Board will now convene in open meeting today is Tuesday January 17 2017 and the
Katy ISD · Board Work Study Meeting Agenda
Katy ISD Board Work Study Meeting, January 17, 2017
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time is 634 p.m. the board met earlier this evening in closed meeting any
action arising from discussions in the closed meeting must be taken in a
subsequent open meeting dr. hint will you verify that we are in compliance
with the provisions of the Texas open meetings act regarding the notice for
this meeting president scott we are in compliance with the texas okay fox i'm sorry madam president
fox we are in compliance with the texas open meetings act regarding the notice for this meeting
matter president mr griffin i moved at the board i'm president it's good to be deaf on the right
side i didn't hear that until it reverberated mr gripper i move that the board of trustees
approves the personal report as recommended by the superintendent close meeting second
I have a motion by Mr. Griffin, a second by Mr. Moholsky, that the Board of Trustees approves the personnel report as recommended by the superintendent in closed meeting.
Any discussion?
Hearing none, we'll proceed to vote.
All in favor, raise your right hand and say aye.
Aye.
Madam President Fox, may I quickly just introduce two individuals that are here with us tonight,
and they are the athletic coordinators, head football coach at Taito High School and at Morton Ranch,
and we have William Gott William if you don't mind standing up early offensive
coordinator at Katy high school from Katy high school Katy high school to
pay to eat hope and then we have Ron counter and they're not related I
promise you but Ron counter and he is coming to us from Stafford high school
will be the head football coach athletic coordinator at Morton Ranch High School
Welcome. Welcome to heaven.
Coach Gott, you already know, but yeah.
Exciting. We love a good football game.
And all of it. Basketball, volleyball, we'll be around.
Okay. Here we go. Any scouts in the audience tonight?
Okay. Then we'll move right into reports.
Our first report this evening is planning for growth.
bond 2017 dr. grooms and mr. Cruz will be presenting this evening
well good evening president Fox board of trustees and superintendent hint tonight
Tonight you will hear much of what we have already heard time and time again.
KDISD is growing.
But you will also hear this evening is a brief review of how we continue to see increased
growth in certain areas of the district including the Southwest and Northwest Quadrants.
You will also see and hear how we have managed rapid growth with regard to long-range planning
and bond programs as well as an outline for a possible model for community bond
advisory committee process should the board decide one is necessary for 2017 I
will be assisted this evening by mr. Lee Cruz our new chief operations officer
and you should have in front of you a folder in which you will have a copy of
this presentation. President Fox, members of the board, and Superintendent Hint. It's
a pleasure to be here this evening to share the good news of KDISD's
continued popularity as a destination district for families. As you know, KDISD's
rapid growth has been widely documented for a number of years. In their annual
October report for the district, our demographic consultant, population and
survey analyst, provided projections for this district
that showed continued growth. You can see here that the projections that we
typically use for planning place our enrollment at about 86,000 students in
five years and nearly a hundred thousand students in ten years. As we look forward
on our long-range facility plan, the most immediate needs for growth will occur in
in the southwest and far northwest quadrant of the district.
As you are aware, rapid growth in the southwest quadrant dictated a recommendation of the
Board earlier this school year that the timeline for construction of Elementary 41 be accelerated.
Upon Board approval, an architect was retained and construction documents are currently being
completed.
Obviously, this rapid growth affects the number of seats available at our current campuses.
Let's first turn our attention to the high school level.
Here you can see the projected enrollments for Katy, Tompkins, and Seven Lakes high schools.
The capacity for these schools is 3,000 students each.
Keep in mind that these capacity numbers reflect design capacity and do not include any expanded
capacity that has been achieved with the addition of portable classrooms.
rooms. Katy and Seven Lakes are projected to top out at over 3,500 geocoded students in 2018,
while Tompkins will be at 3,694 that same year. The peak enrollment we have reached at any high
school in the district was Seven Lakes at 3,996 in 2012. Assuming the passage of a 2017 bond,
the earliest a high school could open would be in the fall of 2020.
Similarly, the rapid growth is evidenced by projections in the Southwest Quadrant Junior
Highs.
Wood Creek, Seven Lakes and Ties are all expected to exceed 1,600 students in 2018.
The capacity for all three schools is 1,400.
KDISD's peak enrollment at any junior high school in the district was Wood Creek at 2,156
in 2016.
With the passage of a 2017 bond, the earliest possible completion date for a junior high
would be fall of 2019.
At the elementary level, you can see that Jenks and Randolph in the southwest and Bethke
in the northwest quadrant are predicted to exceed design capacity as early as the fall
of 2017.
Bethke's design capacity is 1030 with a projection for 2018 at 1,390 students.
By 2019, their enrollment will reach well beyond capacity at 1725.
Jenks Elementary's capacity is 1280.
This is slightly larger capacity design is to accommodate the bilingual program housed
at the campus.
You can see that next year we project them to open at over 1400 students and approach
1600 in 2018.
And as a side note, I do know that they enrolled their 1300th student recently.
Randolph Elementary shows similar growth numbers, topping out at just over 1500 in 2018.
In Katy ISD, the peak enrollment we have reached at any elementary school in the district was Wood Creek Elementary at 1602 in 2012.
Fortunately, with the approval of our board, provisional funding was provided to begin construction of Elementary 41,
which will relieve both Jenks and Randolph. These funds are being committed
from our existing assigned fund balance. There is, however, no such funding
mechanism for projects that would address growth at Bethke in the
northwest quadrant nor the junior high and high school needs in the southwest
portion of the district. In summary, with a considerable growth project predicted
in our southwest and northwest quadrants, the board may wish to consider the
exploration of a 2017 bond. Dr. Grooms is here to provide some details on bond
history and review some possible next steps should the board feel that
exploration of a 2017 bond is needed.
Thank you Mr. Crews. President Fox, Board of Trustees and Superintendent Hint, as
referenced by Mr. Crews, the primary funding mechanism for capital projects
like schools and other facilities that support student needs are bonds have
historically been bonds I'd like to provide a little recent history
concerning bond timing in Katy ISD as you can see in this chart the community
has a history of approving bonds as early as 1994 in order to build new
schools and address other projects in response to rapid growth but let's begin
with the 2010 bond, which as you know was a $459 million zero tax rate increase bond.
The 2010 projects, which included five new schools and other transformational projects,
have been completed to date. You'll probably also remember that in 2010 the perfect storm
of ideal economic factors led to favorable bidding conditions that allowed the Bond Review Committee
to recommend that the district approve the building of two additional elementary schools that were already a part of the long-range facility plan.
These new schools were built using construction savings from the 2010 bond.
This allowed a potential 2012 or 2013 bond to be pushed back to 2014.
So bringing us to 2014, that bond was for $748 million and provided for six new schools,
six major campus renovations, technology security, and safety and other component projects.
Out of the 63 line items in that bond, about 97% have been already started or have been
completed to date.
As you know, we went into that bond planning trying to hold a tax rate of no more than
a half penny.
However, we are very pleased to have been able to pass a no tax rate increase bond and
even dropped the tax rate by a penny the following year.
And so you'll recall probably the 2014 bond committee.
A bond package was recommended to the Board in August.
That committee was led by Committee Chair Keith Carmichael and facilitated through 16
weeks of discussion, project review, and analysis by outside consultant Michelle Hughes, both
of whom did a fantastic job navigating that committee towards consensus and towards their
informational needs and a final package.
As you will recall, the 24-year bond committee consisted of a core decision-making and deliberating
group comprised of about 100 individuals representing nearly all of our campuses, parent groups,
various community members and perspectives, civic and professional groups, and various
demographic points.
The members included board nominees, three each, self-nominees who applied to be on the
committee via online application and individuals from groups including PTAs, PTOs, business
organizations, teachers of the year, boosters clubs, parents of bilingual students, special
education students, parents of GT students, senior citizens and other areas that were
reflective of our community at large.
We also had a group of bond committee, quote unquote, alternates who were considered part
part of the bond committee but they didn't participate in the daily decision-making processes.
They were rather considered as fill-in for the individual core decision-making bond committee
member.
So if that person was unavailable to attend, the alternate would step in and take that
individual's place for that meeting or for all future meetings if the core decision-making
member was not available.
And then finally there was a bond committee gallery.
This gallery was an opportunity for the community at large to engage the committee.
The gallery was designed to serve as an observatory group that could provide input via comment
cards.
And all bond committee meetings were open to the public.
The gallery's role was to witness, learn, and observe the transparency of the process.
So while the Bond Committee of 2014, while that structure was generally very successful,
there are a lot of lessons learned, particularly with regard to the alternates concept. Over
the past couple of weeks, we have worked to develop a draft framework that could be used
to develop a Bond Committee and more importantly, to start to build public awareness of critical
capital needs should the board choose to move in that direction. We know that as a board,
you have expressed a desire for a very broad representation when gathering community input.
Based on what we learned from the 2014 bond committee meetings, we know that a committee
in which every member has the opportunity to review, scrutinize, and decide upon the capital
capital projects to be included in their school district's bond package is a successful one.
While 200 members serving in a deliberating and decision-making capacity may be beyond
a manageable size for a single committee chair and facilitator, we do believe that a group
consisting of 150 can be accommodated while still meeting the time and participation constraints.
constraints.
Much like the 2014 Bond Committee, membership would consist of a body of individuals who
are reflective of our geographic, professional, business community, campus programs, and cultural
demographics.
The committee chair for KDIC Bond Committees has historically been appointed by the Board
President.
In 2014, Bond members nominated up to three members each to serve on the committee.
This is criteria you may want to consider for your 2017 Bond Committee as well if that
is the direction that you take.
The Board may also wish to consider including teachers, principals, students, members from
previous Bond Committee as well as other individuals named in the 2014 Bond Committee in terms
of the various demographics that were reflected.
accepted. In your folders you will see a copy of the 2014 Bond Committee Charter. We've
taken the liberty of making some edits so that the document reflects a 2017 Charter
for your consideration. Here you will see a proposed Bond Committee schedule should
the Board decide to move forward with establishing a committee. Basically there is a committee
meeting every week for about four months leading to a presentation to the board
in July a final recommendation is expected after dialogues with the board
and the community it is anticipated that a recommendation to the board would be
during a regular meeting in July or special meeting in August
much like the 2014 bond committee structure the group's goal will be
consensus on items pertaining to the bond package.
This is encouraged through a model in which staff spends the first seven meetings educating
the group about KDISD's growth, demographics, budget, long-range facility plan, safety,
technology, construction cost, and tax rate models.
The following five to six meetings will include table discussions in groups of nine to ten.
These are the meetings in which the group begins developing their bond.
Again the ultimate and optimum goal for a bond committee is consensus.
In the group consensus is defined and accepted by the committee.
The next two slides you will see show a possible timeline that could be used leading up to
to the Board calling for a bond election in August, some of which are Board action or
reporting steps. Key actions included in the presentation this evening include approval
of the Committee Charter and in February, making the Committee application accessible
to interested individuals. The first Bond Committee meeting would then be held in April.
April. Thereafter, all additional meetings, including board meeting updates and a final
recommendation from the committee, will follow in the summer.
At this time, we'd be happy to answer any questions you may have about this presentation.
We thank you for your time and your attention.
MR. Madam President, if I could just make a general comment about the last time
we did the bond committee. I want to thank the administration for the work that you did
and the amount of people that you brought into this process,
having worked with you to help select people on the committee,
for the public to know that the administration does a great job of looking at every single area,
looking for people to fill certain positions.
Like you might have one certain group that turns in a whole lot of people,
but they're not going to get to manage this board.
The administration did a very, very good job of looking at everybody's needs and wants
and making sure that everybody's represented.
Thank you.
And I look forward to this process, and I hope that we as a board use the process
that we did last time with the improvements because it turned out really good
and nothing but high expectations for this to be redone again.
Thank you.
Madam President.
Mr. Scott.
There's no question that we need to proceed with another bond issue.
needs are great like i said at a earlier meeting if you have a driver's license and you're not
driving the district you don't know what's going on however let me say that i think there are five
issues from my perspective that i hope we can address one i do believe that the chairman of
this committee should have professional credentials and i think that's been a missing
ingredient in the past. I'm not criticizing anyone, but I go back to my
days as president of the Tax Research Association where I have evaluated
dozens and dozens of bond issues and capital improvement programs as a
professional and I think one of the things that is missing is not so much
the content of the committee, they're all dedicated, I believe that there needs to
be someone with professional credentials to be chairman of the committee. Two, I
I presume that all board members will have an opportunity to have committee representatives.
Three, one of the weaknesses that I have observed in the past that has created a lot of conflict
in this district, I would like us to cut off at the pass.
And we can agree or we can disagree, but we should not fight over this
because I think this is a common denominator belief.
I believe that the level of prioritization for surplus funds as they become available during the bond cycle should be very rigorously prioritized.
Not that they cannot change.
In a prior life, when we were working with HISD and they had had a hard time in getting bond issues passed,
asked my organization, literally asked HISD to take every bond, every part of the capital
improvement program and give it a number, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, et cetera.
And our position was that at the front end is the best time to do prioritization.
there is absolutely it would be irrational to say that priority 28 on January 1st 2017 is going to
be priority 28 on January 1 2019 it's not that the prioritization cannot change it's just that
if you start with a rigorous and I mean rigorous I mean that what it means one two three four five
If we have surplus funds, we're going to put Astroturf at the practice fields.
If we have surplus funds, we're going to do this.
That's what I'm suggesting.
The fourth thing, and in effect, again using HISD as my experience,
the Greater Houston Partnership and the Old Tax Research Association
kind of conspired to be the independent watchdogs of HISD bond issues.
And we would each retain our own professionals and we would kind of go in
and we would look at specific issues in terms of specific components of the bond
issue. That's not really common practice in suburban school districts. So I
I believe that a committee should have a modest amount of funds to retain some level of professional
independent expertise by someone that does not draw a check from KDISD to guide the chairman.
The more professional you have the chairman, the less you have for this need.
so I do believe there needs to be some oversight so that if the chairman or professionals or
concerned citizens on that committee say why are we doing this that there is someone that does not
draw a check from Katie is D to whom they can say what do you think help me frame my questions
better. And the fifth is property, but that is an issue best left for executive session
because there would be no reason. But those are the five issues. But there should be no mistake.
We absolutely need to proceed with the bond issue. I believe these suggestions are constructive.
They're not designed to be anything but constructive. And I think they're based on my
experience of having looked at maybe 35 to 50 capital improvement programs and
or bond issues in my career and I think these are helpful creating a lot less
controversy
any other questions for dr. Graham so mr. Cruz mrs. Doyle I noticed that in
In the 2014 bond committee structure, we had 100 bond committee members and we had 100
alternates.
And then in the restructuring with the proposed 2017, you're asking for just 150, but I don't
see any alternates there.
How would we work that if with the 150?
I know that in the last, in the 2014, the purpose of the alternates were if we had a
committee member that possibly wasn't going to be able to continue to attend the meetings
for whatever reason the alternate stepped in. How would we work that with
150 if they weren't able to continue with the meetings or they dropped off?
