001So this is for our required session for the application process for gen 31 for sub D and sub E. If you are looking more of the route of subG or HPE, there are separate sessions for that. You may check our website in order to um get more information about that and sign up, but they will happen um later this week. All righty. So I did see a question in the chat, but Sarah was on it. She already answered it. Thank you so much, Sarah. All right, I Before we get started, let's get you get to know who's on the screen. I'm going to pass it over to Valerie to introduce herself. >> All right, good morning everyone. My name is Valerie Trovinho. It is great to join you all this morning. I am the division
002director for charter school authorizing here with TEA. Super happy to be here. Um, prior to my work in this role, I have been here about three months. I was a school leader and district leader for charter schools in Texas for the past 11 years. So, I am very supportive of the charter school movement and I am really excited to enter this process with all of you as you each present a new model for a brand new charter school in Texas. You are going to be led today through a lot of the detail that is going to go into the new school creation process, the application, the approval process, and you're going to learn a lot of detail. I bet a couple times throughout the day you are even going to hear the word arduous because
003this process of becoming a new school in Texas for as part of the charter network. It's a lot. We put you through um a lot to make sure that we're putting the very very best in front of our students across our state. So before we get into all of the detail and the process, what you need to submit, the deadlines, and all of the hard work that comes with this, I want us to first take a moment and ground us in our why or who we are, why we're here, and what we want to to ultimately be in order to serve students. So what you can see up on your screen there is the TEA core values. They might be similar or different to those of the organizations that you are a part of. Um,
004but I want us all to just read those that we are determined. We are learners. We are people centered. And we are servant leaders. So throughout the process today, as you're taking your notes, as you're making your to-do list, really keep in mind why you're doing this. You're doing this to support staff. And you're doing this to support students so that they each have absolute best school model that fits their needs and the needs of their family so that they can grow up and to be empowered and excellent people. So keep that with you. take down a note of which core value you're going to hold on to throughout our our different sessions today. And with that, I'm going to hand it back to our incredible new schools team who have done so much work
005to prepare all of the information for you today. Back to you, Britney. >> Thanks so much, Valerie. Um, so just in case you were noticing, um, as we kind of review the attendance, um, we are removing any AI noteakers. Unfortunately, um it is against TA policy to have those present in our webinars and our Zoom meetings. So, if you see that it gets removed, um that is the reason why. So, who am I and who are these other people that are up here on this screen? I'm Britney Glenn. I'm the new school's manager. Um before this, I was on the PM team, so I worked on the other side of the ball. And before that, I was on a campus for several years as a campus administrator, campus teacher. Um, so all of the things,
006um, education has been a big part of who I am. It's kind of shaped my outlook on life. Um, and I really enjoy working with the students here in Texas. I'm going to pass it over to John. >> Good morning. Sorry, technology is not my friend this uh this morning. Uh, I'm John Garland. I've been working in this same seat working with charter applications and charter applicants and supports uh since uh I think 2015. Uh, so it's been a while. So, I'm hoping to uh continue to bring um that expertise and historical knowledge to this process um and answer any questions you all might have. Um but before I pass it to Sarah, I did want to alert um anybody who has joined in this webinar through their cell phone number. We need you all
007to either email us to let us know that that is your name to associate with the phone number or join by another method. Otherwise, we can't really confirm once you all do submit an application um if you if you attend it because we don't have your name to the number. So, um we'll provide some more information on how to do that later, but just in the meantime, if you all uh can join by another way or again, email us. Um that said, Sarah, back to you. >> Thanks, John. Um as John said, my name is Sarah Khan. I'm a new school specialist here on the New School's team. Um and I have been with the agency for two years now. And before that in my life, I've worked in charters my entire career. Um, starting
008from a teacher all the way to a district administration. Um, so I'm just happy to be here. Happy to support this next generation. And back to you, Britney. >> Awesome. Thanks so much. So, we all make up the new schools team and the division of authorizing. So, you'll interface with us quite a bit. Um, and if you have questions, we will be providing our contact information at the end. All right, so let's talk a little bit about the agenda for today. So this morning, we're going to spend some time hearing from the new schools team. We will then kind of dive deep into our um learning of the virtual application and what that entails. We'll talk about some charter law and then our sped department is going to give a presentation um about things you
009need to know um for that sped section of your application good practices. The afternoon session um we'll dive deep into CSP or charter school programs the financial plan workbook and emergent bilingual. So, you're going to leave here with a plethora of information and we want to make sure that you have time to understand what is being said. So, there is some built-in time for question and answer. Um, if we were on the emergent bilingual section and you want to go back and ask a question about something we covered in the overview, that's fine. Um, it doesn't have to be correlated to what just was presented. We just want to make sure you leave here with information and questions answered. All right. I don't see anything in the question and answer right now, so we can
010dive in. So, let's talk open enrollment charters in Texas. This is going to help kind of ground all of the information that you're going to hear today. So, the next slide is intended to support the historical narrative of charter schools in the state of Texas. This marks the 29th year of charters in our state. The first charter school was approved by state board of education in 1996 and opened in the fall of 1997. That was generation 1. We are now on generation 31. The Texas portfolio has grown over the past 29 years from those first 20 charters that were awarded in 1996 to the current over 180 charters in the state operating over 900 charter campuses. So here at TEA we use a lot of acronyms. The first important one that you are going to
011hear first definition before I get to our acronym um that you are going to hear is what is open enrollment? So it is a school that is open to all students on a first come first-s serve basis regardless of that school model. Um, and it's important to know that when you are applying in this application, you are applying for an open enrollment charter school. So, let's move on over to that acronym. LEA and what does that mean? It is a local education agency. So, charter schools are their own LEA means that they have a governing board that is legally responsible for administration, performance, and governance of all their campuses under that LEA. And just to note, um, an entity may not hold multiple charter eleas or local education agencies. So, the purpose of T Texas
012Charter Schools, Valerie kind of alluded to why we exist as the authorizing um but why you guys exist as those applicants is to improve student learning, increase student um and choice in that public school system, create professional development um for teachers, professional opportunities for those teachers to attract them to this profession, establish a new form of accountability, and encourage different and innovative ative learning models. What makes your application stand out? What makes you different from the local school in your area? That is what um we are looking for, different and innovative. So, this is where we currently sit as far as charter schools, student enrollment, and charter campuses. So, you can just take a second and look at those numbers. All right, on this next slide, since 2016, 13% of charter applicants have been approved,
013and that equates to 241 new charter applications, which have turned into 32 approved charters. So, this information does not include data from our last generation, which was generation 30. So, let's talk a little bit about the application and just a quick overview. So, the big thing if you hear nothing else today is this slide going over the timeline. So, before we get too deep, let's take that bird's eyee view um into our timeline so we can anchor and contextualize our time together. From the onset, you can see that the application is going to take about a year from when we release our application until the state board of education deliberates on an applicant um who the commissioner will potentially prop propose. If you think about our process in terms of season, we release our application
014in late summer, early fall. Um applicants spend fall prepping their proposal. We then spend spring and winter, winter and spring, there we go, reviewing the application and ultimately we re-engage with some of those applicants in the summer who um will then potentially go before SBOE. So all of this, the whole application process takes about a year. The most important date for you guys to remember on this slide is November 14th, 2025 at 5:00 p.m. We That is your applicant submission deadline. So everything must be turned in by November 14th, 2025 at 5:00 p.m. John's probably going to say this again. Sarah's probably going to reiterate it again. So you are going to hear that date multiple times today. So for quick reference um he we've talked about the timeline where we are right now in
015the timeline is in the information session. Um you know when your application is now due but let's just go over what you are going to kind of walk away with in today's session. We want you to have knowledge about eligibility, what the application requires and how to submit your necessary documents. So there are three categories which I'm going to speak about right now before we move into that last one. So under sub chapter D there are three eligible entities that can apply for an open enrollment charter and those are taxexempt organizations under section 501c3 government entities as defined by state law and institution institutes of higher ed such as private public or independent institutions defined by Texas education code or TEC under sub and this is limited to public colleges or universities as defined by
016the TEC. Um and historically, just a quick little note, um we have seen most applicants apply for their tax exempt 501c3 um and then they apply um for their open enrollment charter school. There are three available applications. New operator, experienced operator and sub chapter E which is that college and university. So that is in this session. Those are the applications that we are referring to for new operator. The eligibility um of the entity they have operated a charter school before. um they have not uh they have not operated a charter school before and is seeking state authorization charter under TEC Chapter 12. For experienced operators, the eligible entity is affiliated with an outofstate charter management organization with multiple years of academic data or operates a district authorized charter campus in Texas with multiple years of
017that academic performance data. They can also be incorporated in the state of Texas um but that operates or manages at least one charter school or campus with that multiple years of academic performance data outside of Texas. So, new operator, never operated a charter before, experienced operator has some experience with being an operator of a charter. And then subchapter E, this eligible entity includes public junior colleges, public senior colleges, or those public universities. So, Generation 30 offers a separate streamline experience operator application document. Please take a look at our website for more information. um that instruction and guidance which sh Sarah is going to actually show you guys how to pull it here in just a second is going to be your best friend. It's going to outline all of these things that we talk about
018in this presentation today and give you lots of specific details. So now I'm going to turn over to Sarah so she can show you how to access those documents. Thank you so much. Before um we talk about accessing the documents um we have been getting a couple of questions. Um, if you have your name, we're in regards to do I need to send in my name. We were only asking if there was a phone number attached to your login. Um, otherwise, you are good to go if you've just logged in using your Zoom account. Um, if you have any questions about it, please put in the chat and we will continue to answer that. Um, so now we're going to talk about accessing the application documents. Um, just as a reminder, all of the information
019that we are going over today will be posted on our website on the charter applicants page. Um, we will have this PDF for you and the recording of the webinar. So, if you need some help accessing that, you should definitely review this video. Um, so what we're going to do is on the next slide, it's actually going to be a video just showing you exactly how you can access the generation 31 application materials. Um, John, we'll go ahead and move over. In order to access your application documents, you'll need to go to the charter school applicants page. Then you'll determine which application you're applying for. For this instance, we're going to look at subchapter D, open enrollment. I'll scroll down to application documents. The first document you're going to want to open is going to
020be the instructions and guidance document. This document will open in your web browser and you should be able to read through it completely. Then you'll determine if you're going to be applying as a new operator or an experienced operator. Once you've determined that, you're going to open the corresponding narrative document. So for this instance, I'm going to show you the new operator narrative document. When you try to open this through the web, you will receive this warning right here. This warning just means that you need to save the document to your computer. And then you'll open your file explorer where it's downloaded and you'll open it through your file explorer in Adobe. Again, if you try to access this document, the narrative document on your web browser, it's going to give you this warning right
021here. You just need to save it to your computer and open it through your file browser. Perfect. So that's how you're going to access the generation 31 applications. So now we're going to talk about the parts of the application in which you're going to complete. So this slide outlines the key components of the application package. Each part is essentual for a su a successful application. So I'm going to walk you through what each one of them entails. It's important to note that all applications will have an instructions and guidance document that outlines the application process in its entire. It's very important that the first step that you're taking is that you're reading through this document from start to finish. It is a very lengthy document, but it provides information about your eligibility criteria, the key
022timelines, your dates, and your submissions instructions. The next document that we have is the narrative document. All applications will have a narrative document in their corresponding attachments such as a financial plan workbook. However, you will um only submit a portfolio overview workbook if you're applying as an experienced operator. Similarly, this year we've added a virtual addendum for you to be able to look at in order for you to apply. So, our um director of special projects will actually take some time to walk you through what it means to apply for a virtual a full-time virtual or full-time hybrid campus. Um, but these are all of the components of the application package and we're going to walk through each of them in detail. So, let's talk about the narrative document. This one might be one of
023the most important documents for your application because it houses every single one of the narrative responses and provides the links to all of the attachments in which you're going to be asked to complete. So, it's very important that you can access this document. I know we watched a video on how you can access it, but I'll also verbalize it. In order to access this document, the first thing you need to do is to navigate to our charter applicants web page. You'll want to download the generation 31 narrative document. Once you have it downloaded, you'll save it to your computer and then you'll open the file from your downloads or your file explorer and not from the browser. If you open it from the browser, it will give you a warning. Once you're able to access
024it within Adobe PDF, you'll notice a couple of things. One is that it's a fillable PDF. So, you'll type your narrative responses directly into the document. Two, the document has expandable response boxes. So, as you're typing in, it will automatically adjust to the size that your text is. And then lastly, it's very important, like Britney named um to go back to the instructions and guidance document to view all of the helpful terminology. Evaluation criteria for each section is listed within it as well. So, every single um narrative section has evaluation criteria and that can be found in the instructions and guidance document. So, it's very important that you're able to access those two documents um to make sure that you're able to successfully complete your narrative document. Are there any questions on how you might
025view the narrative document or the format of the narrative document? Okay, there's no questions in the Q&A function. If you have any questions, please make sure you're putting them there. If that's the case, we're going to move on to the attachment documents. So, this slide explains how you can view and complete the attachment documents in your application. First, you'll need to know that all of your attachments are hyperl on both the narrative attachment checklist page and the relative narrative pages for easy access. You're going to find three types of attachments to complete. The first is a simple cover sheet. It's going to provide specific instructions for completing each attachment and each attachment must be submitted along with its cover sheet which outlines what's required. The next type are fillable forms where some cover sheets come
026with a fillable PDF form. Um, and you'll need to insert your responses directly into this document and no corresponding documents should follow those. And then lastly, we also have the the worksheets or your Excel workbooks. Applicants must complete the Excel workbook attachments in Excel and then also submit it in Excel format. Are there any questions about the attachment documents, the formats, or how you can access this? Okay, I don't see anything in the Q&A right now. So, we're going to keep moving forward to drafting your application. So, coming back to our timeline, you'll notice that applicants have roughly four months to complete the requirements of our application. We'll briefly go over some of the most important questions that you'll encounter while you're drafting your proposal, such as how many applications will I complete? Are there
027any enrollment limitations? Do I need to notify anyone um that you're applying? And what about public meetings? Then we'll briefly discuss the role of selecting instructional materials during the drafting process and how you will engage with us after this information session today. So to answer your questions, applicants only submit one single application that if awarded will become a charter LEA. This LEA will operate one or more campuses within the first 5 years of an of its existence depending on what you apply for in your application. The charter school board will then govern all of the campuses that were authorized throughout the application process. But the new charter is limited to the number of campuses stated in the application. So that talks about how the application phase once the charter decides to expand whether by adding
028grade levels, extending maximum enrollment or geographic boundaries. Those are called expansion amendments and they're governed by separate processes. Um, and expansions cannot become effective until the fourth year of a new charter in its operation. And they're granted by the commissioner based on your school's academic performance and financial health. So, one thing to note is that when you are looking at this application, you are looking 5 years out. So, everything within your application is looking at the first 5 years of your existence. So now let's talk a little bit about selecting instructional materials. We want to reiterate some of the expectations and information around instructional materials requirements for charter schools. To be clear, charter schools have the ability to design, select, and implement instructional materials at the local level. However, you must still cover 100% of
