I hereby call this, sorry, noting that a quorum is present, I hereby call this regular meeting of the Board of Trustees of Katy Independent School District to order. Today is Monday, January 20th, and the time is 5.30 p.m. Dr. Grigorski, will you verify that we are in compliance with the provisions of the Texas Open Meetings Act with regard to notice for this meeting?
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Madam President, I do confirm we are in compliance with the provisions of the Texas Open Meeting Act in regard to this meeting this evening.
At this time, the Board of Trustees will give members of the public an opportunity to speak. A meeting that is open to the public under the Texas Open Meetings Act is one that the public is permitted to attend. A governmental body may give members of the public an opportunity to speak at a meeting, which KDIC Board Policy BED Local does allow. As defined by this Board Policy, the first 20 speakers who have signed up at least 15 minutes before this meeting began and have provided their first and last name will be allowed to speak. 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. If you are not finished speaking at the end of your three minutes, your microphone will turn off. If speakers wish to share written material with the Board, 10 copies must be provided to the Secretary for Board Services, for Board members, the Superintendent, the Chief Communications Officer, and Permanent Record. If a speaker has not attempted to solve a matter administratively through proper channels as stated in Board policy, the presiding officers designee shall advise the speaker to seek resolution through the appropriate policy board policy BED legal states that it is a criminal offense for a person with intent to prevent or disrupt a lawful meeting to substantially obstruct or interfere with the ordinary conduct of a meeting by physical action or verbal utterance and thereby curtail the exercise of others First Amendment rights board policy BED local provides for the removal of any members of the audience after at least one morning who disrupts the meeting by by his or her words or actions. Finally, pursuant to Texas Government Code Sections 551.074 and 551.0821, the Board will not permit the presentation of personally identifiable information regarding a student and will not discuss the appointment, employment, evaluation, reassignment, duties, discipline, or dismissal of a public officer or employee or to hear a complaint or charge against an officer or employee. Should a speaker wish to address one of these issues, they must do so through the appropriate local grievance policies, FNG local, DGBA local, or GF local. As I announce your name please come forward and state your first and last name for our record. Our first speaker this evening is Sean Dolan.
Eighteen months ago I quietly brought to this board's attention the allegations that the then superintendent appeared to have plagiarized his doctoral dissertation. My pleas for this board to investigate the matter privately were ignored. I was forced to take my allegations public. Within hours of doing so, KDISD released an official statement stating that my allegations were verifiably false. This board voted at the May 10th 2019 meeting to reserve $25,000 in taxpayer funds to assist the then superintendent with a defamation lawsuit. At the same meeting, the board also amended that superintendent's contract in a closed-door meeting to give him the largest golden parachute any Texas superintendent has ever received. And he gracefully retired amid tearful monologues from the board with a $750,000 severance. And as taxpayers, we paid for all of that. Last week, 623 days after reluctantly beginning a formal inquiry into the plagiarism allegations, the University of Houston concluded its investigation. Though UH declines to comment, Katie ISD's former superintendent's doctoral dissertation dissertation was removed from UH's server on December 23, 2019. Fox News reported, university guidelines clearly state dissertations will only be removed under special circumstances including copyright violations, plagiarism, or falsification of data. Despite sitting in the middle of televised prayer circles amid these accusations, the former superintendent is holding no press conference to offer proof of his exoneration. While this board very publicly defamed me via slander and libel, they have only offered silence since the conclusion of this investigation. If the decision UH reached was anything other than damning, this district would have been the one calling the media versus responding to the media's requests with no comment. This board owes me an apology, but I don't expect to ever receive one. I do, however, call for this board to publicly confirm they are no longer considering suing or funding a suit for defamation surrounding these plagiarism allegations. I'm also calling on the board to make a motion to add an agenda the item to the next meeting to discuss options for recovering the $750,000 they lined our former superintendents undeserving pockets with in that backroom deal. You also need to investigate whether or not recovering that severance will negate the $350,000 penalty assessed to our budget by the state as punishment for giving that record-setting severance. This board is comprise of elected officials who are here to serve us as taxpayers. You are not in charge of our district. We are. This isn't about building your egos and you're not here to provide perks for your friends. I think long time investigative journalist Wayne DelSofino said it best when he stated that the arrogance and KDISD among the school board members who think they're so much smarter than everyone else is symptomatic of why HISD is now destroyed. You have shamed your positions and your actions have embarrassed this district, but most importantly you have jeopardized the future of the 80,000 plus children who attend this district. It's time for you to do your jobs, And if you can't it's time for us as taxpayers to find someone who will and at this point literally anyone else will do
Thank You mr. Dolan our next speaker is Susan Wallace I
Would ask that the three corrupt board members step down and not run for reelection since you're doubtful unless you go after that seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars at that point you might be able to get back in our good graces
Thank You mrs. Wallace our next speaker is Georgia Strickland hello everybody
happy Monday super fun okay so I have a PTA update I know at the next part of the meeting everybody's really excited the presidents are coming to see you guys so I'm happy to have them here and our current membership status is 32,000 189 so that tells me that the parents definitely support the PTAs in our district and we are 3,502 members away from the goal that Texas PTA has set for us of 35,000 691 I know that's a big number but I think we can do it and we We have some things coming up that will help get us there. Just so you know, as of right now, there's still more time to get this award, but seven of our 62 PTAs have the golden apple, which means that their whole staff has joined their PTA. So seven is a lot, but I know we can do better. So I'm encouraging the PTAs to get their staff on board. I know our Katy Council received the golden apple. Thank you, Dr. Gregorski, for joining all the PTAs. that means a lot to us. So we are excited about that. Voice for Every Child is the award that is to me just coveted. I would love a Title I campus. I'm a Title I mom. I would love for a Title I campus to one day achieve that and then I can die happy. That is an award that every child is represented by a voice. So that would mean the world to me. Three of our PTAs have achieved it. Kilpatrick, Pattison, and Randolph. Woolman is 12 away from Voice for Every Child. So we just want people to go on joinPTA.org and join as many PTAs as you can. You know ask your best friend what school they go to and get on there and join. So that's kind of our mission. February 25th I'm so glad y'all put that out there for the vaping stuff. February 25th Texas PTA is going to be live on the Capitol floor with legislators and we have a live video we're working right now at the district to host a live watch party and so I'm working on the details for that but it's at noon anybody can watch from anywhere that they are but it'd be so much fun to have a party with some snacks and some water and some sodas or whatever and the best part about it is people are gonna be able to send in questions live which is to me really awesome that the legislation is taken out into consideration and they're gonna listen to us but it's called straight talk a matter of life and breath in regards to vaping among all the teens these days um so again texas pta our goal for the whole state of texas is 515 000 by two by february 25th and so we're about 30 000 shy as a state but i think we can do it thank you so much for your time and i appreciate all of y'all and all the hard work that you do
thank you mrs strickland our next speaker is robert willoughby
Hi. I'm here tonight to speak in support of our school board. I see many comments on social media and many people seem to forget that KDISD is in the best shape it's ever been financially, academically, socially. No one will doubt that there is a lot of work that needs to be done. A lot of that work starts in this very room. It starts with the people behind the dais, but also all the people around the perimeter that represent so many areas of our district. Our current board leadership has been instrumental in providing effective guidance over somewhat stormy weather. We've seen this over the last three or four years. Even during the storm, they continue to make difficult decisions, process improvements, implement meaningful student programs, and work for the good of our community. I know I'm not alone when I say thank you. But let me add, contracts mean something, and so do the facts that they represent. Thank you for your service.
