] do [Music] i don't know why i say too much [Applause] [Music] we're just pieces of our broken [Music] hello oh [Music] here we are face [Music] broken hearts how we stay together is to fall apart [Music] oh animals [Music] is [Music] hey [Applause] [Music] do [Music] do [Music] do [Music] do [Music] [Applause] [Music] do [Music] do [Music] so [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] do [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] do [Music] so [Music] so [Music] do [Music] [Applause] [Music] do [Music] do [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] do [Music] do [Music] do [Music] do [Music] do [Music] do [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] do [Music] do [Music] oh [Applause] [Music] so [Music] do [Music] do [Music]

002do [Music] so [Music] so [Music] so [Music] foreign [Music] so [Music] uh bye yeah [Music] so [Music] yes [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] do [Music] do [Music] do [Music] [Applause] [Music] do [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] foreign [Music] oh [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] this [Music] baby [Music] laughs me [Music] um [Music] i [Music] so [Music] um [Music] let's go there you go yes hmm oh good evening ladies and gentlemen i would like to call to order this meeting of the arlington isd board of trustees on june 17 2021 at 6 56 pm due to health and safety concerns related to the covet 19 coronavirus members of the public are encouraged to participate by watching the school board meeting online at www.aisd.net one or more trustee may participate

003in this meeting via electronic means consistent with the texas opens meetings act and the governor's disaster proclamations related to covet 19 through proclamations executive orders and suspensions of texas law at least a quorum of the board will be participating in person by video conference or telephone conference in accordance with the provisions of sections 551.125 or 551.127 of the texas government code that have been suspended by order of the governor members of the public may access this meeting via aisd website at www.aisd.net the board of trustees on june 17 2021 beginning at 6 57 pm already convened in closed session so i will continue at this time we are reconvening an open session this meeting of the arlington independent school district board of trustees june 17th beginning at 6 57 pm we will start our meeting

004with the opening ceremony please join mr wilbanks in leading us in the pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all you may be seated please silence all cell phones and electronic devices to avoid disruptions to anyone around you and now if you please join me in a moment of silence thank you okay next on our agenda we will consider administrative appointments dr cavazos thank you president mays and tonight i bring for your consideration the ratification of the assistant principal at martin high school is discussed in closed session okay do i have a motion to approve the administrative ratification as discussion is executive session mr wilbanks have a second okay

005i've got a motion by mr wilbanks a second by sarah mcmurran any discussion seeing none please vote uh mr wilbanks just want to confirm there you go thank you so all present have voted in the affirmative and the motion passes thank you president mays the new assistant principal for martin high school is dr gregory cartwright dr cartwright attended texas wesleyan university for bachelor of business administration uh texas wesleyan for a master in management and the university of texas at arlington for his doctorate in public and urban administration most recently he's been an educational technology specialist in fort worth isd but has taught career tech at lamar high school since to 2019 here in arlington isd so congratulations to dr cartwright very good thank you dr cavazos we now come to our open forum for agenda

006items 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 by sending an email to the superintendent of school secretary l b e n j a m i aisd.net no later than 3 p.m the day of the board meeting mrs benjamin do we have any requesters registered to address the board regarding agenda items no ma'am we have no registered speakers this evening thank you mrs benjamin then we will continue on our agenda next is our discussion action item item a consider 2021 2022 preliminary budget dr cavazos thank you president mace and so this evening we continue our uh budget discussion and so as as we have progressed through these months we have been uh analyzing and providing different inputs

007to the budget process and i thanked last week the finance division and i'll thank them again but i also thank our principals and all our division heads and others who have been diligent in working on the development of this budget and so tonight um you uh the board asked us last time to add some things to the budget so you'll see that uh there are some revisions on from that respect and then there's some review slides that we have as well this is again an opportunity for the board to provide direction and guidance as to what ultimately will be up for adoption on tuesday the 22nd when we have our next board meeting and so ms moss has been working through this and has been preparing this budget update so i thank you ms moss

008for that last point i'll make is that the board has received what i would call an abundance of information during this budget process and so i thank you this is this time of year is always challenging from that respect but you received an abundance of information and different ways to look at things including compensation and subs and pay rates and things like that so i just thank you ahead of time for your diligence in reviewing that information and i know you'll have inputs with that tonight so at this point i'll turn it over to ms moss to lead us through this presentation thank you dr fussos um president may's trustees uh again dr cavazos is right we've been working on this for some time now the process actually started the end of last year we

009tried to start in november and working on our next year's budget then we bring in the campuses and different departments in january so we've been doing this work for a while we've come to it come to you with a different information and hopefully tonight we can be brief we're required by law to propose a budget by june 19 and have it adopted by june the 30th we're on track for that as dr vaso stated on the 22nd we will be adopting the budget and having our public hearing so we will be briefed tonight but we'll give you the opportunity to for your feedback to see what we've done and what we propose what we've added into the budget for your consideration again i have my team members here and i would be remiss to not

010thank them again they're the heavy lifters we have our executive director of financial services and our budget director here tonight with us and i appreciate all that they've done we've made lots of changes we've done different scenarios and each time it is a um a heavy lift for them to do that process we're working on streamlining some of those processes but uh um okay there we go you've seen this slide before this is our budget timeline just to keep you up to date with where we are on june the 11th the notice was posted for the public hearing that was scheduled that is scheduled for the 22nd um and tonight we're just updating you on what we're proposing as i said earlier on june the 22nd also we'll be adopting that budget or asking the

011board to adopt that budget so that we're in compliance with all laws uh again this is just a repeat for you it's the budget assumptions it tells you what we've um what we've done to calculate the budget uh they are included in the proposed budget that you will see tonight i will note that the mcr of course will not be final until august we've communicated that with you as well as as to the why we're july july 1 june 30 district so we won't have that information what is included in the budget i will highlight is the maintenance and operations tax rate of 1.0565 again we posted that the current rate in the paper um on the 11th but we will we have budgeted at this rate so this slide you've seen part of this

012slide last week that's first column there uh just shows you or it depicts what we shared with the board on june the 10th in the preliminary budget uh so you should be familiar with that bottom line of 10.1 million in the column next to it highlighted in yellow is what we've adjusted to include what the board asked us to include in the budget that's the stipend the tasby stipend adjustments the new positions an increase in the substitute rate the other difference that you will see there is our team recalculated the revenue template there was a new revenue template that came out earlier this month so we re um calculated that and we saw a little increase in in the revenue on that so all of that is included in what we're presenting to you tonight

013and so uh this slide as well the only change here we've shared this with the board on several occasions the only change tonight is under um priority a we added the health insurance increase and at this time i'm going to pause for any discussion or dr vasil yeah thank you thank you miss moss and so again the the brevity to get to this point seems brief but it has been a heavy lift and so i sincerely appreciate that so as the board can can tell on that on that slide we have kept these priorities front and center and these priorities have been something that we have worked on throughout the entire year we know the the type of year we've had with covet and things like that and so no need to re-emphasize all that

014but just know that it has been challenging and that's why we set these priorities with the board of of our budget and so at this time we we certainly welcome input related to those priorities that have not been included in the budget yet and that we will include upon board discussion for tuesday thank you very much dr cavazos dr reich you press your button one more time thank you oh there we go thank you uh yeah so i wanted to go through a couple of things um you didn't touch it as soon as i said that the light went out like no we don't want to hear from you tonight uh so there's uh there's been a lot of work that has gone into uh what has led us to this point now and uh

015ms moss to you and and your department uh you guys have knocked it out of the park uh keeping these budget priorities is is essential these are these are issues that have come to light uh sometimes they're recurring themes uh year in and year out uh i think there's also some considerations due to this incredible year that we've had as a pandemic year we've seen a lot of a lot of information both in committee and just through communications and i'd like to go through some of these things you know we did ask to have those uh equity adjustments the stipend adjustments the new positions the subpay uh included which i saw is is reflected um i i'd like to just put some thoughts out there for the board's consideration uh now to be considered to

016put into the proposed budget uh moving forward um i'll start off with the uh i guess i'll start off with the the uh percentage increase uh first salary for the raise uh we've seen scenarios and and you've said that uh it's about four million 4.2 million per percent we as a board made a conscious decision last budget cycle to employ a four percent raise and we let out with that ahead of any other district uh we made a commitment to our staff uh to offer uh something that is uh really unprecedented was at the time um given the the data that we have been presented uh with there's been a you know every year most districts seem to go back and forth between uh two and a three and a half percent and we asked

017the voters which they did agree uh to have a uh voter approved uh tax ratification election and we did that with the intent of remaining and excelling and being competitive in compensation it was a really nice thing to be able to say and guarantee to every teacher as an example last year that there's going to be every teacher is going to be receiving at least 2 400 of an increase and it's my opinion that i'd like to be able to say that again which means we would be at a four percent again this year uh based on the data that has been supplied from tasby that would keep us very competitive uh bump us up even a few notches in the different year uh bands of service uh so that's one thing that i'd like

018to put out there as as a consideration is that we go we go bold this is a bold board it always has been uh that we look at four percent uh versus any other other percentage um the reality is these will cause swings in your previous slide uh it will bring us maybe into the negative maybe just a lower net positive i fully believe that after we get even without esser with the valuations and perhaps an enrollment increase which we don't know we're going to be okay and being fiscally prudent has always been number one on my mind and it was very painful in the past year or so to have to approve deficit budgets that i knew weren't going to swing and i i really feel confident that we're okay this year that it's

019going to come back positive so i would say four percent would be my recommendation for consideration the equity adjustments the stipend uh adjustments uh the new positions now equity is something that we are looking at year in and year out we we've we've learned from uh previous times and not really from mistakes but just circumstance of the year that we're not able to make adjustments and all we have done is slip further and further down and it causes more pain moving forward and so i really applaud uh you dr cavazos the whole team and looking at that and and and making sure that we we don't end up in that trap again if we can at all avoid it uh stipends the same thing to make sure that we're actually we are market competitive maintain

020that market competitive i don't have any changes in those at this point nor the new positions um the substitute uh rate increase um that's about a 700 000 or so add in into the budget that's already baked in that we asked last time that is based off of uh median to move our numbers and it would be uh one of the things that has been of interest i know not just to my of myself is that what what what is the difference between that median and that max can can we do more because coming off of this year uh gosh thank you to the subs that that that worked during this pandemic year oh my gosh what a year for anybody uh in this district and other districts um our subs have done remarkable work

021um it's always a recurring theme no matter how much we try to adjust there's always noise it seems to me still on yeah but it's still not the same as other districts and so uh based on the information uh that mr kale has has provided in briefings um it would be good for us my opinion to lead in the market for subs across all areas and i believe that's an additional 1.3 million to be on the top of the market maybe we can have some more discussion around that but that's what i would recommend uh is that we we we don't just shoot for what is uh a tasby recommendation uh to keep us you know middle of the road maybe edged out uh a few but let's lead let's lead in this district let's

022thank our subs and and and structure it so that we get the highest quality subs possible that's what our students deserve and that's what our teachers deserve that are entrusting all their babies with those subs so that that would be another recommendation to go to the top of the market there and then on the health insurance so we we just uh started talking about it last week and we'd actually been in discussions about it longer than that we've got 20 was a number that was proposed to keep us at a higher rate if we look at comparison to other districts uh move us up a few notches um and i'm i'm comfortable doing that uh so i'd put that out there i'm i'm comfortable also we've seen a number at 28 of an increase in

023contribution and that moves us up just a little bit more not significant but i think what that does if we consider that is we don't know what other districts are going to do this is always the you know the magic 8 ball and crystal ball kind of thing that that we all go through and with rates likely overall increasing for all districts there's a chance that there's going to be movement by other districts and so another number was 28 as a consideration and i would lend my thoughts that let's look at at 28 maybe there's even an additional thought on on that per contribution so that if other districts do move and that needle does move we don't have we at a minimum maintain where we are uh and we don't slip and so that'll

024give us a little bit of a cushion there so that's uh i think that's where i i would see uh in in keeping with what we want to do as a board in line with our strategic plan uh recruit retain reward the best let's lead out there uh financially yeah it's always going to be a challenge and if we forecast things out there's there's certainly going to be some tough roads ahead but this year uh coming off of the pandemic year i think it would be great if we can offer these types of things so that's those are my thoughts and i'd open it up for everybody else thank you dr reich do we have any other trustees with comments and or questions mrs mrs fowler thank you mrs mays i do think the four

025percent is is a good number um when i think back on on teachers and and my sister being a teacher in the district of the year year and a half they have faced i don't know i don't know that i could have done it um i teach on the college level but that's totally different than than our teachers in the district and to think that they were also doing face-to-face and virtual at the same time i just can't even imagine that i i was just doing virtual trying to keep up with that so i think the more we can show them how much we appreciate everything that they've done you know thinking about last spring or or of 20 those teachers were kind of thrown into that and there was training but they were trying

026to learn it on their own they were trying to teach their students they were trying to figure it all out and most of them kind of had to do it on their own and a lot of teachers were not that much into computers and trying to figure that out and master that and get all the material loaded i just commend them so much for everything they've done for that year and a half and i think the four percent would let them know how much we appreciate them and um i like the other things that we've talked about too but i think they need to be rewarded for the year and a half that they have stuck it out the progress that they've made helping their students contacting parents and keeping up with all of that