029the TEICSS or the Texas essential knowledge and skills that form the foundation curriculum in Texas. So here at the agency we provide many resources to guide and planning TICS aligned materials but the agency has also in recent years created the open education resources which are free for public use and have been evaluated through a rigorous vetting process called IMRA or the instructional materials review and approval process. So we're going to talk a little bit more about the IMRA process. The new instructional materials review and approval process um replaces the former state board of education proclamation and the Texas resource review process. IMRA was enacted under House Bill6005 and brings new components to a single SBOE governed review of the instructional materials. So instructional materials in the IMR cycle are reviewed for their coverage of relevant
030prek guidelines, English language proficiency standards and their tei as well as quality and suitability based on the state board of education's approved rubrics. What you'll notice too is on um this site right here, we've also linked for you um the site for the EMR re review. So once you're able to access this, you can go and look through the um state approved instructional materials. And just to note, every SBOE approved instructional material are considered highquality instructional materials. And that's going to be important as you're going to see that throughout the application. So again, I referenced high-quality instructional materials um or HQIM. You'll see these two interchangeable throughout the application on the last slide, but you'll also notice um this termed throughout the application. HQIM is a researchbased initiative here in Texas to offer extremely high
031quality proven materials to really enhance student learning um and remove some of the burden from teachers to create all of the instructional materials with best practice requirements. So, here in the center is the definition of HQIM. I'll give you about 20 seconds to just kind of look at that real quick. This definition is also restated in the application in the school design section and in the instructions and guidance document. Please know that just identifying an adopted or reviewed material through TEA provided resources is a good start. Um but strong applications narratives really demonstrate their knowledge and familiarity with the selected material and how they plan to utilize it in their proposed school model. Any questions on highquality instructional materials? Um I don't see any questions on that but I do see will the recording and
032slide deck be available to attendees after today? Um, so yes, you will have access to the webinar recording and to the um slide deck. However, please note it will likely be on our website, the charter school applicant page next week. Um, we will submit the ticket. It does take some time. Um, it should be on next week. Okay. So, now I'm going to talk about communications and support. We, the new schools team, really try to offer you supports throughout this process so that you have time to ask questions. Um, and we do that through what we call support seminars. You can find those support seminars listed on our charter applicant page. I believe our first one is coming up this week. Um, you do need to register for it. And once you register, you'll get
033a confirmation similar to this one. Um, and then you'll attend. We also have office hours and these are more informal um and they you do not need to register for it. The link is provided on the charter applicant page and you can join for that one. So please just note that we are here to support you throughout this process. Um you are always welcome to reach out to us for technical support. Um we cannot offer you specific or competitive advice about your proposal or what you plan to include in your narratives. We, like I named before, we are offering our optional support seminars. So, those are not required. Um, but they do pertain to specific sections in the application. And I highly recommend you looking to see what sections are being addressed. Um, and apply
034and um, register for the ones that you feel like you need some more support with. Um, and with this, we are pleased to have agency staff and content areas experts sharing valuable information during those sessions. Are there any questions about any of the topics that I just covered any communications or supports? Sarah, so there is a question about HQIM um as it relates to full-time virtual. So we are actually going to have a presentation by an she will be on a little bit later this morning um in order for um us to kind of give some really good information about virtual to you guys. So we're going to hold that question. She's going to review um that topic when she does her presentation. >> Perfect. Thank you so much, Britney, for that. Okay, it looks
035like we answered some other questions live time. That's perfect. Um I'm going to go ahead and pass it over to John and he's going to talk to you about one of the most important parts, the application submission. >> All right. Thank you, Sarah. Um yeah, so we're going to talk about what happens after the drafting period. How do I get this thing turned in? um what is involved in that? What is included in that? Um and then obviously where are we putting it? Um as Britney mentioned, your application submission deadline is November 14th, 5:00 p.m. I'll repeat 5:00 pm one more time. 5:00 p.m. Central Standard Time. And I will explain why I'm repeating that so many times here in a minute. All right. So, you have spent two and a half months um preparing
036your application. you've completed your narratives, your attachments, all the things. Um, what is actually included then in the final submission. So, this is going to kind of depend on how you are applying. So, if you are a new operator, which I suspect 95% or more of you will be, um, you will at minimum at minimum submit your narrative response document. As Sarah mentioned, that is the document that has all the questions and you're going to input all your responses directly into that PDF. You're going to submit one document that has all of your attachments combined. Um, on the next slide, we'll talk about what that looks like. And then lastly, the financial plan workbook. Um, so these are going to be your basic three if you're a new operator. If you're a new operator and
037you want to also have a full-time hybrid or full-time virtual campus, you will have a fourth submission uh document and that will be that addendum that Sarah was talking about. So that's four documents. If you're an experienced operator, you will have the narrative response document, the attachments document, the workbook, but you will also have the portfolio overview workbook, which is an Excel document as well that I outlines just the charter portfolio of the charter management organization. So, that's four. If you're a new operator to confuse you more, um you will have five submission documents. If you want to be an experienced operator that also wants a virtual campus, right? So, at minimum across all applicants, you will have a narrative response doc, attachments, submission document to upload, and the workbook. And then depending on if
038you're an experienced operator, you'll have an additional one. If you want virtual, you add another one. All right. So, with regards to the attachments document, um, by now I suspect the majority of folks have accessed the narrative document. Um, you will notice that especially for new operators, there's a pretty lengthy amount of attachments. And so, what we want to avoid is taking all 30 attachments that you have completed and uploading all 30 documents, right? That's that's too much. um and um unfortunately it causes confusion. So we have chosen um to consolidate this into one document. Um but that puts the onus and responsibility of you all to compile that. So end goal is to take all 30 attachments or however many attachments compile them into one PDF document and that was what you're going to
039submit. Our applicants typically do this in two ways. Um, primarily I think people print them first. So if Sarah uh applies and she has drafted all her 30 uh attachments, she will go print all 30 out, put them in the order um that they are arranged in in the narrative document. Or Britney, who is a bit more techsavvy, she um knows how to use Adobe and can combine all those attachments um digitally on her computer. Either way works. and whatever is comfortable for you all. In Sarah's instance, she has printed out all of these documents. She's going to put them in order, like I said, into one huge stack and then she's going to start pagionating the numbers, uh, pagionating the pages rather. Okay, so Sarah goes through all hundred something pages, however many pages,
040puts page numbers. Britney has figured out how to do it in Adobe, so she's good with that. Sarah, who's printed the stuff out, is going to then take that pagenated paper copy huge stack of attachments and either scan it in at her house or take it somewhere to have it scanned. That scanned document, that's the attachment submission document. That one PDF that we can open and see all of your attachments in order, including those cover sheets. That's what we want. Britney again, her her road is a little bit easier. She's put the page numbers in Adobe. All she has to do has hit hit save and she's ready to submit. All righty. One note on here, and I believe uh Sarah mentioned this earlier, is that the workbook is an Excel document. So, you're going
041to download that as an Excel. You're going to complete it as an Excel, and then you're going to submit it as an Excel. there is no need and um nor should you convert any of the Excel workbooks into PDF when you submit it. So we should not receive a PDF copy of the workbooks. We want that that raw Excel copy that you've been inputting data in. All righty. Before I move on, do we have any questions? I don't see any. Okay. So review process. So you submitted it. What happens then? Um, if you do make a mistake in that process, are there things that you can fix or remedy um that would not remove you from the process? Um, what happens to your application um in the evaluation process? And then what happens after the
042review process? All right. So, it starts with completion check. Um, so both Sarah and Britney have submitted their applications. Um, now the tea, our team will at that point begin the first stage in reviewing your application, which is checking that it's complete. So, looking through all of your documents, not for quality of content. I want to be very clear about that. When you submit your application during this process, we are not reading through your application for quality of content. Okay? We are looking to see all the documents are there. We're seeing that things are filled out. We're seeing that attachments are in order. all those things. So, we will look for eligibility. Um, and so why I kept repeating the 5pm and we'll get to this also on the next slide is it is extremely
043important that in the upload process because it's a digital process. You're not mailing your applications in, you're submitting them online through a data portal that we receive that information by the deadline and no later, not even one minute later. uh we will be unable to accept that application. We will also confirm that you attended at least one of these app info sessions that you have filed your articles incorporation with the state here in Texas. Um that you have at least applied by the time you submit your application to get your tax exempt status. That's that's the 501c3. Um, we will also run plagiarism checks to just ensure that all of our applications are expressing original ideas or at least um, articulating them in an original way. Um, and then also we're making sure that your
044narratives are significantly complete. We look at your attachments again, making sure that they're all there. Making sure that you have met all of the requirements within each application uh each attachment because some of some attachments have multiple pieces that you have to submit in conjunction with that uh with that attachment. So, we look for those. We look to make sure that all your signatures are there. So, one big attachment are board member biographical affidavits, which means you're going to take this affidavit and give it to all of your board members, and they will uh complete those individually, but they also have to get those signed and notorized. So, we look to make sure that they are all signed and notorized. Uh there are letter of special assurances at the back of the narrative where you're
045basically signing saying that you affirm that everything that you've put in this application narrative is true. Um, and then also notifications. And, um, we highlight this because I do see some familiar names in the attendance log today. Um, and so that tells me that we have some folks that have engaged in our process in the past. Depending on when you engage in our process, um, you might be expecting to send out a lot of certified mail receipts um, to a lot of people. Um, that is not how we uh, do conduct that process anymore. Um, and so in the past you would have to send a lot of notifications to certain elected officials as well as superintendent and board of trustees alerting them that you plan to apply for a charter school. Um, what we
046do now is we will take the information provided in your application and we will handle the notification process. So again for my returning applicants, please know that you do not have to send those out and nor should you. All right, still seeing no questions. I must be doing a pretty good job. Okay, let's talk about opportunities to cure. So again, Sarah, Britney, they we go through our preliminary check. We see that Britney has completed all of her her all all of her items. We confirmed her eligibility. All her attachments were there. She filled in her narratives, etc. Britney's going to get a letter from us that says, "You are complete. you will be advancing to the next stage in our application process. Uh Sarah um forgot to include a specific attachment um or forgot to
047put something specific in an attachment and so she will get a different letter and that letter will say that she has um she has 5 days to remedy or cure this deficiency that we found in this process. This opportunity does not extend to every piece of the application and that's important to note. Um, typically it is limited again to attachments or certain uh things in the narrative document. That said, there are things that will permanently disqualify you and someone did have a question about this earlier like well what would prevent someone from moving forward in the process? This is the first big uh reason late submission. Uh it seems like every year um we get at least one applicant who waits till about 30 minutes to try to upload all their documents. And what will
048typically happen is we will get a call at 458 saying, "Hey, I can't figure this out. Can I get an extension?" Unfortunately, the answer is always no. And so what we have to tell you all and we will continue to echo this throughout every support seminar, every office hour is a is a reminder that as you plan, you need to be done with your application at least by the day before it's due. So you can reserve the whole day or at least half the day to try to get that thing submitted because what we don't want is you all spending two and a half months doing almost doctoral level work to only get disqualified because of 60 seconds, right? So we just want to ensure that you understand that now we beat that kind of
049into you know you all's lexicon to make sure we all have a happy ending come November 14th. Eligibility issues. uh you all need to file with the state. So again, to be a nonprofit status, for the purpose of our application, you all need to be nonprofit within Texas and then file for your tax exempt status, right? And so you need to file those state papers by November 14th. So you cannot retroactively do that if you forget. Um if you all do not attend the app info session, this shouldn't bother any of you all because you're here, right? But again, certain instances we will hear like, "Hey, I didn't know I had to do that." And again, we have to unfortunately um we can't extend an offer to reattend or anything else like that. Missing responses.
050This is a big one. 99% of your application should be complete. There are certain narrative responses that may say, "Hey, you can put NA." But if we get an application submission that most of the responses are blank, a lot of them are blank, then that is grounds enough for us to remove you all from the process. So again, it's very important that you all look make sure that all your document um all of your response is saved all of that before you submit it because again if we get a document that is substantively incomplete, excuse me, we will remove you from the process. Speaking of review process, okay, Sarah remedied hers, Britney remedy or she's already complete both their applications. Now go to the next stage in our application process, which is the external review
051process. So at this stage, TEA is not going to score any of your applications. So I'm not going to score Sarah's application. I'm not going to score Britney's application. Both their applications get sent to a panel of external reviewers. Each of their applications is going to be scored five times. So, five different reviewers are going to receive their application. Once they score, they submit those scores back to us and then we do the math to figure out which score, final cumulative percentage score, we are going to accept as your final application score. We do it two ways. First way is all five reviewers, we take all five scores, we get an unadjusted average. So 80% 85% 95% 100% uh and 75%. Right? We'll take the raw average of that or we'll drop the highest and
052the lowest and average the three middle. Okay? Whichever one of those methodologies is most beneficial to you all as the applicant, we will take as the final score. So if your unadjusted average is 84% and your adjusted average is 87% we would take the 87%. Okay. So once the scores are finalized 85% is the magic number. However, if you get an 80 to 84% we will send your application out for one more additional read. So you will have an average of six reads at that point. Okay? If that additional read, so that sixth read is enough to push you to the 85% at that point you will also move. So anyone who preliminarily gets 85% or higher on their final cumulative percentage moves to the next round. Anybody who gets 80 to 84% gets an
053additional read and has the opportunity to advance if they can meet the 85%. Any applications that get 80 79% or lower are removed from the process and you all are then welcome to reapply in the subsequent application cycle. All right, let me check to see if I have a question I can answer. Okay, looks like we have a filing eligibility question that I'll get to in a bit. Okay, let's talk about capacity interview. So, uh Sarah and Britney's applications have made 85%. So, they are moving towards the next hurdle in the process, which are capacity interviews. Even if you are not, even if you don't know if you're applying today, I need you all to write this week, these this this time window down, May 5th through the 15th. These are when we're having capacity
054interviews. These if you are invited to capacity review, which we'll talk about in a second, your board, yourself, and other folks that we will list at a later time if you get to that process, need to be available to interview, right? So May 5th through the 15th are very important. So if you do submit an application, just ensure that that that time window is fairly relaxed on your schedule just as a preventative measure. Okay, so winter capacity interviews we just talked about and then like who participates in those. All right, so you've got your 85% or higher, you now got a letter saying, "Hey, you're invited to capacity interview." At that point in May, you uh will attend a zoom a virtual capacity interview uh with both TEA staff as well as state board member
055uh state board of education members. Of the TEA staff, um you will obviously interface with the new schools team, the faces you see here today. um charter school uh law division uh emerging bilingual program specialist will also attend. Someone from my financial compliance, someone representing highquality instructional materials here at the agency um and then also someone representing special education. So that's the panel from TEA that you will field questions from for that two hours or however long the interview is from the state board of education. Um we invite all state board of education members to each and every interview. So even if they are not in your district or you're not in their district, it doesn't matter. They are more than happy to both attend but also engage with you all and posit any questions
