2021-11-15 SMCISD Board Meeting - Regular

001hey calls regular scheduled meeting of the board of trustees of the san marcos cisd at this time i'm declaring that we have quorum with all trustees present except for president cantu um i will be acting in her stead tonight so please y'all bear with me um let us now uh stand and say the pledge of allegiance and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all honor the texas flag i pledge allegiance to the texas one state of god and at this time i don't think we have anybody here to speak for a public forum so we will move on to the superintendent's report madam president members of the board good evening members of the public and those in attendance we appreciate you at this time

002we have a very special recognition so if i could have mr ralph gonzalez mr jocas castillo mrs celia varagan mr silvia beau acy maggie moreno she is pregnant mrs maggie moreno mary earls and melissa donaldson they represent nosotros lagente and we have a special proclamation from board president halsey thank you this is a proclamation recognizing the 25th anniversary of nosotros legende whereas in 1996 ralph gonzalez founded a non-profit organization that became known as nosotros legente dedicated to improving the community by providing assistance to families in need and promoting equity and justice to all citizens and whereas nosotros legente has provided assistance with medical needs to citizens of the community and created the viva zapoto's shoe distribution 25 years ago to provide a free pair of shoes to needy children from the san marcos consolidated independent

003school district and whereas nosotros legente has held an annual shoe distribution in december giving over 1 000 pair of shoes each year and whereas the organization's fundraisers are made possible by its members more than 400 people strong as well as volunteers contributors and donors from local citizens and businesses and whereas the organization has provided to date over twenty five thousand pair of shoes to low-income children of the san marcos consolidated independent school district and whereas the north lagente organization has spent well over a quarter of a million dollars during the 25 years at its annual viva sapotos shoe distribution and whereas this wonderful organization has made a difference in the san marcos community and will celebrate its 25th year of service to san marcos texas in now therefore be it resolved that the san marcos

004consolidated independent school district board of trustees recognizes on november the 25th anniversary of nosotros legente and do hereby call upon the people of our community to express our sincere gratitude and appreciation to the dedicated men and women who provide assistance to san marcos citizens and shoes to the needy children of the san marcos consolidated independent school district thank you [Applause] i would just like to thank the school board and our superintendent for this uh dedication to our organization i also want to dedicate this proclamation to mary gonzalez my uncle ralph's wife who was one of the backbones of this whole organization and our turkey dinner that we had annually since covet and illnesses we've lost some of our most valuable members aunt delia lopez irene trinidad sammy gomez and of course our aunt mary gonzalez

005but we continue to find a way to be there for our kids i'm a former san marcos cisd teacher from here i taught here 27 years and so this is even though i live in new braunfels now my heart is here this is home to me and my uncle ralph like they said 1996 25 years ago had this dream to continue to help the children of san marcos and covet or no covet we found a way and we thank the parent liaisons from all the schools because they have helped us out by making it possible to get those shoes to the kids and to make you know make a difference and so i just want to thank all the people that help us i want to we couldn't have our turkey dinner because of covet

006and just making sure that everything was safe but we continue to find other means to gather our monies together to be there for our kids on december 7th we'll do our shoe drive again and we'll get those shoes out to the kids and make sure that they know that we're here for them so i thank you for acknowledging us and i thank the community for always being there to support us thank you [Applause] thank you um you know to us it's rewarding to be able to do this for this many years and the community that helped us and the school district that let us use their well we could the cafeteria to do fundraising and we thank all of you also from the bottom of our hearts and uh i'm not the one that does

007speaking i let somebody else do it because i start stuttering and getting trembling threes i'm holding right here but thank you the community in the school district and the school board and we love you and we'll continue doing as long as we can thank you [Applause] thank you there we go ready one two three one more one two [Applause] thank you very much andrew oh wait look mr fernandez it's on there just a couple more things madam president i want to also take a moment to thank mr wozniak and all our school nurses this past weekend we had our first vaccine clinic for our students five through 11 years old you always worry when you sign up but we have some dedicated professionals who were there from nine o'clock to about two o'clock saturday and

008uh talking to to families and to adults about the importance of being vaccinated and we're going to get some information up because i know this board is very interested in the health and safety of our community i will say we had 350 people sign up we had 251 students actually show up which is about 71 percent of those kids who signed up came and additionally uh diana eastwood you know being the bargainer that she is you know traded some vaccines to the county uh and got some adult vaccines and so we took care of the 36 additional adults who either needed a booster or a second shot so we appreciate the work that they did bringing up the other information i also want to take a moment to thank our coaches our athletic director coach

009walsh is here it's been a fun fall semester it's not the way we wanted it to end but as i told coach friday night it's just the beginning of a building block and so i also want to take a moment to thank our fine arts coordinators we've had some amazing fine arts things going on our ffa students we had three students participate in the national ffa program as band members and so in december we'd like to honor um have a festive event to honor all our kids who have showcased we have our national merit kids that we've had up here before if we can go to the next slide please on the coven that left me hanging so we also want to thank dr salmi who connected us with a company that does asymptomatic testing

010so just as of october we have tested over 706 tests and we've only had one positive we've given over 500 booster shots for staff their third shots i mentioned the vaccination clinic and we also had the all during this time we had the flu vaccine and so we have about 300 people that went through our building that are employees who got vaccinated we have we we estimate more like i got mine outside of the school system and so we we feel very good about the safety and health measures and mr wozniak i don't is he present here somewhere i don't know if you want to add i can't believe i can't see him if you want to add anything else that i'm missing the good health and safety director right there [Laughter] and finally i

011just want to take a moment to uh thank all our parents our students our teachers um you know it's been extremely difficult first semester but i think it was less anxiety driven this this go around because of the wonderful staff and the administrators and the parents and the students cooperating it's easy easy to get caught up in the social media aspect but when you're on campuses every day you see the great work taking place with our students and with our staff members and how much they are committed to making sure that our kids are reading writing on grade level and doing math and for that we hope that in the near future four more days you get some rest put your phones down and your computer's down and just take a moment to be with

012your family and just relax for a week as we head towards our next break and madam president um with that that ends in my superintendent report thank you so much i wanted to say a special thank you to mr wozniak and his team i know that giving vaccines to five to 11 year olds is sometimes very difficult i have witnessed it and so we really appreciate that i've heard just spectacular things from everybody who was there on saturday and then i know that we're going to do a big um acknowledgement in december but i think that we should uh announce tonight that um coach tayo was selected as the coach of the all district coach mr coach of the year for 266a for volleyball and maggie walsh was mvp of the district which is just

013a significant huge achievement and so we're so proud of everybody so thank you [Applause] then we'll continue with reports and information from the administration mr sanders it seems like we're having computer glitches right now okay we need to do we need to everything's a computer on date can we do the budget without them it's all on the same computer in the auditors take a break mr doyle could we could do the audit do you need the computer to do your auto report miss gutierrez or mr russia you want to introduce let's move ahead to the audit report while we're getting the computer programs computer problems worked out so thank you so good evening board and dr cardona my name is denise garcia finance director tonight we have the presentation of our 2020-21 annual financial report

014and tonight we have ms janet pittman from our auditing firm abip that we'll be presenting good evening i'm going to take this off my voices not very loud you have two documents in front of you one is the actual bound report of the final draft and then a letter that will go we'll go through this first i forgot to say good evening and thank you for having me here tonight on page one and we're i'm not going to ask you to flip through the document i'll just tell you where the items are located in case you want to look at them but on page one is our independent auditor's report it is what we call an unmodified report is the best report that you can receive and it basically means that we didn't make any

015modifications to your financials and they are presented in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles again it is the best assurance that we can give to you back on page 93 is another report that we issue it is over your internal controls and other compliance matters so when we start our audit we do what we call a risk assessment so we're looking at your internal controls over your major processes which are like payroll and cash disbursements cash receipts who's approving all of those items if we had any issues with segregation or segregation of duties or internal control related matters they would be in this report and we are pleased to say that we did not have any issues to report to you on your you have good internal controls and segregation of duties over your processes

016the third report that we issue that's in the bound document starts on page 95 and because you receive you receive this year over 11 million dollars in federal funds we are required to do what we call single audit which is basically the federal government gives us regulations that we're supposed to look at certain items to make sure you're spending in accordance with with the federal government and this year we had two major programs you've got special ed special education and your esser funds which are your covert 19 funds and we're pleased to report in this report that we had no findings or question costs related to the federal programs this year now i'm going to skip back to page 17 which is the most important number on that page if you do want to skip

017to it is the general fund unassigned fund balance it's 47.8 million dollars a very healthy fund balance it represents seven months of operating expenditures in in your general fund is of course your major operating fund for the district so those dollars are meant for ongoing operations last year you had six and a half months of operating so it just increased slightly best practices suggest two to six months of operating expenditure so you're just a little over that again a very healthy fund balance you did have a refunding this year on your series 2015 bonds so what you do is issue new bonds use those dollars to pay off the old bonds and um the new bonds have a lower interest rate so you did have a savings of five about 560 thousand dollars then the

018one schedule i would like to is on page 56 it's your budget to actual i'll give you time to to get there and you can see you did a nice job budgeting the revenue you uh your final budget was 81 million dollars it's at the top of the page under final and then your actual was actually 83.6 million dollars so you had a positive variance of of 2.5 million dollars on page 57 you can see your total expenditures you budgeted 84 million dollars you actually spent 78 million dollars so you had a nice savings there six million dollars it's been very difficult with especially with cobid to get right on some of those expenditures so the biggest savings was in of course instructional services that's short i know but i'm done with the financial if

019there's anybody that has any questions i would be glad to take those thank you so much and thanks to our spectacular finance department in another banner year so thank you i i just wanted to quit i'm quickly going to go over the other letter that we issue i'm not going to go through i mean you can read it it is basically um required communication between us the auditors and you the governing body that oversees the the district i just like to mention a couple of items on page two at the very top of that is corrected and uncorrected misstatements we did not have any audit adjustments that were very material this year that's always good news to report to the board because the financial information that you're getting throughout the year you can rely on

020those numbers to make your financial decisions and then on the very last page we are required as part of our audit process to make sure you are in compliance with public funds investment act and we did find that you were materially in compliance with that act with your investment policy and your investments that you invest in that's all i have it but i'm glad to any questions any questions thank you so much thank you all right are we ready i think so okay i'll turn it over to mr superintendent all right good evening board trustee superintendent cardona tonight you will hear the final presentations from our campus leaders on their academic updates so we have our three leaders from hernandez mendez and rodriguez here so i'm going to turn it over to we're going to

021start with hernandez okay sorry i didn't know if i pulled it up or if andrew was going to do it i will do it okay good evening board of trustees superintendent cardona i am jennifer gonzalez the proud principal of hernandez elementary and i'm here to tell you about all the wonderful things our heroes are doing this year like all of my colleagues we have a strong focus on sel supports for our students so focusing on those morning meetings every morning our counselor is amazing and she goes around at the beginning the middle and the end of the year and checks in with every single student just to see how they're doing safety checks so she's been doing those constant brain breaks with our kiddos sel integration into lessons in our school-wide pbs pbis system mentoring

022and counseling our counseling is built into our specials rotation so students get time with the counselor and their specials we have mentors on campus who do check-ins and check-outs and we also have the greater san marcos youth council that comes in for some of our students as well an enrichment opportunities uh community building events uh clubs is amazing at our school this year one of my my gt teacher has started a garden club and recruited every person she knows and we have an amazing garden this year so that's awesome and also field trips oh this got all kinds of mixed up sorry so our star data was great not where we want it but comparable and this got moved around a lot but comparing 2019 to 2021 our third grade reading we had in 2019

02370 approached and in 2021 we had 71 percent approach so not too far off from where we were in 2019 but we still have a ways to go the meats was at 46 in 2019 and 45 in 2021 and for our masters we stayed the same at 31 for math um that's where we need to grow a little bit so in 2019 the approaches data was 71 in 2021 it was 67 percent um and i can't even read it right now because it got so scrambled but we're working on it the meets and masters is where we really need to get our kids back up to so our growth opportunities are rebuilding strong relationships with students of course teaching to mastery focusing on guided reading and guided math grade level flex grouping to meet kids

024where they are and strengthening tiered instruction and rti systems our esser support so our campus instructional specialists are guiding our we call them our closing the gaps teachers to focus on targeted small group instruction um they are also working on remote conferencing when we have students who have to go for covid purposes and then our rti tiered support these teachers are also giving our data comes from of course like everyone else our nwea map screener adaptive programs common assessments and m-class screener our strategies we're using is differentiated tier one instruction individual student feedback and goal setting targeted small group instruction plc reflections are big and are avid supports professional development is offered at hernandez every fourth wednesday after school it is constantly embedded within the plc cycles we have many collaborations with texas state and

025all of our teachers are either have completed enrolled or will be enrolled in the texas reading academy so our campus goals for this year targeted professional learning communities which is something that district-wide we're all trying to strengthen we have a four-week cycle where we look at data we have reflection on practice and our lesson designs and we're learning from each other we go on learning walks in classrooms targeted small group instruction is data driven our esser teachers are there to support that we have a shared responsibility they are all of our students and we are constantly focusing on the continuum of needs excuse me our social emotional learning and community outreach we have regular community events scheduled we had a huge fine arts hispanic heritage month open house night that was amazing and we our

