001All right. Good evening and welcome to the meeting of the White House ISD board of trustees. I call this meeting of the White House Independent School District to order. the record show that a board members is present and the notice the meeting has been according to executive session Executive session. Please join me for the pledge of allegiance. That's a brief introductory. Heavenly Father, we want to thank you for this meeting today. Thank you for allowing this for us to school father. We do not have any recognitions this evening. School hasn't started. So, it's hard for us to get anybody to come. which takes us to open forum and we had two people sign up for open forum uh this evening and so I'll just start by reminding everybody of the rules for open forum the
002first is that no one be will be allowed more than three minutes to speak the second is that remarks that are liable malicious or slanderous for an individual are not acceptable and the third is that complaints naming particular employee or student can't be voiced So with that be our time keeper Mr. signed up first school program. Yes, sir. The floor is yours. Yes, sir. First of all, thank you guys so much for president and all presiding board members. My name is Scotty Wallace and I am a certified chap. This National School Chap Association is new to a lot of people in this area, but we don't get this wrong. We're serving over 28,000 schools worldwide in 23 countries. And so it's just not getting here CEO. I'm here to share with you on behalf of
003the National School Chap Association, a holistic care program for all prek 12 schools here in the state of Texas. The Texas School Chap Senate Bill 763 was signed into law, 2023, allowing school districts to hire or to allow volunteer school chapes. A lot of people don't even know Texas was the first state to authorize chaplain in our public schools. Since then, 20 other states have followed suit and enacted this legislation. If you have not already done so, I hope you all will take a look and investigate some material here with you and vet this incredible program. The ISD packet that I will leave with you, uh, Dr. Whittle will provide detailed information on all aspects of this program. That being said, here are just a few of the many benefits. Number one of having a
004school chap chap on your campus. Emotional and mental health support. Uh I could talk about it, but I know I only got three minutes. I could go into telling you what that entails, but we are there for emotional and mental support. Secondly, character and we value education. Values education. Chap can reinforce positive values such as Empathy, respect, and integrity. Our training equips us to walk with people through grief, conflict, uncertainty in a deeply human and compassionate way. Fourthly, community building. also help foster a more inclusive and caring school culture through our presence at events, in classrooms, and around campuses. We are the trusted figures who unify and strengthen the school's community uh support staff. We're there to support all staff, the cafeteria workers, bus drivers, counselors, principals, everybody that needs uh somebody to talk to,
005somebody to be there for them. Lastly, I want to let you know that the chap work is not about promoting promoting particular religion, but about offering spiritual and emotional care to people of all faiths and culture. I will skip down and say this. I've learned that in my 25 year career as a public school teacher uh and coaching that being present and offering simple kindness can make all the difference. Dr. Will, Robin, Vice President and members, I'll leave you with this ISD package which has all the information for you to review and consider. I thank you for considering this vital addition to your campus or campuses. I will be happy to discuss this further and assist in exploring what a chap could look like for your schools. Thank you again for allowing me to share
006this program with you and your sir. Thank you. Thank you. My handwriting is terrible. So, I don't hold anybody, but I was trying to figure out what he said. I may too, but they're all bad. So Mr. Fields, is that correct? Okay, great. Same same rules and yours. Um, I'm a father. I tried to handle it at the lowest level. What I was talking name document hand couldn't c White House family. My concern is one of my biggest concern. know my business trespass on my custodian on 59 all the way in Then it felt like a trap when I went back down to Tyler ISD to find out if I had safe passes which I've been asking for school and I found out from Tyler ISD that trespass still stands trying to handle this at
007the level where we are now. And so if you don't think I'm not bring that since day one decided I could take my child in the room for my child. Leave me alone. Is that simple? Leave me alone. Let me take care of my kids. I have been doing I used to have the best reputation for this every I'm pett because I'm trying to take care of my kids. My last final thing is how do y'all want to do this? Do y'all want to bring attorneys and lawyers involved in it? I'm bringing up everything from 2023 November 18th from when I signed him up until present. That's what I'm here to present to y'all. How do y'all want to do this? I asked y'all to leave me alone. I had a job. I left the
008school district. I was working for Jack Elementary. I lost that job. My son tried to get away from y'all, but y'all dragged me right back to the White House. My only job. I lost that job because I had to keep dealing with y'all and y'all crap. So my question is how do y'all want to help? Do y'all want lawyers involved or do we want to fix this? I tried to talk to you. Y'all ask me how I want to read. That's how I can go either way. like nothing happened. That's not tow involve these are my kids school. >> Thank you. Thank you for bringing that to our attention. We'll we'll certainly get back for sure. Okay, this will take us to our budget workshop and Clint Ray I know has presentation. Well, good evening.