Thank you, Mr. Willoughby. This concludes the open forum portion of our meeting. The Board will now convene in closed meeting as authorized under Section 551.001 of the Texas Government Code for the following purposes. Texas Government Code 551.071, 551.129, and 551.074. The Board will now reconvene in open meeting. Today is Monday, January 20, 2020, and the time is 723 p.m. On behalf of my colleagues, I welcome everyone to this evening's regular Board meeting. Each board member received the agenda and documentation for this meeting on Friday, January 17, 2020. The board will receive information and recommendations from staff, administration, and the superintendent on these agenda items at tonight's meeting. Board members will be able to ask questions, receive answers, and should be prepared to take action this evening. The board has just reconvened from closed meeting in accordance with Chapter 551 of the Texas Government Code. Any action arising from discussions in a closed meeting must be taken in an open meeting. Agenda item 4.1 consider board approval of naming a principal for Creech Elementary School.
Madam President.
Mr. Lacey.
I move that the board of trustees name Sally Gupton for the Creech Elementary School as recommended by the superintendent in a closed meeting. Not done yet.
Oh, second.
Thank you.
I have a motion by Mr. Lacey, a second by Ms. Vann, that the Board of Trustees names Sally Gupton as the principal for Creech Elementary School as recommended by the superintendent in closed meeting. We will now proceed to vote. All those in favor, please raise your right hand and say aye.
Aye.
All those opposed, motion passes. Now.
Madam President, I'll just say we're excited to, as the crowd is as well, to have Sally step into that role. And Sally, did you bring anyone out with you that you'd like to introduce?
Absolutely. Thank you, Dr. Newhorsey. Thank you, Board of Trustees.
All right, thank you. We're super excited to have you in that position.
Congratulations. Congratulations. I would like to say that Ms. Gassoff is absent tonight. Next, 4.2, consider board approval of naming an executive director for transportation.
Madam President.
Ms. Vann.
I move the board of trustees names Paul Landis as the executive director for transportation as recommended by the superintendent in closed meeting.
Second.
I have a motion by Ms. Vann, a second by Mr. Lacey, that the board of trustees names Paul Landis as the Executive Director for Transportation as recommended by the Superintendent in closed meeting. We will now proceed to vote. All those in favor please raise your right hand and say aye. All those opposed? Motion passes six to
zero. And if I may, Paul is here with us tonight and I will say for all of you out there, Paul is a graduate of Texas A&M University. Yeah, I knew it would all come so I'll give you a minute for that or a second for that one. But we're excited to have Paul he comes to us he spent a career in transportation comes to us from sci fair where he's been doing a great job over there we're looking forward to having him on staff almost immediately but Paul did you bring anyone out with you that you'd like to recognize coming with you
Welcome.
Congratulations.
Thank you.
And Madam President, if I could, I've got one more personnel, person we'd like to recognize. Actually, a couple of people I'm going to stand up. I'm looking for Dr. Carl somewhere out there, principal of Jordan High School, and Mike, Robbie, where you at, Mike? You back there somewhere? There's Mike. I want to recognize these folks. Mike is of course Dr. Crawl is principal of our newest high school soon to be open in August and Mike has stepped into the role over there leaving Maid Creek High School we're sad to see him go from there but he has taken the position over at Jordan High School as head football coach and athletic coordinator for the campus so we wanted to bring him out and recognize him for his new role with KDISD so thank you all both for coming out and Mike did you bring anyone out with you tonight or are you back there by yourself? Awesome. Well thank you Mike. We're excited to have you in that role. I know May Creek's gonna miss you and I know Principal Edwards over there is working hard to find a replacement as strong as you have done for the May Creek community over there so he's gonna come up with a good one and all will be well so welcome to your new position.
MS. Congratulations.
MS. Agenda item 4.3, consider Board approval of the Superintendent's annual evaluation and approval of an amendment to the Superintendent's contract as discussed in closed meeting.
CHAIRMAN BRYANT LISLEY. Madam President.
MS. Mr. Lacey.
CHAIRMAN BRYANT LISLEY. I move that the Board of Trustees approves the Superintendent's annual evaluation and approves the amendment to the Superintendent's contract as discussed in closed meeting.
CHAIRMAN BRYANT LISLEY. Second. I have a motion by Mr. Lacey, a second by Mr. Redmond, that the Board of Trustees approves the superintendent's annual evaluation and approves an amendment to the superintendent's contract as discussed in closed meeting. We will now proceed to vote. All those in favor, please raise your right hand and say aye.
Aye.
All those opposed? Motion passes 6-0. Ford, I'd like to also give you this opportunity if you would like to share some sentiments about the year that we've had with Dr. Gagorski as our leader. Go ahead.
I'm not shy. I'll go first.
I was waiting. No, I did not have an order. I was letting you all. Okay.
I was trying to. Dr. Gorgorski, I've only been on the board a little while, but I wanted to say in front of everybody that I really appreciate the enthusiasm you bring to your job. I've had the opportunity to go to several campuses with you and see your interaction with with the people on campus and I think you bring a lot of enthusiasm and knowledge to your job. It's evident that We're doing well under under your leadership. I also want to say that I know I've had some difficult questions for you at times and Some we I knew we weren't going to see eye to eye on but I do appreciate your willingness us to always answer those questions and also want to say when I get those six o'clock messages from those out there in our community that need some assistance I'm always thankful that I can flip those to you and in very short order have some action or answer on that and that's I say that because that's something that the community doesn't always see except for the person who asked the question but I've been I've been very thankful for your willingness to stop whatever you're doing and answer those questions so thank you I'm present miss van in my
six years almost six years of tenure I've had the opportunity to serve with three superintendents all three very different this year you stepped in during a time that was very unusual way to step in and this district these students teachers administration didn't skip a beat didn't lack for anything nor did this board and I appreciate your steadfast leadership your constant communication your willingness you're always being fair and just and and kind and one thing that this district doesn't always see is he's so funny I mean he's just he's got to wick a sense of humor but he's also so smart he knows the answer before you finish your question sometimes and that's just something we've come to rely but also one thing that is is a unique in one in that I've never had in serving a superintendent is you're also a parent in this district And so you're out there, you're at the games, you're at the parent meetings, you do homework with your kids and you have that experience that is unique and real. And I hope in this next coming year as things will level out, though there will always be that noise out there that you've done a great job not listening to, people will get to know Dr. Gorgorski, the Ken that we've all gotten to know and your administration has gotten to know. So thank you for this wonderful year of leadership. Appreciate you.