026pto did a trunk or treat and we have huge outdoor spaces and so we probably had about a thousand people show up and it was safe because we were all outdoors and so bringing our hernandez community back to a sense of normal getting together doing the fun things again we've seen a lot of growth in our kids the extracurricular activities of course and just the continued focus on health and safety for our students questions thank you i do not have a student at hernandez as you know but i am the in case of emergency for several of your students and so i get lots of text updates from hernandez and your staff is doing a great job okay thank you thank you yeah we do communicate quite an awful lot but it's better to over

027communicate it's terrific and it's and it's always really positive and focused and it's great so thank you we will figure it out together good evening i'm christina woody i'm the proud principal of mendez elementary and i am super excited to tell you about all the wonderful things that we have going on at mendez as soon as i can open this and make sure you can see it here we go nope here this one well this says nope those are just your two in there yeah scroll down oh no it didn't let me that's what i was trying to do but i'll try again i like this i see what you're saying okay that'll be interesting okay we'll do it so um i'm gonna start with i'll just get to the good stuff so this is

028where we started as men does and so when we're looking at 2021 and the data that came in with our kids and where they started this year some strengths we saw were that our first and second grade math scores showed increased growth i think a lot of that has to do with kids coming back at that end of the year our second and third grade emergent bilingual reading star scores were better than they had previously been that has to do with the tier one instruction happening in that classroom our growth opportunities when we looked at it all together we're really our writing and science scores and our math and reading three through five star just our student achievement and making sure that they are where they need to be so as we look at those

029things and we think where are we going what are the main things that mendez to address all of that we created four main things every decision that we make is based off of these four items and i'll go into detail about each one of them so i'll start with tier one instruction and so this is my a big one for me and i think the biggest question that i want to answer for you tonight is if we're being reflective on where we ended last year where we started this year what looks different at mendez so if you came now what would look different to show you that we're really addressing those things and so there's a lot that i would love to talk to you but i don't have all that time so i'll start

030with our goal is really building capacity in our teachers and so we have three um coaches that are all all bilingual and they can service our dual language teachers and our mainstream teachers each one of them has two grade levels that they're serving so we have a k1 coach a 2-3 and a 4-5 these coaches go into every classroom at least once a week to provide observation and feedback and a next step after that their job is to support our teachers in implementing that action step so that can look like planning it can look like building resources together it can look like them modeling together or even going next door to the class next to them and seeing what the teacher is doing there i what we've really built a culture around is that we

031are our best resources and so let's use each other as we grow we're also having our leadership team all goes on walks on wednesdays so we go together and see every room and then we sit down and we talk about if we're doing a targeted plc what is the best way to move all of our teachers in one and one goal or one targeted area so we develop those together this second sorry and that kind of goes through it but pictures are better to look at our second main thing at mendez is our foundational support so this is how we're using our esser funds as we're building capacity and tier one instruction what research says is that if kids aren't reading on grade level by third grade their chances of graduating go drastically down and

032so as we're building that tier one capacity in our teachers now we can flip the intervention model so two of our sr teachers and one in our sria are all being used for k3 literacy they're pulling over 32 groups a day just making up those phonics gaps giving them what they need our instructional coaches are bilingual so we're able to provide that intervention through them for all of our spanish readers and writers we can tell it's working because i made this in the middle of october and at that time 114 students had already moved at least one reading level and we got to celebrate them and it's already going up and up so we're excited about that our other essar teacher is miss roberts and she's being used for her first through fifth grade foundational

033skills in math so we know if kids don't know place value their operations are number sense it's really hard for them to be successful at anything else so the first nine weeks that's all she worked on now we've got our first ca data so she's pulling kids based on the teat gaps that they don't know building those supporting standards so when they get in the classroom they're able to be successful the third main thing oh oh look at that okay the third main thing at mendez is enriching with equity and there's all of these things we're doing but for time's sake i'll focus on one last year being new to mendez coming in something that we spent a lot of time with parents talking about was their desire to have enrichment for their kids inside

034of this school day we know that a lot of our kids weren't able to stay after school because of transportation or just anything else in life that's going on and so we decided to build in stryker innovation hour which is clubs every friday from two to three so our kids get clubs during the school day two through five goes to clubs we have photography gardening yoga cultural cooking club you name it we probably have it it's awesome and so kids go and experience that k1 at that time personally i think we have a lot to learn from bonham and so what bottom does is they have this inquiry out where kids just kind of explore and go and so we do that with our k1 kids i think if the pandemic taught us anything those

035opportunities are extremely important for our kids so we every teacher in kinder and first has an activity they do so it can be dramatic play to planting little plants to yoga to legos and kids just go in and out in this picture you can see a kindergartner he's taking a little token because he's moving it to say he's entering the room so they go in and out it's amazing what they can do they're awesome and so that's been something we're really excited about because it gives every single kid at mendez the opportunity to be an experience that and attendance on fridays has gone up drastically imagine that um the fourth main thing at mendez and the most important for us is well-being of students and families so these are all things that we're doing and

036we have a hundred percent morning meetings and a hundred percent of our kids are eating breakfast in the classroom again bonham implements zones of regulation so what we realized was if kids already coming to us knowing that and doing that why are we reinventing the wheel so we do zones of regulation here these pictures you can see in every single classroom at mendez we have a regulation zone so kids are learning the curriculum in their morning meetings through guidance lessons with our counselor and then they can always access that space if they need it we also have cis this year so we're able to really wrap around our families and provide additional support that we haven't in the past we also have the thinkery which is a restorative dis restorative process so it's no longer

037consequence based discipline what that looks like is it's not about the behavior it's about the learning environment so if the learning environment is disrupted we our social worker our counselor or one of our admin go and we just pull kids and have one-on-one reflections with them in kindergarten that can look like looking like at pictures saying hey this is how i was feeling before this happened this is what happened this is what i'm going to do in the future and building the capacity for our kids to be successful in coping and regulating those behaviors so these are the things that i feel like we're continuously doing and we're continuously reflecting on and measuring our progress and seeing if we need to adjust so looking at our cas looking at our tiered services ensuring that we

038have that attendance rate still going up our discipline of fractions continuing to decrease and so we're constantly looking at these things as a team and reflecting and just getting one percent better every day so that's what's going on at mendez any questions thank you um i was so glad that you all were able to do reading mania again this year in a safe way it was terrific and i also i don't know if it's tied into what you're doing with the continuation of the bottom methods which i love um i'm a big fan of the plain inquiry um i wish we could do that k12 i think it would benefit high schoolers also in their own way but anyhow um but i really um i read with a great group of first graders and i

039don't know if it's um there's a causality here or not but they were super curious and inquisitive and they were asking great questions and they were making great comments about the story um in our conversation so super so thank you thank you good evening madam president board of trustees and dr superintendent cardona my name is cash greathouse and i'm the proud i'm the proud principal at rodriguez elementary um here with me today i couldn't let this night or this year get over with without introducing my brand new assistant principal miss gene hague [Applause] so let's go ahead and get started so at rodriguez we believe that we should provide a holistic education that is personalized to the individual learner preparing all students to become leaders within their families communities and of their own learning so

040how we go about doing this is through our strong starts our mentoring and our project-based personalized learning our strong starts begin with rodriguez reads it's a k-5 social emotional learning program that we implement across the campus with a strong emphasis on literacy we also do a very good job of integrating our fine arts and our physical activity into our classrooms through activities within built into lesson plans in addition to after school clubs and uil we've also included a wellness room not only for students wellness and motor lab but also for staff to be able to blow off some steam after a long work day it's been very big hit currently this year we also are in our fourth and fifth grade we focus a lot on our mentoring program that is through our summit learning

041every student in fourth and fifth grade has a mentor on campus they meet with them each and every week they talk about goal setting creating plans providing immediate supports for academic and non-academic areas so students build these relationships throughout the course of the year with those mentors that guide their learning throughout the year and then through our project-based personalized learning 58 of our k-3 teachers are certified pbl curriculum writers and 100 of our fourth and fifth grade teachers have been trained in our summit learning programs so some campus data strengths and growth opportunities in in our nwa map and our progress monitoring 75 percent of our kindergarten cohort are at or above level in their english language arts acquisition and so that's a huge shout out to our bonham pre-k teachers and staff members and

042principal there doing that hard work with those those littles um to bring them to us at grade level for math we are tracking our students math cas and checking for understanding in our third fourth and fifth grade and our students are doing that tracking on their own some areas of growth for us just like my colleagues before me and as a district we are trying to improve in our literacy acquisition and so we at rodriguez are working tirelessly to try and increase our percentage of k-5 students that are reading on grade level we're also increasing uh trying to increase our projected star achievement levels in all student groups with the emphasis on our sped population our esther supports we currently have three esser teachers um well we have one extra teacher that focuses math and

043ela for k through two um she focuses um through k22 and she um also does our remote conferencing for students that have gotten covert another one of our um esther teachers is now inside the classroom and helping with leveling out a classroom so she's helping us in in a second great classroom she's a second grade teacher currently and our third one it was miss googie but she got promoted to our assistant principal so we are in search of our third essar teacher to hire they work with our cis in our tier two and three supports um for the current one that we have so she's she's got a she's got a wicked schedule right now but she loves it you can ask her so at rodriguez we believe everyone at rodriguez deserves a learning experience

044that meets their individual needs and that's everyone so we do this through weekly plc's to improve our practice and engage in structured coaching style cycle and monthly campus-based pd opportunities listed there and rodriguez university it's something we coined and it's going on two years now in which our teachers um after the long work year comple ends they participate in professional development for up into a week and there those areas right there summit learning pbl curriculum writing you teach reading math academies they have all dedicated their time after the school year's over to help get prepared for the next year so our campus goals our three campus goals this year are deeper learning and academic rigor data driven and data informed practices to make data inspired decisions now what that is is pulling data is one

045thing but taking those taking that data and making an impactful difference with our students and how that impacts the day-to-day classroom rotations and instruction that goes on inside the classroom that's what we're working on through plc's as well as developing our student agency and ownership really giving our students and allowing our students to be the drivers of their own learning to know what their strengths are what their areas of growth are and to do that through interest-based activities this last thing that i have here this is a student and staff survey that was taken last year right before the end of the school year rodriguez elementary was one school in texas to receive a new schools grant in 2019 it was the only school in texas to receive that and we are in a cohort

046of 68 other schools across the united states and this cohort all took these student and teachers sel surveys and without digging deeper into it if you can just look at the the larger numbers on there the 4.3 the 3.7 all of those um numbers to the right of of those are a comparison group and overall rodriguez in comparison to that compare our to our comparison group of 68 other schools across the united states um did really well in terms of the types of culture that we have at rodriguez the type of school community that we have built not only with our students but with our staff and we look forward to taking um taking it again um in the in this upcoming uh spring semester to see um any differences to see what areas of

047growth and areas improvement what i will say is if it is a 3.6 or above that means that 90 or more indicated a positive interaction with that survey question so that that's that's a very very great thing that we shared with teachers we shared with students and allowed teachers to share those with students now the 10 8 to 10 percent that did not meet in there we want we want a hundred percent so we we're working hard to try and ensure that that population or that um small select percentage of students that we aren't hitting or aren't reaching finding out what it is that we need to do to reach them to have their experience just as well as the rest of the students and teachers at rodriguez elementary but that is all i have

048today thank you all very much do you have any questions i will say that um i brag on all of our schools for various reasons but i've had occasion over the last since probably school started to talk to several families from outside of the community who have elementary school students who have asked me about my experience with my students in elementary schools and i always tell them go look at the trace community go to if they're looking for a house go check it out and that's to take a tour of rodriguez and see what's going on on that campus and look at the you know the beautiful campus that it is and the way the innovative ways that it's being used and then then let's have a conversation so yes ma'am when we started it

049was as you all know was 283 students we hit approximately 400 we took a dip in during covet but we got to in surge right after covet and we have classrooms filling up teachers coming over so it's good to see that movement across the campus thank you thank you the three of you should we do the attendance update and then take a break good are we okay good evening school board trustees and dr cardona superintendent my name is rose pearson i'm the director of pupil personnel and student support services so our attendance from the start of the school year august 23rd through last friday november 9th for the district was at 90.82 percent you will have in your handouts the absenteeism truancy documentation handbook that has prevention practices that we use across all of our

050campuses in the district including the conference and agreement forms that we use when we're meeting with students and families our expectations for communicating the importance of school attendance all of our schools get this training up front all of our schools also work with the attendance campus committees that are trained at the beginning of the school year so just to highlight some of our processes and our procedures we do have two district case managers that are working with our campuses one of them is exclusively working here with the san marcos high school mr mario hernandez and then miss natasha padrasso is supporting both of our middle schools and then they both support the feeder elementaries to those middle schools we also have our parent liaisons who are fabulous that work with the attendance committees as well