009Uh, this afternoon, this evening, what I really want to do is revisit some of the presentations that we had, I believe, since April. And what you're going to hear tonight is kind of a recap of some of the things that we have talked about previously and then the new information uh that has come about as of the last couple weeks based on some information we received from the county in order to calculate budget tax rate effectively. So, um, the items that I hope to cover tonight in your board packet, there's a memoid some budget highlights. And so, we're going to in this recap cover a lot of that. There's comparison reports in there budget compared to the proposed budget. We'll have a little bit of tax rate discussion. Uh, talk a little bit about paper
010for the budget tax workshop hearing and then um talk a little bit about the certified appraisal role which is the information most recent received from county as far as the proposed budget goes um just some assumptions that were made on that we're using prior year ADA and then the demographers projections and then the transfer estimates based on our transfer policy as last fall and then the comparison reports revised budget. So that's not the we're not comparing the proposed budget to last year's adopted originally adopted budget revised and then um these last couple budget is currently balanced and I'll go a little bit deeper into that and then the proposed debt service budget is a deficit and I'll expl kind of how we get to that few slides. So, as far as the proposed budget, just
011a few items of note. This this slide is all about revenue and all about revenue in the general fund. The next slide is going to be about the expenditure side. What you're going to notice is that the general fund revenue increase that's projected here in this in this proposed budget is 6.2. million. That's the increase. That's going to be 1.75 million greater than the projected increase expenditure side. And that is to make up for the deficit budget from the prior year. So we're uh of that 6.26 million increase 4.26 of that is from the state side. That's state revenue. Most of that is due to the teacher retention a lotment that's new this year. We talked about that and I believe we're going to hear a little bit more about that future presentations at this
012meeting. Um we've got the second sub bullet there projected funding increase for special populations. There's a couple of items that related to special ed uh weighted funding. Most of the special ed weighted funding doesn't come on until the last year of the ban that would be the 267. But one thing that is happening here is uh we had some programmatic changes to our CT program and so we're especially at the junior high we're looking to get some more funding there from the state. Also, there's the safety aotment increase and that more or less that was some legislative action that increased our safety aotment more or less doubled, but it's still not enough to for us to to cover the items that are mandated for us on that safety line. So, we appreciate the money, but
013maybe need a little bit more of that. Um, and then the overall enrollment increase. That's obviously transfers as we discussed. And so that's uh the bulk of where that 4.26 million came from. On the local revenue increase side, $2.13 million net. There was a slight increase in our tax values. But the main thing there is a proposed tax rate increase. And so we'll talk about that a little bit more in depth in a couple slides. And then federal revenue transfers, that's an actual decrease and that is us kind of separating ourselves from char and less reliable as we talked about over the last couple years. On the expenditure side, $4.51 million net increase. Again, it's less because We needed more revenue to balance the budget. Um as compared to the prior year, more revenue expend.