027i just can't imagine the strain that they've been under so i hope that we can consider the the four percent if we could do more i would vote for more but four percent i think would be good thank you thank you mrs fowler mr chappa uh thank you president mays i um having looked at the numbers and the data that's been provided to us over the last several weeks and we took a deep dive into some of the numbers in in finance committee and and as dr kavanaugh said earlier we've had sort of a data dump and i think uh miss moss that the the proposed uh budget the numbers that you've put together definitely make the case that a four percent raise is feasible uh that is something that we did last year uh

028which followed a very strong raise that we did in in 2019 following hb3 uh we have for several years now been in a position to be able to follow through on commitments that we made to not only just maintain our competitiveness but gain ground back because we had taken a dip in our our competitiveness vis-a-vis other districts there for a short while and i i we have made a in the last budget we made a lot of progress on that front and i think a four percent raise would build on that progress sustain uh the position that we we have moved to and keep us in the top ranks of uh districts in the dfw area when it comes to teacher and staff compensation um very encouraged to hear that uh that the four percent

029raise would again result in a minimum of a twenty four hundred dollar raise for teachers across the board and then of course with the equity adjustments uh some folks will get we'll get a little bit more than that to maintain competitiveness and those those especially in those experienced years of teachers who have a lot of tenure with us uh and who have a lot of experience in the classroom it's important that we keep the experienced uh educators around they're they're great value to us and our students i'm i'm very pleased with the stipend adjustments we haven't looked at them uh you know in in a lot of detail but i can it can tell from the study that tasby did it was a really comprehensive study and we have looked at this before and made

030some minor adjustments but this i think with this type of adjustments because they a adopting the tasby recommendations would go a very long way towards restoring the competitiveness of some of our stipends with some especially with respect to some of our positions where we've just fallen out of competitiveness and that's that's something that um you know that we just have to do um on the substitute rate increase i i agree with dr reich and miss fowler um that substitutes uh are so important to our district it's an area where we have struggled uh we look at some data for fill rates uh at across various campuses and i know it was just a snapshot in time um and and kobe threw a lot of that that data off but it is it does seem to

031be the case that that for a large number of our campuses we struggle to get more than 60 or 70 fill rate and at the end of the day you know our job is to focus on students and so when we can't fill um classrooms with substitutes uh the people who are going to suffer the most there are are of course the students but also our staff who are going to be pulled in different directions to try to make ends meet for that day when we can't fill a position so i totally agree with dr reich in the in the sense that i don't think a a modest adjustment along the line to meet market median is going to fix that problem we have tried variable rates of compensation for substitutes depending on campuses before

032and we made some progress with that but it doesn't look like it came anywhere close to solving the problem so i think a as dr duresh said a bold move in that direction to get us towards the top if not the top of the market i would fully support that being included in the proposed budget and i'd further say that to the extent that we can distinguish among substitutes and create a tiered scale between non-degree degree and degree certified substitutes i would be strong in support of that with waiting especially towards the degree certified substitutes who those are the individuals that we know um especially because a good chunk of them seem to be retired teachers uh or people who are formerly teachers that those are probably going to be the best value for us

033to have in the classroom on a day-to-day basis and also have it to where it's not just degree certified getting a boost in pay for the long-term assignments i would be supportive of the degree certified teachers being able to get that increased pay rate even for daily assignments because um it's just not long-term substitutes who provide a value to our students it's you want someone in the classroom on a day-to-day basis even if it's just for one day who can give value to the students and not just go in there and sit and make sure they don't you know tear the classroom apart as a former teacher myself um the health insurance increase i would also uh support going beyond the the previous 20 amount that we looked at i believe that 28 covers the

034increase in premium monthly premiums this year um for the lowest cost uh or the lowest the plan with the lowest increase i would would here love to hear other trustees thoughts on on whether maybe another metric should be used beyond the 28 but i could definitely support uh doing it at least the 28 and i know that you don't have the budget numbers screen up here but i noticed the priority e there i know we can't bank on this the stabilization due to enrollment loss but i i do want to say um miss moss that that you have we have a tradition here of looking at very conservative budget projections um sometimes as has been said that results in a as adopting a budget that looks like we're going to have a deficit but almost

035invariably we end up with a surplus because we are very good at managing our not only our our spending but we're we try to project forward conservatively expecting things to maybe not be as rosy as we would like them to be um so i know from looking at the numbers we've been provided that we've been provided it seems like we could do all of those things and at worst adopt a modest very modest budget deficit but that stabilization due to enrollment loss two things on that my understanding is that the budget projections we've we've looked at have been built on the assumption that we are going to not only not recover any students that were lost during covet we would actually have a very small a few hundred student decrease and so for every student

036that we do get back uh any deficit number that shows in this preliminary projection is going to be reduced and i you know i like to be hopeful in in looking at the pockets of students that it seems like we quote unquote lost this year they tended to be pre-k and kindergarten students who probably the parents kept them home for most of the year and i would expect most of those students to come back so i'm very hopeful that this is sort of a you know i would say worst case scenario budget and even if that doesn't pan out i think it's a very good decision if we and we i understand we've applied for but we don't have formal approval yet which is maybe why it's not going to be included in the budget

037chart that's that's going to be shown but to use some of the esser funds to stabilize our budget while we account for changes in enrollment because last year was such a change we need time to adjust to any permanent enrollment loss and that allows us to do that and that would also um from my understanding uh result in the budget being in a surplus situation when we account for those stabilization funds even if it looks like there's a um a small deficit that would adopt from this so all of which is to say i think this is a year where we have because of smart decisions that we've made in the past the ability to make a bold statement on compensation and staff support and i think this is the right time to do it

038we did run um to put a tre on the ballot in the fall that was built around the idea of paying our teachers put out quite a few of those signs uh ourselves uh and and we made that commitment and this is us i think the the budget incorporating the things that we have discussed so far if my colleagues agree would go to a long way towards fulfilling that commitment and um those are my thoughts at this time look forward to hearing other comments thank you mr chapa mrs mcmurra okay so last time we talked about the possibility of a substitute rate increase which was good but considering a substitute race rate increase to where it would be top of the market is great um realistically we share subs with neighboring districts i know a

039lot of i mean i myself as a teacher you know would have a substitute who would have to choose you know pick up a job in this district or should i do aisd today so i think that's key um it's not just what they deserve but it will also help us address problems you know with retaining subs and not having hopefully not having them drop those jobs last minute so i think that that's that's huge i mean i'm in great support of that i'm particularly hopeful that we can incentivize this to attract our degreed certified substitutes it was said earlier that this is the caliber of person that we want in charge if the classroom teacher can't be there and i'm really hopeful that we can pursue particularly incentivizing sub-jobs for them i'm really hopeful

040moving on to the health insurance increase that we could contribute twenty eight dollars a month rather than twenty every little bit counts um and this is a step in the right direction and we we definitely need to address it and most importantly i wholeheartedly agree with a four percent race and there's so much to consider when when thinking about budgets there's so many moving parts but it's not just about staying competitive with neighboring districts it's about our people it's it's about our teachers and staff and what they've endured as miss fowler said um this past year and not only were our teachers you know teaching virtual and a person at the same time making hybrid look easy but they they were putting their health on the line and you know that's that's their level of

041dedication they're doing all of this for our kids and so i say if we can do four percent we must do four percent let's do it um the most important thing going on in our district every day is what's going on in those classrooms so i'm really pleased um to hear this and i hope that we can do four percent thank you miss mcmurray mr wilbanks thank you president mays and um i agree with my colleagues um we passed a tre and with the promises my colleague justin choppa pointed out that it would go to pay the teachers and i know we gave a four percent which was a raise last year which was out of the ordinary but there were circumstances that require that to make us competitive which we as the board have

042been consistent in our messaging on that we need to pay be competitive on our salaries the most important resource in terms of moving the needle in terms of student outcomes is the quality of teacher in that classroom and the fact remains we're in a very competitive market for those and that very tight resource if you would have asked me if we would have the luxury um a year ago to give another four percent raise i would have thought you were crazy uh but the way the cards felt uh fell from our budget and looking at the surpluses um added with the tre and the fact now that we've had a chance to see what that effect um i agree with my colleagues i i think a number of districts around us have given um retention

043bonuses and hardship bonuses because this was an extremely tough year for teachers as miss fowler pointed out they were kind of uh flying the plane as they were building it um and not only that it was a huge amount of time i had teachers tell me they got up at six put together their plans and they were staying up doing videos or doing outreach to students well past midnight so they were operating a lot of limited sleep they went way above and beyond and for right or wrong you know it's not been our culture here to give bonuses when we feel that um a one-time bonus uh is just that one time when when we could have the opportunity to build that into a raise instead which would help go towards the pension um i

044come from a culture that's a little bit different and views those as two separate things but i get it um and since we do have the opportunity um in lieu of maybe some of the bonuses um and we can afford it then definitely four percent um so i'm i'm all for the four four percent um you know the other issues is when you look at um where we are in a very good position financially right now stipends is something we've kicked that can down the road um a long time and we've fallen out of being market competitive there i think um i think want to thank caspy for coming in kind of analyzing that they made a lot of great suggestions and i think the proposal from the finance team to bring those back in

045line sometimes go above market is totally called for now of any year it has to be this year um and the same thing with substitute pay um our phil rate you know my colleagues have already talked about that at length and again we have that the issue there is not just competing with substitutes and other educational resources we're really competing with a broad labor market in the area and if you've driven down cooper street or anywhere there's help wanted ever no one can fill those jobs so what's that causing it's causing that minimum wage in those hourly rates to go up um to where we're now looking at 15 is the effective minimum wage in the in the area so i know substitutes are paid on a day rate but essentially you know when someone

046could instead of substitute teach you could go and get a teller job somewhere and make more money that's going to have a deleterious effect on our ability to recruit substitute teachers and i would even pause it not now but it's something i'd want us to do in our finance committee is take a deeper dive and look at all of our hourly uh pay rates and where they are competitive given this new reality of the labor market especially for hourly employees so i'd like that to be an action i don't think that's something i would want you necessarily to come back because unlike contracted employees that's something we can look at at any time and when there's a need come back and fill it and that's something i'd like to take a deep dive and really

047look to see you know gauge just how big the gap is and what the need is there if any but something i feel it's important we do need to look at [Music] but in terms of our substitute pay i think the proposal set forth putting us top of market i mean is absolutely i mean if we're gonna have any prayer given where the trends are in the labor market we have to take a bold action and this is a bold action i think that's going to help prevent problems later on and also given the fact that the theme going forward is recovery and what we don't want is stress on that tier one instruction in the classroom because teachers are having to cover two classrooms and are stressed because we're not feeling the right it's

048imperative that we have all hands on deck for the learning loss recovery that needs to happen so um kudos to the team and mr cal and your group for coming in and putting a bold uh proposal in front of us and i think that's something absolutely has to happen um and um with that i think you know i've covered i think we've covered all everything the stipends substitute pay healthcare um i think in finance what was the information that we were given was that the the minimum cost increase the lowest cost increase for one of our health care plans was 28 uh 28 dollars so that's we looked at 20 and a proposal uh for 28 but you know i think the reality i'll defer to my colleague mr hogg who you know i think

049we all come we all have our superpowers each one of us on this board and that is definitely mr hogg's super power so i'm gonna uh end by turning it over to him and and um i'll defer to him on his opinion but i think since most employees are in the plan where that a 31 dollar increase occurred on that that's what we should be looking at possibly so i'd like to see what that looks at and be curious what my colleague mr hogg thinks on that and with that i'll turn over the mic thank you mr world banks unfortunately mr hogg would like to speak mr hogg i'm just glad i found out my super power um i'll take it uh first off miss mawson team i know this was y'all's first full budget

050as an organizat as a group together with change in our finance department and i appreciate it i think you'll run a really tight budget cycle um i haven't heard a lot of complaining from all the departments so that's a good thing right we're going and uh i think it's it's pretty nice when a a board can sit up here and talk about some of these extras and things we have to do to be able to help our employees so i appreciate y'all's hard work on this because listen y'all are a new team working all together and getting through it and it's you know we talk about budget all the time it just seems like we talk about it these couple of weeks um the budget's a living breathing document it's something that's constantly going we

051have budget changes we have budget amendments and we have to work through a budget the entire year you guys are putting together predictive budgets the entire year and we're going so i really appreciate y'all's work um i also appreciate my colleagues and you'll hear me talk about it all the time of total compensation sometimes you get pitch and hold in one piece of compensation and we have some surrounding districts that focus just on salary good strategy it's fine it's that's their strategy um you know they add more kids to the classroom they keep their health insurance costs low they do some other things and they that's their strategy and that's that's okay that's a good strategy i appreciate this board in this district looking at total compensation from where we're going and you've heard my

052colleagues and i won't reiterate a lot of it but the talk of total compensation i'll be honest i came in planning couple you know start a budget cycle with us thinking three and a half percent is where we're gonna go but as we looked at numbers the four percent makes sense just plain and simple um from where it comes mr choppy you said it and some others um you know we had to get there because this is about student outcomes and the really true way to change student outcomes is our teachers in the classrooms um and we have to focus on student outcomes and to focus on student outcomes it's what are we doing on our campuses every single day and while central office maintenance they may not be on that campus every day they're

053affecting that campus every single day across the board and so i think as we look at total compensation i think the four percent is a total thing on the same note we have to be cautious of our spend we've had enrollment drops we've had declines do i think we'll have some enrollment increase yes um do we have a good way of adjusting that and do we build that yes i would also ask you know as as we start moving forward of the fund balance what are we allocating that fund balance for um you know and listen there's always flex on the allocation but we do need to have very guided plans in our fund balance from where it's going as we expand our pre-k what's our three-year funding mechanism in that what is our funding

