Board Meeting 7-19-21

001than at the district level uh it has since come out uh in um jesse and beth and dr glover i cannot tell you how many hours of webinars they have been attending with tea and i believe i was sitting in jamaica on a beach when i got a text you will not believe what we just heard easter two has to first be paid for second semester ada and so uh when i got back i met with uh jesse and shea adams our cfo and yes they had heard that also um and so we are uh waiting on the final settle up of what that's going to cost us because we know that we did not meet ada as we had in the previous years and so until we can determine exactly how much that's going

002to be we are not um planning on expending any of those easter two monies when is that going up yes so um we met today finalized all of that uh the principals have their flyers ready should be going out to them in the next couple of days we are also uh um communications has built a website so we will have a one-stop shop for our parents so with all of their flyers on there and then my only other question to you on some of the star results it's at uh july 30th you're we think we have most of them um we're tracking them we keep calling um we should be finished pretty quickly and then the other thing is our telpas results we sent out a message to all of our parents that the tel-pass

003results were in the portal the parent portals because that is the message we got from tea and then we had a slew of phone calls all day today that they're not in the portal so we have been calling tea saying where are our results so we don't know if this is a continuation of the issues we've had with ets or a new issue so um we are investigating that with tea now and we'll be following up with emails to the parents about where the tel pass results are it has been nothing but a challenge this year about star results and now we're facing the some of the same issues with our telpas results do you see any other impactful issues with the delay i mean like that no no because it did not impact eoc

004our big impact was in math and it was it looks like not looks like it was a hundred percent in eighth grade uh and it wasn't just it was any eighth grader whether they took seventh grade algebra one or eighth grade and so that is where the issue has um been solely focused for our school district so no we did not have any any um issues with our seniors and with new legislation that passed we've actually been able to graduate a few of our senior cents well i want to clarify that because earlier you made a comment that eoc still counted for graduation yes however however new legislation as you know we have the individual graduation committees so after graduation was when the gavel fell and then the governor signed and so we were able

005to open up the door for for individual graduation committees you can only do that if you had um passed three of your eocs which means that you only had two remaining to pass but the legislation that passed because of the pandemic allowed us to look at all five so if a student had not passed more than the the requirement before we were able to look at those students thankfully we had the igc projects pretty much in our pocket because we took the opportunity of having students work on the projects just in case and so we were able to quickly grade those projects and see how many students we could graduate based on the new legislation for igc i do not have the number but i can find out and send mr gallagher an email it

006was a very small amount because we had already used every opportunity we had to get students graduated so it was not a very large number but but one is great you know more than one is fabulous okay all right uh dr micka you're still up and give a brief update on our goals yes thank you so i'm going to ask us um cecilia jones and ashley brown to get ready to present with me um we have a lot of district goals to update you on and so as you know this is tied to our destination 2025 and we have our strategic focus and community engagement teaching and learning ensuring fiscal health and sustainability as well as human capital and our overarching focus is always student success so our district focus one which is teaching and

007learning we had goal one point a point three which is the development of the leisd assessment plan as you know three years ago we called for a curriculum on audit and this is one of the areas of deficit noted in the curriculum audit and so we had due in our audit gantt chart five-year plan the assessment plan to be developed this past year and so we are proud to have the leaisd assessment plan finished in draft form we will be sharing it with principals in this week's um newsletter for feedback with implementation in the school year 2021 and this will not be a standalone document it will attach itself to our curriculum management plan which we already had written two years ago in our district focus one goal two point b point two we said

008that a hundred percent of our teachers would earn an eighty percent or higher on the texas reading academy as you know the texas reading academy is required for all k three teachers as part of house bill 3 as well as all specialists that work with k3 students and assistant principals and principals last year we had 163 teachers and every ap and principal and a lot of curriculum and learning staff enroll in the texas reading academies online of that we had 157 successfully complete the academies which is a rate of 96 percent but we had five of those teachers leave the district before the end of the school year and so if you take those five out of our numbers we're actually at about 98.7 percent success rate so what happens now those two teachers who

009didn't successfully pass it will be re-enrolled in the academy for another year um part of new legislation in the house bill cleanup that was passed this year for cleanup of house bill 3. due to the pandemic they have given us one additional year to get our teachers successfully passed the texas reading academy and i want to give a shout out to our teachers because we're ahead talking to other districts a lot of districts put it on pause last year and we did think about it but our teachers they moved through it so we're really ahead of other districts here and i have to give a shout out to our teachers who made this happen um so kudos to all the teachers absolutely i did it i know how grueling it was it was 60 hours

010of college level work solely on how to teach reading and so um it was um i have to say for a state-developed training it was probably one of the best trainings i've ever attended and that actually taught me knowledge that i would be able to use and that i could see our teachers using in the classroom daily and so and i've heard that from a lot of teachers so the next cohort will begin in january so any of our new teachers in k3 who we have hired that haven't had the texas reading academy will be enrolled beginning in january and then any of our teachers that we're not successful will also be re-enrolled as well as our instructional coaches and our reading specialists and so we will have another another not as large as this

011but a fairly substantial group of teachers uh moving through it uh from january to november of the following year so uh still in the teaching and learning focus goal four point b3 um the professional learning catalog will expand to include goal based on anterior pathways for all educators this is completed we had a committee of teachers and campus administrators that worked on this and we have a new canvas course that is going to be called school me that will house these gold-based and tiered pathways so that teachers that are in the district know what professional learning that they are required to attain in year one of employment in year two of employment in year three of employment so that it builds upon each other um and so it's a progression pathway for professional learning much

012like english one english two english three english four is for a high school student we now have a a very succinct pathway for professional learning for our teachers and so we're we're proud of that a lot of districts our size don't have it but we knew how important it was to ensure that our teachers had the professional learning that they need to be successful in the classroom all right so i am going to turn it over to cecilia who will talk about the focus for the community engagement good evening board members president montemayor daniel gallagher so our piece under focus 2 goal 1b is to talk about the destination district as you know our vision is to become the destination district and so um actually pre-covered when our team was sitting around the our conference

013table having a brain session a brainstorming session actually some of my great ideas happen in the morning i don't know if that happens to you in the morning when you're getting ready and i thought about you know we talk about becoming the destination district but what does that look like and so i had this idea of of surfing the web and looking at some of these destination websites that are out there and really um taking on a new spin on our website and marketing approach about the destination district where it is a one-stop shop of bragging about our school district um and and what i found out lewisville isd has one and it's called best schools in texas.com we have secured the web url for the destinationdistrict.com so that is ours um and so we

014are building a website around that now the goal was to have it complete in july well casey bain started this project and then she left and we have brandon buckner he's back there way brandon and um this guy is amazing he brings a set of skills that um is going to build on what casey started but he has a a whole other idea so as we're thinking about the destination district he has some ideas that he wants to bring to the table so casey was going to use the adobe spark where it's it's a digital magazine where you you scroll through and these pictures come up and this is actually a snapshot of the landing page um and we're going to use language like more friendly language like we're a place where we are a

015family you're gonna you're us we're a small town but you have we have big opportunities for our kids um the the story behind little elm isd and really talking about our facility the people that work here and why you don't want to leave so as i was browsing these destination websites they really capitalize on location and what i found was it's about talking and selling the experience that you get and what kind of experience will our students and our teachers even when they work here what kind of experience are they going to have well they're going to have a family experience through i mean think about our meet the lobo night and even our homecoming parade in fact daniel last year said we're not doing homecoming parade because it brings too many people together let

016me show you a photo and he showed it to me and i said that is not real it was real it was real and i i mean just the the the fact that the community comes out and backs our schools it's just it's one of the unique features about we actually had jason in arm motion and and ross um but it's these community events and even our facilities with our brand new middle schools um even brandon buckner when he drove it he drives in from mansfield every day by the way um he's like man that middle school is awesome and so that was one of the first places i took him and he couldn't believe how fascinating and beautiful that building is um and you know maybe a a call to action to visit and

017explore little mysd and then really the call to action is ready to enroll and somehow have some button that would take them back to our website where we have that information where they can get the the stuff that they need in order to register their kid for little misd um even maybe an hr link where if you want to work here um here's how you do it what what i really and i'm sorry to interrupt but what i'm i'm really excited about this is all the realtor events that i go to this is going to be the one piece basically that we can go to a realtor event give them the website now they can give it out to all the potential home buyers because they're always asking for information so this is going to

018be awesome and i'm i'm super super excited about it i'm really excited in fact um and i'm glad brandon's on board because he's a visionary um he he uh grasps web design and graphic design pictures he just got a brand new camera so he's looking forward to attending a lot of these community events sporting activities um anything outside extracurricular to and even going into the classroom and showing kids engaged in a classroom and doing their thing with teaching and learning engagement so we're going to work really really hard to get some great photos i think one of the things that kind of slowed me down a little bit is i didn't want to use pictures with teachers and our kids in masks even though that was our reality if you're looking at long term that's

019not really what you want to sell so it's just kind of a weird year last year which brings me to a good segue to thought exchange so our um we did meet the goal in the fall where we had campus engagement with thought exchange including the district you know we we started the school year with a few thought exchanges um but then in the spring um i i didn't meet the goal um i think mainly if we asked the question for if we had principles ask the question to our parents i think we probably would have heard we just we're just ready for this year to be over with and so i i our principals were exhausted our teachers were exhausted our kids were parents were exhausted so i think we're going to move into

020this next school year we already have a plan of action to engage with the staff about a month into the school year but we also used thought exchange when we were looking at hiring our new presswork principal we asked that community what is it that you would like to see in your next leader and we did get a lot of engagement with that and it was helpful oh here we go yep so we're moving into action in 2012. and that's all i have thank you okay so then the next goals are um human resources related so um district focus three um regarding human capital management um the goal was to recruit at in-state universities to maximize quality hires so we did that a whole whole bunch this year all of these schools that you see

021on the screen we recruited at we did it virtually this year um so we were able to recruit from here from zellers at all of these different campuses so you'll see really almost every university in texas we were able to virtually recruit at you know university of mary hardin baylor even some of the ones that are maybe lesser known and and then some of the ones that are staples in terms of producing really really wonderful education graduates and actually i'm seeing on here that i've left off one of the big ones that we recruit at and that's sfa we went to sfa and i somehow someway ross roberts is going to get me later like yeah but we went to sfa2 it was unintentional ross but they produced really great education graduates too so we've

022been very busy virtually recruiting and finding some really fine candidates to come to the district so then goal 1b1 was to establish an hr facebook page that was done we were able to complete that back in september of 2020. i will say that i feel like this is an area that we can do even better on in terms of i mean it's created but really making sure that we post an update to it more regularly is an area that i think that i can do better on going into the next year um the next goal was to increase engagement on social media and and i kind of addressed that here by a minimum of one post per week we did really great with doing weekly tweets so twitter has been something that we've been very

023good about updating but as i noted here we need to continue to expand our facebook presence while we do have a page created we just need to do better with updating it so facebook will be a place we really focus going into next year um goal 1c was to plan and execute end of year's end-of-year awards events to recognize employees of the year at longevity and retirees we did have an excellence awards ceremony on april 29th at walker middle school that was really nice um you see a couple of pictures there where we honored all of our campus employees of the year as well as we recognize the district employees of the year in four categories we did paraprofessional professional auxiliary and then um teacher how could you forget teacher okay and then the pictures

024more towards the right of the screen there are um pictures from our retiree event which was held at the stadium so um that was a nice event as well that was on may 3rd um all right so the next goal is goal 1c to plan and execute an auxiliary employee appreciation event that is scheduled for wednesday august the 11th we sent out digital invitations for this last week i need to forward it on to our board of trustees because we would love for you guys to attend the auxiliary appreciation lunch if you're able to it's going to be at the high school so i'll make sure that you guys get that digital invitation before the week is over next goal 2a was to visit each campus to provide an opportunity to ask hr via the