014Um the expenditure additions the bulk of that is salary increases that we talked about earlier. The bulk of that being teacher retention. Um also some instructional technology upgrades and instructional and extracurricular supplies. That would be Chromebooks, those types of things that we're trying to work back into our general fund budget as opposed to funding those out of our capital projects like we've done last couple years. Um, as far as the expenditures, uh, deletions and decreases, again, like I said, this is a net increase. So, we had these additions. Um, we had more additions than that, but we netted that out against some decreases here. The elimination positions and then the equipment purchases that did not have to be duplicated in the current year or in the coming year and just some contingency reduction. Just a
015couple of other items. our capital projects fund uh transfers. We've done this in some years past. Uh we haven't done it the past couple of years. This is where we try to set aside money to serve for larger scope repairs and that type of thing that are irregular in their nature. We haven't been able to put that money aside because of the conraints that we've had that we discussed budgetary constraints. Uh we hope to be able to work our way back into that being able to set aside for those projects that fall below the scope of the um also just our staffing is based on our prior year and other identified needs. So our team will continue to monitor enrollment of of our students program salary increases reflected in this budget I will say the
0164,000 and 8,000 there on that first sub bullet that is the teacher retention those are the numbers I believe Matthew is going to cover that a little bit more extensively also on the tales to soften that curve a little bit. We have elected to $2,000 I mean some $2,000 increases on the very front end of that. So that is not funded through the teacher retention the manual trades professional and administrative professional scales. This budget proposes a 3% minimum 3% raise based on the compensation plans and then there is a on some of the scales we're proposing up to% some of that and then some other equity path adjustments as far as the debt service budget. Um I mentioned earlier that that budget is a deficit. Um all the that debt service can be used for
017is to service other small and so I want to be clear about this. A deficit budget in the debt service fund is a means for us to manage tax. So what we're going to propose is to keep that tax rate down and balance it against our M rate. So getting to the proposed tax rates for the M we're proposing a rate that is 4 prior year. Um that's 4 cent increase from last year's rate. The debt service rate is the same as prior year. So that takes our total increase proposed. And I want to talk a little bit about our tier 2 pennies and and how we get to that 4 increase. To support this budget as presented to you, it is a balanced budget, but for it to be balanced, we would need the
018nine additional that are available to us through a voter approval tax regulation. Now, I've talked about a 4 increase and I want to be clear about why we're talking about a 9 election and a 4centent increase. You'll recall that last year we had the disaster relief pennies and we had five of those. And so what we're asking what we're asking the board to consider is a call for a 9 voter approval tax regulation for us to maintain the five pennies that we've been taxing the prior year and then add four more pennies to that and that would get us to a balanced budget. Um the VAT uh if it is not called or if it's not passed uh the difference in general fund revenue would be between 2.5 and 2.6 million. So you could say
019we would have that deficit. Um and then we would need to work on whether whether we want to whittle that down further or whether we want to continue to support some of those programs at that same level and absorb that deficit. This is just And these are last year numbers. Everyone's going through the same process as we are right now. These are the 10 school districts that have taxing authority in Smith County. You can see us there in the maroon. Understand that with the homestead exemption >> and the way compression is calculated, we're not planning on having we do not have maintenance operations compression this year. All of the other districts that I've talked to are not coming out to impression here. And so pretty much districts are holding steady that I have talked to.
020It's my understanding that they're going to hold steady M from the prior year. Um also the same with the INS of the ones that I talked to and so the components that would indicate that these these districts most of stay pretty steady for tax rate. We are currently the third lowest tax rate in Smith County and if we taxation election and if it passed that would move us up from this rate to the 96.49 it would move us upove and then we would still have the fourth lowest. And so what you can see is there's other districts out there and many of our peers, many of our neighbors have already avail our our posting requirements. We will have a meeting to discuss the budget proposed tax rate. U the date and time were listed for
021this room next Monday, August 18th at 7:30 p.m. Did that in order to be able to accommodate the meet the cats and so that all of you could attend that and still in the community also as we move that uh the proposed tax rates are stated previously. Um, and then one of the sections there asks us to compare the tax levy, the projected tax levy on an average home, get that information from county and from year to year. Um, even with a 9 VAT because of the increased homestead exemption is part of the calculation and they require us to to calculate that as if it's going to pass. because it will be voted on in the November election. Uh even with the 9 VAT, the tax on the average home would decrease by $246. So,