I'm not seeing an alternate. What you described is correct. In our previous bond
committee structure we did have 100 core decision-making members and we also had
100 alternates who would step in whenever a core decision-making member
was not available to attend a meeting. Conceptually that sounded great but in
in practice, it didn't work as smoothly as we had hoped for.
We learned our alternates really want to be involved in the process in a hands-on way.
They want to be a part of the decision-making process.
So in order to accommodate more individuals in that decision-making piece, we increased
the membership on the core committee to 150 and left out the alternates altogether.
Okay.
Should a committee member be unable to attend, say, three or four meetings, then it would
be up to the committee chair to reassign somebody to the committee to serve in that position
and this is outlined in the proposed charter as well okay okay great yeah well and and i remember
that it did kind of get frustrating for some of the alternates that were like gosh i'm here all
the time but i want to be able to make the decisions okay so i like that idea as well thank
Thank you.
Mr. Maholsky, you had a question?
Dr. Grims and Mr. Cruz and certainly Mr. Ganell.
I see your little smile there, aren't you retiring
just before this starts.
But you led us through that last process
and I agree with Mr. Griffin.
It was outstanding involving, in prior years,
we'd have 40 or 50 people come and just
Expanding that to meet our needs and just because of our growth and to allow
community members from all across the district to come and
Help us give us feedback learn a lot about the district and walk through this process
helps them understand just the magnitude of what it is and
meeting every week for four months and then I remember the
Work you have to do based on the questions you get at every meeting
just is
all-consuming and you handled it well you did it with grace and with a lot of
professionalism and our community came away very knowledgeable and they
appreciated the process and the honesty and transparency that you gave them
information and it worked so well and so 150 sounds like a daunting number but I
think you're right not all of those will be able to attend every meeting and I I
I think that's a good number. I wouldn't be comfortable with it falling very much below that because because of the
you know the time commitment of four months is
It's tough and a lot of things happen and life happens and so we won't be able to maintain 150 is my guess
So I appreciate you starting with you know as many as you can and getting a broad section
Thank you. You know we work for the community. That's what our jobs are as trustees
We work for them and we like when they tell us what their values are and what they hold dear to them.
And so we look forward to their participation and helping guide us to our decisions that will happen.
So thank you very much for the outline.
I can't believe it's here already.
Every three years we grow, you know, 2,500 children every school year.
That's like growing an entire school district, bigger than most school districts in Texas, a lot of school districts.
Texas so every three years comes around and it's needed and we appreciate you thanks so much thank you
Okay, we'll come to the Charter in a few minutes, okay, and now we'll move right into mr.
Smith on the 2017-18 budget update
Good evening miss Fox and trustees and dr. Ham I
I said at leadership meeting last month that one day before I retire that I hope to be able to get up here and share great news when it comes to budget planning this early in the year.
But unfortunately, it's many years before I can retire, and if I ever get to be able to do that, it's going to be a long time from now probably.
But I am here to talk about the 2016-17 initial budget talk.
This is the first budget talk officially that we've had with the board.
We really kind of started the budget process right after we adopted the budget in August, and we got PASA's numbers in October, and we started doing our long-range plans based on those numbers, and we've been tweaking those between then and tonight.
As always, we have objectives when we adopt our budget or when we work towards a budget and we want to maintain a balanced budget.
We want to maintain competitive salaries.
We want to maintain our health care program.
We want to stay in our own health care program as long as we can. TRS Active Care has, it's not well, pun intended, it's not well, their health care plan.
It's got its challenges and we have what I feel is a superior product.
Opening Bryan Elementary School, Stockdick High School, I'm sorry, Stockdick Junior High School and Paytoe High School is a challenge for us, as it always is.
As you've heard me say before, that's like adding rocks and a bucket of sand when it
comes to the fixed cost that those campuses incur.
And then we're opening one, we have to plan for opening one additional school in 2018-19.
Our enrollment, right now we're budgeting $77,000.
233 students. That's just under 1,500 students, more than we budgeted this last
year. It's not over 2,000 as we've seen in the past or as high as 3,000. It's
dialed back some and to be just under 1,500 students. Campus staffing units and
growth. We're building, they've started when we got back from the holidays, the
the campus staffing plans that's based on that growth of up to 77,233 students, and
will follow the same formulas for staffing that we have historically.
Taxable values.
That's a big if in this scenario, and you'll find out why tonight, but we're currently
at $36.4 billion, with a B. Our property values district-wide added together are $36.4 billion.
dollars salary increase percentage that's a big part of the budget we're
going to talk about that briefly tonight and we're going to talk about our
current tax rates that are dollar twelve six six and thirty nine cents or a total
of a dollar fifty one six six visiting with mr. Smith and looking at the
process that has been part of the budgeting process in the past with Katie
I wanted to start more with the end in sight and then work off of that
backwards to determine where are some areas that we may be able to refine or
reduce
You know visiting with mr. Smith looking at
Data from the past one area. I want the board to kind of think about tonight is
establishing a appraisal value growth that we can work off of a growth that we feel comfortable with is
10% so we would start with that in the budget is naturally that can always be
changed up or down as we get closer to another area is salary increases I think
many of you may have seen or will see some data where we have our first year
teachers five-year teachers to 15 20 25 and 30 and I will tell you there are
some discrepancies all right when we look at it based upon surrounding school
districts, Cy Fair, Fort Bend, Spring Branch. What are the other two, Chris, that we're looking at right now?
Hayleaf.
Hayleaf.
Lamar Consolidated.
Got it. So I would rather start with the end in sight versus starting with the budgeting process,
and then we get to the end and we say, oh, this is what we have left over and work off of that.
So one of the areas that we're looking at right now and making adjustments based on the tenure of the teachers
is a 2%, which would be a reoccurring cost,
and then that 1%, which is that lump sum that our staff really likes.
It is a 3%, and you're going to see that there will be some parentheses
when we start this budget, and then we'll work off of that.
Another area that I would like to take a look at,
you just heard a little bit about our bonding.
We're getting information right now from our financial advisors.
Chris is looking through it. He's running data through me. We feel comfortable. It's a small step, but I think it's a step that we need to take at looking at a possible interest in seeking decrease, not of a penny, but maybe a tenth of a penny, so that we're showing some due diligence.
And by doing this, we're still not going to put ourselves into a risky situation with
a future bond.
We feel comfortable with this.
But I'd like to start with those three parameters and sites subject to change.
Another area that I would like to change is I would like to have these discussions regarding
our budget in a workshop setting like this on a monthly basis.
I think in the past there was a two board members that would meet with administration
I feel like that we can do a lot of that talk here and have a lot of that conversation here
And if need be we can have a workshop
Specifically for a budget that includes all of us at the same time
So as Chris goes on and I'm sorry Chris not to interrupt
But I just wanted to plug those items in there right now as a starting point unless there's any objection from the board
that way we can start moving forward with some real concrete numbers for the
board all right so but our current budget looks like right now is obviously
we're labor-intensive and and that a majority 87.8 percent of our budget
rounded to 88 percent is in salary and benefits now we don't outsource any of
our services we don't like some school district does some school districts do but we do so all
our services are in-house so we are going to show high and and percentage for payroll costs salary
and benefits at 88 i think that's about industry standards somewhere between i've seen 85 and 90
and we've historically been about 80 percent um 88 is a large percent uh of course it's in salaries
both teaching staff and non-teaching staff salaries. It's another compensation.
One of the big ones, another compensation would be substitute teachers. Nine
million dollars that we spend on substitutes annually, nine million
dollars. Other compensations such as teaching and coaching stipends, after
school tutorials, etc. And then a benefits, and we talked about our health plan at
length over this last summer and I mentioned that earlier that we currently
have a good thing going with our self-funded health plan. We want to try
to continue that. In addition to the health plan, there's other benefits like
our workers compensation, unemployment, etc. This is the salary increases that
we've been able to do over the last five years. When there's an increase in the
basic allotment, in other words the state helps us with our funding, we're able to
do a little bit more and so you can see years that we've been able to do a
little bit more with salary increases. Currently with the $5,140 basic
basic allotment and that being static or stagnant, it's harder to do things without reducing
expenses somewhere when it comes to pay increases.
But this is a little history of what we've done over the last several years.
I took this information, we showed you as an administration what our beginning teacher
salary is this last summer.
This Texas academic performance report that was published a few months ago with 15, 16
Team PEMS data shows where we stand amongst districts around us. Some areas were up there,
some were not when it comes to our salaries compared to those averages that begin. The
beginning teacher salary was zero years experience, one to five years, six to ten years, eleven
to twenty, and over twenty years. So I present that to you as information to be aware of.
And then I found it interesting on the bottom row that of these six districts that we are the second most
seasoned when it comes to 11.4% with our average teaching experience, but with
average district experience as far as those teachers that are been teaching in Katy ISD were the second most immature.
I found that was interesting information.
Majority of our budget,
budget, but a vast majority of our budget is instruction where it should be and you
can see the areas of where we spend or where we're spending our current 16-17 budget.
And our expenditures per student, I showed this I think last summer, we won't have
the 15-16 data.
Districts are still reporting that information and we won't see that until the spring.
But for the first time in the 14-15 year that was reported, our expenditures are a little
above state average.
We've historically been below. There was a time, you know, 15 years ago we were
right on it or a little above state average, but we're at state average again
or just a little above. And looking at some of our peer districts that we look
at, whether it be from competitiveness or what we're doing in the classroom type
stuff, I've listed those districts there and you can see Katie's there in the
blue, and the average amongst these districts is just under $7,500 per
per student so we're about five hundred dollars more per student on average and
we're we're our expenditures are not as much as a leaves when it comes to per
student but they are a little above average y'all seen this before and and
and and I got it I got to give credit to David Thompson's where I got this idea
on this slide. I've used this ever since when it comes to it but I mentioned
Robin Hood and those chapter 41 school districts that we read about all the
time are above the surface of the water because it's easy to write about and
it's easy to understand or see some geeky guy like myself write a check and
seal the envelope and send it to Austin whereas the bigger part of Robin Hood
happens under the water and it says wealth grows, state funding goes down.
They're not taking my I'm not having to send a check but our state funding is
going down and you've seen these and you're probably tired of seeing these
but I think it's important enough statewide that we see these ad nauseum
because it's so important just three years ago the state was funding 49% of
our of our expenditures and now they've dropped down to 35% that's a 14% decrease
in the state's commitment to funding public education and president could I
just ask a quick one there yes sir is that apples to apples between those
years yes sir thank you mr. Smith this means that for every new dollar of
property tax that comes to KTISD they just withhold a dollar is that how that
and that just creeps up like that right but we're not writing a check to them
we're not writing a stick we're not writing a check or just our state
funding per student goes down and I'm going to show you on the next slide or
or next slide, that in detail because of the importance of this concept.
But this equates to, again, if you could just go and use those same percentages
where we were just three years ago, it would be a little over $100 million to KDISD over three years.
And so I call that rotten apples.
Now let's talk about the details, and don't let these details shock you
because I'm going to make it easy for you as we walk through this.
At least I'm going to try and president. Yes before you get to the details go back you go back to the slide
102 million dollars
How much did we pay for our last mr. Grinnell? You probably know that our last elementary school
elementary school
So basically this is
Three elementary schools that we could have built on cash with our own taxpayer dollars, but the state chose to keep it
Is that a fair statement?
Or we could have paid our teachers more.
We could have billed those elementaries.
Yes.
Okay.
And, Mr. Smith, from that same slide there, that $102 million that they keep,
that we generated by new growth, new houses, more taxable values,
that $102 million doesn't go into education fund.
That goes into the state's general operating fund to do with whatever they want. That's correct
It does not go to the education fund. Correct. Thank you
So let's get into the details of those apples and we got three columns here and I've highlighted do one column in yellow
That's the 1516 school year
This is the 1617 school year and the difference between the two
So that's your three columns and we're not going to go into all these rows, but basically
Basically, these rows, and I'm highlighting yellow on down, these are based on the number
of students that we have and the different types of students we have.
And there's dozens and dozens of formulas that are happening behind the scenes here,
but basically the type of students we have generate different amounts of money for Tier
1.
And when the total cost of Tier 1 in our district from the 15-16 school year was about $479
million dollars and that increased by because of student enrollment growth to
494 million dollars or a 15 million dollar increase the more kids you have
the more expenses you have because you need more teachers etc so naturally this
would grow and this is all tied to the five thousand one hundred forty dollar
basic allotment these formulas although different numbers used into them are the
same from the state to state from district to district when it comes to
to the basic allotment. There are some minor changes when it comes to the size of a district,
et cetera, but for the most part, $5,140 is what drives these numbers that come up to, in this
case, a $15 million increase from one year to the next. Now, our local fund assignment, this is
those apples, has increased, and because we had a big property value increase of 15.5 percent
a year ago, or two years ago now, we had an increase in our taxable revenues, and the
state's taking that away now.
This is the percentage going away.
Our participation in funding public education, or KDISD's taxpayers' participation in
funding basic education has increased by $50 million in this case.
Now, we've grown $15 million, but our participation has increased by 50, so the state share has
has gone down $34.7 million or the difference between $49 million and 50.
See those two numbers just above it?
If you do the math on that, the difference is $34.7 million.
That's the state share of participation going down.
Now, I want to be clear that, and I know there's somebody keenly aware of this in the audience,
that that's the state's mechanism of saying, hey, we need equity amongst kids in the state.
And just because Katie's seeing this high property value growth doesn't mean they get to keep it all because that's not fair to a district across the kids in the district across the state or three counties over that may not be seeing property value growth.
And that's the way that the state's using in these formulas to try to create equity so things are fair from one district to another.
And I buy that.
But the problem is when you're seeing statewide property value increases for the most part statewide, that adds up to $5.4 billion.
So ours in this case is $50 million, but statewide it's $5.4 million over a two-year period of time that we're currently in.
They're not putting that money back.
That's given a benefit to the state of $5.4 billion, and right now there's no mechanism to put that money back into public education.
They're putting it into other areas of the state budget, and that makes essentially the local taxpayers funding more towards basic education happening.
Again, I want to point out part of it's equity and the need to basically make sure that Johnny in this county gets as much as Johnny towards their education in another county.
and that's part of it the other part is is just your property values are rising
statewide and the money's not going back into public education I'm president
could I inject just one thing here I think it would be helpful mr. Smith the
the state would have a good argument there and I'd like your comment on this
if they were increasing per capita state education funding which they're not
doing in any appreciable way in fact it's probably down so if they're
capturing more of the local property tax, putting that into the state's general fund,
and using what de minimis amount of dollars they have to do equity, that is a totally
different kind of equity than recapture.
The fact of the matter is, I wish that lawyers could figure out how to frame a constitutional
Institutional property tax lawsuit because this has more dramatic impact than the state property tax that we went through
15 or more years ago, okay
Where's mr. Thompson anyway?
It's a state property tax and one thing I would like you like to see you do
to communicate this is
It's a real simple calculation
How many dollars does every penny produce in Katie is D?
Take the $102 million over the last three years, divide that by the pennies, and show what our tax rate would be, not in terms of new buildings.
We have a $1.51 tax rate.
What would KDISD property taxpayers' tax rate be if all else were equal?
We keep our tax base because we're not a recaptured district.
We're not a 41 district.
What would our tax rate be?
