001The record show that this meeting has been duly called that a notice of this meeting has been posted meeting act code. Please be advised that this meeting is being recorded and will be available for public access. Thank you for the blessings on our community, Lord, our schools. We ask that you continue to watch over us, Lord. Give us wisdom as we make decisions and let us always all your will and all we do. Lord, we ask that you remind us at this time of year to be thankful for what we do have and gracious to those. In your name we pray. Amen. Uh public commentational items too fund got uh two fundraisers kicking off. Uh National Honor Society actually there's just about over and then junior class uh to help fund prom. >> Um so
002those two are kicking off uh will be over before one right after Thanksgiving, one before the holiday. >> What is It's like one of those calendar type situations where you claim whatever number you want to pay like 1 through 30. I want 12. I'll pay $12. >> Okay. 2B basketball schedules. Uh basketball's taking off for everybody. Uh first home games are during the break on the 25th. Um that's girls only. Uh then boys kick off on the second. Um that'll also be home. And I mean from there we're rolling pretty much every Tuesday and Friday. Uh we do have tournaments coming up uh at the beginning of December. Um so we'll have you know kids and coaches out for that. Buses on the road. So justformational there that we're getting rolling. >> Uh 2C partnership
003with Lamar University early bird admission program. >> Okay. Um, this one I'm pretty excited about. Um, I got to be part of this in Bridge City last year. Um, and it it really did a good thing for our kids there. Um, so early bird admission to Lamar is a program for current high school juniors. Um, it would be able to be available for this year's juniors. Um, it would start immediately with this year's class. Um, what it is is for any kid that has a 3.5 college GPA. So, that's no weighted scale. It has to be a true college average GPA of 3.5 or higher and they're in the top 50% of the high school class. Um, their information goes before the admittance committee at Lamar and if they are accepted early as juniors. It
004also comes with a minimum of an $8,000 scholarship to them. Um, it can go up as high as 40,000 but minimum of $8,000. Um, one of the great things with this, it won't go down. So that kid senioritis and their GPA drops a little bit, that money is still guaranteed. On the flip side of that, if that kid suddenly gets their tail in gear, makes a higher SAT score, moves up in class ranking, the money can still go higher. It allows them to apply for the presidential scholarship earlier than most people do, which presidential of Lamar is a full ride worth about 110,000 depending on which program you're in. So, it gets them an early chance to apply for that. It's also non-binary. So, a kid can go in and accept this offer as a
005junior, get a better offer to Texas A&M, LSU, Stephen F, want to go away. The money Lamar just absorbs the money back into the next year. So, it doesn't cost the kid or and the family anything to accept it. There's no sign on the dotted line, we hold you to this, or you have to refund it. It's it's just money to be had. Lamar is doing this. They got a grant. Um they're working with several of our local companies. They're doing it trying to keep some of the best and brightest kids from wanting to go off. And by they're hoping by offering them early, there'll be a little bit of a loyalty factor there. Uh they're hoping also to that, you know, they can get big money in the hands of kids that deserve it.
006Um and have a chance at keeping them from going off. And that's that's what's in it for Lamar is that they they want some good kids coming in to be part of their programs. for us. Um what we have to do, we have to provide them transcripts and student names um so that they can go through and find which kids meet the criteria. Um if we get it back to them, if um by December 12th, it also comes with five $1,000 scholarships that we as a district get to award based on the needs we know about our students. So that would have nothing to do to be a that meets these criteria, but once they do, we can look at it and say, "Hey, we know Johnny's family doesn't have the money to send them
007to college, so we're going to add a thousand on him." Whereas, you know, Jenny, his family's got some they can put on the side. We don't need to add a thousand. Um, so it allows us to assign those based on the needs that we know for our kids and our So, great. There's not really anything to vote on with it. Um, but it is something I want people to know about. Uh I think it's uh it is a three-year deal. Um unless uh the business partners behind it pull the plug on the money on the Mars end. Um it's a three-year deal. So it'll be this year's junior sophomores that will have access to this at a minimum. Hopefully it gets to keep going, but at least those three grades will have access to this
008program. >> Great. Good job. Thanks to the ball. ADA special population. Okay. Two seconds. >> I got the cover page. [laughter] >> I'm not crazy. Just I got a big square. >> Okay. Um, special populations report. Um, just going to kind of run through some highlights. Um, most of our grades are at 50% ecodis or higher. Um, there's only, I think, two that are not. Um, they're 50% or higher. Um, every grade level multiple um special ed students and u a lot of them have um emerging bilingual that's a growing population as well as most of the state u seniors are up to 45 students with um some students that are choosing to graduate early in three years. Um so we'll be looking at a slightly larger class there than we thought a little smaller.