022and then of course the over 65 frozen levies would not be impacted unless the calculation was in favor of the taxpayer. So, it would be at the same level or These are the certified appraisal values. I've put them in here. There's two sets. It's the same information presented two different ways. At the bottom, what you have is an apples to apples comparison of last year and this year. The without the passing of increased homestead exemption. The top section is the way we have to calculate that. for these purposes. But I wanted to give you this apples to apples comparison down here. $375 million increase. That's an 11% increase. If we were comparing the same homestead exemption, but with the effects of an increased homestead exemption and it's size of $40,000 on all homes and then
023an additional increase of another $50,000 to the $10,000 over 65 exemption. So 100,000 and 110 turns into 140 $200,000 with passing that proposal. Um, with that said, I know that's a lot of information, but I will sum it up by saying what we're proposing is to you for your consideration is a balanced budget with a 9 voter app. tax rate to to be considered at next week's meeting and at next week's meeting will ask you to adopt a budget tax rate and then if necessary call at this time if there's any questions comments or clarification needed to enterain One quick one quick question. If the homestead exemption increase does pass and the voter approved tax rate adjustment does not, what would be the expected deficit? Um the expected deficit would be 2.5. Yes, it would
024be the 2.5 2.5 six right in there. And then um we would probably consider taking some things uh you know and I couldn't speak specifically to the things that we would consider taking out, but there's some things that we've added back that um into a balanced budget that you know we put back kind of pull back on and consider. So we would have a deficit if we made no adjustments like 2.5 to 2.6. Why is it over the past couple years? Well, uh we've had just about every way you can consider losing revenue. Um it's happened. And then on the other side, we have inflationary pressure, you know, on our just our day-to-day operations. I've presented to you in the past. um our property casualty insurance premiums for example not addressed in any of what
025the legislature did. I mean, they did they gave us a what they called a basic increase, a basic cost increase, but it uh I think by my calculations comes out to about $500,000. And you know, that's a that would be ongoing. That's one time, but um over a fiveyear span, our property insurance rates increase 175%. From 400,000 to$1.1 million. Well, that's a $700,000 shot. overan years for insurance. Um that really the safety of it benefits us, but where where is the it's not a visible benefit. Um and you know, we feel like there's some inflationary pressures on on those types of expenditures. The cost of a bus went from the mid 90s during that same time frame $90,000 $95,000 up to thousand for schools and we still transport kids. We need school buses, you know,
026and so the cost of building buildings and that would not come out of this, but just to give you an idea cost of building buildings per square foot went from $200 per square foot to $435 during part of that that time frame. And so we just had some and then we've lost our ESRE funding. Um, you know, we we lost what we projected two years ago to be $900,000 worth of charge funding until this year. I've just taken it completely out. We the rules changed two years in a row on us and it just kept on cutting back and to the point where we're not even going this year. no increase in the basic a lot until this year. And that was that was a $55 increase. And the projection back during the summer of
027what it would take for us to get back to was over $1,300 per ADA and we got $55. And then the rest of that money was given in the a lot of that money was given in the teacher retention which is great but that's a piece of the puzzle that we need and we need the rest of that rounded out Um well it will impact services you know if not immediately eventually we cannot we cannot continue in good faith to spend at the same levels that we do without the revenue to support the spending um because it's a as you all know you can't just continue to spend more than more than you make. And so, uh, we do have a a fund balance that that's sitting there. It's four times such as this, but
028it's not meant to rely on on a ongoing basis. And so a two and a half million dollar deficit um we could only we could only do that a few times uh this year and maybe three more times. But that would take us down to a dangerously low level fund balance because what is recommended as far as holding in fund balance is three months of our operating and that is until this until this year with this year's deficit 425 deficit. That is what we're at this three months operating. And so just trying to maintain best practices on fund balance. Would you say everything? We have um I mean there's some other things that we can do, but we time to implement, you know, and change. I mean, because at this level, we're talking about um
029undesirable I mean, you would you would have to start talking about undesirable changes to to some programs and that type of thing. And we're trying to maintain a level of service for our students because they deserve Appreciate it. Thank you. Any questions or comments on any questions or discuss to approve the 2025 policies fill us in on that. >> Good evening, trustees. This is simply a first reading of polic updates that impact board organization. Um, this is not a part of the larger policy updates that we'll see coming later this year as a result of the most recent legislative session. However, these policies are mainly surrounding board organization of committees, which is not something that we typically engage with in our district. However, if we needed to do that in the future, these policies would
030govern those actions. Questions? That takes us to our state program evaluation submission. >> That's gonna be hard. >> So, um this is actually the evaluation for the final submission for the 234. So, some of the data is going to look a little old. that now this is when it's submitted to the state. So that's what we're looking in the future. So this goes with our goal to provide relevant learning experiences to ensure our students. So state compository education is defined in law as programs or serviceslement and our students are achievement. So what's required in our statement indic different things like that. It could be homeless department numbers. The district and campus have funds for have question. All right. So, how did we fund our extended programs? instruction such as the first time that I believe