051as our school administrators they all dedicate at least one administrator in some cases it's our principals in some cases it's an assistant principal and then of course our gear up coordinators support attendance here at san marcos high school so along with the attendance campus committee what their responsibilities are is to monitor attendance and chronic absences using data so they will pull their reports from our e-school system they meet with our students with a parents and our families to identify barriers and create an attendance plan sometimes it needs to be very personalized so sometimes our parent liaisons will work on a needs assessment because sometimes the barriers may be basic necessities our counselors and our sel counselors our cis community in school has been a great great resource and then we also have a partnership with

052greater youth san marcos council and we do referrals to those different but whether they work in our schools or whether it's an outside agency and then again those family needs assessments our campuses our administrators are doing a tremendous job celebrating good attendance just campus-wide and they also celebrate improved attendance for individual students that goes back to those individual meetings where they create a plan they can provide mentors for chronically absent students sometimes the mentors are campus teachers sometimes they're the gear up coordinators sometimes they're the attendance camps managers sometimes they're central office folks we we have mentors as well uh they do home visits sometimes the homes visits uh consist of a success support team and i'm sure mr greathouse if you would have led him would have talked to you in great detail those

053take longer sometimes those can take up to an hour because we take a counselor we take attendance case managers sometimes i attend those and we really just try to get to the barriers of what's going on and then of course we file truancy with courts if necessary and that's after we have exhausted all um remedies and we're just not getting that reciprocal partnership with the families but we do everything that we possibly can to build those relationships because we truly believe that in order for us to improve attendance attendance matters it's all based on relationships and trust do you have any questions for me did you say it was 90.8 percent 90.82 percent that's for this school year from the beginning up until last friday yes ma'am do we have them broken down by um

054by elementary middle and yes we do so san marcos high school was at 87.09 same time frame goodnight was at 92.96 miller was at 91.86 percent bowie was at 95.65 crockett at 91.02 percent de zavala at 92.29 travis at 91.46 hernandez at 93.92 mendez 92.52 bonham 89.62 rodriguez 92.16 so that's um i mean we would expect that the high school would be a little lower and we would expect that the preschool would be a little lower but it seems like through the middle school and the elementary schools are averaging out about the same and it seems high for elementary and middle school and so i think i have sort of an anecdotal sense of um of narratives around the preschool in the high school but i don't underst do we have a narrative around what's

055going on like at the elementary schools so we're still in a pandemic and i'm just going to speak honestly in transparency and so a lot of families are still urging on the side of caution so if their child is not you know not feeling well or has it you know stomach ache asthma you know coughing still wearing the mask some of those are a little longer prolonged absences than typically would be when if we were not in the pandemic okay and so i know you know we've already talked about having had done the vaccine clinic um could we do just another round of messaging but coming into the holidays for all of the students and really just asking teachers and administrators you know to do it and as and as non-partisan and just you know

056from the health standpoint of trying to get as many students vaccinated as possible so that our attendance numbers and this coming back after the holidays hopefully can come back up i yes no we we definitely feel positive about that and i think saturday's clinic shows our families are wanting so for sure and i know i mean i just think of everybody you know possible could just reinforce it in just like straight medical terms right like this is this is just about the health of kids and keeping them in school um that would be great so that we can have this most successful spring semester as possible which i think we all really want yes ma'am any other questions yeah miss pearson thank you um is there can you give me perspective as the new board

057member on the block is are these numbers 90 attendance is that what we saw before covid is that a normal number so uh actually i have last year's percentage and we're a little below last year's percentage but we have to keep in mind last year is that we also had remote learning as an option so we were able to ta allowed us to count remote learning so last year around this time we were at about 94 percent okay overall um prior to that i'd have to pull a longitudinal but we are about at that 92 93 94 district-wide okay yeah i think that perspective we had 95 or 96 as a goal at one point that we were getting close to correct yes pre-pandemic correct depending on where we which campus our goal is what's

058that 96.5 above 95 is ours we were we were getting there and then going over in some campuses so this is a significant 97 yeah 97 98 yeah in some cases yeah trustee ardando thank you president halsey miss pearson i asked for this presentation two months ago but i'm glad based on timing and some other events and occurrences it has allowed us to have some more longitudinal data to have a more robust conversation i'm excited to hear about the attendance case managers that we've deployed across the isd but seeing at i guess what would some could characterize as the severity of our absenteeism for a number of reasons and because the only information that you know president halsey kind of referenced and that i can reference is anecdotal i'm concerned about the caseload of those

059two caseworkers that we're essentially asking them to you know identify not only the root causes of that absenteeism but to help you know address those root causes so as we go through tonight's agenda you know let my colleagues be aware that this is the first time i'm going to reference you know front loading s or funds or even fund balance to address some of the issues that we see occurring as we emerge out of the pandemic um i think you know miss woody um anecdotally shared you know their emphasis and really focus on a subpopulation of their campus when it came to literacy saw immediate gains and returns for those students and so i'm going to make the argument tonight that we continue to do that when it comes to things like absenteeism especially as

060we see how many of our students are gone um we know that they need to be here uh to learn and so again just thank you for this presentation and the information and i look forward to these ongoing conversations when it comes to what we can do to hopefully you know get our students back into the classroom and back to learning so thank you you're very welcome and i just wanted to also just emphasize that we also work with e3 alliance and we're in a cohort with many other districts and they're facing similar challenges but it's great that we're able to collaborate and the high school is working very proactively i mean we're meeting with families every day here at the high school thank you thank you oh should we go ahead with the construction

061update please okay good evening board of trustees dr cardona i'll be delivering the november construction update the budget we're still hovering around the 5 million mark we did close out the high school project we received the final payout from weber so that number there on the high school is reflected as far as paying webber out the remaining retainage that we had we're just waiting on a final actually we received the final invoice from the architect and then we have some work to do on the pond and then we still have a little bit of technology money but we should return we should be under budget at the high school of about fifty thousand dollars it will add to the uh to the overall savings the remaining projects obviously miller de zavala and we still have

062a little bit of technology money that that uh that we're going to spend as far as miller still making a lot of progress with miller phase one we saw quite a bit of progress on the mill work we had weber reach out to some additional installers we still are missing some items and we have some non-conforming work that we'll have to address and we we will do that uh the punch list we get a daily update from weber on the punch list mr duvall heads over there every day looking to see looking at progress we got into a couple of weeks where we were actually meeting with subcontractors directly to find out what their plans were that seemed to to drive some results and then the elevator badge we're just communicating or trying to connect

063dates with the installer and uh tke dyson comp which has the elevator contract as far as phase 3a and 3b which was the summer renovation the dance room was delivered to us in time for school as you all remember we did get the tco approved on november 1st furniture floor waxing all was done before november 9th or on november 9th and as of last thursday the art rooms are being utilized and i talked to miss hart this evening and it looks like the science labs are going to be used i think we had some activity in there today they'll be used tomorrow for testing so we're in that space we still have some mill work that's outstanding we have a punch list that's outstanding the retention pond a lot of work has been done on

064that and then landscaping which is being done this week courtyard one which is in the back of the of the school we have removed that that scope will work from weber we'll do it ourselves not ourselves but we'll find a subcontractor to do it all it is is dealing with drainage but we didn't want uh weber to continue to drag their feet and we needed to move forward with it so it's not a lot of work we'll have somebody in there to get that done quickly i know we have a tour tomorrow uh one o'clock at de zavala and then we'll be at 2 30 at miller but i did provide some pictures for those of you cannot make it the picture on the left is the main corridor looking into the art rooms and

065then the picture on the right is the science labs before the furniture was delivered last week that's the dance room it's been completed i've got a we've got a dance teacher that's thrilled about everything about that room and the way it turned out and then there's the entry the outside seating is extremely nice seating outside right outside the front office and then we have the lettering doris miller middle school that was placed on the school itself as far as days of our lives not a lot of update here we're still uh still have some activities for december i do the only update i wanted to provide you is the canopy for the cafeteria we'd get it you did get a price and we do need to move forward on this it's about 65 000 uh

066but we have it in the in the budget uh the other big piece is the additional parking area that we're waiting on and if we're out there tomorrow i can sort of explain why we why we need to do this it's going to be a big ticket item so we're going to have to make the you know everybody needs to be be on board with that decision but after tomorrow's visit you'll get a better idea of why we need to do that so that's really all i have i'm looking forward to the the if y'all can't make it uh tomorrow i'm certainly available at any time to uh to go and tour except for thursday sorry but uh any questions thank you i toured desval on veterans day so that came out nice just odd

067how amazing it looks it's just fantastic good yeah i was going to say that mr uh hernandez gave me a lovely tour of dz at the veterans day event so i won't make it for that one and i think you and i have something scheduled on thursday at miller was dz one of the schools that we wanted to do an additional on our list of activities that we hope to a adjustments that we hope to make some of our campuses and different things that we'll make with the surplus that we've retained is is there an awning projected at dz as well in the front there's on the outdoor learning areas there's not okay i guess i meant actually on the drop-off line is one of the elementary schools oh so on the parent pickup line

068that's the canopy that i was talking about okay as they're coming out of the cafeteria we do need some cover in there so that's the canopy that i'm making reference yeah i sort of thought that thank you i'm very much looking forward to getting a full tour of both campuses and i'll just share with you my dad was here visiting me for a few weeks and he had um he was a 40-year high school career teacher so he's been in some schools and he had been taking the boys to school before and then pick them up this time and he asked me if we'd torn down the whole middle school to rebuild that he was just blown away by how spectacular it looked and it's really it's turned out great so thank you thank you

069and the dual language esl update all right very good so good evening uh superintendent dr cardona uh president halsey and board of trustees my name is monica valadez i'm the director of bilingual and esl education and i think i'm standing too close to this so so i'll do a quick update on both the bilingual and esl programs that our district run especially on the dual language some updates on that and then if you have any questions i'd be glad to answer them this is a pdf so i'm gonna have to scroll down okay there we go so this is our program staff of course i'm the director and we have two coaches that work for the department one focuses on dual language so really at the elementary campuses right now and then our esl coach

070who's a new hire and david coronado who just started two weeks ago is focused on the esl esl component which is the secondary although we do have esl at the elementary our larger population of esl students at the secondary level so he does focus on the on the secondary campuses both middle schools and high school and that is our number of teachers per campus those that are bilingual certified most of them are bilingual certified we do have one of our esl teachers at goodknight who is also bilingual certified he's actually helping us out this year for a pilot and dual language and i'll cover that a little bit too so our programs uh as you uh are well aware we have a two-way dual language program pre-k uh through fifth grade so um our fifth

071graders are our oldest cohort in the dual language program they started when they were first graders and that's when we started the program initiated in 2017-2018 and then we do have students who opt for the esl program at the elementary schools we don't have as many in the esl we have definitely a whole lot more in the dual language program but we do have some in the esl program and then of course at our secondary level we have esl grades through six through twelfth and then we do have newcomer newcomer is also esl but they're set aside there are students who are immigrant students uh for the first two years under ta regulations they qualify as immigrant status and so they're provided additional provisions to help support their academic growth so this year at goodnight

072we do have a dual language pilot school pilot just testing the waters in anticipation of our current fifth graders who are dual language the first cohort uh moving into sixth grade next year uh so 27 sixth grade students from our previous uh bilingual program the transitional program that graduated from fifth gate last year so they are right now um a good portion of them are at good night attending good night and so we have 27 students that are in a pilot course and this course is being offered in spanish is world geography and cultures that's being provided by the esl teacher who is bilingual certified so that's one of the caveats the teacher has to be bilingual certified um the the the product that we bought is tci history alive we had our coach our

073specialist review the product to make sure it was good products so that our students could utilize it so right now they were just delivered the textbook and the in the student workbook so that they can utilize in the teacher has a curriculum for those students so this is our program enrollment from pre-k all the way through 12th grade um sorry for all the different colors but trying to distinguish between our students who are receiving dual language services those who are esl services at the elementary campuses and then of course the green with esl from pre-k all the way through 12th grade currently in our dual language program as you see towards the bottom of the matrix we have 442 emerging bilinguals that's the new term the ta has adopted so even i just recently noticed

074in our peems under e-school it's no longer a lep indicator it's eb indicator so uh considered emergent bilingual and of course that has a lot to do with the way we reference students and it is a more equitable term because we see them as students who have the capacity to become bilingual because they already come with another language into our schools and then our esl numbers 562 uh the total across programs is a little over 1200 that does include our students who are native english speakers that apply to the dual language program so there are 242 native english speakers non-native spanish speakers that are enrolled in our dual language program of importance and i'll just briefly mention it is the 65 and 35 the breakout between our dual language students who are native spanish speakers

075and qualified as eb and then are native english speakers who apply to the program just because of the tec regulation in terms of our bilingual program has to continue to serve the majority being eb students so there's a forty percent can it can be no more than forty percent uh do in our dual language program that serves um the non-native spanish speaker if that makes sense there's so many nons and so i can definitely clarify um so my apologies these some these numbers here in sixth seventh and are going to be a little different than the handout you have and i have extra copies if you would like that and that's totally my fault on search queries in e-school after a while those vector lines kind of all start running together so my apologies but