025hrd to you initiative at least once per semester so check completed we did that we were able to go to every campus both in the fall once in the fall once in the spring um to just be on site to answer questions if they arose so there it wasn't they didn't have to schedule appointments they didn't have to travel to zellers we came to them and we've had lots of feedback that this was greatly appreciated um and people were like you know i i probably never would have made it over to hr but i'm so glad you're here let me ask you about blank certifications we had questions about certifications we had questions about benefits um questions about the work calendar all kinds of things came up so it was a really great time we

026did take with us a payroll person every time so that if there were payroll questions or benefits questions that department could answer those as well so we're going to continue that going into the 21-22 school year goal 2b first year leisd teacher check-ins um we were able through the hrtu initiative we were able to touch base with those first-year teachers um to see how they were doing it was an effort to just kind of let them know that they're not forgotten about and that hr is not going to just visit with them when they're being onboarded but that we're going to kind of check in on them as the year their first year progresses so that went well as well and then this is our final one i believe that goal 3 that will provide

027training to all district administrators in those areas title ix t-test tps documentation bullying social emotional learning and discipline so this uh kind of happened in partnership with our student services department clint and and also ross did a lot of this training with our assistant principals through their monthly meetings with assistant principals so um like the bullying training the social emotional learning the discipline happened in those monthly assistant principal meetings we had several title ix title ix underwent a major overhaul this past fall and so we had several title nine trainings that we conducted in the fall the only one that has not been completed yet of this list is the documentation training and we're looking to bring someone in to do documentation training in october in a couple of months um and so that's it

028that's all the updates for hr questions brian i appreciate the schools that were listed i didn't see any of the hbcus in texas were they yes so we had um a plan to do a prairie view a m they were on our list to go to prairie view they ended up canceling because they had some technology issues we did get a refund of our registration fee but h but prairie view is on our list um the other i will tell you it's a little bit difficult with hbcus because they don't have a college of education um job fair because the college of edu they don't really have a specific college of education so what they have is an all majors job fair and when you go to those all majors job fairs to be honest

029with you there's very few college of education people so it's um it's hard to really get the bang for your buck when you don't when you go to an all major straw fair however we were going to go to prairie views until they had to cancel because of technology issues no texas southern was not on our list but we can look into going into the next year and you know um we also looked into now this one's out of state but we looked into gremlin in louisiana going there because we do know that gremlin has a good number of education majors um but it was cost prohibitive to go to that one so we it's on our radar and you did notice that there were several um campuses who have large enrollments and our bilingual

030certification like so we had utsa we had utep so it's definitely on our radars to make sure that we are casting broad nets to a diverse range of of um universities and we look forward to going to prairie views in the future and we'll look into the texas southern as well university the largest hbcus in texas that's right in houston you got it noted all right maroon and grey just me sorry i should have asked for questions any other questions for those first year teachers you mentioned that you do that check in do we have yeah absolutely and that actually goes through cindy's department so amanda ball is in charge of our new teacher mentor program um and every single new teacher to the district whether they're a first year like an induction year teacher

031or whether they're coming to us with experience but from another district are assigned a mentor on their campus through amanda's program any other questions okay any questions on any of the district goals all right thank you yes thank you dr mecca and team and actually i'm going to call one of the team members back up miss jones so cecilia is going to be discussing the long-range facilities planning committee that we have just finalized so she's going to give the board members a preview of the names of the community members and staff members and parents here on this committee and the process that we that we went through which i'm very proud of and i think this is going to be a wonderful committee with really great people uh helping us plan for the future of

032the district thank you mr gallagher tonight i'm discussing with you the long-range facilities planning committee at work i can't believe that we're here already discussing this but it's going to be exciting um i just wanted to review a couple of things in terms of the purpose and to bring these people together really is about gaining community input while we study our student enrollment projections facility conditions and capacity campus safety and security equity among school facilities and programs so how did we find these members here was our process so we we created a google form um and then we blasted it out on facebook and twitter we posted it on our website thanks to brandon for creating a wonderful graphic that grabbed the attention of our folks out there and i would say i would like

033to believe that really helped because in our first week that we put this out we had over a hundred responses and by the time we closed it july 1 which we kept it open for a month we had a total of 129 responses to our form our selection criteria really was three things we um we made sure that they lived in the little home isd boundary we chose people for from a variety of neighborhoods and we wanted good representation from all campuses but particularly oak point and little high school that included parents and staff and so when we broke down the numbers we really had our eye on 35 but there were we went above that it's 45. we understood that not at any you know there's a given time where not all 45 are

034going to show up so we're going to have good representation at the meetings and so i broke down those numbers a lot of these numbers that you see if you try to do the math it doesn't equal up to 45 because some of these parents represent three campuses so we have representation at the high school you can see we have 11 from the the middle school six from walker five from strike the elementary campuses we have 18 with them with about six of them from oak point and then they equal out we have representation from every campus we have eight staff members and then community members there are six and these are people that don't have children attending a campus but they are voting members um when it's election time we do have a website

035created it is the bare bones but as soon as we get content we are going to put it on the website um brandon was working with blackboard today to get our list looking nice but these are the committee members that have been selected uh when we looked at a few of these there were other things that we considered to mr gallagher has a a list that he pulled some names from from valencia on the lake because they have an interest in that area too but representation people that have been on a committee in the district in one form or fashion so here this is live you can go see this you can find it by hovering over our district and it's right here it says long range facilities planning committee and we have our overview

036we have five meeting dates planned we will visit different campuses across the district and wrapping it up december 6 here at zellers we will serve dinner we will make the meetings open to the public they won't be voting members they can be there to observe i wanted to state that for the record and that is all do you have any questions yes so when we get those agendas the website will serve that purpose where we post the agenda any presentations we will put that out on the website and we had our first meeting with huckabee today and they are assisting us in creating the agendas for future meetings thank you all right thank you cecilia and next i'd like to ask our executive director for construction mr martin to come up to the podium ladies

037and good evening thank you for the opportunity to give you a quick update of where we are in our program included in your in your board packet is an update of the the budget analysis and where we are this was updated the first part of july and this also includes our interest to date and our expenses to date through the end of june so far we're still looking pretty good we have one more uh sale to go for five million dollars this is what we've done so far just a recap i think you've seen most of those already still under construction strike middle school we have they finally did get all of the sod in on the practice field and we're going to ask for your help to make sure we don't have groups playing

038on that for the next 20 to 30 days because the assad needs to sit and settle and be able to take root so we appreciate some help with that the tennis court finally did get get poured now we're waiting for the concrete to set up so we can do the tension and be able to put the surface on it and then put the fences up and have it ready we will miss the beginning of school did you know our indoor facility or with high school is under construction um unfortunately we'll go to the next slide that's still the way it looks now what we have been able to do is some underground utility work uh the main sewer line going out to uh out to the street across the soccer fields and put in soccer

039fields being put back back together um we know where our cold serve is going to run the electrical line we know where our water is coming from out the front there's a lot of those taps a lot of that type of utility work that is taking place uh we do plan to have a meeting with our geotechnical engineer to see if there's other ways that we can get the soil conditioning to work so we can get started with construction this won't this won't affect our deep foundations for the two-story building this is primarily for paving around the building the fire lane and the surface underneath the indoor athletic field now i remember on the front end that was a big issue we're not up to 22 passes yet but we have gone beyond the six

040that was expected we have about 60 percent of our densities have passed unfortunately the last group of them they actually got worse so that's why we're calling a meeting with our geotech and our soil conditioning folks to see what can we do now is there something else that we can do in some of these areas that where it's not showing uh the test cri what we need it to is be a reason why they sold this one [Laughter] that was before my time well no it was before all of our time yes absolutely no it's nothing wrong with the location um the whole peninsula has some has issues with very bad soils and bad in a sense that they like to swell when they get wet um i'll show you some some things that well

041then there was also a lake here that i wasn't late here then it wasn't like here and they've been with three different reservoirs in the area for over the past five years so it's just no taste we will get there do we understand and your high school is still standing it's not moving it's not going anywhere so that's why i'm saying this this will not affect this will not affect the the big building the building portion of here we just want to make sure that our field doesn't create any increases so this just on this one the the soil condition that we're talking about is for stabilization of the soil so it doesn't move and shift correct and what are they for the extra year make sure if it's okay we're going to put enough

042piers down below yeah that the the actual foundation of the building will be solid because we're going to go down to bedrock but this is also so around another pressure right yeah right 60 feet or 40 feet what are we i believe they're i believe they're in the 60 60 foot range 60 okay okay next combination of diameter and depth okay you have to create the outer skin surface for them right and you know something down a bit rocky metal send them to bed rocking so we'll keep them this time you can find bedrock if you can't you have to rely on the on the skin friction of the surface of the pier okay okay so just to let you know the teams are working on this this is a topic of our meetings every

043week they have done it in a rotation in such a way so that we're seeing some positive results almost every week this week this last week was the exception building next door our admin conversion is moving forward uh we are probably 90 complete with the furniture selections and materials we've got all of the finished materials selected um the relocation of interior walls has just about come been completed we are waiting for the building permit which i expect to get this week so we can continue to move forward with the rest with putting everything back we're still looking at trying to make a move over christmas break and that just really depends on how how quickly and efficiently we can get our our building materials that as you might understand is becoming more and more of

044a critical factor i think golfer has their cost issues under control it's just now getting their hands on the stuff over at the high school behind the high school some smaller projects we have going the new sidewalking fence down the main athletic drive between the parking and the football field that is progressing well the new spaces you see on the right side those are our new sped spaces it's bed classroom spaces there's two of those now that we've converted some old offices that were in there uh and then we've created two new offices at the back of the admin that's the upper right picture um we've got confirmation uh today that our our furniture will be here everything except maybe the two teacher desks and the two classrooms they just might have to use their

045old desk until the new ones come in but they're supposed to ship three days before school starts so there's still an outside chance to be there will it go down aside to keep out to separate the track the football from the baseball there's a separate fence that will t off of this to go down to that so once this is constructed the answer is yes that's that's been the issue is we want the community to be able to use all of our tracks with the exception of the stadium that's the one we do keep blocked unless it's a special event but the issue's been because of the fence there is no way to separate the baseball and softball fields from this track so our goal is to have a fence running down and then we'll

046we can leave that one open for the community to this one this one is out along the roadways there will be interior fences that will go from here to the retaining wall in front of the football stands and then at the far end of the football sands back around to the batting cages on that end so that will effectively shut off access to the ball fields but still allow the community to use the track yeah okay and at the end of the day we know fences i mean they're fences but if somebody wants to get in somewhere it's you know but the goal is to leave that up open for the community yeah and what are we doing to one of the things that happens to something happens especially that area it seems to slough

047off and then it seems to move that fence uh are they going to be putting some here so it doesn't defense doesn't down the right side where those posts are that's a concrete footing that goes down a couple of feet okay so that's the same thing we did at the front the little sidewalk that comes in the first driveway at the front we had to build a lower edge it's a thickened edge but it's actually winds up being like a small grade beam on the lower side of the sidewalk that'll hold it and then putting the fence in that in that footing and not just leaving it out in the grass perfect perfect it doesn't move so i know there was off of the gym the backside of the locker rooms there was water damage

048last week and wrestling had to move out okay i was not aware of that okay um so apparently if they had to move the mats up to the gym so there was some kind of water damage in the back locker rooms where they go okay wrestling has lost their space but i'm told that they were told they can't utilize that space next year so wrestling has no place to go i do messed up yeah miss myers uh alfred mr gacious of that and they've decided and they will move back into that facility so they have access to it it's all been taken care of and they will move back into that room that was constructed for the wrestling program and all that been taken care of yes yes it's all been ironed out and that

