2020-06-15 School Board Meeting - Regular

001to order we have all trustees present so we have a forum we can say the pledge is of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands okay we have election a school board officer says item four before we go into public comments miss hanson um i nominate john mclaughlin for president okay we have a nomination i'm sorry nomination for ms hanson second by okay any other nominations [Music] we're taking them one at a time are we taking are we doing it i think i have two open nominations didn't come as a motion came as a nomination so we'll say all in favor of john mclaughlin raise our hand and then all in favor of clem cam two and razor i'm saying do you want to take president yes now no

002i'm gonna do president and then go down to vice president because i don't i mean i don't even at this point know if i'll still be in this chair okay so all right so all in favor of john mclaughlin for president one two three all in favor of miss cantu the cantus habit 4-3 miss cantu come on [Music] first i'd like to thank john for serving as president this last year he's done a good job we'll move on to nominations for vice president the floor is now open for nominations for vice president ms halsey i nominate um mr aradando we haven't mistraded nominated any other nominations mr mclaughlin we have a nomination for mr mclaughlin we ready to vote any further nominations all those in favor of miguel three all those in favor mr mclaughlin

003are you voting mr mcdonald i did vote for myself four to three mr mclaughlin is nominated and elected as uh vice president secretary ms cantu i nominate miss hanson thank you ms kostia miss hanson's nominated any further nominations there being none other we can declare you as our secretary thank you for the job you did through the previous year as well public forum do we have any well there's one on that we printed out an email there on there this that i think it's hard to see with this ask here's a statement sent to mr barton mr mclaughlin miss miss clapp who has the agenda's request to have penalties and interest reimbursement provided this statement to trustees for public comment our statement first and foremost we are so mr thank does anybody have theirs yeah

004anybody greg's gonna have to drool [Music] hello we can hear you hello can you hear me yes okay can y'all see me yes we can see you as well oh i can't see you guys you can go ahead and speak and we can hear you okay um mr barton are you there mr barton are you there yes he is she can't can you hear us i could barely hear you guys we can hear you quite well go ahead and talk okay so i just sent out the uh statement to mr barton yes we have it in uh on paper okay wonderful um so my main concern is um based on what i sent you guys um it that pretty much explains everything what we're trying to do is that when we close our escrow account

005our bank they we asked them what we needed to do for our property taxes because it was our first time switching over to just escrow only for us to pay and they informed us that we didn't need to do anything on our end it was a recorded line a video conferencing with a female representative and that we would receive a bill down the road um and so we never got that bill i kept calling every month and they kept telling me uh no you need to just check with hayes county so i called hayes county and i spoke with a representative another female rep there and she told me the same thing as well as being that it's going to be delayed this year so i was like okay that's fine and then my husband

006we spoke with the chief deputy there elizabeth shannon and she informed me about this new section code that that pretty much um were the ideal candidates for and basically they said that we had to call the bank to find out what happened uh when we spoke with the manager martin lux he admitted that they never notified hayes of the change and that he didn't need to show he did not need to inform them um which you know led to the large late fee and he said that it doesn't matter um because it said it in the contract that it was disclosed or something but we didn't we didn't get any of the notifications and so that was the first time as a folks first time as a homeowner that we were notified by the deputy

007chief that we can actually see the bill online so again with the whole statement it should explain everything why that policy specifically states for that section code 33.011k now what is the standard is the bank not supposed to notify the uh hayes county running out of time i could barely hear you guys you have 30 seconds to go can you hear me yes do you have any additional comments before we close i didn't i didn't hear anything that you guys said do you have any additional comments yes i i want to know if the bank is responsible to turning in that document to hayes county we can't respond to that right now this is just a public comment and we will have that item on our agenda later time's up thank you very much for

008joining us miss clap thank you let's move on to the superintendent's report madam president members of the board um while mr wozniak is is coming up i'd like to take a moment to introduce he's been busy getting acclimated but coach john walsh stepped in here is in the back of the room and coach i don't know if you want to come up to the podium and say anything i will yes it has been a uh it's been a whirlwind uh especially with the return to campus with our athletes but it's uh it's been a fun whirlwind and solely based on the people i've gotten to meet it's been the adults the staff and then finally getting to meet the kids it's been uh it's fun and it's gone fast and it's been challenging as you

009can imagine but it's uh it's been a good challenge so i'm happy to be here and i appreciate all you thank you coach appreciate it welcome to regular nation good evening president cantu members of the board mr cardona [Music] this presentation is just to give you a real brief update on what we've been doing the last couple weeks obviously we've been working longer than that but since summer started and kind of where we're heading for the rest of the summer so this is our update on return to school so who's going to be guiding our decisions from here on out as you know cdc kind of sets the the tone right for for the country federal government doesn't always follow cdc sometimes they do sometimes they don't but we do know that our governor tends

010to follow the white house and so he immediately will come out with something after the white house dshs department of safety and health services they're kind of a mini cdc right but they're also they guide texas and they fall under the governor ta again as you know is kind of a standalone entity but they they go off of the um the guidelines of d a d that's a hard word to say dshs as well as cdc and then of course you've got san marcos emergency management in hayes county and they collaborate so that we can be uniform throughout our county and consistent and there we are at the very bottom listening to all the people that are above us so what do we know we know that we're coming back on the 24th and that

011instruction is going to look different i'm in the process of putting together a holistic plan that i have to hand in to texas school safety center but as a district and as a team we're putting together a very detailed team a very detailed plan we're calling that our our covet handbook and in that we'll have specifics from every department in every area what is still unknown we still don't quite yet know what families are thinking in terms of returning as well as needing bus service andrew has put out a survey last week it was thursday thursday thursday night and he's getting responses and hopefully that data will continue to guide us the guidelines continue to change as you know it's a moving target for us cdc i have a statement from cdc that says that

012schools should not be responsible for screening kids for covid ta put out a document last week for summer instruction that said that it is recommended that we take temps and screen kids so it's a constant of us trying to figure out who do we listen to when's it going to change again and where is this moving target going to land so how will we keep facilities disinfected so custodians will have the ability to disinfect large areas very quickly our teachers will have an unlimited supply of disinfectant what i mean by that is we have a machine now in every single school that's been bought the last couple years just out of robert gutierrez is not his foresight that something was coming but just to make things easier for his custodians what that machine does is

013it takes salt it takes electricity and tap water and it turns it into a disinfectant so the only thing we have to provide is the salt and we have an unlimited supply of disinfectant that is green it's safe you can almost think in terms of if you notice the trend right over the last i don't know how many years how swing pools have kind of switched to salt water when you go in a swimming pool you don't it doesn't taste like the ocean right it still has like a chlorine tint to it that's what this machine does it turns the salt almost into like a fleet of free chlorine and that allows us to have a disinfectant and really an endless supply so right now what we've done is we've ordered about a thousand spray

014bottles for teachers to get ready we want to make sure that we have a custodial response team in case of emergencies in case we have to do something very quickly that we have a team that's ready and on standby and then again with a lot of the things that we talk about there'll be training involved in august a new kind of training for teachers right in the past we would never thought of well we need to provide teachers with a disinfectant training but that's what we need to do now because teachers are taking on a new role they're going to be part-time custodians we're going to have front office staff that are going to be like safety officers that have to constantly disinfect door handles and things like that so there's going to be training

015involved how will we keep employees safe we've ordered a a lot of ppe our purchasing department's been basically in a frenzy of ordering masks face shields are coming hand sanitizer thermometers again we're going to have more training for teachers in august but that is a constant in fact i just got the word today we're heading to austin tomorrow sending one of my drivers we got 20 000 masks that um i got through the city for free so it's it's that kind of constant huge purchases that that we're working on right now how we keep students safe again as i mentioned we've got we've got the disinfectant we'll have the hand sanitizer we'll be providing face coverings for the students we'll have multiple hand sanitizer stations and again we'll we'll be doing all the social distancing

016things that we need to do we're meeting constantly with departments almost daily to try to support our campuses and see what they need we meet once a week as a recovery team dr ruiz mills is on that team and we're constantly challenging each other to say okay what do you need from us what do you need support services because a lot of this stuff needs to be ordered right now and not yesterday right so what will happen with extracurricular events as you know uil like ta continues to put out guidance constantly we have athletes here now we've had them since monday right coach or is this the second week so still week this is week two wow and so a coach's had at any point in time 150 boys and then the second session with

017a hundred girls so i've been very impressed um just observing coach and and how he's running things um he's he's using every safety measure that he's put into his plan with social distancing with constant disinfecting and really and truly he's going to be the model that guides us from this point forward as we get into band next and then as we get into our fall sports so for coach walsh it's going to be volleyball and football next that we'll start writing the plan for and hopefully this is going to be a really good blueprint for us in the future so these are just a few of the pictures bottom left is um just an example of the the temperature check every single day for every single athlete that walks through the doors and even something

018like these infrared thermometers which are a really neat thing that we have access to now but um you know we're at the mercy of of suppliers and so my secretary every single day is getting on the internet to say to see on amazon it's funny how she'll they'll be like a lot of 20 and if she jumps on it she might get it but then if she tries to order like 60 it won't be in we talked to dr harrison and she was waiting on two of them for like two months now and my secretary got eight within a week so it's just game of trying to get your ppe in in in time can we wait until the end can we ask questions now what do you prefer that we wait till you're i

019don't want to disrespect the survey yes i'll let andrew touch real quickly on the survey results so we sent out the survey to parents and guardians last thursday night we we did our research so we have 81 around 8 100 students but we have around 5 500 families so as you can see it's kind of small but we have around 2 300 responses as of right now i didn't want to put it in powerpoint formats i wanted it to be as live as possible for the board meeting so if we have it down we have it broken down by campus let me pull this mic and then the first question we asked was during school closure did your student use a personal computer or school device we wanted to know the challenges that were faced

020from our family so we gave them a few options you know what were some of the the greatest challenges you faced with at home learning we did not have access to internet did not have access to a device so that we can better prepare for next school year we then started planning for next school year by asking would you feel comfortable sending your student back to campus if we followed the cdc guidelines so 56.6 families a percent of family said yes they would feel comfortable setting their student back and 43.4 said no and this is like i said this is out of the 2300 responses we received i would feel comfortable with my child wearing a face mask or a face covering so 61 percent of fam family said yes and 39 said no the

021next question was about child care so if families or families able to have an adult home if campuses were not reopened next school year so as you see 46.4 said yes 17.8 said no they don't have an adult home 27.3 percent said not sure at the moment and then 8.4 not needed so their ages allows them to stay at home by themselves then we ask which of the following calendar types they would prefer so 45 said a blended model meaning some students come in you know two to three days and then two to three days uh at home learning which ms stray and dr ruiz mills will explain those types of calendars a little later at home learning 26.9 percent and then traditional face-to-face going back to regular school model 28.2 of families prefer that

022option because of the loss of learning due to covit this past school year we gave them two options a regular school calendar that the board approved back in february or an extended calendar which would extend the school year by eight days 79.7 percent of families responded they prefer the regular school calendar approved by the board in february 79.7 and like i said this is just a snapshot of the into all the all the families in the district but i wanted to provide that with you today the next question we asked wasn't regards to transportation will your family need transportation for next school year 62.7 percent it just actually went up by 0.1 said no their family will provide their own transportation and 37.3 percent said yes they would need transportation you have access to internet

023at your home 94 of our families that responded said yes six percent said no and then we asked how many devices are available at their home zero one two three four or five plus and that's broken down it looks like 37.9 have access to at least one laptop or more 10.7 do not have access to a device and so those are families we would reach out to as a district to provide them with the device and then the last question we asked was in regards to communication how do you prefer to receive your communication email text phone call social media district app and then this survey was conducted in english and in spanish and the message that went out was in english and spanish thursday at five o'clock yes um in regards to the attempts