076these are updated numbers here as you can see in terms of our monitor status and these are students who have already met the criteria to no longer be considered as learning the english language they already have proficiencies across all four domains speaking listening reading and writing and they've also shown proficiency in their reading star scores so this is the number of students that we have on those monitor status in terms of the fifth year monitor so the fifth year monitor continues to be fifth year monitor from here on out until they finish our at our high school and that's simply for us to be able to continue to see where former students who were receiving health services are now uh taking advantage of whether it's cte gt uh et cetera so that we can kind

077of see where they are pooling so professional development this is a district campus and teacher level so at the district i only give you a couple of them right now we're looking at redesigning our newcomer program our newcomer program at the high school specifically we have about 20 something 24 students who are considered newcomer so we are working to identify campuses districts that have a program that can week and go of serve i had a recommendation for another district so we're already in contact with them we're also part of a 50 district member think group with tea and this is around just newcomer programs and really kind of envisioning what those might look like to better serve our newcomer population at the campus level it's increasing the capacity so our coaches are working to increase

078the capacity of the folks on campus to provide that in classroom support and help drive the rigor up that's one of the things that we're really focusing on is increasing the rigor and the understanding of what rigor is and how it looks within our lesson plans but then also how it looks within our teaching and our learning stations that we have in our classrooms the other focus is sheltering practices sheltering practices if you're not familiar has been around for so many years i mean decades right sheltering practices are really about making the content comprehensible so what are strategies that will make your content comprehensible to students who are second language learners but also for students who may not have that academic rigor language yet and that could be whether the student is an english speaker

079or not an english speaker it applies to all students so sheltering practices you'll see them in avid you'll see them in avid excel you'll see them in so many of the blended learning you'll see even so many of the initiatives that we really need to focus on uh those particular strategies that that increase uh the students uh opportunity to comprehend exactly what uh the teacher is trying to teach across all all core subjects um and then for the the teacher we're really focusing on uh language development and i know we are the bilingual department but really the four domain speaking listening reading and writing and i i say this ad nauseam on our campuses the importance of really those four domains because we can't just hyper focus on the reading if our students haven't developed

080an ear for the language or the ability to speak the language to the extent that one is able to speak the language you're able to read it you're able to write it so it all really joins all together and we're really focusing on how our lesson plans show where the teacher is finding ways of really maximizing all those four domains are the t are the students practicing the listening are they practicing the speaking the reading and the writing throughout the lesson and also uh working with our teachers some of them are departmentalized so working with campuses who whose teachers are departmentalized because the core content areas also need to be language teachers and so you're teaching language through science you're teaching language through math you're teaching language through social studies so those four domains don't

081go away and they're not regulated to relegated to the to the elar slar teacher so those are our main focus on on professional development uh waivers um and so this year we have 13 teachers on on a waiver so this is an esl waiver so this means that there are some teachers who are teaching elar who are not esl certified and so we work with those teachers uh to make sure that they're they earn certification by the end of the the school year uh this year we'll focus on uh the esl supplemental 154 that's the texas test that the teachers have to take and we're going to focus hyper focus on that that the test booklet the test prep material so our coach mr coronado will be working alongside our cis stephanie malinix who focuses

082on elar and in combination create a canvas course that is self-paced for those teachers but then include checkpoints so that the teachers are working through the components and then demonstrating mastery and if they're not demonstrating mastery then we'll provide additional targeted support and include in their practice test prior to them signing up and taking the test and then we provide a reimbursement for a past test so 120 that will reimburse the teacher through our funds to encourage them to to get esl certified and of course we also have for new hires hr has included for new hires they have to be certified within six months of higher so we are focused on those teachers as well so additional resources and support this year we start going back to ice station and some of y'all are

083been here for a while you'll remember that we used to have ice station istation has made a lot of improvements one of the reasons we got eye station was because lexia which is one of the products that our campuses have is not available in spanish and so the i station makes up the difference to make sure that our students who are in dual language programming have access to a an adaptive program that serve both the development of english and the development of spanish proficiencies in literacy in language two of the the main contracts that we're working with is dr kennedy who is a dual language consultant has been really wonderful and is now helping coordinate learning walks on our campuses to make sure that we know and understand full well what we're looking for within

084our dual language classrooms provide that feedback to teachers and so she's increasing our capacity she's focusing on me on our coaches and on our administrators to really go in and and observe and be able to provide feedback specific to dual language development within our classrooms and then dr selaya is working more with the esl component and so he's working really the trauma-informed education the seo component and then the culturally relevant pedagogy and he's working with a cohort of secondary teachers they just completed their their second session with them and they'll have a third session and we're wanting to to bring together not only those teachers but if and i'll speak in a little bit about it we had a culture camp so we also had a culture camp with students secondary students to kind of

085bring them together so that the teachers are learning from the students uh which i think would be will be super powerful um and of course i mentioned the newcomer academy one of 50 le elas participating with tea to really kind of increase our capacity to offer a more robust program for our newcomers we also have a position posted for bilingual education compliance specialist and that person will really help us focus on aligning practices and this is straight up compliance lpac telpas getting our coding teams folders making sure that all our eyes are dotted our t's are crossed and this is just documentation for our students receiving eb services and then just some quick celebrations um we focus in bilingual education esl education try to focus really heavy on the equity the cultural equity the racial

086equity we hosted a group of principals this summer we did a race and culture equity uh learning exchange over at the lbj museum downtown over two days and really was able to explore the area of mlk because we know culture is not confined to the latino community so really culture and race is about across all races and not just in regards to spanish speaking and then we had the culture camp which is the one at the bottom right so those are a group of students 40 secondary students that attended the culture camp with dr celaya over at the activity center so that was at the end of september and so this is the group of students that we are going to coordinate a panel discussion so that the students are the panel and the teachers

087are learning from the students and so that will happen in january or february we're identifying what what day will work best for all those teachers and then to the far left that's our teacher cohort so those are the teachers that are working with dr zelaya to work really on understanding the newcomer experience and how to best support them in their classroom and just some more celebrations of course i always celebrate our teachers our teachers are awesome uh they participate in a dual language conference our first one i want to point that out because this was a regional conference so we invited some teachers from lockhart and some teachers from seguin this was the first regional dual language conference we're hoping to give it wings and then continue it to build the attention around how to

088do dual language effectively within the region and then hopefully attract because one of the things are our greatest struggles right now is identifying staff that is appropriately certified to the central texas area so we're hoping that the dual language conference will do that and attract people from different places especially like san antonio the houston area but also the valley to come to central texas and participate as dual language teachers and then of course the kids who doesn't love the kids so there's a picture of one of our dual language classrooms and that's my presentation thank you trustee hanson uh back on the program staff i just want to understand the number of uh teachers at goodknight miller and the high school yes ma'am how do those teachers are they teaching one subject area are they

089going in and assisting teachers or how so a little bit of both uh so these are what or what are considered our esl teachers at those secondary campuses they say say for example at the high school the teacher teaches the esol uh classes for our newcomers the english ela basically for our newcomers so teaches in esl one esl too and then there's actually two teachers here so they also assist in push and support but here at the high school they also have two ias that help with push and support uh and then at each of the miller's middle schools they have an esl person an esl teacher they focus also as as mentioned they focus on they instruct they do it english language development course for their newcomers and then they do push and support

090for other core content areas especially focused on prioritizing our eb students based on their proficiencies so if they know that the newcomer is taking algebra then they're pushing in to help support that that student in in that language we have classroom teachers that are also of course yes and yes yes of course and our the focus of our our esl coach mr coronado is really to increase the capacity of our esl coaches to else also provide the additional guidance when they're doing their plcs it's all about additional and raising capacity because we just don't have sufficient staff at each of our campuses to really focus on pushing support across the the campus so it's really about increasing our capacity so our esl coach is also going to be working right now he's done two weeks

091of observations going in i'll kind of get an idea and so right now he's going to focus on tested subjects at the high school test the subjects at the high school and then provide for other subjects [Music] sheltering practice pd thank you i thought that was it but i wanted to make sure absolutely all right trustee tell me hi thank you very much for this presentation i had a couple of clarifying questions do you have a number for the for the number of newcom students in your newcomer program right now or is that a number you could send me yeah yeah i do um let me sorry so we have currently we have 43 total and that's across the district that is 24 so the majority of them are at our high school and then

092we have six at our middle schools and then uh 22 at our elementary schools is that a number that tends to fluctuate in your experience in the district or is that a pretty consistent it's it's been a pretty consistent and i mean my tenure has been pandemic but it's it's pretty uh pretty consistent so far about 25 ish at the high school level and then at our elementary so the majority of them are from spanish-speaking countries uh so the majority of them do go into our dual language program which of course has the the rich support in the language uh at our secondary campus that's not the case um they also continue to be largely spanish-speaking so we really focus in terms of new right now in terms of the focus on new newcomer academy

093that will be for the the secondary level specifically the high school interesting so and then okay bilingual exception was one of the terms you had and you explained what the waiver was i just was curious what the bilingual exception meant so but the bilingual exception um is so the esl waiver is when the teacher ela teacher is an idsl certified so the bilingual exception would be if our like say we had a dual language classroom that's delivering slar spanish language arts and reading and the teacher is not bilingual certified so that would be an exception right now we have all our dual language classrooms covered by bilingual appropriately certified teachers okay and the last one is the term lea which is in one of your presentations oh newcomer academy or one of 50 leas local

094education agencies thank you yes that was all yes ma'am thank you very much i have sorry i had a couple of questions and it's sort of a three-part question um so my first part of it is tell me what happens with the students who are in fifth grade this year that when they move into sixth grade next year that are the original dual language cohort what will the school day what what does that look like for them next year but in part of that too i'm wondering when we started that program we had conversations at the time about how students in that dual language program would appear to be lagging behind their peers in subject areas through the through a certain trajectory until which point then they would hopefully catch up and then ideally surpass

095in many cases right and so i'm wondering if how the last year and a half has affected those students in the dual language program and also the students that are in the newcomer program are they and how fast or how quickly or how much are they adapting and rebounding now that we're more in person and we're back to a more normal day does that make sense yes um so for our students that are at the elementary campuses our focus really is on the early literacy as uh principal woody was mentioning really focusing on that early literacy and working with our teachers to understand so our our consultant dr kennedy has really been focusing on what is it about um the four components of language and then also phonemic awareness phonological awareness and then the distinguishing

096pieces uh when you're teaching the student to read in spanish as opposed to teaching the student to read in english and so really for our teachers is making that connection with our our students knowing the family so we're big on you need to know the the families as well in order to provide the best instruction for our students we're also focusing on the sheltering practices across the board not only in our esl classrooms but also in our dual language classroom sheltering instructions by and far whether the teacher is instructing in spanish or the teacher instructing in english it's really about making the content comprehensible and figuring out what are the strategies that best work for those students so we're really focusing on that um so we have seen some lag right as you were mentioning

097in terms of that development but we've also seen um significant um connections like belongingness right so when the students have come back to the campus they reconnect to the to the teacher and to the peers and so we feel like that belonging is that connectedness to one another we've walked into say our fifth grade classrooms that are dual language have been since first grade where the students are reading and writing in english and in spanish and then and then providing that support for their bilingual pairs excuse me so moving forward we have that pilot over at goodnight um that is one of our world geography sections two actually two sections that are taught in spanish for dual language pathways by tec regulations in order to be considered a dual language pathway you have to have

098two courses per grade grade level so two courses in sixth seventh and eighth so we're working with our campus administrators to figure out okay do an inventory of our staff at the at the secondary campuses to see who's best prepared to do that so we potentially would have a bilingual exception exception if we have say a secondary teacher who speaks spanish but didn't do a bilingual certification because that was in their background if their you know core content in history or core content something else and so we could do a bilingual exception and help them just like our esl waiver teacher gets the esl supplemental our bilingual our dual language at the secondary would get a bilingual supplemental so that might be a reality for us especially if we want to continue the dual language

099program and i know that our parents do want to continue to do a language program into secondary campuses we have 81 81 students currently in those fifth grade classrooms that will be going up to middle school and so are you currently envisioning that it would be just a good night or do you think that we'd be able to offer the students those opportunities both at miller and good night yeah i think it all depend on the inventory and kind of getting a good idea of our human capacity our human resources each of the campuses and then speaking with uh mr sanders and then kind of figuring out as well with our our campus principles i have had a couple of conversations with some parents that have called me and said are we continuing this because

100we want our kids to participate so i would expect almost 100 percent of parents in those fifth grade classrooms are going to want something we've also considered maybe doing where a teacher travels between both campuses and so the kids can can participate in their home campus it's just the teacher would would go to each of the campuses and provide the section well i know that the pandemic and when everybody went remote that presented particular challenges in your program and and i've talked to a number of parents and students in the program and they're just really pleased to be back and so happy about it and i think it's a really tremendous success so thank you thank you appreciate it should we take a quick break it is that clock is not correct it is 7