049is the long-range plan to reorient some of the existing locker rooms at the high school once those sports move out into the new facility to reorient that and redirect redesign that so we can have our wrestling station at the high school and i have a question okay until you get there okay any other questions i can ask mr uh ross to answer okay there's our sped space again okay um this is not a bond project but this is over presswick um this is kind of the conditions that they've been working through every time it rains it floods and this we've discovered as a result of some broken roof drains as your roofs drain the drains get collected in a line they come down under the building and then go out from into the building into

050a collector pipe outside a number of them after bean scope were found to be broken and so every time it rains all the water on the roof dumps in under the building we're beginning to believe that this was the source of our major problem it never got dry and it stayed wet and just continued to swell and build upon itself until it broke things off and i've got a couple of pictures here that i didn't put in the slide but i got these in today that it's pretty evidentiary um what i am trying to show you here though is that there is progress being made um let me back up area d is under the kitchen that you see here uh the gem is to the bottom of that and then c is under the

051admin those areas have been excavated they have started building back the plumbing under the kitchen we expect to have the the kitchen back in service or being able to start to clean up and service the you know we redid all the kitchens in there there was a small redesign in that kitchen that will be completed by august 2nd and so the kitchen staff have a couple of weeks to get into shape before the kids start showing up the water is off right now but it's on schedule to be turned back on by the 26th when we start having new teachers show up the toilet rooms in the admin area and in the gang toilets down that hallway between the the gym and the kitchen will be usable the toilet rooms in the education wing which

052is under areas a and b in those pods that's expected to be back in operation by august 9th because they're doing the same thing here they're uncovering uh the plumbing systems that come down out of those those three towers and repairing it the same way and i want to jump in real quick we actually just met with you know as you know we have a brand new principal that you met tonight and we wanted to make sure she had an update on this we met with her today talked to her about getting out communication from her to the community to her parents because as you drive around which i'm sure uh president montemayor you've seen it you see mounds of dirt around the building and i'm sure it's raised a lot of questions you know

053especially if people didn't pay attention to the communication that we put out previously but i've asked uh jamie allen our new principal to work with cecilia on getting some communication out to to lower any anxiety that might be there i know right now there probably isn't but the closer we get to school there is with teachers and i've already talked to her about letting teachers come in and they can still work um it's not a construction zone in the building so teachers can get in there they can do work right now there's no water but you can still go and work in your classroom but right now the main thing is getting some communication out to the parents to let them know kind of where we are with this so that way there's you know

054the anxiety won't be there so there should be something coming out rather relatively soon as we told her this afternoon the water will be back on the plumbing will all work the bathrooms will be available the main entrances to the front and the back of the school from the parking areas will be accessible there may be some sidewalks around that we haven't gotten back put back in place yet there are nine area ways around the outside of this building where these trenches are have come out we're building concrete boxes if you will with metal grates over the top of them so that we can get access under there we can have air flow under there there will be some under there that will any water that collects from now on will be kicked out of

055the building into a new system that's going around the building so all of that activity we think can still be taking place even after school starts and so we pulled their teams in to have them complete the plumbing and make sure the plumbing is working and the water is on and these other things will come after that we just kind of prioritize where we want them to focus and they've done a good job so far and it does look rough but all of that dirt that's about a third of what they've actually pulled out that's still sitting over there they have taken truckloads away i think it was three thousand cubic yards that they've dug up from underneath that building and all of it's by hand these little conveyors they bring out a little handful

056of dirt every so often but all of that is by hand and rick i want to point out just for any community member that's watching we've said it before but i want to be real clear there's no foundation issue with the building itself the building is solid what this is it goes back to and i heard mr olsen you mentioned the soil here it is a shifting it can shift and you said earlier when it gets soaked it expands well it's kind of like the way this was built originally there wasn't a crawl space so when that shifting happened some of the pipes were really literally am i saying this correctly rick just in the dirt and it would shift and move it's almost like this was built like my house a slab the pipes

057just go into the dirt whereas when we build buildings we want to make sure we put some kind of crawl space under where the piping is is that correct commercial building that's exactly what we're coming back and doing after the fact that i'm past passed around a couple of pictures of some of the things that they've uncovered when they were digging underneath there it's pretty amazing we were even still using them but that's why some of the drains four drains in the kitchen weren't working they just just didn't have a place to go but it's coming along and i'd like to say it's not going to be perfect and pristine first day of school there's going to be some um those areaways they're still going to be working with them there'll be some orange stuff

058around it but the paved areas will be clear of dirt and bud and clean and kids will be able to get to school some of the other things that we're still involved in we're finishing up both middle schools and phasing out the phase two the espc correcting issues at the ball fields addressing warranty items with folks like hellis we did complete their 11 month warranty walk at the new concessions building there at the mall at the ball fields and everything's working good there i'm still at the high school this is a project that's coming up that i'm i'm not quite sure when we're going to get a green light to do this but this is in in conjunction with credit union texas they want to do a a branch bank at the high school if

059you see in the lower right hand corner those two red boxes that is the last two classrooms in the cte section of the high school um the entrance to the left there is the one that you come in when you're going to the bistro and so we're working on a way to be able to secure that corridor um and allow customers to come to the bank without getting access to the school um but we've worked through some options here and i think we'll be ready to go as soon as everybody agrees on how it's going to get done yeah it's going to be what's going to be great about this is it's not just a branch but it's one where our kids are going to be working in so it's a great opportunity for our

060kids for the financial literacy piece there's going to be a classroom and that's what rick has one of them will be the bank branch and then right behind it will be a classroom and cutx is paying for this which is even better but a great partnership cutx has been a great partner for little misd and proud to work with them obviously you remember they they picked up the tab on our food trailer and they came and presented this idea to us and we thought it was wonderful so at this point we're really just waiting on i think the attorneys have already worked out the mou and now we're just waiting on the green light now will the loss of those two spaces no and we worked with dr predia actually dr pretty was the one

061that originally came and presented this to us and mr roberts you may have to talk more about these two classrooms but no it's um these two classrooms it's not a loss it's actually the perfect location because of being across from the bistro i don't remember exactly what's in there right now do you remember mr roberts classes but she's moved them around around the corner and so she's adjusted all of that area to be able to take over and have this put in there so she's adjusted all of her class assignments teacher classroom assignments and cutx has done this in a couple other districts i believe allen isd they just completed that last year so this is the this past year was the first year that allen had the branch open in their high school um

062i don't know anyone else so we'll be the second yeah it's pretty exciting well i'm sure that will go over well with the students i oh i who knows chick-fil-a probably they have them all so that's exciting that's on the horizon that'll be fun to work on it's a beautiful facility and so that would be financial literacy also for students yeah that's what's different it's really awesome they have cutx has the people there but then our students actually do the work and of course they have like a an actual loan officer and people in there that if a community member comes in they can do those types of things but they also train in our students and and sure and what's really again what's really awesome about this is one of the things cutx does

063with this is they hire students right out of our you know out of these student branches uh to work in their regular branch so it's a great opportunity for kids to get into the financial industry i mean just a foot in the door so i'm really i'm excited i wish this was something that we would have had when i was a a student okay and then always going forward we still have some things left to accomplish in the in the program a lot of miscellaneous items that just need to be final scope and triggers pulled on on them the cte renovations that we've talked about the expansions of the welding shop uh several opportunities for us to do program expansions at the high school will take place once the athletic outdoor athletic groups move outside

064there's a whole new uh weight room out there for those activities so that we don't need two large weight rooms so we can steal some of the space out of the existing weight room to expand welding which is right next door when the locker rooms empty out on some of those outdoor sports the idea was to go back in as i mentioned while ago and create a permanent wrestling space at the high school in those in those areas there was also some conversation about a construction program i know that there was a was a fire ems type of a class that had gotten started over there didn't really have room so there's some opportunity there there's just a whole other list of things that i'm trying to do to expand opportunities in high school get

065rich i think one of the things we had ct with halt up up on the 380. i think we had our cte program with them for the diesel mechanic stuff uh so they thought about potential auto mechanics stuff as well because i know we were doing the whole thing right uh yeah but that's that's us that's separate that is not um not here right as a yeah but not are you i'm sorry i was my brain was somewhere else are you talking about adding a cte program at the campus well i'm thinking about since we have kind of that whole work together program the question is can we potentially go to them and have them help us with that ct program we think about expanding yeah that's what i would recommend the same thing with

066um with the hvac you know bring in a company because anytime and rick has been through this in another district bringing in auto auto tech it's awesome and i'm a big supporter of that because i think that's something kids can leave high school with go right in and make some money we have to be ready to financially support it and i would say today right now that would not be a decision i would recommend to the board but i think looking at a potential partnership whether it's hvac bringing a company like train or carrier where they can outfit it possibly but that's a question i'd have to ask um dr ayers to first of all clarification out there i want to make sure that the engraving and athletics is really brought into that conversation because

067i think there is some concern over when part of that athletics is moved out to be to that um when it's moved out there that obviously we need to bring what's inside up to meet the same standard you know there's some equality there but they i think too they don't want to lose space we want to make sure that there's enough space because obviously if you just get rid of a lot of locker rooms that the boys side had well the girls are so overcrowded so i want to make sure that there's space for all and that we're not taking away just for cte but we're still overcrowded for girls programs but the guys now yeah mrs myers absolutely and that's one of the things that again i know we just did an expansion at

068the high school five years six years ago it was just before i got here that y'all were doing that so even with that we know the high school's going to have to be expanded again so part of the long range planning committee uh long-range facilities planning committee part of their and we will have meetings i don't know if i mentioned that to the board earlier but we're going to be meeting at different campuses the first meeting will be at walker and then we'll but the high school will be one of the meetings that will be one of the the charges is to look at what you just said there making sure that when we talk about expansion are we expanding everything that's needed so i think um you know knowing that you're taking high school

069girls away from their own school is hasn't made a lot of high school girls have yeah you know they want to be in their school so they're you know upset that they have to go somewhere else now granted walker's nice so it's been okay but it's one of those things where we don't have enough space to meet the needs of all the kids but now we're going to you know do we can let go of some of that weight room or you can decorate it to make it just as nice as well so i just want to make sure that the athletics department has that say in it because i think we did put some amount of money towards a renovation of what's present there i don't remember what it was but there was motivation

070costs in the current in the bond that we had when we met the outdoor facility there was an amount inside yeah there is there's a line or two that are in the current program that is in your in your board book toward the end of the program because we need it's a domino effect we've got to move some things in order to improve others and that's kind of where we are in the program right now okay yes i want the law firms and like i said they're not awful but it's just you know what they're going to get out in the authorization and so and i visited with coach young which i think he visited with you on a particular day and i think the two of you along with coach brown walk those facilities

071and so from that making sure you know that he's involved in those meetings for um that facility there inside yes but also too we even talked to him in the last couple of days about the long-range uh planning committee too kind of looking at all of that to make sure that it is very accurate you know the pack strong was difficult if you look at it it was caused by just one vm-6a and having one weight room right so once that multi-purpose is built you know essentially we'll have two two weight rooms and even if we take a little bit of that for the cte what i've seen in my past experience in in an athletic program like ours 6a that it would be very adequate to have that auxiliary gym it's very functional uh

072very equal to you know the other facility so we're we're in good shape but thanks for bringing that up we'll make sure coach young gets settled into those pipes absolutely any other questions all right thank you folks all right as uh second one we have is considered approval of our regular board meetings board meeting minutes from june 28 2021. there's a motion to approve those as presented is there a second sorry again minutes from july 2nd is there a moment to approve those some move [Music] any questions or comments yes oh he wasn't there he's got him yeah so we gotta wait until alex is here before we can pass him so we have four for four fourth year bonnie jason myself and alex that was it we're the only four that we're at the