024so every student if they as they come into a school building they will be their temp will be taken on a daily basis that is our intent currently hopefully we get all the supplies in that we need but regarding the shields that you mentioned so there's some people that have asked me about that so where are those shields going to be placed so as it stands now we were we were looking at the option for teachers to have a face shield or a face mask and we were we were going to purchase both of those so that they have that option because we know that with certain students covering your mouth may not be the best way to teach maybe something like reading so we want to give teachers both options we have run into

025trying to be patient with the face shields because it's easy to say well let's just buy a thousand really quick but we tried a couple samples so far and some of them are just really really low quality and so you have to be careful so what we've gone now to is saying we need to see a sample first before we order a big batch because i put one on and there's no way even after 20 minutes that i wouldn't have a headache so you can imagine if you're looking through something that's kind of um warbly you know that look that there's no way a teacher is going to be able to look through that so we have to make sure that we're purposeful with that so should you go to with the shields for whatever

026reason supposedly uh are there going to be no need for like shields where people are are working behind a desk in our offices to when somebody comes into their that's still the that plexiglas has been ordered um mr wyatt yes he he ordered that that was a good probably two weeks ago right so those will be in place yes ma'am yes ma'am yes will you have this presentation online where we can see it i mean i can't see what's being presented so will it be on uh on the on the website so that we can send it to us and okay thank you absolutely and then of course in july we'll be back with a much more in-depth um plan to show you what we've been working on with our playbook that's gonna that's gonna

027push us through the rest of the summer and get us ready and mr fernandez once you get the once it's closed for the survey could you also send us those results thank you any other questions for me mister had a question uh thank you miss kane too mr fernandez is there a plan for the isd to reach out to the 2000 plus families that haven't responded to the survey so this survey our goal is to have campus individual surveys once we receive this information okay the reason why i ask that is because obviously i have a general concern of creating policy enacting a calendar making a lot of very massive major decisions using a sample size that i would assume is an enfranchised population so being able to navigate online communications and resources obviously is

028a specific population in the isd and so for them saying they don't need transportation historically every other year our isd has had a massive population that needs transportation so that's one of the biggest concerns that i have is you know have we been busing students just for fun or are we not reaching the students that we know utilize those services so that just is one example of you know i'm glad to hear that individual campuses will reach out to those families to get more robust data as we make these decisions but again the transportation response really struck me because i know that our numbers historically don't match that 70 percent of our families provide their own transportation if anything i believe it's the opposite yes sir and we will probably be reaching out possibly by

029phone from a transportation department because of the the complex nature of this and really specifics on how many kids are riding because it's really going to guide a lot of things so we may end up calling five thousand bus riders to see where they stand because um we were trying to match it up with online enrollment and there hasn't been as many students that we'd like enrolling online which we had a transportation component to that so we may have to just go old school with that which is fine mr mr mclaughlin mr posnick um do you and it's possible that this is coming in the later update right so that's an okay answer but um if your temperature's scanning at the door and a student has a fever what happens can you say that first

030part if your temperature's scanning at the door i thought i understood that we were going to do that at the start of the day yes sir and the kid has a fever what happens that'll be an immediate nurse referral referral we'll go to the west what we'll end up doing too mr mclaughlin is in the long run we'll have a very complex kind of flow chart that says if then right so principal gets a phone call about this right how does that how does that chart start to work because you can imagine the complexity of even just trying to send a kid to the nurse's office what that's going to look like so it has to be this this this very well thought out communication piece where we say if a child you know has

031a temperature then what because we're even talking about right what happens if if a child gets on the bus with the temperature we can't let them on the bus okay then what what if nobody's home so there's a lot of things that between now and then that we have to get squared away as far as a flowchart and a communication piece thanks yes ma'am um i was just curious is it possible to put a paper copy of the survey with the food you know pick up i know it might not come back in time but we could add those at a later date and that way we could get more families that may not have you know internet access or not as proficient as they'd like to be yeah and we talked about this for

032a week of how we wanted today we want to make sure we get it right um but this is pretty much the survey went out so that we can have a foundation of where to start and then the main goal is to like mr wozniak point out we're going to have to talk to every single family to understand their needs whether that be internet you know food transportation but this gives us an overall structure of where what we want to look at for next school year okay thank you dr comment oh she's coming up my head and bus drivers are checking temperatures that that is definitely our intent those were i think we ordered 65 about a month ago and they're they're getting close dr valadez has a team that will also be going out

033into the community to speak to the families and collecting that data as well and they should be starting this week and going into next week so that will also support what you just recommended as well ms hanson thank you miss cantu [Music] could you say again the number of athletes that we've had show up so far i don't know the grand total but i know coach's averaging was averaging about a hundred males a day he had 150 peak [Music] and how many of those have we um how many students have we had to dismiss because they've run a temperature at check-in so zero we've had a few that the because we were outside the the infrared thermometers were showing so we brought them inside cooled it all down and they didn't have any temperature so

034zero turned away at the door thanks are we asking them if anyone in their family has the yes so they have to fill out every day they have a there's a qr code they put their phone on they fill out a survey and that's one of the questions if they've been exposed and if they answer yes to anything they have to not show up or we send them back home and we have seen we've had some that we've had to send home because they don't answer the survey correctly thank you well they answered it correctly just had a yes on it [Music] this game too yes uh thank you miss cantu uh mr wozniak and really i guess this is the superintendent is there is a specific population in the isd that is heavily dependent

035on face-to-face instruction obviously they're at risk and they already have challenges performing academically at grade level and so as the isd and the administration and the team works on that there's obviously a population that needs access to our food programming as well and face-to-face instructions so as these plans are developed obviously i think there's families that have the wherewithal and are more equipped for distance learning at home instruction there's some that need to be here face-to-face with instructors and facilitators and educators so i hope that is something that is taken into account when it comes to our at-risk populations whether that's our special education students whether that's our ells and english language learners and then also dr baez i had a question about the hr side of this when it comes to staff is there

036any legal prohibitions of making it mandatory for staff to wear face shields or face coverings and if they refused to do so if it wasn't health related or not putting them at risk because of some underlying condition what powers or authorities does our hr department have to make staff compliant with any type of initiative such as that so that's a loaded question and so to date we highly encourage we can't mandate can't mandate and why is that testing can't mandate for for violating people's personal so we have a we have a dress code that we could send an employee home if they're wearing something inappropriate or not in compliance so a cloth face shield could not be something that is required as part of our dress code that we would send a staff member home

037for wearing so we've had folks say that it breathes anxiety we've had different people to say different things most folks are complying with the highly encouraged at this point we changed it from mandate to must to highly encourage again we're seeking guidance from the list that was uh placed up there and has changed a couple of times um [Music] i would definitely be we're going to continue to to monitor that i'd be curious to get a legal perspective on that or what other isds or districts are doing and we've been told that we can't well so this tells you how how quickly it changes so he presented to us with june 1st data from tea that had one thing and then we had june 4th data from tea that said something completely different so when

038i reached out to mr cruz i was like hey you just presented information that's conflicting with what we have currently and he texted me later and said yeah you're right so um i i there's something with um when he was training us about mandating paying people and then violating their rights right so right now we like i could say technically it makes me anxious and i'm should be covered under 504 so you know so could isd employees do that with our dress code that's already in place as well then if i said i need to wear jeans on a friday or shorts when i come to work in my 20s we have had people that have chosen to from various districts challenge the dress code for variety whether it's religious or they're allergic to the

039plastic that's in the gene stitching like i've seen where we've lost that battle but i mean we can highly encourage i think the issues we're going to have is not one of compliance i think the issue we're going to have is people not wanting to come to work and then it's going to create issues of draining resources because under the current federal law if they choose to go emergency correct me if i'm wrong go emergency fmla they can get two weeks of paid leave that we're responsible for and we have had an employee already come in and say i want to be paid for having co-ed for the last two weeks that i was out and so actively but they have to hear over it and they're back and they were asking for it they

040have to have doctor's note they do have to go through a series of steps and it's going to involve a lot of juan cruz conversations and i wouldn't mention it again review it eventually right so everybody has a different situation so it's when did you get it where did you get tested we need those hand results then it's when is your release date you're not allowed to return without the release date you know who did you come in contact there's it's literally we're handling every single situation on an individual basis statement so that's why mr wozniak is trying to find a variety of like either good shields the masks we've even looked at the voice augmenting system so that we can help teachers like alleviate some of their stress so that there's not a reason

041why they can't wear a shield or some type of covering to help but then it gets with some of your hearing impaired students it's hard for them to read we don't have any signing but we do have some kids that may have some hearing difficulties but most of our kids are at another facility for responsibility yeah this is um you mentioned that your assistant was every day scouting amazon trying to locate supplies does that mean that we're not receiving any assistance from the state or from ta in securing pbe at all so on thursday or friday the state put out a a ppe statement and so the governor has now ordered like so many million masks thermometers and like barrels of hand sanitizer so miss casparis has to put in um just our numbers i

042guess she has to validate how many kids we have and they're supposed to ship in july so we are we are getting help the big question right always is well we'll be okay for august right but what does october look like that's what kind of scares all of us when we're when we're ordering and so we're really trying to make a healthy um inventory of everything so that we know like we'll be okay for october november december because who knows right if if supplies like we saw in march right where you couldn't get anything and so we want to make sure and i believe we ordered i want to say like 12 like 50 gallon barrels of hand sanitizer separate from the state to have us on every campus so that we can do like

043a refill system instead of trying to um you know buy a bunch of little hand pumps that we'll just we'll just keep it we just keep ordering literally every day our poor secretaries it's a constant order this order this over this thank you you're welcome superintendent's report still i just kind of wanted to follow with miss baez and some staff questions can i ask them or should we wait until the calendar discussion well we're in the super intense report right now so i don't know how my question would fall i was wondering regarding when you mentioned staff when we were talking about staff making them whether we have or with no doubt we are as far as uh faculty or staff asking given their medical condition or how many are going to ask and how

044is that going to impact us especially if we we are going to be having whether it's blended or whatever it is so should we talk about that until we get to the calendar we have reached out initially right so you want to talk about it okay i'm not sure if i i'm understanding your question so again it's individual anyone who has contact or has everyone knows that they're directed or their questions are directed my way or our way and so that's we've had folks um say they're afraid well unless you have a doctor's note that says you know or you've had contact we've had folks that said you know we live with somebody that was there's just there's literally you're going to have those staff that will have that medical documentation absolutely supporting that absolutely

045that's that's going to be realistic as to how many i don't know i'm just saying that how is that going to impact us when it comes to the dollar sign as well we at this point don't really know i mean with mr cruz we're taking just a case by case but you're right we are going to have some employees who fall under that category that you know we always want to work with all employees but you know i made a comment i think last month if you have a bus mechanic and there's only i mean he has to he or she has to be at work to fix the bus you can't do that you can't do that remotely and i understand so that's going to be some to be not so much are we

046going to put the burden on the employee or is that going to be our burden where is the burden going to lie well if they want to be relieved of and have a like a 504 accommodation they have to like we would ask of students they we would have to work with the doctors to figure out you know what's a reasonable plan for that employee you know what accommodation you know we we have had you know teachers that maybe break a leg and we make an accommodation through hr that put them on the first floor you know move classes around so we see this as kind of a very similar process it's just that until we get a vaccine and give people like it's going to be at least another year we think of uncertainty

047literally case by case so if it's reasonable like mr cardona mentioned then that's that's what we do and if it seems unreasonable we work through it together what about staff that is 65 and older i mean because i know that at the university any staff at 65 and older they can request to work remotely the rest of them they would have to provide documentation i'm just asking from from us here what if they're 65 and older are they just automatically saying okay you you fall into that category they still have to accommodate depending on the the type of work that they're doing that that you know whether it's essential or whether it can be if they can work remote we've been being this example right exactly exactly we're trying to accommodate as much as possible