10128. let's come back at 7 35 thanks everybody this time i'd like to turn it over to mrs denise garcia our director and mr mike doyle our director of federal programs uh geneving board dr cardone superintendent i'm mike doyle director of state and federal programs along with denise garcia director of our finance program so tonight in answer to some questions that came through agenda prep we wanted to present to everyone the budget planning process so in this presentation you'll see that we'll cover the review of the settle up process from 2021 we'll check in on the 2122 revenue projection we'll discuss a little bit of our esser decision or discussion excuse me we'll discuss a little bit of out of our esr grants one two and three and then we'll also discuss uh priorities that

102we can we can use to move through into the 2223 budget process so first thing to consider is uh the review of the settle up process from so settle up is a process that tea follows in the fall of every school year where the actuals and the outcomes are collected through some repeal submission and then the final funding amount from the prior year is determined so a few things to think about right the settle up happens every year and traditionally there's not a lot of corrections or overages to be determined but that there is a variant with the 21 or excuse me the 2021 school year two things to consider and we'll talk talk about a little bit further in this presentation is the tax collections that the isd actually collected versus projected and then

103also the hold harmless issue from the 2021 school year this is an example of the summary of finance report that you would find on tea so just to give you an example of the near final process and i apologize for it it's it's scrambled but you can see that the amount of nuance if you will in this process is tremendous from tea based on team submission data throughout the year and as that information comes to districts we're able to see these near settle final ups or preliminary uh settle ups as of the 12th of november we're still in a near final so again looking at our settle up process from 2021 this graph shows some key information so first if you look at the line item where it says local intermediate sources that's their taxes

104right so the school district received 1.4 million dollars uh in tax collection above the projection right so there's a few things to consider in this so in the spring of 20 was when this work was done this also coincided with covid pandemic so there are a lot of things to consider so first when you're looking at tax revenue the district did set a projected base their projection on 97 percent which is atypical usually it's 99 percent but the reason for that is again covert projections or coven businesses closing uh the struggles that families are facing like i mentioned earlier we actually did collect over the 97 percent and actually collected the 99 percent also some other things to consider are that when this projection was certified it was only a projection that was certified the

10597 percent and that hayes county their appraisal district actually had some trouble meeting their deadlines as well so that further caused that delay in 97 versus 99 percent the other thing to consider is the second line item if you will is the state program revenue that's our state aid so we receive state aid based on our students their characteristics other factors if you will such as and how it plays in with their tax tax collections that we project right so you can see here that we actually we actually received a little over a million dollars more than what we expected based on our projections so you have to ask yourself is this an issue or is this a problem authentically it reflects the changes and the challenges that all districts especially san marcos faced in

1062021 it's not an issue if districts do identify these overages and and ensure that this is left unspent and that's protected in the reconciliation process further the just as a note the overage was recognized and reported in our third quarterly third quarter quarterly and annual reports to the board revenue approached excuse me i apologize the overage was reported in the third quarter quarterly report so the other issue that we wanted to talk about as well is in the review of the setup process is the hold harmless as a result of the 2021 school year so tea maintained the funding levels for school year 2021 based on student counts and information and data from 1920 so as we move forward and you'll see this is spoken to when we talk our essa grants and the timelines

107in which districts receive their essa grants ta is expecting uh districts to use their sr2 grant to make up that hold harmless gap if you will and you'll see that as we move forward in the 21 22 projection so this information here again as we discuss our uh our review of our uh settle up process from 2021 culminates the numbers that we've already discussed right our foundation overpayment is 2.5 roughly and then our hold harmless gap is 1.9 roughly totaling up to about 4.5 keep in mind a few things these are overage payments based on the the discrepancy if you will of the 97 versus 99 percent and the actual receiving of payments uh based on our student information right we did not or nor will we pay anything back this is just the gap

108that will be made up with sr2 and also going forward in the budgeting process as we check in on that budgeting process or the revenue projection process if you will for 2122 this graph is really key information so if you look here you can see the comparison of enrollment versus ada so if you look at the far left column the actual student counts through the march 21 you can see that our enrollment was a little over 7 900 with our ada being a little over 7 100. the projection if you will for 2122 based in april of 21 our projected enrollment was 81.49 with an ada of 74.28 and you can see that that culminates to a projective revenue of a little over 81 almost 82 million 81.9 if you will million in projected revenue

109so we took a little bit we wanted to look and massage these numbers and not massage them excuse me we wanted to use this data current and see how does that influence our our projection going forward into 2122 so a few things i wanted to point out after the first six weeks ada you can see that enrollment is 8187 with the first six weeks ada being 7058 and you can see the difference and how that influences our projected revenue and it comes out to that 77.9 million now a few things to consider first the ada is taken based on refined ada so it's not just one six weeks it's a multiple uh average or your best six weeks 88 so last the second six weeks uh second six weeks closed on friday the new ada

110number for the second six weeks that i got this morning uh is over 7200 so we're seeing that ada increase on in comparison so when you input that updated ada it does bring up that number significantly the other thing to consider is based on the information that we've heard prior to this presentation and the work that the school district is doing we're seeing those gains and i really do believe that we'll see that ada increase and get closer to that projected number and not that 7000 number and one other thing i want to mention too it's quite interesting thursday of last week the tea announced what they're calling the 2122 operational minutes adjustment so it's it's not a hold harmless but for school districts who are experiencing that loss and ada in the first six

111weeks of this current year ta is going to provide support uh to help that make up that gap because it was just announced there's there's some methodology and some more information that school districts are going to learn about going forward but it is something to consider as we move forward in this process the next part of the discussion is esser and our s are grants and so going back to the timeline um you can see we have essa grant one two and three essa grant one was announced i would say roughly april ish of 20. the grant application was submitted in june of 20 and the grant period actually got extended to september however we worked really diligently to identify those costs and also support our students throughout the coveted pandemic of last year and

112we've been able to exhaust those resources with our sr1 sr2 and sr3 it's very interesting right so you can see how the timelines are switched if you remember back in june i came to the board to discuss our sr3 grant and you can see that we actually submitted our application in june of 21. this grant does roll to or is the grant period ends september 23 with the carryover to 24. that's why we've been actually moving on sr3 quicker than s or two the reason being is and this speaks to the whole harmless makeup that ta is uh asking districts to do with their sr2 their plan actually went all the way up to the united states department education so districts didn't get their actual application until august so we submitted our sr2 application august

11321 that grant goes to september 22 carrying over to 23 and you can see our allocations right sr2 is 7.3 million with uh with as of november 21 we have a remaining balance of 4.5 in sr2 and again our allocation 6.16.4 in sr3 with the remaining of 14.3 but there's also something to consider about sr3 tea released only two-thirds of that 16.4 there were still parts of the sr-3 plan that had to be approved by the federal government here in december districts will then amend the application to then pick up the additional one-third so that that's why you see that's only a difference of roughly one and a half two million dollars we're we're working on two thirds right now but it is a guarantee we'll get that amendment and it's just going forward so

114with that all being said are there any questions or any thoughts as we move forward in our our process into setting priorities for 20 to 23 budget yeah i have a question you mentioned a newly announced initiative by the state that was not the same as the hold harmless but that would affect our income can you explain that a little more and we will know more about it yes ma'am um that was the uh is called the 21 2122 operational minutes adjustment and like i said it's a newly announced plan from tea that will help leas or districts right it will support those districts who are experiencing that ada loss from the first six weeks of this current school year so with that additional support there's still much to be learned about this program but

115it will be a benefit if we see a gap if we see that discrepancy in our refined ada from the first six weeks okay and is it an accurate description of the hold harmless to say that that the state kept our funding levels the same during the covid pandemic but when we had fewer students enrolled and all of those other things that they used to measure how much money they're going to get us when those metrics weren't met they're now they're now expecting us to use the esser funds to make up that gap correct that is that is correct to say the sr2 grant um the the expectation from ta is to that districts use their sr2 grant to make up that hold harmless okay thank you so thank you mr doyle and ms garcia

116and i appreciate dr barton's work also in putting this together and answering the questions that i had about the 4.5 million dollars and how that was reported out and i've got some things that i want to talk about in terms of financial reporting going forward that'll hold for another time um but i appreciate all that explanation and how comprehensive and thorough it was and i understand now the process better and the timelines i still have concerns i know uh mr doyle you said that that the settle up process you know generally isn't this rocky but we in the six years that i've been on the board at least the first few years it was often rocky because they would grossly underestimate or grossly overestimate and we were sort of playing this game of ketchup which

117the biennium was the finance law in the biennium was supposed to fix that right and then obviously now we've gone through this whole pandemic and that put everything into out of whack and so we're now once again in an adjustment period so i'm wondering one if you have any sense of you know will this be steadier next year or is this something that we i mean i know you can't first you don't have a magic 8-ball um but if you have any thoughts on that um i also want to make clear just to rewrite what we just said is that that the sr2 funds those are basically invisible i mean that's just going to our operating procedure to shore up what we didn't get from the state that's not really any extra money to us

118that just puts back into the budget what ta didn't a part of the sr2 uh is making up that hold harmless because our hold harmless is not the entire allocation essence but a significant portion it's not like it's not that we can do new things because we still have to pay for the other things that we were doing previously with that money right yes okay so the other point and i know that you just talked about the operational minutes adjustments which i will be hopeful that that will come through because i want to make sure that i understand this correctly that if that doesn't happen or some other um the ta doesn't do something else then what we're looking at is another four million dollar deficit based on the first six weeks projection so that

119would be the 4.5 that we already don't have to give back but we don't get and then what we have still have to pay for and now another four million dollars ostensibly or hopefully some portion less based on what we're doing and also that tea will come through but we need to be cognizant of that yes we need we do need to be cognizant of that but you know keep in mind that a portion of that 4.5 that you're referencing is the hold harmless that sr2 is going to make up so it's not going to have that impact on on our our local funds that was the first 4.2 but i'm talking about this ford this back on that other slide with the enrollment and the ada numbers there's another 4 million between what we

120projected and what is now being correct and so again that's something i wanted to point out with transparency and and looking at our our ada every six weeks i eagerly pulled that number this morning to see how significant of a change it was and it it has increased from that 7000 to 72. so we we hope with the initiatives that we're doing in the district uh that um we see that ada to uh continue to increase certainly but it also you know i think we have so many challenges that we need to address and that we you know we're trying to solve all of it right and that money is not going to go that far in trying to solve all of the challenges that we are currently all of us here trying to overcome

121so that's sobering um i think that is my question or comment in terms of that i don't know if they doctor saw me other comments you just brought up the estimated ada that's so you're you're telling us what it was in the first six weeks and then you said we've already increased the number of the attendance number so when this projected revenue is actually calculated is it calculated over the course of the whole school year what's the time period correct so so when you look at projected ada in that april column that is a projected 88 number right so it does factor in uh an entire school year if you will so the the column on the right uh to kind of clear up any kind of misconception if you will is only the actual

122for the first six week six weeks ada but it will require a reconciliation that we like the same sort of settle up process that we're still going under from last year will have to go through next summer this time next year for this year and this is the trend at the moment correct right um okay so we were projecting approximately eight point eight percent absenteeism and in april of 21 yes ma'am okay thank you so my question and i've got more questions about the reporting but i will say those for later but um my one question is if you all could find a way starting next month to report out to us on what this like how this is trending on a month-to-month basis i think that would be helpful for us to see and

123specifically the the impact it's having to the general fund because we've made some big commitments with the general fund monies and i know we got a great auditor's report tonight but they also you know they were saying two to six months is standard practice and where after our expenditures we are looking around three but then if we lose some of this that will have an effect on the general fund also so if we can be as um and i know that there was a report that was sent to the board and included in the board book that sort of put all of the general fund information together in a snapshot i found that really helpful and i would appreciate seeing that on a monthly basis it and doesn't necessarily need to be presented but at

124least included in the board book and even if it could be somehow incorporated into the regular reports that we're getting on a monthly and quarterly basis so that we can be tracking that as we are making decisions yes ma'am we can put that in our board report that mr fernandez works like we can start listing that i think that would be really helpful to see all those things together um because you know i think it's been discussed before but we we're talking about different pools of money right but but they're all going to this to the same boat so um thinking of them holistically is helpful trustee aridando do you have a question yes thank you thank you president halsey as i start my line of questions for my colleagues benefit and the benefit of

125staff i'm going to reference page 103 of our board book so it's on page 103 it gives us the original budget a lot advan including original revenue projections based on this information our current expected expenditures for 2021 2022 remain 85 million 422 243 is that correct i don't have the board book in front of me so uh 103 is lamar never mind it says 100 on here but it's not page 100. yeah it's page 72 it's june of 2021 june 20 78. sorry i don't know that's my fault that this this um just so we're clear on this that um the next few pages of those board of the board budgets that's something that i pulled together looking back over the last six months of the board books because i wanted to sort of compare