073meeting we're going to wait until mrs flores is here no no it's quorum of what's present we need a forum what was right there all right absolutely moving perfect to it uh first one is consider approval of hiring executive director for special populations right good evening again board of trustees superintendent gallagher today we are bringing to your recommendation for the recently vacated executive director for special populations position so after a thorough interview and selection process we are bringing to you for consideration our recommendation and so the administration recommends approval of the hire of the new executive director for special populations for little elm isd as discussed in close session [Music] all right fantastic so i'd like to just announce for the record and thank you board of trustees for your support that our new executive

074director for special populations for the district will be lisa shockley and we'll bring her to introduce her to you next month hopefully we have considered approval for the 2021-2022 school year yes yes so i have a few slides i wanted to share with you guys i also want to invite dr weissman up to the front to join me as we talk about this this absolutely has been a joint combined effort between the business as it should be between the business department and the human resources department and really as we've been kind of transitioning so it's really been miss adams our incoming you know cfo along with our interim cfo and then me so it's been kind of us three ladies working through this so we're both going to present to you a little bit of

075data and information um so let me advance a couple of things to point out and to bring to the forefront to highlight about the um compensation plan that we're bringing to you guys one is that we're recommending rolling a three percent retention stipend that we gave last year into the excuse me this year into the employee salary that would have no impact on the budget no effect on the budget because it was included in this year's budget then um after rolling that three percent into the employee salary we're recommending a two percent salary increase for each employee based on the midpoint so um those are our two recommendations when it comes to an increase for our all of our staff that's across the board then when we zoom in on teachers we are recommending an

076increase and some adjustments to the new teacher hiring new teacher higher salary schedule so um the starting teacher pay the zero year teacher has been 54 000 this past this current year we're bringing to your recommendation going into 2122 that that zero year goes up bumps up from fifty four thousand to fifty six thousand five hundred twenty five dollars and then there's bumps at each level at the one year experience the two year experience but i'm just kind of highlighting that zero year um and that will allow us to remain competitive with our neighboring districts in fact that 56525 will put us above one of our neighboring districts that um is um we're constantly kind of competing for the best which is denton and it puts us very close to closer to to frisco um

077dr wiseman anything about those when we're looking at the teacher's schedule this will give the hr department a hiring schedule but the two percent raise that's being recommended is a flat amount applied to all of the teachers so you'll have the steps based upon years of experience whenever they're brought into the district but after they're brought into the district then the the raise will be a two percent of midpoint for their scale which gives each teacher the same amount as far as their annual increase and then advancing um we're also as part of this new compensation plan recommending a structure adjustment to the pay scales um so dr wiesman i'll get her i'll get her to tell you more but she did a very in-depth review of our peer districts and also the market so

078you want to tell them what you mean by peer and market we selected uh districts that were comparable to little elm in size enrollment um economic disadvantage students things of that sort to come up with peers and took that as an average of what those peer districts were compared those to the current pay ranges for little elm we also took the market which is the ones that we were competing with which is louisville denton and frisco as a market analysis and looking at that it's it's no surprise that some of our um salaries whether it was peer or market needed to be brought up as far as the structure uh for example custodians there's been a a need to to increase that because of the ability to fill those during the board workshop it was

079brought up about the instructional assistance it's my phone we're hearing about the senate bill that passed we've been hearing about that a lot lately gotta love technology mr bircham those ones and zeros i guess it's better that was senate bill information i apologize for that but looking at the structure adjustment by looking at that the only thing that it would impact would be a change in midpoint for the current situation there were items that were um that have come forward about the fact that there were people with maybe the same amount of experience but they're making different rates of pay within the the district those would be um addressed through an equity adjustment we had talked about that at the word workshop about bringing that forward and it may not be something that the district

080can afford all at once but to to know that it would be addressed um to ensure that everybody is being treated fairly within their their pay family and their pay grade so the first step on that would be to address the pay structure based upon as i said the peer and the market districts so in doing that it was given i don't know whether you could tell or not but it's giving me a little angst because when you start moving that it's it's going to increase the budget so by looking at that it's about a 300 000 impact to the budget to move the pay ranges up to where they needed to be to address pure and market the ones that were impacted the most um like i said were the custodians um child nutrition

081workers some of them the pay grade one which was almost a dollar an hour bump on the structure that is i mean that's what the raise is going to be but that's that's the first step the other ones that we addressed were the fact that on the administrative pay we had administrators where the daily rate was less than what our teachers were so in working with with ms brown on that we adjusted those to where if we have an ap coming in that at least they would have what the daily rate would be for a teacher or more than that so those were the things that we were struggling with and trying to come up with a plan on the compensation so we feel like this is a really good start on getting the the

082pay ranges in place and then working forward as far as equity adjustments within those going forward in your one two or three of a compensation plan review [Music] it's it's not the equity adjustments will take more time because we will have to evaluate each individual person with their years of experience and how they would fit basically as if they were a new hire but we can do that with some spreadsheets spreadsheets are the answer to everything and so with that equity adjustment though um we mentioned it in the board workshop last monday that we're looking at doing that over a three year period um because we can't address all of the equity um pieces that need to be addressed in one budget year it would just you know we can't do it all at one

083time we have to get in small chunks um the second bullet here is that we're also recommending an increase in select stipends to move them towards the median so that they're more competitive and comparable to our market and peer districts and on this slide you'll see a list of all of the ones that we have addressed and have bumped so that they're comparable and competitive and more towards the median or the average um so you know i won't read all those to you but they're listed there um and that's our last slide so um what questions can we answer for you about the comp the proposed compensation plan oh yeah uh doc if you could actually back up a couple slides please real quick uh right there um just like the verification on the second

084bullet point there where it says recommended two percent salary increase based on midpoint you specifically said teachers is this only teachers is this all staff it's all staff but typically a district may use the hiring schedule also for their their raise and give what is known as a step increase the step increases is for hiring usually and i illustrated that because when you're when you do the structure and the midpoint and use the two percent of that you can build in the the structure i'm sorry you build in the step based upon that that race but instead of it being a step increase it would be a two percent raise based upon the midpoint yeah so the first two bullets mr mr the first two bullets on this slide are for all staff yeah and

085i understand i just because for clarification you guys were very very clear with that on the budget workshop last week i just wanted to make sure that that's type of things that employees when they hear this are going to notice and that every other employee in this district besides teachers and librarians were very upset with hb3 because they were left out the only people who got raises under hp3 were teachers and librarians i'm sorry and i think nurses also but everyone else was forgotten so i just wanted to make sure that we were abundantly clear that that two percent is for every employee okay yeah let me let me reward it it's because i want to be clear too because i do want all of our employees to know that everyone is going to get

086a raise and it's going to be am i saying this correctly nearly a five percent raise including that three percent that we're rolling into it um it's going to be nearly a five percent raise for all employees off of what they were making last year what their salary was is that correct if you take their base salary without the the three percent retention then it would be comparable to almost a a five percent yeah because we're rolling that three percent into their base and then applying a two percent on top of it so that that stipend where they received one check basically around the holidays i think it was that's going to be rolled in permanently to their to their salary so which has trs benefits yes there's a lot of benefits to it so

087we're really really excited about that for all employees and one of the reasons just want to kind of point this out one of the reasons that we discussed about on during the budget workshop is the main concern that you folks had and once you dressed us up was a big big concern for us also is with that stipend uh our teachers are basically earning i'm just gonna throw a number out there say it's fifty thousand dollars this year they get the stipend this year of two percent so quick math about 51 and change the next year they don't get that stipend their salary goes back 50 000. so basically every other year they're taking a pay cut so with the way that with the way that we were doing it also right around the time

088that i came on the board uh four to five years ago or five years ago we did a market adjustment right around that time and because we were giving increases every other year instead of a small amount every year we're now within five years we're having to do another market adjustment so the goal moving forward is to try and do a small increase each year instead of increase stipend increase stipend from what we discussed in the meeting correct that is the goal going forward and it's it's to the benefit of the employees if they're getting ready to retire if it's the last year or two that retention stipend was not helping on their best three years of their compensation yes okay and i'll say you know the goal it's not necessarily to give a a

089small or large increase what we want to do is we want to stay competitive with other districts around us first and foremost to make sure we can present a balanced budget to the board and stay financially and fiscally responsible because our our teachers deserve that our community deserves that but we also deserve to pay our teachers um i mean they're the ones doing the the work all of our employees are so as the community knows most of our budget goes to our our uh you know to salaries but you know we hire the best and we expect um great things from them but we also want to reward them as much as we can in favor thank you very much thank you all right so now we have to consider approval of our new course

090request for 2022-2023 school year [Music] good evening again board members a few months before we brought to you the two courses to include in our course guide for the 2223 school year ethnic studies the african-american studies and the mexican-american studies and so a few months ago we tabled this to gather more information for you which we have been supplying um today i i also provided some more uh information just to clarify some some key i um questions that had come up recently and so um you know is this a required course or is it elective as you know we were watching a house bill which did not pass which would have made it a required requirement to offer and that did not pass so this remains an elective and how social studies works when we

091went to school we had to take four years of social studies but with the passage of the pathways um two legislative sessions ago so about four years ago house bill five we have students who now choose a four-year pathway and that is their endorsement and so most of the endorsements only require three social studies for that endorsement to graduate in the state of texas you only have to have three credits of social studies and that has to be from either world history or world geography and u.s history and the half credit of government and have credit of economics so out of those four three must be taken for your three credits every student has to have it to graduate no matter what endorsement you're in um on top of that uh two of the endorsements

092require that fourth social studies and that is interdisciplinary studies and your fine arts collective your fine arts endorsement and so um this uh any elective in the social studies pathway would count for that fourth or they can take the world history or the us world geography whichever one they didn't take for their three credits okay so right now we currently have psychology and sociology so the ethnic studies would add to that elective for those students that have to have four social studies credits also uh it would count for an elective for any general electives so our students have to have so many electives and so most of them do take that in their career pathway but this would just add to our bank of electives um and how do students choose electives they really choose

093it in their four-way pathway four-year pathway plan that we start developing them in conjunction with typically in their eighth grade year to develop their high school plan of graduation and what courses that they will take each year and so first they typically choose those electives that meet their pathway requirements um and then if they have any other holes they choose from any course of electives that is of interest to them and so if these courses were approved that is how it becomes part of an elective they are not required for any student it's by student choice only um and then a lot of questions around well what exactly is going to be taught well we have to follow the teaks we cannot t we have to teach the teaks as they are written and we

094cannot add to the teaks and so i've included uh in the board book as well as in some email dialogues over the past couple of months links to those teks for both the mexican american studies class and the african-american studies class and then how is the curriculum developed and this has been really a concept that that i think has just been brought to light in this discussion that we don't develop curriculum unless a course is approved as you know as part of the curriculum audit it was found that we were not providing um in-depth specific curriculum for 100 of our courses across the district and we have taken on that task over the past three summers of writing curriculum it is a huge endeavor with a lot of resources poured into it we have teachers

095that come up here almost every day for different contents and different subjects from core content to our elective subjects that have been writing curriculum we three years ago decided to make an investment in tek's resource systems which helped us with what we call stage one which is the scope and sequence and the um some of the specificity of the looking at the rigor of the verbs of the standards and what exactly has to be taught so it's really looking at the teaks that are required and then bundling those into units so if we have a hundred teaks which teaks are similar in concept that we can bundle together in a unit of study so for example in math we're not going to bundle adding of fractions with adding of single-digit numbers that doesn't make sense

096we have to teach single-digit numbers first addition of single digit numbers first way before we ever teach the concept of decimals does that make sense and so that takes the same thing where we look at all of the teaks that we have to teach that are required in that course and we kind of combine them together in smaller chunks which we call units um tek's resource system does this for all of our required core curriculum but it doesn't provide it for our elective programming and so that is where we typically will join in with other districts that are teaching the same courses as us in our regions to help us along that pathway of how what is how what what what teks bundle together to form our units of study and what is the progression