048thank you miss cantu mr wozniak i know superintendent cardona and staff have referenced it that you know we're getting conflicting guidance from the center for disease control and tea whenever we get conflicting information have those restrictions or those guidelines become more stringent or have they become relaxed or and again i don't need like a enumerated list of that but from your experience what you've seen so far when we're they're moving the goal post which way is it going i think it goes both ways but to kind of answer your question what we choose to do is go the more aggressive way if that makes sense i've heard it stated in the safety world that you always go with like the top level first and then work your way down so you set your your sights

049at like the cdc level of course we have to comply with ta um because that's who pays some of our but um we we want to be the most aggressive first knowing that if we have to back off but you know it's just like what we tell teachers right if you're going to get strict in in january it's probably too late start off strong and be aggressive and then if anything relaxes like where we don't have to take temps of kids you know every single day but right now it's our intention to to go to the max with with our safety protocols so and the reason why i asked that and i've communicated this with superintendent cardona on several occasions outside of board meetings is whatever resources or support at least individually you need i'm

050you know willing ready and able to offer that i'd rather us buy the supplies staff accordingly and then come back and say that we over prepared versus we open in two weeks and you know cindy's on amazon trying to get stuff primed for you know a week later um so with that being said that was my first comment my second one is to dr baez and then superintendent cardona i think a reality is is that some staff members throughout the course of the year are going to be you contract this virus right so is there a strategy when it comes to human resources to have like a stable of permanent substitutes or certified teachers is that something that the isd is exploring does that require additional resources to have kind of a bench of faculty

051and staff ready to go whether that's in food service transportation custodial services teaching and learning what does that look like or what support if any is needed from us right so yes we're going to continue with our pools of of as you said bench players again it's going to depend on how we come back if it's blended then we're going to be very strategic about you know staff that can address needs in a blended way so that's going to help us with certified folks being in front of our our students instructionally but yes we'll continue with the um with our substitute pools at all levels and part of that is texas state because they did they did adapt sorry i keep fogging up they did adapt their like when we had this cove but they

052helped us adapt kind of how we work with like the student teachers also so i think that they will be more willing to release a stable of people to help us through this i think and if that's something that can be codified in like an mou or some type of agreement you know informally formally with the university when it comes to that population obviously i would be interested to see those types of efforts move forward because i'm assuming that every isd in central texas is going to be looking for substitutes and licensed teachers you know retirees or whatever that looks like that can come in at a moment's notice if we can get those assurances in place now at the beginning of summer versus when every isd is looking for substitutes again that would make

053me more confident in whatever way we open up the isd in the fall i know where they haven't given way tea trs i mean is relaxing any kind of like i've seen that in some of the tea documentation where they're not relaxing the requirements of people who are retired like so if you have any yeah they have not like they would like to relax some of the restrictions they place on trs employees who are retired here help us i think with pools of teachers because we've had i've had substitutes uh reach out to me email me and say you know they're they're willing to step up for certain schools they've always go to those certain schools and so we just pass them on to hr and say we appreciate any support and when we train

054our people under safety and come in and work with us but trs needs to relax so if anybody knows anybody up at that state level um it would help us with some pools of retired teachers potentially that could work help us you know figure this out unless you've talked to the people from the smarts come group that we have here they move slow they we need to like i don't know exactly who we want to bring into the campuses is the highest risk population though if you're trying to bring the retired i could see like online instruction or something like that even working out of the you know yeah with us at central office helping us do stuff away from kids i mean any little help would help okay are we complete with the superintendent's

055report [Music] oh i gotta click [Music] update [Music] first is academic yeah maybe we have to take a break before we start on this [Music] good evening president cantu board of trustees i'm monica ruiz mills with executive director nicole dre and we are just going to do a brief presentation on calendar and schedule adjustments we've been going through this uh process during these heightened times we came up with three guiding principles we've been working with a committee of 27 people that have been providing input on how we can strategically move on returning will require us for for us to develop multiple paths for our return in 2020 2021 with the express intent to address the needs of all students we need to reimagine what teaching and learning will look like and what the classrooms will

056look like and how that will affect the entire district community but creating an atmosphere where everyone can thrive and then revamping our system with agile and responsive practices to support all students and families as we go through these heightened times so ideally we want to create a plan to optimize student learning and the ideally it would be with face-to-face learning but in doing so we would need to develop a plan that if students were going to return that we would be following all of the safety precautions and protocols that mr wozniak was up here discussing what that would look like if students were to return would be putting students potentially into small groups identifying students and cohorts maybe coming with staggered start times because transportation would look differently and the amount of students that do

057ride buses so there may be students that would be starting at 7 30 leaving at 1 pm and staggered throughout the day again that's if we were to return to a traditional setting again we would also have to redesign the classroom layout how could we get 22 desks in a classroom six feet apart what would the partitions look like if we put partitions in between desks would they be clear would they be the testing carols would it be between two or would it be kind of like a square in fours so those are all of the discussions that have been going on with scenario one you heard mr fernandez speak about the blended hybrid return which as of right now on that survey that seems to be the response that some of our community members

058would like what would that look like the first consideration would be in the blended model where we could do what we call a 2-2 split where students come to school in the am a certain group in the a.m then they go home in the afternoon and then another group comes in in the afternoon also we could be selective with potential grade levels so different grade levels coming on certain days having that remote instruction happening also at home but we heard earlier too from mr arredondo concerns about the students that really are they're school dependent how do we get them here another idea for this blended model would be the students that need to come to school we pair them up we put them into the environment following the safety protocols but then we also have

059another group that is doing the remote learning at home so if i'm doing my remote learning at home i log in let's say at 9 30 because that's when my class starts i see my teacher in this smaller class and i'm able to participate and receive the live instruction that would be another way for us to do this blended hybrid return despite no matter what scenario we come in with whether it's scenario one or scenario two we need to be able to pivot immediately to a remote learning plan in the event something happens again so if we get struck with illness we need to be able to go ahead and move into complete digital learning so what would that look like based on our reflections of how this entire process is gone we will continue

060with our digital resources such as lexia dreambox and also we are going to go into a purchase with ixl ixl is pre-k through 12 curriculum which we can align to our scope and sequence so if we go into a complete digital learning platform for say two or three weeks we can follow our curriculum but we also have these adaptive programs and curricular programs where i as the teacher can go in and assist my students in that classroom environment except it's digital we can also use those platforms and scenario one and two as well as additional support in all three scenarios there needs to be an emphasis on the social emotional learning of our students with the challenging times that we have been facing recently so we need to make sure that we are embedding the

061sel supports and all of the curriculum because if we don't address that then academically it will be difficult to get the students to thrive and so that those are the considerations as of right now as we wait for dr valadez and our team to collect information ms mariano and her team will be calling all students participating in special education as we get that information we'll be able to have a more concise plan on what it's going to look like we spoke earlier about teachers who you know may have anxiety and mr cardona brought up a 504 plan we may have those with our students as well any student who is currently on a 504 plan or is diagnosed with say anxiety or medically fragile right now we will just have to go through that process

062so we can put them on some sort of remote learning platform and offer them a system of support to enhance their education well-being so that's where we are as far as the scenario considerations we do have um miss vanessa jackson and miss keeley sotliner they should be on the zoom to provide import their input they're also on our committee and they wanted to go over the scenario considerations before miss dre discusses the calendar so hi i teach it good night i'm happy to have the opportunity to talk this evening and the scenarios were are really nicely designed they allow for us to still have that face-to-face contact with students and to set up the virtual learning as needed um it is really nice to be considering the impact for our families as we go through

063this and um it is it's going to be good to have a variety of technological resources at our disposal in order to deliver the curriculum and those are available in all three scenarios [Music] ms sontliner hi my name is keely sunlightner i have one child in the district that isn't going to be going into fourth grade and i really appreciate the opportunity to have been on this committee and to be able to provide some feedback i um support the hybrid and i i really hope that we're able to move forward with the hybrid scenario i think it's the best scenario to um have balance between allowing students to go back into school be with their friends be with their teachers but also allows us to have um if we have to go all the too

064remote that will already be there that aspect will already be there um i i think we also have to be able to provide um structure for the students through this model especially with the remote learning whether it's um logging in for zoom classroom um a couple times a day but i do think it needs to be structured and scheduled i think that's very important to the students um i think that having the hybrid model will also help relieve some of that stress with parents who may not have the flexibility to work from home five days a week i was very fortunate that i do have a flexible job but a lot of the parents are not and if and if they're able to send their students back to school even just for two or three

065days a week or half the day i think that'll help relieve some of the stress um and maybe also some of the apprehension with sending students back um going back to school having been at home this whole time and with kovid still being active hopefully that'll help relieve some of the apprehension as well thank you we're also still awaiting though recommendations from tea because we need to know how that seat time is going to count for us if they're going to allow us to do the waivers are they going to allow us to collect ada and use the students checking in as part of our attendance processes so we should be receiving hopefully this week clarification and guidance from tea [Music] any questions thank you so much um so my first question is do we

066have any guidelines from tea on class sizes so they're saying now 22 in a classroom six feet apart okay and then um i know several weeks into i'm thinking specifically of the elementary instruction we had to do a pivot because we recognized that the instruction wasn't consistent across all the campuses and so there was a uniform curriculum that was developed and then distributed at both paper and from which all the teachers were working in their google classrooms correct right yes so are we over the summer creating um that curriculum now so that we have it all set up and ready to go when school starts in whatever way school starts yes ma'am we've been working on our scope and sequence and the lesson designs are part of that and so it will be uniform throughout

067giving teachers though also the autonomy to add to those lessons that's great and so that's at the elementary school level it's k3 pre-k through 12. pre-k through 12. so explain to me then what that looks like at the middle school in high school because my experience looked like different teachers doing different things which is great and different teachers taking different approaches also great in theory i also saw that you know there was a synchronous model and that worked really well for lots of kids but if it didn't work for a kid and that was the only model the teacher was doing then there were problems and vice versa if it was an asynchronous model and it worked great for some kids super so are the teachers blending their instruction approaches or will students be if

068they're going to be doing a hybrid model or an at-home learning will they be able to know in advance what the instructional model would be yes we have our district curriculum specialists at the secondary and they are being the lessons and it will be similar to the elementary there will be some cross-curricular like we'll be embedding social studies into the curriculum as well now if i'm a student and i'm going to do the blended model asking teachers will need to continue with the high-tech version of using canvas or google classroom at secondary we use canvas where students will be able to log in and access those lessons and so we're going to become more structured in the event a we have to pivot to a complete remote learning platform but also more structured as well

069in this blended hybrid model and so that be both with the core classes as well as the electives because that's where i really felt like there was a wide range of styles yes in the core classes with the electives we need to work on making sure that we're unifying that right because like right now with band and choir they should be able to start doing some lessons on screencastify to uniform that to make it more uniform we just have to do the training on how to do those type of lessons for them and mr mclaughlin dr mills uh i'm a visual so help me visualize i'm trying to visualize this at the high school so if you have um math classes for freshmen you have four or five math classes for freshmen so you take

070one math class so you're saying that half of them will be coming in in the morning and half of the other half will be coming in the afternoon is that what you're saying if we did a two-two split yes if we did that if you had 30 kids in the classroom then 15 would come in the morning they would still the other ones that are at home would still participate no yes so yes that's a good question so if i'm coming to school and i'm in the am right and then i have a group of students at home if they're not coming to school that day because let's say they need to do remote learning they can log in right but if i'm doing the am and then i have a different group in the

071pm i come to school in the morning and then i can go i have my two class periods there we've got to be purposeful so if i'm taking algebra 1 as a 9th grader that means i may have moved into the district but i'm also taking english one so how do i arrange that schedule where the students can get algebra one and their english one and the only person that changes is the teacher right then they go home and then they can log in and they can do their work for english one and algebra one the second group comes in then let's say on tuesday they come in and then they get their biology and their history so we have to be very purposeful on how we're planning that but if i'm if we're doing