009We've rolled those three year graduates up. >> Um except for sixth grade, we're pretty consistent on class sizes. Um hovering high30s to high 40s. Um sixth grade is the outlier at 28. Um everything else is pretty consistent. Um there's also at least uh one homeless student in every September 5th, I think they're the outlier that there's no homeless students report. Keep in mind with that Mckenni Vento own me and my parents are living at my grandparents and we know we're there. So, we got a we got a roof over our head, it's a stable situation, but by the beginning stuff for education that makes you homeless. Um, so when we went through the residency stuff and enrollment information that families gave us, um, that was what the way it coded out. So, it's not too
010many. We don't have people living under the bridges and tents and tar 500 tarps in situations like that, but we do have people that are doubled up in houses with other family members or they're in a temporary situation. U even even a travel trailer be the nicest one on the lot lot, but travel trailers are automatically considered homeless under stuff like that. So, as we got that residency information, we make sure we coded it. It does help us on accountability to make sure that that's coded correctly. >> So that was my question. At the end of the day, you see stuff you ask that question I always ask. So what what does this >> is there some things taken into consideration special considerations financially? Yes. teachers. I mean, if I look at what is it
011kindergarten and first 20% of our kids are in special ed in those two particular classes. I mean, is there any consideration or extra help that we get for I mean that's a chunk that's equals >> a lot of those are speech only and so you're next. >> But in general, this this helps us keep our title one status and a lot of the title one funding coming in. It also helps on a accountability at the end of the year because it puts us in a different comparison group um as far as our like schools and make sure that we're accurately compared. Um and then with special ed there is um funding on the back end, special ed. Um it helps the transportation cost um when we're transporting those kids. It goes into part of why
012we get free mills u for our students at both campuses. Um just an example, Rich City, we have a hard time getting they had a hard time getting this information into the secondary campuses because, you know, high school kids don't like return paperwork. Um, and so in Brick City because the numbers aren't right, the elementary [cough] campuses get free lunch and breakfast in the secondary campuses and students have same kids, same families. Um, but it's just a matter of getting these numbers. So, pretty proud of our people and the work they did on the back end making sure it was all right. um both campuses and up here there was a lot of time spent making sure we got this. >> Can I interject? But at the high school it also helps us dis helps
013us get more fee wavers for SATA because of that percentage. Um also it helps with our college high school application because the more eco we have the more we can. So kind of those numbers help with that. Other questions for >> Okay, any more questions? >> Uh 2E SB568 special education update. >> So excited. Welcome to my spid of the updates that were given to the state as far as you wanted to share with you that we have as of snapshot day and this is subject to change. It's probably changed probably today. But we had 78 special education students out of a total of 573 um which is about 13.6% like 48 of those are junior elementary, right? >> Quite a bit of them are. Yes, sir. If you look, I included a graph in
014there as a percentage. I also went through and just again I love to talk about special education. Special education is one of those things and a lot of rules and things exist that probably are more than what people realize. And so I through information on what the difference is between an educational eligibility and medical diagnosis and how that's attributed to the uh our meeting. I did the laws that required us to do inclusion. It's not called inclusion anymore. The state of Texas has changed that terminology now because apparently inclusion is not a nice word. I don't know why, but it's called meaningful access at this particular moment in time. So I apologize that my correct is not necessarily listed on there. Uh I did include how many like I said percentage wise were in each
015grade level. Um we do have that with Miss Ky's report as well. I did want to share that. Um we get additional funds this year. If you look at that first page on the blue, it talks about um we will receive $1,000 for each initial sped education evaluation. So that's that's good that it costs us a lot to get those done but again they are providing for that and >> we have our own diagnostician but we use her as a case manager and we contract those out uh to our psychologist and also our contract diagnostician. We use a third party to do all these. >> Yeah. So it it there's a couple of reasons, but the most predominant reason would be it's somebody who is not necessarily working for the school. It's contracted out and
016it gives a little bit more >> district. >> Um bigger districts usually have their own diagnosticians, but we >> big districts have somebody that only does testing. So they're not necessarily It's essentially the same thing as the contract except for they're full time because there's so many kids, >> right? >> But it's very common to have somebody that's not a campus case manager testing them. That way there's no predisposition about judging from what you hear from the teachers every day or what you see in the hallway as you're doing those tests. >> Exactly. Because you have to take into account a lot of different aspects of uh we've done six the initial ones already and three of and three ones we have at least four that are waiting in the wings to be done and