054mechanism in that fund balance is it 10 15 to adjust for enrollment discrepancies um which we have a flexible enrollment right now it's it's hard it's probably the hardest we've ever had to predict enrollment just being fully honest um you know luckily we have a fund balance because no one would have predicted what we had with the pandemic coming up and so i think as we allocate some of those things to assure that we're making a commitment investment in pre-k and that it doesn't come back and say well now we can't follow through three years from now that's where we need to allocate and so i just say as we move forward in the budget i think that's a plan to show here's where we're looking to project on this fund balance and show some

055of these things in the fund balance to get to that um a camera rich colleague as you all said good things mr kale in our subway we have to do it especially i appreciate the look on our certified degreed and that's kind of going into teachers that are either staying home with their kids and they want to sub a couple of days a week or retired teachers that are coming home they're coming back and saying okay i'll go i'll go help my friends out the teachers that i know it's important because each day you don't have a highly qualified sub we talk about highly qualified teachers each day you don't have a highly qualified sub that's a lost day of learning for that young man or woman and we've all been in classrooms either as

056an educator or student where you're like oh look at the sub we got today this is total chaos in this classroom and so um there's a trait that a certified teacher has so i think the more we can do that the better um mr kale i also ask us as we increase this subpay and we talk about being flexible we have to be flexible on what this pay is and if we need to make budget adjustments coming in the future we need to make those adjustments because um i my colleagues know i hate choosing just arbitrary numbers right like pick a number out of the pie this guy and that's what we're going to go with um and there's a little bit of i feel like we've done that i think we justified it by

057saying we're going to be at the top of the market and so that's how we've chosen that number but which i want us to really track how we're increasing fill rate but also increasing with certified degree teachers um is what we need to be tracking on if we're at the top of the market we'd better be top of the market on certified degree teachers in there because because otherwise it's not doing what we hope it does if our fill rate hasn't gone from you know i think we averaged 97 in the 90s somewhere across the board if we're not increasing a couple of points then we need to adjust that if the friday incentive pay is not helping us get to where we need to be on our friday rates which fridays can drop at

058the high schools to 70 or so then we need to adjust that we have to make those adjustments because you hear the stories of other teachers having to cover classrooms a piece covering classrooms all day from those things so i just i'm glad we're doing it because i think it gets a lot of our certified degree teachers that would sub and now maybe it's an extra incentive to get them to come in because a lot of them don't want us up every day they're like i'll serve a couple of days a week but i don't want to come back every day there's a reason i retired i get it i get it like i fully get it but if i can get you to come in for a day or two i know how valuable

059you are to that classroom you'll mention the stipends um which i fully agree with an equity adjustment listen we we got behind like just plain and simple from where it is all these things come up and then we get into health insurance which y'all know y'all probably heard me everyone's tired of hearing me talk about that but it's a big deal it's especially a big deal those that have no other option right and if we don't do the right things on that we're almost penalizing a group and they can say well we're putting this out well also there's insurance advantages to having it go to your insurance on that side um there's also you're penalizing people that sometimes don't have another option of where they want to go and what they want to do so

060mr kell let me ask a question which plan is it active care primary active phd or active care primary plus that we have the most participants in and i'm saying across employee online police spouse employee children employee family i think it's is it hd or primary it's active care hd with about fifty point one percent mr hogg so fifteen point one percent five zero point one five zero so over fifty percent of our employees and that is our that's it's funny that's actually not our lowest premium from where it is and it's the second lowest premium so if you look at what's our lowest premium which is you have to assume employee only in our lowest premiums active care primary and that premium has gone from 386 to 417 which is a 31 dollar increase

061mr kale we both work in this industry a lot of times people choose that lowest premium because that's all they can afford correct right that's what happens yes it's just a reality from where it is if you look at activecare hd not only do they have an increase for fifty percent of our employees you also have employees there's a two hundred the debt the deductible rose by two hundred dollars for individuals and four hundred dollars for families then you start looking at the numbers the co-insurance rate rose from twenty to thirty percent that they have to cover the out of network went from forty to fifty and out of out of pocket out in mac out of pocket max went up i would sit there and say they're trying to push people out of the

062hd plan is what trs is looking at would you agree that's probably the right attitude there's probably a sway toward the primary plus plan which is a managed care plan which is which is a managed care i fully agree with that but if i look at that and i and listen i can't believe i'm spending this much time talking about three dollars on this but i would look at my colleagues and say i think we go 50 of our employees are in active care primary we increase this by 31 is the number i think i would unless my colleagues disagree go with it and i've spent too long talking about three dollars right but it gets there but i think it also gets us to mr kale of over 50 percent and listen we're not

063even talking about and i think we've got to take a look you know the group i worry about the most is those that have their employee and families on the plan because those plans have gone up if you count them across the board 104 dollars 107.87 that doesn't sound that bad until you look at the number and it's like oh hey you're on fifty percent of people are on active care primary if you have your family on there it's fourteen hundred dollars that that's that's i would consider that i'm not asking you for that exact number right now but i bet it's pretty low on how many we have enrolled why because it's unlivable wages that's what it is there it's not in part this is state state only contributes 75 dollars requires us to

064contribute 150 on that minimum and so i think we've got to take a deeper look and i say it but okay i know i can't cover that 104 adjustment on there but i think we go with active care primary the 31 dollar is the employee only which is not terrible insurance it's okay and blue cross blue they've done a good job our trs active care folks with through all your work mr kale and advocacy and if we all remember we fought pretty hard to be able to look and get out there and started that relationship off pretty uh pretty aggressive i think we could say and say we're looking for some change and they've made some change so i appreciate katrina and the trs active care team for what they've done so i would pros

065a 31 but i would also propose and mr kale as the legislature came through and we hear from our friend in the back and our friends in the back to talk about legislative changes we have the option to potentially bid out i would look at this board and our staff and say i hope we take full advantage and take the full analysis to look at potentially bidding out and it may not be the right option it may not be the best plan for us to leave but if we don't take a full advantage and take that look i think we're missing a huge opportunity for us to get there and by us having another bump in this insurance it also makes that if we do make the change it may be a little less of

066a bite for us to make that change and come back with an adjustment for the next year for what we're trying to do so unless my colleagues disagree i would ask staff to put it and say i think i heard everyone say 28 i don't think anyone's gonna fight um a little another bump on where we're going um to get to that but otherwise um there's my superpower mr wilbanks you know listen i'll talk about insurance until the day i'm done up here because um i hear the stories from our security guards and i ask them and i say you don't have to tell me if you don't want to do you have your family on the plane they're like no i go your kids uninsured i go yeah and that's the reality so um

067and mr kell you've worked so hard and i don't think the staff in this district knows how much you fight for them on these type of things and so i truly appreciate your work but i think there's more to be done yeah i agree and there's a lot more to be done we have to be cautious over our budget but we also have to be cautious because our strategy is not just to dump it all in the salary our strategy and i think i've heard everyone up here is total compensation is what we're going through so let's let's look at all the different pieces and the reality is 60 are still on our insurance so i i'm glad we're pushing towards that and my colleagues agree with that and i'll leave it at that and

068then miss miss space thank you thank you very much mr hogg thank you mr cal um i guess i will finalize this by saying appreciate the discussion um that we've had here with our colleagues bowie completely agree there's no numbers pulled out of a hat because as you've stated this is something that's been worked on since november this is something that continues to manifest until we vote i mean till the very last minute um i am very proud that we've set priorities and priorities that reflect things that are important to our staff i'm here in the district ms boss thank you so much for you and your staff thank you for accepting input thank you for answering our questions um and from what i've heard from all of my colleagues up here is that the

069main thing that we're really focused on is one that our students succeed and understanding what's going to help them succeed and when we have an opportunity and honestly i will say pre-covid covet now post-covered teachers and staff have always deserved more because they work hard every year yes we had an odd year where things were having to be done even more than normal but everybody our staff works hard every single day and all of that impacts the success of our students so once again thank you very much thank you for this discussion to my colleagues up here and june 22nd i don't know if y'all are marking days off your calendar but it's coming very soon so thank you very much to you and to your team and to everyone else who is working in

070the background to make sure that we get this budget as we try every year as right as possible to reflect our goals our strategic planning of having successful students and a happy staff of 8 000 employees um to the best that we can do so thank you once again really appreciate it thank you and thanks for all the comments dr apostles did you thank you president mason thank you miss moss so uh we'll go for a couple more slides we know we are going to make those adjustments as the board has uh has uh as at their input uh but this next slide shows uh the proposed and we'll go through that with the adjustments coming back on the 22nd that you all talked about and we'll show the other budgets too so keep going

071this month okay and so before i i just want to make a couple of comments before i go forward just based on uh the conversation uh from the board uh one uh uh comment is i think we're headed in the right direction uh and i'm looking back to make sure my team is still here we're going to have to make some more adjustments and that's going to take some time for them to do that uh but we'll get the budget of pros uh proposed and adopted on the 22nd um the second thing is i didn't want to bring up that you know we're looking at the impact um you know of the teachers of the pandemic on our teachers over this past year uh we've also had an impact on our taxpayers as well so

072i just want to take an opportunity to bring up the fact that we are looking at decreasing that tax rate by three cents and our budget reflects that as well the third point is i think it was mr chapa who mentioned that we've been conservative in the past we haven't left that we are still conservative in how we budget we have some opportunities here the team and i have identified we know the work that we need to do we have the s or two dollars and and we'll talk about that on this next slide but we're not depending on just the just the s or two dollars we're going to use those for our benefit over the next three years but we're going to plan the general operating budget and forecast out so that we

073know where we should be as far as staffing and position management that type thing so just wanted to assure you that okay so this slide is what we had proposed with the items on the right there included so 10.8 million is the deficit based on those new calculations and what we added from the board it includes the four percent midpoint increase the tasby adjustments that you spoke of tasby stipend adjustments the new positions substitute rate and health insurance so that's those last two items um i think you're asking for us to do a little bit more than what we've calculated in this amount um my quick estimate is that's going to be possibly 1.5 to 2 million dollars so if we'll say we'll round it to 2 million dollars that number would then be a

074deficit of 12 million so i'll go to the next slide and show you all of our budgets so again general operating that 10.8 would then be 12 million um i want to add that again the ester dollars that we use to stabilize our enrollment would go towards that now when you adopt the budget it's going going to be a deficit amount of about 12 million or so um and please don't quote me on that we've got to do the calculations and the math so it may be different but that's what we will propose for you to adopt on tuesday it will be somewhere in that neighborhood with the new new items that you've added we had a small adjustment to the food service budget i think when we um shared it out last week it

075was at about a 400 million deficit we've done some calculations out of the four percent in there and and that uh is now a 167 thousand dollar deficit and just a small change to the construction fund the others are the same as it was when we proposed them last week any other questions i think we got all of our questions okay thank you once again thank you okay that is business at hand so our next discussion action item dr cavazos thank you president mason tonight we bring one more update on esser planning and funding and so tonight this is also a disc discussion action item uh it provides a little bit more detail as we refine the plan of what these items would be for esser funding so this time i'll ask dr works to

076lead us through that presentation all right good evening president mays members of the board dr cavazos i'm here this evening to share with you an update on our plans for sr 3 and to share with you a little bit about where we intend to place some of the funding in terms of buckets of where those funds will go i thought i would just start off by orienting everyone to the two dollar amounts that we're receiving in in esser i'll address sr2 a little bit at the end of the presentation but sr2 is primarily designated to assist with stabilization of enrollment and that is a little bit close to 60 million 59.9 million dollars 45 million will be attached towards that stabilization and then sr3 is a little over 134 million dollars and this money is

077designated primarily to work on gap closure there are i know you've seen these slides multiple times and i only keep including them again and again is because i know that we have different audience members that tend to watch the the different meetings so i'll kind of go through these quickly but in essence we have specific requirements surrounding the the use of sr3 funding and there is one specific requirement that states that 20 of the monies must be designated to work on use towards evidence-based interventions to help with gap closure and specifically towards programs that uh serve students who are part of the title one part a homeless or youth in foster care and this money can be used in programs that take place during the school day it can also be part of extended school

078year or extended day there are four main areas i've talked about the last few meetings specifically that we're trying to address in terms of use of esser funds i've i've spoken about gap closure of course and then working towards helping to provide resources for students and families who are struggling with social and emotional well-being and doing that in an equitable way to make sure that our students have equal access to resources so they can all come to an equal playing field in terms of getting their needs met we do we've tried to do all this with this concept around sustainability in mind meaning we are very aware that this is an infusion of funding and that it will have a termination or an end date and so we want to use the money to really

079build capacity in the system to serve our students and our families knowing that there will be a time when that funding will no longer be available there are six primary guiding principles that we've thought about as we've kind of approached our work in terms of planning for the use of the money to address these four areas when it comes to gap closure really trying to focus on the rigor of instruction and make sure that we focus on the depth and not necessarily the pace so we want to make sure that we give teachers and staff the flexibility to meet students needs based upon where they are focus on current grade level content standards while filling gaps that might have been generated from prior this prior year we also want to prioritize which portions of the

080the curriculum or standards specifically really need to be elevated that have what i call are considered big rocks things that students really must know and understand and master in order to be successful in the in the next course so we want to elevate those in the curriculum for staff and we want to make sure that we're addressing all of our learners and not focusing primarily on just the results of a single standardized test we've talked a lot about that over the years in terms of star there's valuable information in the star but it isn't one test given on one day and it doesn't necessarily articulate the full needs of a student and then finally uh in arlington with our learner framework we're focused on relevant learning making sure that students have access to learning that