072them in cohorts and just a select group like everybody in this classroom goes to school right every day but then nicole's group stays home nicole's group can log in and access that class period on canvas watch the teacher do the live instruction and participate that way because we have those interactive touch screens in the classrooms they can see everything on that touch screen so you're looking at basically 50 of having them here and the other 50 over there now let me ask you also when it comes to lunch so how is that going to work are they going to eat at their in their classrooms or i mean is lunch going to be served no yes as of right now i know mr wozniak is working on that there have been conversations about having different

073stations throughout where students are separated but also bringing lunch into the classroom and that's a good point right because again we've got to think about how we still continue supporting our students with the meals as well as with the academics one more question and because of the encounters that i've had with you know parents have this idea maybe of how it's going to be or they've heard about how it's going to be and so one of the questions has been okay so how are you going to select students to either do homebound or do or or be at the classroom so i'm not hearing that it's so much as a selection since it's going to be a trade-off trading in the morning and the p.m is that correct if we do the 2-2 split if

074we did the cohorts the waste would be a selection process and that selection pro process would be based on student academic needs right and which students have to come to school because they they're school dependent the parents need to work the other thing that we need to consider is that some families have multiple students in our system so ms hernsberger is pulling up that list we're going to see what grades are they in and how do we we literally need to go student by student and design a schedule that is conducive for the family environment and for those children as well were the counselors working on those schedules already it would be everybody working on it too not yeah so that's going to be a team effort right now we're working on building what the

075traditional schedule would look like so if i stay home because i'm doing remote learning i can follow my traditional schedule if that's the model we use mr mclaughlin okay so just logistically because it's 70 days till school right and it's a lot of unknowns and then there's things that happen based upon how those unknowns are answered and then at each step there's another three options that you'd have to decide and at the end of this you have to order a whole bunch of plexiglass by example right and when's that and how do you get that in time and so i know this is overwhelming like you you're in charge of redesigning how education works for 8 000 kids and you need it tomorrow but at the same time you're in charge of or y'all are

076in charge of redesigning how education works for 8 000 kids and we need it tomorrow so what is your timeline on those decisions and what role do we play as a as the elected representatives of the community because i don't want to like hear what the decision was and then me think well that's a really bad decision you know i want us to have a voice in that so would that be at our july agenda prep or is that too soon or what what's the schedule may i answer that surgery at the july 7th agenda prep as soon as mr fernandez gets the results on thursday and we have the team go out this weekend next week to meet with the parents because we need to be in consideration of the families that need to

077come to school and the buses then we can make a decision if it's that blended model it's all up here we just need to all come together put it on paper and start doing the schedules and so we have that plan we have the plexi glass as well but i do know that we need to um for certain we will have students that will be coming at a minimum at least three to four times a week because they need to be in school so their parents can go and work and again we call them our you know our school dependent children but just our children that learn better face to face and not in a remote setting we have to take all of that in consideration so july 7th we will have a plan in

078place for you but i think two prior to that we can share the results of the survey and share the information that we get from our team and what data they collect so we can give that to you as well so when the one thing you said there that stood out to me i don't want to be a parent i am right of three in this system and told oh we decided your child wasn't school dependent so they're going to be at home like i think the parents know their type of boys they know what their kid needs and i don't just want to look at like who's i mean i think they're all school dependent to be honest i think some parents may opt out or opt for a more blended model because they

079have anxiety about it or their child has special health conditions or whatever it might be but i don't i don't think we can stratify the kids based on need i agree some kids do poorer at home than other kids do at home but they all do worse at home than they do here and and so i that concerns me i know you're you're throwing it out as another concern but um you know the parent's voice will be also a decision just logistically much more trouble than either than like a monday wednesday tuesday thursday because if in that event you're still transporting 8 400 kids to campuses every day and and you're doing it at different times and i transportation is great but they're going to be running around like mad and and and then parents

080are going to have to do that well now every day i have to get junior to am oh tomorrow it's p.m and there just aren't jobs aren't that flexible you know once i'm at work i'm stuck at work and i work for myself so um so i'm i have concerns just as you all do right so i'm eager for a broader conversation mr redondo and then miss halsey thank you miss cantu and thank you dr ruiz mills similarly to what mr mclaughlin said obviously we're tasking you with fundamentally changing how a system has worked for hundreds of years and you know prepare for every scenario and eventuality my biggest concern i have several concerns actually but was illustrated during the presentation and that's technology malfunctions and we have issues and so when it comes to

081these blended models of learning where there's an instructor in the classroom meeting face to face and a handful of students are at home watching via zoom call undoubtably there's going to be technical difficulties and i need assurances that we're going to have staff at each campus ready to go to those classrooms to troubleshoot those technological challenges versus a teacher spending 45 minutes trying to figure out what's wrong with the sound why a child at home can't hear the lecture that's taking place calling someone from you know central or wherever our technology department is how is to come over and fix that so that's one thing is the technology of a blended learning model is we saw here even just at a board meeting their challenges and technology fails secondly my other concern similarly to mr

082mclaughlin's is families can't manage child care when my child goes to school monday wednesday and friday in the am so as we talk about calendar options and students physically being present on our campuses i hope this and don't take this the wrong way when we talk about like a census of families to get this information obviously it's going to be better i think in my opinion if a student comes monday wednesday friday or monday tuesday wednesday and has thursday friday off and it's a longer weekend because you can hopefully try and find child care in day after day versus i need you every other day for three and a half hours in the morning or in the afternoon so some type of consistent schedule that managerially makes more sense for parents i would be interested

083to see what isd families would prefer is it an every other day model is it every day in the morning or in the afternoon what does that look like when it comes to families navigating that process thirdly when it comes to our career and technical education courses especially at san marcos high school i still don't understand how someone who needs several hundreds hour several hundreds of hours of certification enrichment and instruction could get that in the modified schedule that's being proposed so i'd like to hear our director of cte talk about that especially when it comes to you know the lvn programs that we have and the cosmetology programs and welding and whatever that looks like is if we're offering these courses i want to see a road map that guarantees that these students are

084actually going to get to those certificates that we're saying that they could be eligible to get at the end of this upcoming academic year and if we can't assure those isd families that we can do that i have concerns about offering those as opportunities from them if they're not going to reach the finish line and so those are the things that i have off the top of my head there are several things kind of rattling around so similarly to mr mclaughlin i would like to see this plan before it's in final draft form just so that we can flush us out together again i think it's going to take a significant amount of resources for the isd to do all of these things and i don't want an assumption that there might not be support

085from some of us to allocate those funds to do whatever it is we need to do to make sure that we meet every child where they are and make sure that they're achieving the way that we want them to i guess fourthly i would assume that we need case managers i know that we've asked teachers to take on this additional burden of find out if your students need access to food or find out if they need access to technology if they have access to wi-fi we're already asking y'all to do so much as it is and to put that additional burden on teachers to constantly be checking in with isd families i think that obviously they're uniquely positioned to do that and they have those relationships with those students but to ask them to do

086that on top of everything else i can only imagine how overwhelming that is i would like to see in this plan that is brought back to us in july what support and resources we're giving to teachers asking them like all of y'all to go above and beyond what traditionally they've signed up for and i appreciate that they've risen to the occasion but i can only imagine how exhausting online instruction has been because i've seen it in other workplaces where now that we are so dependent on email and technological communication these jobs have really become 24 7 365 roles and i do not want that to be reflected at you know mid-year as teachers are burned out or even you know at the end of the first grading period so again thank you for all of

087y'all's work that you all are doing to formulate a plan that needs to have 8 000 different iterations to it and i can't even imagine what y'all are going through but again i appreciate y'all's leadership on this thank you thanks um i agree this is a gargantuan task and i really appreciate all the work that's going into it um i also share some of mr redondo and mr mclaughlin's concerns and i'm wondering what scenario one should we decide like should we you know i don't believe that we'll have a vaccine by august i don't think that that that anybody really believes that's going to be the scenario right but if we figure out some way to do an act scenario one and we brought back all the students and we had all of the kids

088that rode the bus at the end of the year riding the bus again do we have the space and do we have the teachers and do we have the resources like the number of buses that we would need to be able to accommodate that like i can't see putting 22 desks six feet apart in any elementary school classroom that i've been on right so the 22 desks six feet apart it just depends what classroom it is and how we set it up if i take these two desks and put them together and then put a plexiglass in between from the end of the seat to the end of the seat would be six feet and right now that's what we've been debating on if that is considered a viable alternative so we're working through that

089what we were working that comfortably we could get at least 13 or 14 correct mr wozniak in the classroom and then we would have an option so if i have my 14 students here the overflow would go into a specials rotation and then we would filter them out right we would also rotate the teachers into the class so if we are not doing just redepartmentalized then we have you know an elementary the english teacher come in or the math teacher come in and they're rotating and then at a certain time those 14 go into their specials group and the next group comes in but what that also means is that we may have to borrow from what bowie elementary has been doing where they've been doing the multi-age and so maybe grouping students by a

090and not by age but blending them together so we can have the classes so teachers may be teaching you know a couple of combined grade levels as well and so with the buses i don't know how mr wozniak is going to do that right now that's what he is in the process of working on but if we were to do scenario one that's what it would look like good luck i mean i mean it's a it's a massive undertaking and you know i say that more facetiously but i really appreciate all the effort i just i'm i'm very worried about how this is going to work so thank you you might have the answer or not already but how is um um extracurricular activities going to be blended into all this football band choir and

091everything else so that ties into what mr arredondo was asking regarding cte so we come up with a schedule let's just say scenario two you've got your blended model there but the constant will be those extracurriculars so based on their practice schedule if coach needs his students every day then there's going to be a certain period of the day where we need to transport them to the campus so they can participate or some of those students may choose to be part of those cohort groups that are going to be attending right as of right now uil music has just released their guidance saying that you can practice outside six feet apart you know but being uh cognizant of the air particles that are transported through the air right because of the condensation everything that goes

092through the instruments and so we've got that then so we're going to follow and model everything off of our athletic plan but we've got to make certain that we create plans for the students to come in and do cte and then come in to do their athletics do their fine arts do the extracurriculars so working with miss presley and our middle school leaders as well on that for the year that ended did you have will you have a report for us on those students that still did not meet their credit requirements and those students that had incomplete time on their cte so we have um mr doyle is working with our cte students right now they have until august the 31st and the state has given them an extension where they could complete some of

093their certifications online by going through the videos and then we have some that have slowly been able to go in and start doing their practicum hours and we also have some that are taking the test currently so they have until august 31st right now at the high school okay students did not lose credit second semester if they didn't attend we've encouraged them to attend summer school we actually have students that did not participate second semester that are now participating in summer school we were able to find them they've come back given them a computer given them a hot spot we have a little over 230 students that are working on credit retrieval that means that they lost the credit not due to covid but sometime throughout their high school career and so those are the

094students that are working out on it as of this time and so they're working from home they're all of our summer school is online those students are doing edgenuity and so we have teachers that are monitoring their work we have 80 students that are doing summer school online here at the high school for acceleration and that is through a live teacher on canvas thank you anybody else have questions okay mr dre is going to finish off the presentation okay in addition to our group that worked on what our school days would look like we had another group of folks work on the actual calendar um we took a look at our currently approved calendar which is right now 172 student instructional days and we we took a look at where could we possibly add additional

095student instruction days trying to recover of course lost instruction so we were able to get the calendar to 177. we were shooting for 180 but we had to stay within teacher contract days and still allow for teachers time to you know set up their classrooms they had to leave very quickly and those kinds of things impacted their ability to close out the way they normally would so we were able to come up with 177 days by increasing five student days mostly at the end of the calendar going into june and i'll show you that in a moment we also needed to stick with our current start date of august 24th because because of construction at de zavala and miller and the other factor that we looked at is we have received a grant called the