097that they should be taught in we do that with fine arts we do that with foreign languages we do that with cte um especially you know in our singleton courses where we only teach one course like dance that's we have one teacher that teaches that one course in the entire district and so for us to ask that one teacher to create all of the curriculum stage one through stage three is is a daunting task so we often will pair up with other districts in region 10 and region 11 that we know are writing the same type of curriculum and say hey let's work together at least to get the scope and sequence nailed down because that will take off some of the burden in one district to do it so we share resources and so

098there are many districts who are implementing african-american studies and mer and mexican-american studies this coming school year starting 21-22 school year more that are beginning in the 22-23 year school year and so they have already started um working together those that have already been approved to to nail down the scope and sequence what teks belong together bundled together in a unit of studies and then what sequence should they be taught that is logical um and so we would be if this course were approved that is where we would be joining with those other regions just to give us a leg up on trying to get the scope and sequence written that doesn't mean that those other districts are dictating what our curriculum and what happens in our classroom is that's where we come into play

099even with teaks resource system we do not just take teeks resource system and say this is our curriculum for english one this is our curriculum for english too as you know we have spent a lot of resources not just funds but also time with our teachers over the past three summers truly developing and writing curriculum what does it look like in the classroom what resources are we providing what is the vocabulary that needs to be taught what are the essential understandings for each of those units and so that is how we write curriculum in the curriculum department it's not a standalone effort it's done in conjunction with our social it would be done in conjunction with our social studies coordinator and the teachers for that course similar as as all of our other curricular writing

100has taken place and so the steps in this is that the board if the board approves then we begin writing i know a lot of questions has been can we see the curriculum now let me see what it's going to look like and that's not feasibly possible because of the time and effort and resources it takes for us to provide curriculum for our teachers from start to finish at a minimum it's a three-year process and so that is why when we start to add courses we do it so many years in advance we are asking you know for the approval for these courses not for this coming school year but for the 22-23 school year and the reason why we started so early asking uh for any course and there were many courses that we

101asked for um in march and april time frame is that we have to prepare the course guide for our chart your course event which begins in early october that is when our students begin picking courses for the following school year and so i know it seems well we're just starting school well we know but we have to start planning that far in advance for course schedules so that we can turn into hr our allocation requests that we need or so that the high school and the middle schools can begin planning their staffing staffing needs for the next year and so we do our students are um we introduce them to our course guides for 2223 in october at um chart your course events and then the very next day we start meeting with students and

102parents to start looking at what courses do they want for the following school year and so if this course is approved the first step of course will be developing the scope and sequence after that the second step is [Music] stage two which begins looking at uh what concept what what what does mastery of the teks look like at the student level so what do they have to be able to perform and at what level to ensure mastery of the teaks required by the state and then stage three is where we tie specific resources i know there's been a lot of questions about what textbooks are you going to use interestingly enough these two courses the state board of education has not approved textbooks yet and so that is at the district discretion about the resources

103that they will use and so that we would go through the same adoption process that we normally use for a big statewide adoption where we would contact vendors who we know have textbooks in this area we would bring them in for review at the teacher level at the district level to see of this textbook what percent of the teaks are covered in this textbook and then we would also have the parent and community review nights looking at those materials before we bring them forward to you for adoption into our instructional materials and then at that point only do we add those resources into our curriculum and so that's kind of the whole process from start to finish asking the board for approval for a course it gets into our course guide we start working on

104stage one which is the scope and sequence of curriculum stage two which is what does mastery look like and what do assessments look like and then stage three what are the resources that we utilize for the courses and like i said we would be our goal what we would like to do in order to save um our resources at this district level is to tie in with region 10 and region 11 those districts that are already starting to work on what does the scope and sequence look like because this is not a content since it's such a brand new course it's not a content or a course that teaks resource system at this time is providing us a second yes so uh the first one say thank dr make a filler with the curriculum committee

105going through and explaining this particular course and what it is uh i've had a lot of thought about this and and talked about this this course for me is very sensitive um on a couple levels um from the minority standpoint but also from an american standpoint um and i have serious concerns about this course serious concerns um we're in a very hyper sensitive environment right now um and if this course if i'm asked about a community member what has been taught in this course what does this course entail what are our teachers what resources are our teachers using how are they using their resources i have no answers for them at all i don't know what books i'm used for this course so i have no idea what books are going to be used i

106have no answers whatsoever for community members on extremely sensitive topic in the environment that we have today we have many groups pulling one way or another activist groups pulling one way other groups pulling another way the impact to our children could be pretty tremendous we've seen groups just recently support brutal regimes and those same activist groups are putting material out to schools those materials could potentially get into our schools and we don't know where those materials do will come from and specifically things like zen projects which produce information about marxism why it's concerning to me marxist was a racist but yet still we have groups putting information out about that information and we have literally schools literally using that same information teaching our kids this information under the guise of ethnic studies those things to

107me are dangerous i love the idea of ethnic studies i love the idea of african-american studies and hispanic studies what i do not like is idea of what could potentially happen with these particular studies information that continues to be used and misused last year we saw that come to a head we saw students in our community not truly understanding what groups they're supporting now we truly understand where these groups stand what they do how they operate which is hugely impactful in our cities we have violence which is spiraled out of control just in the last few weeks as we talked about some of these groups which support minority activism minority belief structures we have our kids 16 year olds shooting 19 year olds no marches i grew up in a community that was rampant with

108gang and violence no marches no flags none of this so this kind of course if i truly understood what was going into it what books were being used what was mental is this of course based on the content of the character of our key or our community and our kids and understanding and i knew that for sure that we weren't delineating kids one race or another lookings one way or another if i if i truly understood that internally i'll be okay but right now i'm not and mr english if i may just respond with the one simple question leaving everything else out of that to the basis of your point of not knowing what books and what the curriculum is you have concerns previously you asked when are we going to bring diesel mechanics here

109can you tell someone in the community what curriculum and what books are going to be used for diesel mechanics i can't but here's the you know you know we haven't written the curriculum yet but here's the difference here's the difference diesel mechanics have books that are already out there this doesn't have books that are optional understand and and i'll in all honesty please i'm not trying to be disrespectful i'm not trying to get into a debate in regards to this i understand your concern yep absolutely i understand both sides of it um from my perspective uh i i get it the one thing that dr mick has stated and we as a board have the ability to do is we if we approve if we agree to approve the the classes once the curriculum and

110the books and whatever text we decide to use come forward there is a community review process there is a board approval process over whatever books are used whatever curriculum is used i personally see nothing wrong with approving the courses for future use but just because we approve it today doesn't mean that we then step back and we have no future say in it we will still be able to review books we'll still be a review curriculum we'll still be able to review everything else that goes into it before the classes actually start so the concern you have yes i get it but just because we say yesterday doesn't mean then that we're hands off and whatever happens happens i'm sorry i guess so i guess the first question i had was where kind of if

111you can kind of explain where it's coming from it was this something that the district wanted to put in place or is this something that's coming from a parent that has requested it or kind of where where did this originate from if you can elaborate yes so in the fall um you'll remember i don't know if you remember back that far but um we actually had community members come and request this course at a board meeting and so from there once that request is made what we typically do is that we put out a survey to see do we even have interest in this course will students take it and so we put out the interest survey and we did show that we had interest from high school students who wanted to take one or

112both of these courses doesn't mean they will so it just means that they have interest do we have numbers as far as how many was it students that had interest was it parents that had interest uh we looked at the student numbers a survey did go out into the parents as well but we looked specifically at the students and so you know we did this when we did we're trying to decide where we're going to put in um culinary arts you know where we have maybe 70 of the students say we're interested in culinary arts you don't end up with that many students who actually register for the course culinary arts because while they're interested in it they're really more interested in health science or stem and it comes to a reality where they realize

113i can't do everything that i'm interested in so we had an overwhelming number of students up in the more than 50 percent who said that they were interested in african-american studies we had almost the identical same percentage that said they were interested in mexican-american studies so that survey showed us that there was an interest in this being offered as an elective okay so i guess because i have i mean i'm along the same line as mr english i guess the concern i have is and similar to mr i think it was mr heath that presented this evening is you know it is a sensitive topic i think the challenge is is how how you can present or teach in an unbiased way um to students and in this day and age i think that's sorry

114that's really loud i think that that that's my first concern um i think secondly it's it does in my opinion it does create division you know i i don't see native american studies i don't see asian american studies um you know asian americans have have had some challenges this year as well you know i think there's that just creates more division than it does unity and so i do have some challenges with with creating if it was truly an ethnic ethnic study versus you know delineating between a mexican-american and african-american but i would also want to understand you know what are we what is going to be taught what are are we truly teaching the history of race relations in our country you know where how far back are we going are we going as

115far back as the 1800s are we going back to 1960 you know i would want to understand kind of where that is coming from and that's it that's in the teaks it's in the standards yeah but to answer part of that question the state only approved these two courses so we don't have the option i mean we could create a local elective but we're not going to do that so these are these both are state approved courses which again that's you know when the community reaches out um you know what we try to do and again and i appreciate all the comments from the board but what we try to do is respond to you know to the community when they've got a request and go through the process just as we would any course

116you know if they say you brought up culinary if if the community comes tomorrow and says we want diesel mechanics well we're going to go through the same process you know doesn't mean it doesn't mean we're going to offer it and then even if we do offer it we may not have at the end of the day we don't know if students will sign up for this we we don't know but whatever course we're talking about you know we have to go through that process and that's really this the same process we followed for this that we do for any course personally i i would like to see i mean if we're going to work if if there's a potential for us working with other districts i would love to see what they've created understand

117how we can lapse that owner look at what the potential course outlook would look like if anything um but as we kind of go through this process and i look at this course and i think about our community which if you look at little elm you look our community the the greatest thing even looking across the different cities is how diverse little elm is how much the kids in the community and the people work together how this community even on the election of these boards and our our our city boards the way our community is put together and last year was was really disheartening because we started to see divisions right and that was extremely concerning and now we have this course like this and this it concerns me it concerns me and i think

118you know from from my standpoint of looking at this i don't want to see division in our community i want to see our community work together and also along with that lines what concerns me is some groups who who put out this course material to schools you'll see some of these projects that are put out there and teachers and schools are adopting some of these projects without actually truly looking at what this course material is saying understanding what it's preaching and why it's preaching what is preaching is impactful and problematic because you adopt this information into your school system without truly understanding what's going on and the board not creating understanding going then it erupts the community we've seen that just a few weeks ago if you go down the street our neighbors down the

119street had a very very contentious board meeting very contentious because the board couldn't answer what was going on in courses and a community couldn't answer what was going on in the courses an administration couldn't answer what's going on in the courses so people want to know what their kids can talk so this is this is an exception to rule i think i think this is one of those one of those situations where if we want to do a course like this we really have to either one think about investing the community involvedness and what's going on the courses so we have a true understanding of what's happening versus saying on the back end we'll do it we'll just go ahead and prove it and then our back end trying to look at what the course

120is in place i just don't know if that's a tenable terrible way to look at this on this particular course other courses i can i can understand that i'm gonna speak on behalf of the crick in the department it isn't it's not feasible the amount of time the amount of energy um that they need to put into and i want to go back to and again i we're going to respect whatever the decision the board makes um but we have the same goal that you'd mentioned you know our our district our community is very diverse i think that's what makes little myst that's one of the benefits of being here is we're a very diverse community you know respecting multiple different viewpoints listening to multiple different people i know we had a community member that