081has some meaning to their personal life and while the pandemic was not necessarily positive it is a common experience that we've all had together and there are things you can leverage in that experience to learn and so we intend to do that when it comes to sustainability we really focus our efforts around these six primary questions one does the investment that we're thinking about actually address not only short-term but long-term needs and does it is it aligned to the strategic plan and the goals and vision that you as a board have set what what we how did how do we make sure that the way that we implement our strategies we do it in a way that's um not only effective but that it's equitable across the system and that we have some sense that

082those evidence that those strategies will in fact be successful if implemented with fidelity and then finally how do we leverage these things to build on things we've already started so what we didn't want to do in our plan is just take a sharp right turn and wipe everything out and start all over with staff we do believe that we are focused on research-based practices to begin with and we want to leverage the money to accelerate that process with our staff and measure our success along the way so these are the primary targets that we will be leveraging over the course of the next three to five years to really track our progress i call them um i call them uh what do we call that when we go to the doctor's office i said that

083earlier today our vitals yes thank you i'm having a moment our vital signs um i i call them our vitals because as a doctor checks your vitals to make sure that you are basically healthy if there's something wrong with one of your vital signs they tend to go a little deeper these are serving as our vitals over the next several years so we can check to make sure students are not only on track to graduate high school but that they're actually college and career ready and to and and ready to go into a post-secondary education environment should they choose to do so there are several categories that we have been thinking about in our planning process and so i wanted to highlight these the major overarching big three categories that esser funds are used primarily

084for really fall into three major buckets one is the safe reopening of schools one is to enhance services that are already in the system and another is to address needs that were in existence prior to the kova 19 crisis within those three buckets we prioritize or stratified our work into the three categories that are part of the current strategic plan or areas of focus within the system which are the learner experience the leadership development work that we've been doing and our process around equity and then to narrow that even further there are specific buckets to which these these funding sources will be allocated and i will share a proposed amount for each of these tonight one is around instructional support one's around extended day and summer programming mental health behavioral support professional learning technology and

085then our infrastructure by infrastructure we're not only talking about buildings but also around core staffing that needs to happen in order to make those things function as required we have solicit feedback from our stakeholders to help inform ourselves about not only what we believe our data is telling us we need to find some areas of focus but what do our constituents also believe is important there are specific groups of people that we're required to solicit feedback from and so anybody who is a student that anybody who works with a student or has a student who falls in any one of these categories where we are asked to solicit their feedback and we have received feedback from family members and community members and our teachers or students from each of these groups we also solicit feedback

086within our system we solicited from across departmental teams across the district principals teachers we presented to the financial futures committee and got feedback from that group which consists of not only staff members but also community and parents we did a stakeholder survey among parents community staff and students and had over 4 300 respondents and we also presented the chamber of commerce and collected feedback from them actually this afternoon and those will be unfolded into our our analysis this is a draft of our current proposed budget in terms of buckets i want to emphasize that this is draft and it functions very much like a district improvement plan those dollar amounts may shift and change over time as we assess our process and decide that some strategies we may want to do some may have to

087actually be discontinued but this is where we're kind of starting each one of these things are all these bucket amounts are aligned to those strategies or those areas that you'll notice in the smallest circle on the left hand side so without going through each number individually you can see the range this it doesn't go in any specific order um but instructional support a little over 33 million dollars for extended day or summer program about 26 million um there's a little over 12 million for mental health and behavioral support and then it works its way down into infrastructure one what i would like to do now is just kind of go through each one of those to give you just a general sense about what some of the strategies are that are the focus areas within

088those buckets are and where that money might be allotted the other important point to note is that whilst there may be some staff that maybe need to be hired to accomplish some of these goals the funding attached to those staff member positions are embedded in these dollars so the first one is instructional support primarily the instructional support strategies focus around a couple of things and these are intended to give you just a general idea one is extending providing additional funding to allow for additional plc time at the elementary level we don't really have that at elementary it's very difficult because of the time constraints connected to all of the standards that have to be taught whereas in secondary is built into a blocked schedule funding is being set aside to make that possible for plc's

089also monies set aside for prioritizing standards with the curriculum purchasing and building up more curricular resources and lesson exemplars within our system on curriculum central really adding more resources to our libraries to increase circulation we have some inequities across our system within libraries um and so we are going to be getting we're trying to bring ourselves up to what the state calls a proficient rate in terms of the number of dollars per student that you would actually attach to a school for library services increased access to avid course work increase access to p-tech programming across the system increased access to dyslexia support we have about 15 different sites that still need access to the new mta program and so this will provide support around that and then of course work around special populations and what

090typically is called rti uh yeah rti but really now we're moving more towards a multi-tiered system of support which looks at interventions for students on the behavioral side as well as the academic side for extended day and summer programming this funding will be used primarily for exactly that extended day and programming after school we will be working with mr perales department to collaborate with community based resources in our community to provide extended day services to our families we'll also be maintaining an elevated uh summer program this year is probably the well it is by far the largest summer program we've had um for as long as i can remember it's more than quadrupled and so our goal is to maintain high level of summer programming so that we can use that summer time to help

091continue to close gaps that might be perpetuated as years go on and then we are establishing this year for the first time summer bridge programs which we intend to continue for algebra one and english one so students who are in eighth grade that are transitioning to the to the ninth grade um algebra one and english one bridge programs are intended to provide them with advanced access to some of that coursework so that they are ready when they hit ninth grade and then finally of course building upon our partnerships um that we have in the community for behavioral support and mental health maintaining our culture of care clinic that we've established and adding to 20 additional therapists over the course of next school year we have been working on our social emotional framework and specifically the

092standards connected to the the instruction we want to provide um students in the classrooms uh elementary and junior high are finished we still need to work on high school next year and then those will be embedded we also want to increase the access to restorative practices specifically at the secondary level and then social work and behavioral supports there are needs for more of that across our system and so we would leverage this funding to make that available and then have more access to our counselors in terms of trying to alleviate some of the um focus on distribution of testing and more focus on the guidance and counseling portion of their work for professional learning our focus is primarily around math and literacy those are the two building blocks that really found the are the foundation

093of pretty much every content area so we will be leveraging a chunk of this funding to really focus on coaching best practices coaching we have 12 research-based best practices that we focus on in our system our goal over the next three years is to elevate four of those best practices and help all teachers actually reach a level of proficiency in those areas we will be accelerating our work on our math and literacy plans paying for our and completing our work around the reading academies which are required by law that focus around early childhood literacy in the science of reading we will be expanding our leadership development process that we've been working on for many years around holdsworth which has been very great for the system or very productive and then of course providing executive coaching

094to our leadership at the schools as they implement these things here in the classroom for technology we would like to update some of our data systems to provide our teams with access to data that's visualized in a way that can be consumed more meaningfully we are looking at screeners specifically math screener for possibility in the in the next coming years right now we use a we have a math screener we're looking for one that actually provides a little more granular data so we can understand a little bit better about where kids gaps may be and then updating some of our instructional software and when i say instructional software that's a very broad term really around resources like quiz like gizmos and other things that we have in the system that are actually resources within the

095curriculum that teachers can access to use to to provide instruction and then finally the last one is infrastructure and our primary objective and most of the funding that you're noticing in this column is really about pre-k expansion um there is approximately 25 million dollars set aside for facility updates that will be required possibly um for pre-k expansion which would include either classrooms and or any bathrooms that might need to be added i have to emphasize that this is a very um this is a rough estimate about what that cost may be we're still in the process of analyzing that but that's what about 25 million is set aside for including costs for the additional teachers that would need to be added in order to make pre-k available to all four-year-olds within the community there's also

096some funding set aside for transportation and for some of the um the positions that need to be put in place to help like a foreman and a router to help distribute where the buses need to go in order to facilitate some of the students access to our specialized programs with all this one of the things we've talked about the very beginning was that it was important that we looked at this from an equity standpoint to ensure that campuses with the greatest need received a specific set of services and and resources and that it wasn't just a one-size-fits-all and so dr brown has been working with her department to really establish a tiered system that would allow us to look at schools based on those tiers and to distribute resources that would allow everyone to kind

097of come to the come to the field at equal unequal footing so what you'll see on the right hand side of the screen are baseline support so there are specific supports that all elementary campuses and secondary campuses will have in common so for example in elementary you'll notice that we will our goal is to ensure that all elementary campuses including those that are not title because the planting is not an issue in this with esser will have at least an instructional coach we'll have at least um a i'm trying to read here a teacher's assistants to help assist with the plc's and then also testing facilitators to help us as i was mentioning earlier allow help us to allow counselors to dedicate their time focusing on counseling and then of course um every campus will

098engage in coaching specifically around the best practices connected to reading and mathematics and we receive either seven to nine touch points over the course of the of the school year secondary you're also going to notice very similar things they'll also receive the coaching and the coaches and they'll receive the testing facilitators which you're going to notice that's a little bit different on secondary versus elementary is the restorative practices specialist so a person that will really help the campuses at the secondary level integrate restorative practices and behavioral supports on their campuses and then finally last one of the things we've talked about is if you're going to add resources to campuses there needs to be structures at the district level to support those positions to make sure they're successful so you'll see on the bottom there

099are some central office supports that will be accessible to campuses to help them in their process so behavior specialists we'll have instructional facilitators that will be housed out of dr brown's office that will really be assisting teachers and leaders in terms of their implementation of the curriculum in their in the actual schools best practices coaching supports from the district level to help teachers as they um implement the mtss system that's going to be new and then also of course any curricular resources and specialized support that campuses may need those are the baseline so what i basically am trying to say is that's something that will be in common across the district regardless of which school you're at but we also know that there are different schools that have a need of even more assistance so

100the way schools are basically stratified right now are they're stratified into three categories one is called basic one is essential one is targeted basic in a general sense are schools that are performing fairly well um they may have a leader that's been in place for a significant amount of time there's a positive culture at the school there's lots of it'd be a very general um functioning school and academically is performing schools that find themselves in that category will have access to additional funding but not necessarily more people beyond the baseline unless they have extra title money or things within their own system that they could leverage to to fund and in if you're a basic school we're proposing is that you would have access to 30 000 additional dollars to fund additional resources or needs

101that you may have to close gaps at your school if you're an essential school what we would say is that you have access to a menu of options in terms of people that you can select one one additional position beyond the baseline to assist you based on your individual needs so while every school may have an instructional coach a principal may decide that they have a have a challenge in both reading and math and they want to separate those two focus areas for the coaches so they can spend more time in the classrooms around that and so a principal may say i actually want to hire another additional coach and i want this person to be focused on reading and this other person to be focused on math that would be an option other options

102that are on that menu could include a restorative practices specialist a student support interventionist so if they if the principal is deciding that they really need more people to work with students in small groups to close gaps they could hire a person for that um class size reduction teachers teachers assistants the list is uh is there and it's designed for principals to have some autonomy and flexibility to look into their own expertise and know the situation at their own school to make a decision under the direction of the assistant superintendent that's working with them and the executive directors if if they are essential they'll be we're inviting them to select one of these menu items and also have access to about seventy five hundred dollars of additional funding sources now the initial question is why

103would you only give seventy five hundred dollars to essential and thirty thousand dollars to basic and really what you have to think about is an fte is dollars so the average teacher costs about sixty two thousand six hundred dollars as a baseline pay and so if you add that plus the 7 500 it's almost double the amount that a basic school would actually receive targeted which is the most of those campuses that are in the ssn network which are those of greatest need have access to the most so they would receive access not only to one of these items in terms of personnel on the list but they would also have access to receiving 15 000 additional dollars on top there of their money so i this is an important component to our plan because

104it was very it was for us it was it was a priority to make sure that there was some equitable way to distribute resources to make sure that there was an equal playing field and that people who students who are attending schools that really needed additional resources had access to those things at the same time recognizing that if you came from a school that was populated by more and more fluent student population doesn't necessarily mean that you don't need for example coaching or other things so esser gave us a unique opportunity to not worry about supplanting which was something we really wanted to take advantage of the last part i wanted to focus on this evening is just sr2 and just emphasize sr2 is a completely different funding bucket so to speak um it is

105close like i said to 60 million dollars about 45 million of that will be focused primarily on enrollment stabilization that has taken place over the course of of coven and so administration is recommending that the board approve the esr plans as i presented them this evening any questions thank you very much dr works mrs fowler thank you president mays [Music] i'm dr wurtz i wanted to ask on the page where you had it tiered yes i wanted to ask why uh the restorative practices specialist is only for secondary and not at the elementary level restorative practices are primarily we the issue is really right now that we need this additional assistance is at the secondary level we have been there we have lots of supports that are being available at the elementary level and many

106of the schools are already using restorative practices but the focus right now is really at the secondaries where that's missing and so dr brown made the recommendation that we really add that to secondary to help support that all right thank you thank you mrs fowler miss mcmarra thank you so much i could tell how much work and thought has been poured into this i was curious um if there were any big findings with the esser survey were there any were there any pivotal you know um changes or were there any big you know trends that you noticed i can yeah i can share with you some of the trends they were not really different than what we as a staff had already predicted um they they did tend to be a little different based on