096adsy it's through tea and it's it stands for additional days of school and this coming year will be a planning year for this grant in which a steering committee will be formed and together that committee with parents community members and staff from travis and mendes will work to design a 210-day calendar beginning implementation in the 20 20 in the 21 22 school year so that grant became available prior to covid so it's not related specifically to covid the intention of the reason tea put this grant opportunity together is because they've been looking at research that shows significant learning loss when students are out of school and then covid came along and now we're really experiencing that so it was a little bit ironic that the opportunity appeared when it did however you know considering student

097needs and extended time out of school even just during the summer we are working to respond to that by coming up with a year-round calendar um tea also has in house bill 3 um a piece of that bill is specific to half day funding called adsy funding for districts who choose to go beyond 180 school days up to 210. so there is some funding available after our planning year of the grant we would then be eligible for provided successful planning occurs we would be eligible for an implementation grant that would also give us additional funds to help implement that and offset the other half of the the funding to provide support for those additional school days so can you go to the next slide so this is just an overview of of the days that

098we took a specific look at um to see where we could add additional student learning and as mr fernandez shared with you right now it's looking like of the 30ish percent of families that have responded to our survey so far it doesn't look like people are very interested in moving to a slightly extended calendar of course we'll ask you to take that into consideration and it would have us ending school on june 8th for students and june 9th for teachers and i believe you have a copy of that in your board book as well so you can see the details so the other impact it had was moving from nine professional learning days to six days so it did reduce our professional learning by three and we have our parent and um teacher that would

099like to comment as well so i want to start by first being appreciative of the opportunity to participate and having a voice at the table in terms of considering the calendar and the schedule i know that we've dropped from nine days to six days uh for professional development i i personally do not think that the loss of those days is going to have a negative impact on our ability to deliver instruction i mean we will still have the opportunity for training at the beginning of the year uh on disinfecting practices i hear and also um on training for hybrid presentations and and i think if we preserve the opportunity to collaborate as teachers and share tips and tricks on what we've learned while we were at home tinkering with things that we will be well

100set up and ready to go for the school year both options still have holidays scattered throughout them and uh days where we all get to have a long weekend and sort of recoup so i think both options are are solid um so to piggyback off miss jackson i agree that both calendars i think have a lot of options um i know the survey is showing that parents right now seem to lean more towards the current approved calendar however i i want to point out that the extended calendar is only adding five days um and only adding two to the end of the school year so from june 4th to june 8th i think that that maybe that information wasn't known um and maybe if that information is put out there that maybe there would be

101more support for that calendar i do find i think it's going to be necessary for those five days even for students who might be straight a students um i think there was just such a big impact for those nine weeks for students to be at home and i mean i know from my personal experience the difference between what my the education my son was receiving at home due to circumstances versus what he would have received in the school is very different and i i think that it's going to be important to try and catch up all the students next year for that for to make up for what was missed this past year okay thank you so my last point i wanted to make was the connection between moving this calendar um by a few

102days potentially if that's a decision that the board wishes to go um the reason we we did look at an intersessional calendar which was one of the options proposed by tea for districts to consider spreading like just going straight to a year-round calendar we did not consider that option because beginning the following school year with the with the grant in place that would have us starting in july and so we didn't want to eliminate a summer for our staff and our students so that's the reason why we were working to end um in early june mr redondo you had a question um thank you miss cantu and i appreciate miss suntliner clarifying that the extended calendar i know i received an email that referenced that you know an extended calendar modified calendar from what was

103approved by the board might remove a child's summer but even at an extended calendar it is not doing such a thing and that it's only adding several days so that i guess was one of my biggest concerns was coming into tonight's meeting was you know what that looked like we're making sure that we message to isd families that a modified calendar is not at least in my assumption is not going to be detrimental to people's plans if they have any already that and also when it comes to instruction time delivered to students and this i think is actually a dr ruiz mills question and then mr wozniak if a set of circumstances presents itself in which a staff member an instructor a teacher exposes a classroom to the virus again that's another iteration of this

104plan that needs to be worked out but again what does that look like or how do we manage that type of dynamic when it comes to providing instruction and blended learning and you know again so many questions that are left unanswered because of so many different hypotheticals but again i'm just curious as we talk about a school calendar if this accommodates those hypothetical situations that more than likely will arise just an additional handful of days i think with a handful of days if we were to extend it plus we are also increasing the school day by 15 minutes at all grade levels with exception to pre-k that will allow us to help minimize you know some of the student loss and embed it into the new curriculum but working with mr wozniak if it uh

105you know if an entire classroom got ill or contracted the virus then that would be a complete remote learning if they're able to or we would have to it would be two weeks or we would need to come up with a plan like we do now if a student is out for a certain amount of days you know how do we go and provide that instruction that was lost and so it will at that point it will need to be based on an accommodation potentially putting that student on a 504 right because of that illness so we can bring them up you know and give them the instruction online so that's we have these conversations once a week or more often than that too again it's all of planning for the unknown unknowns that we

106know are going to hit yes absolutely and then my second follow-up to that and it's in response to a comment mr mclaughlin made because i am in agreement i would really appreciate data and information and really as we make these decisions is how many isd families believe and want their child to be present full time you know there's obviously going to be some families who say you know it's best for my child to stay home or opt into an online instructional model which the isd is planning for but i would be similarly interested in knowing what families are just going to flat out say nobody's home we work full time we can't facilitate online instruction we don't know calculus you know we need the educators in the isd to you know fulfill this role in

107our child's life because again i think that data is going to be critical as we make these decisions moving forward and how staffing looks and what those additional resources are and when it comes to professional development i would also be interested and i know this was done at several campuses throughout the last nine weeks is what support we can offer parents who are partaking in online instruction and being that facilitator for the child at home but i would even be interested in miss mustafa looking into resources really to support the parents and the grandparents and the aunt and uncle social and emotional health because i know that this is obviously taking a toll on them as well regardless of demographic or economic status asking a parent or guardian to become their child's instructor in any

108way is a big ask and so again whatever resources and support the isd can provide families outside of what we've typically done because we're doing something outside of what we've historically done which is fine but again i hope those things are being taken into consideration and again all of those requests have a dollar sign attached to them but as we have these plans individually you know whatever those resources need to be allocated you know you can count on my support [Music] yes i have a question on the extended day option um may 28th was in our current plan is our current calendar is instruction day why was it changed to a holiday because if we left it as instruction and then the last student day we could actually end the school year at the same

109time as the current calendar oh i see what you're saying yes we had to account for only 187 days for staff so we couldn't go beyond that so adding um so that impacted that if you backed it up and made that a construction day then you would back up when the teachers left and when the students left yes that's the committee was taking um into consideration where breaks were throughout the calendar as well and so that was one of the days that they wanted to wanting the school year to end the same time because we also backed why are we skipping june 7th we're not skipping june 7th no instruction will go straight from so so june 3rd currently on the calendar is the last student day right and so it would be the instruction

110would continue from june 3rd all the way through you know monday through friday through june 8th i didn't i just didn't write every day i see that i see that i just think if we could i think parents if they're concerned about summer would prefer that they just go ahead and have instruction on that may 28th i'm just that's comments i've received from parents is to not not take up as much summer as possible we can take another look at that thank you mclaughlin mr ruiz i i was remember when we first started talking about calendar shifts i thought it was to build in some slack so that if we have get shut down for two weeks or something we've got some days to eat it up but my understanding was if we didn't need

111them we could still let out at a similar time that we weren't aiming to have more minutes of instruction in the school year we were just aiming for some flexibility but but it seems like the new proposal the extended days option if there's no disruption is just going is still going to extend the year and and my child's still going to go to school whatever 15 minutes times 172 plus those five days are did i miss the transition from building in slack to we just want them here more now we could the building in the slack was going to come in the form of the intercessional calendar where we could still do that but also if we stick with our calendar because that's what the families right now on mr fernandez's survey have said if

112we do that if we end up saying having to shut down for two weeks there would be a potential where we could make up those two weeks at the end or we could do interventions and supports during the thanksgiving break giving teachers extra duty pay bringing in students you know that monday and tuesday of that break and also doing it during the winter break as possible we do have a calendar like that that we drafted but the committee went with these two options that we can also present to you as well we can send it to you okay this can too whoever wants to go if am i next yes i guess again with the handful of days that have been added i think with it being such a unknown right now individually it might

113not be a popular conversation to have but i'm interested in looking at what an intersessional calendar looks like for the isd affording us those opportunities if we have to shut down for a week at a time or if students have to quarantine for two weeks at home or staff have to quarantine for two weeks at home whatever that looks like i mean the reality is that we're a working class community and i understand that a handful of families might have summer plans and summer camps and things like that but i think most of them have the means and wherewithal to modify those with a year of advance notice so again as we talk about the most at risk and the school dependent students i hope that that's the population that we're focused on when we

114make some of these decisions i have that calendar i'll get with mr fernandez tomorrow so he can beautify it and i'll send it out to the school board miss ponzi yeah i was wondering about decreasing the number of professional days for teachers because if we're asking teachers to you know suddenly become multimodal in a variety of different technologies and changing the curriculum to suit this group and then doing blended ages that seems like a lot of planning um at the very minimum that's going to be needed for the teachers so i also feel like we're going to need to be really flexible no matter what right because we don't know what the next year is going to look like nobody does and so we might have to decide in january to redo the calendar again

115right so i would prefer because these are so similar to stick with what we already have um and adding a few days of instruction on at the end of the school year doesn't seem to me like necessarily um i don't know i go back and forth because i feel like it's often a time when parents struggle for child care at the end of the year before camps start and especially if there are again no summer camps next year so i can sort of see extending it by a few days to give parents that help i also think that those are often the days that students really do receive the least amount of instruction during the school year um which is good and bad right um so i would be inclined to stick with what we

116have um giving the teachers the extra support and then knowing that you know we might have to change this again in august we might have to change it in november we might have to change it again next march it just seems we don't really know thank you ms holsey abandon um i tend to agree with ms halsey and i'm i'm really interested in having the the the shorter calendar and uh i like the idea of maybe finding out what who would be available to to do some um you know student uh teaching for in in during the thanksgiving group break i i think maybe there's some that might be available where others want to take the whole thanksgiving week but some some that may be a couple of days where we could get some um

117arranged for some teachers to be available but and students it whatever they need let's go did you have a question mr mclaughlin okay got it covered thank you okay which can do i have one last question about the calendar of the three iterations that are floating around these two and intercessional one what miss halsey referenced to was we might have to pivot mid-year or after the first nine weeks do these calendars allow for that i would assume we would need more minutes built in if we were to move things around or you know again i guess that's my question is what calendar allows us the most flexibility moving forward if we for instance have to call an audible given a new scenario that arises you want me to answer you want to answer i i

118think the calendar that would offer the most flexibility may be the one that's not up there the intercessional calendar because you have those breaks embedded throughout the year so we plan it by you know kind of based off of the predictive models of when the virus may spike again and that would provide us the flexibility i'm also adding those 15 extra minutes and i can't remember the total off the top of my head will also give us latitude in the instructional minutes because we'll go over the 75 600 minutes required so we'll have flexibility within that as well for additional days but i think that one would be it i think the one where we added the additional six days that would help it would just be spread out it wouldn't be all you know

119in different weekly formats like the intersession go ahead so the one thing it does though on the end of the screen by spreading the breaks out is that it would push us further into summer with an end date and so by doing that that in that significantly would impact whether or not students and staff have a summer break so there's a give and take with each with each option in mystery that was the one that adds additional days at the end or the intersession that would push us uh almost to the end of june is there and again send us a copy of that intercession i have 172 days that would push us through the second week of june with an intercessional calendar i i hate to say i all the time but one day