126how the budget had changed so that's my um semi-professional presentation so that i should be held accountable hold responsible for that not staff um in terms of the pagination etc i just wanted to have it in one place then include my very long preamble to my question what is the current projected budget so right right now our our revised budget our revenue is still set at 81 980 182 and then our expenses are at the 92 million 689 644 which minus all of our budget amendments that you guys have approved so far this also includes the 7 million right now but we're down to um i'm sorry i don't have my glasses on 28. mike is that 28. 29. 29 million okay at this point and that's that is with a uh the fund balance

127of the previous audit fund balance this is not updated yet so our fund balance now is at 48 so actually we're going to be above we're going to be about 38 is our fund balance now okay i guess my question is with all the documentation we have in front of us do we have a budget forecast that reflects an ada of 7000 to where revenue has decreased from 81 million to 77. no that's that's prior year what you saw with that 7 000 number is for revenue projection working forward into the 22 23 school year okay that's so that's not how it's like it says 20 21 20 22 22. sorry if you go back two slides or one slide right so 21 22. but working in 2122 projecting forward but they would still take

128that money i mean we would still be where we are now where we have to be reconciling this year against next year and with the loss of funds that would have come out of the general fund correct right right so that would just show up on next year's but it would be actually but i mean we're still losing we would still be losing the money right okay do you follow okay yeah i need it do you have more questions okay um all right so i mean i think in terms of goals um and goal setting that seems like a whole separate workshop um unless people are prepared tonight to speak on what i mean my objective tonight was to sort of have an understanding of what where we've been where we're at now sort of

129starting to think about the process for setting up next year starting after the new year um unless the other people have trusted hanson i'd like to have a schedule of when we're going to have these workshops and i would like them to be separate from the board meeting because it just drags it on too long so it's of a date any sort of days days of the week preference mondays well i will talk to i know that we're you know heading into the holidays and we do want to start the budgeting process as early as possible this year because we want to make sure that we are all managing all these many different um but i will talk to president cantu about maybe setting up a budget workshop for right after the new year um

130where we could start with the projecting out and goal setting for that period and then sort of set the timeline up for the spring if that makes sense to everybody i don't want to set a date tonight without her present but yeah and i think perhaps if we broke it up into smaller sessions it might be more effective i would prefer more effective smaller sessions with fixed close times like two hour max so that we were all a little more able to participate instead of just waiting to get out yeah i think that makes sense and i think that now we have a sense of where we're at yes mr appenda ah yes um i think we have a monday in between agenda prep and and the actual board meeting is that agreeable with anybody

131or if you want to do the fourth monday of the month i don't know whatever in january i think january gets a little crazy because the holidays but we can ask to figure out which one my preference is mondays because of work that makes it easier for me we'll see if we can figure out which monday we don't already have an agenda prep or school board meeting on in january and try to schedule a two-hour budget workshop for that evening where we can talk about the process for the spring budget process for figuring out the spring spring projections set our goals and what that timeline will look like and get an update on where we're at with this budget process which seems like really okay thank you thank you thank you all right with that

132we will move into the consent agenda items and i know there are consent agenda items but and and we will take them all at once but prior to having a motion i'm going to ask dr cardona to explain uh b c and d because i think that we need a little more context for those items sure okay actually i'll let the experts present on items so item b i'll just talk real quickly is consider approval of contract between gramercy's specialty clinic bllc contractor san marcos consolidated independent school district and authorized the superintendent and that is uh so regarding the gramercy contract april chapman and i can speak to that it's uh something we're budgeting in with sr3 uh it's a if you want to speak a little bit about the service um it's a it's

133an additional support service for uh students to seek counseling um in terms of in response to covet and the trauma that our students have faced item c is consider approval of contract between star autism support and san marcos cisd and miss frank i believe is here to answer any questions on actually item c and actually item d consider approval of contract between trinity educational services and san marcos cisd do you have any specific questions or the star autism grant is not new it's um something that we've had in the in last year so it is a grant that provides training materials and supports we have them come out and consult with our acl teachers to provide that in the acl classrooms the trinity educational services the trinity educational services we are currently contracting with them

134to provide evaluation support we um we have a numerous evaluations right now for special education services um and so we are contracting out for speech evaluations and eligibility for special education evaluations for fies any questions no but i appreciate the clarification trustee hanson i was just ready to please i moved that we approve the consent agenda items as listed second second from trustee are dondo all in favor please subscribe oh yes sorry uh thank you miss halsey my only uh request moving forward with the grammar gramercy specialty clinic pllc contract is if the board can be provided at whatever staff's interval is deemed most appropriate but i would be interested in seeing the usage of students you know how many of our students where those students are enrolled essentially who's using the service and where

135and how frequently so thank you i actually have a question will that be provided on our campuses or is that an off campus it will be clinical services on our campuses great justin i'd appreciate that as well it was a good point and i'd also like to know the numbers of the tea chat that we're already providing i i've never seen the numbers on that sort of uh usage of that program as well so if we could get both of those numbers on some sort of a regular interval i would appreciate it i think as an update to the board after the first semester on sort of sel programming because i know it's being integrated throughout just throughout the district in classrooms and campuses including those services would be helpful all right um all in

136favor please raise your hand anybody opposed zero josie hernando uh yes miss halsey uh seeing is how our police chief has uh joined us this evening i am going to request that we move up um the consideration and approval of the amended school resource officer program interlocal agreement between the san marcos consolidate independent school district and city of san marcos i think that's just fine dr cardena please please if you want to come up here uh to the podium thank you for joining us today we appreciate you so just to give a little context the the city council had some amendments that we sent to y'all four specific ones there are chief and myself city city manager burt limbreres and some of our executive cabinet mr wozniak we met with last week to discuss some

137of these and there are a couple there are a couple i'll let chief explain that we feel might be problematic from a legal standpoint if you know there's a situation chief can correct me if i'm wrong if there's a situation involving something that the police have to be involved in quickly that necessitates administration not being involved i mean i could use a specific example maybe something inappropriate with a minor of some kind that the police already investigating there would be potential for problems for always having two people in the room that make sense i'll achieve well good late evening my name is stan standards i serve as a police chief here in san marcos i'm also a resident of san marcos and for most of you i am new i'm here with my wife beth

138tomorrow marks our one year anniversary serving the citizens of san marcos so we started november 16th i am retired from the abilene police department did 26 years there my wife served as the police and city chaplain there before we relocated to san marcos and we're very pleased to be here so school resource officers are not new to me we had we employed eight school resource officers in the school and the abilene isd and tonight what's before you is an interlocal agreement for our citizens that's a memorandum of understanding where we execute a written agreement between us and the san marcos city council you previously voted by unanimous vote 7-0 to approve the inter-local agreement as it was stipulated however the city council provided written amendments for your consideration i believe that night there were as

139many as 11 introduced amendments i believe that you have the only ones that passed by a vote of four to three so i'm going to specifically reference for the benefit of everybody in the room on page one under goals and objectives it was important to four of the seven council members that we educate our students on how to file grievances against police officers that was approved to be candid i can live with that if a citizen yes ma'am um justin hasn't would that happen so if a citizen approached the school resource officer and said hey i have concerns about your conduct what could i do with that then i told the council i would absolutely expect the officer to take that moment okay i didn't know education had to be educating all the students in

140the campus no and i was wondering how that would okay thank you sir i have a question chief thank you so much for being here to help us work through this i appreciate it um and welcome to san marcos thank you um it's nice to have you here um so just for my own notification on this with the grievance process in this case then go through our district grievance process or does it go to to you how does that work so the inter-local agreement stipulates that the regulation so to speak of the school resource officers falls within the wheelhouse of the police chief it's actually stipulated by law so we are a civil service agency which means we are governed by the texas local government code chapter 143 and chapter 143 specifies that i as

141the department head can basically complain and then be the final arbiter of discipline nobody else outside of that so in the case of fire services it'd be chiefly stevens so all such complaints would ultimately come back to us we have a classification system we classify the complaint as a class one or a class two and then it would be investigated and ultimately mitigated okay i'm going to draw your attention to sorry are you are you sorry i've got one more question on that point if you're done so you said that you would be fine with with keeping that in i am yes i would expect the officers to take the time to explain to the students and would it be also amenable to you because i think we've had this conversation on our board about

142making sure that that our constituents know how to file grievances within our district right that's a that's a really important outlet for our students and our parents um to be able to to fix a situation that is problematic for them right for us also and so we we put that procedure available to people on our website could we also include just a line or two with a link that would say if you know for information on filing a grievance with this school resource officer please follow blah blah blah yes with one request yes madam president would you please consider to file a commendation or complaint sure we typically get focused on just the complaint process but absolutely i appreciate that suggestion i think it's great and i would ask then um that that's writing notes

143right now because that seems to me like that would help to to to satisfy that request also yes absolutely thank you you're welcome draw your attention to section 5.0 for the people who don't have copies i'm going to reference what's called duty of school resource officers specifically for the school board of trustees i'm on page four and i'm gonna look at 5.4 here is what your superintendent was referencing earlier the council approved by a vote of 4-3 that they added a sentence that says any such counseling will be conducted with a minimum of two people present in addition to the recipient of the counseling so let me back up for just a second the sentence before that says to counsel public school students in special situations such as students suspected of engaging in criminal misconduct

144when the officer deems necessary or is requested by the principal or the principal's designee or the smcisd superintendent or the superintendent's designate i explained to council that i can't agree to this because there's a provision of this that's not lawful to counsel public schools in special situations such as students suspected of engaging in criminal misconduct please know that the records associated with juvenile offenders and juveniles are defined in law as age of 10 up to 16. those are protected by statute specifically family code 58.008 b so i could not allow a third party in the room when the school resource officer is counseling a student specifically about a criminal justice matter so what i would ask you all to consider is you can read that first of all you can vote as is my recommendation

145would be you need to redact such as students suspected of engaging in criminal misconduct because we're perfectly fine if we're counseling the students outside of a law enforcement issue i think they should have a witness i'm okay with that but if it's a law enforcement issue where we're working on probable cause reasonable distinction or we may even be taking the person into custody by law i cannot allow that third party president and i do not have enough resources to call in another cop off the street to provide that witness so i would ask for your consideration 5.4 you have any questions before i move on that sounds reasonable okay 5.5 to answer questions that students may have about texas criminal or juvenile laws that's existing language but they added as well as how to report

146crimes and violations of their rights i can live with that it's uh congruent with the free first suggestion and then this is the last one i'm going to draw your attention to page seven under 12.0 evaluation now this obligates you all so you get to ultimately decide what the school board of trustees will be obligated to but the council is asking you to consider the s m c isd shall create a mechanism by which to collect feedback from caregivers regarding the sro program do you have any questions on that one miss halsey please mr i don't know thank you president halsey chief sandridge it's my understanding that through the sros program with the school safety center there's already a mechanism in place that provides some type of opportunity for not only feedback from caregivers and

147students but the teachers themselves is that to your recollection true is this already happening somewhere and it's not the isd's responsibility to do it yet it is true that the your isd and your police department are in a grant driven research project and it's a couple of years in duration it's funded actually by the national institute of justice through the bureau of justice assistance and what they are trying to assess is the efficacy of school resource officer programs that have specific goals and metrics for determining success it's my understanding that you have two campuses that are participating in this ongoing research beyond that i would defer to your superintendent but i think that's what you're referencing okay thank you that was adequate information so dr codona can you speak to that because in my mind

148and my sort of thinking about this um i really approached our stu our sro program is it's a part and partnership of our district administration um that's why i was sort of asking like where i'm surprised actually that we don't have a grievance process internally for it right because i really see it as a team and that um i understand that that the ultimate responsibility for your officers lies with you but i really see them working you know cooperatively with our staff and with our administration and so i think if we were going to to undertake the efforts of doing such a feedback program i would not like it to be separated out i would want it to be in concert and in correlation with other things that we do throughout the district around safety

149and responsibility for safety and student counseling et cetera et cetera so maybe mr wozniak can help me out here good evening so there's there's there's a misperception surrounding this grant there will be no specific feedback for our sro program in any kind of evaluation type of piece of it so we started with the high school and good night and we're now with miller doing this grant for instance the high school had a goal to educate the students and the staff to better understand what an sro's role is so they took a pre-test right they gathered some data and then they did a little bit of education took some some online things and then they had a post survey that showed whether they met that goal or not so it has absolutely nothing to do with

150any kind of feedback in that sense and then goodnight did something similar with relationships and now miller's in the process of doing that so i've heard that mentioned a couple times with you know let's wait to see what this research shows and it's it's not like that at all it's it's more for our own benefit and then they will take some of that data that they've gathered from multiple districts that they've worked with to try to improve the sro program as a whole but there will be no feedback as far as well this is what san marcos needs to do better this is what they're doing well this is how they need to grow so that kind of answers about the grant so really it's right it's totally separate than than what we're talking about

151which which chief mentioned we believe what the what the city council is wanting is more of a survey put out to families that we would create or if if tesla school safety center has something that we could use or help us create that be even better and then we'd get some input from them um on how how we think the sro program is doing from a stakeholder standpoint dr sami yeah i think input from our community about the sros is an extremely valuable thing my question is around how that input would be used and who would have access to it right so if we're required to uh to conduct this survey and collect these data are are we then required to share them with the police department are we then so what what would you