056to you all. So um sometimes board members sit through all the interviews, sometimes they sit through some of them. There's no way to really know. So again, um you will interface potentially with state board of education, but at minimum definitely us as tea staff. Okay, let's see. Looking at questions. Okay, we have a CSP question. Um, we do have a CSP presentation a bit later, so we'll hold off on um allowable costs, which is what someone's asking about. Okay, proposal and deliberation. So, again, what happens after the capacity interview? Uh when do when does a commissioner make a decision? What happens after that decision? And I think probably most important to everybody here, when would you actually open your school? So you've interviewed um at that point the commissioner will take the totality of the
057interview the application materials letters of support etc and will make a final proposal and or choose to not propose um any particular applicant or applicants um from advancing forward that'll happen that proposal meaning that that list of applicants um that he chooses to propose will be published on or around May 27th. And then for those who aren't proposed, um move on to the next step, which is uh deliberating with the state board of education uh during their June 2026 meeting. All righty. So to wrap all of this up in kind of like a a tight bow for what happens after the capacity interview. So in May again the applica uh commissioner will review everything make decisions um on May 27th he will then publish who he whom he wishes to propose to the state board
058of education to deliberate um at that meeting the state board of education will then decide to either exercise their their statutory right to veto any andor all applicants that attend that meeting or um choose not to exercise that. And for those that they do veto, those folks are then removed from the process. For those who are not vetoed by the state board of education, we'll then move on to more or less the last kind of big authorization hurdle um which are the contingencies. So if you are not vetoed in that June meeting by SBOE, what will happen is we will re-engage uh with us the new schools team uh where we will then address any have you address any contingencies uh that need to be remedied before uh contract can be issued. Speaking of contracts,
059as Sarah said, uh we operate on a 5-year initial contract. So for new charters, you are given a 5-year contract first. you have that contract more or less by October on or around October from October to August to the next August. So, we're a year in now, right? You've you've you've committed a year to the authorization process. Now, you have to commit one more year to uh your startup your startup year. So, in October 20 26, so next October, some of you all will get a charter contract. those who do will then spend the next year um planning to actually open the school. And so that will then lead everybody who is ultimately awarded a charter gets to their startup year to open their doors in August of 2027. So it's about a two-year two-year
060plus commitment um that we obviously don't take lightly as Valerie opened with. You know, we want to ensure that we're putting the best of the best in front of students of Texas. That said, I want to end with support seminars. So, we have one coming up tomorrow. That's our first one. Uh it's a pretty uh packed one, but we'll be covering a lot of good stuff. We we will be recording them. And so, if you were unable to attend, we will upload the recording. Again, please understand there's a lag in our ability to upload these things just because of accessibility issues and just workflow. So, tomorrow we'll be diving a little bit deeper into governance, community engagement. Um, you'll hear from me about the workbook and just some best practices about it. And then there'll
061be a deeper dive into that charter school program startup grant or CSP grant. Uh, in September, we will bring back special populations folks to talk about special education and emerging bilingual again on a little more granular level. In October, we will come back and talk about curriculum and instruction. And the big one is in November, shortly before the app is due. We highly encourage everyone if you don't intend any of these most timely one is going to be the final steps before submission where we will uh the new schools team here will address any best practices good quality control measures to take to do to your application and review of it to make sure that to maximize uh the chance that you will be initially complete and not have to do a lot of curating
062andor hopefully not you know be removed from the process uh because of technicalities. So, with that said, I'm going to end on charter application email address. I said I was going to talk about this way earlier. Let me see. It looks like we're good. So, if you're here, it's we we see your name. Um, but again, if you have to rejoin by phone or call in specifically, again, this is what I was talking about. you would email us at this email address just to say hey I called in to the to the uh app info session using this number so if and when we get your application and we need to cross reference your application with who attended we'll be able to know that the name is associated with this number but again sitting here
063now everyone sitting here is good so you don't need to worry about it all right that is all I have I'll leave this screen up for a second and just see. I think we have a couple minutes. Oh, yeah. Still the the filing one. Okay, I think we're good to go, Britney. >> Yep. Perfect. Well, thank you so much, John and Sarah, for all of that great information. We are going to move into our next presentation, which is our virtual application overview. Um, and I will have Ann whenever you are ready. You should be able to share your screen and get started whenever you're ready. Thanks, Britney. Um, give me a thumbs up if you guys can see it. Think you should. Thank you. Uh, good morning everyone. Uh, my name is Ann Rajin. I'm
064the director of special projects, uh, at the department of authorizing policy, uh, which also includes supporting virtual and hybrid campuses. Um today I'm here to talk to you about uh the option of the virtual hybrid campus which is new to this application. I'm going to go give you an overview of uh key definitions and options under uh Senate Bill 569. But before I dive into that, I want to spend some time just talking about um why might you consider a virtual hybrid model? Um when we talk about virtual and hybrid, the definition for virtual is that students are learning primarily online. So they're not required to be in person or it's very minimal. And when we talk about the word hybrid, a hybrid model is when students are uh on campus for part of their
065instructional time and then they learn remotely um online for the rest of it. Um so we know that for majority of students brick and mortar campuses inerson campuses are the best setting for them to learn. However for some students a virtual hybrid option might be better suited and when these learning op options are um designed effectively. They can be transformative for students who require a little bit more flexibility. uh they need more personalization um and they just need access to um anytime anywhere learning. We often see families opt into these options um if they have students who have interests outside of school and are pursuing those uh dreams such as like they are training to be in the Olympics. Um, so they're like professional athletes or we have families who opt into it. If students
066have medical needs, whether it's mental health and a a structure of coming into campus every single day is not an option for them. Students who require something that's more accelerated or more at their pace. Uh, families who are looking for options uh for outside of homeschooling. U maybe they're the students are in higher grade levels and they're not quite equipped to help them through those courses. So they're looking at what would still give them the flexibility and still a high quality education and then uh folks who have traveling schedules. So the reason why um the virtual hybrid model option is included in this application is uh due to senate bill 569. So this bill was passed uh during the regular uh session and it establishes a new framework through which um school systems can offer
067virtual or hybrid models. We think of these and delivery uh models in three different ways. So one is that you could offer courses and this means that it could be a standalone course. So it could be a virtual hybrid course. Um and the bill outlines requirements uh for if you were to offer a course, what would those requirements be? Such as that it has to meet the um tiques. It has to be of high quality and if students are going to engage in this that they have to be you know reaching mastery of these subjects and prepared for the next grade level. So that would be in courses. Um another option would be a program. So if you if you think about this is if you have a brickandmortar campus and you have a subset
068of students who are engaged in a structured virtual or hybrid program um that exists that's that's another way to offer this model as well. And then you have campuses and this is where we would be spending majority of our time today. And for a virtual hybrid campus, it does require an authorization uh process and that is uh in through this application. If uh there are schools who are thinking of adding a virtual hybrid campus or just want to establish a virtual campus process, then this is part of that um application. some terms that um are outlined in the application, but I also want to go over if you're unfamiliar with is um is included on this slide. Um I'm just going to quickly go over some of these u synchronous or asynchronous instruction. So when
069we talk about synchronous instruction, we're talking about real time scheduled learning sessions between an instructor and students and there's some interaction happening um whether it's through like video like how we're doing right now if you were interacting with me or you have some some tools and these are like schedule sessions. So that's that's an a way of uh doing instruction in a virtual hybrid setting or an asynchronous instruction is online learning where students access the material at their own pace and schedule. Um there's minimal to um no realtime sessions scheduled. Both of these or a combination of these are allowed in the course and the program or campus. So just an LEA would decide which option they want to offer. Um, and folks do it differently. They have some classes that are asynchronous. They have
070some classes that are synchronous. They have a combination. So, it's really up to the model. When we're talking about a virtual program, um, the the key word here is that it's virtual. So, again, students are u attending entirely mostly online and they're not required to be on campus. they can uh learn synchronously or asynchronously based on how the model is designed. And the other option here for a program is the hybrid option. So in this case, like I mentioned before, the student is in attendance in in class in person for um less than 90% of instruction time. So, a couple ways that folks might uh design a hybrid program would be that maybe there's uh a schedule set in place where students come um in person for the first half of the day and they
071take their courses in person and then they have some courses that are virtual that they take the rest of the day. Or uh they just have hybrid courses, which means um it's all the same course, but on certain days they attended in person and on other days they learn asynchronously. So the main difference here is that for hybrid program students are in person for some of that instruction time. Another term that you'll see in the application is a whole program virtual instruction provider. So you have the option to partner with a private or third party service and depending on the extent of the service. If they provide like a majority of the oversight and management for the virtual instructions um program or campus then they would be considered a whole program virtual instruction provider. You
072do not need to partner with a private or third party entity, but if you do, then there are questions in the application that ask you to elaborate on who this is, what are the services, and so on and so forth. If you have questions that are coming up for you, I forgot to mention this. Please use the Q&A feature and uh put it in there. Um virtual and hybrid campuses like I mentioned before um have to be authorized to operate. Um we consider a virtual or hybrid campus when at least 50% of the students enrolled in that campus are participating in the full-time virtual or hybrid program. Schools have to have their own CDCN if you're running a campus. And the uh funding model for campuses are going to be uh different than uh courses
073or programs. Here the funding is going to be based on your enrollment. So the the equivalent of how many students are enrolled at that campus is then assigned uh is multiplied by the charter school average daily attendance or the state's ADA. So if you have other brick and mortar campuses um then that ADA will be applied to the um the number of students enrolled at the campus that is virtual or hybrid. If you're doing a course or a program, those students would just be included as part of that brick and mortar campuses ADA and you would just take attendance for them in a little bit more flexible means. For virtual and hybrid campuses, authorization continues indefinitely unless the school receives a D or F rating for three preceding years. Um SP 569 outlines uh requirements
074for campuses, programs, and courses. I am not going through all those um requirements today. I'm just highlighting a few things that help folks with uh what they should consider if they're planning on opening a virtual hybrid campus. And so, uh, some of the requirements here is that a newly approved full-time virtual hybrid campus must complete a planning year prior to serving students. If you're, uh, hoping to run a campus, then it should include at least one grade level in which an assessment such as star or EOC would be administered. There are some uh different student eligibility requirements for students who would want to be enrolled in a virtual versus a hybrid campus. Uh the main one here is that for a full-time virtual campus, that student um had to have attended a public school in
075the state for a minimum of 6 weeks in the current school year or preceding school year or meet one of the other requirements that is outlined. Again, you would find the same language in SB569 for a hybrid campus. A student eligible to enroll in a public school is eligible to enroll in a full-time hybrid campus. Um, like I mentioned earlier, once you're authorized to operate a full-time hybrid or virtual campus, uh, that authorization continues indefinitely unless it's revoked for the specific reasons outlined here. Um as I mentioned before, one of them could be receive an unacceptable performance rating for the uh three years preceding three years. Um, another reason could be if there's a special investigation that's conducted or if you do choose to partner with a third party or private entity and they are
076deemed ineligible to be continue as a provider, then that might affect your authorization unless there's an alternative provider that is approved in their place. That's a consideration if you're thinking of partnering with a third party provider. I shared a lot of information. However, it's not exhaustive. So, if you are considering on applying um to open a virtual hybrid campus as part of your application, I would highly suggest that you start with the review of Senate 569. Um it outlines in more detail um the requirements and what the application process entails as well. The instruction and guidance document has some of the um the terms that we talked about and and gives a little bit more context for when you're applying for the virtual and hybrid campus portions of the application. There is an addendum for
077virtual and hybrid campuses that is required um if you are opening a virtual hybrid campus. You do not have to fill it out if you are not planning to open um a virtual hybrid campus. And then there are some asurances in the addendum as well that that highlight the requirements that we have in Senate Bill 569 for running a virtual hybrid campus. Um in the narrative document um you'll see there are questions in there that apply to um anyone. Uh if you are planning on having a component that is virtual or hybrid either in the campus or program or even courses part uh just note that um this is also a space where you would um mention that you are planning on operating um a virtual hybrid model within the narrative itself. So um not
078just in the addendum but there are some questions because we didn't want everyone to like have to duplicate their efforts that that these questions are also relevant to your virtual hybrid campus. So we do ask that you address them as well. You'll see that in the addendum um the the questions are very specific to the virtual hybrid campus that you have. So this would be uh the opportunity to go into more detail about it. And there's also a section that addresses the whole program provider piece on the kind of services that you would um get from the provider um the cost of it you know what is the performance uh previous performance of the provider they made you select it so on and so forth. Okay, if there are any questions, um, please put it
079in the Q&A and I will try to answer them. Um, and let me stop sharing. >> Thanks, Ann. Actually, there are three. If you just want to take a look at those and then team, if there's any general questions, we can go ahead and look at those as well. any of those you want to answer live. Um yeah so the first question on K12 Texas connections academy those would be considered those partner it's a whole program pro program instruction providers so you would put that information in that in that uh section um so there's a question here about um a full-time virtual program if it needs to be associated with an ISD in the state. No, a charter. If you're opening a charter school and you want to open a virtual hybrid campus, this is
080the avenue to do that. Or if you could, you can have a brickandmortar campus that has a virtual program as well. Uh, can the full year of planning for virtual be done during year zero or does it have to be in operation? No, we do require a planning year. um where exactly do we apply to be a virtual hybrid campus? So this is the part this is the application process for that and then there's the addendum uh that is included um as part of the application where you would specify uh details on the virtual hybrid campus piece and my camera is going crazy. Sorry guys. >> That's all right. Awesome. Well, thank you. Um and Sarah, I also see you typing in a few questions. Um and thank you guys. anything that we um get
081after the fact. We can pop over to Ann and her team to get back to you. John, I saw you come off of mute. >> Yeah, I just wanted to just make sure we're we're clear that that person got their question answered. Um yes, Ann said that there you do have to have a planning year. I think the question was and and whoever asked the question, just make sure that I'm understanding. Can you do that planning year during your startup year? And I believe the assumption is yes. Right. So if you all are if you all are awarded a subchapter D or E charter school um as we said earlier you're required to do that startup year that that startup year would count towards the planning year for your virtual. Thank you. Uh for whoever
082answered the question or asked the question um was clarifying. Yes. So that's that's a correct interpretation. So yes your planning year if you want to do virtual would be during your startup year that we were talking about earlier. Thank you. >> Awesome. Well, we are actually caught up um answered all the questions and thank you so much Ann for joining us for that virtual information. We are going to take a break until 10:25 and then we'll be back to discuss charter law. Britney, there's also one more question I want to make sure we answer. >> Go ahead. >> Um it says, "I'm still unclear on whether a virtual program needs to be associated with an ISD. it does not um when you're applying for a full-time virtual or full-time hybrid, you're applying to become an
083LEA itself. So, just note that. >> Perfect. Thanks, John and Sarah. Um we we love the saying clear is kind. So, we want to make sure you have all the information, you know, um is this application right for you or are you in need of something else? Um so, ask those questions. We want to make sure those general questions are answered so you know how to move forward best with your application. Awesome. All right, guys. I'll see you back at 10:25. All right, guys. Well, welcome back. We're going to get started here in just a second. Um there is a question in the chat um about attending the webinar. As long as your name is listed um we can make sure that we have you on that attendance list. So we do see it. Thank
084you. All right. Thank you Bridget for joining us. We are going to get started on the charter law presentation. Give me just a second to get your slides ready to go. All righty. Just let me guys know if you can see the screen. Whenever you're ready, Bridget. >> Thank you. Good morning. Uh my name is Bridget Remish and I'm the TEA attorney assigned to assist the agency uh with charter school matters. Um today um uh the legal issues we're going to go over um governance uh applicable laws and rules, admissions and enrollment issues uh and then of course the 89th legislative session. Uh can you go to the next slide? So just a very uh general overview of some of the legal issues that you should be aware of uh during the application uh process.