And if somebody would take that number and pound it like a two-by-four, we ought to be doing that, and we ought to be trying to figure out a way to take the state of Texas and say the property taxpayers of Harris County and Fort Bend County and Aleve and all these other districts, the Constitution does not envision an ad valorem property tax in our district being used to support the state budget.
And we damn well ought to try to put an end to that and your presentation is great
Again, and we can produce that
So we'll next next time we have our workshop on our budget will produce that number
It's a big number. Actually. It's a lesson for the taxpayers. That's right
So you can you can see here at the bottom on the row that I have highlighted now we're in the year that we're in
is going to generate higher property values and so we'll have the same thing
a year from now instead of that forty nine point nine million dollars two rows
up it'll be thirty point five million dollars again we didn't see quite as
high value increase but because we didn't see quite a high value increase
our total funding when it comes to tier one is down four million dollars
although we have two thousand more students that are generating five fifteen
$15 million in Tier 1 and our total revenue is down.
Now we knew that that was coming and that that was possible and so in budgets, prior
budgets, we budgeted one-time expenditures such as instead of funding the technology
retrofit cycle through bond funds and borrowing money for our technology retrofit cycle, we
used general fund dollars knowing that that was going to go away someday possibly had
had our values not grown as much.
Well, that has been the case,
and because our values didn't grow as much the year that we're in now,
we cashed in our chips and we pulled that one-time expenditures out of the budget.
We hoped that the state funding lawsuit would be in our favor
or that there would still be a surplus in our favor
that the legislature could use to increase the basic allotment.
Those haven't happened yet,
but we've cast that chip in and we've pulled that $20 million out of our budget.
Now, let's talk about property values.
Over the last, I guess it's 11 years, 12 years that you see here,
we've averaged 10% value growth year over year, average of 10% value growth.
And I think this is the key slide, and this is the pendulum on the budget for this next year
and the health of the budget.
What are these values going to do there on the far right?
Right now, this last year, we actually, based on recent information we've received from Harris County,
our values are looking a little bit better,
and it's looking like we may have anywhere between a 10.2% and a 10.4% increase.
But our average is still going to be 10%.
As Dr. Hemp mentioned earlier, we're comfortable using 10%.
I can't speak with the, I have not spoke with the county appraisers to get information out of them.
They won't give it to me.
If they do, it will be a very conservative number.
But what's that value going to do?
Is it going to be 10% or is it going to be 6%?
I have spoke with our previous tax assessor collector who's got a lot better handle on this than me,
although he's not an appraiser anymore.
He thinks they'll be somewhere between nine percent and eleven percent
That gives me a little comfort
Nine percent and eleven percent, but but I don't know and and and I'll
That I think that's the biggest unknown in the budget and we won't know this information until April and
April we have already approved a staffing plan etc
So depending on it that number comes in at six percent or the number comes in at ten percent
could come in at 15% like it has before, could come in at 4%.
But between those two dots on the right is about a $16 million delta in revenue
or change in revenue from one to the next.
So the 85th regular session started last week.
As we've mentioned before ad nauseum, there are increased property values the state is relying on
to reduce state spending.
They've historically done that and they're doing that continues to be
being relied upon
When you read stuff from the LBB
The focus last session was on taxpayer relief
With some of those surplus or some of the growing monies again the five point four billion dollars that were that the state was able
to gain from
Rising property value statewide two point six of it went back to taxpayers
Which is in the form of tax relief?
The taxparency resolution and I think item 6.5 on the agenda tonight both hit on that.
Oops, and motivation. You got a question with the things I read, is there a motivation?
They no longer have the proverbial gun to the head after May 13th of Friday the 13th
when the Supreme Court issued their decision. That's no longer there on the school district side.
So we're moving forward with a budget under current law, and what the variable, the big changes there is what's going to happen with our property values because the state budget revenues, our state funding revenue issues are yet to be seen.
Last Monday, I believe it was, Glenn Hager, our comptroller, the Texas comptroller, released his revenue estimate.
rather sluggish forecast of $104.87 billion that's going to be the disposal of this budget to this legislative session.
That's a 2.7% decrease over where it was 2 point years ago, but I will point out that I believe the state left a lot of money unspent on the table and had a significant surplus going into the session anyway.
way so are we gonna have a turbulent forecast what will happen with our local
property values and future property values for that matter when it comes to
our district's general operating fund and potential bond authorization
discussions we have the living on the lag or the funding cliff that we must
face if if our values come in at a lesser amount we'll have to face that
funding cliff that may be in a tough year for our budget we've seen some
some slowed enrollment growth, but we're planning on that, and with slowed enrollment growth
comes slower expenditures when it comes to hiring new staff, which can be offset with
that, and then the state revenue budget.
Again, that's an unknown.
So shifting gears, this is the last section of my presentation tonight is the tax rates.
You can see that we've kept the same tax rate for about 10 years, and then we were able
to lower the debt service tax rate by a penny, and I'm remiss to say that when we were talking
about the state funding slide and those numbers that 10 years ago this district
received 23% assistance from the state when it came to making its bond payments
now we receive none and it's because of higher wealth if the state would would
commit back to the level that they did 15 years ago I guess 20 years ago now if
they made a commitment back to that level then it would provide us relief
relief in making our debt service payments and that would be real tax relief to the taxpayers of this district.
Whether it be from a lower tax rate or shortened lives of bond sales to accommodate these bonds that we're building
schools with or a combination thereof, if they funded to the level that they did 20 years ago, committed to 20 years
years ago, or 23% would be significant tax relief to the, could mean significant tax
relief to this district.
So what's a penny give us when it comes to the tax rate?
In the general fund, it's $3.6 million.
We get matched by that, or a little more than matched by that, at $3.8 million on those
sort of golden pennies that go up to the Austin yields, the Austin's wealth level.
For a total of one cent equals about $7.4 million to the general fund.
The debt service fund, one cent again is $3.6 million.
There are no state funds received from the state when it comes to that.
So one cent is up or down is worth 3.6.
And this goes back to my assumption slide and the questions that Dr. Hint spoke about earlier
to try to get some dialogue of where we may be comfortable with as far as beginning with the end in mind
when it comes to these values that i put these variables that i put question marks by
and i can just repeat you know what i mentioned earlier when you saw this side
based upon the information that you just saw i'd like to start the process with those three
assumptions working off a 10 appraisal value increase working off the possibility and let
me phrase that again possibility of a two percent one percent two percent reoccurring salary increase
one percent lump sum and then working off the possibility of a point ten percent decrease on
the ins side as we work through this process those are numbers that we can adjust and look at but
like i said and like mr smith said i'd prefer to start with the end in sight and work this way
versus building a budget and then trying to find what we want to do at the end
no president mr. Mahal some actually question for dr. Han on kind of your
appreciate you kind of laying that out there the question is around these
salary increases for staff because I think we saw on that chart that there's
some differences that you know beginning five year ten year fifteen year twenty
Are you saying a kind of a flat increase or are we going to look at?
We could go back and this one of the thing that we've talked about
Maybe saying hey at a minimum or at a maximum, but then making some adjustments
It may be two point two percent two point one percent and trying to get competitive in some of those other areas
We can play with this number quite a bit and bring it back to you
I think one percent is am I correct in saying it's about four million dollars one
Yes, sir. A little bit more than $4 million.
A little bit more than $4 million.
These are some numbers we can come back based upon what you just saw,
give you some recommendations by 1.5 or 1 to 5 years, 5 to 10 years, 10 to 15, etc.
We're all good.
Great. Thank you so much, Mr. Smith.
MS.
No.
MS.
Our next report is a data report by Education Resources Group.
Our presenters, Dr. Hint.
MR.
Yes.
MS.
And he'll introduce our presenters.
MR.
I do.
We've got Mr. Paul Heberlin, I believe I pronounced that correct.
If not, I know that he will correct me.
He's with Educational Resource Group, also known as ERG.
It was founded in 1999 and provides tools to analyze performance in public education in Texas.
ERG applications are in use in school districts throughout Texas.
ERG founders have testified before the House and Senate education committees
and to other organizations working with public education in Texas,
most recently in August of 2016 to the Senate Education Committee
on the interim charge to student productivity in public education.
Just one last bit. The founders of ERG worked in the private sector in the fields of management
turnarounds, engineering design and operations and measurement models. They've taken much
of the private sector technology and applied it to the sphere of public education. I think
you're going to find the information that he presents is fascinating, it's informative
informative and hopefully gives you guys
an indication of where we are as a school district. Now here's the deal
though and I need to preface this. You know we're going to work off of
unfortunately the state of Texas provides us with a star assessment and
that's what we're gauged under and I think there are many of us sitting right
here that will disagree with the contents of the star but it's a
comparison of the star compared to school districts across the state of
Texas. In other words, it's a common assessment that we're all engaged off of.
So with that, I'm going to turn it over to Mr. Hebelin.
Thank you, Dr. Hint. Okay, yeah, let's talk performance management because that's
really the background of the founders of ERG, and we try to apply the lessons we
learn in the private sector to public education, and not surprisingly, a lot of
them, in fact, do apply. But when I say performance management, what do I really
mean it's really designed a suite of tools to answer some relatively
straightforward questions that pretty much everybody wants to know how are we
doing how's how is our school district performing where do we need to get
better if I want to get better who do I copy the private sector they constantly
benchmark their performance against other people in the same sectors to understand who's the top performer, we want to be the top performer, look at those metrics and try to achieve that. How do you do that in public education? Who are the top performers? And then when we decide on performance strategies, are they working or not?
And so these are relatively simple, straightforward questions. You might be asking, well, don't we already know this?
We have an accountability system. And I guess the point that I'm going to make tonight is that the accountability system isn't
really a performance management system. So what we'll talk about is the difference between performance management and accountability. And where we start is
by the heading here is that all performance is relative.
All measurements, we like to say all models are wrong, some are useful. There's no perfect measurement. So you can always be concerned about whether it's a test score, whether it's a measurement in a refinery, are we getting the exact number. But at the end of the day, what we can do is compare how we do as a campus or a district on a performance measure with how everybody else does.
And I think the best example that we have of that is UIL.
UIL
organizes its
into divisions. So KD ISD high schools play their football games against other
school districts and the divisions are based on size because that's the main driver. The driver on how effective they think football teams,
bands, drill teams, and what have you.
Basically, if you have more students you have a better chance of
having a more powerful team. So that's how they organize. So Katy doesn't play Moulton, Texas
for the state championship because that's not a level playing field. And in fact, UIL adjusts
those divisions every year based on changes in sizes of the respective school districts.
And so the question is, in the UIL, the driver is size. Well, we're here to talk about academics,
So what is the driver in academics? Because if you're going to have, if you're going to compare performance,
the first thing you have to do is level the playing field. And so, and this is really the core of really where the way
ERG looks at data has been different than the way the state has traditionally looked at data is through this graphic,
which is actually quite illustrative, where you see three people trying to climb up to the top, and yet the poles are different sizes.
And of course the comment being, well, it looks like B is the best because they're the highest.
And there is a close analogy in academics in that we have always focused on achievement values,
achievement being high scores on a test or high pass rates on a test.
And we say, well, if you have the highest pass rate, you must be doing the best job.
And the accountability system has always been driven that.
And most of the current accountability system is still driven that way.
And our point is achievement values, I got highest test grades or I have the highest percent passing rate or the highest SAT score or the highest graduation rate, are very effective measures of the student.
But we're in the business of measuring how effective the organization is.
So if we want to measure how effective KDISD is, we have to realize, well, where's the starting point?
Because we realize that the driver that shows the difference in academic outcomes is, in fact, student demographics.
And the way we do this is we create models.
We create a model of performance.
And this model basically looks at the 200 largest school districts in Texas.
Each one of those dots is a school district.
they represent four million students which are actually larger than any state
except California and what we're looking at is student demographics on the x-axis
and we're looking at some academic outcome on the y-axis and what this
relationship shows is as the percentage of economically disadvantaged students
increases the academic outcomes decrease and this is a fundamental relationship
that has existed forever, exists today, it exists in Texas, it exists in Sweden,
exists in Massachusetts, it is fundamental. We talk about closing the
gaps, but the fact of the matter is this gap doesn't change over time. It's not
necessarily what we like or not like, it's just model of actual behavior. And
how that plays out then, you can have two school districts that have exactly the
the same pass rate.
And the presumption is, well, if they both have the same
pass rate, in this case 75%, they must
be doing the same job.
But we, in fact, know that that's not the case.
Because the one on the left in this case has 22% economically
disadvantaged students.
The one on the right has 82%, but they get the same pass
rate.
So how do we level the playing field?
How do we reconcile the fact that it's more challenging
student environment when you have more economically
disadvantaged students?
Well, this model generates through a regression an expected value for every school district for any academic outcome.
So if I know that you have 52% economically disadvantaged students, I can go up to the 52% on the red line and go to the left and say,
this is what your pass rate should be.
And then I look at what your pass rate actually is.
And then are you above or below an expected value?
This is not hard math.
This is something that everybody in this room knows quite well as a height-weight chart.
You know, if I have, if I weigh 180 pounds, do I need to gain weight or lose weight?
Well, that's not enough information.
How tall am I? You know, once I know the height and weight, I can basically say the actionable information
isn't how tall I am or how much I weigh, it's am I above or below an expected value.
Well, in the case of academic outcomes, the actionable information
information isn't that the pass rate of those two districts is 75%.
The actionable information is one is about six points below and one is about 12 points above.
So that is the informative information.
That is the measure of the effectiveness of the organization rather than the achievement of the students.
Because at the end of the day, all we can do is manage our districts.
We do not choose the students.
We educate whoever shows up and we endeavor to do the best job that we can.
So fundamentally to level the playing field we simply then look at the
variances or are you above or below an expected value and then we're able to
rank districts from in this case from 1 to 200 in any academic outcome and in
every year we basically rerun these regressions so the system itself is
basically defining the performance and it's your relative performance to
everybody else is defined how good you're doing and at the end of the day
relative performance is everywhere do you get into the chemical engineering
school at University of Texas or Texas A&M well it's relative you don't have to
necessarily have to have the highest score you have to be higher than the
alternatives that they choose so at the end of the day if you're higher than
someone else you get in they don't so relative performance isn't just a a
concept it is how decisions are made same with a job there may be ten people
qualified for a job but somebody gets a job and nine people don't so relative
performance is the way the world works and that's why we think it's so
effective in looking at at performance in public education because once again
what we're really trying to say is how good is Katie ISD that's the question
we're trying to find out and this is the way to do that and in our index of
academic index we look at these four components because basically you're
you're tied to whatever academic outcomes are reported by all school
districts and all campuses and and these are the ones that exist and that they're
systematic they're validated if there are others available great but absent
anything else everybody's taking the same tests so we're really we're not
saying stars a good test or a bad test what we're really saying is that's the
game you're playing it who's doing the best job on that test relative to
everybody else who's taking the same test so basically that the first step in
relative performance is leveling a playing field after you do that a lot of
things fall out but let me tell you one of the impacts of doing this because
when we I've made this presentation and along with my partner Tim tower out here
hundreds of times before school boards and within the school districts.
And often the first question is, okay, well, you're using economically disadvantaged students.