121was very eloquent very articulate you know spoke from his heart i think that's what makes us great but at the end of the day no matter what decision the board makes if the board does decide to approve these courses you know we're going to follow the same process that we follow for all courses mr black blackwood brings up a great point that it it will continue going through the review process of the board um and the community um it and again you know i want to be clear as superintendent and and you you're all on the same page we're on the same page we're here to educate every single one of our students no matter what race they are their gender their religious beliefs they're all lobos and they're all all going to be lobos

122i want to say that to the community first and foremost is we're going to take care of our kids and you know at the end of the day we want to do what's right for our community and for our kids we did have a request multiple requests from community members for these courses it wouldn't have been appropriate for me as superintendent to ignore those requests i think it was very appropriate for us to do our due diligence take the time you know this has been requested of the district i can go and again i'm not on facebook but i can go back to my facebook post i had a lot of requests from community members over a year ago about this so we've been moving slowly on this purposefully um because we do know it's

123sensitive and we do know it's a um you know it it it can stir up a lot of concerns and and and questions but i want to assure the the board first and foremost but just as importantly the community that we are not going to allow these courses to create an environment where kids do feel separated you know we are all lobos but it would not be appropriate for us not to move forward and bring this to the board when there was a significant number of students who showed interest and our community did so at this point you know again the community voted for the board i'm a former former board member you know we're going to do what's right for our kids and we're always going to support our kids no matter what race

124they are gender religious belief and we will ensure that if the board approves these courses that they're developed appropriately you know i'm not a politician any longer but there's a lot of information out there about critical race theory and we know what the governor has said about that we that cannot legally be part of this i know there's concern about things like that creeping in but our job as as professionals here is to ensure that what the state says we can teach that we're teaching it and if we do have a teacher that goes outside those bounds and starts you know teaching things they shouldn't be teaching we address that and and we have in the past um long before these courses were approved we've had i've had parents reach out to me not just

125in this district other districts that i've worked in where there's been concerns about what a teacher's teaching or how a teacher teachers teaching it and most the time we work it out by bringing that teacher and the parent together and letting them have it have a discussion and letting the parent have a deeper look at the curriculum look at the resources that are being used because that's really what this is about this is about transparency this is about offering something to our students that can be a benefit but it takes all of us working together on this it takes the board there needs to be oversight it takes our community there needs to be some questions but it takes us as a district to ensure that what we're doing first and foremost is appropriate for

126all students um but at the end of the day however the board votes on this we as a district of course are gonna you know support and recognize the the decision of the board yeah and i would say i often appreciate it and i completely understand it's like say i just personally have too many concerns with this course and there's a lot too many unknowns and those unknowns are impactful they can be extremely impactful in a point where we may not catch that in time um even though we did the community but there is the community because of people who wanted it not people who didn't want it there was there's a difference look at the way things and information so anyway i just want to voice my my opinion on this particular one one

127is because it is super sensitive to the the impact it has to our students more importantly um to our community and our kids so i'm always looking and you know to protect our kids regardless of who they are absolutely there are no victims in our community no pressure our community our community is a group of people who have the ability to do what they want to do in our country and to make sure and ensure that those students understand me being and you know you know this as well as i do i take a lot of time into a lot of reading and history is one of my areas that are that i love in particular um and so i've taken a lot of time to understand the historical context not only of what we

128have now but the corporate perspective of different things around the world including slavery um including um some of the race wars some of the the laws that are in there there's all these things that are impactful through our society as we go and we've come a long way as a society and speaking of history one of the things that um and i had this question when you look at for instance like the african-american studies course when you look at the standards for that the teks that's again what the state says you need to teach if you're going to offer this course you need to teach these standards i wanted to know what because as i was looking through i'm a former u.s history teacher i taught 11th grade u.s history and i feel i was

129pretty good at it i knew i knew the standards so as i was reviewing the the teaks of the african-american studies course i saw a lot of the things that i taught so my first question was are we already covering these teaks are we already teaching these my initial reaction and dr mickey you're going to have to refresh the actual percentage because we had our social studies coordinator go through and break down how many of these standards in the african-american studies course are we currently teaching and how many are new my initial thought as i looked at i glanced at i thought well i taught about 80 of those or 85 so we're probably already covering it i was surprised it's not quite that and maybe that's just because my knowledge of history i just

130assumed but what did you what did we discover dr mecca yes so in the uh mexican-american studies there are 40 teks that we have to cover and there are 92 in the african american studies and so we looked at all of the teks in grade fourth grade through united states history which is an 11th grade course and we we counted this as partially covering the teaks maybe not 100 percent covering the teak as it is written in the course but did any of those courses in fourth through united states history touch on or partially cover a teak in one of these classes and what we found was that in the uh mexican-american studies um we only had 52 percent of this takes of that course that were partially covered in any of the previous courses

131taught and then in the african american studies it was even lower at 46 percent so i'm going to take this a different way for a second can you answer to me how many other social study elective courses are out there besides the three years required just because i'm sitting here and i'm gonna look i'm gonna look at this from a financial perspective how many are we offering how many are taken advantage of it goes back to the discussion this board has had many of times is about the viability of our classes we can't cannibalize one class for another class when we get to certain numbers we've got to provide a breadth of opportunities for our students so i'm just curious what that breadth is right now of how deep do we have right now outside

132of the three i guess technically four classes correct how many more options do they have because i think the key point in this conversation once again where i'm going is they're required by state to do three years only two of our uh disciplinaries require a fourth year so we got to think about that now how many classes do we have so we have the one left over from the four uh-huh okay one year one year one and then we have psychology and social study which is each a half credit okay so that's a one and then we have a personal financial literacy which is also a half credit so we have the one left over from the world history or the world geography plus we have one and a half between psychology sociology and personal

133financial literacy okay now we also have our ap classes so you have your ap euro which while it's in our course guide you'll remember that it hasn't made in enrollment the past two years that's another thing we can put things in our course guide but if they don't make a certain number of enrollment we can't offer it because it's not financially feasible for us to use a a partial credit of an fte for that that's what i'm trying to yeah so we take part of this conversation we do i don't have that entire list i'm sorry um but we do have other social studies courses that are in our course guide that do not make because we don't have enough interest so for example ap euro is one of those examples roughly do you have

134any rough idea of how many out so i guess that goes back to my additional questions how many options do we already have for one year to do that for two disciplinary studies and potentially somebody to do this as a general elective i can find that if you'll just give me a second one and the other the other uh piece that i want to point out is we would not be adding any new ftes for this right this is that where you were going with that because now we're talking about if this course does make of course does we do have enough student enrollment now we got to pull a teacher from another class which may limit another let's i don't know let's say ap euro passes and we've got 18 and euro ap euro

135and we got 25 and african studies and 22 and hispanic studies how are we going to make decisions where is pooled who's pulled to teach this and that i mean to me this i have your answer okay thank thankfully we have a great web page love our webpage um yes and so we offer the um uh ap euro which i spoke about we offer psychology sociology we also offer ap psychology we offer on the back side of that a social st a social studies research at the um advanced level that personal finance we also offer dual credit for sociology 1301 and psychology so it's eight about eight options so we're talking about option we're talking about adding option nine and option ten of which we don't even have one of our option eight already making

136for the last two years and option nine and option ten if they do pass which i would hoped if we'd offer them they would pass that means we gotta pull from somewhere else so it's it's a to me this is a jigsaw puzzle and it's moving around and we can't there's a lot of pieces we got to put together to make sure this is all going to fit properly well and it always is a and mr olsen brings up a good point it always is a jigsaw puzzle whenever we add an elective it it may pull a teacher off of another elective so dr mikket can you talk about that briefly like what that could look like you know how would we make that happen because you know obviously we don't have an extra ft

137to add to this um and kids would be moving from one social studies elective or possibly another elective so can you talk about that yes so let's say we have um one teacher teaching seven sections of psychology which is a full full schedule they teach seven periods of psychology um and then we have another teacher that teaches maybe like two sections of ap psychology and then five sexes of sociology so if we did have let's say one period make 25 30 kids one period make of the one of the ethnic studies let's say mexican-american studies then um they would be coming out of those other electives what you would hope is that they were coming all out of psychology or all out of sociology um if that would be pure right so let's say all

13825 were coming out of only on level psychology then you would take offline that one period of online psychology but when you have you know eight classes they might be coming out of psychology they might be coming out of ap psychology they might be coming out of personal financial literacy so out of that 25 if you're taking four maybe out of the eight electives then um you're making a choice of what teacher do you um take from the other electives and then the class size of the existing electives could go out if you cannot do a pure we're just taking one period away but it would be an existing teacher so it's always a balancing act when you have electives because you're left over with some electives that are more popular than others um and

139so you do chants driving up um class sizes but but again that happens with every every time it happens with french everything i remember going through this what was it two years ago with spanish i think we were having discussions on this topic and so i understand that there's but i just want i guess my point was i just want everybody to consider that option of this also um i have concerns just like mr english and miss myers you know i've got my own personal concerns about a lot of what we discussed tonight but at the end of the day what is best for the students we do want to offer them the best opportunities available out there for their studies while here at let alone so there's a big if and that big is

140if do we i mean i think we said it earlier interest is one thing but then when you put pen to paper and you got to sign up for classes that's a totally different thing and we don't know what that's going to do and i'm also looking at this from staff's perspective that is a lot of time and energy and developing that curriculum which kind of leads me to one of my other questions is can we not almost piggyback and let others do the work for us and then come in and tweak the work so maybe potentially not approving it tonight but hey if region 10 and region 11 is doing this okay well let's let them do the work we'll let them put this out and if we join in a couple months okay

141we'll we want to come back and revisit this then we'll kind of see what they've got from that curriculum book perspective what else is going into that that they've decided from a region 10 11 perspective then we can come in and craft them you know you have the curriculum around that and i will tell you i think and and i want to dr mick you you can clarify this but we typically don't do that with even with what we're dealing with teaks resource system it doesn't provide everything so i think with what region 10 and 11 are doing am i correct in saying this dr mikka they're just creating this the scope and sequence so taking all those standards the content which i think we i sent the links today the content of what will

142be taught in these courses and packaging that together but the the actual curriculum i i would be cautious i i would want the district to be a little more hands-on with the curriculum um that's just that's my personal opinion and my recommendation for the board as i really if the board approves these i would like this district to um develop the curriculum because i think it you've got more say so yes thank you and then we don't want it we don't want it to be someone else's curriculum i mean that's why we took critiques rs and we made it our own um i shouldn't say the curriculum that wasn't the intent was the as you stated the packaging yes of i mean we as a district would develop the curriculum right but the actual packaging

143of the sections to say okay well we're spending one week on this topic two weeks on this topic correct that i mean then the actual coming into okay what's going to be taught in those two weeks to me is the curriculum piece that the team would work on but the actual packaging okay well if this is all region 10 and all region 11 that's our neighbors and what they're teaching so that was just my thought process that's what we would i'm sorry that's what we would actually recommend is working with them to let them do and you mentioned it earlier kind of the heavy lifting because i i've worked on the curriculum side and i've done some of that it is very it's tasking and it's time consuming when the state says here are the

144standards they don't write the standard in any order and what the challenge is as a teacher is to and i taught before there were there was curriculum i mean when i started teaching all i had was the standards i had to do my own that's i'm old and i know cindy when you started there was no district curriculum there was a we didn't thanks for calling me old well i don't think i said all but we had to take and and that was the challenge is we had to take the standards and take that what the state said we had to teach and figure out how we're going to teach it what are we going to use what order we're going to teach it in so the the intent is to go ahead and work

145with them it's what you said mr olsen let let region 10 or 11 develop that but then that's not the curriculum that's just the scope and sequence but i really would not recommend using someone else's curriculum for these courses what i was looking at is that aspect of it even us as a board i know we've been a little slow in this but i think conservative and slow is the right way to look at this from our perspective but that gives us a little more time to look at this holistically and approach this and that if we allow region 10 and 11 to do the packaging you know and we get a better idea of what that packaging is going to kind of look like well let me let me rephrase not i'm trying not