085Uh full disclaimer though that these do not cover every statute or rule that you uh should know as both an applicant but also as a as a charter. Um I want to take a moment to distinguish between laws and rules. The education code makes up the laws passed by the legislature. Uh much of the laws regarding charter schools are located in chapter 12. Uh title 19 of the Texas Administrative Code. Chapter 100 contains the commissioner's rules regarding charter schools. Uh keep in mind that there are some other laws that apply to charter schools that are not located in chapter 12. And we'll talk a little bit more about this uh later. So um go can you go one one back? So just uh these are the topics that we're going to highlight in terms of
086governance. So, entities that are eligible to hold charters, uh the Texas Open Meetings Act, uh non sectarian requirement, restrictions on board service, and then just some general notes about governance. Okay, so eligible entities, uh subchapter D, open enrollment charters, is the focus here today and and probably what most people think about when they think about a charter school. Uh el eligible entities for subchapter uh D charters include institution of higher education um as defined in the education code uh nonprofit corporation uh that has 501c3 status through the uh internal revenue uh service um and then a governmental entity um as well could also hold a uh subchapter D charter. Okay. Um, sub chap subchapter C charter schools. Uh, I'm not going to go into detail, but these are the charters that are authorized uh by
087a school district, including um, and these include things like 1882 agreements. Uh, subchapter E charter schools. Uh eligible entities include a public senior college or university or a public junior college. And subchapter G charter schools are adult high school charter programs. Uh and eligible entities are include nonprofits, a school district, an open enrollment charter, uh or an institute of higher education as well. So, eligible nonprofit entities must abide by the uh business organization code, which essentially governs all business entities in the state of Texas. Um, questions regarding nonprofit corporations really should be directed to the Secretary of State's office. Um, but in general, there are things that you should know. For example, the number of directors of a corporation cannot be less than three uh members. So, uh, the commissioner may grant a charter for
088an open enrollment charter school, uh, only, uh, to applicants that meet applicable standards. Uh, those standards are actually found in the rules, the Texas Administrative Code. Um, the commissioner is looking to see if an applicant can operate a school of high quality, but also keeping in mind past history of a particular entity. Uh so an entity or corporate affiliate of or substantially related to that entity um cannot have had a charter or charter in another state that was surrendered under a settlement agreement uh revoked uh denied renewal or returned. If any entity falls into that category, the commissioner will not be able to move forward u for consideration. All applicants need to submit litigation history. Uh so including uh regarding any previous charters that were surrendered under a settlement agreement or as I mentioned before
089revoked, denied renewal or returned either in the state of Texas or in another state. Um the documentation has to be clear enough to determine eligibility of the entity seeking the charter. If an entity loses its 501c3 status for whatever reason, uh the charter is automatically null and void uh and the charter must be returned to the commissioner. Uh taxexempt organizations are required to file uh an annual information return or notice uh with the IRS. If an organization does not file for three consecutive years, the IRS is automatically going to revoke uh the tax exemption. Um, the law doesn't give the IRS any authority to un undo uh one of those automatic revocations uh by the commissioner and there's no appeal process there as well. Um, there's some uh links here at the bottom for more
090information if you need more information about the the 501c3 uh status. Okay. Open enrollment charters are subject to uh Texas Government Code Chapter 551, which is the Open Meetings Act. Uh some of those requirements include that when the governing body meets uh to discuss public business, the body must post notice of the meeting uh including the subject matter of the meeting at least three business days prior to the meeting. Um and just to note that three the three business day rule is new uh with the passes passage of uh house bill 1522. Uh it used to be 72 hours prior to the meeting uh not business days but now it is three business days. Uh under this uh new provision there are also some new requirements regarding uh meetings where uh the adoption of a
091budget will be discussed. So, uh, charters need to be aware of that as well because there are other postings that are going to be required if there's going to be a discussion about the adoption of a budget. Um, chart charters are also um required to follow the requirements of chapter 552 of the Texas government code. Uh, and that's in respect to public information. Uh there are there are some links down here as well uh from the attorney general's office uh for more resource resources on uh open meetings in particular. Okay. Ch a non sectarian educational nature. Um, charters are required to be non sectarian as traditional public schools are in all respects. Um, including in regards to student admission, uh, employee hiring and instruction, visible, uh, religious iconography, which, uh, may require covering decor in
092a building, uh, and naming student holidays in the school calendar, uh, must also be non sectarian. And this is just the the two reasons why is the establishment clause and the the US Constitution, but also the Texas Constitution um notes some things about non sectarianism. Okay. Restrictions on board service. We're just going to highlight some of these. Nepotism, conflicts of interest, and uh criminal history. So the general rule is a public official cannot hire, select, appoint, confirm or appoint of or vote for the hiring, selection appointment or confirmation of an individual if the individual is related to the public official within the third degree of consuity which is by blood or affinity by marriage. So who is a public official for purposes of a charter school? So public official means a member of the governing
093body of the charter holder or the charter school, an officer of the charter school uh who retains the final authority uh to hire or terminate employees which is typically going to be the superintendent. Um also two more things. Uh two or more relatives within the third degree cannot serve together on the governing body and a board member's relative within the third degree cannot be employed by the charter holder or charter school. uh there are some exceptions there that could apply um but we're not going to go into those uh today. So this just sort of highlights the relatives within the third degree consequentity or affinity. And so that could be the public official or their spouses uh spouse, child, parent, grandparent, great-grandparent, grandchild, great-grandchild, sibling, aunt, uncle or niece and nephew. So just keep that
094in mind um in the application as well um because there are a lot of restrictions regarding u relatives. Okay. The rules uh state that an applicant cannot ask questions of review of the review panel or tea staff during the application period. A failure to follow the no contact period will result in the application being ineligible for award. So applicants should not contact us about nepotism issues. If there is an issue and the charter is awarded, the agency will advise the applicant of any nepotism issues that will need to be corrected uh prior to finalizing the charter contract. Okay. um conflict of interest restriction on compensation in general because a member of the board cannot receive compensation from the charter holder or school. Uh they cannot serve on the board um and be an employee. Uh
095there is an exception to this, but this exception would not apply until the fourth year of operation. The exception essentially requires that all schools operated by the charter holder receive a satisfactory rating for two of the preceding three uh school years. Uh then the charter school employees may serve on the board uh as long as the employees aren't making up a majority of that board or a committee. Okay. Again, um the rules state that the applicant uh cannot ask questions of the review panel or tea staff. So, applicant should not contact the agency regarding conflict of interest issues. Uh failure to follow that can result in an u an applicant being ineligible for award. Um if the applicant is awarded uh the charter then uh the agency will work with the applicant to resolve any
096conflict in um conflict issues and um be prior to signing the charter contract. Okay. If the charter is going to work uh with a management company, um a person either serving on the governing board of the charter or as an officer or even an employee of the school cannot have a substantial interest in that management company. Um substantial interest is defined in the statute. Uh but it includes someone who is employed with the management company. So an individual couldn't be receiving compensation from both the management company and then uh the charter school itself. Okay. There are restrictions uh on board service. uh a a person cannot serve as a board member and this actually extends to employees or an officer. Um if the person has been convicted of a misdemeanor involving moral turpitude, a felony,
097any offense listed in uh the education code under chapter 37, which are offenses for which a ISD student must be expelled, or any offense listed in the code of criminal procedure um article 620001. um this is the minimum a charter could adopt a policy that includes um other criminal acts. If a charter decides to do that to sort of expand those restrictions, I would suggest speaking with an outside attorney um if you decide to take that route. Okay. So, uh, the CEO of the sponsoring entity must certify in the application that no board member, employee or officer has the criminal history restrictions. As I noted in the in the previous slide, um, criminal history checks through the Texas Department of Public Safety must be conducted before an employee begins work for the charter. Um, and
098then those checks must be completed uh, every year thereafter. non-eleigable duties. So there are specific uh powers and duties that must be exercised by the governing body. Um and those include the the grievances both employee grievances, parent grievances, um any adoption of the budget or authorizing uh expenditures. Uh the safekeeping of public records, operating uh just charter school operations in in general and the policies that govern that. um audit reports and um the authority to select employee direct evaluate the superintendent or CEO. Um these are non-eleigable. So I know that there are charters that have other committees um that work on different different things, but the governing body uh must not delegate these particular duties and these are outlined in the rules. Some final notes on governance. Um a statement regarding uh bankruptcy history must
099be included in the charter application. Uh each board member must complete a biographical affidavit uh which will also be included in the charter application. Um just also note the majority of the board members have to be qualified voters. Um essentially Texas residents, they have to be voters in in the state of Texas. Okay. Uh applicable laws and regulations. Um, so we sort of talked about the relevant statutes uh for charter operations. Most of what you're going to find in chapter 12 of the Texas Education Code, subchapter D. And then the rules, title 19 of the Texas Administrative Code, especially chapter 100. But then you have some other um codes that you will need to consider. The Texas Business Organizations Code, the Texas Government Code, and the Texas uh local government code. And then to the
100right, you can see there's two columns. Um the left columns um are laid out in uh section 12.104 of the Texas Education Code. Uh requirements that are applicable to both ISDs and charter schools and those include the following special ed uh bilingual edi graduation requirements open government laws both in regards to information and with meetings. uh pre kindergarten and then health and safety under uh Texas Education Code Chapter 38. Um to the right though you'll see that charter schools have greater flexibility um with certain as certain things in the code. Uh flexibility with student teacher ratio and class size uh certification requirements for teachers. Um certifications are limited to those uh teachers teaching specific populations. So, prek, special ed, and bilingual. Um, there is some differences um in regards to chapter 21, which deals with
101educators. Um, in general, there's a lot of flexibility for charters. Uh, chapter 37, uh, which is discipline, requires certain things of ISDs that are not required of charters. Um, and then charters have greater flexibility with school calendars and admissions. um except in regards to some of the criteria I'll go over in the next couple slides. Okay. Admissions um and enrollment. So the statute requires that the commissioner adopt a common application form uh that must be used by applicants for admission uh to an open enrollment charter. Uh these application forms must be easily accessible to families. So, um on the website, uh but even printed out as well. Uh during the enrollment process, uh after the student has been offered admission, uh the school may then ask for items such as uh past academic achievement, medical
102history, and documented history of discipline problems. Open enrollment charters um are required to have an admissions policy that prohibits discrimination uh based on sex, national origin, ethnicity, religion, disability, academic ability, artistic ability, athletic ability um or the district the student would have otherwise attend attended. Um, I will note too that there are federal anti-discrimination statutes that are also are going to apply. Um, two things also to note. Uh, Texas law permits charter schools specializing in performing arts to admit students based on artistic ability and and audition. Uh, federal law and non-regulatory guidance require charter schools receiving federal funds uh to use a lottery uh when a chart when a school is overs subscribed. Okay. Um, admission policy requirements. Um, to continue on, uh, your policy is also going to require a set application period um,
103in the non-discrimination statement. If you are excluding certain students because of documented discipline problems, uh, you will need to ensure that it is stated in your policy. Um, this past legislative session, uh, House Bill Six has clarified the exclusion of students, um, and provides specific instances in which a charter may exclude a student. So, you'll also want to, uh, consider that as well. Uh, your policy also needs to explain the application process, including the lottery process. Uh, this must comply with um with the statute 12173. Of course, charter schools may not charge admission fees um and cannot require parents to volunteer attend sessions or commit uh to the charter uh for admission. Okay. Uh some notes on enrollment records. Uh schools uh cannot prohibit students from enrolling pending receipt of records if records are not
104furnished within 30 days. uh statute requires that the school notify law enforcement to determine whether the student has been reported missing. Um McKenna Vento act uh is also going to apply to open charter. So a school uh must enroll a homeless student immediately even if the if the family the student cannot provide uh or produce records. Okay. And finally um legislative updates. I just wanted to highlight a few here today that are tied uh specifically to charter schools. HB2 increases several aotments uh including the base aotment uh new facilities for charters uh and safety and security uh house bill 6 uh I just talked about it clarifies the disciplinary history of a student uh in the charter admissions process. So you'll want to look at that well because the that has changed a bit. Senate
105Bill 12 addresses parental rights um as it relates to parental access to instructional materials and curricula. Um it requires the adoption of a parental engagement policy. Uh parental rights to information regarding a student's mental uh emotional and physical health needs and services offered by the school. Uh along the same lines with parental parental rights, uh Senate Bill 13 uh provides parental access to li the library catalog and allows a parent to limit access of certain library materials uh by their child. And then finally, Senate Bill 569 uh creates uh chapter 31B in the Texas Education Code, which expands uh virtual learning opportunities uh for students. And that is all I have today. Awesome. Thank you so much, Bridget. All righty. As we move along, team, if there's anything in the question and answer that we
106can go over while we get ready for our next presentation. We do have a question in the chat. I don't know if you're able to see it, Bridget, about would you please repeat the section on the requirement for board members regarding being qualified voters in the state of Texas. Does TEA allow any percentage of the board to be out of state residents? >> So, it's just the um let me find them. I can fight the fact. It has to be a majority of the board has to be qualified Texas voters. So, not everybody on the board needs to be a Texas voter, just the majority. Thanks, Bridget. All right, I think we're caught up unless you guys see anything else. Okay. Um, so our next presentation is not slated until 11:05. Um, the presenter is
107not here just yet, which shows me. Um, they are not quite ready. Um, so I I think we're just going to have to break until then. I want to make sure to protect your time. Um, but I also have to also watch the time for my presenters as well. Um, so we'll just take a little cell phone break um until 11:05 and I'll give you guys a one minute warning before we start. All righty, guys. So, thank you so much for not leaving and staying for our next presentation. We are going to have one more before we take our wonderful lunch break. Janelle, Lori, thank you so much for being here. You guys should be able to share your screen and I will turn it over to you guys. >> Perfect. Thank you so much
108for inviting us. Um, I'm going to make sure that you can see everything correctly because for some reason with the new update, my computer has been completely like mirroring itself. So, are you seeing the presentation? Awesome. All right. Thank you. Um, and thank you for inviting us to come and share kind of an overview of um, the charter monitoring and supports that the agency provides uh, charter schools. So, we'll jump on in. um overview of the special education monitoring. It's really a four-part um we have policy review, we have a cyclical desk review, and we have stakeholder surveys. Those are always part of our monitoring um process that we engage in every six years with eleas. In addition, we have the opportunity to complete discretionary on-site visits which can be triggered by data um cross
109collaboration um across the agency um various reasons for those discretionary on-site visits. But for the most part, these are the four um main pieces of that special education monitoring. Um LEAs are um scheduled, as I said, on a six-year cycle of monitoring. Uh so one time every six years the eleas are monitored in what we call that comprehensive cyclical monitoring. Um we post the schedule so eleas have plenty of um runway um on when their schedule uh cyclical review is to occur. Um you can see that our cycles we're just entering into phase two. We just completed phase one. So we've completed six years of cyclical reviews and we're about to enter into our next set of six. So, a lot of the eleas are about to have their repeat uh cyclical review, but you
110can see how the cycles are structured. Um, they're broken down. Each cycle has a group one, a group two, and group three that you can see the timing of the school year um on the screen as well. Our reviews focus on what we call our diagnostic framework. Um this diagnostic framework um centers around those three principles those implementation, student outcomes and family engagement. And we review those sever seven critical elements. Um those seven critical elements have items that fall under those three buckets um of the diagnostic framework. So we have properly constituted arts evaluation, IEP content, IEP development, IEP implementation, state assessment and transition. In addition to cyclical monitoring, um we have what's called the state performance plan. Um TEA collects data from ELEAS on 16 state performance plan indicators. These indicators are actually identified
111that by um the federal government. So they're not identified by our state. They are um provided to us by the department of education. Um eleas are required to provide that valid, timely and reliable data that reflect the measurement for each of those um indicators. You can find out information on all of those indicators as well as which indicators automatically pull from PE submissions versus those that the ELEA's manually upload um data for um submission. We actually just completed one of our larger SP submissions. So the summer is usually the time for the um larger LEA uh self-reporting mechanism of the SP and that's for child find ECI transition and then overall transition um post-secondary. Um I jumped ahead. I have a slide for it. So state performance plan monitoring there are four indicators that our
112team engages with um leas on for for that for that SP monitoring. Um those include indicators 11A and 11B which deal with timely evaluation and that timely um eligibility determination or holding that IEP within that 30 calendar days from the date of the report. SPI2 which is ECI transition and SPI13 which is secondary transition. um each of those indicators have a 100% target. So LEAs who submit less than 100% um are eligible to participate in pre-finding corrections and then any LEA who's not able to pre-finding correct to 100% or did not submit by the timeline or submit valid and reliable data um they receive a notice of non-compliance and then engage in a corrective action plan with the agency. Another element that our team um works with eleas on is results driven accountability. Um you
113will learn more if you haven't already or you may have already seen information on the results driven accountability system. Um but RDA um has special ed but then there's also information on bilingual ESL um and OSP programs. And based on the information submitted in this results driven accountability process, the agency makes determination levels for each LEA across the state. You can see those determination levels on your screen. So you have meets requirement, needs assistance, needs intervention, and then needs substantial intervention. Based on those determination levels, LEAs have required engagements with the agency um as well as additional interventions and possibly sanctions based on um the number of years and the the data reviewed um from that results driven accountability. One of the big mechanisms that come out of results driven accountability is what we call
114the strategic support plan. This is a tool that's used annually by eleas um based on their determination level where um the LEA completes a root cause analysis, determines the areas of need, develops that strategic support plan um to address those areas of need and then based on those determination levels either hold it and maintain it locally with support from their educational service center or for DL3s and DL4s submits to the agency and then we engage in a cadence of meetings to ensure implementation and that you have the tools and the strategies and the resources needed to truly implement that strategic support plan. All right, I'm going to pause and I'm going actually turn it over to my colleague Janelle Weber who is one of our um specialists who um conducts a lot of the monitoring
115pieces with our charter schools. >> Good morning. Um it's still morning, right? Uh thank you so much for joining us. And one of the pieces that um we provide is firstear supports for our new charters. And so these are the four buckets that we work with. Um we make sure that you guys have um child find systems in place that you're working on professional development, self-monitoring, and staffing. Um we do that a couple of different ways. And the first thing that we'll do is before we come on the site visit with the authorizing team, we um ask for some um evidence of procedures and policies that are in place. And those are around those four components of child fine professional development, self-monitoring, and staffing and operations for supporting our students in special education. Um, and
116those are kind of the areas and what you would be required to submit as you move forward. policies, um your professional development plan, um what you're using to make sure that you're doing everything that you're supposed to do and making sure that we have the certifi certified staff in place to support our students because um I think one thing that Lori will cover later on is that our special education teachers do have to be certified as well as our um emergent bilingual um teachers. Once we are on um and have visited your um new campus, we have um quarterly support calls and those happen in December, March, May and June and they kind of correspond with activities that are happening during those time periods. In December, we'll talk about any follow-up from our on-site visit.
