December 17, 2020 Regular Meeting.
We had a regular meeting which was longer than usual because we had several complex presentations. We received a presentation from UTA which conducted a Demographic Study to give us information to consider about student population trends and the impact that it would have on the number of students at each campus. We have not had such a detailed report like this in the past to help us with planning.
Our Director of Finance presented a report on our FIRST rating which has to do with our financial reporting. We continue to have excellent financial systems in place.
Dr. Vu shared with us the need for a waiver for staff development to give our teachers additional time for collaborative planning periodically throughout the remainder of this school year. Covid has created many challenges which require our teachers to continually adapt and they need time to plan for the changes. They need time to train for new systems and still provide a quality education to students in person and remotely.
Goals to comply with HB 3 were accepted noting that Covid has affected best practices for education. For reading at a young age, almost everyone agrees that sitting with a student and reading with them yields results far better than trying to do a reading lesson over a computer.
The District Safety Audit was approved and finalized the calendar for completing our Superintendent evaluation.
We discussed how we can get information to monitor student performance and recognized that there are real problems with the validity of testing data comparing testing on campus and remotely. I do not think that we should rely on the STAAR test as the primary tool to evaluate our students, but we do need to have true measures of student performance. The Superintendent and his team have been working to get systems in place, but we need to recognize that Covid has change everything. Priorities have changed and while we want school to be like it was, basic things are important right now, like just having a chrome book and access to the internet.