146to put pressure on the board but you already have that information you already have it's fatigue so and i've read so so what you would get from region 10 or less is just it chunked so it wouldn't be any new information i think what the board and and again community we all will feel more comfortable when you know you can see here's exactly what's but we're not going to put our curriculum department through the process of developing it until it's approved i mean we're just not the amount of resource the time the energy they're busy as it is and this is just something else that they're going to have to develop and and again it's a two-year process yeah you know so up to three years yeah i mean it's 2021 we wouldn't be offering

147these courses until the 20th 2013 school year so i mean it's it's quite a ways away but it gives them time yeah but hold on that so that's the part that confuses me a little bit and maybe it's only me i just heard a three-year process okay but in all reality we're one year away from offering the course and having it correct so that's where i'm i've i've heard that now a couple times and that's confusing to me and i don't know if the community feels the same way maybe it's only me but help me understand we're saying a three-year process yes so um what we do in the first year is we can develop stage one using the other and it's not the region service centers it's just districts that have put this on

148their course catalog that are coming together as a coalition okay so it's like our social studies directors of north texas anyone in that group whose districts are working on these courses they've kind of banded together because just to get it written quickly the scope so in year one by the end of next summer if this is approved we would have all of stage one done which is the scope and sequence the essential understandings the vocabulary to be taught we would also have um stage two uh mapped out which is our assessments what are our s unit assessments going to look like okay that's the district supplied unit assessments um and then we would have in stage three the resources that our board adopted okay so that all happens in year one in year two the

149following which is so we we teach we teach that the first year with what we have provided right in year two is when we go into refinement so that's when we start looking at more of the formative assessments so what happens on a daily basis to see that students are mastering the objectives day by day instead of end of the unit that's also when we start looking at um are there how did the teachings go do we need to change up the unit at all move some units around um also that's when we start looking at did we have enough resources what are some additional resources that we might be able to add to this and then it's also where typically not in the second summer this typically happens in the third summer any lessons

150that went as outstanding those would become what we consider exemplar lessons we even would start video recording students teach teachers teaching lessons so that that would be in a bank for other teachers to learn from and so that's why it's a three-year process you have the meat and the heart of the curriculum done before you start teaching the course you have to and so but it's not at the depth and specificity that we now understand from the curriculum audit our curriculum has to be at in order to ensure um that there's equity from teacher to teacher no matter who like if you have three teachers that are teaching it you want the same things that are happening in teacher a teacher b and teacher c and that doesn't finalize and nail down until really after

151that third year so i guess my question comes along on the timeline as well um so if we were to prove this tonight it would go into the course catalog in october it gets how much of stage one or phase one phase two phase three is done between now and october none none so then back up so um theoretically we could um our the social studies coordinators meet monthly in north texas i don't know how often the other groups meet we have a very good working relationship with a district to the west of us who went through the curriculum audit the same year we did and we have really joined forces with this district in in helping to move their district and our district forward and so we have a great relationship with them they

152are a year ahead of us in this process and so um we would be able to um quickly come on board um once it's approved with that scope um so that would be the the initial foundation of stage one um we do not pull teachers to write curriculum typically during the school year we want them to focus on the academics of the courses that they are teaching at that time that as you know the bulk of our curriculum writing occurs in the summer so the majority of this would occur right so so that that leads into i guess my next point is the devil's in the detail right i don't think any of us would have any objection to the scope and the you know the scope and the sequence and anything phase one phase

153two maybe even most of phase three it really comes into when the when the when the textbook is chosen when the actual curriculum the actual day-to-day lessons are written um and then ultimately actually what the who the teacher is going to be right because so much of so much of where i can see this going wrong is in someone adding their own their their own flavor to it right their own their own take on what they feel needs to be taught so if we were to come along and at that point i mean we would ultimately not know anything until the end of the summer and if we were to not be happy with it and say no we don't want this to move forward but don't forget you guys at a huge against a

154huge wall if we've already planned on a course you know written the curriculum done scheduling everything it has to be approved by the board so the curriculum has to come back and when would that come back we wouldn't you wouldn't come back what we have written would come back for review in the summer now textures because of our textbook adoption we would actually start on that process immediately because as you know from other adoptions we started working on for example the elar adoption early in the fall before we brought it to you we brought it to you in february in order for us to ensure that we have resources in hand um by late july for the following school year we have to order in march um and so we would actually that would actually

155in it saying sounds weird but in this instance because there is no state board approved resources for either of these classes we would have to really intentionally begin looking at resources right off the bat before possibly we even have a scope and sequence developed and start stage one because we would have to have that to you the list of publishers we would have to have all of that and our community review nights typically occur in early february because we bring new adopted materials to you in february otherwise we won't have anything for teachers to teach from so um i know it seems out of sequence but in this instance it would have to be because it's a brand new course yeah so i go back to so my little understanding here was you know mr

156english was asking couldn't we know some of this information before we approve and the response i got both from you know mr gallagher and dr mika is no because there's so much effort that goes into developing this that we this doesn't want to be done if there's if there's a risk that we come back and say no and i guess my concern is that the risk of us coming back and saying stop it is just as high right now as us coming back and saying no in yeah i've been six months yeah i understand so it's kind of you know to me it's either we say no now or no later you know so if we already you already said there is a surrounding district that is starting this in 21 22 school year presumably

157they already have a textbook then so i think there is some of this information that we can get a hold of now before we have to say yes i would say this here in again we're going to let the board vote on this and the board can the board will make a decision and we're going to respect that but a couple things i want to say one is you know we [Music] i understand um i understand the the comments and and the concern but i want to assure not just the board but the community that anytime there's a concern with something that's being taught in our buildings we will address it we certainly are not going to put and i can promise you i mean i can guarantee you whatever curriculum we develop i would

158be shocked if you wouldn't support it because it's going to look very much like u.s history curriculum it's going to look almost identical i taught it you know when i went and reviewed these these teaks there's there is no crt in these teaks there's no radical agenda in these teaks i think where the concern is and and i heard it from the the community member tonight is can somebody put that in and teach with a bias well you can teach with the bias in any course and and i've dealt with it as superintendent i've dealt with it as a as a director for elementary i dealt with it as a principal our job as professionals as superintendent as deputy superintendent is executive director for human resources is when we find something that is happening in

159our school buildings that's number one not appropriate we deal with it number two if it's something that that happens that we're not aware which we're going to be aware of it because people reach out they reach out to me on facebook or or you know directly through email we will address it i i i'm what i want to the point i want to get across to the community and to the board is if the board approves this tonight it gives us the go ahead to start the process to developing these courses if the board votes them down it doesn't necessarily mean we won't come back to the board again and part of that is because we've had such a such interest in it so i want to be real clear we will certainly respect the

160board's decision the the community voted these you know the board members in um it doesn't mean we can't come back and it doesn't mean we won't come back um it doesn't mean we're going to have curriculum developed i think the key is looking at the teaks looking at the standards um we certainly as a district don't want to i don't like controversy at all i went into this business because i love kids and i want to make an impact on kids and i know that's the same for everybody in this room and our teachers as well but at the end of the day whatever decision the board makes will we will support but this is these courses are something that the community did reach out for and our kids um you know they they expressed

161interest i'm not sure what the answer is as far as coming back to the board what that looks like but what i want the community to know especially the community that did push and reach out for this you know that that is something that we will certainly look at if the board doesn't vote for these courses we certainly will look at how do we come back um and examine this moving forward but you know again at the end of the day the board so i would say i mean i think for me personally if this were to pass tonight i would definitely want you know within the next meeting or two an exact timeline of when are we picking a book when are we picking this when are we picking that and each with an

162understanding of where along that line we're gonna have an input on whether it proceeds further or not because i think too i mean everything you've said and you said earlier the question i still have is whatever book is still something yeah and i have one of our western that's correct that's correct and i do have one of our our um western districts um that um and um there's what what what what more likely is what we're going to find is that there isn't like in algebra one there's one textbook that covers every teak this is such a new course really both of them mexican-american studies even though it was approved in 2016 most districts did not begin teaching it at that time they've just started teaching it in the past year or two african-american studies

163was just approved last year and so um the majority i think 12 districts in in our region we'll start teaching it next year there were only i believe two districts that jumped on and started teaching it this year but they taught it as an innovative course that had already been approved and so but what you find even from looking at i um the possible textbooks out there um that in one of our western districts that i have access to what they have decided to use and this is the only one that has a confirmation already of what they've decided for that and they're teaching it beginning next year or this year 21-22 school year they actually have chosen eight different textbooks to ensure coverage of the tweaks so they're using portions of those eight different

164textbooks because this is there's not a textbook written for this course so that's what you're going to find is um typically is that there's because there's not a textbook written that state board of education approved you're finding resources where you can that cover the teaks that have to be covered the delineation people start getting upset about so yeah so that tells me that there is so many different places right because ultimately this is all about trust right i mean i think as as as evidenced by how much we've gone into this tonight i think you understand what we would want or wouldn't want absolutely i know mr gallagher understands what we want or wouldn't want it's you know how many people down the road are going to fully understand what what this community wants or

165doesn't want and when you're having to go to that many different sources it's just i don't know it just troubles me it's that many more ways for something to find its way in that that we would that the community would not support um so i don't know that that's this is all stuff that's just been in my head yes and that's for the mexican-american store studies class i don't have any i have no research on what anyone's choosing for the african-american studies course dr michael i just want to give some clarification here because you play you let us know how this is always done because this is not unique to these two classes no and for the ap euro class you took the same approach i would imagine correct then you offered the class and

166it didn't make correct so there's a survey so every time the people say they want something then we see how many people you look at the students who wanted to take the class we do have students who are on two pathways who could possibly take the class correct but we already have students who could possibly take an ap euro class and the class is not making correct so the process of establishing the course from what i understand is that we approve the course then you provide what seems to be answers to many of the questions that people have tonight the answers are not there because we have not approved the course so therefore we're going to continuously and always have these same questions until the course is approved we already have a district that operates

167off of a lot of trust because you're trustworthy from what i understand you've dealt with teachers who stepped out of line already you dealt with them problem dealt with from what i understand you've already had to deal with writing curriculum last time i saw y'all wrote tons from your own planning of getting it done so you have plenty of experience writing curriculum and you already have a method for how to go about doing this that's not brand new is tried and true so what i'm not following tonight is if we do not approve the course then many of the questions that my colleagues have will simply never be answered we cannot look to another district for how they figured out how to set up every course because that's apparently not actually what you wrote you

168you put how much curriculum did you write this summer we wrote um i have the dollar amount we budgeted over 160 000 for curriculum writing this summer and that is for all of our core curriculum for our third summer of writing and then this is our first summer of writing for cte and um our foreign languages your first summer writing for cte so you've even had experience writing something for the first time before well i can tell this particular decision that we're making tonight is just the same as any decision that has been made before about approving or not approving the course and that the next step is not unique either which is then you begin to write your curriculum the takes have already been approved by the state correct okay so you're following the

169state approved teeth and that is always and that's what you always do so you're not doing anything and little lamb has always you've been writing the curriculum all the time we've been doing this the whole time so we're not actually doing anything new the questions that you have my colleague here the concerns that you have i understand and have some similar concerns but i understand that my concerns cannot be addressed until we approve the class because you don't have the answers because the next step has not been taken okay that's all i wanted to clarify because we also are kind of going but we've been on this for a long time tonight and i just want to make sure that if we continue our discussion that we're focusing on the actual decision at hand which