Madam President. Mr. Redman. Dr. Gorski, I've been ecstatic to serve with you this year. I think even as recently as Thanksgiving when everybody's gone and I have a question or a concern and you respond quickly. I've multiple times throughout this past year had people come up to me parents teachers uh those in pta uh local politicians uh and and it's funny i think miss van mentioned this uh we we know some we see some of that stuff behind the scenes uh you just see your personality a little bit but he's so well spoken he's so good at what he does wow right they're just they're just impressed once they get that chance to spend some time with you so i'm excited that uh we'll have many more years in the district for more more of our uh community to see that. Thank you. Madam President. Mr. Lacey. I want to reiterate the
personality part. This is something that a lot of people don't see. A lot of people did not see what we see with Dr. Gagorski and for him to be able to show his sense of humor, his level of participation in the community that we We have seen, it's refreshing to know that we made the right decision when we voted to hire Dr. Grigorski. So I'm very excited that we've had this first year. I'm very excited that the public overall, not only in the district, but across our community, has come to know the Ken Grigorski, Dr. Ken Grigorski, that we have. So I'm very excited about that. The one thing that if I could hang my hat on that most impressed me, though, is your love of our kids. Your love of the kids that are in our community and KDISD is just, it's shown every single day. Every time I see you, every time we talk about anything, it's always about the love of the kids. So I cannot thank you enough for your leadership. The staff that you have put together, the people that you've put in place, they are first right. And I cannot thank you enough.
Thank you, Mr. Lace. all right thank you so much thank you for the work that you're putting in um i agree with all of the board members and so i won't be redundant and repeat anything but it's been a pleasure to work with you and i look forward to many more years working with you and you leading this district we'll move on to the pledges of allegiance um i will turn it over to you
all right we've got special guests with us tonight we have wyatt feist from griffin Elementary's fifth grader joining him seated in the front row up here it's also principal Jackie Kithin is here and his parents Dr. Andy and Mrs. Jennifer Feist and a sister Claire who's in first grade a couple of special interests about the student Wyatt that he plays baseball with 12 the 12 baseball organization member of the Wild West 4-H club shows broilers at the Fort Bend County Fair and Houston livestock show and rodeo and he enjoys hunting and fishing. Favorite subjects, math and science. A couple of quotes from the folks over at Griffin. From Mrs. Bailey, fifth grade math and science teacher, when I think of a responsible, independable representative of Griffin Elementary, Wyatt comes to mind. He is a wonderful example for his peers on a consistent basis. And from Ms. Kithin, principal, Wyatt is clever and has remodeled his garage to accommodate his prized chickens. He is early to rise each day taking on the care, sorting, and selection of his chickens which requires a keen eye and examination of data and a little advice from his parents who were formerly involved in the FFA. He applies these problem-solving skills at school in all subject areas while also giving us a few chuckles with his great sense of humor. So Wyatt welcome to our board meeting tonight. You'll come up to the podium and lead us in our Pledge of Allegiance.
I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Honor the Texas flag. I pledge allegiance to thee, Texas, one state, under God, one and indivisible. Good evening, Dr. Gagorski, Madam President, and KDISD board members. I have been a student at Griffin Elementary since 2014. 14. Griffin is a great school because our teachers are nice and helpful. I enjoy learning with my classmates and have made many friends over the past six years at MGE. Some of my favorite activities at Griffin are Grist Fest, Griffin Fun Run, 5th grade Super Bowl, and 4th grade kickball tournament, which my class won. Our school is also involved in service projects projects to help our community. Some of my favorites have been Love on a Leash and Cats for Cubs. Thank you for allowing me to come tonight and share some exciting things about Griffin Elementary.
Thank you so much.
Great job, Wyatt. You said you were nervous, and I wouldn't have known that at all. You did a wonderful job. Here is a certificate that says that today, on January 20, 2020, pretty cool, 2020, 2020, you were the leader. Only 10 kids are asked to do this anime. This is a pretty awesome recognition, so thank you so much for doing this tonight. You also get this bag. I don't know, maybe you can collect some chicken eggs in it? No? No? It may not work very well. But thank you so much, you did an awesome job. And Griffin is one of my adopted schools, so maybe before the school year is out, I can come by and see you in the hall or something. Alright. We're going to go here. We're going to go in front of the camera. Right back here.
Thank you.
Thank you very much. Are there any scouts in the audience? All right, perfect. We will move on. Agenda item number six.
Next on our agenda, I'd like to introduce Ms. Rini Deanda, director of communications to begin the board appreciation portion of our
meeting thank you dr. Gorky we would like to open with the special video we prepared in honor of our Board of Trustees
a lot of people to keep the business moving in the right direction.
And one of the groups that leads our way to educational excellence is our KISD Board of Trustees.
Our trustees are required to ensure our students have access to
unparalleled learning experiences. They volunteer their time and talent to serve our students, teachers, staff, and community.
January is Board Recognition Month, and we want to take a minute to thank each of you for your dedication to our students.
With more than 80,000 students, it takes a lot of work from a lot of people to keep our district moving in the right direction. Set teams to cool down rooms. Thank you.
Hey, thank you.
Thank you KDISD Board of Trustees. Thank you. Thank you KDISD Board of Trustees for giving us all the stuff we have in our school. Thank you for all that you do.
Thank you, KDISD Board of Trustees. Thank you.
Board of Trustees, thank you for all you do.
Thank you.
Each year, the Texas Association of School Boards proclaims the month of January is dedicated to celebrate the contribution of men and women elected as school board members who take time to serve our local schools. KDIC joins districts across the state to honor school boards for tackling the enormous job of governing local school districts. The City of Katy is just one of the many entities honoring the work of our KDIC school board. The City of Katy has proclaimed January 2020 as school board recognition INCIDENT. RECOGNITION MONTH. DUE TO THE CITY COUNCIL MEETING TONIGHT, MAYOR BILL HASTINGS COULD NOT BE IN ATTENDANCE. HOWEVER, HIS OFFICE ASKED THAT THE FOLLOWING PROCLAMATION FROM THE CITY COUNCIL BE READ ON THEIR BEHALF. WHEREAS THE MISSION OF THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS IS TO MEET THE DIVERSE EDUCATIONAL NEEDS OF ALL CHILDREN AND TO EMPOWER THEM TO BECOME COMPETENT, productive contributors to a democratic society and an ever-changing world, and whereas local school board members are committed to children. and believe that all children can be successful learners and that the best education is tailored to the individual needs of the child, and whereas local school board members work closely with parents, educational professionals, and other community members to create the educational vision we want for our students, and whereas local school board members are responsible for ensuring the structure that provides a solid foundation for our school system, And whereas local school board members are strong advocates for public education and are responsible for communicating the needs of the school district to the public and the public's expectations to the district. Now, therefore, Mayor Bill Hastings, on behalf of Katy City Council, do hereby declare my appreciation to the members of the Katy ISD school board and proclaim the month of January 2020 as school board recognition month in the city of Katy. I urge all citizens to join me in recognizing the dedication and hard work of local school board members and in working with them to mold an education system that meets the needs of both today's and tomorrow's children. In official recognition whereof, I hereby affix my signature in the seal of the City of Katy this 20th day of January 2020. So thank you to Mayor Hastings for sending that over. Now we would like to partner with our KDISD Council of PTAs in our next portion. KDISD has a very active group of parents who work each and every day to support our schools. The KD Council of PTAs is here this evening for a special presentation for our board members. At this time, I would like to ask that each trustee please stand in front of the dice. May I introduce Ms. Georgia Strickland, President of the KDISD Council of PTAs. Thank you Ms. Strickland and to our parent support groups for their commitment to the students of KDISD. At this time the PTA presidents are going to come forward and present their books and stand next to their adopted PTA members.