117We'll make sure that you're connected with your ESC liaison and um getting support through your um service centers and we'll talk about the dyslexia screeners and what's upcoming the state assessment. Um in March we talk about followup other questions that have come up staffing for the upcoming school year and um talk a little bit more in detail about the um DMS the cyclical monitoring piece. And then at the end of the school year, we talk about um our SP indicators that Lori talked about earlier um because there is a lot of that data that comes in over the summer and you want to make sure that you stay on top of that. Again, your ESC liaison are a wonderful resource for that. And we'll talk through your um PD plan for the summer and your
118upcoming school year. And then the next slide is just talks about um technical assistance for those big buckets. your child find, which um everybody is responsible for your development and implementation of your IEPs. And one thing that you would really want to look into is those transfer in timelines for those kiddos that are coming to your campuses and um making sure that you're ready to serve them on their first day and your first day when you open your doors. So, I'll hand it back to Lori. There's lot and those are all just like click resources that are all free um for you guys. Perfect. Um the last part of our presentation is to provide an overview of frequently asked questions that our team receives as it relates to charters and some of the nuances that
119go into that monitoring, review and support um piece. So um who supports special populations? The answer really is everyone. So, um just making sure that um everyone knows their role, understands the process, is familiar with the requirements as they relate to the special education. You know, making sure they're familiar with um IDEIDA and uh local uh policies, procedures, as well as rule um in the state of Texas, especially if they're not housed in the state of Texas. making sure that they're familiar because Texas rules sometimes are slightly different than other states. Um, special education requirements are the same for all LEAs. So, oftent times there's a a a conversation or a misunderstanding about what an LEA has to do versus what they don't have to do. When it comes to special education requirements on the
120screen, these are required for all LEAs regardless of the type of LEA. So um admission cannot be denied to students with an IEP. LRE which is that least restrictive environment must be considered. Um child fine must be implemented. Academic, functional and related services according to the IEP must be provided and special education certified staff. So as Janelle mentioned at the previous slide, um any staff member that is um performing the duties as a special education staff member must be certified. So, um, charter schools do have the same certification, endorsement, and licensing requirements for special education providers as all other public schools. There's a additional information in, um, CFR, which is that code of federal regulations, that's IDEIDA, as well as our own education code. Um, we do often get asked, can you contract with a
121third party for special education services? Um, our guidance is eleas can do what they need to do to ensure that they get the services provided to their student. It's just very important that eleas understand that they are accountable and responsible for the implementation and oversight of those services. So, in our reviews, it's not uncommon for us to see an out of compliance element or an evaluation that was delayed and someone explained that it was a contractor who caused that issue. the LEA still receives a citation because the LEA is still the the party responsible for ensuring timelines and compliance. So, just making sure that that is thought through at that initial onset of contracting a third party um provider for any of your services to really spell out those details and ensure that compliance can
122be maintained by the providers. Um who can make a referral to SPED? um parents and guardians, school personnel, and then any other person that's involved in the education or care of the students. These referrals can be made verbally. They're not required to be in writing, but if they are received in writing, all eleas must respond no later than 15 school days after receiving that request. uh prior to beginning that evaluation, the LEA must give parents that prior written notice and the notice of procedural safeguards and then obtain consent for that evaluation. As far as who qualifies for special education, there's two parts that make a child eligible to receive a specially designed instruction and related services. and that is that they have been determined to have a disability and as a result of that disability
123demonstrate a need for specially designed instruction andor related services. So very important to know that both those elements have to be true to qualify for special education. Um eleas have 15 school days to respond to that written request for evaluation as discussed on that previous slide. Once the parent uh signs the consent and the LEA receives that consent, they have 45 school days after the receipt of that consent to complete the evaluation. And then from the date of that evaluation starts the 30 calendar days to hold that IEP meeting. We emphasize this because this is an area um both of our cyclical monitoring as well as our state performance plan that SP data submissions that we've spoke about where we see lots of non-compliance. So it's very important that everyone understands the timelines, builds in
124the processes and ensures that everyone knows what date triggers what deadline. Another big piece that we are often asked is who attends the AR. So there's kind of two parts. There's the always required members of the AR committee which are in that blue box. So parent or the adult student, that general ed teacher, the special education teacher, an LEA representative, and then someone who can interpret the instructional implications of the evaluation results. The item the the individuals in the purple um box sometimes can become required based on the purpose of the IEP meeting. So, it's very important that if we identify a specific purpose on that IEP invitation that we then make one of those additional members become a required member to be compliant with that. There's lots of information that can be found on
125the Texas Bed Supports website. There is um an IEP guide, there's an evaluation guide. So, we really recommend that all LEAs log into that Texas um support system and look through all the resources um and and connect with educational service centers to get additional assistance as needed in these areas. Um what are IEP content considerations? These elements are those additional pieces in the IEP that we do monitor for and are required through IDEIDA. So accommodations and or modifications that frequency and duration of services a consideration for extended school year transition supports and then training. So just making sure that as processes are being built and operating procedures and training and PD that everyone is aware of those IEP content elements. There is the um the area of least restrictive environment which mandates all schools including
126charter schools um must provide a continuum of services um and a continuum of placements to to students with disabilities. So this continuum includes the following placement options as noted in uh the Texas administrative code um for instructional arrangements and settings that you can see the entire continuum in the legal framework and we provided a link but it's really important to know that these are kind of the the big mile markers on that continuum and then there's variations in between. So, another really helpful resource for understanding the instructional arrangements and settings is the student attendance accounting handbook. There's an entire section in there that talks about all the codes related to special education. Um, and those codes are super helpful to ensure that you have um a continuum that will be able to support any and
127all students based on their needs, including students who transfer to any LEA who may come with an instructional arrangement that is not yet represented at um the LEA that's receiving the student. So the the main areas on this slide are the mainstream which is services provided inside that general education classroom, a resource room or service or resource services which are provided outside that general education classroom. Self-contained um where the student receives their services in a setting outside of general ed for more than 50% of their school day. And then of course homebound services which are provided either in the student's home or um in a hospital. Another big question that we always get is about special education transportation. Um, the AR committee determines if a student will require transportation as a related service in order
128to attend and participate in their academic services, their extracurricular programs, and related services. The IEP must describe the way that the transportation services will be provided. There's some great technical assistance on IEP development um on transition in our IEP development um resource. So, be sure to check that out. Um, all LEAs have to consider special ed transportation for a student based on their needs. This is the resource that we've been mentioning throughout the presentation. It's super helpful. Um, it guides not only the development of that individualized education program, but it also talks through those required ARD members, the required elements to be considered, the continuum of services, special education, um, transportation, transition services. So many of the big ticket items that were on that um framework slide that we showed you at the beginning are
129addressed in here to help guide eleas um as they are developing those um processes and operating procedures and enhancing their policies uh for their their eleas. So that was everything on um special education. There's another element um which is the section 504 plan that our team does not directly monitor but we do provide um information on and that is the section 504. So section 504 plans are formal plans that the section 504 committees develop to give students with disabilities the support they need. The plan covers any condition that limits daily activities in a major way. So, as we reviewed earlier in the slide that talked about the two elements that are required to receive specially designed instruction, this section 504 would mean the student didn't meet one or both of those elements. Um, or may
130have never been considered for specially designed instruction because their disability fell more under section 504 than it would have under IDEIDA. A super helpful resource that the agency provides is the Texas Sped support um website. It's full of technical assistance. It's got guides, webinars, on demand um PD resources. There's toolkits for new administrators. There's toolkits for new providers. So, be sure to check that out as you're planning and preparing for your LEA. Um be sure to sign up for any updates in the webinars and the newsletters to learn more. Um we try really hard to make sure that anything that's upcoming we get in those newsletters and then we host webinars um several times a month. Uh sometimes they're just a did you know we have this resource. Other times they're timely reminders for maybe
131compliance um activities that are about to happen or submissions that are due or uh changes that are uh being proposed. And then here's our contact information. Um, in case you have any questions about today's presentation, you're welcome to connect with us. Um, otherwise, I think that's all for us. Did we have any questions or comments that we need to address? I'm answering one of the it says um the question is would we receive training on how to properly conduct an AR meeting? And I'm dropping in this the Texas Fed support website and there are um a couple of different good trainings on there that could help get you started. Um I would definitely connect with your ESC liaison um and hopefully um you'll have you'll be able to find somebody that has that experience already.
132So, >> right. Yeah, your educational service centers um are really good at that professional development side and helping kind of operationalize some of those concepts that we discussed today. >> Awesome. Well, thank you guys so much. Your information is always so helpful. Um and I think that was the only question that I saw pop up in the chat. So, we really appreciate your time. And um anything else Sarah John in the chat for sped before they hop off? Okay, perfect. Awesome. Thank you, Lori. Thank you, Janelle. All right, guys. Well, we are actually currently caught up with all of our other questions as well. We are going to break for lunch and we will meet back here on the Zoom. So, you do not need to log off or anything. You can just turn us
133off, put us on mute. Um, we'll give you a countdown prior to us starting again. Um, but our afternoon sessions will begin promptly at 100 p.m. today. All right, guys. Thank you so much. See you at They're going to talk through some CSP knowledge. Chelsea, whenever you are ready, you were able to share your screen and be awesome. Thank you so much, Britney. Just confirming that you can see my screen. Wonderful. Well, good afternoon everyone. My name is Chelsea Garcia. I'm the director of resources and support with our resources and support team within the division of charter school authorizing. I'm excited to be here with you today. So, we're going to go over um our CSP grant overview. With us today as well is Mel Miss Melissa Miner. She is our new charter school program
134grant manager and her contact information is listed there. um not here with us today but excited to have her on the team as well. Britney Eldridge. She's our new charter school program grant specialist. My information is listed there as well. And then um others who also work on the CSP grant within our division of grants administration and Charlotte Worman and Carmen Patrick. So today we'll quickly go over the purpose of a CSP grant, grant timelines, all use of fund. So, back to the purpose of the charter school program grant. Purpose of the Texas Charter School Program is to support the growth of highquality charter schools in Texas, especially those focused on improving academic outcomes for educationally disadvantaged students. So, moving into grant timelines and some information on those. So, a grant start date, that is
135the date that an LEA can start incurring costs related to the grant. The NOGA date or the notice of grant award date is the date that the NOGA is approved and the LEA can start entering expenditures for reimbursement. So let's say that campus A spent two months in negotiation and they get their NOGA 2 months after the grant start date. The subgrantee is able to request reimbursement for any expenses incurred from the grant start date to the NOGA date and so during that two-month period. However, any expenses that are unallowable will not be eligible for reimbursement. So, if you do receive a CSP grant, please make sure that any costs you're planning to request reimbursement for adhere to your proposed budget and are allowable under the CSP grant. And we will go over allowable and
136allowable costs later in this presentation. Then, the grant end date is the date by which the LEA must expend funds and utilize items or services purchased with the grant funds. Please note that all generation 31 CSP grant awards are subject to availability and eligibility, the completion, submission, and or ultimate award of a generation 31 open enrollment charter school does not entitle an applicant to CSP funds from the state of Texas. The CSP grant is broken into two phases, planning and implementation. So planning our activities are related to the planning and program design of the charter's educational program. These activities usually take place during the period from the grant start date to the first day the campus starts serving students. And then planning activities cannot occur for more than 18 months. And then implementation are activities
137related to the implementation of a charter's educational program. These activities usually occur between the first day the campus begins serving students and the grant end date. So there is an image there for some visual visualization on the timeline. So planning period then we have the first day of school and then that starts the implementation period. So budget and expenditures are tied to the type of activity not when the expenditure occurs. So again planning activities are activities or expenditures that are tied to the planning and design of the educational program. And then implementation activities are activities or expenditures that are tied to the implementation of the charter school and the educational program. Some activities are only allowable in the planning phase. Some are only allowable in the implementation phase and then some are allowable in both.
138So certain purchases that are allowable during the implementation phase may be purchased during the planning period, but these will still be budgeted as part of implementation. The phase in which a purchase is allowable is determined by the type of activity and not necessarily when the purchase is made. So an example of this is classroom furniture or technology such as desk or smartboards. These purchases are considered implementation activities but are necessary to purchase before students arrive on campus. So you can purchase it during the planning phase although it is an expense tied to implementation. A visual representation of this um those that are allowed under planning are salaries for allowable positions, contracted services and rent. Those that are allowable under implementation are classroom equipment and furniture, equipment installation, textbooks, playground equipment, and a bus or a
139van. And then those that are allowed under both are staff training, administrative furniture, and outreach materials. So again, the phase in which an expenditure is allowable is dependent upon the type of activity it is aligned to. So now we'll review allowable uses of funds. All cost associated with the CSP grant must meet the minimum threshold of being necessary, reasonable, allocable, and allowable. So, necessary. Is the item needed for the startup of the charter school? When filling out the application, ask yourself, is what you're proposing to purchase necessary to accomplish the goals you established in your application? Reasonable. Would a reasonable person spend that amount on the item? Would it withstand public scrutiny? So, say you're only going to serve five students but are requesting $500,000 in administrative cost. This would not be necessary or a
140reasonable request. So, make sure that the outcomes in your application are justified by the amount requested. And then allocable is the cost being incurred specifically for startup and is the cost proportional to the benefit provided. And then allowable is the item allowed under this grant program which we will go over more in the next few slides. So allowable costs under planning include planning and design of the charter school's educational program, professional development and training for teachers and staff, and special education support. So moving into salaries, salaries are allowed for the following positions only: teachers, school leaders, and specialized instructional support personnel. But certain conditions apply. What constitutes a specialized instructional support personnel will be clarified in the program guidelines posted along with the grant opportunity on the TEA grant opportunities page. The conditions for allowable
141payroll cost include that salaries cannot be paid for activities related to ongoing operations. So please note if personnel split their time between ongoing operation activities and planning activities only the portion of the time associated with conducting the planning activities is allowable as an initial operational cost. The charter school campus must maintain accurate time and effort documents um to document the amount of time each employee works on tasks related to planning activities associated with the charter school campus. Additionally, payroll expenditures pay with CSP funds are only allowable for activities that support the planning or program design of the charter campus. So, back to those planning activities. And then no payroll expenditures are allowed beyond the 30th calendar day after the campus begins serving students. Additionally, contracted personnel may be paid from the grant start date up
142to 30 days after the campus begins serving students. and rental or occupancy costs for the school facility can also uh is also allowable up to 30 days after the campus begins serving students. Reminder, reimbursement for contracted personnel is only allowable during the planning phase and then certain contracted services are allowable in both the planning and implementation phase. Allowable costs under implementation activities include one-time startup equipment purchases necessary to implement a charter school, which may include desk, chairs, computers, equipment related to technology such as smartboards for classrooms or computers, and tablets for students, physical education and art, and playground equipment. Additionally, other items that are allowable for implementation activities include non-consumable supplies and materials for startup activities, including textbooks, library books, reading materials, and teaching materials. Non-consumable supplies um are supplies and materials that can be
143reused. Um so there is a list there of those that can be reused as examples. Consumable materials materials however are items that cannot be reused such as onetime workbooks, pens, pencils and paperworks. And expenses for consumable materials are not eligible for reimbursement by the CSP grant. So only non-consumable supplies and materials. Also allowable costs for implementation include installation cost associated with the following computers, data systems, networks, and telephone systems. And like mentioned earlier, you can also pay for the installation of classroom technology such as smartboards. Also, allowable costs for implementation activities include onetime startup cost associated with providing transportation to students and then cost associated with carrying out necessary renovations and minor facilities repairs. Please note that minor repairs neither add permanent value to the property nor prolong its intended life. So, some examples of