031we So this data is a little moving forward. It comes from the reports. Some of the data was not. So what we have is 2122. Again remember the data behind the So we did increase our graduation rate. And then the last column is looking at our dropout. So you can see that nonisredit recovery was 163ach. overap9 credits. So students that they needed to get that credit 260 credits 49 on our students that students are provided opportunities to regain credits to accelerate. Students are provided the opportunity to learn in smaller settings. Our program is a much smaller focus to continue the credit recovery. Also looking at our paper that way. That takes us to our safety and security update. Survived one meeting just to make it another one. Huh. That's why it's good to have a
032police officer on. All right. Dr. Robbie, Dr. safety and security update. Got a lot of good things going on in the White House. Uh so the board go ensure a safe and civil environment that is responsible to the needs of our students and community. So in regards to that, we are doing some things. Just a general update. We have five White House police department officers assigned to our campuses. We have two at the high school, one in junior high, and we have two that are now this year. The rovers are going instead of rolling four campuses and including they're going to slide in. We're going to have one at Kane, one at Higgins who rolls those two campuses. We're going to have one at Stanton and one in Browns those two campuses. This summer they
033were able to attend the 40hour basic NASRO school which is National Association School Resource Officers. So they learned a lot more about becoming an SRO. So we wanted to allow them more time on campuses to learn administration, learn our more effective in that role as an SRO. So, we're doing that. We have six level three licensed security officers. Each elementary school has a license security officer all the way has one and then we have one at our guard check at the high school. Our last year guy moved on. So, we have a lady coming back and she has worked at some glad to have her back. We have our guardian program going strong. I have carried them to the range and I do not want to be on the wrong end when they're shooting. All
034right. TEA reporting from if you're not aware of it has came out with safety and security website and the ultimate person responsible for it is so it's our job to help him out so that he succeeds. Okay. So we want to do that. This is the front. This is the dashboard of it, but on the left hand side under the LEA modules, you'll see the IDA, the DVA, and BTA. And I never thought I'd see more acronyms from law enforcement, except I did when I got school business 28 years. Those three modules we'll talk about just the district vulnerability assessment, we will not have that until the 26 27 school year. That is where the TEA security guys come and do a thorough security investigation. This is the document repository. There's 48 things on there
035of which is a grading rubric that they're going to look for. Everything in green is done. So you see there are some in black that's left. Upper left hand corner that's the emergency operations plan which right now we actually have to fit it into a 3inch binder. So, we're doing pretty good only in you can see the other stuff we're working on. So, that's the district vulnerability assessment and if there's any findings, we'll find that out afterwards, but we don't plan to have any behavioral threat assessment. This is one of the modules and this is where we reach out and try to locate students who may be in crisis. They're required by the state investigate, review, and recommendations for all threats. Every threat that's been made or is known gets a behavioral pred. It's designed
036to be intervention. It's not punishment. We're here to intervene. Since it is designed for intervention, the parent or guardian is immediately involved into the BTA process. Give you an idea. Staff training. We have 61 trained staff in the district and they just don't get online and take an easy course. They spend seven hours on an online course to get certified to be on PTA. Each campus has a team by a team lead and we have 10 members here at the ESC that coordinate backup. I'm usually on each meeting that we have. So the IDA, the intruder detection audit, if you're familiar with Yaldi, you remember that the shooter in Yaldi got into unlock door that should have been locked. So what happens here, region seven, which is another bunch you'll hear about here in a
037minute over in Kilgore, they come over and they'll visit each campus totally unannounced. They'll call me when they show up, but I don't know. We need to know the truth. So two years in a row that I know of, we have 100% success rate that they have not found a single door unlocked or propped open in any of our campuses. No findings, no corrective actions. A lot of stuff go into play with that, but for the most part, we don't prop doors open and we keep them locked, which means we're in our secure as we're supposed to be at all times. All right, go back. Safety and security audit. Mentioned region seven. Well, region seven, we contract with region seven to do a safety and security audit. This is different than the district vulnerability. This
038is safety and this is security. a lot on the safety side. They look at just to give you an idea proper storage of chemicals, lay grounds, trip hazards, drills, SRP, which is another acronym, but that's this your standard response protocol, and they look at everything else regarded safety. Now, we have close to 4,900 students now, but last year we have about 4,800 students, seven large campuses, plus the AI center. So, here's what they found. Dr. Rob I hope we didn't tip y'all off. They found some eyewash stations that needed to be worked on. Found a shower head in the egg shop. Rubber coating on one playground, a boat in the playground. One playground, one little boat was sticking up and obviously constru. Okay, they're not and and we know the design of can so we