All right, can we do two lines? Can we do two lines? Can we do two lines, please? Come on in. We have to come in on this side? Let's have y'all come on in some more.
Cam, if we can that would be fantastic. Okay, perfect. Safety first.
And if we can get this side here to kind of come in a little more. What's your cutoff right here? I got it. Y'all can come in here some more. Can we do one third one right here in the front? There we go. Right here in the front? Can we have you guys come on in a little bit more?
John, do you want to step up on the ledge?
Alright, here we go. Everybody ready? And in 3, 2, 1. Let's get another one. There we go. And in 3, 2, 1. Thank you all very much. All right, here we go. Stand in by.
Not the time or place.
And in three, two, one. Let's get another one. And in three, two, one. Thank you all very much. Hold on, I think she wants to go.
Can you hold up the books? I pulled up the books. I pulled up the books if you got them. So we can all see them. Yeah, if you got them, hold them up. There we go. One, two, three. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you again. Next on the agenda is discuss and consider future board approval of the naming of elementary school number 43 as recommended by the naming advisory committee.
Thank you, Madam President. So the committee for elementary 43 did convene this past week and they have brought forward a name from the committee for consideration that I bring forward to the board tonight. And that name is Peter McElwain Elementary. And I see Peter is here today. and we're gonna make Peter stand while I read some stuff cuz I got three four pages here Peter so you might maybe you better sit down but I would like to read a few things about Peter for those of you who don't know Peter I've known Peter a long time and looking forward to this recommendation here by the committee Peter McElwain joined KDISD in 1998 assuming responsibility for all facility related matters including planning, design, construction, property acquisition, maintenance, operations, and energy management. At that time the district had a student enrollment of only 28,000 and was on the verge of tremendous population growth. By the way we're 84,000 almost coming up very soon. Mr. McIlwain developed a facilities and planning department as well as the process that enabled the district to keep pace with growth while ensuring outstanding learning environments for every student. He hired and worked with a talented and dedicated team to plan design and construct 25 elementary schools nine junior high six high schools along with several comprehensive renovations and additions at existing campuses mr mcawain also led the department in opening education opening educational support administrative support facilities including performing arts centers on secondary campuses the leonard merrill center ld robinson pavilion and billy morgan arena gerald d young agricultural Cultural Sciences Center, Robert Shaw STEAM Center, the Education Support Complex, Student Activity Facility Complex, South Transportation Center, Maintenance and Operations Center, Mark Hopkins Law Enforcement Center, and the Franz Road Support Services Complex. He was also the visionary leader in the development of the state-of-the-art elementary school prototype design upon which Elementary 43 is based. It represents a learning environment that supports the district's cornerstone skills skills for learning, collaboration, communication, creative thinking, problem solving, information literacy and social contributions, offering a wide spectrum of flexible learning experiences for our students. KDISD campus and facility projects created and developed under Mr. McElwain's leadership regularly received recognition and design related awards from organizations such as the Texas Association of School Administrators, Texas Association of School Boards. He was also a recipient of the 2016 People of the Year Award by Katy Magazine and the 2017 Citizen of the Year by the Katy Area Chamber of Commerce. Throughout his career in public education, Mr. McElwain was an active member of the Council of Educational Facility Planners International, Association of School Business Officials International, and American Institute of Architects. He also served with distinction for six years on the Board of Directors of the Katy Area Chamber of Commerce, followed by six years on the Board of the Katy Area YMCA. His dedication towards young learners through the design of progressive and supportive learning environments extended beyond the realm of architecture. While at Katy, Mr. McElwain mentored two students throughout their 7th through 12th grade careers. In retirement, Mr. McIlwain wanted to support children in another way and has written and illustrated children's books and is a member of the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators. After a 30-year career of supporting student learning, Mr. McIlwain retired from Katy ISD and its district architect planner in 2017. The district at that time had 75,000 students enrolled. old. Mr. McIlwain was born in Philadelphia and raised in Toronto but considers himself a Texan with deep Katy roots. Graduated with a degree in architecture from Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada in 1978. He and his wife Darlene have one daughter who is a Katy ISD graduate. So that is our recommendation Mr. Peter McIlwain.
Well deserved, Mr. McElwee.
With that said, we will have a community forum. It will be posted on our website. Anyone can come attend and speak at that forum. And then next month we will bring back the recommendation for formal adoption to the board.
Board. The public hearing is January 30th at 6 p.m. It's two weeks from now. Next, we'll go on to 8.1, presentation of the 2018-2019 annual report to include the Texas Academic Performance Report. Dr. Matney. Good evening, President Doyle,
Superintendent Kragorski, and members of the Board. I'm here this evening to present the 2018-19 annual report in the form of a public hearing and before we get started in looking at all these data points you'll notice at the top of the slides various years the data that goes into this report sometimes is pulled for a graduating class sometimes is two years behind and sometimes is only one year behind so that's why you'll notice some variation in the different data points and I'll discuss those as we go through the slides so the requirements for the the annual report each year include the district accreditation status and KDISD is accredited. We include various data points from the Texas academic performance report that's posted online by the TEA, our special education status which we meet the requirements in the special education status, the review of the campus performance objectives, a report on violent or criminal incidents on campuses and the student performance in post-secondary institutions. So we'll start with district performance indicators. As a reminder, our performance thresholds the last few years have included approaches grade level meets grade level in the highest masters grade level. All three are considered passing, meeting the passing standard on the star assessments, but they are cordoned off into those three levels. So we'll start at approaches grade level. You can see that KTISD continues to be significantly above our state and region 4 peers. And the majority of these indicators are improvements even above our 17-18 results. At the meets grade level, again, you can see the difference in the bars in our state, region, and our KT tan bar on the right-hand side of each area. All of these indicators at the meets grade level were up from the 17-18 school year. So we're incredibly excited that we're moving kids not just from not meeting standard to passing but getting those higher levels of achievement on their star assessments and The same as is said for the Masters all of these are an increase over the 1718 school year I'm showing off our outstanding performance as measured by star assessments In our school progress domain, that's our second domain we look at students and their achievement from one year to the next. So from 17-18 to how they performed in 18-19. And you can see that our students again are outperforming the state and our region peers as they progress from one grade level to the next. In looking at attendance and post-secondary indicators, our attendance rate continues to be at a high level. Students enjoy coming to school in KDISD as evidenced by our high attendance rate. Our annual dropout rates, a zero for grades 7 through 8 is a nice target to have and a nice target to meet. And in grades 9 through 12, again, we're looking at the 17-18 school year. So this is two years behind. We're at .6 for grades 9 through 12. So for our class of 2018, we look at our graduating class. And did they graduate? Did they continue high school? what's their classification once fall of 2019 happens and we have an increase over the prior year of 94.8 and again above our state and region data. Our TSI criteria graduates, this is an indicator that the state sets out our students who graduate exceeding or meeting the required TSI threshold and TSI threshold threshold tells colleges and four year or two year institutions, are they ready for college level coursework? So the percent of annual graduates that KDISD has that meets or exceeds that TSI criteria, again, is significantly higher than both the state and the region. For our college career and military readiness, this is included in many different areas of our accountability system. We look at our percent of grads who meet one