144a minor facility repair may include repairing a leak in the roof, replacing a broken window, and repairing a furnace or air condition air conditioning unit. Um, in summary, minor facility repairs again neither add permanent value to the property or u prolong its life, but rather keep it in efficient operating condition. Additional items that are allowable costs for implementation activities include financial management, software, and training. However, please note that the software costs must be one-time expenses if it is a subscription service that is considered a reoccurring expense and is not allowable. Additionally, property insurance to cover equipment purchased with grant funds and other appropriate non-sustained costs that cannot be supported from other sources. The CSP grant funds will be allocated into planning cost and implementation costs. But again, keep in mind the phase in which the
145expenditure activity is allowed when creating the budget. There's an example budget there. We also have a great resource um that can be utilized for creating this budget on the CSP grant um under the TA grants opportunities page. It is called the planning implementation guide. It's very detailed document that will help you determine if an expend expenditure is allowable or unallowable and whether it would be considered a planning activity, implementation activity or both. So in summary, CSP grants supports the planning program design and initial implementation of public charter schools and these are one-time cost. So to reiterate, all your expenses must be onetime costs, not reoccurring. Now, we'll cover some common budget mistakes that we see. These include budgeting salaries for personnel other than teachers, school leaders, or specialized instructional support staff. Another pitfall in regards
146to personnel salaries is budgeting for the reimbursement of salaries in the implementation phase. As discussed earlier, salaries will only be reimbursed for allowable personnel up to 30 days after the campus begins serving students. Additionally, some other pitfalls include including costs for construction or cosmetic renovations, including expenditures related to charter management organization fees, and budgeting for expenditures related to ongoing accounting and bookkeeping services. So again, no construction or cosmetic renovation expenses are reimburseable with the CSP grant, only those minor facility repairs that neither prolong the intended life of the building or increase its value. And then you can purchase accounting software to ensure you meet the F requirements, but you cannot fund ongoing accounting or bookkeeping services. Some example unallowable costs are listed here. This is not a complete list, so please review example program guidelines
147for the complete list of unallowable costs. Um but these analogable costs include religious instruction materials or insignia, ongoing cost associated with the transportation for students, construction, consumable instructional or other supplies and materials, field trips, and then any expenditure in which the charter exceeds fiscal authority to a charter management organization. Again, this is not a complete list and the program guidelines will provide a complete list of unallowable costs. So if you would like to look at documents and guidelines associated with this grant, please see the TA grants opportunities page and you can find a collection of grant resources um from grants past which include the program guidelines and funding amounts. So you can see the example here is our previous generation 29 CSP grant and the program guidelines are there with the arrow. Now I move
148into CSP startup grant goal setting. So, in a CSP grant application embedded within your generation 31 application document, you will set three to five programmatic smart goals that will be achieved using CSP startup grant funds. All programmatic goals should be achievable by the beginning of year three and clear clearly support the board's student outcome goals. You will also include all progress measures that will be used to track each startup goal. These goals should be smart goals, which means they are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely. So, here are some examples of smart goals. All of these goals are considered smart, and we'll use the first one as an example. So, it says by December 2024, 100% of teachers will be trained in the ABC method instructional strategies to support the academic model. It is specific
149and that it identifies the exact instructional strategies that will be used to support the academic model. It is measurable as you can keep track of what percentage of teachers are trained. Is it achievable? It is achievable as all teachers can reasonably achieve these trainings and receive these trainings. It is relevant to the grant purpose as teachers who are trained in instructional strategies can more effectively teach students and boost their outcomes. And finally, it is timely and that there is a target set a date. My goodness, there is a target date set as December 2024. Apologies. And then the progress measure there. The professional development calendar will be utilized, a session signin sheet and PLC PLC meeting agendas. So with these examples, all of the goals are aligned to the overall grant purpose and proposed project
150and are necessary for project implementation and are aligned to the academic model. And then the progress measures are aligned to the smart goals and would effectively measure progress towards those goals. I'll give you a few more moments just to read the rest of those examples. And now example two, these goals are not measurable and most do not support the academic model or overall purpose of the grant. So example um on the first one students will be given benchmarks in October 2024 and the progress measure is testing logs. So most of these progress measures would not effectively measure progress towards the goal and it is unclear how these goals support project implementation. So, I'll give you a moment to review these non-examples of smart goals. And that concludes our very brief overview of the CSP grant
151process, but please feel free to reach out to our team. We're happy to answer any questions. and I will stop sharing so I can see if there's any current questions. Chelsea, there was one question that I sent over to you in a message. Um, if you want to take a look at that one. I'm not sure if you already covered it or not. Um the director of operations uh would as long as they are a teacher, school leader or specialized instructional support. Um so if you identify your director of operations as a school leader um then they can be paid under CSP funding by with their salary. Um but again there are those certain stipulations that are in effect with personnel reimbursements. >> Perfect. Well, those were all the CSP questions. I don't see anything
152else in the Q&A. Um, nope. I think you're all good. Melissa, Chelsea, thank you so much. We really appreciate you guys. We'll actually see you tomorrow for our support seminar where you guys will dive in a little bit deeper. Um, but I really really appreciate that. Um, Chelsea, if you wouldn't mind just like repeating the answer to that question that you just said. >> Yes. Um so a director of operations should fall under a school leader. Um again we request a justification for that of them being a school leader and a scope of work for them. Um but generally that is allowable under personnel salaries. >> And just to ground everybody the question was can a director of operations salary be paid with CSP funds? And that's so that's what she was asking answering. So
153thank you for repeating that. >> Thank you all so much. Have a great rest of your day. >> Thanks Chelsea. Thanks, Melissa. We appreciate you guys. All right, we are going to mosey on over to our next agenda item, which is the financial plan workbook. So, John, it's your time to shine, buddy. Can everyone see the uh slide deck? Great. All right, we're going to spend a little bit of time on the financial plan. Um, but I want to spend most of the time today just kind of going over what the workbook looks like. It's probably going to be the better use of our time. Um, because I assume probably most of you have not had a chance to look into that workbook yet. So, this is a good time to get a get acclimated
154to it. But before we do, just want to talk a little bit about the components of the financial plan because it extends beyond the workbook. uh you will flesh out collectively the financial plan across um descriptions about your startup year or what we like to call year zero. And so that's going to be any time that happens after you get your contract but before you open your doors uh to serve students that startup year that we were talking about earlier. Um again we talked about the workbook and we'll dive into a little bit more. Uh the budget narrative. So the budget narrative is an attachment um and there are no page limits associated with attachments. So applicants are encouraged to utilize a budget narrative to really flesh out concepts, assumptions, projections, all those things that
155were highlighted in the workbook andor in the narrative section of your application. Um there's also places to provide evidence of financial support. Um, this will ultimately identify dollar amounts. Um, it could be property uh real property and or personal property or any other sort uh sources that you could uh utilize um if you awarded. I will note however that evidence of financial support is not a requirement of the application. So if you do not have evidence that is not going to necessarily penalize your um the assessment of your your application. However, if you do provide evidence of financial support, we will be looking for uh letters of commitment u meth memorandum of understanding um something to indicate the status of where you are in that process etc. All right. In terms of the workbook, just
156outline the purpose of it, it is a very robust tool. Um, as we will see in about two minutes, but we we really utilize this tool to ensure that you all as applicants are able to demonstrate financial readiness. Um, as Sarah said earlier, you know, we start with an initial 5-year contract. And so, we're really looking at that budget um not only for a startup year, but longitudinally. Um, we want to ensure that your budget will uh meet our our agency guidelines and regulatory requirements. Uh, we want to see that you all are able to demonstrate structured planning in conjunction with your staffing plan, your org chart, as well as how this is really kind of conceptualized in the workbook. And then again, as I mentioned, um, kind of longitudinally, we want to see that
157your budget is going to be viable uh, for your whole initial five years. And then lastly, just to anchor ourselves in the workbook before we look at it, you can really conceptualize the data that we're looking for in three buckets. There's enrollment and and attendance projections. You're going to have to project out not just your basic, you know, rolled up sums, but we're going to disagregate and look for disagregated data for um all kind of student populations, which we'll see in a second. Um the workbook will calculate your state aid. We'll look at that in a second. But it's also a valuable tool for you all because as you all are able to fluctuate and kind of recalibrate the budget based on how you um change up and down your enrollment. So we'll look at
158that in a second as well. Uh personnel structures. So you all are going to have to identify key personnel, the number of positions and associated salaries with those personnel and staffing positions. Um you'll itemize not just the personnel but also the payroll taxes, benefits, any contracted services. All of that gets uh captured in the workbook as well. And then lastly, operational expense planning. Um again, this could be look like anything out supplies, textbooks, equipment, rent, uh you name it. And again, we're looking at for that year-over-year growth as well. Okay, now the boring stuff is out of the way. Let's actually look at the numbers the workbook. Okay. So, as a reminder, can you all see the workbook? Okay. So, as a reminder, you all access this workbook through the narrative document. So, when you
159open up the narrative document, you will see uh in the checklist at I think it's page two or three of the applica the narrative document, you'll see a list of attachments with hyperlinks. You'll click on this one. It will take you straight to the download and it should automatically download onto your computer. So once you open it, you will see a series of tabs. Excuse me. The majority of them are either green or they are blue. If they are green, that means you have data to input into that tab. If it's blue, there is nothing for you to do other than to confirm the accuracy of what it's showing. The blue tabs are autoc calculating and feeding off of the data that you put in the green tabs. Okay, first tab you'll notice is the
160cover sheet. Uh this is again a very valuable um tab because it's going to give you the reasonable planning estimate per student. So if you are going to serve students kindergarten through grade 12, you would budget around $7,533 per student. If you're doing half day prek, you're going to do 3,776 again as a funding as a planning estimate. The next, excuse me, the next tab is the general instructions tab. This tab is going to be more or less your troubleshooting guide. And so if something's not making sense in the workbook, you can look here under the general instructions. If you don't remember where to put things, again, this is a very good place. So before you input any numbers into this, highly recommend that you look through in totality the general instructions tab. All right,
161school info tab. This is important. Just ensure that all the information you put in here is correct. You will have to designate for your entity um what your fiscal year end date is. Um, and then also your total number of instructional minutes or total, yeah, total number of minutes. I will call your attention to some of the cells have little uh red triangles in the upper corner. These are just uh note tools for you. Um, they'reformational and supplemental. So, it's really just for your review. So, this one is just going to give you more information on the 75,600 minute requirement um that you must have even as a new open enrollment charter school. So, just keep be keep a lookout for all of the cells that have these little triangles. All right. So, moving on
162to the enrollment tab. So the enrollment tab is going to again itemize all of your enrollment projections rolled up not only by grade but by year but also by student group. One key important thing to mention about the enrollment tab before we move any further this box. So general, so this general enrollment here, this information should match the enrollment projection table in the narrative document. So if you don't know what I'm talking about, that's okay. But when you open the narrative document, you will clearly see on page three or four a box, a table for your enrollment. That number should match what's here. Very important. Some applicants put lower enrollment in their workbook as a way to show that they are having a more conservative budget. You can do that, but you need to add
163notes. So, we know that that's not a mistake. Otherwise, that's be that will be something that we'd have to ask you later. So, if you do that, please add a note. And I'll show you where to add that on the next tab or I'm sorry, on a couple tabs away from here. Okay. So, you will just enter whole numbers in here obviously. So, let's just say year one, I want 50 kindergarteners, 50 first graders, so on and so forth. Year two, I'm going to add a grade. Year three, I'm going to add a grade. Oh, so on and so forth. So, as you can see, it's autoc calculating here. The next box uh that you all will have to input data in is what you all project the average daily attendance to be. As you
164can see, there's a a little note here that we recommend that you all start with a conservative amount of 85%. So, it's not unheard of that we'll get applications with workbooks that project 95%. We ask you to start with 85% because it's a pretty general consu uh that's a pretty conservative um assumption and again highly recommend that. So this these numbers will change based on what you project your ad your ADA to be your average daily attendance. As you continue down, you'll see that you'll have to add information about your uh special education students. And again, there is plenty of additional notes and supports here to kind of clarify what the expectations would be in terms of what you will put in these cells. And again, you will continue down and see all of the
165other different student groups u and programs. So, CTE, dyslexia, pregnancy related, bilingual, ESL, compensatory education, comp ed, early education, uh gifted, talented, and then lastly, uh transportation. So, that's all encompassed in the enrollment tab. It's also a fair point to mention right now is that as you work through this workbook, look at it in its entirety, but when you start inputting data in, it's extremely important that you start working from left to right. Okay? Because the data that's the data that you put in the school info tab is feeding all the rest of the tabs. What I put in the enrollment tab is feeding the rest of the tabs. So, it's important that you work from left to right so that your cells properly um calculate and you don't get error codes at the end.
166Okay, moving on. You'll see that there's also personnel tab and as I said, you have a five-year contract and so we are asking that you uh show your staffing plan for all five years including the startup year. So, let's just say uh my superintendent. Uh there's a drop-own box here where I will code or classify what my the staffing position would be. Let's just say a teacher. I'll put regular. I have to input the salary. Let's just say 80,000. But let's just say I can what I can do is say that my superintendent is going to be halftime for year 1, but year two is going to be full-time, right? So you can show how you're going to not only create your staffing model, but also how that staffing model is going to grow um
167over the five years. You will also account, if you scroll over here, um for raises, if there are any, you will account for those as well. want to draw your attention to column M which are the notes. Um typically applicants will put uh someone asked earlier about what positions can be funded by CSP. So if any of this 40 any of this 80,000 is going to be um drawn upon from those CSP grant funds for however long we would see that in the notes. So you would put in notes uh 40,000 from CSP or whatever. And again, as a reminder, we want to see five years plus the startup years uh worth of staffing plans. Okay, moving on to the startup uh year one and assumptions tab. So, this is going to be your first
168sort of like rollup tab, but you're still going to have to input quite a bit of information. All right, so based on and as I said that these these tabs are fed from previous tabs. This is autoc calculating my state aid entitlement based on the enrollment that I put here. So, it's already doing that, but I'm also able to include what I want to budget for with regard to the CSP or any other federal revenues I think I'm going to be entitled to. Um, local and other revenues. So, again, any other like philanthropic funds or any other localized funds I I would reasonably expect I would account for those here. And here you're going to itemize all your expenses again across excuse me um across a multitude of different domains. So there's admin costs, instructional
169personnel costs. I'm not going to read all of them. Um your payroll taxes and benefits, contracted services, school operations. Again, it's a very nuanced and very granular um budget template, but again we as I said try to provide quite a bit of support for you all. Um so here it shows that other expenses could include here hardware, software, internet, etc. Uh you'll get into facility operations and maintenance. And then lastly at the bottom of each of these tabs is a rollup and a summary of your expenses. Okay, so those are the green tabs. Those are all the tabs that you are going to personally enter information into. The blue tab starting with the budget is going to be a um summarized look look at your projected budget and operating plan. So here again it's showing
170my total expenses that's being fed from the previous tab my revenue per pupil etc. So it's going to itemize the revenue and it's going to itemize the expenses. My summary of finance tab again this is just a tool for you all. It will show estimate uh of of state aid based on how many students you put into your enrollment tab as well as how many students are going to be enrolled in specific programs etc. So once you do that you can look at this tab to sort of see the financial uh and funding breakdown. So this is a very good tool. You could even put it to one student and see what that one student would generate across different um again different programs that you might enroll them into. Payment formula. Again, this is just
171uh for you all's benefit. This just sort of projects what a payment schedule would look like. Again, based on the projected enrollment um that you all would then uh create state aid from. And then lastly uh is just the financial plan workbook summary. This is just a very simplified uh revenue versus expenses highlevel one-pager. So this might be something useful again as you were disseminating it across your application team or maybe potential funders or potential stakeholders. Um this would be a good opportunity to print that out and it's just a one-page very 10,000 ft view of your budget. Okay, that was a lot. But um again, as I said earlier, um it's something that is very robust, but it's very necessary. And we highly encourage you to look at it um with a very fine
172tooth comb and ensure that you are capable of filling this out. And if not, it's very important that you find someone that has the skill set um to really analyze this, assess it, and then complete it um with fidelity. Now I'm going to end on this and then I'll try to address questions. I'll stop sharing. So one thing is very important. The workbook is designed for there to be no error codes when you submit it. So if you're getting strange error codes or strange uh cell reference numbers, things like that, that means something is not calculating correctly in one of the other cells. That is something that we can address with you all in troubleshooting. We cannot tell you what to put in a cell, but if you are having problems and you're getting weird
173error codes or you don't know what you're getting, you can certainly email us with a description of the issue. And very importantly, I need to remind you all to please, please, please put the cell number as well as the tab because what we can do with that information then is look to see what data it's pulling from and let you know like, hey, look towards the enrollment tab or look towards this. Uh, it looks like maybe something's going on with that tab or that particular cell that it's being calculated from. So, that is something we can help out with, but we just ask you please um make sure that when you submit your financial model workbook that it's error code free um and reach out to us with any additional troubleshooting questions. Okay, let's see.