What about all these other issues?
What about ethnicity?
What about mobility?
And how do they influence?
Because, quote, we know they influence outcomes.
And so the answer is yes, but what we do is we start with the main driver,
driver, which is economic disadvantaged students.
And what you see here is basically a chart of raw numbers using ethnicity, in this case
percent Hispanic students, with the same academic outcome.
And for those of you who know anything about statistics, what you'll see is this relationship
is much less predictive than the one for economic disadvantaged students, which you see those
dots scattered all over the place.
So what we're saying is if you start with the most dominant thing like a new IELTS size and
academics is economically disadvantaged students
Then you look and say do we need to take the effects of a secondary influence such as ethnicity?
So the chart on the right basically says once we've made the adjustment
For economically disadvantaged students and we plot that versus percentage of economic
percentage of Hispanic students, what we see is the R squared in this case of 0.04 means there's no statistical, there's not a strong predictive relationship between the two. In fact, there's a slope that goes the other direction, which said once you've taken the economic conditions of the family into account, the more Hispanic percentage students you have, the higher are the academic outcomes.
outcomes.
So we do this for basically all the variables that we can track and we've been doing it
for 15 years and basically it always comes out this way.
So once you've taken the economic conditions into account, you don't have to make secondary
adjustments because it doesn't change the answer and there's no reason to make the problem
more complicated than it has to be.
So anyway, that's basically kind of the background on leveling a playing field.
field. So let's talk about how we can use this information now. And we're really concerned
here about Katy ISD, but a logical question ought to be, well, how's Texas doing? There
was a case where Houston ISD was competing for the Broad Award, and in that case, Houston's
competing against school districts from all over the country. So what we we put a
little analysis together for Houston that basically defined Houston was in
the first quartile in terms of academic outcomes among these same 200 school
districts. Once we adjust for demographics they were also in the first
quartile in terms of what we call spending efficiency so they effectively
were using their funds. So if you're in the what I call the 1-1 box the first
quartile in academics and the first quartile in terms of efficiency in Texas
well then where's Texas so you know is Texas on the bottom or the top and it
when that case Texas was like the fourth highest ranked state among the 50 making
those same adjusted so so the case they can make then is if you're a top
district in the top state then that that's a pretty good case if I'm
competing with Florida or competing with California which they were which which
Texas is much higher. But here's the numbers for Texas and what we're looking
at is now data in two dimensions because we talked about academic outcomes in
terms of achievement and academic outcomes in terms of performance.
Achievement in this case is on the x-axis so the states, each one of these
circles is a state, on the very right the 1-1 through the 4-1 box have very high
student outcomes. The dots across the top from the 1.4 to the 1.1 have very high
performance. That is once you take into account that Texas's demographics are
there's only either three or four states that have more challenging demographics
than does Texas that that the Texas is in we saw the first quartile in terms of
of academic performance.
So it's just simply a matter of saying achievement's important
and performance important.
They tell you different things.
Achievement is a measure of the student.
Performance is a measure of the effectiveness, in this case,
of the system, of Texas's system.
So Texas is in the first quartile of performance,
the third quartile of achievement.
And the reason I spend so much time saying this
is that we have spent so much time just looking
at achievement as our measure of how the district was doing, that
that's not enough information to really make that judgment. So if we move on to
Texas now, and now we're looking at those the 200 largest school districts in
Texas, and the axes are the same. So across those four blocks across the
right are school districts who generate high achievement, and the four blocks
across the top are school districts that generate high performance. So and the red
dot of course is Katie. So Katie in this case is in the 1-1 box which means it is
both high in achievement and high in performance. And the fact of the matter
is as you can see there's a distribution in all 16 of these boxes. So every
district wants to be number one but in fact once you level the playing field
and use a consistent set of measurement, a measurement framework,
that's not how it distributes.
The accountability system basically thinks pretty much everybody's made it.
98% of the students are in school districts that met standard.
Okay, well, for an accountability system, that's okay.
That's not okay if you're trying to manage the school district,
manage the performance of the school district.
So the real question is, if 98% of the kids are in districts that made it,
well, how are we doing?
Are we in with a lump of everybody else?
And well, how do we get better, and how do I find models of high performance?
Those are the things that are required in performance management,
not easy to do with the accountability system.
And so you can see the ranks here.
Tonight really wasn't the purpose to talk about finance,
but I'll just mention briefly the district out of the 200 is 88th in finance in 2016.
What that means is we do the same exercise in spending.
We don't look at the revenue side.
We just look at where you spend your money, what does it cost to educate a student.
and we create an expected value for all these school districts. We make
adjustments for percentage of economically disadvantaged kids and
regional cost differences. You were saying 88% of your spending is in
people. Well people cost different levels in Katy versus
Abilene versus Dallas versus Fort Worth. So if you don't make that adjustment you
You can't really measure what the expected value of spending is.
But 88 simply means that Katie is spending less than we would expect,
given the demographics that Katie has and given the location that Katie's in.
So if you're between 1 and 100, you're spending less than expected.
If you're above 100, you're spending more than expected.
And then even better in productivity, and as Dr. Hinn mentioned,
I was asked to testify in August before the Senate Education Committee on productivity and and part of that message was
well, if
You if you want productivity
You have to have a measure for it. There is none
We we in Urg have had one since they won because once you measure costs and once you measure outcomes
You put the two together you have productivity is in fact. It's how far you are from your dot to the upper right hand corner and
so
And then you have to reward it.
There is no reward in public education for productivity.
You basically get your funds and you spend it.
And so if productivity is important,
they have to define it and they have to reward it.
But whether that'll happen or not, we'll see.
So what I did is draw a box around.
So everybody, basically all those white dots
that are above you are performing higher.
So this comes back to that question,
how do we find high performing models if we want to get better what do we do we find somebody who's
performing more than we do find out what they're doing and then try to beat that so that's that's
how the system can be used to define high performance and I guarantee these are not the
ones that you would you would normally hear when we were in Austin presenting to basically the
Senate in the house and the agency and the governor's people and we had at that time there
There were seven school districts in what we call the one-one box, and we asked them to name one, and they couldn't get one.
They didn't know.
They couldn't name any that was both high academic outcomes and basically high efficient.
And understanding, since they didn't have access to our system, maybe that's fair, but the flip side of it is if you're up there setting policy, is it important for you to know who's good and who's not?
I mean, I would think so.
So, I mean, this isn't just an exercise.
It is really important that we know who the high performers are and who are not.
The second thing that we do and we've always done is look at trends because it's often
more important to know how you got to where you are than even where you are.
If I'm good and getting better, that's one thing.
If I'm good and getting worse, it's another thing, which means we have to develop different
strategies.
One is a turnaround situation.
The other one is, hey, okay, just keep doing what you're doing and encouraging.
But the accountability system is not very kind to us
because they're constantly changing the rules every year.
And it's really hard to compare yourself to others
unless you have a constant base.
So that's one of, part of our methodology
is to keep things constant.
So when I measure Katie's performance one year,
I can measure it the next year and know,
well, did they get better or worse?
So what you see here is basically the achievement index,
which is once again, the raw scores,
how you did in pass rates,
how you did in this case post-secondary readiness on the left and then on the
right is the performance index and the performance index is much more telling
because what it does is basically tell you how you're managing against what I
call the headwinds because the the demographic challenges and in Katy are
increasing as they are statewide so you're getting more economically
to get disadvantaged students. So the question becomes, are you doing well with the changes
in demographics? And as you can see, in 2007, the district was at the 72nd percentile, and
in 2016, they're at the 84th percentile. So whereas in achievement, it's been pretty flat.
So if all you're looking at year after year is achievement, Katie's good and has always
been good. But in performance, the district has actually gotten better and then adapted
well to the changes in demographics. So once again when you look at the same
data two different ways it tells you different stories about what's really
happening. The other thing you can do in once you've developed models of
performance is you can predict the future because we have historical
project historical data on basically all thousands school districts but we focus
on the 200 largest. So what this chart basically says is, well, we can look at
Katy's history and based on its current trends and based on the current trends
of all the other 200, where is it going to be in three years? So that's what we
call the baseline. Where we do this for campuses is campuses are
tasked to do a campus improvement plan. Well, the real question is, compared to what?
I mean what's an improvement really mean because the demographics might change
drastically we did an example in spring of one of their high-performing middle
schools that basically was getting much more challenging demographics but in
three years they would have gone from one point above expected value the six
points above expected value but the raw pass rate would actually go down so so
that's the influence of demographics which is frequently not taken into
account when you're looking at forward-thinking campus improvement
plans or in fact district district improvement plans but so what we see
here on the red line is really just that chart on the right from the previous
slide and the green line is based on what Katie has been doing over the last
three years and what everybody else has been doing and how your demographics has
has been changing and how everybody else has been changing, where do we think you'll be
in three years? And what it says is you're now at the 83rd percentile and you're going
to the 88th. To some extent, how districts use this, this is kind of a report card on
your current practices. Because if it predicts up, that means your current practices relative
to everybody else's are effective. If it predicts downward, it means relative to everybody else,
you better go back and review them. So very, very useful in looking forward in the planning.
The other thing you understand in relative performance that if either the red line or
the green line were dead flat, what that means doesn't mean you're not getting better. What it
What it means is you're getting better at the rate of everybody else.
So once again, we're not used to looking at relative performance.
We're focusing on achievement, but relative performance is really the metric that tells
us how we're doing.
And in Katie's case, very high performing district, very high achieving, very high performing,
and getting better.
So that's that's the bottom line if there's a report card for KDISD.
So in summary,
first quartile and achievement performance, getting better relative to the peers, and it's not easy by the way because I do these presentations
kind of all over the state and believe me all school boards sit around trying to figure out how to get better.
Everybody wants to be number one.
So especially when you're in that first quartile you are competing against the best in the state and they're all already pretty good and they are
fine-tuning their programs as well so when you're good and getting better it's
a real compliment to all the staff in KDISD because because it's a very very
challenging thing to do and and and should be rewarded that said the
accountability system is changing we've looked very hard at a through F we know
the Commissioner very well a couple of the domains are actually copied from
ERG. Domain 1 now looks like ERG's index. Domain 3, they made a big, they made a
try to try to do our height weight chart but I think they did it wrong. But
nonetheless, you have, you know, it's the rule, it's the law, it will be the law
next year. So the fact of the matter is this is a compliance system you're in
and in our mind, yes, you have to comply. You have to do whatever the state tells
tells you, but that's not enough. And so the real reason that we're of value to
school districts is, yeah, we want to comply, we want to do the things that the
state tells us, but that's not enough. Our constituents expect more than that, so we
need a system that tells us and guides us to make sure that we're doing that.
.
Happy to address any questions. Hope we understood that.
Thank you so much for your presentation.
Okay. No, I have questions. Mr. Scott, go right ahead. I was waiting for you to call my name.
Madam President, I've actually had a fairly significant discussion with Dr. Hemp
regarding the questions I'm going to ask tonight, and it's not going to take that long,
but I want to start off by saying this. There's rarely a week that has gone by,
certainly not a month that has gone by since I've been on the board and Dr. Hinn
has been here, that my respect for him has not grown. And one of the reasons
that is the case is that I believe that there has been more of a commitment to
producing data than any time since I've been in this town since 1983, starting as
a reporter, heading a nonprofit research group for many years, looking
looking at the state of Texas and other school districts.
I have a tremendous amount of respect for Dr. Hint doing more
than any superintendent I've dealt with since 1986,
other than Billy Reagan, to affirm the role of data
in public policy.
Having said that, I believe that relativity
Relativity that you've discussed in your reports has a higher degree of credibility
the higher the standard of integrity of the base that you're analyzing and
One of the problems that I've had is that standard but what I want to tell you is
If you don't feel comfortable with the questions that I'm going to ask then you tell me I'll give my questions to dr
Hint and he can forward them in writing
I'm not trying to give you a pop test. I'm not trying to put you in in an uncomfortable situation
But I want to go through about seven scenarios
And if you can answer yes or no, then the next question will come really really quick on page four
Of your chart. I just want to confirm something that the pass rates that you're talking about are the passing standards on star
are yes the content mastery required to pass the test yes okay and the deviations from expected
pass rates or statistical calculations based on those passing standards yes okay as in the tables
that you have presented you have not made it seems to me a value judgment on
what that standard is you're just taking the standard as it is and doing pretty
sophisticated statistical analysis is that true yes in the course of your
company's analysis has your company performed any independent correlation
analysis with statistical due diligence that would correlate
the student academic performance that you've evaluated to other independent measures such as PSAT, SAT,
classroom grades, advanced placement?
Well, we look at the current test, whether it be TACS or STAR, and yeah, we correlate those against SAT scores and ACT scores.
You actually, does this, I don't see it, and that would be very helpful.
students in KDISD had this PSAT score in the 10th grade and that correlated to a DLA score it
correlated to a STAAR score and you have confidence intervals and you have the the typical correlation
analysis on those individual measurements you've calculated that and you can provide that to dr.
hint. Sure. Right. I can't wait to get that. Do you believe that this
analysis would be different if you performed it on the recommended grade
grade level, which generally hovers between 54 and 60-something percent content mastery,
as opposed to 37 to 50 percent content mastery.
Would these statistics look different if you were using the recommended grade level rather
than sort of the de minimis passing standard?
Well, what they're putting out is three levels, right?
There's three levels of passing standards in STAR, and we use all three.
Now, is passing standard, percent passing the best metric?
No.
You know, I'd much rather have percent correct answers.
I think that's a much better metric to track not only performance but year-to-year change of performance, but those data are not available.
But if it were available and it could be retrieved on a student-by-student basis and correlated into classrooms and correlated into future performance, then that would be something very valuable, I think,
that's what i heard you say yeah could the system get better yeah you know what that's enough
questions dr hen i've heard what i want i look forward to having a chance to maybe visit with you
in the future it'd be my pleasure oh yeah but i mean this is what i wanted to hear thank you
Thank you very much. Okay board we'll move to the consent agenda. Dr. Stevenson, Mrs. Stevenson is
here to talk about the contract for the purchase of musical and performing arts equipment supplies
and then she'll move right into some other things. All of the things on the consent agenda just get
started go right ahead good evening president Fox dr. Henn and board members
I have six contracts to bring forward for your consideration they this evening
their first one is indeed the contract for the purchase of musical and
performing arts equipment and supplies this particular contract is for the
routine purchase of these items that happens in the performance of the school
district during the year items included in this category or things like
instrument parts, accessories, music stands, sheet music, costume and uniform
accessories, equipment cases, and all other program supply items. What the
purchasing department did with the assistance of the Fine Arts Department
is develop a list of vendors based on our historical data and input from the
teachers and instructors at the schools. All the vendors that were contacted and
responded to us did qualify to become KDISD vendors and although the
district does not have prior history with some, all were able to provide
references for districts of similar size and scope qualifying them to become a
vendor for us. All information required regarding the vendors including the
discount levels that they offer and their past history with the district or
other entities is made available to the schools and departments as this contract
is presented to them. The departments and the schools will utilize the list to
make purchases and they will base all of their purchases on the best value
criteria and anything any purchases over 3,000 or more will require competitive
quotes. This contract I do want to mention will not be the contract that
will be utilized to buy the musical instruments for our new junior high and
high school. We will do a separate bid for those because of the amount of
instruments that we're purchasing so this will be a one-year contract which
an option for two additional one-year renewals and all purchases will come
from the general operating fund and our special revenue funds and the annual
expenditures are anticipated to be 1 million 250 thousand dollars per year
any questions Thank You mrs. Stevenson keep going okay the next contract I have
is the contract for basketball volleyball track and cross country it's
for the equipment supplies and apparel of these sports again what we did was we
could use work with our athletic department to develop a list of the
items that are commonly used for the programs throughout our schools and then
we also developed a list of vendors for those items that were not specified from
which the staff could could utilize the vendor list to get obtained competitive
quotes or quote the items that they need. All of these items will be purchased
competitively if the purchases are over $3,000 and all the vendors that did
submit qualified to become KDISD vendors. This will be a one-year contract with
two additional one-year renewals. All purchases come from the General
Operating Fund and or special revenue funds and the annual
annual expenditures are anticipated to be $680,000.