120i couldn't sleep if i remember correctly that worked out that might leave about three weeks of a summer break for the schools implementing um extended school year to 210. is this can to you is there like a hybrid between intersessional and a traditional school calendar that doesn't take away so much of june and july i mean if you talk about building a calendar that potentially could follow the you know spike a virus contraction throughout the year i mean we we have like good friday that is a bad weather makeup day if you know things don't happen as bad as we hope that they don't are there ways that we can give those days back to families is there a calendar that exists in such a way that if we need them we can use them

121and like mr mclaughlin says is if we meet this threshold of number of minutes then we can effectively end this school year or give days back to families and students yes we could and if if you give me 48 hours we can have that for you i we didn't anticipate that quick of a turnaround but i appreciate that but again as we you know talk about these things i don't want to take away our student summers but without knowing what the spring or the fall in the spring is going to look like i don't know if five days and uh you know three days at the end of the year is going to help us manage what we don't [Music] are we finished i don't think there's a win situation with this calendar for this

122year it's just everything is so up in the air um you know whether the international calendar that you're talking about whether whatever time is extended and leaves for students to enjoy summer to some extent to whatever extent so when you're talking about the intersessional calendar that you have it's unknown whether maybe we will close have to close or not or whatever it is that we might happen to where it continues to stretch it out so and and that's where i think a lot of parents are going to complain about if we go with whatever calendar that's why it's going to be a no-win situation at this point in time because we're not ever going to be able to please at parents uh all parents you know they're all going to be somewhat upset with whatever

123if something happens or not happens and we go this way in this world that way maybe what we could find is maybe a uh something in between what you've got here and that way maybe we do need additional days whether it's you're looking at five additional days here right that you're putting up besides the 172. i'd hate to think that parents would get upset if we went further than what we normally have because we have not had i mean this situation is unusual it's not a typical atypical calendar year that's been previous years so i think i think our parents i like to think that our parents would have common sense and and be understanding of whatever of the calendar that we we feel is best given the circumstances that we're operating in right now

124but i still like to see that in maybe a few days in there or whatever it would be but the other one that you were talking about as well we'll get those plans to you my preference at this point you know with the unknowns out there is to k is to keep the current calendar but add in um time during thanksgiving winter break and even spring break where students can comment if they need extra time or and i'm sure we could find enough staff members that would be willing to do those things of course for extra pay but that would be my preference at this point but anyone else mr josenda in response to that i guess my concern is having students come in for additional instructional time around holidays is that they would essentially

125be around family you know if we say we're going to bring students in the week of thanksgiving for additional instruction more than likely they're around family which could essentially expose them to the virus so as we have these conversations i understand that there are holidays that we could essentially ask students to give up for additional instructional time that's not what i would like to see happen i think two and a half months of summer is more than enough to find some time for additional instruction versus christmas break or thanksgiving break i mean there's universities who are not coming back into session after thanksgiving for that exact same reason and so you know when billion dollar institutions find that as a best practice i hope we can look to them as a model of what we

126should or could do for isd families and students and i thank you for all the work and there is a no-win schedule because they'll always be parents and students upset are we through with the academic update because i think the board is going to need a break we still have to yeah we still have two all right let's take a break now [Music] are we ready for a break yes everybody okay let's take a ten minute break right now come back and eight oh three [Music] just stand up ready to there's a get back to work let's start with the school board construction update good evening board president trustees mr cardona my name is bernie sanders i'm the director of construction management services here for the district i'm going to try to give you a

127brief overview of uh the 2017 bond project uh just from a high level perspective i can tell you what's important probably important to y'all is the budget looks good and the deadlines look good more importantly so with that i'm going to just jump right into it the numbers the budget the overall budget really the big change there is the new elementary school rodriguez we're starting to realize some additional savings so if you look at last month's presentation you'll see an increase on the estimated savings and a lot of that is driven by by rodriguez elementary school as far as we've had to go back and correct three roofs uh for the crockett travis and bowie campuses uh crockett is done pending a final review in fact we're out there today looking at the looking at

128the work probably some adjustments we're gonna have to do nothing structural mainly cosmetic uh the travis and the bowie campuses uh they actually started bowie this week as well today and both uh or all three will be done by the uh by the end of july which is which is good the san marcos high school uh fully expect by the by the next time i'm in front of y'all that will be completely done with this project we are probably working on the final punch list i mean you can see some items there but really uh having seen this building it's something that the district certainly needs to be proud of it definitely comes complements this building as well as the athletic facilities and it's it's really something to see it's it's going to be good

129for the students good for uh good for the faculty and like i said we should be wrapped up with that by the end of uh or at least by the next time i'm in front of y'all uh as far as miller middle school the renovation there that one is probably of all the projects we have going on that's probably the most visible to the eye if you're just driving by with some of the work that's being done um we've got as you can see there there's a lot of stuff that's happening inside but there's a lot of stuff happening outside as well uh some stuff that'll be completed in the next 30 days and there's a picture on the next page the eighth grade hallway will be tiled and and the flooring will be in

130uh the future admin area which just sits in front of the school if you're coming off fox trail you can see the the prep work has started the exterior site prep has started classroom framing inside the inside the school is taking shape and then the courtyard one which is sits right next to uh the new admin area uh within the next 30 days that'll be finalized rebar is going in concrete so that's going to be uh that'll be visibly uh from the road that you can see that's being completed as far as as far as de zavala this is a lot of internal work that's going on uh you can see what's been done over the last 30 days since the last time we've talked or the last time this was it to y'all uh

131some of the stuff over the next 30 days really from the from the view of the street you'll be able to see that the parking lot will be completed with new curbs new access retrofitting the roofs on on each of the on each of the classroom ring wings so once again work a lot of good work going on there there's some pictures on the next page of the framing of the new admin area and then some pairs that had to be installed on the right hand side that's going to support support as well as support the building and then the last project which we actually just started last week is good night that is a a project that is going to be completed right up to the start of school in fact august 18th is

132the day that we have there's not a lot of complicated work it's a lot of hvac a lot of air conditioning a lot of light changes uh some demo of some restaurant uh some restrooms in the uh in the cafeteria area but uh that'll be should be completed on time and like i said that we just got uh we just got started on that last week with a lot of demo uh demo work and we should have a more of an update at our next meeting any questions is this one back on miller it's always confused me what is phase one completion that's not going to be done until january of next year so that would be uh that would be the new admin area that's up at the front so while they've started work

133on that to demo the existing building and work on the uh the foundations that's why it's not gonna be completed until next year i was just curious phase two is actually the classrooms eighth seventh and sixth grade hallways the hallways leading up to those to those wings that'll be done august 12th thank you any other questions for many trustees thank you very much thank you good job welcome hb 3 board adopted plans [Music] so [Music] while they have restarted but really just some background house bill 3 requires school boards to adopt detailed plans that achieve goals in early childhood literacy early childhood math and college career military readiness there are some plan specific requirements for and for these goal outcomes these goal outcomes that we're going to be discussing this evening the specific requirements is

134that both early childhood and ccmr require boards to adopt goals that address student growth and we're going to be talking about that here in a moment as well as the student growth we need to also address the closing the achievement gaps for the student groups within the state accountability the closing the achievement gaps as you recall is domain three and those gaps or those targets are set at the meets or above level so those scores are always at the meets level not the approaches meets and then masters so in addition to student growth there are also some early childhood goals and those early childhood goals require teachers to attend professional development and we can also have specific goals as well for our english language learners and for our bilingual students so let's talk about the

135targeted professional or development the targeted professional development that would be for our pre-k teachers our kindergarten our first grade our second grade and our third grade teachers including the principals at our bonham pre-k and our elementary and they would attend what we referred to as the science of reading academy or our reading academies right now really learning the science and the pedagogy on how to master and teach students how to read and so that would be a requirement and we would have through to full or yeah 2023 they changed it to 2023 to achieve that training for our pre-k kindergarten first through third grade teachers and our principals at those campuses now oh good thank you so right here is the information for household three and what it requires right and so we'll be setting

136goals that are for five years that pertain to early childhood literacy early childhood math and college career military readiness and that's aligned to the domain one indicators we have like 12 different indicators and student achievement in domain one and right here are the plan specific requirements where the targeted professional development it should say pre-k through three classroom teachers and principals and then also developing specific goals as well for bilingual and esl students it will be based off of our third grade star math and reading and then also in the closing the gaps domain so as we start moving into developing these goals we'll work with our campus leaders once they're developed to implement the goals in the campus improvement plans we'll also work with them on goal setting because even though we'll be focusing on

137third grade or ccmr we also need to make certain that we have progress measures in place as a guide to ensure that each campus is meeting those specific goals so that we can achieve it at the district level right because these board outcome goals are also aligned to the superintendent's evaluation so we need to make sure that we have the systemic process starting you know in our primary grades prior to students taking the test in third grade so there is required training for the board and that was the hb3 evaluating and improving student outcomes training you participated in this training back in september in 2019 it was part of the lone star governance training remember they broke us up in groups miss hanson i was with you and we had to come up with goals

138and we were trying to figure out this is where we are right now this is where we want to be in uh five years and coming up with these incremental processes so we participated in that training and your next training for that won't be until 2022 so we're good on that but then here again all pre-k through third grade teachers and our early childhood and elementary principals will also participate in the science of reading academy training now right now i think we roughly have 48 teachers that have been participating in that all year and so ms dre is working through these reading academies to set up the training for this upcoming year and then in the summer and then the following year as well so we have some proposed performance goals again it's a five-year

139deadline and where in which we are going to be given to meet the federal targets and we'll see that in a moment so go ahead and go to the next slide okay this is a little difficult to read i know but this slide right here is the percentage of third grade students star reading if you look at that it says the percent of third grade students that score again at the meets grade level or above on star reading we're saying that if you look at that target group right there at 2019 we were at 37 percent by 2024 we want to be at 44 is the federal target for the all student group but if you look at each student group if you notice at the bottom each student group has a specific target so

140if you look at our hispanic student group in 2019 we were at 32 percent the federal target is 37 percent tea recommends that we develop attainable and quantifiable goals and so we're moving up at about two percentage points each year to get to 37 percent so that's how we've adjusted this this is based off of our 2019 data at the meets level in domain 3. okay now of course if we're at 32 percent right now we want to make certain that we're closer to 37 percent and if we surpass that then that's great but we also want to make sure though with everything going on in light of that that we have something that's quantifiable and measurable and still attainable and what we put here on the bottom closing the gap student groups as a

1412020 alternate target because we did not have star this year this is our map screener data and that's our beginning of year and middle of year the middle of year test was taken right when we came back from the winter break and so this is where we were in the middle part of january all right so this is the screener that we would use in addition to our cua data to help us come up with those progress measures and we will report how we are doing uh quarterly to the school board we'll provide you with the report just like we did at this year with some of our campuses we'll give you that information november then i want to say into february and then may so you can also see how we're progressing and then

142whatever assessment we're given you know what the accountability system looks like then you'd have that finalized report too before august on the next slide this is the percentage of third grade students in star math and so what we're saying here is that third grade students that score meets grade level or above on star math will increase from 38 percent you went up one too far right there uh from 38 in that all student group in 2019 by june of 2024 we want to be at 46 and you'll notice the federal target is right and so again for each student group we're trying to be at or above those federal targets and again we included the map data here from our beginning of year and middle of year in january okay and then our ccmr board

143outcome goals we're saying here that the percentage of graduates that meet the criteria for college career military readiness will increase from 47.8 percent to 57 percent by august of 2024. as you can see if you're looking at our student groups in 2019 we were already above the federal targets what we also need to note though in this closing the gap student groups this is off of the lagging indicator so even though it says 2019 this is really the graduating class of so this particular goal will always be one year behind all right and that is based off of the domain one student achievement those various indicators that are there and then they take it and they break it up and then they put it here in the closing the gaps domain so these are the