of the eight criteria whether that's meeting a score on the AP exam, enlisting in the military. Again we're significantly higher than the state or region at 73.9% of our grads from 2017-18 achieving that threshold, achieving one of those eight criteria. For our advanced course dual enrollment completion, again you can see that we are higher in most areas other than English language arts than both the state and the region. And there's a list of what these advanced courses and dual enrollment courses are, whether they're dual credit, AP exams, there's also some additional advanced coursework for science, for social studies, for math that our students can take that are considered advanced by the Texas Education Agency. For our advanced placement, we do not offer IB in the district, although we certainly receive students that have been taking IB exams and IB coursework in other districts. Our participation rate is again above the state and region and then the percent that are reaching that three level on an AP test or a four on an IB exam 82.9% of our students. That is a great success story for our students achieving those high levels and ultimately credit for college coursework in high school. Our 2017-18 SAT and ACT ACT results. We have our participation. We are a district that does not administer SAT or ACT to every single student. Most districts in the region actually do, which is why we have a little bit of a decrease in comparison to our regional peers. But this school year, 2019-2020, we are implementing the full-day SAT school day for juniors. So we will see a little bit of a difference in that data in coming years. But the percent of students that are scoring at criterion for SAT and ACT, 71.1% of our students who are assessed. So we have a great student body that is moving on to college and being able to be accepted into colleges for a year or two year with really nice SAT and ACT results. We have our average SAT score. So you can see the trend continues, Katie being higher than state and regional peers. ACT is the same trend as SAT. And then 2016-17 graduates in postsecondary institutions. The reason the data is so delayed here is we have to wait to see once they graduate from KDISD, what are these graduates doing the year after? Are they enrolled in an institute of higher education in the state of Texas? And then did they complete one year without remedial courses? And you can see here our students who leave KDISD enrolling in a Texas Institute of Higher Education. That doesn't include a University of Oklahoma or Arkansas or anywhere else, just the institutes in Texas. And then completing one year without remediation, they're being successful once they get there as well. So our district profile, this is based on our 2018-19 snapshot date in October, for October of 2018. For our race ethnicities, the only student group that is declining is our white population. All others are showing an increase over previous years. We have retention rates by grade level in our annual report, as well as class size by elementary and secondary for the state and for the district. district. We have percent of staff and percent of teachers by years of experience included in the annual report. And the campus performance objectives, again, are aligned to the strategic design goals in KDISD. You approved those campus performance objectives earlier in the fall, and these are continuously monitored by campus personnel through quarterly updates. For violent and criminal incidents, we report out level 5 and level 4 offenses. And for, in looking at the chart, we divided out by elementary, junior high, and high school, the number of incidents as well as the percent for the level 5 and the level 4 incidents. The way we're addressing that as a district is through the district improvement plan and Again, course campus improvement plans address various degrees of the data as it pertains to each campus. But as far as the district improvement plan, we have processes for creating safe learning environments, safe facilities, training, behavioral needs through positive behavioral supports, and awareness of those safe school initiatives. In looking at the performance of postsecondary institutions, so again, once students leave Katy Independent School District, where are they going? So we've got the data here for the class of 2017 where they enrolled four-year public university versus two-year public colleges. The data that always kind of raises eyebrows is what is that not trackable and not found? Not trackable are typically our students that enroll without a Social Security number, so we assign them a number and so then they don't carry that same KD number through to the university level and not found have have standard ID numbers but may not be anywhere. And again, this is Texas. This is not looking at anywhere outside of Texas. So these could be students who are at Stanford or the University of Oklahoma and are just not showing up in the database because those are not Texas institutions. So in summary, it's always exciting to get to this page in this report each year. We are higher than the state and region in all of those areas. And looking at approaches grade level, meets grade level, master's grade level, even looking at the progress level of our students. So they're not going backwards, they're making progress. Our graduation rates, our students, our graduation CCMR and TSI achievements, SAT and ACT, our academics are setting them up for success for post-secondary work, and then how our students are doing in post-secondary institutions. We're going to continue a focus of increasing achievement for students who are English language learners and students who receive special education services making sure we're raising those bars and increasing the performance in the area of writing at all levels that concludes the presentation portion thank you very
much those individuals requesting to speak regarding the 2018-2019 annual report to include the Texas academic performance report signed up prior to the start of this meeting 30 minutes have been allotted for this public hearing forum. The time allowed will be divided equally among those requesting to speak but no presentation may exceed three minutes. As I announce your name please come to the podium, state your first and last name for the record. Our first speaker this evening is Sean Dolan.
This camera here, Justin. I'll take that as a yes. Try to get it straight. I'll just hold it. So I'm looking at the report here and I've got Maid Creek and I've got the entire district and I was just wondering if Bill Lacey plans on paying his tax liens or not.
Madam President, this is not part of this report and I'm going to recommend that you warn the individual that's up here that this is not part of this report.
Mr. Dolan, if you would like to have public comment on the Texas Academic Performance Report, you are welcome to continue. If not, we'd ask you to please sit down.
No, I'd really like to know if Bill Lacey plans on doing this.
Madam President, I'm going to ask that Mr. Dolan be removed from the facility.
Thank you. Our next speaker is Brandy Snyder. Mr. Dolan, please leave. Thank you. Ms. Snyder, are you in the room? It doesn't look like Ms. Snyder is available. That will conclude the end of our public hearing. Thank you for your participation in the hearing. The board appreciates it. Next we'll get to the reports. I'm sorry Dr. Grigorski, go ahead. Thank you Madam President. Sorry for that.
I do want to take a moment and I know Dr. Matney has just stepped away from the podium. I don't know is she heading towards the back, but we're going to call you out anyway, Dr. Matney, and we would like to take a moment to recognize you for all the work you've done for KDISD. You have... It appears most of the room knows what I'm about ready to say, but that's okay. Dr. Matney will be leaving us at the end of the week. She has earned an opportunity for a promotion and we wish her well in all of her hard work and everything she has done here is testament to that and we're certainly going to miss her, but we do want to recognize you for everything you've done and thank you for your service to Katy ISD.
Madam President, Ms. Champagne, may I ask any questions about the report or no? Sure. Okay. Dr. Matney, I just have a few questions for you. But I just wanted to say I'm always so impressed every year. I mean, this is only year two, but anyway, I guess for two years. Been impressed with our low dropout rate. But I just want to know, at what point, you know, I see all the numbers of GED and all that, but at what point do we stop tracking those students you know I mean how is there an age limit where we say we're not gonna follow up with them anymore and they really are a dropout I mean how do you so there's several different
things that go into the dropout rate once a student leaves there is a lever code that is assigned to them in our state system students can come back to school so they may choose to leave at age 17 and they can come back especially in our programs like our Simon program, Raines High School, they can come back and complete their degree but at that point they've already been coded once as an annual dropout so it's indicating that. So that doesn't mean that that percentage of students has stayed a dropout. Some of them were able to recoup. Dr. Creech and her team do a great job of reaching out to some of those students and and trying to get them to come back and earn their degree or earn their GED in order to be able to be able to go out and do different things in the workforce and in the community.