Any questions?
Okay.
Okay, moving on.
I have the next contract I have is for the purchase of football equipment,
supplies, apparel, and helmet reconditioning.
Again, we grouped these sports to make it easier for our athletic staff to
purchase from these contracts.
So this contract will be for football equipment, supplies, apparel,
and helmet reconditioning.
And again, we developed a list of the most commonly used items at our campuses with the assistance of the athletic group.
And then we went out and solicited the vendors that were suggested to us by the department and from our historical data.
And we qualified the vendors to become KDISD vendors.
For any items that are not specifically listed, any purchases over $3,000, the staff will have to obtain competitive quotes.
and they will purchase based on the best value criteria.
This, again, is a one-year contract with two additional one-year renewals.
The expenditures will come from the general operating fund and or special revenue funds,
and annual expenditures are anticipated to be $900,000.
Mrs. Stevenson, I'm assuming that all of these supplies that we're buying,
especially when I'm thinking about football helmets they've all met the
safety standards that the highest safety standards that we expect for our boys
and girls right as far as recommendations and those can be Decker
can respond to that better than I I know I know they probably I'm absolutely sure
they do but I did just kind of a question pop in my head and they are
very careful about quality I do know that and that's part of what we use when
we're evaluating vendors is to make sure that the equipment they provide is the
highest quality. Thank you very much. Any other questions? Continue. Okay the next
contract that I have is for the purchase of junior high athletic sports equipment
supplies and apparel and again we group these sports because it makes it easier
for the athletic staff when they're doing their purchasing to be able to
pull from a specific contract. The contract for this was developed with the
help of the athletic department and we did develop a large list of the items
that are most commonly used at the junior high level for athletics and we
also developed sections of the contract that allow them to purchase items that
were not specifically listed we developed the list of vendors with
assistance from the athletic department the coaching staff and our historical
data and for any purchase over 3,000 well all the vendors submitted were
qualified to be Katie ISD vendors and for any purchase over $3,000 the
competitive quotes will be obtained and they will use the best value criteria
again to make their purchases the contract period will be for one year
with an additional two year to one year renewals all expenditures come from the
general operating fund indoor special revenue funds and annual expenditures
are anticipated to be three hundred thousand dollars the right of hip-kate
The next contract I have for your consideration is for the preventative maintenance and repair services for the emergency generators.
As you know, it's very crucial that these generators are maintained at an operational level,
as this equipment could be needed in any type of emergency situation.
So the service plan proposed is one that will provide the units be inspected quarterly with a load test performed in the fourth quarter.
Repairs then will be performed on an as-needed basis for the large emergency units as well as
the smaller units that are located throughout the district. Use of factory authorized technicians
will result in greater efficiencies when those services are required as the technicians are
properly trained to service the district's units. So after consideration of all the proposals
received it was recommended that we award this contract to LJ Power Incorporated. They submitted
the proposal that was considered to be best value to the district and although
we do not have any previous experience with them they did provide satisfactory
references of entities of similar size and scope so this contract will be for a
one-year period with four additional one-year renewals the it what the
expenditures will be funded from the general operating fund and or special
revenue funds and annual expenditures are anticipated to be one hundred
thousand dollars per year. Any questions? Thank you very much. The final contract I
have for your consideration this evening is to consider the approval of the
contract for the district-wide security upgrade package number five. This is a
continuation of the packages that I presented before. Again we utilize the
services of Mr. Brian Hood with the PBK MEP group to assist us with the
development of this plan so that it would work with phasing in our
integration of all our security systems in the future as is the districts planned.
In the information presented to you is a list of schools that will be
impacted with this particular section of the project and after consideration of
all the proposals that were received the recommendation is to award the contract
to FISC at a not to exceed cost of $1,262,670.
That includes all the software, hardware, and an owner's contingency of 8%.
The project will start upon approval by the board and is scheduled for completion by August of 2017.
The funding for this particular project will come from the 2014 bond fund.
Any questions, board members?
Thank you very much, Mrs. Stevenson.
Always appreciate your thorough presentations.
Okay, board members, we will move to the discussion action portion of our agenda.
Tonight we have a list of proclamations and resolutions,
so there will be lots of reading and let's get right to it.
I have asked our board secretary to read the proclamations
and the resolutions for us this evening.
Our first one is discuss and consider future board approval of our proclamation for National
School Counseling Week.
I want to present this to the board because National School Counseling Week focuses on
the unique contributions of our professional school counselors within the U.S. and highlights
the tremendous impact they have in helping students achieve school success and plan a
career.
And the proclamation will be read by our board secretary, Courtney Doyle.
Proclamation of the Board of Trustees for National School Counseling Week.
Whereas school counselors are employed in public and private schools to help
students reach their full potential and whereas school counselors are actively
committed to helping students explore their abilities strengths interests and
talents and these traits as these traits relate to career awareness and
development and whereas school counselors help parents focus on ways to
further the educational personal and social growth of their children and
whereas school counselors work with teachers and other educators to help
students explore their potential and set realistic goals for themselves and
whereas school counselors seek to identify and utilize community resources
that can enhance and complement comprehensive school counseling programs
programs and help students become productive members of society, and whereas comprehensive
developmental school counseling programs are considered an integral part of the educational
process that enables all students to achieve success in school, therefore the KDISD Board
of Trustees do hereby proclaim February 6-10, 2017 as National School Counseling Week, signed
this 23rd day of January 2017.
17 Rebecca Fox president Katie ISD Board of Trustees any questions any objection
to moving this to consent so moved our next item is
proclamation for school bus driver appreciation week this school bus
driver appreciation week will be February 13 to 17 and it celebrates
transportation staff that focuses on the safety and needs of our students while
conducting their duties and I will let mrs. ask mrs. Doyle please read it for
us whereas school bus drivers consistently took the safety of our
children first maintaining an awareness of student needs school bus routes
mechanical issues traffic and weather condition and whereas school bus drivers
face many driving perils both natural and unnatural while conducting their
daily duties and whereas school bus drivers consistently exhibit patience
and kindness towards students parents and school staff in the faithful and
dedicated performance of their responsibilities and whereas school bus
drivers have collectively built a remarkable and exemplary record of
safety by driving for hundreds of thousands of miles year after year
therefore the Katy Independent School District Board of Trustees do hereby
I proclaim February 13th through 17th, 2017 as School Bus Driver Appreciation Week in
Katy ISD.
Signed this 23rd date of January 2017, Rebecca Fox, President, Katy ISD Board of Trustees.
Any questions?
Any objection to moving this to consent agenda?
So moved.
Okay, our next item is a Proclamation for Career and Technical Education Month.
Mrs. Doyle, will you read this?
Yes.
Whereas, February 1st through 28th, 2017 has been designated Career and Technical Education
Month by the Association for Career and Technical Education.
And whereas, Career and Technical Education offers students the opportunity to gain the
academic, technical, and employability skills necessary for true career readiness.
And whereas, students in Career and Technical Education programs participate in authentic,
meaningful experiences that improve the quality of their education and increase
student engagement and achievement and whereas career and technical education
provides students with career exploration opportunities earlier in
their educational experience which enables them to make informed and
beneficial decisions about their academic coursework as well as pursuit
of established programs of study and career pathways and whereas leaders from
business and industry nationwide report increasing challenges related to the
skills gap and connecting quality qualified professionals with available
careers and critical and growing CTE related fields including health care
energy advanced manufacturing and information technology and whereas
career and technical education prepares students for these and other fulfilling
careers by offering integrated programs of study that link secondary and
post-secondary education and lead to the attainment of industry recognized
credentials and whereas ensuring that employers have access to a qualified
workforce as a crucial step in ensuring productivity among the business and
industry communities as well as continued American economic growth and
global competitiveness and whereas this year marks the hundredth anniversary of
the Smith Hughes Act the first act of Congress to provide funding for career
and technical education which allows us to celebrate how far CTE has come to
become a powerhouse of America's economy therefore the KTISD Board of Trustees do
hereby proclaim February 1st through the 28th 2017 as Career and Technical
Education Month in Katy Independent School District and urge all citizens to
become familiar with the services and benefits offered by the Career and
Technical Education programs in this community and to support and participate
in these programs to enhance their individual skills and productivity.
Signed this 23rd day of January 2017, Rebecca Fox, President, KDISD Board of
Trustees. Any questions? Any objection to moving this proclamation to consent? So
moved. We have three proclamations. Counselors, bus drivers, and career and technical
education gets a whole month, not just a week. We love all of you.
Thank you for all that you do for our students, all of you.
And 6.4, discuss and consider future board adoption of a resolution concerning the A through F accountability rating system for Texas public schools.
This was brought to us by Dr. Hint.
But Mrs. Doyle, our board secretary, would you read this resolution?
Yes, ma'am.
And then we'll have questions at the end if we have any.
Board of Trustees Katy independent school district resolution concerning the a through s accountability rating system
for Texas public schools state of Texas whereas the Texas legislature has enacted legislation
that requires the Commissioner of Education to implement a
public school rating system that would assign a through F grades to schools and districts beginning with the
2017-18 school year and whereas at least 16 states have implemented a similar rating system
utilizing a through F grades for schools and districts and to date there is no
definitive research that suggests these ratings have improved student our school
performance and whereas in a recent statewide survey conducted by the State
Board of Education an overwhelming majority of Texans do not want high
stakes standardized test scores to serve as the primary basis for a public school
rating system and whereas the majority 55% of the a through F grades are based
on the state of Texas assessment of academic readiness star a high-stakes
standardized test that does not accurately measure student learning and
whereas the star provides little meaningful information to guide student
learning inform teachers or report academic progress to parents and whereas
the commissioners were proposed rating system utilizing a through F grades for
schools and districts includes five domains and numerous unrelated
related indicators to determine a single grade leaving the public with an invalid
disconnected reflection of school quality and whereas the commissioners
proposed rating system utilizing a through F grades for schools and
districts creates a false impression about students ignores the unique
strengths of each school and unfairly reduces each student's worth to the
school's assigned grade and whereas we embrace meaningful accountability that
informs students parents and teachers about the learning needs of each student
and each school and whereas we believe our state's future prosperity relies on
a high quality education system that prepares students for college and
careers and without such a system Texas's economic competitiveness and
ability to attract new business will falter now therefore be it resolved that
Katy Independent School District Board of Trustees calls on the Texas
Legislature to repeal the rating system utilizing a through F grades for schools
and districts and develop a community-based accountability system
and empower school districts to design their own internal systems of assessment
and accountability that while meeting general state standards allows districts
to innovate and customize curriculum and instruction to meet the needs and
interests of each student and their communities and be it further resolved
that new systems should reduce the use of high stakes standardized tests
encompass multiple assessments reflect greater validity and more accurately
reflect what students know and can do in terms of the rigorous standards passed
and approved on this 23rd day of January 2017 by Rebecca Fox board president
Ashley van board vice president Courtney Doyle board secretary Ryan
Mahalski, the Board Treasurer, Henry DeBrell, Board, Sergeant at Arms, Charles
Griffin, Board Member, George Scott, Board Member. Any questions, comments? I have a
couple of statements. Mr. Scott. Get this out of my ear while I talk. I'm not going
to quibble over the wording of the resolution. I am going to vote for it, but
But I've been doing this for a long time.
I've been involved in watching the accountability for a long time.
And when I vote against this A to F system, I want to say that there are components to it that probably should have been in place 30 years ago.
I'm not going to quibble on that.
But the TEA, but I do want to make a statement because when I vote to oppose this and to say it goes away
I'm voting in good conscience because it's a piece and it's it's not good
Okay
But I want to make a statement not for the purpose of boring you but because I've been on the record for
29 years on this and I want to put mine in context just like I did when I came to the defense of District of Innovation
The TEA has spent most of the last three decades lying to parents, taxpayers, state and federal
courts and lawmakers about the integrity of its succession of academically fraudulent
testing and accountability programs.
The reason is literally rooted in state-sponsored racism, with its origin arising from the end
of segregation, to 1972 Civil Order 5281, to Senate Bill 7 in 1993, to the Supreme Court of Texas in 1995,
and to the Western Federal District Court in 2000. The TEA has consistently and pervasively
misrepresented the genuine grade-level skills of students, consistently misrepresented the genuine
academic equity gaps between student populations, which is embedded in the
Constitution and in state law, and misrepresented the actual meaning of
upper-level performance. The difference is this, and I predicted this probably
15 to 18 years ago, that when the state of Texas put a test on the system, that
more closely approximated reality is that the system would have to get rid of
it let's make no mistake about this school districts in Texas have spent the
last 20 plus years luxurating in high ratings on a corrupt system and now that
some of the truth is coming out about college readiness about non equity gap
closures there is this uprising but make no mistake about it what the state of
Texas is doing with the A to F in my assessment is in conjunction with what
Mr. Smith has shown us tonight in a brilliant financial report. We have a
two-tiered assault on public education. We're destroying it financially and
we're dropping F-bombs across the state of Texas. That's what we're doing with
this rating system. It's irrational, it's evil, it's sinister, it needs to go away
and I'm not going to quibble with my peers on the exact wording of that.
But it is one of the reasons that I ask seven or eight questions of our gentlemen.
It's one of the reasons that we need to pull data so that we can more aggressively,
not just assert problems, but independently and empirically go against the state of Texas
in this irrational system. I don't have nearly as many problems with my peers on
this board and we've had some rough spells as I do with the Texas Education
Agency and what it is trying to do to destroy public education and further the
cause of privatization and vouchers. This A to F needs to go. I'm going to vote
against it and I'm not going to quibble on this word or that word. And I'm proud
out of your taking the leadership in this county to step up and say this and
what you've said mr. Scott you're gonna vote for the resolution voting for the
resolution which goes against the a3 if you're not gonna vote again I'm voting
for the resolution but I'm not going to quibble against any of the individual
phrases that I might have some problem with it's the big picture here and the
big picture is this thing needs to go Thank You mr. Scott mr. Griffin dr.
Dr. Henn, I just got one question on the words, on the resolve part.
It says develop a community-based accountability system that empowers school districts to design their own internal systems.
If we would go to that, how would his presentation that we had today, how would each district then judge itself against each other?
What the passing rate is based upon that standard.