017then we have a multitude of seven were too big but we don't get any funds for those so I also wanted to share with you because I think there is some misunderstanding what we call transfer. It's not like a transfer for school. >> Okay. So, whenever we're doing my um we have kids who move in to the district and that's what we call transfer and we had 10 of those already. Those are all new So for a small district it is a substantial amount. >> But again you say the majority level >> there is not all of them. Not all of them. There is a very large percentage that is only we have 16 districtwide that are autism right now which is a pretty good percentage and we have um 14 ars in the next
018two days two of which will probably add to that number as well. >> Do we do we have any that are actually that are are speech speech only, but I think I have one on. >> No, it's a very low percent. Not that I have anything. >> What are your child? What are all those questions on the numbers? Is it because the testing on it has changed maybe or improved that more cases of that that we >> have a far environmental as well. >> So, you have to be wary. That's the reason why I included in your information. Um, anybody can go to the doctor and sometimes they'll get a medical diagnosis of autism, but we consider that in our um meeting, but that is not the thing we like to do our own because
019we're looking for an educational need for services because special education is specially designed instruction. It's not like 504 which just accommodations and modification. I also included in there training that we have done for our teachers. I'd like to do more next year. um we have um behaviors are one of the main concerns that we're having and we definitely want to address those and um I and staff wonderful people are looking into how to um do that and individualize those things for our children. So the the training for the teachers is that for staff for all staff or >> I listed it in there who I actually had region five come out. I had our psychologist do a training I had our related services and instructional services people trainings there's education and I also had where
020we could If the teacher had a specific need, then I would get a psychologist to come out and speak with him or whoever it was because again, some of some of these are challenging behaviors and we want to serve our kids. So, if you have any questions, let me know how that's been. >> Thank you. I think I've asked this before statistically are we an outlier? Is it is it all districts are running around 16% now? >> Mr. Loveorn tells me quite regularly that that's not a lot. I feel like it is. Um because you know the whole goal of special education is to provide that specially designed instruction and then as they graduate you know we start reviewing supports and everything so that they can be independent. Um we're finding that the the needs
021are more involved now and >> there's a lot >> well that's the challenge and not to be it has nothing to do against the American but it all costs money all cost. district, right? >> We want to give every kid I'd like to let every kid eat with a golden spoon and have a golden plate every day. It's just notable, right? So, >> how are we making sure we're getting all >> next year? And that's one of the things that is that's on here. Next year, um the state of Texas is going to help us with monies uh by doing a uh I believe it's called where it depends on how the services the intensity of the services. So if you have a kid that's got a lot of services, the state will help pay
022for those services. Right now they don't do that. Right now it doesn't matter if you got a kid that's got 10 services or you got a kid that's got one. It doesn't really matter kind of thing is it's going to change and anybody who's interested I say this again regularly state test is free. I know you're right. I know yall know people the state test for special education certification. That's another thing that we're finding is that it's very very difficult to get people nobody wants to do special education. They just changed the test to test and nobody wants to do it because it's challenging those are most innocent population that invest in life changing. What we do in special education can be the difference between a resial home or a group home or an institution
023and being able to live independently. So you have to look at really and truly that's where >> most people's like yeah but we really need good people who exceptionally special, >> Right. You and our special education students must talk about special education. >> Thank you again. Appreciate it. >> All right. to F reporting F1 bilingual ESL program. >> Trust me. It is uh required that we give a little update yearly to the board about what our bilingual ESL program looks like. We um do not have a bilingual program. We do not have the number of students that require that at this point. Um we do ESL pull out or ESL content based depending on the students. We do not currently have um any receiving services at the high school level. We just had one reclassified
024from emergent bilingual to English proficient. Um so we're our numbers are increasing but we are making progress with the kids and um we have three districtwide teachers that are ESL certified. So that's something that along with the snow certification we needed more of and and hopefully we will be working in that direction. So we did have enough uh students to teachers with the ESL certification that we did not have to file for a waiver through TEA. So we are able to with our staff meet our students need to They they >> question to our action items. 3A discuss and take possible action to approve monthly bills reports and utilities. I'll make a motion to discuss second. Any questions, concerns? I have a chance to take a peek at it. >> Yeah. Thank you for your