But what age do we stop, you know, 22 or, you know what I mean? I mean, what age is it that they?
Dr. Kreacher or the PEIMS group. I'm actually not sure of the final age. But I do know that we've had students that have come back and the only thing that they're missing is an assessment requirement And we've tested 30 year olds 35 year olds who that's the only thing they're missing They've met all their their credits, but they're just missing that that testing piece So we test them until the state says we can't use that test anymore
Okay, those are great success stories and then and then on the college and career readiness Although I know that we're higher than you know other everybody else It said 73.9% is ready for military college career, but And I know they met one out of eight like you said, but that's still 26% more Kids that are we saying they're not ready for
The next step so I think that's a great question What what that says is that they just didn't meet one of those eight criteria criteria. So the criteria include earning a certification exam, earning a certification through a certification exam like Microsoft Office or there's, we've got a lot of those. One of the things that the state did several years ago was they limited the number of certifications that would be included in this calculation. So a lot of those students, they meet the standard on a certification and are doing great things in a field of work, but it's just not included in this calculation. So I would stop short of saying that they're not ready to move on. They're just not in TEA's calculation. So I think that's one piece.
I just have two more. I notice that class sizes are smaller for the state. And maybe this isn't a question for you, but how do you think we can get a little bit better with that with a smaller class sizes I know that's important to teachers I mean
that's probably not your I don't have the answer to that however the state data remember we're a very diverse state and so we've got school districts with classrooms that may only have a few students in them because that's their population so it's important just to know we're a very large school district in a state with 1,200 school districts that are very different so the data that goes into that, I think it's important to be able to look at. How we can lower our class size is a question. A different question.
The last one is you talked about the level four offenses, but how does that – that was the only one I couldn't find something that compared to other districts or the state.
So I don't have the comparison, but I know that that is something that we could look into. I KNOW THE TEA PUBLISHES NOT IN THE COMPARISON FORMAT NECESSARILY, BUT WE COULD LOOK AT SOME of that specifically if you have that as an area of interest okay thank you thank you for your
presentation absolutely enjoy your retirement thank you again dr metney thank you and if you want to come back you just let us know i don't know if anybody's as great as us but we'll let you try i'm just picking thank you very much and congratulations next we have 2020 2021 budget
update mr. Smith all right well it's 813 and I'll be done by now hopefully before 820 just break the ice here real quick our night our 2021 budget objectives is hard to believe it's 2021 budget objectives as we start out the year we're already working towards how are we going to maintain a balanced budget we're going to try to maintain competitive compensation we're going to try to maintain our health plan and obviously put a high priority on student and state staff safety we're going to plan for opening elementary number 43 no excuse me mcelwain elementary and jordan high school and then we're going to implement house bill 3 or continue to implement house bill 3 and plan for opening junior high number 17. so our assumptions that we're using is taxable values we're projecting below average for Katie growth taxable values on the maintenance and operations or the general fund don't mean as much as they used to now that the passing of House Bill 3 but it does mean a lot on our debt service fund and we're using them just below our average growth enrollment we're projecting as of today a little above average enrollment increase folks Folks, the kids are coming and they're coming at an amazing rate. As Dr. Gorski said earlier, we're just 100 kids, less than 100 students shy of 84,000 at this point. And we are reflecting that in our planning for next year, continued growth. Campus staffing units will obviously be started based off those enrollment numbers very quickly. We're going to always try to make into account the salary increase. One of the things that old law and even current law still makes tough is an inflation factor. And any time you're looking at a cost of living increase or anything subject to inflation, it makes it tougher when you're not increasing the amount per student that a district can earn. We're going to talk about tax rates. We're working at tax rates. The early indications are that the state's House Bill 3 is going to require us to reduce our tax rate yet again somewhere about 1.4 cents. That's the early indications. If our value grows above the state rate, which is the average that they use from a growth perspective, was 4.01 percent. We've historically grown more than that. If we grow more than that, it could be that we have to lower our tax rate even more. But we're looking at it probably about 1.4 cents is what it looks like now. Just as a reminder, we spend 88% of our money in salary and benefits. Utilities is next. And software is then followed by supplies and fuel. There's a history of our tax rates. You can see that we rocked along with the same tax rate until the 15-16 school year. we were able to drop that yellow bar, the yellow part of our tax rate by a cent. And this last year we dropped the gray bar by 7.3 cents. And so we were able to drop the tax rate by seven cents. Again, that's a result of House Bill 3. Future considerations, of course, for enrollment growth, I've already spoke to that. Ongoing implementation and rulemaking of House Bill 3. I've got an interesting little thing to say about that. You see there's a map. and here be dragons often alongside vivid illustrations terrifying beasts may may look maybe lurking there and in a grim that was a grim warning that they didn't know exactly what would happen if you ventured outside the unknown it likely wouldn't be good and there's still some unknown out there I'm glad to say I'm comfortable up here saying that I've been able to sleep because we didn't venture too far out of the unknown a house built three had major major changes in areas such as the Comp Ed allotment, the dyslexia allotment, the CCMR that Ms. Matney just spoke to, the fast growth allotment. There's still rulemaking that's happening. I am amazed at the amount of work that the agency is doing, but I'm also very frustrated that it's not happening as quick as I'd like because we are already planning the 2021 budget and there's still a lot of rulemaking going on. We've been, with the clarity that we've seen so far, there are a couple of things that we may have overestimated on or got out of that comfort zone, out of that map where the beast may be. But for the most part, if we weren't sure, we didn't go there because we didn't want to experience that because it wouldn't be good. And so we are going to be looking at amending the revenue budget based on the enrollment increases that we've had and what we know it is to this point probably in February I think it will be positive information again we do have a balanced budget and at this point hopefully hopefully that will can maintain I feel strongly that it will of course the economic uncertainty of the state of Texas long-term liability of state funding you know when I mentioned went back when the passing of it when you're going to lower your M&O tax rate that is a steady portion of our income and we're shifting it to more volatile in the state sales tax or oil and gases revenues that the state receives so that's a little concerning to me and I hope that our economy and the state can can sustain house bill 3 as it moves forward and again using that property value growth statewide to further compress or lower all ISDs tax rates. It's going to be expensive for the state. Property value growth, again, I mentioned that earlier, it's not as important on the general fund now that we've shifted to current year values, but it is still very important when it comes to our debt service fund, which we'll talk about next month. And so with that said, we are done with January. Next month, our municipal advisor, Hilltop Securities and Jeff Roberts are going to be here to talk about our long-term term debt plan and the projections thereof. We'll be asking for parameters for our next bond sale to support our construction projects and again look at our debt plan and how that that looks from a planning perspective. In March we'll take a look at our initial bottom line projections in the general fund. Mayor June we may dig a little bit closer to that and in July we'll show you a projection of all funds working towards the adoption of the budget in August. Remember we are in August 31st end date or September 1 start date. There'll be a lot of school districts that are starting for July 1 start date. They're even under more pressure to get some of these rules behind us. But again I don't want to be negative when it comes to the rules. I am very impressed and and with with the amount of stuff that the agency has done. It's just that it's time to start planning for folks like me to move forward and try to do as best we can to meet those parameters that we set out for. And with that, I'm done.