I mean, there's multiple measures we could use to make that determination.
Okay. And I think we as a local entity can do a much better job of determining what it is that we want our kids to achieve when they exit our buildings versus a one-size-fits-all at the state level.
Okay, thanks.
Thanks.
And I know I have been a part of speaking to our legislators
in Austin and when they are out of session about the STAAR Test
that ties our entire school district to one day, one test
for every student.
That if they would take away those weights that they have
given to us by tying us so deeply ingrained into that one
day one test system let us show you what we can do you're keeping us back we have
more I know our teachers and our administrators have more but there are
so many teaks and so many requirements put on them that we have asked them to
let us show you what we can do let really successful districts pilot a
program something that lets us show you what we're capable of in this that's
exactly what you've said in here we are capable of more but being tied all those
standards and all those mandates keep us from being all that I think our kids can
be and there's no better individual than the power of a teacher that has a
student 178 days a year to determine fact or fiction are they meeting the
expectations of this local absolutely okay any objection to moving this to
consent okay so moved so now we go right into some legislative priorities I'm
president point of order mr. Scott in fact I'm going to raise two points of
order in succession on item 6.5 6 6.7 and 6.8 the first is we have a board
policy that pushes items to the agenda I want to know how these four items
got on the agenda so that I know and feel comfortable that we should even be
considering this tonight the board president put them there the board
president and superintendent build the agenda and I put them I asked I spoke
with dr. Hinton I both whereas the where is the policy on three board members you
took this on your own initiative I did the board mr. de Broglie has told me
that he was behind the Braille has helped facilitate the one voice that
we're going to hear about okay these legislative priorities are something you
should be very familiar second point of order please excuse me I'm speaking I
thought you were finished I'm not okay go ahead then it'll probably prompt more
questions your rudeness is noted I'm finished what would you like to say
did mr. de braille conduct meetings with other school districts and others as
part of developing the resolutions that we're about to read in this building
and president mr. de braille let me speak to that because I hear the angst
or the hostility and in your voice there mr. Scott madam president I have asked
you for a point of order ruling and I've asked you a direct question you said you
you put this on the agenda and I am asking you if Mr. DeBrell or any other member of this board
participated in discussions with other school districts in the preparation of these four
resolutions. I yield the floor to Mr. DeBrell to answer the question that you're asking about
Mr. DeBrell and I'm not going to speak for him. I'll let him speak for himself. The genesis of
of these projects, Mr. Scott, or these resolutions,
and the one voice came in a conversation I had
at one of our mandatory trainings at Region IV
with a board member from SCIFARE.
I began to discuss with him our legislative priorities
that were formed here in Katy, and he began to tell me
of the priorities they formed in SCIFARE.
That conversation led to the fact that many
of our state representatives, many of our state senators
will tell us that can your school districts
come into an agreement because many of their districts cover more than one district.
Mike Schofield covers both Katy and Cy Fair.
John Zerwas, both Katy and Fort Bend.
And from that, we began to talk about can we find a way to come up into an agreement
on two or three of things that we already agree upon, things that are already similar,
And we speak with just one voice to our legislators
so from that on my personal time on my personal time dime I met with
Me I call friends from other districts and I met with them and we each brought our legislative
priorities to the table and from that we noticed that three of these were very similar and
Those are the three that we're moving forward on the ones that we're bringing to the board the ones that we're bringing to the board
tonight are legislative priorities that were already agreed upon that you worked
on as part of the committee and what I'm asking the board is to move forward so
they we along with Cy Fair, Ward Bend, Alief, Spring Branch, Lamar, Consolidated
representing over 400,000 young people can speak to our legislators across
across their district lines and say these are three things we agree upon.
That's the genesis of this.
As a member of this board, you have the right to vote for it or vote against it.
We're having a discussion about that right now.
That's the genesis of this.
Madam President, we have a legislative committee.
We have received a report of the legislative committee.
We've adopted it.
these clearly are recommendations about legislative committee i was appointed a member
to work with that committee to develop a legislative agenda and i did not know about this
i think that policy is turned on its head here when a board member takes it on his own
without a charter from this board to go around a charter that was previously
approved by this board do not include a member of that committee that was
appointed by this board to participate in these discussions we had a legislative
agenda we had a legislative committee that is approved and now we are coming
back without acknowledging or honoring that process boycotting a duly appointed
member of the board who was on that committee to keep me from participating
in that and we are now doing legislative agenda B mr. Scott I think that you're
overreacting to that there was no president I'm moving this action I'm
Mr. Scott, I am speaking.
I move that 6.5, 6.6, 6.7, and 6.8 be tabled.
Second.
We have a motion and a second.
Discussion?
Madam President.
Mr. Moholsky, you were speaking first.
and I would I would ask for some clarity real quick from mr. Thompson regarding
the motion that's on the table to make sure that we are in compliance with the
open records act and what was stated in our board agenda you have these items
posted for consideration by the board tonight and it's it's ultimately the
will of the board whether to move them forward to your full meeting or not i think actually
technically the motion mr scott is probably a motion to postpone indefinitely
the motion to table is actually a temporary motion under robert's rules
uh if if the effect is to permanently remove the items the proper motion is a motion to table and
indefinitely? Mr. Thompson, I am not making a motion to permanently remove it. I am making a motion to table it. We have the first time I heard anything about one voice.
On the floor, Mr. Scott. If I could just finish. I don't need help in changing my motion.
All right.
Thank you.
Technically, a motion to table is a temporary motion within the same meeting.
Simply to postpone something for a limited period of time within the same meeting,
it is not a debatable motion.
Madam Chair, you either vote up or down on it.
No discussion.
And move on.
We have a motion and a second.
All in favor of tabling the next four items?
All opposed?
All opposed?
Nay.
Nay.
What was the vote I didn't hear?
The motion fails.
No, I mean who voted no?
I didn't hear the disaggregation of vote.
Against?
Again, all against?
5-2.
Okay.
Okay.
Thank you.
Madam President.
Once again, I'd like to comment on these items to what Mr. Scott said.
The legislative priorities that KDISD has already adopted as part of the committee are already moving forward.
They're on our website, they're in our literature, and we're planning,
and I will be getting to bring the committee together once again to plan our own advocacy efforts.
These, Madam President, are something where multiple school districts are trying to work together in an effort to have positive change for the young people of our communities.
And none of this is past. This is only for discussion.
Every one of us has a vote on these items.
And if someone would, if you want to vote against making reasonable changes to our financial system, if you want to make changes that allow us to keep the over $30 million that the state holds from us every year, and if you want to vote against that, then vote against it.
If you want to vote against reasonable accountability assessment
Then vote against it if you if there is something that any one of these board members
Would like to vote against in this that is totally our option and that's the beauty of this
we can agree to one we can agree to none and
This is something I'm bringing to the board
knowing that other school districts are working in the same direction so that we
can make some meaningful reforms for the young people of our community I'm not
getting bogged down on all of these procedures I have been spending my life
trying to affect young people's lives positively I spent my time there is no
KDI SD resources that have gone through this Henry de Braille's resources have
gone through this. My cell phone has called other trustees.
My time has been spent talking with them. This is being brought
to the board. You can approve it or we can deny it. It does
not hinder our personal legislative agenda
moving forward. It only adds our voice to other districts
so it can be stronger and that it can be heard
in Austin a lot longer.
Madam President. Mr. Griffin. Is there a reason why this work wasn't done to the
administrative, the legislative group that we had that Mr. Scott was on? We had
it several months that these people met, the community members, we asked them to
do the work. If this was part of the legislative group, why didn't this work
go through them? Mr. Griffin, each school district I'm assuming has a legislative
priorities group that forms their legislative priorities and mr. de
brel from my understanding try to speak for you but jump in if you'd rather
answer but mr. de brel those relationships with other okay I
understand that but why didn't they I'm getting to it just give me a minute mr.
de brel works with other trustees around the state and certainly in our region
and as they were talking about legislative priorities, wouldn't it be better if it were stronger?
If all of us came together, our legislators will pay more attention with the greater number of students.
To gather, I don't know what the discussions were, but I'm thinking if we were to gather legislative committees,
a group of people from each district, the magnitude of getting those, everybody in a room to talk about those,
we have our priority would be would be monumental and we're on a deadline the
legislature began meeting on January 10th we need to get this in front of
them other school districts are bringing this to their school boards or adoption
and for approval so we're hopeful that together we can prevent and present a
unified front because it will carry more weight with a total of 400 or 500
hundred thousand students behind it mrs. van but I'm make sure I'm understanding
this correctly our legislative committee that this board form that mr. Dubrow
and mr. Scott are part of will be meeting again will be going forward with
the work and will include both mr. Scott and mr. rebelle going forward correct
that is yes that is yes absolutely that is not it's not it's gonna be it has not
been no it is still the work that has been done is being respected and being respected and is what
actually mr scott is it actually what created all of this energy is the work that you did so for you
to to be offended by it is shocking to me because the very work that you did is what sparked the
conversations and together we're stronger i don't understand your your objection madam president
Mr. DeBrell. I'd like to answer Mr. Griffin's question directly. Mr. Griffin, until our committee came up with our legislative priorities and other school districts came up with their own, there was nothing for us to talk about. I didn't want to bring a list of priorities to our committee. I wanted to bring to them a blank slate so they could develop it.
So now that they have developed it, we simply presented it to, I simply presented it to other school board members, say where can we find unity and work together to see these changes?
Madam President.
Mr. Scott.
On January 3rd, it's stunning to me, I'll tell you what's stunning, is on January 3rd we were having a meeting out there.
and Mr. DeBrell is saying in response to my wanting to be able to bring citizens
and talk at different times that we're not going to have an opportunity to have input or hear what we say.
Here is a fact you cannot escape.
We have a legislative committee.
Its work was done.
Mr. DeBrell started working on his own initiative and did not get a charter from this board.
And for Mr. DeBrell, for this latest work, we've known for 10 years when the legislature was going to go in session in 2017.
We knew it back at the time of the breakfast.
there was plenty of time if there was an effort to do collaboration there was plenty of time to
work that into the legislative group that we finished two months ago or so it is stunning
to me that we had a board do a board operating procedure that that rejected that I asked that
at every meeting a citizen should be able to come and address our board tonight it's on the
workshop we want to move it to a consent agenda and next week we don't have an
opportunity for a public forum that's what you've done in for you to assert or
assume that because I have problems with this approach that I am against reform
that I'm against school finance it's pretty demagogic and I'm stunned by that
okay so here we are here we are we are at a place where I don't even know what
one voice for Texas public it is can you give me their IRS tax statement can you
tell me what their legislative agenda is can you tell me what bills they're
pushing before the legislature you're asking me to approve membership in an
organization that I barely had enough time to Google and know about you're
asking us to move to a consent agenda membership in one voice for Texas public
education and approve it next Monday and no one in the public is going to have an
opportunity to talk about it because that's the rules you've created madam
president those are your rules and you all will be held accountable for the
power of how you use your power thank you mr scott
madam president my
mr de brel have a question for you was your intent
when when you were working in the legislative committee to go do an intentional end around
something to do this or was this more of an organic conversation that happened when you
were at a different meeting that caused this community to come together how did that happen
As I stated when I began this, I'm having a conversation with a trustee from SciFair.
And I'm telling him, these are our legislative priorities that we have just adopted.
And he's telling me what his legislative priorities are that his district just adopted.
And we saw that in several of them, there seemed to be agreement.
And we began to talk to other school board members.
What are your priorities?
What are your priorities?
What are your priorities?
and we saw agreement and from that we said why don't we just sit down come up
and see if we can find some place where we all agree and then bring them to our
boards for discussion so again we want to bog down this process with all of
this minutiae this is why we're not seeing seeing change in our society
today because of things like this this is not about a charter to allow someone
to go talk you just fought for your First Amendment rights to talk to the
media are you saying I can't talk to a friend and another school board about
what our priorities are I'm still have the floor question I still have the
thought you have my hand God mr. Scott mr. Scott I have not met a visit the
floor not a president mr. Mahalski I move to limit discussion on item six
6.5 through 6.8 to two more minutes.
I second it.
All in favor?
To limit it to two more minutes for this discussion on 6.5 to 6.8.
All in favor?
Aye.
Aye.
Motion passes.
Madam President.
Mr. Hoholski.
Now that we've got that out of the way, might I suggest,
I believe there is a reasonable assumption that these items are not going to be moved to consent,
so they will be a discussion action item at the next board meeting and I I think
my suggestion is that we the reason I asked to limit discussion is to take a
pause everyone take a chance to digest all of this and let's let's have it as a
discussion item next week if so desire
any other feedback I do have one more thing to add on this as we finish on
on 6.8, Mr. DeBrell.
My understanding is that you have more information
that will be provided to the board,
something you received.
Yes, ma'am.
We received the, basically our letter of intent.
What one? Resolution.
Our resolution of what One Voice is
and what we purpose to do in this legislative session.
And I will forward that information to Ms. Nowak
who can forward it to the rest of the board
and to Dr. Hint for consideration for next.
Dr. Hint, will you send that to us when you receive that information, the resolution and more information about one voice that we can look up?
You'll be provided more information.
Okay.
Then these items will not be read this evening because we will read them into the record next week and they will not be moved to consent agenda.
Item 6.9.
discuss and consider future board approval of the 2017 community bond advisory committee charter
dr. hint yes I'm just going to quickly read the purpose in the organization of course you heard
or saw the presentation earlier thank you very much dr. grooms and mr. Cruz the purpose of the
2017 community bond advisory committee or otherwise known as CBAC shall be to review
review the need for capital projects, timelines, and costs.
The CBAC counsels and provides input to the administration and presents findings
and a bond recommendation to the Board of Trustees for their consideration.
Organization, the CBAC shall be comprised of approximately 150 members.
It could be slightly more, possibly less.
We're going to look at that as the numbers come in.
Reflective of the diverse skills, backgrounds, cultures, and geographic regions
found within the Katy community. The committee chair shall be appointed by
the board president. A total of 21 members of the CABC are to be appointed
by the Board of Trustees, three per trustee. The CBAC will also consist of
16 teachers, four principals, six students, while approximately 25 members of the
CBAC will be comprised of members of the community who have
served on previous bond committees. The remaining members of the CBAC shall be
chosen from applications submitted by members of the KDISD community and
appointed by a selection committee led by the committee chair the CBAC shall
function as a fact-finding deliberative and advisory but not administrative
committee and is responsible to the superintendent of schools and to the
general public I think you can see what the membership consists of and I'd also
like to note the five items that mr. Scott had mentioned earlier when we
present it earlier that he would like for us to take consideration to as well
Mr. Scott earlier had mentioned if we would consider five items that he had commented on,
and what I stated was that consideration would be given to look at those items with relation to this
Any questions for the superintendent about the CBAC community bond advisory committee
Okay, so this item will not be moved to consent agenda because we're
You're still looking at some considerations before you make a final recommendation
That correct I think I was just saying that we would note those items
You will note during the selection process that falls within the chart I see okay
Okay.
Okay, so any objection to moving the charter to consent agenda?
Any objection?
Okay, so moved.
PBAC will go to consent agenda.