039know what they're talking about. So that's That's what they found. That's all they found out of all of our campuses as large as we are. And I told them in the meeting earlier, I call that a A+ to find no more than that. That is pretty awesome. I think so. Awesomeness. All right, here's some stuff. You're going to see that these are repeated throughout these schools. You got basically cleaners, fire extinguishers, bleeding control kits, guard shack personnel at the high school, mil welding shop is uncommonly well organized and clean. And as I told him in the meeting before, my shop was not well organized and clean, but ours is. I've been in it. They do keep it that way. The junior high control stations cleanliness greeted by staff. You'll see that you think, did they
040just cut and paste these because they retired? No, they cut and pasted these because our school they don't give you anything that you don't earn. Okay, so you'll see that most of them are the same. Those are pretty well identical. Electrical things are stored, right? Didn't find any hazards. Staff knows about safety and security. Same at Stanton Smith, same at the same. Basically, it's when I first read it, I thought it was cut. So, when I talked to Joey, I said, "Hey, y'all earn it. Y'all earn it. Don't worry about it." So, up here perspective to put everything in perspective of the safety and security office. There's five numbers there. Well, actually four numbers. I'm sorry. I can add 52, 43, 37, and 25. Anybody know what those numbers are? When I went through the
041five, when I went through their recommendations, did y'all see something highlighted in yellow? All of them. Okay, I'm going to take just a second to sing somebody's praise. 52 years old, 43 years old, came 37 years old. High school 25 years old. Looks like a brand new high school when you walk into it. Cleanliness. 52 years old. 43 year old. I'm going to take just a minute to see Tim Daisy and his praises to keep this place looking like it does because our kids aren't going to learn in dirty schools. So a 52 year old school looks like the day it was built in my opinion. I've been there all the time. Y'all been in I've never seen them dirty. So, I'm just singing our praises. And this was noticed by region seven that we
042brought in to do the contract. So, how it ends up during our audit, it was obvious that White House ISD is committed to the safety and security of its students and staff. Each campus was very welcoming and provided many examples of a positive culture and learning environment. All facilities and grounds were well maintained. White House ISD is performing at a high level with regards to safety and security and we truly enjoyed our visit to this fine district. Joey King reiterated that he was very very heafety and security update didn't drive too fast. We did all right got anything at all? All right. Thank y'all. Thank you for putting the survey this cleanest district. All right. And that takes us to our enrollment staffing update. >> So, Dr. Dr. Robbie School tonight, we wanted to talk
043about all of the new hires that we've had this year. Everything we do when it comes to hiring is centered around the goal of retracting retain attracting, retaining grow high quality professional staff. So these are the numbers that we had this year. We had 102 new hires this year and as you saw most of them at the new teacher induction 51 teachers. You can see this year for our total We have 49. Last year we had 757. And when we talk about some of the things that we're trying to do to tighten our belts, that's eight positions that we've absorbed. But the campuses are doing a great job by going back and really schedu really look at what they need. We had a few professional admin positions that we also this year. Our new hires
044are coming from a few differentities. You can see we have a variety of degree levels, but the majority of our newer Texas&M of the other this year is that we have a lot of new hires that are coming from university based programs to get their certification and also not looking through an alternative certification program. However, we are partnering with CNI to make sure that those people that are going through an program or going under they have the support they need to be able to do what they need to do. This was really neat years of experience. You can see for our teachers there are many of them that have 10 to 19 years of experience and we do have some experienced teachers at 20 years old. Our retention rates the lowest one we have is
04589% for our teachers. However, the state average is around 86.5. So, we're doing a really great job of keeping our staff when they do everything else. And one of the really cool things is we have 13 new hires that are White House graduates this year, making our total come up to 74%. That's about 9% of our staff is from White House. Any questions? >> That takes us to our action items. Agenda motion to accept financial reports. Next time salary scales again. Okay. So, tonight we want to present the salary skills that we're asking to be approved. We have our teacher and media technology specialist pay that the majority of them are coming from that are requiring the $4,000 for teachers and MTS's experience three through four and then we have teachers and media technology specialists
046five or more getting $8,000. So that's what our scale includes. We also did a $2,000 increase for the steps through and the reason we did that we want to make sure we keep a good starting teacher pay scale. So that will help us accomplish that. That means the starting pay scale will remain at $52,50. We're also recommending a 3% raise for all other pay for our staff as well as our cl market. We want to make sure that we take care of those individuals. And then we also typically do a review, a compensation review every year. So we've identified a few positions with what household required us to do for the teacher pay scale. Some of those other positions for people that have gotten out of the class that are required to certificology specials. You're