107who you were actually speaking to and there were some so i can give you some examples so for example um when it came to the three most important priorities it came out to curriculum support specifically around english language arts and mathematics additional support for reading and writing and then behavioral intervention and then when it came down to which which three supports were primarily the focus for mental health or emotional well-being it was lessons more lessons for teachers or for counselors to use with students parents support and helping their own children who are struggling from mental or emotional issues such as anxiety or depression and then more opportunities to receive individual counseling and the good thing for us is these things were already already embedded into our plan there were some distinctions in some of the

108groups for example if you were a student that attended jj aep um that small group tended to uh they didn't necessarily articulate a need around behavioral interventions they may have chosen something else um when it came to technology it was really around technology hardware like such as laptops wi-fi and infrastructure um let me see one other one i wanted to tell you most of the parents were aligned with campus staff community members and district staff but more parents selected school tutoring as a priority in need over a behavioral intervention if you ask staff or community behavioral interventions were elevated as i'd need one of the top three if you stratified it out by parents parents would suggest that tutoring was needed more than behavioral supports that was probably the biggest one difference and then students

109they were asking specifically this at the high school level were specifically asking for more curricular support and after school tutoring and more opportunities for high school credit recovery if you pulled this the high school students out which were the majority of our survey takers that was something that was a little bit unique and different but other than that it pretty much fell right where we anticipated it to be and they were pretty aligned with each other in terms of the different groups about what they were looking for that's good um can we go back to the slide about instructional support that's good that our plan was aligned with with um you know a lot of our trends and our survey um the dyslexia support can you elaborate a little bit on that because i know

110you know that our our dyslexia screeners are you know we're trying to identify so that we can put the proper interventions in place to meet our students at the elementary level so that they can be successful the whole rest of their school career and i know that this is not a district-wide or even a statewide issue but screening for dyslexia you know i feel and i think it's a growing trend unfortunately i think a lot of kids fall through this the crack so i'm curious to know what our plans are specifically for dyslexia support so dyslexia we have we are phasing out one specific program for dyslexia and we have implemented a new one in the last few years at the elementary level the challenge was is it's it's based at each elementary school and

111so students who are at a school where it was not offered we always gave them the opportunity to transfer to school or was offered but the problem is is that because of the problem you're describing which is many many more students are being identified with dyslexia the number of students with dyslexia need and dyslexia service outpace the vault the number of teachers who could actually provide it so this actually would allow us to hire 15 additional dyslexia teachers so that every elementary school would have access to the program and students would no longer have the need to transfer to another school to receive the services based on that need that's wonderful that's huge and i think we will see the benefits of that um okay and again we've talked about this before i'm elated to

112hear about the additional curricular resources and excited to see that in curriculum central um that's mainly what i have the only questions i think i had i will say the reading academies if we can go back to the professional learning slide the more support we can put into that the better i just i just completed the reading academy myself i finished module 12 and i can say now firsthand it's a lot it's good stuff but it is truly an academy i mean it's it's what i would imagine a master's level online course would entail and that's what i'm hearing um from a lot of colleagues too so i know it's not just me right um now it's good stuff um we're getting back to the science of reading and i'm really hoping that what our

113teachers and administrators learn through the reading academy can trickle down to best practices in the classroom and come to fruition so if it hasn't already been explored i would love for us to consider possibly allowing our teachers as i know third grade i believe if i'm correct third grade in aisd has already completed the reading academy now we're moving down to second grade and um i would love to explore the the possibility of allowing our teachers to you know get subbed so they can complete at least part of the reading academy during the work day because the reality is if we make teachers do that during their own time 60 i mean for me it took longer than 60 hours but a 60-hour academy doing that outside of work hours most of our teachers have

114families and other obligations we want this to take flight and we also want to respect our teachers time and so you know they all go above and beyond and attend pd's you know and conferences and stuff like that but a 60-hour web-based academy it's difficult to stay engaged and it's difficult to retain what you're learning it's good stuff and we want it to take take flight in the classroom so i would just really reiterate that the more support we can throw our teachers in completing that reading academy um you know and being able to do so when they can focus the better and so i'm really happy to see that we're prioritizing that it's a lot it's a lot but it's important so and that's all i've got you thank you thank you miss miss

115mcmurray if i could just piggyback off of one thing we're talking about for dyslexia services so did i hear you say that for those students that are now needing the services for dyslexia they will not have to go to another campus yesterday that is our intention yes that is the intention with these additional staff members we should have dyslexia services the new program at all the campus we'll have teachers to staff everybody we've been slowly phasing this in and this will allow us to catch completely up so that's great one of those other opportunities that now we have a chance to do are there any other services where our students particularly at the elementary level have to attend different campuses to receive any services outside of special programs now some there are some students that

116are special programs because equipment or the environment is that way but general programs like dyslexia for example no okay thank you mr wilbanks thank you president mays and uh thank you miss mcmurrow for your first-hand account of the reading academies i know uh over the years has been a big religious battle on how best to teach reading and hopefully this good science-based approach will put that religious war to bed um but yes it is a big burden and it's a big a big concern of dr wurtz the amount of time and effort to launch it but i think everyone i've talked to including dr wertz and now you have said that it's really good stuff and rock solid so um yeah i i'm looking forward to that getting rolled out and being able to apply

117additional resources of that and not only that but um it's one thing to sit through 60 hours a webinar but we know from best practices and in the research it's even better when there's a coach helping them implement those strategies in real time along with that learning and i assume that's what you mean by those additional resources um let's follow up to the top level and you know i don't know if you need to throw up the slide with the big plan you've got i think i'll try to see it my eyes are failing me i'm like this is there we go in front of me yeah the big buckets there we go uh that's a lot of dollars and but i think that's the right allocation i'm a little i mean i've had a

118day job and i haven't really had time we just got this so i'd like a little more time i don't know if tonight's the night to you know approve this i'd like a little more time to look at these numbers but i can tell you just right off the cuff they look good the infrastructure in terms of i mean we know i talk about high-yield strategies universal pre-k is a high-yield strategy and now we have the opportunity of a lifetime on something that we didn't know how we would be able to pay for um and kudos to you guys for kind of building that in and knowing hey now we have a way forward on universal pre-k um so that i'm all for um on the instructional support and in the daycare um and perf

119you know some of the other ones but specifically those two you know one thing i've been blown away with over over the years is the detail that you've put in every plan and a plan is not just the action but it's the dollars and how do you measure success so my question to you is this i assume you're building in those kpis or those key measures of success um into the plan i don't need a laundry list of what they are but just you know if you could share with you in the planning process have you already identified what those are and and and what how is that baked into your planning process so they're not that part we know what we're going to use to measure those things we have to put them we

120haven't completely finished that all out in the plan and the reason being is because we had to finalize the strategies and understand how you're going to do two things one measure the quality of implementation of the strategy which we call the process and then the impact so dr barlow's department will be working with us on a quarterly basis to really measure how these things are actually happening i can highlight one as an example that might be helpful so coaching is a is a we have a system that we use in coaches called e-suite and when it when a teacher is being coached around a specific best practice we'll say small group instruction as an example for standards alignment as an example there are specific behaviors that the teacher and the students are doing and so

121what happens is the teacher sets goals around that best practice and has a plan and that plan is logged in e suite with the coaches and all of our coaches will be doing this what happens is as the teacher progresses through mastery of that best practice based on evidence they earn something called growth indicators and the system will tell us for example how often teachers are receiving their touch points so for example our strategies they receive nine coaching touch points over the course of the year we can see how many teachers are actually getting coaching touch points by coach how many teachers are progressing and earning growth indicators under that coach when that's not happening what supports we need to put in place to make sure that that's happening and then we can then measure

122how students are performing under that teacher who have actually earned the growth indicators is the relationship there between those two things so that's the kind of structures we're putting in place around these to make sure that we're measuring not only is the process happening but is the process then resulting in an outcome that's connected to a student and if the answer is no there are two disparate processes or two disparate outcomes that don't really have a relationship with each other then we will pause and reconsider yeah yeah when the reality is the battlefield dictate otherwise we readjust our plan so yeah that's something you guys have been really good at um and i would you know you know for us as a board we're focused on student outcomes and specifically with this endeavor closing those

123learning gaps that exist from the code loss and i would be curious if in that process we get asked that you know those nine touch those intermediate kpis or goals that's too much minutiae for us as a board but those student outcome focus goals uh and measures if those could be shared with the board yes in fact the goals will be shared with you so um what you don't see here in the performance towards those goals yeah so what you'll see is there's a table and an example the best way i get the best example i can share with you is if you on the website if you go to the house bill 3 goals that you adopted earlier there's tables at the district level and for every single campus that actually articulates by student

124subgroup goals of our five year period based upon a baseline of 2019 where we started we're going to probably adjust that once we realize where we're at because there will be learning loss that we're going to assess once our star scores come in what you'll notice with these new targets you're going to see a very similar table for every school and the district level the same around these what i call vital signs for every for all the campuses so you'll be able to see and we will report them out to the board our progress towards those goals and when we have gaps and not gaps in why we think it's happening or not happening but that will be in place for not only at the district level for every campus that leads up to that

125district yeah yeah perfect perfect and then in your presentation you mentioned four best practice areas that you guys were gonna elevate was kind of the broad strategy with this money what i assume data driven instruction is one of those uh no yeah well it's embedded it's embedded it it's embedded in when it does but that's not what we call it but that's the strategy but that's not one of the four right yeah so what are the four again so it's assessment uh standards alignment construction differentiation and ddi is embedded actually spread it through most of most of those right yeah right and i was just easy yeah i've been getting a lot of that tonight um so part of that one of the one of the strategy in on the instruction the plc extended plc

126time i assume that extended part of that extended plc time is for just that yeah exactly so they would use it for ddi for planning um plc's are really so this is the thing about plcs i'll i'm gonna i'll stand up for a second talk about these plcs have kind of gotten this idea that it's a plc has almost gotten this word as it's the name of a meeting but a plc is actually a professional learning community it's a group of people who come together to learn with each other and to make decisions yeah it's a culture so um what what this is really designed to do is to give elementary teachers time to look at their data to go through the ddi process to strategize around which strand which uh lessons or activities are

127going to help kids close gaps and sometimes what happens is teachers use the time to actually plan and co-plan with each other so this plc time would be used for that purpose it's basically we're trying to give teachers more time to work with each other to your point there's only so many hours in a day and you can't just plan a night when you're when you're tired so we want to give more time to teachers at the elementary so another example of this an outcome of having this additional time i know in some districts across the state they use their plc so that when they go through a unit let's say long division um the teachers get together and compare notes on what percentage of their students mastered what didn't and assume one of the

128five teachers in the pod be the rock star and taught it really well and maybe a couple others didn't struggle would they then have that time to then maybe when they do enrichment and um intervention time maybe have the rock star take the kids that didn't yeah mastering in that's completely the campus have autonomy to do that right yeah they have complete autonomy do that sometimes it's re about re-teaching too um yeah i'm glad you mentioned the big a word because i know i share with mr hogg uh great enthusiasm for the word autonomy and and empowering our campuses to have more autonomy and and i guess one of the great things i like about your plan is we're not dictating every single dollar we're giving the discretion to each campus and i think when

129you're dealing with a issue this big across the whole system i think would be impossible to dictate every single thing and really i think it would be an inappropriate in the opposite of propitious um uh auspicious um yeah i don't think it would be uh setting yourself up for success if you didn't give those campuses agency in the process uh to help make those decisions in you know in a lot of ways they're the not every campus is the same and they're the experts on what's going to work best as interventions for their students and i'm just really i'm glad that it's that's built into the plan if you could go to that slide you said yes oh data systems um first off so part of the success of doing data driven instruction is good

130reliable systems so that we can aggregate the data across a team a plc team across a campus and across the district um so are you look you said you're looking for a new math screener for instance or are we looking at assume ice station map no we're one of them that we will consider is map um it's a nwea and it's a it's a it's it's really reliable it's very well known it allows you to really understand which portions of the math of math building blocks kids are actually struggling with um and so that's one of them that we're looking at what we're trying to do is we're trying to get to all right now our current screener gives us this holistic idea of how kids are progressing in mathematics but frankly i'm seeking something

131that gives me a little more granular information the teacher can leverage that information to make better decisions and so we're in the process of looking around well i've got a self-assured yeah i've got a selfish reasons for wanting to know that because i know my colleagues and other board members across the state and across the country they use that screener data to populate their dashboards on student progress in terms of mastery of certain takes and standards and kind of as a gauge so i assume the one we're looking at is going to be one that's widely used so not only when the teachers look at the data that come from the screeners they'll be able to compare their students with students across the country i i can't answer that question yet because i have to

132go through the process of identifying the screener we haven't done that yet but but is that a requirement for the evaluation i i haven't can't believe that i can put that in there sure i think the thing about it is we're referring to as a national norm reference assessment which allows us to compare other kids that are in the similar age bracket across the country the same and i think when it comes to a screener that's very helpful so i don't see why we wouldn't um the only reason why you i the only reason why that becomes the issue on on on assessments that are outside of screeners is because we assess different standards and so that the thing kind of looks different so um but yeah i don't have any i have no reasons

133why we wouldn't look at that if you're trying to make sure that your students in texas are are compared to their counterparts that are competing for similar spots and universities and things like that but i haven't established quite so many i could interject just a quick context because i think it's important in all of the discussion so this is three years we are very mindful and we're still working on pacing this we talk about a new screener different positions different support for the schools different resources and things like that we have those things have to be paced out to be implemented with fidelity number one but also to make sure that the teachers and the campuses can actually have time if we implement new screeners and things like that that's a big change for a