6.10, discuss and consider future board adoption of the local innovation plan as required by the Texas Education Code Chapter 12A in order to obtain designation as a district of innovation.
Mrs. Holland, good evening.
It's good to see you.
Good evening, Madam President, members of the board, and Dr. Hemp.
In accordance with Board Policy AF, on September the 26th, the Board of Trustees passed a resolution
to explore the district's designation as the District of Innovation in order to increase
our local control over district operations.
Then on October the 18th, the board voted to pursue the designation as the District
of Innovation and appointed a 21 member committee to develop a local innovation plan. That committee
met on the 17th of November and developed the plan which was then published on our district
website on November 21. On December 7th, the Katy Improvement Council, which is our official district
advisory group, met, reviewed the plan and voted on the plan. The plan passed with a majority vote.
in fact it was unanimous. Then on December the 12th the board voted to
notify the Commissioner of Education of its intent to vote on the District of
Innovation plan. The Commissioner has since been notified. Tonight after having
met all of the requirements as in accordance with statute the
administration is presenting a local innovation plan for the board's review
you in approval. The plan, as Dr. Hint has noted on several previous occasions, is limited
to only three requirements that we would like to exempt. The first of those is the school
start date, a topic that we have discussed many times in board meetings and the flexibility
that we will be given here is to start school earlier and ultimately end school earlier
with much flexibility in between that we have not had.
The second area of the exemption deals with teacher certification.
Although it is the district's intent to make limited use of this particular exemption,
it does give us the flexibility to recruit and hire individuals
for some of our career and technology non-core courses,
individuals who have a lot of experience in the field in which the students are going to work.
In areas, let me add, that have typically been hard to fill.
Yes, very hard to fill positions. Things like cosmetology, criminal justice,
engineering, veterinary science, some of those areas. The third area is to exempt
from the requirement to name a single individual to serve as a campus
behavior coordinator at each campus. That is not practical in KDICD. We do not
need another person to serve in that capacity. Our principals and assistant
principals serve in that capacity. We believe that we are able to run a more
efficient, effective, and systematic approach in that manner. And most
importantly, it allows these administrators an opportunity to build
rapport with students and parents. So those are the three areas that we have
included in our district innovation plan and we hope that the district is pleased
with the work that the committee has done and in order to pass the plan we
will have to have a two-thirds vote of the board when you decide to move it
forward any questions for mrs. Holland I have mrs. van thank you very much for
your presentation I just want to say thank you to the committee I think this
is a very upfront and very exciting for the district I have a question is there
one we get that printed copy of this to have personal copy of absolutely this is
on our website right yeah I'm just I'm just a copy so kind of a paper in hand
kind of a person and sure just to go back and thank you doctor here mr. did
you recognize mr. Scott yes all right him dr. Hinnant what is the I think this
is great I think you have done a wonderful job I support it totally the
The only question I have, just as we go forward, is, is there a determination on how the salary
schedule for the non-certified employees will fit?
No.
Those, the certification, what the District of Innovation calls for is how that certification
will play.
I don't envision that the salary schedule will change for a hard to fill CTE position
based upon the criteria that we present to the Board that we believe best fits our community
and filling these hard-to-fill positions.
I don't know if I want to venture down having them in a different pay category
than what we already have established.
Okay.
Thank you.
Okay, any objection to moving this to consent?
So moved.
Thank you, Mrs. Holland.
And I have to take this.
I'll tell you, Ms. Holland and the group has done a wonderful job,
and I appreciate her efforts.
It's been a three-month process.
We'll see the efforts come to fruition.
I hope on a vote come the 23rd at which time then we'll push out
calendars so that our staff and our parents can have some options of a survey to look at what the school calendars can look like
in the future
We've been looking forward thank you the
6.11
Discussing consider future board adoption of local policies BDA a local and BED local as a result of special board meeting held on January
3rd
2017. Mrs. Holland? Really the changes that we're presenting in these two
policies are a result of your discussions and decisions in your
special board meeting where you were reviewing your board operating
procedures. In BDAA it was the decision of the board that they would like to
eliminate the positions of treasurer
sergeant at arms and the policy simply reflects that decision. Then the other
change was very minor but it BED in regard to the public forum. Previously it
was indicated that this individual who wanted to speak before the board would
need to sign up 20 minutes ahead of the board meeting and that would be the
person to speak. The change there is that a person who signs up to speak before
the board may designate someone else to take their time so the changes are
minimal but they are consistent with the changes that the board wish to make in
its operating procedures any question any objection to moving this to consent
agenda any objection to moving it to consent is that one way on that one yes
Yes, we are.
Mr. Scott?
On limit on participation, I'm advising everyone that wants to listen that I believe that this is in conflict with the Open Meetings Act in some regards.
I think it is generally okay.
I'm not going to oppose the policy.
We'll move it to the consent agenda, but I can assure there will come a time in the near future where I
will
Test the parameters of the open meetings act
On audience on the board being able to talk to audience as it stands right now
The only people we can talk to are people that we write a check. I think there's a fundamental flaw in that
I think the open meetings act goes over policy it overrides policy
Therefore, I'm not too concerned about this policy because state law prevails and we'll
have a good discussion on that state law at some point reasonably soon.
But I'll go for consent agenda on this.
Okay.
Any objection from anyone?
Okay.
So move to consent agenda.
The next item is board adoption of the Katy Independent School District board operating
procedures.
Dr. Hint?
Yes.
Yes, if you recall, we had a workshop just recently in which we reviewed board operating procedures.
The two policies that we just brought to you were reflective of some of the changes.
One of the requests by, I think, several board members when I arrived was to take a look at board operating procedures,
directly tie it to local policy, remove some of the additional verbiage that has been added over a period of time
That may not be reflective of local or legal policy of which we did
We we took the conversation that we had at that meeting of course we present it
What we recommended and what you have here is a clean version of what we?
present it a
Couple of weeks ago what we've cleaned up from that and it's in a bullet point process. It's not a paragraph or
a hard read it's pretty concise and direct to to what those board operating
procedures are and let me remind you it's it's more or less a gentleman's
agreement between the board that these are the guiding principles that are
going to lead us or lead you guys in future discussions I'm present mr.
Griffin dr. hint thank you the hard work that you did I've gone through this a
couple times I was hoping to find a an addition or correction and it's awesome
awesome the way that you that you wrote it and you know like if I could just
make an example of what happened tonight or one of the discussions that we had it
reaffirms an individual's right as an individual to talk and to do what you
want as an individual and allow the community to hold you responsible but it
also says that an individual member may not act on behalf of the board only with
the express authorization of the board which i think is very very powerful because if you try
to do something for the board or speaking on behalf of the board we have a way to say i don't
want you to do that you know what i think you were taking away stuff in here that we as a board did
not have or weren't bothering to uh to enforce anyway but thank you very much well and i'll
I'll tell you, you know, you've got to give kudos to where kudos is due.
Sharon had to endure me saying yay, nay, nay, yay,
and making her correct things that already made her correct.
She was the one that really did all the hard work.
I just got to point out the things I liked or didn't like.
Thank you.
Thank you, Sharon.
I appreciate also the board operating procedure,
the great discussion that we had in the workshop.
shop mr. Griffin I'm sorry you weren't able to join us for that but we had a
great discussion and three hours of lots of discussion a lot like what we've had
tonight and we came to some really good streamlined cleaned up language and I
had to applaud applaud you and us for getting there any objection to moving
moving this to consent agenda.
Next is the approval of the annual financial audit report. Mr. Smith? Mr. Smith, we bring
with you some Whitley Penn advisors, is that correct? Well I have what I think is
good news to report. A little change of gears from what I talked about earlier.
Education code, Texas Education Code 44.008 requires us to have an annual
audit. One could say that our audits ongoing because it kind of is. We're
always dealing with audit questions and looking up things with on the Texas
Education Agency's FASRAG and calling the auditors and saying hey we need your
thoughts on this but they formally started in june they were in our district two weeks or two or
three weeks and then they started in november and have been in and out of the district ever since
until tonight um our glue that holds it all together i do want to recognize they're kind
of behind me uh uh and fighting her fuel wave and our business manager and liz haven our accounting
supervisor. We're key in working and engaging with this guy and his team
throughout these last several months. And then of course their staff, Liz's staff
of five CPAs made up of Steven Johnson, Sterling Schiller, Rand Baker and Sally
Smith, no relation, do a fantastic job working with these guys. But I have and
I'm proud to introduce with Lupe Garcia of Whitley Penn. Lupe was the senior
manager on this project and I'm excited to brag for him that I found out just
after the first of the year that on as of January 1st Louie has been made a
partner with Whitley Pinn. Good evening Madam President, members of the board,
Superintendent Hint. It's my pleasure to be here tonight to present to you the
results of the district's fiscal year 2016 audit. As Mr. Smith alluded to, I was
the senior management on engagement during the the audit. The engagement
partner, Selena Miller, and concurring partner Tom Peterson, and then in the
field we had Eddie Juarez as a senior and then Araceli Rivera and
Cynthia Trejo were the staff on the engagement. This process really started
last spring when this board approved our engagement letter. We were on site for
interim field work in June and we were here in the fall for year-end procedures.
I'd like to cover some required communications that we have to make to the board as your
external auditor. One is to make the point that we are providing an opinion on the financial
statements and it's reasonable assurance, not absolute assurance, that the users of the
financial statements can rely upon the information contained in the comprehensive annual financial
report. To do that, we do evaluate the district's internal controls, their policies and procedures,
to guide us and help us design our procedures, the timing, nature, and extent of what we do
throughout each phase of the audit. We did review the district's accounting policies and we did
determine that they were in line with industry standards. There were three GASB pronouncements
that were implemented in fiscal year 2016. Those are listed there on the bottom of the slide,
72, 73, and 79. This didn't have any impact on the way information is presented in the financial
statements themselves. This only affected the notes, the financial statements
related to fair value measurements, the district's participation in TRS and
investment, external investment pool balances that the district had. There are
accounting estimates in the financial statements, those are listed on this on
this slide. We did evaluate management's basis for determining these estimates
and we did determine that they were reasonable and adequately supported.
The largest estimate in the financial statements is going to be that fourth
bullet, the net pension liability, the deferred inflows and outflows of
resources and pension expense. If you recall last year the district
implemented a very significant pronouncement, GASB statement number 68,
and for the first time this net pension liability amount was reported on the
the face of the financial statements. TRS has their own actuaries, their own auditors that provide this
information to the district. The district takes this report and records it in their financial statements.
I'm happy to report that we didn't encounter any difficulties in performing and completing the
audit. We had the administration and staff's complete cooperation through each phase and
that's greatly appreciated because it does make the process much smoother. There were no material
misstatements that we identified that management did not correct, nor did we
have any disagreements with management when it came to the implementation of
any new standards, any accounting estimates, any existing accounting
principles. The last piece of audit evidence we obtained is a management
representation letter. This letter will be dated the same date as our report,
January 23, 2017. It will be signed by Mr. Smith, the superintendent, the accounting
manager and accounting supervisor and that's going to essentially state that
the district has provided us with all the information that we've requested.
They were an open book. They haven't withheld anything that would materially
change the financial statements or what the users of the financial statements
might conclude based on what's found in the financial statements. As far as we're
aware, other than the districts, does it buy, you know, there's an interest rate
swap and derivative that's in the financial statement so they do consult
with other accountants to get the information needed to make that entry
into the general ledger but we weren't aware of the district consulting with
other auditors or public accounting firms regarding the audit opinion or
accounting estimates or any pronouncements as mr. Chris mentioned
you know the audit seems to always be ongoing we do encourage the district to
to ask us questions throughout the year.
If there is an unusual transaction or something
that they have a question about,
and we do answer and give our guidance for management
to make their ultimate decision
on how they're gonna treat something.
But in no way do we feel that providing
that value-added service is the reason
why we're being retained as the district's external auditors.
To get through our opinion, there's a process.
And so risk assessment, which is the bubble at the top,
and test of controls, that's really the focus of interim field work and that
takes place during the fiscal year that's under audit. When the year is
closed and the district has made their closing entries, we're actually testing
at that point in your balances, we're verifying information with third parties,
we're testing cash investments, long-term liabilities, capital assets, and
performing analytical procedures on the balances to arrive at our opinion on the
financial statements. There are three different types of opinions that can be
given on a set of financial statements. You have your unmodified opinion, your
modified opinion, and your disclaimer type opinion, which is the worst. And so
I'm happy to report that on page one of the comprehensive annual financial
report, you'll find that we're going to issue an unmodified opinion on the
district's financial statements. So that's the highest level of assurance
that can be given on a set of financial statements. So there's good news for KDISD.
We also, there is a separately issued report, the single audit report, because the district
received and expended close to $36 million in federal awards in fiscal year 2016, in
addition to an audit of the financial statements, we also perform what's referred to as a single
audit where it's an audit of the district's federal programs.
We go through a process of identifying major programs to test at each fiscal year and those
major programs are listed on this slide. Title I, Title III, and Carl Perkins
Basic Formula Grant. So those three programs were tested as major in fiscal
year 2016. We didn't identify any material weaknesses or internal control
deficiencies in compliance. We're actually issuing an unmodified opinion
in regards to compliance for the requirements that apply to these three
major programs. So again, good news for the district in regards to the single
audit over its administration of the federal programs that it receives. The
next several slides are just some financial highlights of the report. On
pages 18 and 19 of the comprehensive annual financial report you'll find a
statement of net position. Governmental financial reporting is unique in that
there's two sets of financial statements within your report. This particular
financial statement is on the full accrual basis of accounting so this is
which you would see being used in the private sector. You have all your assets,
everything that the district owns is going to be reported on this financial
statement and the largest part of your assets are going to be your capital
assets. You see here on this slide for fiscal year 2016 your capital assets
amounted to just north of 1.5 billion dollars. So that's going to be buildings,
vehicles, equipment, net of depreciation. You have your total liabilities of just
just under 1.9 billion.
Again, the bulk of that's gonna be
your long-term liabilities or the bonds
that are outstanding that the district has
as of the end of the fiscal year.
For comparison purposes, you can see fiscal year 2015
in the far right column.
Total net position is $265 million
compared to where fiscal year 2015 ended at $217 million.
dollars madam vice president there you go Oh mr. question would you discuss I'm
sure there's some reasonable understandable explanation but on net
pension liability that's a substantial one-year increase could you explain that
from 61 to 141 yes the district's proportionate share of this net pension
liability the way that that is calculated is based on the district's contributions
into the plan in any given measurement year. The information that's presented in
the district's financial statements is not on the same fiscal year as the
district. So what's in this in your financial statements is as a
different fiscal year. So there was a difference in contributions from last
year versus this year. And another thing that factors and there's various
various factors one is how did the investments do that TRS is holding and
and managing it there's actuarial changes that occur you've got lives of
the retirees are you know people are living longer so that gets factored in
the makeup of your an episodic event this number will will ebb and flow year
to year and this is only year two of this information being reported in the
financial statements. So there's actually a great table behind the notes and the
required supplementing information that once year after year starts, it's a
10-year table. So that's really what's going to be great to kind of see a trend
once you have several years of information to see is this net pension
liability trending up or down. TRS is a very well managed plan. You hear a lot
about net pension liabilities like the City of Houston for example. You know
know they don't participate in a plan like TRS. TRS keeps its member districts
in line. It tells the districts this is what you need to contribute in order to
keep this plan at a healthy position. And so it's in the pension world this is a
well-funded retirement plan. That is not a red flag. No. Yeah this net pension
liability is never an amount you're going to pay off. It's just going to be
an amount you're presenting on the face of your financial statements. That's
correct. On pages 26 and 27 of the report you have your fund financial statements.