152see um chief what would you see is the benefits or drawbacks of this sort of thing and do you have any opinion about it i think as soon as your superintendent shared it unless somehow you had a confidentiality afforded an executive session it becomes a public record as soon as it's shared with the school board of trustees so ultimately everybody would have access to it you would expect that i would be very interested in the data and you can bet my city council would be very interested in the data so what would ultimately be done with it i would suspect it would probably frame future conversations about this very agreement okay trustee hanson uh do we uh this is for dr cardone do we already have some survey that we could attach this to rather

153than doing another separate survey or and then be able to piece out this information or i don't know we do have survey when we talk we do have the mechanism to do kind of a holistic approach with this as part of a holistic like in the year looking at different programs we work with qualtrics so the name qualtrics you heard in the equity audit so we we could develop we have we would have access to um i mean do i sound as bad as i sound we do have access to what other districts are doing around the country like thousands of other districts are doing in terms of surveying and i will say that we would not send a survey out about the sros without it going through the chief and the city legal department

154first right so that you know we're sending something out i did tell him that i don't have a problem doing some type of program evaluation because i'm fairly confident the majority of parents would really support the program as it is but it would be a conversation between us you we would bring that to the board obviously because you have to approve the interlocal agreement so i would imagine that you would see that survey before it goes out also to weigh in on it okay so it wouldn't be he might be missing something wouldn't be more extra work for the district no we i mean we're starting to put in program evaluations for a lot of our things that coming out of covid that we want to see if if what we're doing is right in

155front of communities and kids cause more work you know so if we if we accepted this um i'm sorry the language you have there in front of you if we accepted that that point number four um does it give us the leeway to spend a year or so figuring out what that what that survey and research mechanism looks like because i don't want to commit to something that then we have to suddenly produce quickly because i think this is not the sort of thing that should be produced in haste like there's plenty of research and data and we need to be thoughtful and um and comprehensive and so how it's integrated into our other efforts so that it because just the standalone thing strikes me as strange so right their suggested language does not have

156an implementation implementation time frame and if i could also piggyback on your thought it says specifically by which to collect feedback from caregivers regarding the sro program i can tell you for purely selfish reasons i'd be very curious about your staff and everybody on all campuses so their perceptions of school resource officers and i welcome all feedback good and bad okay great um thank you so much any other questions trustee rodondo there's one more do you have to go over right uh if i missed it tell me which page you're looking at i may have missed it i didn't know if he had you gone through all was the fourth and this is just for a conversation i don't have a question one i think i did go through four yeah you did yeah i

157did i don't see i think that's all of them okay thank you all right thank you um so shall we go ahead and take action on this while we're here treasury eredando thank you president halsey i guess individually this process has been incredibly bizarre for me watching it unfold if i can be brutally honest with the six of you all this came to us and we approved it unanimously several months ago and something somewhere has happened in which now we've been given directive to do additional things that i think just are outside of the purview of the isd or what we can do effectively i mean even the results of the survey have to go back to the city and to the police chief himself to where they would i guess possibly implement those amended

158changes and so i don't know how to put into words where i'm going with this except that i'm in favor of the contract that we approved several months ago and that we voted on unanimously and so that's kind of where i am right now and so i just kind of wanted to throw that out those initial feelings and that perspective as we have this conversation trustee hanson i agree to a point um i don't understand why the city sent us a contract and the city council came back and amended their own contract that they sent to us uh it's a little confusing to me if this was really important they would have put it in at the beginning or wait till next year's contract i don't have a problem approving it except for redacting that

159part on 5.4 but that you know that's my only thing is i i want that redacted because i don't want us to get into legal trouble but it's frustrating to keep reviewing and reviewing and reviewing this same thing right trustee viapando did you did you have a comment uh i just wanted to point out that but on 5.4 that we've needed to get that done but i don't see any problem with the auditions for me as long as this is it doctor tell me this came to us from the city yeah so we approved that we remember the original approval so this came back to us from the city council just right when they went to approve it they made these changes okay then i um i would like to move that we make two

160changes to what they sent us the first being in 5.4 removing uh such as students suspected of engaging in criminal misconduct and in 12.1 adding collecting feedback from caregivers caregivers staff and students and then moves that we approve this uh interlocal agreement i just have one follow-up stress here trustee saw me uh thank you president halsey so i guess and again this leads to part of my confusion the city council voted it sounds 4 30 to send us this contract approved by that 4-3 or however that vote went down for it being as written but tonight we are potentially making two changes two changes that i theoretically support so does that mean it goes back to council for them to approve the two changes is that okay just making sure that this thing is still

161not fully baked after tonight if we do this right and i guess that's kind of where i am is as of right now i don't know how our sro program is like operating without a contract and so i just wanted to reference that again we voted on this thing a couple months ago so if we vote with the proposed changes then it would then go back to city council for possible approval correct i don't know how their vote went yes okay it's not they didn't approve it with those changes and as long as we sign it then we're good and as long as they sign it right if they want to bring it back again tell them no that they'll have to approve it again um and until then is our sro program operational that

162doesn't change housing thank you they're operating under the previous contract yes okay i second the second from trustee hanson and yeah well in just a second i wanted anybody else to comment um so i um agree this process is a little bit backwards but um i know prior to the pandemic we were having regular at some interval meetings with our board and or members of the board and the superintendent in the cabinet with members of the city council and the city council uh cabinet and the county i can't remember what we were calling those meetings because now i have pandemic brain the co it was sort of the core four but there were the core four regular meetings and i think those have sort of fallen off given all the the emergencies that we've all

163been dealing with but hopefully in the spring we might be able to bring back one of those meetings if not two of those meetings and i think an appropriate topic for consideration at that meeting would be looking at this and how do we review this thoughtfully and comprehensively but also in the context of our ongoing um comprehensive uh equity audit because i think that that's a that's a large conversation with many people involved but is an important one and i know i'm going to be looking in december if not or december or january for the next report from the equity audit and sort of what measures we are implementing based on those recommendations and where we see our path forward and how that's all working because i think this obviously has so many pieces that

164go together and talk about attendance right and and and everything that we've been talking about tonight so all right without further ado um all in favor of the motion at hand please raise your hand one two three four and all opposed two so we will make those approve those changes with the detail um in the motion four to two thank you thank you chief um gabby all right what time are we at here guys okay 8 38. um let's go back to items for action and consider approval of the 2021 comprehensive financial report that we were seeing earlier this evening correct do we have more information any questions trust me that we approve second from trustee biapondo any other questions discussion all in favor please raise your hand opposed that's 6-0 i said seven before

165sorry we're missing six i just want to command our financial our people handle our finances for such a wonderful audit you all did a great job and i appreciate all the hard work of everybody i agree i know we put you all through your paces and we you know ask a lot and um demand a lot but you really are terrific and we appreciate it um okay consider approval of district and campus improvement plans dr cardona trustee ardando president halsey i'm going to make a motion that we approve the district and campus improvement plans as presented second from trustee via pondo any questions any comments without that we'll take a vote um all in favor of approving the plans as presented raise your hand that'll be six zero please thank you and consider approval of

166the board policy update number 118 all nine hundred and some pages of it thank you dr bios um yes trustee arredondo uh thank you president halsey make a motion that we approve board policy update 118. bye second a second from trustee mejia any questions here we all read all night trustee hanson has a question i have a question on page 105 of our board book a board's designee cannot further delegate the authority to receive these resignations to another individual that means all resignations have to come to dr cardona is that correct um there were some there were some exceptions because that was included in the recording that i listened to multiple times right so he could ask us to say that dr baez can also accept resignation at the beginning besides doctor it could be

167dr cardona and somebody else or just somebody else superintendent okay okay okay thank you for clarifying that other questions all right um all in favor of uh i am confused yes please we have two options here what exactly are we approving on update 118 not the board policy the human resources update from the biennium yep thank you and confused no worries um all right so all in favor of accepting the 900 and odd page board policy update please raise your hand all opposed 6-0 um now we are at the consideration of an approval of board operating procedures and i would like to pull this from tonight's agenda and have a conversation at our next agenda private because it these are really the the rules that govern i skip something you're on d i believe madam

168president the bed local policy oh i thought that wasn't contained in the other one sorry discussion and possible action to modify board president board policy bed local dr baez so this one actually is similar okay so usually the board president can if you have 30 speakers and you have 30 minutes and they say all 30 are going to have one minute now the board has to authorize the board president to do that so this change in policy is y'all saying the board president can say what they were saying before does that make sense so when would we do that when do we do that and there were two options weren't there yes do we do that at the beach meeting or can we do it no this is just the one when the officers are

169elected i mean i don't know when we're supposed to do that so president halsey there's yes trustee here donald go ahead uh yes i am gonna suggest requests that this item be postponed as well mainly because i think there's some clarifying issues that we're running into based on the comments of some of my colleagues right however also because i don't know like when people come to speak to this board there's a set standard or set expectation i'm gonna speak i'm gonna have three minutes to speak on whatever issue good bad indifferent congratulatory or not and so i really want to have that conversation with my colleagues that i think regardless of circumstance instance or frequency of speaker i think every citizen who shows up should be entitled to their three minutes in front of us

170so anyway with all that being said if we can table this item or pull it from tonight's agenda as well i would that's what i'm advocating for yeah i hadn't recognized that that conflict until now thank you all for bringing that up i think that there is a conflict here between the the approval of this local policy and the um discussion and changes that we are looking to make to our board operating procedures so i think we should take that as one conversation and as i was going to say i would like to hold off on the board operating procedures from tonight because in part and they really are the guidelines that dictate our our operations and behaviors and procedures and we don't have one of our members here and i think it's important to

171have that conversation among all of us and plus we just got a new revision from mr cruz today and there's some other changes that i wanted to talk about so i think we should move that to to no december trusty hansen also i thought we were going to try out some of these before we actually adopt them such as having the board books ready the monday before the meeting to see how that impacts the staff that was my understanding if i'm wrong then i think we should try out at least that one if not some of the others to see how is that gonna mainly impact ms loeb but also all the people that have prepare items especially when we have sometimes we have agenda prep it's not very often and next monday we have

172our board meeting so which will probably be the case in december because the holidays december and i think january off i think it's the following tuesday so right we're going to make exceptions on those or you know exactly what but i'd like to try it out like say for december to see if that's how many extra man hours and how many extra supplements we get at the board meeting which i don't really like getting those because i don't have time to read them ahead of time i think in favor of trying it out if it means we get the board the board book more than three days ahead of the board meeting so if we could have that triumph period i'd be all for that and i'm perfectly happy with changing with postponing the operating

173procedures i would ask if it's possible for us to discuss and vote on it at our agenda prep meeting or is that outside of our we've been trying not to take votes but i think that we could certainly if everybody would be prepared to have any comments any questions any suggestions that they wanted to make ready to either to submit in writing for the agenda prep meeting if you're unable to attend or to present at the agenda front meeting so we can collate them all there and then get them together and distribute hopefully a week in advance of the board meeting in the board book and then we could do hopefully what will be because we will have already worked out those things a a quick approval in the meeting on in december if that

174makes if everybody is okay with that yep that's the moving item d and d dnd please yep all right then that we still good okay we'll move to uh item f consider a resolution to vote for candidates for the board of directors of the caldwell appraisal district we will take f g and h all together and we need a presentation mr fernandez welcome you learn something new every day so today i learned a little bit about um appraisals so i first want to just thank alicia gunther she's a godsend and she helped me well she'll help us get through this process so with caldwell county we have we're entitled to 187 votes out of 5 000 and we have eight candidates to choose from and we can delegate the votes however we like to one

175person equally to all eight it's truly up to us yes ma'am do i see very pando yes yes we had one candidate reach out to us that yes reached out to us and asked for the votes who was that estonia villalobos that's him okay or caldwell that's for caldwell yeah trustee ardano thank you yes i'll make a motion that we delegate our allotment of votes to miss phil libos i'll second that okay any questions comments and then let's take a vote on designating uh our 187 votes to sonia villalobos to represent us in the board of directors of the caldwell county appraisal district all in favor post 6-0 for miss via lobos please all right next up is guadalupe thank you and we have we're entitled to 54 votes out of five thousand for five

176directors we have five nominees and once again we can delegate those votes to any five members or one member in particular again do we have anybody contact us not at this we did not have to my knowledge anybody from guadalupe county reach out to us but they still have the previous superintendent as the superintendent of schools here so you know trustee like to make a recommendation i'm trustee hanson i move that we just divide our votes between all of the people applying i'll second questions comments okay let's take a vote on assigning our 54 votes between the five people which will not be quite even that's not divisible by five i do know that one so 54 54 yes you can 54 divided by five right in order in order and okay order the other

177don't give the odd numbers out there oh should we just do 50 of them yeah just do 10. if we can only do equal 50 divided by five yep okay that's ten ten each two eight two five four math i'm gonna need y'all to go to all right all in favor of dividing up 50 votes among the five uh people seeking this appointment on the guadalupe appraisal district i'll raise your hand all opposed that is 6-0 and we have to have some fun right i move on i'm sorry yes hayes county hayes county that all of our votes go towards joe castillo he served us well all these years and i think he'll continue to do so i actually have a question is it 1054 votes out of 5 000 still out of 7 000.