047up again. >> Good evening again. Right. As you all It was a busy legislative session this past session. And so these few updates that we're going to talk about tonight, these are just the first of others to come. Um, but these are three actions that require your action and approval before the start of school this year. And so that's what we're going to take a look at tonight and ask you to take um action on. The first is SB 401, participation in UIL athletics by homeschoolers. This is actually not something different than our current practice. Our recommendation is that we're asking for you to approve for White House ISTD to opt out of having homeschooled students to participate in UIL and um activities. This actually aligns with our current practice that we have in the
048district and so it's really not a change for us, but we do have two policies, two local policies that would be updated as a result of that. Any questions on this particular action? >> Out of curiosity, why are some schools locally choosing to allow of participation in their district. Um for us in White House, we do have a transfer policy that allows other students also to come into our schools now. And so there is the opportunity for students who want to be part of our different programs to go through that transfer process to become members of the White House team. Other questions? All right. The second is SB13. Um, specifically tonight, we're going to be asking you to approve a resolution that would establish a school library council, also known as Slack, not to be
049confused with the SHAK, uh, the school health advisory council. But the purpose of the Slack is really to assist our district personnel and also the school board in ensuring that all of the library materials that we acquire as a district meet our community standards and expectations. Uh the Slack will also provide recommendations for you as the board in terms of materials that we acquire as well as any potential challenges or removal of materials should that come to be in question at some point in the future. So again, we that you would approve a resolution to establish a slack and then that impacts local policy questions about that. So the policy actually prescribes certain types of individuals uh that need to make up that committee. So you've not been provided with a list of those specific
050members at this point. What we're asking is for you to approve that resolution, adopt that polic, and then work with our lead librarians in the district as well as our MTS's and campus administrators to make sure that we fulfill a well-rounded committee that meets all of those different um stakeholder roles that are prescribed by policy. Um it is so staff would be kind of like non voting members of the Slack but it's like it's kind of like all of your advisory committees where you have uh business representatives, parents, different functions within the community. It is important for this particular committee that we do have a well-rounded group of individuals because the idea is that we are wanting to reflect the diversity that's in our community and in terms of collection matches that as well. >>
051So, moving forward with this new policy, EFB local, there's actually new procedures for how we acquire library materials. There will be a list that is publicized. It'll be public for 30 days, kind of a comment period, if you will, um to review those materials that we planning to purchase and bring into the library. So it is more focused on acquisition of new materials as opposed to kind of a inventory of what is historically here. Yes. >> Right. >> Absolutely. This policy would >> enact the steps that we would take through the slack support. Um, which is why there's a benefit for us having that slack as they help to guide uh both the district and the trustees through that process to make sure that we're making balanced decisions. Other questions? All right, just one more.
052All right, House Bill 1481. You might have heard a lot about this in the media. This is uh one area where White House is certainly ahead of the game. We're not asking you to actually anything, but we are asking you to adopt a new policy, FNC local, which matches what our student code of conduct already says, which is that we do not allow cell phones during the instructional day. Uh there is one change to our student code of conduct. We will no longer be charging students a fee um to have their cell phones returned to them. Uh but there are some disciplinary consequences and things of that nature for students who do violate this procedure. So, um, so moving forward, the expectation, much like it's been in the prior years, is that students are allowed
053to have their cell phones on campus during the school day, but they are to be off and stored in their backpacks until the last bell rings at the end of the day. Same goes for other technology communication devices. So, earbuds, smartwatches, um, all of those things are encompassed in this usage policy. questions about that. All right. Well, those are the three items that we'll talk about tonight. There'll be a lot more for us to take a look at over the next several months. All right. Thank you. Each of these requires a separate motion. First one eligibility requirements students. We have a motion to approve Second is motion to approve the resolution establishing a local school library. All in favor materials policy. carries. And then last student Any questions? Okay. >> All right. Mr. Hooray. You
054are on again for audit services. Promise this will be short. We're simply recommending that the board approve for us to renew our engagement with Squires and Company, our current auditor. They've done a good job for us in the past and that agreement has run its course. We're just asking approve the services. We'd like to ask you consider and take possible action to claim the good cause exemption under Texas Education Code section 37.0814 subsection C and approve the Alternative standard plan of utilizing security guards as part of their staff. We have a motion to approve action close session. as an enthusiastic motion made by Mr.