174Let me look at the questions. Someone's asking, is the grant treated as a loan to be paid back? So, the CSP loan is a reimbursement grant. Um there's no quote unquote repayment terms. Um, I think that addresses your other question that you asked. Let's see. Okay, I think that's all that I have right now, Britney. >> Perfect. Thanks, John. That's always a big lift. Um, and we want to make sure everybody has some accurate information. Alrighty. So, what we're going to do is take just a second and make sure we've answered everything that's already in the chat >> there. Nico, >> um, I'm not sure if that question was answered about is the grant treated um, let me see, let me find it. Sorry, it just went away. Is the grant treated as a loan
175to be paid back the CSP grant? It was answered written. >> Perfect. Well, just if you didn't hear it already, it is a reimburseable loan. So, yes. >> Perfect. So, our next presentation isn't going to be until 2. Um, so we're just going to take a second. We're getting lots of questions on how to open the application and download it. Um, so while we have just a few minutes until that next presentation, we want to make sure you guys have the option to see that one more time. Britney, can you see my screen? Okay, so since we have been receiving a ton of questions about how to access the application materials, we're going to go ahead and take a look. Again, I'll verbalize it real quick and then I'll show you the video so that
176you have multiple ways um to see it. But once you access the charter applicant web page, you're going to scroll to subchapter D, open enrollment, and you'll see application documents. Um, you're going to hit the new operator or the experienced operator, whichever one you are eligible to apply for. You're going to click on it and it's going to show you a warning. You are going to have to save it to your desktop or to your downloads and then you're going to open it through your file explorer on your desktop. Again, it's going to probably prompt you with a download button and you're going to want to click it um in the browser. But if you do that, it'll just give you the warning again. Um, so I'll go ahead and play this. Let me know
177if you can hear the sound. In order to access your application documents, you'll need to go to the charter school applicants page. Then you'll determine which application you're applying for. For this instance, we're going to look at subchapter D, open enrollment. I'll scroll down to application documents. The first document you're going to want to open is going to be the instructions and guidance document. This document will open in your web browser and you should be able to read through it completely. Then you'll determine if you're going to be applying as a new operator or an experienced operator. Once you've determined that, you're going to open the corresponding narrative document. So for this instance, I'm going to show you the new operator narrative document. When you try to open this through the web, you will receive
178this warning warning right here. This warning just means that you need to save the document to your computer and then you'll open your file explorer where it's downloaded and you'll open it through your file explorer. So, I'm going to stop it real quick. I want you to see in the download section right here on the internet. If you click this one file to open it through the internet, you will receive the same warning sign. So again, you'll go to your file explorer where you where all of your downloaded documents live and you'll click on the actual document you've downloaded. If you click this download right here, it will give you the same warning. It will be a little cycle that you go through in Adobe. Again, if you try to access this document, the narrative
179document on your web browser, it's going to give you this warning right here. You just need to save it to your computer and open it through your file browser. Okay. Any questions about accessing the narrative documents? >> Perfect. I don't see any questions about accessing the narrative documents. >> Thank you so much, Sarah. Um, and if you guys still have questions, it's going to be best just to send us an email. Um, you can let us know and we can hop on a Zoom call with you. Sometimes it's easier just to show us your screen. Um, we can show you where maybe the error is falling and we can help you troubleshoot it that way. So, that's always an option just to shoot us an email. We'll set up a Zoom with you so we
180can show you how to do it. But hopefully um after hearing and seeing how to do it um we've troubleshooted as much as we could today in case you are an eager beaver and you want to get on download something right now. Um we want to make sure you have access for all of that. Um as well as the stuff that John showed that financial plan workbook all of that is listed on our website. Again if you need assistance with downloading we are here to help you with that. All right. So, we have 10 minutes and then we're going to do our last presentation which is going to be our emergent bilingual. John, I saw you come off of mute before I >> clarifying response to someone, but please finish and then I'll I'll I'll
181jump jump into my response. Okay. Um I did want to elaborate a little bit. Uh Chelsea did address a question about um can you use salaries um towards CUSP funds towards salaries? Um and so yes, but to just clarify because I just want to dig into that a little bit. So you can use CSP funds for salaries during the planning phase. As you recall, there's a planning phase and an implementation phase. So you can use sal you can use funds for salaries during the planning phase and then up to 30 days after school starts. So I just want to be sure that no one walking away thinking that those funds can be used during both the planning and implementation phase. Just want to be clear on that. That's all. Perfect. Thanks, guys. All right, so
182we're going to have 10 minutes. I will give you your one minute warning and right at 2 o'clock, we will finish off with your sessions for today with emergent bilingual. See you at two. All righty, everybody. Welcome back. We're going to get started here in just a second. I did see one chat. Um, if you guys are still having trouble with that application, send us an email so we can set up a Zoom time with you so we can go over how to access that document. All right, we are going to jump right in to our last session. We have emergent bilingual and we have the wonderful Amy here today. So, I see you're sharing your screen. You are able to take it over whenever you're ready. >> Okay. Thanks very much everyone. I hope
183y'all have had a a informative day that you have clear guidance on where you're going to go now, what are your next questions, and so I hope to um add to that uh bucket of knowledge with some thoughts about emergent bilingual uh students and how you plan to serve them. So, let me see. Here we go. So, as we get into it, we're going to talk a little bit about emergent bilingual students in Texas. no surprise the services um that you are required to provide for them. What is the ELPAC and what does it really do? How are we implementing these programs and what are the programs we're supposed to implement for bilingual and ESL program students and then how is the program funded? So just some light topics for your afternoon. Uh first of
184all I just want to clarify um the term emergent bilingual student is one that means in Texas is a student in the process of acquiring English and has another language represented as a home language. So it's a synonym to English learner. It's a little it's more additive which is why the um couple legislative sessions ago um Texas decided to stop saying English language learner English learner. Now we're emergent bilingual student. Emergent bilingual student doesn't mean bilingual program though. It just means a student who has another language as a home language. In PES you will see the term EB sometimes with a slashel emergent bilingual English learner. So same group of students. It may not surprise you um as a group that is wanting to start a charter school that emergent bilingual students in Texas are
185a large group and have continued to grow. Um each year they have grown. This is the first year 2425 that we have not seen the actual number grow. It decreased a little bit um which we um attribute to uh reclassification criteria, not to any change in demographics. um but it decreased so little that we're still at 24.3%. So about a quarter of our students of the 5.5 million students in Texas are considered emergent bilingual. And of all of the applications that I have seen in the past two years, the majority of them have way more than 2 24.5% anticipated emergent bilingual students. So, if yours is like that, then I know that you'll be really wanting to see how you can implement these programs effectively because it will be such a large percentage of your
186students. Um, I also want to point out uh dually identified students, which in our definition is students who are emergent bilingual and are served by special education. You may be inheriting some students who are already duly identified. There may be students who are emergent bilingual identified but may be going through the process of MTSS and may be recommended for special education. So when that happens, it's very important that we recognize that both of those uh services are ones that the student is eligible to receive. And so there's not a let's choose between one or the other or our scheduling doesn't allow it. These are both programs that have services the student is allowed to receive. Little bit of an interesting fact here is that you see the the numbers there statewide which really it's going
187to really just matter your student population but the in these numbers dually identified students comprise 14% of all emergent bilingual students and 22% of all students receiving special education services. So you may have more dy identified students than you are thinking. Um, so if you have anyone um on your team who's has special education experience, some of this may be some new information for them as well. Um, and dually um dual identified students are not the only way that the emergent bilingual population is varied. Um, you may have um t some of them may be newcomers, new to the country that may or may not be identified as emergent bilingual. Um, some of them may also be identified as gifted and talented. Um, they may, if you're in a high school, they may already be
188enrolled in CTE classes. So, their emergent bilingual students don't fit into just one category. They are not a monolith and they um are as varied as the students who are in that group. Um, and on on our on the bottom of the slide here, you see 99% of districts serve emergent bilingual students. So it is highly highly likely that your um the students that you will be serving are also going to have that identification. So let's talk a little bit about bilingual education in Texas. And by bilingual education we mean both bilingual programs and ESL programs. It's the the bigger umbrella. So, a question that we have gotten in the past is are open enrollment charter schools in Texas required to provide that bilingual education? There was some question maybe we don't have to because
189we're a charter. Yes, you are required um to provide that and there's the Texas education code um that shows that requirement. So getting back to that umbrella I was talking about bilingual education in Texas if you think of it as an umbrella there are six state approved program models for serving these emergent bilingual students. So on one hand if you have a minimum of 20 students with the same home language at the same grade level districtwide which may mean across your building then you are required to have a bilingual program. We call it the rule of 20. Um, and so if you have that um concentration of third graders who have Spanish as a home language, you may likely be required to have a bilingual program. If you have fewer than 20 students with the
190same home language at a given grade level, then you're not required to have a bilingual program, but an ESL program is required. So, if you have one Mandarin speaker, three Arabic speakers, and four pasto speakers, they can all be in the class together um as with an ESL certified teacher. Um with a bilingual program, because you have at least 20 students with the same home language, then um that bilingual program is required. Now, what kind of bilingual program? What are we talking about? Well, there are dual language immersion programs and transitional programs. I'll talk about those a little bit more in detail in a moment, but those are the two um different names and then there are two types of each one of those. And in an ESL program, it's not enough to just say
191we're going to have an ESL program. Is it going to be contentbased or pull out? And I'll talk about those a little bit more, but hopefully you'll remember this umbrella and remember that bilingual education is for all of these program models and that there are different models within each subgroup. Now, currently, um, in the way that we look at the distribution of emergent bilingual students across the state right now, what has been happening ever since the legislature legislature um approved an additional bump of funding for dual language programs, if you look on the right, you'll see those uh the first couple of green are dual language immersion oneway and two-way, which I'll talk about what that means in a minute. Those numbers have been steadily growing over the past at least 5 to six years.
192And when those grow, then our transitional, bilingual, early exit, and late exit programs are going down. They're shrinking, right? Because that's that's the same the same programs. Alternative methods at the very top of the right side means that we're required to have a bilingual program. We don't have adequate staff. We did not we were not able to hire a certified teacher. And so these are the things that we're doing to closely approximate our required bilingual program. And then on the left um you'll see at the bottom there's ESL contentbased and ESL pull out. Now ESL, spoiler alert, but ESL pull out means that only the ELAR teacher is certified in ESL. Math, science, social studies are not. That's the minimum requirement of a pullout program. ESL contentbased means that all four content area teachers are
193certified in ESL. There's no in between. So we know that within that ESL pull out part of the pie, we have um students who have maybe two or three content area teachers who are ESL certified. They just don't have the complete four. So um that's part of the reason that that ESL pull out uh part is so large. Um, you'll also see emergent bilingual students with parental denial. Um, I'll talk more about that also. 4% statewide, and that has been that way since I came to the agency in 2019. That number has not budged. Of course, we'd like it to be lower. Um, but that is the right of a parent to deny the program. We'll talk about that later. All right. The LPAC, Language Proficiency Assessment Committee. There's probably you've heard a lot of
194talk about the ELPAC. If you don't have your own experience, you're probably thinking, "What in the world is this magical group?" Well, the um LPAC is required by our state law and they are required to make sure and approve this standardized statewide process for emergent bilingual students to make sure they're appropriately identified, placed, that their progress in both language achieve language proficiency and academic achievement is appropriately measured. that they are reclassified when appropriate and that they are monitored according to what our state requires. But if and if we look at the federal law, title 3 part A of the Elementary secondary act, also known as ESSA, um that goal is for our emergent bilingual or English learners as the feds would say, um and immigrant students attain English proficiency and develop high levels of academic
195achievement in English. same goals that we have in Texas, right? And under ESSA, Texas must have a statewide process for these bullets, which are very similar. Actually, they're identical to what is in our state statute. So, when you are following our state rule and statute, you are also meeting federal compliance. All right. So, in speaking of that standardized process, um over the past couple of years, TEA has developed some standardized letters that are intended to ensure that this process is uniform. Each district isn't creating their own letter for these purposes and to increase educators and families to be aware of this whole process. So, standardized means you're required to use them. So, in all of our language in chapter 89, it says that you must use the TEA develop standardized letter. And so, um, the
196bullets here on the right show you what we have standardized letters for the home language survey. And then each of those steps that we saw before, most of them have a standardized letter here. So, identification and placement, everybody's using the same letter. So, when if you get a transfer student from another school, you will recognize that letter right away. If there's a parental denial, we have a standardized state level uh letter change of service, which you also might have if maybe a student was in a dual language program and then you're doing a transitional program or they were in a transitional program and you have ESL only, there will be a change of service for that student. And then of course at reclassification and exit um or continuence, there will be um another standardized letter.
197So, just very quickly looking at the standardized home language survey. Um, in the past couple of years, we have um developed a new home language survey that actually has three questions. Maybe you were thinking it was going to be two. What is the language spoken at home? Um, spoken at home. What is the language that is spoken by the child? And if the child has had a previous home setting in which another language was spoken. Think international adoptions. Think foster family who doesn't speak another language at home but the birth family did. All these scenarios where students language proficiency experience was not captured on the home language survey. So now it is um there is on the standardized form um an acknowledgement of when and how parents are allowed to make corrections. many of the
198a lot of the um text on the standardized forms came from our experience of what was the most common question in the field. So um it's important that you understand and clarify the parents answers. For example, I had a question last week of a parent who was upset that his child was being tested for English proficiency. Well, they had Mandarin on the home language survey and he said, "Oh, we're just doing Mandarin as a family through Dolingo. We're all trying to learn Mandarin. So it all of that confusion could have been avoided if the district had said, "Oh, Mandarin, tell me more about that Mandarin in the home. Oh, we're all doing Duolingo." Okay, that's not what we mean by language spoken in the home. So, it's a really key pl point for at the
199when a child comes to you and is filling out the home language survey initially for Texas public schools that you take the time or train those folks at intake to clarify and understand the parents answers. Um, it is possible to have these forms uh digitally. A lot of districts are doing that. Um, but there's no drop- down menu to enter the languages. Parents need to type it all out. We have a lot of FAQs on that. So, getting back to the LPAC, what what is the ELPAC? Well, if you have a student in a dual language or transitional bilingual program, then you have an ELPAC administrator. One of your administrators is is um has experience in the ELPAC and is going to facilitate that. A bilingual teacher and a parent of an emergent bilingual student.
200If it's the ESL program, then same thing, you just have an ESL teacher. Um many districts have additional members in there if there are interventionists. Um but this is the minimum that is required in TAC which is cited there on the slide. So what uh do they do? Let's see. Oh, I have a click. So even if you have a par a student with a parental denial for program services, then the ELPAC is still considering them because there still are some requirements that the school um must meet. So, if the student was um recommended for an ESL program, then you would have that ESL program teacher in there for the student with a parental denial. Don't get overwhelmed. I'm just going to say a couple of things here, but we have very detailed uh information
201about um what to do when a student enrolls. There's the home language survey by the first blue bullet. What kind of language testing is required? It's all standardized in right there. And then the ELPAC meeting. One thing I'd like to emphasize here is at the very top it says students initial enrollment in Texas public schools. So the identification process for you is only going to occur if the child has never been in a Texas public school before. So it may be your prek students, but I'm thinking that many of your students may be transferring from another Texas public school. if they fill out a home language survey, they didn't really need to because we're going to look at the original home language survey and look at their history of services. So, the ELPAC is not
202meeting in those cases to determine if the student is emergent bilingual. The ELPAC is meeting to look at the students history of service and growth and continue those services. Maybe there is a change. Like I said before, if you're not offering exactly the same program model that the sending school was, um, then you need to communicate that with the parents. But we have seen cases where, you know, oh, we're identifying all these students. Well, only if it's their first time in Texas public schools. If you know they're coming from another school, you will inherit those emergent bilingual records, LPAC minutes, services, all of those trajectories. Um, and and in this section, when you fill out this section of the application, we really encourage you to be thinking not only of compliance. Yes, we're going to
203have a home language survey. Yes, we're going to test. Yes, the ELPAC is going to meet right where these three the these three are, but think of how the programs that you've chosen to offer are going to impact instructional decisions as well. thinking that serving emergent bilingual students is compliance only is not going to translate into the student outcomes that you're really looking for. The compliance is the foundation for making sure that the program um is equitable. So the ELPAC at the end of that last flowchart is going to recommend program placement. That's right. Recommend because it's the parents who have the ultimate um power to say yes, I approve their placement in this program or no, I don't. Some parents say, I don't want them in bilingual, but we will put them in ESL.