025passion. All right. There's no questions, no concerns. All in favor? 3B. Discuss and take possible action to approve monthly board meeting minutes. >> Discussion possible action to approve monthly board meeting minutes. >> Second. >> All right. Any questions, concerns? All in favor? Receive. Discuss and take possible action to approve donations. It's mouthful. discuss action to approve donations. >> We have any um donations. >> Those 3D discuss and take possible action to approve purchases over 10,000 CH local. >> I move to discuss and take possible action to approve purchases over $10,000 CH local. Uh D1 being Spice Good Music Company and D2 Batting Cage. >> Okay. So for the good 11,400. So that's to that's to lease >> the bass. Okay. >> Basically. >> Um so right now um Tiffany to to try out for region
026music which we have a student who is trying out for all regional percussion. You have to have four Tony. Uh we have two and a half. Um two work. One doesn't hold ditch and the fourth one doesn't exist. And so when the student's practicing he's literally hitting air and not getting a return on sound. Um, we can piece together a set, but I don't know how much longer till those other two break. They are all old and um why Smith was able to work as a bill to get them were much cheaper than Miss Anderson than I thought and it be a good step. Um, and so I feel like the best thing to do is to go on ahead and get all four as a complete set at one time so that as we're
027building our um, planned obsolescence chart, we know the exact age of all of them because the two that do hold tune correctly. We're not exactly sure how old they are. Nobody nobody knows. All anybody can tell me is they were here when I got here. That's the that's the reoccurring answer. And so um, I talked with Miss Welch about this. We have the ability to do it um within our budget and so something that it's a real need. We have a student practicing without achievement for the competition. He's about to try out for a couple weeks. >> No, ma'am. We won't get it in time this year, but he's a he's a freshman. We got >> a question. >> Um, those are large percussion instruments that are used for contest season within concert contest um
028back there for our percussionists that they will play some different things. So this is this is for conting to get those in and out. >> Yes, sir. >> Okay. All right. Any more questions? Okay. Okay. So, the other one is the batting cages. >> Okay. Um I was hoping to have a little bit more information for you on this one, but uh you see that we got two different quotes today from Sportscapers. We just got them today. Um we don't have cases. We need them. It's tough to do hitting drills when you when you got to clear the field to keep people safe every time. We're just not getting the reps that we need. All this does this does address. We're not choosing one or the other. Um so both of their quotes address baseball
029and softball. What I was hoping to have for you is um athletics has agreed to split across because we didn't get that. They want to have that meeting with them and just say give us a random number when we don't know if it's actually enough to cover right and so um I've got a meeting on Wednesday with athletic boosters to get an exact number. Um what I can tell you on the district side um from Jana is that we have uh about 10,500 to spend towards this u and so my proposal for tonight is that we agree to spend up to that amount and if athletics boosters could cover the remainder of it towards 18,000 the better then we do that. if they can only cover the remainder to get us to the 13,000, we
030do that. But by voting on it tonight, um, as soon as I meet with them, it'll let us start moving forward to get the batting pages so that we have them before baseball season. We've got to wait till we can get an number from athletic boosters and then vote on it at the December meeting. I don't know if we can get up in time for the start of triyou. So either way, As a district, we're going to spend about 10,500. That's what we have. Um Jana was able to put the money aside from what we brought in this year. Did not have to pay officials out of our 199. So that's where it was coming from. It was money already allocated to athletics and we're just changing it from a function of paying officials to
031a function of uh Yes. Sorry. Uh where the there's some existing concrete over there. >> Yeah. No, I know. I know where the old I think he's still cool. All right. Any more questions? All in favor? This one 11 between 11 and 13,000 >> discuss and take possible action to approve the increase of ISD USDA lunch prices to I'll make a motion to discuss action. >> I'm assuming this is our standard requirement from the state or whatever. >> Yes. Region five just came out about two weeks ago. Um and after Mr. Lizby from region five the numbers. Um he said that we're going to we're basically have a shortfall right now about $20 a day. Um and over the course of the year that's up. So it's not much that we're increasing each lunch, but
032that we needed to up it to this so that when we're reported back to federal and state programs that are reimbursing us, it covers the entirety of the cost. Um some of that had to do with some requirements to buy food only um sourced in the USA. And so there's uh been some out of country produce that we cannot buy anymore. And so now it's more expensive to get what we're getting. And it's just meeting those um requirements that they're being updated as everybody grapples with the uh massive amount of legislations last summer. Um so anyway, when he ran our numbers, he came up with 5.5 to cover out for the remainder of the year. Again, this is not a cost to pass on to students because the kids will free. Um, it's a cost