1787 000 yes ma'am questions comments all in favor of designating our votes to joe castillo and that is 6-0 thank you especially to mr cosio who isn't here but for his faithful service on our behalf um can we keep moving or do we need to break because i'm real okay all right let's go to item i discussion regarding dress code for teacher staff paraprofessionals dr cardona could you please provide us an update and information on this so human resources will be sending out some updated information to our teachers and staff there is a section that says no genes in schools and then on the next page if you look down there is principal discretion is given so we're going to move that sentence of principle discretion and move it up to the the section that

179i think is causing some confusion to give our principles gratitude and lay you know leeway and working with their campus staff who are working hard this school year uh so that we can take care of that and then we will send that information out to them they sign for their staff handbooks so we want to to create a process where they get that second update the amended update so that they know their principles and we met with the principals last thursday and explained the glitch and how they can take care of it and we have some very innovative principals that know how to read really well can use the system so i'm sure they will take advantage of that okay so can i just make sure that i understand then um that it that at

180the principal's discretion staff will be able to wear jeans appropriate jeans and and school t-shirts and school shirts that represent the isd or their individual campus and that that will also include staff who might work at multiple campuses so if they fall under a special department that they will also be included even if they report to a director or somebody who is not a principal correct are big buckets avid dual language programs character education programs sel all those things that the difficult year or ccmr university days purple pride days all those fit under that okay that's great and i and just my personal preference is that it not be held out as a carrot i think our teachers are under such duress and working so hard and sort of saying that as good rewards you

181get to wear jeans that doesn't it doesn't bolster um the sort of moral support that i feel like we really need to to surmount for them and just you know so as we can treat them as much as like the professionals that they are i would ask that um kindly of y'all and appreciate that support for them um because i know everybody is working so hard this year and great things are happening but it is hard okay so i don't know that we actually need to take a vote on this item unless anybody has any further concerns or questions we can move on all right um we have already taken care of item j so now we are at item k discussion possible action regarding the dissolution of the central office subcommittee and that was

182a request that i had made to the agenda trustee hanson um i discussed before a meeting we feel like we're through so okay if you want to formally dissolve it fine but we've done our work thank you trustee viopondo i think that um it was automatic when we all voted to hire santek it's their chance to come back to the board and decide i mean you will all decide what they recommend whatever but we did our part and i'm thinking we need emotion okay i'm fine with that also i think i appreciate the work you all put in and i know that it took a lot of time and i think we have a good plan to move forward and i am fine to move forward as long as we all understand that now whatever

183transpires and how this project proceeds that it will come to the full board for input and evaluation and discussion and the questions comments all right we can move through that one um we might get out of here before eleven y'all let's um uh discussion i've already missed the basketball scrimmage but that's okay um discussion and possible action regarding staffing at san marcos high school president halsey yes trustee ardando uh thank you so much president halsey so this was i apologize an agenda item request that i made after agenda preparation but within the window of putting it on tonight's agenda i think we had a very beneficial discussion and executive session last month and without speaking to what that discussion was my expectation or my hope is that with this budget projection that sits in front

184of us that we can all kind of sit with this information and reflect on potentially considering using esser funds to increase support at san marcos high school we've seen not only in the attendance presentation that there continue to be challenges that i think were just not forecasted or expected returning from virtual instruction while amidst a global pandemic and i think a public health crisis that both in regards to like mental health public crisis as well so my expectation or my hope is not to vote on this tonight one way or the other but to have us have this information i wanted to explain publicly why i requested this during the discussion portion of this item but my hope our expectation is to have a more lengthy robust conversation in december so no need to vote

185just kind of wanted to throw this out here i think there's needs at san marcos high school that are not being met and so i wanted to see kind of what the breakdown was is if we hired any of these positions to increase our support at the campus it's not saying we would imp approve all of these at a cost of 342 000 it could be you know one or two hall monitors it could be an extra core subject teacher an administrator counselor whatever to the board's desire but anyway trustee hansen i would like whenever this is brought back again to know okay how many aps do we currently have how many counselors and then the numbers that are uh for the need for extra teachers i mean i know we kind of talked about

186it but i'd like something in writing and i understand the need for hall monitors after our discussion yeah so i um i have heard from a number of teachers who are concerned um and would like to have more support um and feel like you know like i think we talked about in the sr conversation that a lot of the esser funds went to to really shore up things that we were already doing i know that we have done some new things and we were adding some things but i think that there is a sense among some of the faculty that that they really need more help um and i think you know we're that in terms of monitoring but also just you know some of the classroom sizes still continue to be really large and

187i would like to see us try to figure that out before the second semester starts um so that you all get the extra the extra help that you need so that the spring you know hopefully everybody gets vaccinated over the holidays and we come back in a really robust manner and we get our attendance up and all the things but to make all those things happen again right we need hands and we need and i think we even heard earlier in the presentation about bilingual education and um dual language that there's some short staffing there right there's just there's so much to do um so i would be enter willing to entertain a motion um to go ahead and approve this funding and maybe then have administration come back to us with uh administration of

188the high school and make a recommendation and say okay if we can have this much money then this is what we would like to hire and we could approve those hires and or the fi the positions in december so we can get people in because we're also facing a shortage it's really hard to find people to teach and also i mean jobs right now it's hard to fill them so i think the more time we can give you all to get this the more likely we are to have people in our schools in january and i would really like to see us bring hall monitors in right now um additional hall monitors i think you know i i talked to some kids and i you know i think it's just it's a real it's a

189very challenging year and we need all hands on deck so that's that's where i'm coming from i would prefer to have a request come from the administration rather than us telling them that this is what they should do so i i support the idea i just would like to hear what that like what they would want rather than us telling them what they need that's my only thing i wouldn't want us to vote on something right now if it's not requested from from the administration dr corona do you want to give us your perspective please well i think we're going to have a presentation by mr mitchell in december so i think it ties in you know the high school i mean every campus has some some vacancy issues and has some needs so if

190we're going to discuss the use of esser funds you know it might involve a bigger discussion around support for not just the high school but for elementary and middle schools because i mean they're also struggling also but yes i mean there most definitely is a need the kids have been out for 20 months so i mean we can sit with the principals and have a discussion in between and then come back with something for you all i think that it would be in us and that's a conversation i think dressier john doe uh yes thank you uh miss halsey dr cardona dr salmi um if the conversation moves there um we obviously discussed it in executive session so without violating that conversation for the purposes of this meeting i would be comfortable hiring or making

191a motion to hire two home monitors this evening to provide immediate relief and hopefully some support at the high school if that was feasible possible do you want to make that do you want to make that an official motion i'll make a motion that we allocate funds to hire two additional homeowners at san marcos high school so i have a question about the capacity at the high school is my recollection of the numbers we saw last last meeting was that they have not been able to hire the full staff at this point right that there are still open positions that have not been filled um so if if that's the case i'm not exactly understanding how us providing more funds to fill these positions would help fill these positions i think they seven miss presley

192now miss presley yes sorry could you come up to the podium please i can publicly record you and vegan season 1 yeah and i just want to make sure that we're understanding so it's a teacher vacancy there right vacancies specifically we're talking about hall monitors right now so how many hallmarks how many do you have any hall monitor vacancies at the moment i don't currently have any home honor to vacancies and do you feel like having more hall monitors soon would be beneficial to you i am and not not to be um i'm a high school principal so anytime you say do you need hot monitors absolutely um i'd rather sit and talk with with district administration and make sure that we are doing not only what's right by our campus but also by the

193district and look at our numbers and also our discipline referrals and some of those things and then we can really pinpoint exactly which what part of staffing we might need to move forward on the quickest okay are the questions so i have a motion but i didn't hear a second so if it dies on the vine it does but i'll second second trustee thank you um okay so i mean from talking to kids into teachers and to um teachers at the high school and students in high school you know i just think everybody is it's such an incredibly stressful year and so difficult and being able to shore that up and helping with the attendance helping you know i think hall monitors in my understanding have multiple functions and so helping with lunchroom with attendance

194with tardy with all of those things i think at this point we need more so that's i i'm going to be in support of that and then i would like to see the superintendent and the cabinet come back in december with a request for what you all need like what can we do for you how can we help who can we else can we help you with and um so that we can get through this together right so trustee ardando thank you miss halsey just as a follow-up um and really you know justification for this we heard and i'll say whatever y'all can take me to court that like one of our teachers was essentially laid out during a fracas because they decided to involve themselves in an altercation between students and that to me

195like i don't want our classroom teachers having to get overly involved in situations like that and so for me like i can't in good conscience with that information move forward without providing additional support in that aspect um so that's why i'm voting in favor of this tonight trista you saw me can i get some clarification on what the motion is are we order are we telling the district that they need to hire two new monitors or are we allowing the district to hire two new monitors if that's what the administration sees fit i guess the intent of my motion is to allocate the funds for them to hire two additional hall monitors okay two ft's well no because on the breakdown it gives us what the cost of a hall monitor allison 135 times two

196i don't even think that gets you to like a teacher so it would just be the funds for the home monitors part of the two-thirds of the funds that are identified here for the homeowners and um i will say that you know i think kids are just having such a hard time right it's just been like tumultuous tumultuous tumultuous and trying to get kids back to into any sense of a normal routine and what they need to do and how that works and what it looks like i i find myself as a parent re-parenting and re-parenting and re-parenting and re-parenting things that i thought that we had parented and solved with my kids five years ago right it's just it's a hard job right now with kids because things have just been so topsy-turvy and

197so having more support more adults who are able to get them where they need to go and doing what they need to be doing and realizing why this is to their benefit right like why why why we are asking them to do these very difficult things um is what i am interested in seeing us try to solve this in in this allocation not solve but but improve um i just think it's it it's hard to be a kid right now um and more responsible adults in their lives that have more time to be able to dedicate to them and work with them the better trustee hanson or trustee if i ponder sorry please go ahead you were first oh i just want to clarify something to see how the vote's going to go but um

198or my vote is going to work out then we just hear a principal president say that they would they would look into this and and and hire some i mean she's here she knows what she what's going on i understand the concern about the the students that are having problems and and acting out you know their frustrations yes i understand that but they're here on a daily basis the staff is here i think that we need to listen to what the staff has to say and then go ahead with your emotions if you wanted to be with how to people but how how we just say how hard to get somebody to come and take her that's not gonna stop anything i think except more people are all stuff but i didn't hear mr presley

199said no she didn't want additional support and that wouldn't the recommendation come from her what what needs to be done we are constantly just do doing this kind of thing to adding more staff and with grant and personally i want to hear from the people that that are in the school and and of course our superintendent so i don't know i just that's just the way i feel thank you josie hansen i will be voting against this because i want to hear from the staff and the superintendent as to what they need before we say here's the money to hire what we think you need instead of asking she may want it all to go towards another teacher or something like that i would like to hear that information and we have an early december

200board meeting so i think that would give enough time to get the information out thank you president i just want to let the doctor tell me talk about this can we just please i understand we'll we'll take we'll take the vote just immediately but i'd like to let dr make her comment thank you i'd be willing to support it if we included the i the item that it was at the discretion we were allocating the funds at the discretion of the administration that's all i wanted to say make sure that they that this is not a forced upon them trustee ardando would you take that revision do you amend the line item to reflect how much money doctor saw me no that you were allocating the funds at the discretion for two home monitors at

201the discretion of the campus administrator high school that you're trying to put them in i'm gonna do the math to give you that number so just one second no i don't need them well because it's allocating the funds for whatever that was right the language i want the change i want is that the language read at that the allocation be that the hall monitors be hired at the discretion that those funds only be used if that's the request of the administration oh well i apologize for the confusion because i always thought that was the expectation like we give them the funds for the home monitors if they use it they do yeah they don't they don't let's just be specific it's okay do you want to so that's okay to be the okay so then

202make a motion that we allocate hundred and 50 dollars to san marcos high school for additional staffing per administrative discretion mejia do you support them and didn't i question yes second all right and then i think we will call the question and without uh further if uh we have the motion on the floor all in favor please raise your hand and opposed and that will carry 5-1 which brings us to the consideration of the approval of the budget amendments we get an explanation of the budget amendments please i believe there's only one budget amendment and that's to when we just approve it it's a big budget but it's to move the money so that we can begin the process of actually building the central office a second any questions trustee ardando that's not a question

203it's just a statement as we prepare to vote on the largest budget amendment in our school district's history i just want to acknowledge that we're all jumping off this cliff together i think or most of us are which is fine i understand that the vote might go differently now here we go so another questions comments all in favor of the budget amendment to fund the construction of the central office at seven million eighteen thousand five hundred fifty nine dollars on favor please raise your hand all opposed that motion will carry six zero i move that we adjourn second from trustee ardando this meeting is adjourned thank you happy thanksgiving be safe and happy everybody be safe 9 15 was still pretty cool oh boy you