Look at that. We almost gave you a one-minute warning, but we thought that would be rude. Thank you so much, Mr. Smith. Do we have any questions at this time for our initial report? All right, we're going to move on. Discussion in action. Discuss and consider board approval of the annual financial audit report. Mr. Smith, you're on.
All right, I'm going to kick this off and go ahead and ask for Selena Saras to come up. And while she's making her way, I'm going to talk a little bit about the audit. In the Texas Education Code, 44.008 requires us to have an annual audit. it one can argue that it's ongoing but it did formally start in June they've been in our district they spent two weeks here in the summer and they've been in our district for since October and really working hard looking at our books and I'm going to turn it over to Selena Saraceras here though she's a partner with Wheatley Penn and Laura Lynch is with her and I'm gonna let her introduce her team and go over her presentation
Well, thank you so much, President Doyle, members of the board, and Dr. Grigorski. We're pleased to present the audit results for the fiscal year ended August 31, 2019. This is the engagement team. Lupe Garcia is your engagement partner. He was unable to make it here tonight, and I am a resource partner. I'm the head of the public sector with the firm, so he asked me to fill in. Tom Peterson did the engagement quality control over the comprehensive annual financial report that your team prepared. And, of course, Laura Lynch, Raul Babuena, and Joey Killian were here on site, and they did all the heavy lifting and worked closely with your management team. I do want to thank your team for being so, your management team for being so helpful, answering our requests, our emails. It is a pretty intense process and they took time out of their busy schedules to meet our request. As alluded to earlier, the audit process is quite hefty and we started in early spring with the engagement letter. We started our risk assessment. We come on site and identify the key controls, test those key controls, all to design our audit procedures. Once the district closes its books, we come back in the October-November timeframe and begin our substantive testing. We're corroborating, confirming information, and looking at analytics, and of course, vouching items, looking at supporting documentation. All in an effort to issue an opinion, which is the last step in the audit process. There's three types of opinions that you can receive, and they worsen as you go from right to left. And no one wants to be in the last two disclaimer modified everyone aims and and wants to earn an unmodified or clean opinion And in order to get there we have to do all of the previous steps And so although that although Katie ISD has received an unmodified or clean opinion over the last forever It's not an easy task to get here. And so this year for fiscal year 2019 we are also issuing an unmodified opinion or clean report. It is the highest level of assurance, and we are required to conduct our report in accordance with government auditing standards, specifically because you do spend more than $750,000 in federal funding, and the Texas Education Agency requires it. Had there been material weaknesses or significant deficiencies to be reported, we would include that in our single audit report, which I'll go over here shortly. We didn't have any instances of noncompliance, or excuse me, material noncompliance, which would include procurement, compliance with the Public Funds Investment Act, et cetera. So no noncompliance to report. You did spend $45.2 million in federal funds. And this year, every year, we select federal awards for testing on a rotation basis. And it's really based on risk. and there's large programs that have to be tested every third year. This year we tested Title I, Part A, Title II, Part A, and the Disaster Relief and Public Assistance Grant. Those can be found on pages 7 through 10 of the single audit report, which is the smaller report that we issue. We are required to issue an opinion on these federal programs, no material weaknesses or significant deficiencies to report. We're also issuing unmodified opinions on each of these programs and no instances of non-compliance are reported within this report. If we look at the financial highlights for your governmental activities, so your comprehensive annual financial report has two sets of financial statements. The first one is the government-wide financial statements. It shows everything that the district owns and everything the district owes. So this looks very much like the financial statements of a business. It's different from what you see in the fund financial statements, such as your general fund. So your total assets were just short of $2.7 billion, and you have deferred outflows of $227 million. Your total liabilities were $2.7 billion. The bulk of that is your long-term liabilities of $2.1 billion, which is your debt, the premiums related to your bonds. The deferred inflows totaled $105 million. That's related to the net pension and net opeb liabilities which are shown also in the liability section and you'll see that there they total over 500 million dollars the net pension and net opeb liabilities in in all the district's net worth is 55 million dollars if we were to add back the net pension liability and net opeb liability that would be much greater and just to refresh your memory that net pension and that OPEB liabilities are not a check you're going to have to write tomorrow. You will continue to contribute into TRS and the TRS care plans at the statutorily determined rates, and so you'll continue to pay in as you always have. This is simply a reporting mechanism to record the, if TRS were to fill, which is not likely, this would be your proportionate share, and your proportionate share is determined by TRS and its actuaries based on your contributions compared to all of the other districts, charter schools, and any community colleges that participate in TRS. So again, there's nothing you can do about those liabilities, but we do have to report them in your financial statements. Your fund financial statements are on a modified accrual basis or current resources and current uses resources. So here you don't see any of the long-term items. So if we dissect your revenues, your expenditures, and look at the ending fund balance, you'll see that overall with all of your governmental funds you added 17.7 million dollars the bulk of it was in the general fund at fort short of 45 million dollars and you'll recall you had that one-time payment for senate bill 500 related to the decline in property value due to hurricane harvey so again that's a one-time payments not to be recurring in in future years you did decrease your capital projects fund by 30 million dollars and that's expected because you issue the bonds to to construct facilities and purchase other capital items and so that's the that's a natural thing to see there so overall you added 17 million dollars to your governmental fund balance to end the year at four hundred and forty eight million dollars the general fund is at two hundred and fifty eight million dollars so if we look at what you budgeted during the year and we look at your final budget you'll see that you came under budget uh excuse me you exceeded budget for your revenues by two million dollars and you were under budget on the expenditure side by 6.5 million dollars you had expected to add to fund balance 35 million dollars but you added the 44.6 million dollars so you you exceeded that expectation by 8.6 million dollars so again you're ending fund balance at 258 million dollars you'll see that if we look at your unassigned fund balance which tea looks at they'll look at unassigned and assigned fund balance for first indicators your unassigned fund balance has been trending upward but again you had a significant increase specifically due to that one-time uh payment in senate bill 500 so uh for for fiscal year 2019 you had 198.2 million dollars in unassigned fund balance. There were other categories included in your total fund balance but those are not available for appropriations. This 198 million is just is what is available for budgeting purposes. What we also like to do is compare this to expenditures. If all revenues were to cease and you continue to spend at the level that you spent in fiscal year 2019. We want to see how long would that $198.2 million last. And so that it would take you about 102 days. The Government Finance Officers Association recommends that you have at least 90 days of operating expenditures, which would equate $175.4 million. The red zone or the danger zone would be 30 days, or that would equate to $58.5 million for KDISD. So you're well above the recommended GFOA which allows you we live in Houston things happen and so if you need to take from this fund balance that's available for you but that's at the board and management's discretion for future years there are some required communications that we have to bring to you here tonight we there are significant accounting policies that are included in your financial statements. There are estimates that go into this note these figures that are presented within the CAFR. And so while we like to corroborate and confirm the estimates are involved, for example, the useful lives of your capital assets, the district does use industry standards so there wasn't anything unusual. State aid is based on the TEA template, but it is driven by your average daily attendance. Any uncollectible taxes is based on historical trends and management's estimates and then finally what i alluded to earlier the net pension and opeb liabilities are based on the actuaries and you have you have no control over that number that number is given to us we concluded that the the that the district's management's judgments are are well within industry standards and they used reasonable estimates throughout the report We didn't have any difficulties performing our audit with management or even getting through difficult areas, so we're very thankful for that. We didn't have any corrected or uncorrected misstatements. It's very rare for us to be in an audit setting where we don't have to propose an adjustment, so that's a testament to your management team that when we get those records, they're pretty pristine. We didn't have any disagreements with management over the application of any of the accounting principles. The last piece of audit evidence that we obtained from your management is that representation letter. They're telling us that they've given us everything that we needed to perform our audit to the best of their knowledge. Everything about litigation, et cetera, if any, is included in there. anything related to regulatory agencies, if applicable, but that they haven't withheld any information for us to perform our procedures. That's the last thing that we have obtained. We are not aware of any consultation with any other accounting firms, so to speak, as opinion shopping. We are issuing an unmodified opinion, but had it been anything other than that, and if your management team went outside of our firm to opinion shop we'd be required to report that to you. From time to time we're asked for our opinion or we're asked to look at certain documentation. Our responses to those questions is not a basis as far as it we don't answer a certain way so that you'll retain us as your audit firm. If the answer is no it's a no. If it's yes it's a yes and it's all based on standards and and and what's allowable or not allowable, whether it's federal, state, or local policy. Any questions for me here tonight?