033that we're reporting back to federal and state providers. >> Okay, any questions? All in favor? >> 3F discuss to take possible action to opt out of summer feeding program. >> I'll make motion discuss possible action to opt out summer feeding program. Okay. So, um this is a yearly thing. It's a letter that we need to our shack committee from the board. Um basically explaining that we're not going to open up and run kitchen staff here in the summer for summer feeding. Um just does not make a lot of sense here. There are some other purposes that are actually um we're not a district that runs the buses to pick up kids regardless of whether they need summer school or not. Um so getting students here that don't have a license would be a problem and
034that's mainly students you're talking about. >> Um so just financially it does not make a lot of sense for us to run a program where we're at right now. I think have we ever participated? >> I got >> All right. Any questions, concerns? All in favor? >> 3G. Discuss and take possible action to approve 2026 2027 appraisal district board of director. discuss and make calls for action to approve the 2026 2027 appraisal district board of director vote. [clears throat] >> So we have been instructed to disregard Mr. Smith's name at the bottom. He was not supposed to be on [laughter] >> I've been back and forth with the cat all day. Um because he was never supposed to be on there. When I called the first time they said well Newton wants have him on
035there. When I called back it's like look he's not in our minute on our board meeting that I sent her those minutes. She said well then just disregard that he's on there. So that's what we finished up today. >> Yeah, that's what we finished up today. >> Well, in the last I went to the last appraisal meeting >> and we had this conversation. Everybody already knows Miss Sharon's coming. She came as well. >> Okay. >> So, do we need to do to vote or is this a paper vote? >> Yes. Uh, so y'all will vote and then you can fill out and sign. >> Okay. So, do we hold our hands up and vote or >> Yes. Well, it needs to be reflected on our minutes though that y'all are going to vote for our
036people. Mr. Joe, >> I vote for Joe Wald and Sharon Checker. All in favor? >> Yes. Everybody said yes. Remember, we all have to own it. We own it as a team. >> Okay, cool. >> Now that I'm off the board, maybe I'll go up there and complain about my [laughter] direct meeting. already said all favor. We got that. Sorry. 38 discuss and take possible action to approve changes to >> local. So student telecommunications electronic devices Oh, so this is a task requirement. >> This is reflective of the new cell phone laws that were passed. That's what all this this one is. >> Any questions? All in favor? Policy 12 policy update 126. >> Oh, hang on. I'm sorry. My bad. We have three I and I we have multiple policy updates. We do these
037one. It's all under >> 31 policy updates for policy updates. >> Okay. So in this we will not be actually voting on DGBA local or FNG local. Those are the grievance policies where we voted um to keep our to keep our grievance policy that we have had and you actually put that within our district innovation plan to keep our current policy. So those two um we will not be using the 126. We will follow our continue to follow our plan that we've had. Um the rest of these are the updates that came with uh the new legislation as far as they got. >> Now I'm assuming did we go through each of these or this was just a some list of goodies they sent we just adopted for part. >> So you know >> we're
038just making our local match illegal is what we're doing. It's all stuff that comes with this huge >> update. Figure that. >> But is there like do we have a list of any substantial changes? I mean that's a lot of stuff. >> Are we sure we're aligned with everything on here? >> The ones that were concerning that they really figured people were going to either choose to have a school library committee or >> change the policy. Those things were done separately. But everything that's generally required to be the same is included in this update. So it's it's pretty except for the DGBA and the FNG, it's pretty in line with what it has been or has to be. >> Yeah, we have been kind of working on this, not kind of have been working on
039this since July. >> July and I I mean the things that stand out to me like some of the student welfare, the student because of all the changes every year for all of that, >> you know, one or two little adjustments there could be fairly significant. >> Correct. >> Sure. For um Senate Bill 12, there were a lot of changes required for um parental rights. And for instance, we have had to send home three different versions of the health and counseling consent forms. Um, it's it's been tedious and it's been a lot, but we have we have managed to keep up with what TASBY has sent out as recommendation to send home and have the parent sign a return. This is the biggest update that TASBY has ever done >> and most of it centers
040around parents. I you used to just student council if you ran for it and got voted on it you were in. Congratulations. Now we need a permission slip for mom that you were allowed to run and allowed to be on student council where most of the parental rights all school organizations clubs etc. We now have to work in the affirmative that you gave permission for it. Not that you used to be, oh s parents said no. Now it's the other way around. You can only do it if they said yes. >> Well, and I don't take issue with any of it. I'm just >> just a lot of stuff here, right? I can hold it. >> Well, it's different now. >> Did you lo? So now she's attached everything. >> I did actually email it
041out. >> Oh, you did? She sent this one. >> I did your personal and your school. I think I think it's both yours and it's both yours. If I and I think I c if I don't and yours, but I don't think I have two for you. >> Yeah. If you didn't see it with me after meeting and I'll get a different >> mine for it. >> All right. Any questions? Any concerns? >> All in favor? >> All right. Well, let's go into a little clos meeting and uh Let's drop the