144performance goals that we are recommending to be our guide for the next five years we will present it to you quarterly and then we will do the final report once a year and then at those times we can go back and if needed we can readjust the goals my first question is how did they determine the federal targets the federal targets are determined out of the every student succeeds act that comes from the from the department of education it's most likely on some sort of methodology based on student performance because they seem low to me yeah they seem wet so they seem low to me well how how is the 47 for the 2019 figures where did we get that so the 47 in 2019 came off of our remember our accountability a through f

145ratings and domain three so they go into domain one student achievement they have all of those indicators right did the student take the tsi did the student graduate with an iep and still meet a cte requirement did a student earn you know an industry-based certification did they take an ap class did they take a dual credit class they have all of those parameters then based off of those parameters they break it up into the student groups to determine the which what is the percentage of those student groups that met a ccmr indicator anybody have questions wow no let's move on thank you thank you very much sent item agenda start with the uh minutes from the regular scheduled board meeting on may 18th and special call meeting on june 1st i move that we approve

146do i hear a second for approval of minutes all second mondo seconds all in favor any opposed 7-0 items for action consider approval of budget amendments good evening board president cantu trustees and superintendent cardona you have five budget amendments in front of you beginning on page 21. the first four are common budget amendments at the end of a budget year the last one has been in the news frequently trust board president cantu how would you like me to address these individually or individually amendment 25 is for our child nutrition it registers the revenue for all commodities we've received this year it is revenue neutral amendment 26 is for trs medicare on behalf again that's a pass through it is revenue neutral amendment 27 is for the bond refunding that we just completed again that's just

147documenting on the debt service budget that we did that action there is no additional uh expenditures there amendment 28 is for functions to make sure through the end of the budget year through the end of this month we don't go over in any function so we have to look at all the pos and move enough money to cover it in every single area and then amendment is the one that we saw in the news this week tea has told school districts that they will be taking or removing our foundation revenue this year in the same amount that we're going to receive cares funding from the federal government next year and so we are reducing our revenue on our budget to reflect that as we've been directed to do questions call for a motion i will

148move that we accept the budget amendment a second is yepando moose and miss hansen seconds all in favor [Music] 7-0 budget amendments approved consider approval of requests for refund of penalties and interest on a 2 2019 property tax payment citing section 33.01 0.011 k of the texas property tax code san marcos cisd received the request for a refund of penalties and interest on a 2019 property tax payment from the hayes county tax assessor collector this was the statement that was provided to the district for consideration at some point during the 2019 tax year ms clapp who we met earlier this evening was no longer required to fund an escrow account through her mortgage company however the mortgage company had already reached out to the tax office to have her bills sent directly to them they

149did not mail a copy of the bill to miss clap as required by section 31.01 of the texas texas property tax code the taxes penalty and interest were paid on march 30 2020 which is the required within the required 21 days from the date the taxpayer knew of the delinquency the amount that ms clapp is requesting refunded is 143.23 and you can see on the following page page 26 of your board book that that's the actual request form the cred request does meet one of the um one of the qualifying reasons that's provided for in the law and just so the trustees know the city and the county have both considered this request and approved it previous to this meeting you said as reque they had to send her a copy as required who had

150to send her the tax office or her mortgage company i believe it's the mortgage company sends the request to the tax office but i i might have that backwards comment to her it should come from the mortgage company or it was going to the mortgage company i got a little bit turned around in the store myself earlier i have an escrow but i get a copy and they get a copy from the tax office so i was just wondering sounds like the tax office didn't quite do their job it was uh it's being attributed to the mortgage company and i want to represent it i want to represent it the way it was told to me and the way it is on this paperwork uh and that it does seem like there was a mix-up

151in between and i think it all happened uh there was so there was a baby delivered and some issues uh where the family was away from home for a period of time also so i think there were a lot of things happening at once it's halsey i moved that the board approved the request for a reef under penalties and interest as requested been moved by miss halsey seconded by mr arredondo that we approve the request for refund all in favor 6 opposed one mr mclaughlin opposes consider approval and acceptance of house bill 3 board rules yes a second moved by mr aradondo seconded by ms halsey that we approve and accept the house bill three board goals a brief comment any discussion yeah briefly i was concerned and i'll be voting against i understand the

152process and the requirement but i was concerned that we emerge at the end with a bigger gap between our anglo and hispanic kids and reading on grade level then we have entering the five year period and i know that's not what everybody wants is that a function of statistics or why why is that happening i'm trying to understand the question so right now if you go back to the first slide of reading on um the early childhood reading okay so the gap between your anglo students and hispanic students is it's not on the screen so from memory uh it's 32 for hispanic and 50 for white and then at the end of the period and then at the end of 2024 hispanics is 37 and white is 60 and those are the federal targets so

153it goes from a 18 point gap to a 23 point gap according to uh the federal targets given to us devos and company yes it does i don't know the methodology that they use i could ask miss hernsberger for that she's not here to excuse me okay i was just explaining why i was voting against that's all i have mrs cantu that's all you have are we ready to vote all in favor three mr aradondo's out of the room so it's five two one correct mr mclaughlin opposes mr rizondo did you vote want to vote in favor okay so it's six to that but you one could i take the vote again though okay then we'll leave it i'm sorry i won we'll leave it 5-1 since he was out of the room at the

154time of the vote so we won't cause any problems possible action regarding calendar options for the 2020 2021 school year i'll move to table the modification of a calendar option from 20 21 school year any discussion or questions when will we bring it back do you think well i think miss ruiz mills was going to put together an option three so i at the agenda prep would we be able to i can i can email the options out to you and then we can discuss at the july 7th agenda prep okay so are we voting we have a motion by mr mclaughlin in a second by mr arredondo consider approval of grade four and seven notification waiver do i hear a second i'll second the motion seconds mr arredondo moves miss riapando seconds any questions

155or discussion we have an explanation yeah yes this is a waiver from tea that came out on june the 9th and usually we use our star data to contact parents of fourth graders going into fifth grade and seventh graders going into eighth grade at risk of them potentially not progressing on their star exam or if they're at risk of not passing their classes and transitioning into middle school or into high school because we do not have that data we are asking for a waiver and it's determined that we will be using different types of means other than test results to have those conversations those will be based on our beginning of your screener and our common unit assessments so we can have conversations within the first four weeks with any parent next year of a

156current of a sitting fifth grader or eighth grader in the sub coming school year just so we can develop a system of support for them yeah thanks um i'm obviously in support of this i just wanted to say that during the break mr a shared with me that we have 600 elementary school students who are taking summer school and i think that that's really great that that either through the teachers reaching out to them or parents deciding that their student needed that extra support that we're able to do it and that we've had that response yes and you're doing it i would like to see us doing that all of the time rather than doing the star test but and you're doing that online thank you all in favor [Music] 7-0 consider nomination for task

157b board position region 13. oh no i'm sorry i miss consider approval of reading diagnostic waiver yes you want me to give you some information on this this is another waiver that came out of tea and because of the disruption to the 2019-2020 school year and possible disruptions to the upcoming school year that we want to request a waiver to continue using our screening instruments which again is the nwea map screener and then we use the bath screener which is from fontes and pinel and we would like to continue using those screeners in the upcoming school year and so we have to put in a waiver for that as well questions or discussion i move that we approve okay miss hanson moves do i hear it second mr arredondo seconds are any further questions all

158in favor did you vote 7-0 discussion and potential board action on a board statement regarding racial violence we're skipping that are we skipping did i scare i'm sorry geez i keep checking them off beforehand you're ahead i'm way ahead consider nomination for tasby board position yes moves and miss halsey seconds that miss viapando be our nominee [Music] i'll accept i'm honored that to be nominated i'll i'll do the best that i can okay um elected in this role [Music] um can i say something yes there is some um travel to several of the meetings and and task b conferences and so uh that's covered by taxby uh the interview is not and so um i'm i'm willing to go on my own it's in austin i think okay we're glad you accepted the nomination are

159we ready to vote all in favor 7-0 now we're at h discussion and potential board action on a board statement regarding racial violence [Music] who is this is requested by mr arredondo and miss halsey to be on the agenda without specific wording so i i'm not saying they own my wording i was trying to be as broad as possible but they had requested this be on the agenda uh yes so uh thank you uh mr mclaughlin i had sent a statement to um then board president um for review and abcc to superintendent cardona as well um candid response but also in support of the administration [Music] well without going all the way back to what i was saying i think it's the responsibility of the board of trustees to come out also with a similar

160statement similar to mr cardonas and to also to reaffirm our support for the programs and initiatives that he outlined in his statement if you didn't hear me earlier mr cardona said he would be more than happy to forward the draft statement to the trustees to review if you have a technological device and access to your email in front of you so i don't know how the board wants to take this up i'm comfortable making a motion to approve i welcome input insight edits but i'm ready to vote on it tonight i was not aware that it was not in the board book that's my mistake i guess you didn't hear what he said no but kathy oh miss hansen said she hasn't seen the statement so it's kind of hard to vote if we haven't

161gotten to everyone why didn't we get this ahead of time we would we would need to distribute it possibly we could distribute the statement and then do our executive committee and then come back to this action item can we do it we can gender prep i mean i'll make a motion that we delay this item until after item 10 b okay so we're just delaying this for this current meeting that we delay it until after we come back from executive session so everybody has time to read it yes i second that okay motion by mr arredondo and second by miss halsey that we delay the action on this item until after executive session that way can be distributed and everyone has a chance to look at it ahead of time before we're required to vote

162on it mr fernandez all in favor of oh yes one two three four five six opposed no i'm one no i'm just saying i was voting with everybody else yeah you i counted you with the six and miss hanson you voted against okay i discussion potential action to authorize an equity audit and or the hiring of a chief equity officer who's going to speak on that that's a board item um there was some discussion in and around the time superintendent cardona's statement that there were two tangible things the board could do with regard to equity for the first being an audit and the second being the potential hire of a of a director position regarding the topic i conversed with so i didn't put put this on the agenda because i wanted to get everybody's

163feedback regarding which way the board would want to go i had discussions with superintendent cardona regarding an audit as maybe a first step something he wasn't sure and maybe he'll be able to speak on the difference between this that something we could function we could cover internally or something we could hire to be done by an group and um and so in order to have this discussion and see what the if the board wanted to take any action if so uh what it was that's the that's the background on why this agenda topic is on the agenda because all of this happened since agenda prep so it's new to all of the trustees but [Music] mr cardona could you speak as to specifically as to the audit the options with regarding first of all what

164did it accomplish and then the options regarding whether that would be handled internally or externally i think in order to do it like the most effectively be an outside person and so i reached out to a professor from the university of north carolina charlotte who i know works a lot with school boards around the country around equity and he was a former principal and he has a company who does equity audits so they'll look at your special education placements gt placements your curriculum your programs human resources practices kind of the whole gamut it just gives you an outside recommendation on where you're at a baseline of where you want to you know maybe where you want to go and perhaps maybe some places where we're really doing well in that we don't know but they

165do analyze everything we have a conference call tomorrow no win wednesday monday wednesday at 10 a.m central time uh he's north carolina's obviously the east coast uh but that was something that prior to this you know we've done some training but when mr mclaughlin brought it up i'm like we can reach out and do that i mean it's something very tangible to do and don't make us uncomfortable but it's something we need to do anyway um so within that audit i'm in favor of having a third party external audit i think that's a great idea but within that would um information be solicited from teachers and from parents knowing this person i would i would venture to guess yes he likes to get a lot of feedback from and probably even students like student voice

166that's part of that so you know they will design it however we say you know however we work an arrangement out with them but knowing him being a former principal who's african-american and like he yes i'm just saying i would like to see both an audit of the curriculum and so sort of the hard scape right but also a qualitative sure he'll do yeah it was my and it was at least my individual after visiting with michael and thinking through this you know i thought it better to first have the external audit identify issues and then as a board decide what solutions would be rather than hiring the position before we know the problem so with that in mind i would move that we authorize a superintendent to hire third party company to conduct a