170is not about textbooks and it's not about the actual nuts and bolts in the underbelly of this course the actual decision on the table tonight is whether to approve the course or not and then the next steps happen so we're jumping ahead a little bit because we don't have all these other decisions to make tonight the only decision we have to make tonight is to approve it or not and we're not following anything different than we normally do to approve or not okay i just want to clarify that the actual motion on the table is not about all the rest of this the motion on the table is just to make this one decision okay yeah and i completely agree with you on the one decision piece of the puzzle my concern is the decision

171after the piece of the puzzle but that's not the motion on the floor i understand but that affects the emotion on the floor and that's that's where things are a little bit different from me it's it's where we go down that road what happens afterwards let's go anyway i don't know what i haven't constantly i mean i think we can and again i just want to make myself abundantly clear that i completely understand and in a lot of aspects i agree completely with miss myers and mr english i also very much understand and agree with dr thompson i think the one thing that we need to look at right here is the simple fact is are we going to approve the course or not i believe in the professionals and the staff that we have

172here in the district i believe with the people on this table that if this starts to go sideways in the future we have enough intelligent people in this room and on this table to stop it from happening or to correct it yes i do not believe anyone on this table has the right to tell any student in this district that they do not have the ability to study a certain subject that being the case no matter what anyone else says i will absolutely 100 vote for this i do not tell my children what they do not have the ability to look at and study and learn and i sure as hell's not going to let you tell my my student my kids what the hell they what they can learn that's it so we have

173the motions yes thank you very much motion passes dr rick thank you for putting up with all of our comments and questions and i'm warning you that there'll be many words and thank you board and again i want to echo dr mecca thank you uh very good job so thank you so much and i do want to say i think one thing i want to thank the colleagues for the vigorous vigorous debate yeah and and this is what's going to make all this yeah it's a vigorous debate and discussion because really in all all lines this is about our children and what's important right yes okay general fun tonight the orange cell cell shows an increase in local revenue mainly due to anticipated revenue from a surplus sale of computers and from hosting athletic playoff

174events uh the yellow cells reflect the purchase of chromebooks for students and kind of a reallocation of existing budget to accounts for personal transfer and staff hired above replacements the purple cell here reflects an anticipated increase in our excess local revenue payment for recapture this year you can see the input the impact of this 57 thousand dollars in our expected fund balance in the cell highlighted in green um board policy uh requires that we maintain a fund balance of 24 of total annual operating expenditures which is about 20.76 million so we're meeting that uh that requirement moving on to our capital outlay fund uh capital outlay fund analysis has been updated to include all approved bond projects as of june 30. and we're on track they're all on track from a budget perspective and we

175have about 32 million project budget dollars remaining on approved projects for debt service fund tonight um as you can see from the blue cell we we realized almost 100 of our budgeted revenue today the purple cell reflects the proposed amendment tonight of 219 000 to increase our debt service payment to reflect redemptions and issuances this year our debt service payment in august will be 20.138 million dollars and the orange highlighted sell shows our remaining budget for the payment including the proposed amendment for tonight so there will be enough allocated to cover the august payment with the proposed amendment tonight you look at the green cell we're currently expecting to reduce our fund balance a little bit in the debt service fund as of right now the administration recommends approval of certain may 21 financial reports

176as submitted all right any questions comments [Music] time and place for public meeting on budget and proposed tax rate mrs joyce thank you so school districts have a special note for the public meeting on the proposed tax rate the notice is entitled the notice of public meeting to discuss budget and proposed tax rates very creative and required to publish it uh 10 to 30 days before in in the paper and requires a publication of the board of trustees reports tax rate the date and time and the place of the public meeting leisd mno tax rate will decrease as a result of hb3's tax compression law however leisd's tax rate is based on a maximum compressed tax rate or mcr for the district that is calculated by the state of texas and until we receive that

177preliminary amsterdam from the state the tax rate is based on statewide compression we'll know that in detail we get numbers on next monday which we then submit to the state by august 1st and we get that right back so the administration recommends approval of august 23rd 2021 at 6 pm and zeller center for learning and leadership as a date time and place set to conduct the public meeting to discuss budget proposed tax rate and recommend the following post tax rates to be not greater than 1.0236 per 100 value for maintenance and operations uh 0.47 cents per 100 value for interest and sinking for a total tax rate of 1.4936 per 100 value [Applause] second any questions or comments um does anyone have anything else no that's all i got okay where'd it go yes sir

178was there a question about a specific yeah i did um jesse looking at the uh accelerate learning um it had gone up thirty thousand dollars and that was for the stem excellence certification and coaching i think i know the answer but i'd like to hear the answer as to why it went up just for clarification for the community that that is a pretty substantial increase on that fee correct so we use accelerate learning which is uh the national institute for stem education for our stem certifications at the campus level so we have um three more campuses to bring on board this year which would equate three we have yes we have the high school we have lakeview and we have oak point which equates to the previous years roughly um on top of that instead

179of just two schools additional staff members we always bring on additional staff members for certification of existing certifications so we can maintain that threshold in case student teachers leave because once you drop below a threshold of certified teachers you lose your campus certification okay so we always bring on about another six to eight certified teachers for existing certified campuses so that layers on that cost but then also remember that this year we're starting our recertification of the original campuses because you have to recertify every three years and so um and it it's about a two to three year certification process to recertify so we're going to go ahead and start that recertification now and do it over the next two years for the first two campuses and we're actually going to start the recertification of

180the four campuses that just came on board okay plus we're going for our district certification and so that also covers our district certification costs so there's a lot of added things for that added amount of money so when you break it all down even though it's 36 000 or so more we're um actually getting quite a bit for that amount you know understood i just wanted the community to i thought that was the answer but i wanted to make sure 100 that that was the answer thank you so sorry dr micka once we do have once we're certified across the board and district et cetera what do we expect the cost to maintain i mean if we're on a three-year rotational renewal and always having new teachers added what do we see that ongoing expenditure

181being so the biggest cost is the initial certification um and that that just is um and so the recertification was only a couple thousand dollars for the campus and then um i'd have to look at the contract but the actual teacher certification is is minimal i we can get that for you but there will be look at the contract and then i can come back to that specific in just a second i have the contract on my computer there you go well i think well from what you say about 30 i would say less than 500 per teacher so and once we get our stable built up of teachers we're not going to have to bring in six to eight per campus because you're already going to have a spread for the benefit it brings

182the district it's a pretty minimal cost and especially knowing that we have the possibility of becoming the first nationally stem certified district in the country we're still going for that we know there's another district in the area that's kind of racing us but we um yeah we believe that we will be prepared for a challenge yeah so that's the goal is to become the first correct and then and then maintain it yep and and let me piggyback off that part of that came out of the bond you know when we we talked about prestwick one of the questions president montamaro was is there anything out there well at the time to become certified at that time there wasn't but nisc partnered with rice university and we jumped on it as quick as we could so

183a little bit of a cost but it's a huge benefit to our kids [Music] uh so is there a motion to approve the consensus any additional questions on that all those in favor approving the concern thank you very much um thank you again very much for all the work tonight um i did appreciate the discussion earlier tonight um this uh the only thing i had was i noticed um in the in consent that we had some discounted rates from the sro costs so with mayor cornelius stopping by earlier uh maybe we can address with the town any additional cost-saving measures that we could maybe take advantage of on the sro costs since he threw out the leaf just a thought um i'll put that on the agenda mr roberts you can call chief tomorrow on

184that um the other comment i wanted to make is that um while i i agree with mr montoya i do believe that um you know my disagreement with the topic of the ethnic studies i think is is a valid disagreement i do believe that it does and can cause more division um with regards to race relations i think you know from a standpoint of i am a citizen i am a community member in this town i do have three kids that go to school here i think it is a valid opinion but i also represent constituents in this town and i do have many that disagree with ethnic studies so while fellow board members feel that i shouldn't tell kids what they should be taking or not taking i do feel it is my prerogative

185to vent my opinion and to offer it at board meetings which is what i did tonight so that is again my opinion on the subject and which is why i voted now i do again represent a good majority of constituents in this town and wanted to offer their opinion as well in front of the board thank you um i would like to uh ask favor of uh the board and uh mr gallagher i know recently this was a actually a uh suggestion that came to us from people in the uh in the district uh recently we had mr moses retire from operational operations department um and there have been several people in the operations department um that have asked we've been looking for a name for the operations building for a little while would the

186board consider looking into perhaps naming after him after 30 plus years of service with the district is that something we'd consider looking into so i didn't know that's something we could maybe put yeah i that's definitely a board decision that you know that's that's a one of the the uh i want to say perks there's not a lot of perks of being a board member you get to go to football games and but that is one of the uh one of the responsibilities of the board is naming the facilities i will tell you that people have mentioned that um you know that's something that again i think there needs to be does there need to be two board members that put it on the agenda or can it just be one i mean we can

187put it on the agenda yeah so we we certainly could put it on the agenda um i will tell you um joel moses did spend 30 years working here but he also grew up here um went to school here um you know i've i learned a lot about joel over the last several years um he is definitely going to be missed here when we talk about character we talk about people working in this district that are family joel really exemplified that and you know when you lose somebody like joel you know you can't replace him you can't all we can try to do is keep hiring people that want the best for this district and love the kids and loved the uh love the community so we certainly can put that on the agenda and

188discuss it uh and my only other comment in the specifically directed to ms meyers and i do apologize it was not meant to be a personal slight in any way shape or form and if you took it that way my sincerest apologies thank you staff what i thought was a short agenda a quick meeting wrong answer but great conversation great topic great dialogue appreciate and respect every one of the board members superintendents and staff opinion so look forward to more of those coming other than that we can all agree go lobos absolutely i just want to say i'm excited about the i know we have to give part of the grant back but i got excited about those of course you know i went and looked to see real quick what the other districts around

189us we did really good we really really did i mean that was a great opportunity for us i'm sorry that the first part of it we have to do something different but the other part of the money that we received for one we really i mean little m showed up with that one i looked at the neighboring districts and we really did well and so i'm very proud of what came out of that um i don't know what we'll end up getting to do it feels a little bit like christmas i know that gallagher was already like no you sending me like bat signals over here on what we can't do but i know that that we can do a girl i mean a great deal to cover some of the gap some of the

190learning gap from kovit that's kind of what i understood that money is for and that really really looks like a great opportunity for us and i know you have some great ideas dr mecca um on what we can do so i'm very very excited about that so i i also want to tell my colleagues thank you much for the vigorous debate um and discussions what's going you know what's going to to drive our district particularly learning with our students and you know i really appreciate the the diligence the staff has done dr gallagher superintendent gallagher and you know what you guys are doing on a daily basis to make sure this district is moving forward um you know and as i look forward to what we're doing now and what our future looks like um

191we look back six seven years ago it's so bright and i'm very ecstatic and excited about where we're going in the future and how this is going to help our children get to be successful as we go forward so i want to thank all the hard work and effort um and not only just with here but a lot of the community members who come out people who are engaged um literally is a great community and uh i can't be more thankful to sit on the board with these individuals here and you know sit by and have these biggest debates and really kind of drive the discussion so thank you very much for the great work and board i just want to thank you for for stan lee staff um thank you all for staying late

192and the just in closing i want to thank the board again um for your support more importantly that each of you are on this board for the same reason you you love this community you want the best for your kids and one of you earlier said something about trust and i want the community to to know that we are always going to do right by our kids and i appreciate the trust the community gives us as a board and our our staff but if there's ever a time where we need to be reminded to reel things back in we always have that open door and any member of the community can reach out to me they can call me i'll be happy to meet with them we're always going to make the best decision for

193our students but at the end of the day you know if there is something of concern we will address it and we're going to make the best decisions for our kids and for our community oh we one other announcement august um you told me and i've already why don't you announce it the august meeting all right all right so that is our motion to adjourn second second thank you you