134system right uh both training and adoption of the screener and all that kind of stuff oh yeah so not overnight just the context that these things even dyslexia and support and things like that all of those things are are being mapped out so that the right pacing will yield the success of those tools and resources and the implementation so just a reminder context because it may sound to individuals who may be watching that all these things are going to start happening in august and while it's exciting it really the reality at the school level it would be overwhelming if all these changes were happening at one time now there will be changes because some of these will be year one but we have to be mindful of the pacing so that it can be done

135with fidelity but also pace at the right level for teachers so yeah my final thank you dr cavazos and and um i'll just add to that is i think utilizing esser funds for those big ticket technology purchases that are going to elevate and increase the success those high-yield levers that we have like data-driven instruction is the way to go um in terms of the technology component of the bucket that we're using the sr funds um and that that is in under the lens of our sustainability requirement a good way to make those funds stretch out into the future um finally i just want to you know be put at ease if you could put up the your last slide with the the tiered supports for the campuses on the basic level on the one hand

13630 000 a year doesn't seem like a lot so when i'm thinking of my favorite go-to strategy hot high yield strategy is high dosage tutoring you know where they're tutoring at least three hours a week for a minimum of 50 hours a semester um that i you know thinking or a campus needy even of a ditto or a butler that didn't seem like it would go a long way for the amount of tutors required maybe it would or if they're planning on you utilizing a partnership with someone like reading partners for reading intervention that shared cost is 30 000 a year and so that's like one strategy for intervention so yeah i mean so i'm having trouble going from just thirty thousand of campus to one point uh 194 million dollars uh system-wide over three

137years um and but then i agree the bulk of the money should go where it's needed most and that's in the targeted schools and so that you know they only have 15 000 outside of those additional resources that we're going to hire on the campus so just put me at ease because the i'm would have thought the amount of money available in those buckets for each school would be bigger and it's not well two things one is the targeted schools are all title pretty much so they all have access to title funds that the basic schools typically do not uh so that's one thing and they already have monies designated for tutoring within those title funds thirty thousand dollars for tutoring is um for students specifically in the basic schools pretty much should be sufficient

138but i want to say this to keep in mind too this is a plan and when we assess if we find out that there's a school that's in deep need that this is not sufficient for we'll adjust for that this is just an initial starting point to make sure there's some equity in the way that we go about approaching our our our needs the last thing i want to make a comment about tutoring is there's new statutes now around tutoring around accelerated learning is basically what they call it and how you apply that how how you structure it at your school what's used for that um and so part of the dollars that we'll even attach to the system level will help to structure some of those things for the campus level and dr brown

139and i are going to be collaborating around that so as i mentioned this is designed to give um sufficient monies to get started if we find that there's deficits somewhere that our people get stuck because there's not enough then we'll come back to the drawing board and look at it okay um so let me wrap up and i but i just thought of an important question which is more i think what i would want to ask for staff to get back to us and not put you on the spot and understanding sr2 that's also a big pot of money and you it keeps talking about you know for use sounds like it's exclusively for um [Music] would you describe enrollment stabilization enrollment stabilization uh however it was my understanding there wasn't a minimum amount used

140for enrollment stabilization but that you know we could determine some other amount of that money to be put for use for learning loss recovery as well so if i could get some specifics around those requirements because you know that's an additional pool of money that i'm um i'm a lot more optimistic than my colleague mr chapa and that i think we're going to see those kindergartners and those first graders and where we saw the most enrollment loss come back once we're back to normal and we're providing good quality tier one in person instruction again so that would mean that we would have more of those funds potentially to use towards those tutors and other high-yield strategies for the learning law so i'd like to give my hand i you know i'd aim for us to

141just earmark that just for enrollment stabilization so uh and then finally to my colleagues i would say i could use more time to go through i might be persuaded if the rest of my colleagues are ready to approve this tonight um but we kind of just got this last minute so i'd like to kind of have a weekend to go over thank you mr well banks yeah okay mr hogg thank you president base um dr works thank you for this and and let me tell you what i'm focused on our academic targets what are our outcomes right and you and staff for more than generation gave us probably more information than what we needed to but what we need to be responsible for is are these federal funds which are still kind of shocking but

142i didn't expect that like still kind of shocking to us to come in and as my colleagues were going through we are making we do have to make sure these dollars are being used responsibly to educate kids but what's that for it's about student outcomes so i would ask that as we as a board or developing a new three to five year goal strategic plan this pretty much should be one of our goals right s are student outcomes of how that's happening whether it's third and eighth grade reading proficiency english one and two algebra one have some specific big three to five year goal and then interim goals each year to show some achievements the other thing i'd ask staff to do is a standardized reporting mechanism to us to keep us updated on what

143those goals and let you dr wurtz as the true academic professional makes all these decisions on where we're going and what we're trying to do from that process for our academic targets because our goal is outcomes how do we produce these outcomes are we recovering from this loss and that's what that's our funds are for to recover and listen we all know this is not this is a good plan this is not a one-year plan this is we only have funding for three but really this is probably a three to five year plan to truly get out of this hole so i would just ask staff and you don't have to do it now and as you have the targets and dr vaso says we start developing as a board our goal is i think

144one of our key student outcome goals should be related to directly to some of these items within you guys developing the interim goals that would occur each year for us to get to that stage is what i would just say with a very strict outcomes reporting mechanism so that we know once a quarter we will have some time during our board meeting to report on this and discuss the outcomes that are occurring from that and with that i miss mays if we're ready i'm more than ready to make a motion on this to approve um because i think we've got a plan and this is a flexible piece that will be coming about and it's all like a budget like anything can be adjustable and move forward and it helps our administration move forward with

145that okay mr hogg if you can just hold your emotion for just i can't one second yeah sure dr reich thank you president mays don't have to hold it i can make it in discussion but i'll just keep it brief so sorry i'm i'm pausing on uh teasing you or not teasing you but not appropriate so i won't um i think this is a great a great plan uh what you've presented to us is the the 30 000 foot level really uh the big the big buckets the big rocks as you always like to say um this is a once in a lifetime opportunity i think i've said it uh in previous meetings not only is the the opportunity to dig out of the pandemic and covet slide but it is truly an opportunity for

146us to crack the nut on closing achievement gaps and accelerated rate and student achievement and there's there's some of the things that you have articulated in here that are are known issues that we've had for years that we haven't been able to budgetarily address and this is our opportunity i love what you know with the the increase of the tas and the coaching the instructional coaches under the guidance and counseling uh the testing facilitators for campuses that they've been screaming for testing facilitators for years that that would help them that would help their counselors stay focused on the kids and that's in this plan and that is fantastic and what i'm hopeful along the lines of what mr hogg stated in uh moving forward and looking at the outcomes and and what the the frequency

147of the metrics review and the roi review is is really what is going to also be taken from this to move into uh a permanent state and i think there's going to be several things that uh we'll be able to take out of this to me that's what the opportunity here is is really cracking that nut and making it to where we can slide out of the increased funds from esser and still handle it maintain it within our current budget or what our budgetary constraints usually are so that we can have high yield accelerated learning uh and achievement and closing the gaps uh i know that's what you're in it for this is just such a great opportunity i'm excited to see uh what happens and i i appreciate all the work that uh you

148and so many people have put into this um this is this is really literally what you're showing us is the the the tip of the iceberg and this is a huge iceberg so thank you for all of the work you've already done and what what you'll be uh continuing to do look forward to if that's quarterly as mr hogg suggested every six weeks whatever that looks like to report back to us very interested in looking and monitoring those outcomes for our students so that's all thank you dr reich and just to piggyback off that for just a second yes these these needs and we're calling that the esser funds are for recovery but for our district for districts all across the nation this recovery are things that we were already buying in on of needing

149help prior coveted and coveted really just exacerbated so many of those things so once again that makes i believe all of my colleagues very excited to be able to use this opportunity to fix gaps that existed pre-covered and have just grown so just wanted to piggyback off of what he said mr chapa thank you president mays uh i just have two two quick points that i want to make and i and these are things you've probably already thought about one um loops back to our budget discussion earlier you know these are because you've identified the the proposals you have you've put a lot of thought into and you've picked the things that you think are the most high yield and we're not the only district that's going to be looking for resources to effectuate those

150high-yield strategies and so when it comes to the personnel resources we need to we need for those high-yield strategies for example tas some of those positions are on the lower end of our hourly salary schedule or pay schedule that we did is built into the budget proposal as i understand it are have some targeted equity uh raises going towards them but as the market heats up just not in the private sector and a lot of the positions we have that i would say pay to the 12 to 15 an hour range um as we have to compete more and more with the private sector with some jobs that are moving that direction already as a result of the economic recovery and it's happening at a pretty fast clip now so things could evolve over the

151next few months um maybe and also we we're gonna i believe have to compete with other districts looking for the same type of folks so it may be that we need to come back um in the next few months and mr wilbanks mentioned this earlier take a deeper dive and and look at if we need to do an early year or mid-year budget adjustment for those positions if it turns out that the equity raises that are built in are not yielding us the the quality of folks or the number of folks that we need to you know pull off the esr strategies that you've identified and the tas and those types of positions i think are critical to that and so i think we would need to we potentially need to be ready to move

152faster on adjusting those if we need to to be competitive in the market the second thing that i would add is um and i mentioned this last time i mean i preschool is such a high yield strategy and uh we used our 19 bond to really expand our capacity there we're getting got hb3 funds to help us uh do that and now we have the opportunity to take it even further and so i'm really glad to see the infrastructure funds in there and i know though the time limit that the ester regulations to put on us to to do this in three years what you're trying to do is is essentially an infrastructure analysis that would normally be part of maybe a five-year or longer bond analysis and so you're having to do it in

153a very short amount of time and so what i would just encourage as part of that analysis that's happening at a really rapid pace to build out that infrastructure is you know a balancing equity of access and so i think you know a tendency might be and maybe it is i i haven't you're still doing your analysis and and i'm interested to hear what comes of it but it may be that there's some low-hanging fruit if we identify a particular campus that has enough land that we can build a pretty big wing on it and have more of a preschool center and so uh you know students from several campuses go there and then they would go back to their home campuses for kindergarten that may be the best strategy um but i would encourage

154us to look at as part of the analysis as whether you know very if it's possible very modest or small additions at the home campuses if that might yield us more students because of the relative ease of access of students being able and maybe the attractiveness to the parents of them being able to send their kids to their local neighborhood school that they're going to go to for kindergarten anyway so there's not that transition year or two i don't know which way that pans out but between that and maybe seeing if there's a way because it is an infrastructure uh issue of if there's places where we already know because of the 2019 bond uh we have facility construction going on if there's ways to build these projects in to get efficiencies with that um

155you know to explore those options too i'm very anxious to for us to get down the road with expanding our pre-k capacity but um you know i just want to make sure we don't because it is a longer-term solution even though the ezra funds are more short-term let's take the time to make sure that we try to do it in the way that balance you know best balances equity of access and efficiencies in our on our spending because that especially is going to be an ongoing expense um and benefit that we see for for many many years well after esser is done right thank you yeah no problem thank you mr chapa and and i like the fact that you said build on additional you did not say pods my students attended to school whether

156it was pods mr hogg i will give the mic back to you thank you president this time i'd like to make a motion to approve uh that's their plans as presented by staff i've got a motion do i have a second okay i have a motion by mr hogg a second by mrs fowler any discussion seeing none please vote okay all present vote in the affirmative recommendation motion passes thank you move forward to our next discussion action item that is consider and possible action regarding proposed settlement agreement with balfour beatty llc regarding ctec project mr dr cavazos thank you president mays and we recommend the approval of the proposed settlement agreement as discussed in closed session do i have a motion mr chapa thank you president mays at this time i'd like to move that

157the board approved the proposed settlement agreement as discussed in closed session and authorized the superintendent to sign it do i have a second sorry a motion by mr chapa a second by mr hogg any discussion seeing none please vote all present vote in the affirmative motion passes thank you very much we now move to our section on the agenda item for our discussion item which is our legislative update dr cavazos thank you president mason this evening we bring um a legislative update and we welcome david anderson in person not in zoom uh welcome him to the podium and uh to provide and lead us through a legislative update uh david take it away thank you dr cavazos president may's trustees we're pleased to be here my colleague kate kuhlman is with me and she'll take

158several of these points as we go through them so thank you fascinating discussion on the on the presentation i made several notes and plans to take those with me and and as we go forward so we're going to give you a review of 140 days of legislative session we're going to do this in about 12 minutes so in our in our earlier conversations with you we talked quite a bit about the circumstances that uh that made this session so unique and as we look at those and show you what happened i do want to remind you of your priorities and you know these very well these were certainly at the forefront of what we did on your behalf and at the direction of dr cavazos and dr hill during the session there were a lot

159of things that led into this session and we have these identified several of these for you you're very familiar with covet 19. i know i feel like i'm i'm talking to noah about the flood in terms of what the impact of kova 19 was you had to deal with these in a very significant way from from mid-march 2020 until now the the circumstance though that was particularly unique was the the financial one because when we talked in the fall we said the uh the session is going to be about four things the budget the budget the budget and a little bit of redistricting well if dr barlow was going to give us an a through f accountability rating on my prediction on that i think i'd get a d or an f because clearly it

160was not about the budget once or twice or three times the economic circumstances certainly changed but leading into the session this is what dominated the circumstance 4.6 billion shortfall predicted several months before that was reduced to 1 billion as the session started and then in may with the revenue estimate that the controller is obligated to provide in the last 30 days of the session he added an additional 1.7 billion dollars to the state's revenue forecast that changed things tremendously and more on the budget from kate in just a second the last circumstance that we have up here is winter storm hurry and people will say well well david we only lost five days well five days out of 140 we lost one week one week out of 20 weeks we lost five percent of the