These are the financial statements you might be more familiar with. Your general
fund, which is the operating fund of the district. Your debt service fund, which
principal and interest payments are made from. Capital projects is where all your
capital outlay and construction projects are recorded. And then you have your
various special revenue funds. This is going to be your state, local, and federal
grants. Looking across your governmental funds here, you have positive changes in
fund balance except for capital project funds. You had a decrease in fund balance
of two million dollars but that was planned, that was expected. These are bond
proceeds that you're using in the various construction activities that are
ongoing in the district. So this is your second set of financial statements. These
are the modified accrual financial statements.
Mr. Mahalski?
The revenue in the capital projects fund, is that interest or is that revenue or is
there another source of revenue there?
Because I mean you've got most of it's the other sources, other financing.
Right, yes.
So the other sources are going to be your bond proceeds.
Right, I got that.
What's the, the little less than $4 million in revenue, do you know what that is?
You have some interest but that's not all interest.
Very little of it's interest.
I was just curious. I don't know why that fund would generate revenue.
E-rate we receive based on our expenditures for telecommunication services.
We receive a reimbursement.
That's going to be the biggest part.
The interest income on that is probably a very small percentage.
It's not that big.
So E-rate is a federal program, so that's federal revenue that's there in the capital projects.
Looking at your debt service fund, total revenues amounted to about 129 million dollars, slightly
more than budgeted.
The debt service tax rate did decrease from the previous year by one penny.
Because assessed values did increase by 15 percent, you saw an increase in property tax
revenues even though that tax rate decreased.
So you had an increase in property tax revenues in the debt service fund of of 12.9 million
There was some state aid related to a homestead exemption. That was just a one-time
Payment from the state of Texas because there was a new homestead exemption
Implemented in this tax year
We had total expenditures of 132 million
Those are pretty you know what those expenditures are because they're tied to an amortization schedule your principal and interest payments
Overall, ending fund balance in the debt service fund was $52 million.
You added $1.5 million to fund balance.
Now, that's a large amount, but you have to keep in mind the district has a principal and interest payment to make shortly after year end.
So that, along with additional proceeds that it will get in fiscal year 2017,
is what's going to be used to make those principal and interest payments in the next fiscal year.
Bridge loans, no. No, sir. Absolutely not. You have your nutrition, your food service fund.
Total revenues in this fund were $28.7 million. $16 million of that was from local generated
revenue. $12 million of that's related to federal revenue, reimbursements for the school lunches and
breakfasts that are served. Total expenditures were $29 million. Fund balance did decrease by
500,000 in this fund and that's okay. That's a good thing. There are strict
requirements that you can't make a profit in your Child Nutrition Fund.
That's not the point of what you're doing here. So the fund balance can
only be enough to cover operations and so having a decrease in fund balance is
not a negative thing. Ending fund balance was five million dollars, well below the
maximum that's allowed for the Child Nutrition Fund. Giving you a visual
illustration here of general fund revenue 56% of the revenue in the
general fund comes from property taxes 35% comes from state aid year to year
there was an increase of 44 million dollars in general fund revenue compared
to the previous fiscal year you can see the other components of revenue TRS on
behalf was 30 million dollars that's an in and out that's funds that are
are deposited into TRS on behalf of the district straight from the state. I'm
looking at the flip side. These are expenditures. You can see the the
majority of your expenditures as you expect are spent in function 11
instruction, 64%. Total expenditures increased by 44.6 million over the
previous fiscal year. I, you know, I will point out that salaries and benefits in
fiscal year 2016 did make make up 85% of general fund total expenditures. That's
just under 530 million dollars. So your general fund expenditures are driven by
by the number of employees the district has so no one should be surprised by
that. Looking at unassigned fund balance in the general fund, this is the amount
available to spend at the end of the fiscal year. For fiscal year 2016 that
amounted to just a little more than 131 million dollars. If you convert this to
the number of operating days, that's 77 days of operating that the district had
in fund balance at the end of the fiscal year. So fund balance isn't a savings
account, this is your working capital, this is what you're paying your
employees to make payroll, this is what you're paying your vendors when you cut
checks to pay for supplies, materials, and contracted services. Looking at that
unassigned fund balance compared to a minimum of 30 days or optimum of 60 days,
the district has a good healthy unassigned fund balance of 77 days.
days. GFOA has best practices. TEA looks at unassigned fund balance to see where this
is. Having a very low unassigned fund balance could be a red flag that the district might
be in trouble. So having 77 days is a good thing for the district.
Chair Greg Musil?
Mr. Michalski?
Who defines minimum and optimal? Because, yeah.
I would think 60 days is a little short for real optimism, but that's just me.
Right.
I think good business practice is somewhere between 60 and 90, two to three months.
So that's where the district falls.
I just didn't know if that was something the TA put out.
No, that's just kind of GFOA best practice.
That's something that they look at there.
Good enough.
Thank you.
TASBO is the one who's always come out and said three months operating costs is a good
So that concludes my formal presentation.
If there are any questions about our report, about the audit process, about the comprehensive annual financial report, the single audit, I'll be happy to take those at this time.
Board members, questions?
Madam President.
Mr. Griffin.
Mr. Smith.
Great job.
Thank you.
You and your team, once again, you gave us a great job.
Thank you.
Madam President.
Mr. Scott?
From Earl Walden to Chris Smith, we're in good hands.
Bonnie knows who I'm talking about.
Well, thank you.
I can't take all the credit.
You know, we have budget managers, principals, grant managers,
and special financial clerks throughout the district that take part in this
and follow those controls and follow the accounting information that we provide them to follow,
and they do in large good part, as well as our accounting staff.
Again, they're the glue that holds it all together,
and they are the ones that deserve the credit, not me.
We're not done tonight.
Once you all adopt the budget, we'll –
adopt budget.
Once you adopt the audit next week, we are required to submit it to TEA,
and we will submit that to TEA in several different manners that they require it in.
We're going to spit-shine it and make sure that there's no typos or font issues.
We're going to post it on our website for transparency reasons,
and we're going to post it with the Municipal Advisory Council of Texas, the
Federal Clearinghouse, EMMA, and various other miscellaneous state agencies that
were required to post it to, as well as we will be submitting all this in a data
format to PEMS, which is what gets information that there is to where
information is derived like we looked at earlier when it came to teacher salaries,
etc. So all of that by this audited information that will submit to PEMS.
Thank you very much. Any objection to moving this item to consent agenda? So moved. Thank you very much.
Our final item this evening is the January 2017 budget amendments. Good evening, Mrs. Butterfield.
Good evening.
Sorry, you're always last. Not very fair.
All right. Look, you brought Mr. Smith with you again.
She doesn't need me. I'm just here for fun.
Good evening, President Fox, trustees, and Superintendent Hint.
Tonight we have six budget amendments.
GOF revenues and expenditures both increase $11,000 for the junior ROTC program at Maid Creek.
General operating fund expenditure budget also increases $1,875,000 for the LAM system that was presented last month.
The remaining three GOF amendments are existing budget that are being transferred between different functions.
There's one amendment tonight for the debt service fund, and this is necessary to record $186,579,610 for the new series 16C and 16D bonds,
refunding bonds by increasing the other sources category and the debt service expenditure budget
increases a hundred and eighty six million five hundred seventy two thousand four hundred eight
dollars for the series oh seven B 08 a 08 B current refunded bonds the net effect of this amendment
is seven thousand two hundred and two dollars increase to the debt service
fund balance any questions any objection to moving this to consent thank you very
much so moved okay and now for the open forum portion of our evening at this
time the Board of Trustees will hear from patrons that's established by board
policy the first 20 speakers who sign up at least 15 minutes before the meeting
began and have provided their first and last name will be allowed to speak a
maximum of 30 minutes has been allocated with the time divided equally among
those who have signed up however the maximum amount of time for any one
speaker is three minutes the time clock is visible on the podium so each speaker
may see the time remaining and our sergeant at arms mr. Henry de brel will
like one minute and you'll know it's almost over if speakers wish to share
non-confidential written material with the board and copies should be provided
to the secretary for board services mrs. Nowak due to posting requirements of
the open meetings act the board is able to respond only to a statement related
to a posted agenda item specific student issues discipline and personnel matters
shall be addressed through appropriate channels established by policy and the
presiding officer shall determine whether a speaker has attempted to solve a matter
through those proper channels as i announce your name please come to the podium and state your
first and last name for the record our first speakers this evening are our katie ffa girls
allison sadler brooke lowry and claire hoffman welcome
and you brought your teachers with you and
and administrators.
Hi.
Hello, good evening.
Well, Alison Sadler, Brooke Lowry, and Claire Hoffman.
Good evening, Dr. Hintz, KIC school board members,
and the K to Q.
community, this year, the 74th annual KDISD livestock show and rodeo is going to be held
this year.
Dr. Hint, you have said that the motto of KDISD is, Be the Legacy.
That's right.
Well, the KDISD livestock show and rodeo has been going on for over 70 years, and nothing
epitomizes that statement more than the livestock show and rodeo.
Brooke, Claire, and I are here on behalf of the entire KDIC FFA to officially
invite each and every one of you to attend the livestock show and rodeo. As a
thank you for letting us come and speak to you this evening and a special
reminder to come by the livestock show and rodeo which will be held Wednesday February
15th through Saturday the 18th we have brought each of you a special gift a cup
that's been personalized by the full department at Katy High School and a
t-shirt that's clearly states KIC livestock we hope that you enjoyed these
gifts thank you for your time tonight and we look forward to seeing you in
February and all the board members thank you so much I know they're gonna show up
with their boots their chaps their cowboy hats or big buckles right in the
the checkbooks we can't take gifts from vendors but we can sure take it from the
FFA thank you thank you girls Madam President Mr. Griffin clarifying
question do you think our superintendent could put on one of those clown outfits
fits and kind of help and I keep the Bulls off the right thank you so much
for being here sorry had to wait you brought your teacher with you teachers
with teachers and your parents principal slash slash your mom tonight rodeo night
yes thanks for being here our next speaker is Tiffany Gettleman
evening was Gettleman good evening good evening president Fox Board of Trustees
dr. hint thank you for the opportunity to address you tonight in this open
forum. My name is Tiffany Gettleman. I am the mother of two KDISD students, a
sixth grader at McMains Junior High and a tenth grader at Taylor High School. I
am also a registered pediatric nurse with 20 years of experience. I am here
tonight as both a mother and as a health care professional because I am deeply
concerned about the no-locker policy that has been instituted at our junior
High this year students at McMain's junior high are now expected to carry all their belongings
in their backpack throughout the entire school day why is this important well let's consider
the long-term health implications of carrying excessive weight on a daily basis OSHA set
standards and work in the workplace to protect adults for repetitive back injury and I feel the
the same consideration needs to be given to our students growing bodies many health care
organizations have studied the results of excessive backpack weight during these years of rapid growth
and development the American Academy of Pediatrics the American occupational therapy Association and
the American Physical Therapy Association have made recommendations stating that children should
not carry backpacks that weigh more than 10 to 15 percent of their overall body weight additionally
the national safety council has also concluded that rolling backpacks a common alternative to
traditional backpacks create tripping hazards in school corridors i've provided everyone with this
written information that you'll receive in a packet later in september i surveyed all the
secondary campuses in our school district and found that mcnean's junior high is the only campus
that does not make lockers available to all students my sixth grader jake started the school
year with a backpack that weighed over 20 pounds which is more than 20 percent of the body weight
the contents of his backpack were only needed items items required by the school plus his
inhaler umbrella jacket lunch box and water bottle he also carried a trombone to and from school each
day every afternoon he would come home and share the events of his day full of
excitement about being in junior high but each day he would also report that
his back ached and by the third week of school he came home complaining of a
sore neck and sore shoulders as well my four foot seven inch son was buried
under the weight of his backpack hunched over to support the heavy load all the
while from September to the end of October my repeated requests for lockers
were denied while working alongside our school administrators to come up with a suitable solution
it took filing an fng before my son was granted a locker at the end of october
he now uses his locker on a daily basis no longer transports extra materials to and from school daily
and no longer complains of back pain
Ms. Gettleman, your time is up. Thank you so much. We received your information that you've provided to us.
I'll be back in touch with you soon.
You're welcome.
Thank you for being here.
I think that this is an example of why the school board should be able to talk to citizens.
I have a couple of questions I'd like to ask her, but our restrictive policy
Says that because we don't write her a check we can't ask her questions. I think that's wrong
Mr.. Thompson
And I do just want to clarify
the
Texas Open Meetings Act has a specific requirement
that relates to comments made by citizens at meetings that are not
specifically related to items that are on your posted agenda and this is a good
example of that kind of comment and under the Texas Open Meetings Act the
two permissible responses are either to provide specific factual information in
request in response to a question or to simply recite it the policy if there's
an existing policy that answers it otherwise under the act the appropriate
action is to put it on an agenda for a later meeting if it needs further
consideration and president Thank You mr. Thompson
I'm president I'm president mr. Scott Thank You mr. Thompson for explanation
of the Open Meetings Act. There was nothing controversial in what you said.
Of course that's exactly correct. But this board could craft a process by
which citizens could address the board and we could respond. That's doable also
under the Open Meetings Act and maybe you'll want to be at that meeting when
when we advance that proposed policy.
Mr. Thompson.
Unless the Board has questions, Madam President,
I don't have anything to add.
I think you are primarily restricting to discussing items
that are on your posted agenda,
but that's certainly a discussion
for a later date for the Board.
Thank you.
Ms. Gettleman, I'll be in touch with you in the morning.
And the correct response is that Mr. Dr. Hint will talk to you.
Thank you very much.
Thank you for being here.
I'm sorry for the long wait.
We appreciate you being here.
Our final speaker this evening is Terry Majors.
Hi, Mrs. Majors.
Thank you for providing my opportunity.
I was going to talk about my voice, but because of the discussion with the chair,
I'm disturbed and feel like I need to do a little bit more research.
Thank you, Mrs. Majors, for being here.
It's good to see you.
Okay, this concludes the open forum portion of our meeting.
Board members, I'll direct you to 8.1.
Our regular board meeting is next Monday, January 23, 2017.
And there being no further business before the board,
this meeting is adjourned at 9.43 p.m.
Official documents
Motions and votes
Recorded actions
MOTION 001 · AGENDA 3.1
PassedMoved by Charles Griffin seconded by Bryan Michalsky that the Board of Trustees approves the personnel report as recommended by the superintendent in Closed Meeting.
7 Yes · 0 No
| Trustee | Vote |
|---|---|
| ashley-vann | Yes |
| bryan-michalsky | Yes |
| charles-griffin | Yes |
| courtney-doyle | Yes |
| george-scott | Yes |
| henry-dibrell | Yes |
| rebecca-fox | Yes |