167equity audit of all school district functions involving parents teachers community members second move by mr mclaughlin that we approve the hiring of a consultant to do this equity audit seconded by mr aredondo any further questions or discussions all in favor raise your hand then opposed zero we're now ready to go into closed session is authorized by section 551.07 of the texas government code discussion of safety and security audit discussion regarding potential personnel appointments discussion regarding superintendent's evaluation so we'll be gone in a while is there a way we could excuse the folks out and stay here and rather that room's kind of small i don't know how we're going to just shut everything down oh well if you didn't just space out chairs already consider approval of personal appointments do i hear a motion i

168move that we approve the personal appointments as presented by administration to the board second moved by halsey second by redondo and all in favor can i read them out so sure at least people will know we're approving the director of energy management and sustainability mr richard duvall director of pupil personnel and pupil person and okay there's not a count in student support services miss rose pearson and director of instruction and campus support miss amber owens all in favor six opposed one [Music] consider approval of superintendent's evaluation i move that we approve a second been moved by ms hanson and seconded by mr arredondo that we approve the superintendent's evaluation all in favor seven oppose zero [Music] i will do it i'll entertain a motion to adjourn oh you're going to read i'm sorry we we

169still have the one we were going to come back to um where was it the statement the statement discussion a potential board action on board statement regarding racial violence i love that we approve the board statement regarding racial violence as drafted well second quote by ms halsey seconded by mr redondo that we approve the statement on racial violence any i have i want to offer in a minute comment some um so i appreciate mr erdondo putting this statement together and it's probably 180 words and i don't have any issue with 175 of them but i would move that we amend the statement to remove the words integrating anti-racist studies curricula across academic programs because with that statement with that phrase i i can't support the statement while otherwise i support the entirety of it i

170don't think our kids are the problem i think we have a very diverse student body um we have very i i've never i don't think i've ever heard of any racial incident among our children um and so to be you know whitesplained about racism from their teachers just rings hollow to me the kids aren't the problem so i don't know what that curricula would be i don't think parents know what it would be so it just seems like it opening a door without much information so that's my amendment is to remove those one two three four five six seven words read them out again please integrating anti-racist studies curricula across academic programs so as we discuss this and obviously i would like this to pass unanimously so i'm willing to have this conversation and you

171know get to a place that would be supported by the full board it's my understanding at least based on a single individual that reached out was that there are programs and systems in place that teach individuals faculty staff students teachers etc you know how to be culturally responsive and how they might not be intentionally racist or problematic or you know throwing out you know innuendo or whatever that looks like it that there is a way to facilitate those conversations with students so as we talk about this i don't know if it's removing across curriculum and you know deferring to the superintendent to look at what that might be and where it would be deemed appropriate that our students and faculty and staff have those conversations i just know that there's some interest from at least

172myself and i don't want to speak for trustee halsey but it's incorporating that in some way shape form or fashion but i do acknowledge and see the concern of where it's a sweeping like in pe and history and math and english and just like everywhere and where it might not be the most fruitful or appropriate so as we have this conversation i just wanted to kind of share where i was but my willingness to have this conversation and compromise and discuss okay well i think ms halsey i mean i just want to respond to that by saying that i understand what you're saying but i don't think it doesn't apply to every subject every moment of the day we don't want to encourage anybody to actively be racist in any way like we wouldn't want

173a math curriculum that was inequitable right and that that's part of the reason to have the equity on it that we undertake that to ensure that we aren't unintentionally teaching or tacitly advocating for something that is inherently biased racist discriminatory um in some way shape or form so i think this is a point of action that we say that we are going to be very intentional we don't dictate the terms of it we allow the audit to inform the action we allow our teachers and our educators and our leadership to develop what that looks like but that we are saying that we are actively going to be anti-racist but we are not going to tacitly or passively accept any discriminatory um intentional or unintentional sure i appreciate that but this particular phrase is talking about

174delivering curriculum to students the the stuff about sustained professional learning experience for teachers counselors staff members i don't have any issue with that that speaks to social justice cultural confidence instrumental equitable access to education i don't have any issue with that but i expect that once we make this statement that we mean it and the community will hold us accountable to our own words so i don't want to commit that we're going to integrate anti-racist studies curriculum across academic programs when that sounds broader than i'm than i think is wise i actually don't want some of our teachers talking to my children about it in designing curriculum to deal with this because my kids are all right but i don't know where they are i don't know where all of our educators are we haven't

175gone through the part of doing this professional training for teachers and counselors and staff members in administration but we're gonna immediately commit to the to the community that we're going to install a curriculum an anti-racist curriculum across all academic programs so that statement alone i don't want to focus on this thing that nobody else can see but us is like 180 words and we're arguing over seven which is just very typical but um but so i i'm willing to pair back i guess my concern and offer a new amendment to see if it garners any support i would move to amend to just remove the words curricula across academic programs those four words leaving integrating anti-racist studies which i don't have an issue with that's similar to what we've done in anti-bullying and general awareness

176i think that's always good say no to racism and all of you know things that we can do but to say curricula across academic programs implies that to me across our academic programs we're going to have a defined anti-racist curriculum i don't know what that is i don't know who's administering it and i opt out for my kids and i think parents should first know what we're doing before you know with a little more definition than that so as i said mr ardano has a 200 word statement i'm moving to remove four words of course i would need a second for my amendment before we could vote it i would like to see us ultimately have an anti-racist curricula adopted throughout the district and i'm not sure how exactly that would work and how it

177would be implemented and how which uh areas of study it would be incorporated into explicitly versus implicitly but um could like moving the sentences around like consider integrating i'm fine with the actually amendment i'm fine with integrating anti-racist integrating anti-racist studies if we're going to at least make that conscious commitment okay and then the equity audit reveal something else we always can do more right and if if there is some sort of broad thing let's hear about it i'm not close to it i'm just not going to pre-commit without seeing it so i understand it i guess was there a second for his amendment well if it's friendly then it can just yeah all right so we're ready for the vote no well there might be other decisions i'm sorry i'm really frustrated about this

178statement not the statement itself but the timeline it was developed on june 4th and three board members were made aware of it and then 12 days later at the board meeting we get the statement and i have to go through it during the board meeting and really i need time to think about it this you know should have been sent to all board members ahead of time including our packet so that i could read over it carefully and offer any suggestions some might have so i can't vote for it because of that reason has nothing to do with the content it has to do with surprise here's this you know for something as important as this yeah so i can address that because i was still president when that came together so i saw it

179as a proposal i put it on the agenda i did not talk to michael about putting the statement in the agenda packet and i don't i the standard practice is i don't preview the packet you know i see the packet when y'all see the packet i work on the agenda so i think that was probably the communication between me and the superintendent regard to including i can't just send it to all of you because i think since we're voting it i would have violated the open meetings act so i was trying to be careful and i didn't talk to anybody with whom it originated yeah so [Music] you know i'm not blaming you i'm just saying i didn't i just didn't i apologize i just i any thing as important as this if i get

180it right there i'm not going to vote for it because i need time to study it and really think about it anyone else [Music] the rest of us are ready to vote i agree with kathy it's hard to kind of take it all in and i i agree with what you're trying to say absolutely we need to make a statement i wish it would have worked out um i like what john had to say his comments uh i i take very seriously about the putting it in across academic programs um i i'm having a hard time i just i just need more time is there something that specifically worries you from your read of it or just time to really read it and study it not okay what board meetings going on here's this you

181know and read all this and and make a decision about it yay or nay so i mean if you gave it if you want to take a 10 minute break no i mean so if it took a vote and it passed by a majority would you have a problem with it being it coming from the board yes because you didn't vote for it i i wasn't given time to really digest it and be able to offer suggestions i'm willing to take a 15-minute break and no i'm willing take it home read it ahead of time the other timing concern might be broader like from the community we have you know massive protests across the nation we have people paying attention to where organizations and elected bodies come down on this the issue of the day

182so for me timeliness matters and i'm not i don't want the process of agenda packets pushing this to july um and not acting so i would be open to any sort of recess i mean i've already every restaurant i would eat at is closed so um if that would be enough time miss hansen no so no matter the amount of time i hope over night or something like that but i'm not going to i don't think we're going to recess for that i mean that it's like a it's like a five minute yeah pushing it off we understand it's not a good idea either i mean we wouldn't get back to agenda prep right yes i think this is something a statement that the whole world should develop not one or two people i think

183that's what we're here to do is to develop it like if you have questions or comments or concerns or suggestions or uh alterations i think you know we're super open to that suggestion we just wanted to be able to have that conversation in public so and again well just to explain since i helped draft this was talking with john was because it was going to be voted on because it was referencing policy changes that could happen because of board action doing this like on the google doc off the dice behind the scenes with all seven of us would essentially be well not essentially would be in direct violation of tomah because it'd be something that would come to the entire board for a vote so we would be deliberating sending edits and modifications back and

184forth and so i apologize if some of my colleagues felt out of the loop about this but you know speaking with john at the time at least my interpretation was is no one wanted to run afoul of tomah no one wanted to seem like we were deliberating before the meeting and this was the easiest way to go about this and even you know i mentioned to john that it might look like we're making the sausage up here at the board meeting because we're going to wordsmith it but that's the only way to being compliant with the open meetings act so if it wanted to come from all of us this was the way to do it i know some of us myself included are willing to write my own thing and just go with it

185but i wanted everyone to have the opportunity to sign on to this letter and there was no way to get this to everyone and your input without essentially a rolling quorum of dialogue and conversation mr you wanted to speak well i was just going to inquire from you know the authors here is that you know we we make there's a reference made to the result of color of their skin or um people of color and so are we just addressing a black population or are we also addressing the injustices that have been made against hispanics as well because you know there was a the individual that was killed in austin was hispanic ramos i believe that was not called for also so i'm just asking because it seems like it's just focusing on black and

186i'm not saying that it shouldn't but if we're going to be talking about color of their skin you know it is based on the color of our skin as well for the ones that have been unjustly so i can't i think it would be helpful if mr ardando read the statement okay that there might be people who are very confused about what's happening here so the giraffe language in front of us and john when i get to the section that we just amended please help me as a school board we write you today in the midst of national strife as we all feel outrage and grief over the senseless loss of george floyd ahmad aubry and brianna taylor the most recent names in a long line of black men and women killed as a result

187of the color of their skin as elected representatives for our community it is our responsibility to acknowledge that in our country across our state and in all cities we have a crisis of institutionalized and systemic racism that is a direct result of centuries of race-based inequity and injustice san marcos and our public schools are no exception it plays out across all aspects of life for people of color regardless of income or socioeconomic background this is why so many of our friends neighbors and citizens across our country have taken to the streets protesting not only the death of george floyd but also police killings of many other unarmed black people over time in the face of continued and horned acts of racial violence across our country we vow to redouble our efforts to ensure racial justice

188is at the center of everything that we do remain we remain committed to eliminating racist discipline policies and practices in our schools and across our district addressing the misdiagnosis of children for special education providing students equitable access to gifted programs advanced placement courses and other academically rigorous experiences what is the language here it still says integrating okay integrating anti-racist studies hiring hiring supporting and advancing the careers of more ethnically diverse employees and providing multi-dimensional sustained professional learning experiences for teachers counselors staff members and administrators that speaks to social justice cultural competence and instructional practices that ensure an equitable access to education for all of our students our schools must be safe havens where all children are heard respected and nurtured can achieve and grow and are guaranteed equity and justice may our community and our

189nation choose this difficult moment to listen to learn and to love and that's the language of the statement as amended [Music] are you ready to call for the vote ready to go all in favor one two three four five six all opposed one madam president on motion to adjourn a second move by by mr redondo seconded by mr mclaughlin to adjourn the meeting at 10 32 yes we're voting you