161session to the storm and you all are familiar with the way the legislature reacts they respond to what is sure what is salient and what is certain and what they were sure about was there were a lot of people who were very upset about what happened during that week and they spent several weeks looking for appropriate parties to blame or inappropriate parties to blame and i think they managed to identify some in both categories in any other session that would be very normal if we had this circumstance it would have made the session very very different but when you put the anticipated budget shortfall on top of the covet and the impact it has on policy and access and communications lay this on top of it it led to a very strange session from here

162now let's look at what happens okay sure good evening kate coleman thanks for having me so to visit a little bit about the budget and that's a good place to start especially taking off from where david just took us you know we were all going in thinking this was going to be a tough budget session and i think it's easy to forget when we think of it that way that a lot of really good things came out of the budget we got it early whenever we whenever the the budget came out it was agreed to largely on both sides so you see some things here that are listed as it relates to education but we had full funding of hb3 which was huge and something that leadership on all sides went in early and said

163we're committed to this we had enrollment growth funding and other pieces that were really important we continued to talk about that esser funding throughout the legislative session but because things settled up so quickly on the budget it's easy to forget what a big win we had in the budget in terms of funding for public education so a big a big piece there and as you look over this there's a few more highlights on exactly how all of that settled up we we talked there at the bottom about 15 25. of course 1525 was the house bill 3 cleanup bill so moving on to that looking at that bill again kind of on the budget side of things we this this bill was one that as we looked at it going into the legislative session i

164think the caption on that bill was something like relating to public school finance which means it could carry all sorts of legislation at some point during the session early on in the process it really was kept pretty tightly to hb3 cleanup specific things we we heard a lot about the cte funding especially for small and rural schools the fast growth allotment was another thing that you heard a lot of in terms of um the 1525 and hb3 as it moved through the process it did pick up a few more things but ultimately the ultimate bill that was negotiated um included a number of things and ended up in a pretty good spot there were modifications to the fast growth allotment the cte adjustments were added into that you see a long list here and i'm

165not going to go down every little thing but there was some funding specific to esser dollars there were a lot of discussions throughout the legislative session on esther funding not just your funding there were discussions about any stipulations or strings attached that might come with the funding that comes to you of course s or three dollars came you see here that some of sr2 is spent on the hold harmless similar to the way that sr1 was utilized but ultimately also on the discretionary spending at the state level so there were some specifications in a number of bills and including in 1525 that said here's how you have to spend some of the discretionary funding the commissioner spending the governor's funding at the state level for education a few bills of note one big bill that

166we heard a lot about was the um accountability related bill as well as the state takeover bill that was at least you heard a lot about it in relationship to houston isd but it was a statewide bill it was not specific to houston isd that bill went through a number of different negotiations it went it included a very different language throughout the process but ultimately it ended up in a pretty good place and you got some direction on specifically dnf differentiation between dnf and some due process pieces in that legislation as well that i think are good for the state and school districts in working together on some of those things hb 4545 is an example of some of the of a bill that the state said here's how you have to spend some of

167the discretionary funding at the state level so that creates um some accelerated learning committees and some specifics on how we use state discretionary money for accelerated learning 4465 is another bill that was in that category it actually didn't pass but again a series of bills that were focused on how we spend some of that state funding from esser one two and three 1356 is an interesting bill because it establishes a tutoring program i heard you talking a lot about tutoring earlier aisd actually weighed in on this bill to to specify that at one time this bill was not permissive and it said you had to use potentially retired i think or as well as active teacher associations to fulfill some of these tutoring roles they did change that to a may instead of a shall

168so this bill at this point creates a a tutoring program that gives you a little flexibility on how you can access tutors the state will the commissioner will be able to identify associations that you can utilize that through 1716 was another bill that we heard a lot about during the session it ultimately creates supplemental special education services program again using federal dollars that are coming down this will be funneled through the state as well as the education service centers there's some specifics on how that money was funneled to the students because it is about a fifteen hundred dollar grant so it is going through the state which was important to a lot of people in that discussion seven and then hb 547 which is the home school participation bill that bill has been working through

169the process for years and years it's it's been on um as a part of the discussion for a number of years this year it did ultimately pass and the way they got that bill to pass was by making it permissive so it is something that a school district will be able to decide whether they allow home school students to participate or not i think you'll hear more about this bill as it goes through the rule making process it's currently going through the uil rule making process and i think you'll hear more about exactly how that will play out at the district level then but this was an example of a bill that has been not has not passed in the past and did get get past this year but again based on the permissive nature

170of it i'm going to turn it back over to david to talk a little bit about trs legislation and close this out before we do q a so there were several bills that affected the teacher retirement system a topic that is of great interest in arlington and to the staff as well as to the trustees uh 1385 is the is the bill that speaks to the trs operations itself this was the the grs sunset bill and we noted several different points on there this is a bill that we could easily take a two-hour workshop and get scott involved with it and and really dig into the details on it but it is a bill that certainly requires some attention from your staff and i know that uh that aisd has the the expertise to really

171dig into this and figure this out 1444 is a bill that focuses on the health benefits and in particular this bill eliminates the district of innovation option that a number of districts have used to waive the requirement that says that you may only offer active care and by waiving that districts did bring in a different one the district of innovation seemed to drive some attitude changes at trs as well as interaction from people here in the room that that had an effect on this and i think that what we have seen over the last probably 28 months or so is very different uh attitude about interaction and input from the field from the leadership at grs in that regard that's been a long slog but it's been one that i think aisd should really be

172patting themselves on the back because you helped drive this in a very very significant way the regional health care advisory committees are established in each of the 20 regional service centers those will be comprised of nine superintendents and if this next comment sounds familiar it's because it's what i've heard from staff and from you for several years now the notion of looking at regional cost variations and regional opportunities and that's really what these committees will look at around the state and report back to governor lieutenant governor speaker the chairs of the appropriate committees of the commissioner of education and the executive director of trs before the next legislative session senate bill 202 is one that i'm i'm sorry to have to report to you that this bill passed it was one that was slipping through

173that our friends at tazbo talked with us about and we did try to affect this in a way and ran into an absolute brick wall for a lot of different reasons but specifically because it was one that the retired teachers association was was supportive of and this is the one that says that you may not pass on directly or indirectly any of the costs that the district has with people who are involved with in the retire rehire so that's one that certainly has a financial impact on the district depending on what the impact of retiree hire is from our conversations with other districts around the state the concern is that the shortage of of qualified educators will be exacerbated because you're going to need people to do the sort of things that that you've just

174heard about in your plan and that will create the need for retirees to come back into the workforce very positive circumstance in many ways but one that will affect your costs the session always ends with unsettled issues and we're going to have at least two more opportunities to have the legislature consider unsettled issues because we believe there will be a special session uh on or about july 27 through august 6th to deal with some non-education issues and then one in late september that will deal with redistricting and the allocation of federal funds to the state of texas not to public education but to the state for other issues among our unsettled issues state assessment policies we had a circumstance this time in which 81 members that we identified signed a letter made a statement had

175some sort of pronouncement that they had concerns about the misuse of the state assessment program that starr was being asked to do more than it really was capable of doing and yet at the end of the session very little happen that really spoke to the administration of our state assessment virtual education one yes we did get the commission that will look at virtual ed over the next two years and that has some very positive possibilities however the bill that was worked on i will tell you kate my colleague todd webster are two of the the four people who were very very involved in this from the house and senate side we ended up with a bill for virtual ed that did all of the things that you wanted to see with regard to local decision

176making no penalties for for funding because students are virtual on a part-time or full-time basis that bill unfortunately got caught on the wrong side of the calendar on the last weekend we believe it would have passed the legislature i can't tell you that the governor would have signed it or allowed it to become law his concerns about getting students back into school in classrooms in real time is something that's very important it's a it's a goal that he shares with all of you i know but what he would have done with that bill it's hard to say in the end it wasn't addressed and so virtual education is something that could be addressed in a special i'm not sure that it will be elections will come up in a special and here we say well

177what does this matter to us because that deals with depending on how you look at it election integrity or voter suppression somewhere along the spectrum everybody lands our concern is that if the governor issues a broad call for elections in a special session will that include the opportunity for legislation that would move to a uniform a single uniform election date for school bonds and trustees so that you're you're only able to hold those elections in november will we see legislation filed that would put in a minimum voter turnout for a bond election to be certified or one that might require super majority these are all concerns that local governments have that could come up under that category chapter 313 not as significant perhaps here in tarrant county as other parts of the state but that

178was left pending and that is one that there is a significant push to get on the on the call and one that affects schools in school finance in certain parts of the state certainly more than others charter schools was really not addressed we saw minimum changes in charter school legislation in many ways uh president mace this was the irresistible force meeting the immovable object the interests of independent school districts versus the interests of the charter schools and in the end very little happened something i think we talked about and predicted that we would not see much change there at all the last point which relates back to your goals and that's governance and the notion of reaffirming and underscoring the importance of local control and the right balance between the independent school districts and the

179state education agency and the appropriate role for our regional education service centers i wish that i could report that we had more progress on that but we really didn't what we have is more authority at the state level and some erosion of your decision making with regard to that we can certainly talk more about some of those things going forward but right now we're in a in a circumstance in which that balance is is a bit out of kilter and and hopefully we can get that back at some point we're at the end of the session next steps of course rulemaking kate mentioned rulemaking on on 547 home school participation in uil that is at the uil most of the rest of the rulemaker that will affect your circumstances and the policies you're responsible for

180will be commissioner rule or state board of education rule of course part of our responsibility is to watch that and keep dr cavazos and his team informed about that rulemaking this becomes very important for us we saw how some of the rules that were developed in response to house bill 3 last time perhaps didn't mirror that bill quite the way we as as school leaders interpreted that redistricting would be up in the fall we would expect to see because the population growth your legislative delegation change fairly significantly perhaps because of the population growth in the dallas fort worth area we already mentioned the two special sessions we anticipate we hope there will only be two but but we'll have to wait and see about that and then of course last interim charges which are usually

181issued around december 1st we'll say to you as we do at the end of every session that if there are some areas that are specific interest to arlington isd that you would like to see addressed in interim charges please give dr cavazos the direction to talk with us so that we can begin to talk with the appropriate people about the importance of those topics we'd be glad to answer any questions we certainly appreciate your attention at the end of a very long day thank you for that thank you so much mr anderson and miss coleman and congratulations to you as well um it was very good to see you in person and we're thank you we're pleased to be here to be released from your spot but thank you so much for the information that

182you provide thank you so much for the advocacy in your position that you do on behalf of districts and specifically aisd um do i have any colleagues that have any questions and or comments from mr anderson mr chapa thank you president mays uh i just had a few one question and really more just one statement you know we included in our legislative agenda and y'all helped us out a lot with uh issues related to virtual instruction virtual education going forward and i just wanted to take a minute to you know this but to explain because i've been approached by people we've all received the emails we've seen some chatter on social media um that you know dr cavanaugh sent out an email last week and announced that you know we could send out a survey

183on virtual ed and we were not going to be able to move forward with some of the things maybe that was preparing for because of the way that this bill uh turned out in the legislature and the concern a lot of people seem to have is well why would you want to consider virtual ed when it seems like it didn't work out for most students this year our teachers were pulled in multiple directions and i just want to reemphasize uh since since you brought it up uh and the bill hopefully will come back i i'm very hopeful we'll come back in a in a special session and get passed we're not intending and this bill would not continue any of the sort of bad practices or things that people had not necessarily bad practices but

184things people had concerns about over the course of the last year this would create an opt-in program for students who want to do virtual education for students who maybe want to do a virtual academy or maybe because of their family situation they want to be able to take a class virtually as part of their other programming that they're going through because we know virtual education is not the right choice for a lot of students we knew that before copen study after study back that up but what we're hoping to do because our job is to serve students is this was a situation where yes for many students it wasn't an ideal environment and some students struggled with it but we heard some success stories along the way of students who for whatever reason they flourish

185during virtual learning maybe they didn't have to worry about bullying at school or maybe they were able to focus more at home than in a classroom full of the friends who are distracting them for whatever reason this seemed to work for some folks and we had parents asking us fairly early on if there was a way that we could continue this type of programming on a more permanent basis and this bill would allow us to do that and so we agree that virtual education is not right for most students but it's right for some and i think we have an obligation both as a district in the state um especially with the investments that we've made over the last year in virtual education and strides that we've made in a very short amount of time

186to see those things through and do what's right by our kids so i do hope that that bill comes back in a in a special session i do want to ask you about hb 3979 the the so-called crt bill i it wasn't in your presentation i'm assuming that was intentional um i i've read the bill as it as i think it passed is there anything positive that you can say about the bill because i and looking at it i do think it's sort of a mixed bag um and i just wanted to see if you could comment on on that are there silver linings there no i'd be happy to the the critical race theory bill is is one that as it was filed seemed to be um we we saw it as a very

187negative bill for school districts um and we saw it as one that was um structured rather poorly because of of what it was asking the state board to do when they were asked to do it when school districts going to be asked to respond to it as the bill got to the house there were a number of things done to it to the extent that the people who had concerns about about that bill could do it to create some some sort of balance with that bill and it got to the senate and of course the senate pulled all of those things out they sent it back to the house but it was clear that it would not pass without some of those things in it and it has we don't know this with 100 certainty