204The ELPAC only recommends one program. It's not a buffet, as one of my mentors used to say. It's a decision based on the child's past, what you're offering, and what is going to be consistent. Um, but if the parents say no to bilingual that they can uh say yes to ESL. If they say no to ESL, then they are a parental denial. They get no funding. That's a different code. You're still serving them, though. So, I'll go into that a little bit more. But remember that the parental approval is required. Now, if you're continuing the same program, you don't need a new parental approval every year, but you will need to get approval if the program is changing or new. Jumping ahead to reclassification, right, which just means that this emergent bilingual student is now
205demonstrating proficiency in English. Yes, there are three different criteria for reclassification. The student has a high composite score of advanced high on the TELP pass. The student has demonstrated that they can pass the STAR or the EOC in English. We have an alternative assessment for non-star grades. And then there's a subjective teacher evaluation that really gets to the day-to-day classroom um piece. Where we talk to districts a lot is where districts say, "Well, we're only going to wait for these test scores to come in to determine reclassification, which is kind of like saying we're not going to practice or train for the marathon until it's marathon day and then we're going to give it a go." So yes, th this is the finish line that students need to come that they need to reach in
206order to be eligible for reclassification, but there is a lot of measuring of progress that comes along the way. And really from the beginning of the year, if you know their Telpass scores, what are we going for next? You I know that you all are aware that if they're not successful on STAR, you're going to be thinking about that from the beginning of the year. You're not going to wait until star testing day and say, "Hope it works out." Right? So, in the same way, the LPAC is not making lots of decisions right at the end. The ELPAC can actually recommend reclassification pending these test scores. So, that's been a lot of learning now is how are we monitoring language proficiency development as well as academic achievement. Usually one is firmly in place and the
207other not so much so that we can really make an accurate prediction about how students are going to do. Um the reason that we say exit or continuation of services is because in a dual language program because they're developing bilingualism by literacy students continue in those dual language programs even once they have gone from emergent bilingual to English proficient. Let's say they did that in the third grade. They still participate in the dual language program in fourth and fifth grade because they're continuing to build that bilingualism and biiteracy. So the ELPAC is responsible for a lot of decisionmaking. New students, which for you all is likely prek, maybe kindergarten, and some new to Texas students, but a lot of them are going to be transfers. You still have to look at them and and determine
208what do you all offer, but you're not starting from the identification place with them. There are decisions to be made in the middle of the year around state assessments, language of instruction, designated supports. Um, as I talked about that progress monitoring, how do we know that they are making linguistic and academic progress during the year? And then once students reclassify, there is a required two-year monitoring period where you the LPAC makes sure that students are still successful without any of the language supports that they previously had in program. Um there we have gone through a lot of does everyone have to be there to sign for the meeting yet? Well, you can participate virtually and have a digital signature, but everybody needs to be in on the conversation. And if there are dually identified students,
209meaning special education and emergent bilingual, there is an ELPAC representative in the AR, but ELPAC meetings are likely happening more regularly than annual ARDs. So, you may need to collaborate with um the students uh ARD committee uh key personnel in order to make sure that all of the decisions are are um communicated between the two committees. And that's where you can find it. Uh we do have some documents that are beginning of the year procedures which really just means whenever students come in um but that is sort of a checklist um format that this field has said has been very helpful. So it'll be overwhelming but you know when you have a checklist you can make sure that you're you're um considering everything. Now let's get into the good stuff. Program implementation. Told you the
210names of these programs when you have to have them. How do we choose a program? Is there one that's really easier than the others? What do we I would hope that that's not how you're making your decision, but let me give you some some background information. So, in the dark purple, we have dual language immersion programs. And as I said before, the students in those programs are developing bilingualism and biiteracy in what we're calling the partner language or the program partner language and English. So there is a language allocation plan where the students get at least 50% of their instruction throughout the day is in the partner language um and then 50% in English. It could start with different percentages but it never drops lower than 50%. Our little mathematical representation here L1 plus L2
211equals L1 and L2. Nothing is subtracted out. Students are learning new science concepts sometimes in English sometimes in Spanish. they can do just as well. When I taught fifth grade dual language, it didn't matter what language I taught in, the students could do all of those on-grade level things in either language. So, a one-way dual language program on the right side of the column means that all the students in that program are emergent bilingual students that have the same home language. Everybody has has that they're identified as emergent bilingual and they're working towards that bilingualism and biiteracy. If it's a two-way program, it is designed to mix emergent bilingual students and non-emergent bilingual students. There are things like bilingual pairs where if I'm paired with an emergent bilingual student and instructions in English, maybe I'm
212able to take the lead there. Likewise, when instructions in Spanish, my bilingual pair can take the lead. So, there are equal opportunities for leadership. Sometimes districts choose two-way because they have students with, say, Spanish in their home, but they're not identified as emergent bilingual. And this is a way for them to build that language as well. That is the only program that is designed to include non-emergent bilingual students. And I'm not saying English proficient because these are students who have never been tested for English proficiency, right? Their home language survey was English. They they don't have any other language as far as we know other than English. Now, transitional bilingual programs do not have a goal of bilingualism and biiteracy, and that's surprising to some people. The goal is for students to transition from Spanish
213to English. Okay? So, the math there is L2 take away your L1 equals L2. And that means that Spanish is used as needed to get the concept. and then right away there are specific ways that that learning is transferred to English. It's not magical. There are special ways. Um so a myth is that late exit versus early exit transitional programs describe how long the students are in the program. This is not correct. Early exit versus late exit describes how quickly the home language, many times Spanish, is subtracted from the program. So, in an early exit program, they students are transitioned to only English instruction, sometimes as early as first grade. Okay? In late exit, it's more of a gradual transition, allowing students to develop more literacy in their home language. Um, you probably won't know
214what the patterns will be of students coming into your school. Um, but any emergent bilingual student that would um be eligible for your bilingual program is going to need to fit into the program model that you are currently addressing or implementing. And then ESL programs, there is no instruction in a language other than English, which is why students with multiple home languages um can be in the same classroom. But that doesn't mean that we don't acknowledge the assets they bring from their home language. Especially with older students, right? We have lots of guidance for how you can use the home language or the students native language even if the teacher is not fluent in supporting that English instruction. And as I said before, contentbased ESL program means that all four content area teachers, ELA, math,
215science, and social studies are ESL certified. This is a great opportunity for them to collaborate on um strategies and how students are um responding in different content areas linguistically and then pull out as I said um it's the ELAR student the ELAR uh teacher who is certified and there are three different ways that that can look it can look like the ELAR teacher is certified it can look like an uh ESL certified teacher is co-eing the whole period with the ELR teacher or it could be that during the ELR time an ESL teacher is pulling those students out physically sometimes to an ESL ELAR classroom. Um, but in all of these programs, they have access to high quality instructional materials, grade level reading, all of that. It's just the way in which their second languages
216are instructed, dealt with, and supported. Uh, okay. So, how do we make sure that students are having accessible instruction? Well, we have uh a whole website from our division that'll be linked later called contentbased language instruction and it's now uh listed in TEA documents all the way across. It's noted in um HQIM materials that this is a way of developing language within the context of the content area. So, um, if I'm the science teacher, then I'm teaching science, but I have some, um, some ways that I can look at the students proficiency levels and make my biology content more accessible to students who may not be proficient in English yet. Certification requirements. This is sometimes where there's some there's some myths that one program is easier to certify than another. I think uh it's not
217so much the certification that'll get you, it's the implementation uh being implemented with Fidelity. In dual language programs, whether you have a one-way or a two-way program, the um the teachers must be certified in bilingual education. It's your choice if it's departmentalized or self-contained. Um but all the teachers must be certified. Now, in paired teaching, this is a little bit different. If you have a 50/50 language allocation, meaning by this grade, 50% of the content is in English, 50% is in Spanish, in that case, you can have the teacher who's instructing the 50% in Spanish be the bilingual certified teacher. And the 50% uh of the content that is being instructed in English can be by an ESL certified teacher. an ESL certified teacher who understands that all of her students are language learners, right?
218And that um he or she is more than teaching in in a typical ESL program, right? So, that's one way that uh districts have said, well, if we do this dual language 50/50 model, then we only have to have one bilingual teacher per two classrooms. But right away they found out that the selection of those ESL teachers is a lot more than just a certification list because there's a lot more to it in a bilingual program. In a transitional bilingual program model, whether you have early exit or late exit, um whether you're departmentalized or not, all the teachers must be certified in bilingual education. There is no paired teaching other than departmentalization and transitional. If you have a fourth grade early exit program and you get a new student from Ecuador, he's late to the
219early exit program, but he still has a right to that Spanish language instruction. So, that's why we need um uh bilingual teachers all the way through, as well as being able to provide those those cross-linguistic connections all the way through regardless of well, they don't need the Spanish instruction, right? But they can still benefit from learning the definition of carnivore by knowing that carne in Spanish is meat. That's the kind of connection that only a bilingual teacher would be able to bring. So that's why now when we talk about ESL, I've said this already a couple of times. Contentbased ESL means all four content area teachers are ESL certified. Pull out. it's just the ELAR teacher um or during the ELAR time that an ESL teacher is is instructing. So that that's pretty pretty standard,
220pretty basic. If your recruitment of teachers and finding those appropriately certified teachers is not at 100% way before you need it to be, there is a um a statutoily allowed process of bilingual applying for a bilingual exception ESL waiver. Basically, that means in our bilingual program, we don't have a third grade teacher who is already certified. Maybe you have a third grade teacher who's ESL certified, not on the pathway to becoming bilingually certified, or a teacher who's bilingual, just hasn't passed a particular test yet, so is on the pathway to bilingual certification. Those are two very different teachers that need two very different things. Um ESL waiver, same thing. We have um an ESL program. We don't have an ELAR teacher, that's the minimum requirement, who is certified. And so you would um file for
221either an exception or a waiver or both. And our division has developed that whole process of what should we be doing from August to October. The application's due November the 1st, but you don't just submit it and then forget it, right? Um, so what should we be doing to support teachers and to work on our recruitment once we submit that exception or waiver? And some of it has to do with the classroom instruction, helping that teacher serve the emergent bilingual students who are currently in his or her classroom and also the certification pathway, helping prepare that teacher for the exam that they're missing. For example, in terms of program implementation, we have um extensive resources. If you are in going to implement the bilingual program, I'm sorry, the dual language program, we have the Texas
222effective dual language instruction framework. That's the icon on the left. Transitional program, we have a program implementation rubric and Texas ESL framework. So, we have guidance on when you ask how do we really implement a strong program? What are the things to consider beyond who and who's who's in it and who's teaching them, but how that's where these program implementation resources will um will address the how. All right. And then funding. How are these programs funded? Well, there are um we have statutory authority in the role of TEA supporting the emergent bilingual students. Texas Education Code Chapter 29 and uh Texas um administrative code um chapter 89. And then we have bilingual education aotment funds. Those are state funds. Those funds are generated only when parents have approved the bilingual or ESL program services. So
223those parental denials would not be allotted the bilingual education funds. Um, on the other side of that second row, title 3 part A federal funds. These funds are used to supplement what you're already implementing that is required and funded by the state. So, we have a whole funding guide book that helps districts understand, can this be title 3? Does this need to be BEA? But because we have state funding to meet state requirements then federal funding must be that above and beyond. All right. So when we talk about the BEA the bilingual education aotment there are all kinds of regulations as you can imagine. So 555% of those funds must be used in providing this is TEC TEC language bilingual education or special language programs. That's bilingual and ESL programs. Um, and these are the
224things that can apply towards the 55%. Previously, it was salary supplements for teachers there in the middle with the asterisk. Um, that will be updated per HB2. Now, it can be the complete teacher salary, but everything else is still the same. These are the things that you can use your BEA funds toward. And then for title three, remember title three includes immigrant children. So, you may have immigrants who are not emergent bilingual students, right? Title three covers them as well. And so these are the goals of title three um which are a little bit more specific. For example, that last one promoting parent, family, and community engagement. Um there are some specific things to do with emergent bilingual students only. Uh common questions from districts are we have our back to school night for everyone.
225Can that count as a parent family community engagement um event? No, because it's for everyone. This is just for those emergent bilingual students. And so again with that allowable use of title three part A, as I've said, it's that above and beyond comprehensive professional development. Uh we don't have a bilingual program now, but we may in the future. So we're going to develop on that. All of your questions will be answered in this funding guide book that is linked here on the screen, allowable versus unallowable use of funds. And all of the questions that you can think of, I bet are already answered in there because we take a lot of stakeholder feedback and it is recently updated. So, how to wrap all of that up? Um when you are looking to develop your program
226um and decide what your program is going to be and need support in implementing the program that you have chosen, please know that your ESC has contacts that are um that we meet with regularly and they can help you with program implementation in particular. Um technical assistance, that's our division, as well as your ESC professional development. We have a website with um uh live and recorded trainings, things that you could look up and and find that are there. We have lots and lots of program resources over the last five years. That's been our focus to not just establish guidance for compliance, but guidance for program implementation to get those outcomes. Compliance only is not going to get students where they need to be, right? It's that day-to-day implementation. So when you think about setting up
227everything, setting up your instruction, setting up your staffing, setting up your materials, remember the percentage of your students who are emergent bilingual, they're going to be in all of those spaces. They should not be an add-on or a oh, we forgot about them, right? And that's the sort of the stance that TEA is taking now with developing HQIM. This is going to be appropriate for all students. So, our resources are found on the web portal. Um, txcl.org is up there at the top. Everything you could want. You don't even have to read all the bullets. It's all there. Leadership calendars, PDFs, scoring sheets, all of the things are there. That's really where we have curated everything. If you have questions specifically about um emergent bilingual students compliance program implementation, any of that, we have an
228inbox here at emergent bilingual support and then there's the um uh link to the portal as well. So that is all that I have. So that's like five different PDs I think in 40 minutes. Um so I'm sure there will be no follow-up questions. Thanks so much Amy. There are a few questions that are in the question and answer function if you're able to check those. >> I see them now. Okay. What other curriculum instruction requirements specifically a certain percentage of curriculum must be in the student's home language? Yes. So um if you go into the program resources you'll see some sample uh language allocation plans. Um the amount of instruction in the students home language never goes below 50%. So some districts start off with 80% in the home language, 20% in English and
229then taper it a little bit. Some start with 50/50 from the very beginning. Uh so that is that it's really about language of instruction. Um, so if for example you're going to have, let's say it's a Spanish language, you're going to have an English language arts and a Spanish language arts all the way through. So you need to be sure and have instructional materials in Spanish. Um, can students remain in immersion programs for prek to 12? And yes, if yes, okay, so you are required to have a bilingual program. If you choose dual language immersion, that's great. from uh prek through 5, that's when it's required. Chapter 89 does address that districts are allowed to um a have the program even if you don't have the numbers and b continue. And there are lots of
230examples your ESC can help you with this also of districts who have taken their dual language immersion program to middle school now or who are bringing it up to high school now. So yes, they can. there is no state assessment in that home language after um uh fourth grade. There are no more STAR assessments in Spanish. So in order to ensure that students are um at bilingualism and biiteracy, there are other assessments that can be used in English and in Spanish and districts around you that are are are doing this have ideas already. Um is there specific instructional minutes? Oh, that that's a that's a sort of a a question we we used to get a whole lot. It used to be that okay, ESL pull out is this many minutes or that many minutes.
231No, it's the ELAR time. The minimum requirement is that the ELAR teacher be ESL certified, right? So for that, what is it 90 minutes? However the ELAR time is for you all, that is the amount of time the student should have support. So that's why in some places if the ELER teacher is not certified but will become certified that year, they have an ESL teacher come in and co-e, best of both worlds, right? Two teachers on that one class, ensuring that the students proficiency level is addressed. And then once that teacher becomes appropriately certified, maybe the test was taken in the fall and adds it to their certification, then that co-e is no longer required. But um minimum is that an ESL certified teacher is instructing the student for the ELAR time period. Okay, they
232all disappeared. I tried to keep it super organized for you. So >> you did. You did. >> Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Amy, for hopping. >> Great presentation, great information, and if they do have questions, um we will definitely shoot those your way, but we really appreciate you joining today. >> Absolutely. Thanks. >> Thank you. All right, team. So, we are kind of closing the clock out here. We are really ahead of schedule, which is a wonderful thing. Um, but there are no more questions. Um, if you guys have questions for us, general questions for us, um, that we can answer to help you get started in this process, how to pull this application, where do you find something, who's the content expert, whatever those things are, we want to make sure we give
233you the right information in a timely fashion. So, please send us an email and we will get back to you. John, Sarah, anything before we close out now that our Q&A is officially Oh, I almost said officially clean. And then here comes another Oh, perfect. It's officially clean. Anything from you, John or Sarah? Looks like we just got a question, but it might have gotten cut off. If you can go ahead and resubmit that question. Um, just as a reminder, this slide deck and the recording will be posted. Um, look for that sometime next week on the charter applicant page where you can access all the documents for the application. So there is a question about public meetings. Um, so in in the similar vein with generation 30, it has become an optional public meeting.
234There is an attachment um and it it gives you all of the instructions for public meetings should you choose to do it. Uh do you need to have notorized for your members? Um yes, you still need to have it notorized. Okay, perfect. Oh, I see that. >> Hey, Britney, let me um yeah, just to clarify um the person's question. I think um if you're a returning applicant, uh you had your board members fill out those biographical affidavits and you were probably still in possession of those from that generation. Uh you do have to have your board members do it again. Um those forms change slightly from year to year. So, ensure that your board members fill out this year's that's associated with this application cycle. Um, same thing, excuse me, if you are a returning
235applicant, um, you do need to site your own work if you are using content that you you previously submitted in another application. So, if you cut and paste your response from your prior your previous application, you still need to reference that you were citing from that application because when we do our plagiarism check, um, that's something that pops up. We just want to ensure that that citation's quickly there for our reference. We don't have to go do a whole lot of digging. So this question is um is there an expectation that the charter finds additional money to start the charter? Um no. Uh again, the expectation is that the charter school will be able to operate based off of state funding and any other federal entitlements that you would uh receive because charter schools are
236allowed to seek philanthropic funds. Again, the more money the better, the more contingency budget you can build, you know, the better. But, um there is no formal expectation that you all would need to find additional money to start the charter. Um again barring you will need some sort of capital or some sort of access to capital um for the reimbursement grant obviously for CSP because it is a reimbursement um you would need to find a way at that point to um again fund whatever those those purchases were before you could get reimbured for them. >> Perfect. Well, on that note, we're going to go ahead and close it out. Please email us with questions. We really appreciate your time today. If you are one of those people who joined by phone and have not sent
237us an email yet to link your phone number to your name, um please take a moment to do that before you leave for the day. That way it doesn't slip your mind and we have an accurate account of attendance. Again, thank you for joining