188but it the interest that was that was expressed by the governor yesterday including critical race theory in a special session because we have not done enough to outlaw this uh means that we'll be revisiting this and whether it means some of those things that created perhaps a better balance from one perspective will be taken out it's hard to say but we're not done with critical race theory in texas and i know there's a significant concern about this particularly in some of our urban school districts around the state and as to how they will respond specific to that bill though there's there's a concern about about teachers two parts of it one is that we know in our in our schools particularly in our high schools when we deal with controversial subjects that's something that departments

189deal with you deal with it dr wertz deals with this at the district level but there's a provision in that bill that says the teacher can opt out of addressing a controversial topic or current event if she or he is uncomfortable with that and that flies right in the face of how our schools are structured and how we make decisions about and how we deliver instruction that's one the other side of that or another aspect of that another angle of it is how do we how do we protect our teachers who are generally trying to create a fair and balanced discussion on a controversial topic when it's so easy i left my phone back there but when it's so easy for someone to to video or audio record anything that goes on in classroom and

190possibly take something out of context and present that in the media or to some group that has an axe to grind protection of the teachers becomes very well doesn't become it has been very important to you and to the administration and to principals this bill has passed and has signed creates some uncertainty there that that i think should be of concern to everyone and we are not done with it thank you i i agree that especially when the effort to to make it balanced there are some things that i in reading it and i'm gonna just read a few of them i think are very you know i i'm a little leery of the state getting into state legislature dictating at this level of detail precise documents that should be taught in in curriculum but

191that's the bill that we have and they seem some of the things that are now mandated uh for the state board of education to adopt as as part of the teks uh some of the things sound familiar like they probably were already there but some of them um you know these this is a direct command that they have to be included now their intention with some of the other parts of the bill that about the things that you just talked about because some of the things that i'm about to read are things that it seems like um it it's going to engender the type of conversation that some people might find uncomfortable but is historically accurate and is now going to be instructed to be in the teaks so for example um the board of

192education should now adopt essential knowledge and skills that develop each student's civic knowledge including an understanding of and this is what is now it seems directed that that students must be taught so um things about the the fugitive slave acts of 1793 and 1850 the indian removal act uh things about underground railroad records the chicano the chicano movement women's suffrage and equal rights the civil rights movement the history of white supremacy including but not limited to the institution of slavery the eugenics movement the ku klux klan and the ways in which these things were morally wrong uh it goes on many documents from the civil rights era the 13th 14th 15th amendments to the constitution uh civil rights decisions by the supreme court derailing dealing directly with segregation these are things now that are required

193uh for all students to learn um and they're necessarily it's it's a mixed bag it's these are things that i think some people who have concerns about this bill we're worried we're no longer going to be taught are going to be taught in a watered down fashion um but i still still think there's the opportunity here to there's it's not critical race theory to teach historically accurate history and so i think um teachers who've approached me with concerns about this i think i would say to them you've been instructed to teach accurate history and so the things that you want to make sure don't get swept aside because of this bill it seems to me like they still have the ability to do that but the the issues that you brought up at the end

194there i think are still concerning is what you know how do certain people react to it um you know that that creates some some awkward questions that we'll just have to see worked out in practice and then i i was a little bit disappointed to hear that you think that this is something that might come up on a on a special session agenda and that some of the the things i just read that i think are real positives might uh um find their way back out but thank you for that thank you mr chapa thank you again mr anderson dr reich thank you president mays uh thank you both for the presentation and congratulations on ingesting watermelon and good luck with that so i would want to if if you feel like you want to

195dip the toe in in the pond as far as governance local control the the out of whack uh balance related to accountability and what's happening in the rules making process right now if you could touch on some of those things uh i think it would be good for the board to understand where uh where we're potentially headed and then uh uh so that we can certainly give uh dr cavazos the direction to work with you and interact with that rules making process as much as possible i'd go back specifically to senate bill which is the again the houston takeover bill that had no bracketing the the concern or the the observation was made a number of times by state officials that this bill really is about addressing what happened in houston and how the court

196ruling undermined the provisions of our accountability system such as such a way that the accountability system was neutered i would tell you that i completely disagree with that i think the court ruling was based on the texas education agency not following its own process but it was an opportunity now to come back and and say this happened therefore we need to do this and my colleague todd webster several of you know todd from his days as deputy commissioner and acting commissioner of education uh at one point in this someone said well we're with help from specifically from david thompson we're we're improving due process todd's response was no we're not improving due process in the bill we're adding due process to the bill because there was no due process in the bill as it thought

197was filed and moved through the legislative session it took it took four or five house members basically saying this bill is not going to get through the house unless there are some changes with accountability which d carney had a lot to do with an input from dr barlow and his counterparts in other texas school science districts through d a lot of those recommendations were taken and and i think dr barlow and ms carney would tell you those changes mean that not only do we have a better bill than we had we have better state law than we currently have because of that on the due pro process part of it it's the same way if this bill really had been about houston isd in addressing the problem there would have been bracketed to houston so

198dr reichel shall say this is an example of of what i saw as as state overreach with regard to accountability and and due process because had it passed in its file form ruling of the commission would have been final you would have had no appeal and that's where some of my other concerns are with other pieces of legislation that put a very heavy weight on a commissioner decision with little or no opportunity for appeal in some of those areas so that's that's a a dipstick indicator to me of where we are with this the concern i have is that we need a strong texas education agency for our schools to be effective there's no question about that the question really is what's the appropriate role for the regulatory agency at the state level with regard

199to where it gets involved with local district decision making i think an offshoot question about that is and then what's the appropriate role for the regional service centers the organizations that for 52 years have provided some very fine technical assistance to school districts but they are not regulatory agencies they provide technical assistance this is where the lines begin to get a little blurred right now with this when you see a state education agency developing curriculum state board does standards instruction instructional decisions have traditionally been made by school districts there's a part of well there's a part of our statute that says the state board may not make any rule that determines methodology other than the provision that they can tell you how much lab time your science classes have to have but otherwise they don't

200have that methodology that authority to do that but what we've seen now is materials and programs that i'm sure are helpful to some school districts around the state and that that's fine but to to have those materials coming out of the state education agency the body responsible for regulating what you do that's that's the concern because when a district then has a troublesome campus you're using the programs developed by the state but the improvement doesn't occur who's responsible for that it's really not going to be the state it's going to be dr and the seven of you who are still bearing that responsibility those are the areas that i think have become very muddied in the last several years and that's that's with the benefit of almost half a century of being involved in public

201education in texas thank you it'll be interesting to see where things go over the next few months appreciate it sir thank you dr raj mr welbanks thank you president mays and um i think i'm going to get out on technicality because i promised my colleagues since i used up my allotment of questions on you know previous two visits i wasn't going to ask any questions but i do want to make a comment this has been a very difficult session for a number of reasons forget the winter storm yuri and covid it seemed like you and your staff and your colleagues and our education-based organization policy groups and uh supporters of public education were spending a lot of time playing whack-a-mole um there are a lot of zombie bills and zombie provisions which we talked about

202last time like uh the one that was in 1525 for performance-based funding um we got out uh thanks in large part to the grassroots efforts by one of your other clients raise your hand texas and i want to thank everyone involved for being diligent this session really working hard to defeat some of the more deleterious uh proposals and bills that were put forward we came out pretty well but not unscathed i guess that's how you would i think that i would characterize it that way yeah especially given some other areas of the state budget so um or compared to our colleagues in higher ed for instance so again thank you um and i'm glad i sent a text late uh last night or the night before to dr cavazos after reading twitter and the retirement

203of another david anderson i was conflated him with you and i was like what we david and i worked together at the education agency for six years he was general counsel and i was curriculum director and we confused people thoroughly then and when he moved to raise your hand uh because of all the overlap with michelle smith who had worked at hilco and now is it raise your hand we did that there and so yeah you gave me a little that tweet i think it was from michelle it gave me uh a little bit of a heart attack um david will be missed by by people who know him and even people who don't know him they may not know they're going to miss him but they they will so well again thank you for

204your effort and i'm sorry i didn't wear mine david anderson burnt orange tie that's quite all right um but hook um thank you seeing seeing the the seven of you up there i do want to say one last thing and that is i mentioned there were four or five members that were particularly important in the last 10 days i've never seen a session in which the final 10 days made the difference they did this time final 10 days are always important no question about it had we had the conversation on may 20th about a number of these bills it would have been very very different had signing die occurred on the 21st then on 31st i really do want to mention state representative steve allison from alamo heights state representative keith bell from forney state

205representative brad buckley from colleen state representative ken king from canadian gary van diever from new boston now gary's a retired superintendent but the other four of those people sat in the chairs you sit in they were all trustees and the experience that they brought to the texas legislature from that seat put them in a very unique position to understand what was happening and to have a very credible voice with their colleagues and if you watched any of it on television i hope you didn't because it says something about your evenings but when you saw someone step to the the front mic and those four or five people or any combination were standing behind them it meant something dan huberty a former chair but also a former trustee who was busted early in the session out

206of his chairmanship showed once again though why he is one of the most valuable members of the house and he did that in the last 10 days because he really took these bills and while the others were all doing a lot of the unrecognized work behind the scenes dan was the person who also carried a very heavy load at the front microphone because his standing with his colleagues and his ability to cross the rotunda to the senate and stand up for what the house wanted is it's almost unparalleled right now but five former trustees and one former superintendent made a heck of a difference for public education this session thank you so much mr anderson thank you just stand there for one more minute mr wilbanks i just want to tag onto what you said

207uh former trustees and former educators are plenty in the legislature right now and we would be remiss if we wouldn't point out our own beverly powell who also set up here with us as well and uh i do want to put i think we should do a shout out to our local delegation um the f valiant effort that chris turner head of the democratic caucus but also our own um matt krause who carried the star bill the furthest it's ever been it's just short of the goal line but um uh so we had people on both sides of the aisle really uh stand up for public education your your delegation was very positive to work with this session every one of them was matt she said really deserves a lot of credit for taking that

208issue that was important to many of his colleagues and moving it as far as he did senator powell always was calling and her staff was always calling saying how does arlington isd feel about this um we felt that your interests and we delivered a lot of letters to your delegation they're not on the education committee but we wanted them to know where you were on them because those some of those issues were going to get to the floor and it made a difference kate mentioned one bill earlier and that's the the uh the bill that the retired teachers were so positive about this the tutoring program one entity objected to that bill in the two public hearings arlington isd board of trustees and because of that the people who sponsored that bill were willing to

209call and say what do we need very simple be more clear that this is a permissive program and we got that language we've got that language and around the state there are probably 1023 other school districts that didn't know that was happening so that's off to you for that thank you thank you so much mr anderson and thank you so much miss coleman we really appreciate the time that you spent with us thank you okay next on our agenda is open forum for non-agenda items mrs benjamin do we have any requesters registered to adjust the board regarding non-agent items no ma'am we do not thank you so much benjamin so we continue to move on with our superintendent's report dr cavazos thank you president mason has has been customary i've been uh thanking different groups

210during my report and tonight since your thanks to the board for your recognition and validation of the work that employees have done throughout this last year and a half and for your diligence in working on the budget and making those adjustments and inclusions tonight that will really bring joy to our staff and so thank you all collectively for that effort thank you so much dr cavazos do i have any trustees with reports okay seeing no lights i would like to just make a comment we are moving into the weekend where we commemorate june 19th and since we are in an environment of education and informing and learning i would just like to share a little bit of the history of june 19th um president lincoln in 1863 uh issued the proclamation the emancipation proclamation um

211which was issued to free enslaved people in the confederate areas of the united states um it so happened that in june 19th of 1865 which was two and a half years after this proclamation was signed that the news spread to what was considered at that time the confederacy and this news impacted over 250 000 people who remained enslaved two and a half years after technically they were stated to be free general gordon granger arrived in galveston texas to inform that slavery had been outlawed two and a half years prior and that news was openly disregarded by the galveston's mayor at the time and still enslaved people were forced to physically go back and continue to work as slaves so this is not just about freedom of enslaved people the celebration of juneteenth in the south

212but i think it's also about a group of people who claim to their rights as americans and many people today are continuing to do that exact same thing why do i believe that this date is important to celebrate by all people that's because it recognizes an expression of hope and resistance a balance of the two and all for who continue to seek freedom today not to throw my son under the bus but um he did get a history i mean he minored in history and he talked about how history seemed so kind of boring when he was in school and as he continued to learn more and more about history what he says he really learned is being able to look back at things that have happened in the past see how they've impacted the

213present and then determined are those things we need to continue for the future to make the world a better place or the things that we need to recognize should probably never happen um in the future so um just take time out this weekend and do something to learn and or celebrate juneteenth and that is my report so at this time as secretary do you have any items oh i apologize dr reich um i just wanted to add that it is uh signed as a national holiday now uh so miss opalie who's been at 94 or five years old marching for that for years and years finally got got her way so yes she did and she is definitely being celebrated in fort worth texas uh mrs fowler thank you president mays mr hogg wanted more

214information about student outcomes reporting mechanism that we need to um have it more regular so that we know how the students are doing yeah like a schedule and then um mr wilbanks would like to know what what all we can use the funds for the sr2 can we use them for tutoring can we use them for what but he wanted more guidelines on what we can use that money for actually what are the minimum requirements for uh enrollment recovery uh versus what other uses they could be used for and that's it thank you so much mr secretary okay it is now 9 51 and this meeting is adjourned