Board members, do you have any questions? Hearing none, we'll proceed.
Madam President.
Mr. Lacey.
I move that the Board of Trustees approves the annual financial audit report as presented this evening.
I have a motion by Mr. Lacey, a second by Ms. Vann, that the Board of Trustees approves the annual financial audit report as presented this evening. We will now proceed to vote. All those in favor, please raise your right hand and say aye. Aye. All those opposed, motion passes. Thank you very much.
Thank you, and thank you, Selena. And I do want to recognize Laura Lynch from the senior managers. She's back there in the audience. And Liz Haven, our accounting supervisor, is back there. Liz is the one that did the lion's share of the work and her team. and of course Ann Feitinger who's going to be next up here presenting. The entire accounting staff does a lot of great work for that, as does the superintendent for setting the course and the expectation for doing good work. Budget managers, principals, grant managers, financial clerks have all done a lot to get here tonight and they do it their excellent job. So our next step is to publish the statement of revenues in the newspaper. That'll be happening very soon. We're going to spit sign this report, 196 page report. We're going to try to figure out how to, this is new, make it ADA compliant as we upload it to the TEA website. We'll be uploaded to the TEA website. We'll share it with the public, the clearinghouse, with the municipal advisors, Council of Texas, and both GFOA and ASBO. And of course we'll be reporting all this financial information through PEMS, which will be the basis of our school's first report when you hear it in October.
Thank you so much, Mr. Smith. Our next agenda item is 10.2, discuss and consider board approval of the November 2019 financial reports. Ms. Feitinger, welcome.
Good evening, President Doyle, Dr. Gagorski, and board. Board. Item 10.2 is to consider Board approval of the District's November 2019 financial statements. There are four reports. The financial statements are in two parts and they represent our revenues and expenditures and budgeted funds, including the general fund, food service and debt service fund. The expenditures are broken down further into function and high level objects. The November reports tonight present a budgeted beginning fund balance and now that you have approved the audit report, next month you will see that those will be our audited fund balances to begin with. The construction report is our second report. It will have our project costs through November for projects funded from the 2017 authorization, the 2014 authorization, E-rate funding, and TERS funding. The third report is our tax report, which summarizes property tax revenues received through November, which indicates current taxes that are beginning to come in and these obviously will be picking up significantly in December and Last is the check register which indicates our vendor payments made in the month of November So these are no our November financial reports we have for your approval tonight
Miss van I move the board of trustees approves the district's November 2019 financial reports
second I
I have a motion by Ms. Vann, a second by Mr. Redman, that the Board of Trustees approves the District's November 2019 financial reports. We will now proceed to vote. All those in favor, please raise your right hand and say aye. Aye. All those opposed, motion passes. Thank you, Ms. Feitinger. 10.3, discuss and consider board approval of the January 2020 budget amendments. Ms. Butterfield.
Thank you, President Doyle, Trustees, Superintendent Gorgorski. Tonight we have several budget amendments to present. And in the General Operating Fund, federal revenues are increased $804,053 to recognize a partial BAB subsidy on the refunded Series 2010D bonds. Local GOF revenues are amended to increase $142,000 with an equal increase in expenditures related to dual credit courses. Operating transfers out are increased $804,053 to move the IRS VAB subsidy to the debt service fund, and the remainder of the general fund expenditures are direct offsets between different functions approval of these amendments will result in no change to the general operating fund balance the debt service fund expenditures are decreased by three million four hundred and sixty three thousand nine hundred thirty five dollars to recognize a change in debt service requirements as a result of the 2019 a and b bond refundings additionally debt service operating transfers in increase a hundred eight hundred and four thousand fifty three dollars to receive that partial subsidy from the series 10 d babs bonds additionally other sources increase 186 million million forty seven thousand eight hundred ninety seven dollars and other uses increase one hundred eighty five thousand six hundred sixty eight thousand eighty eight dollars relating to accounting entries for that same series 2019 a and B refunding bonds the other sources and uses net to three hundred seventy nine thousand eight hundred nine dollars and other uses and approval of these debt service amendments will result in a four million six hundred forty seven thousand seven hundred ninety seven dollar increase to the debt service fund balance now note that we took part of these entries back in October so that amendment related also to the 2019 a and B bonds recognized a decrease to fund balance of three million thirty seven thousand two $227 and this January amendment recognizes the increase to fund balance. So net total savings this year related to that transaction is $1,610,570. Then there's one construction amendment tonight to amend $2,963,966 is to establish the budget for the chiller replacement project that was approved at the December meeting, and this will be funded by 2017 bond project savings.
Thank you so much, Ms. Butterfield.
Madam President.
Mr. Lacey.
I move that the Board of Trustees approves the district's January 2020 budget amendments.
Second.
I have a motion by Mr. Lacey, a second by Mr. Keller, that the Board of Trustees approve the District's January 2020 budget amendments. We will now proceed to vote. All those in favor please raise your right hand and say aye. Aye. All those opposed? Motion passes. Thank you so much. 10.4 discuss and consider board approval to form a 2020 Community Bond Advisory Committee and approval of the committee charter. I have Dr. Grooms and Mr. Mr. Veerling back there.
Thank you, and good evening, Board President, Mrs. Doyle, Dr. Grigorski, and trustees. This evening, you'll hear much of what we've been discussing for the past two months, which is KDIC is growing, and it's growing rapidly, particularly in the northwest quadrant of the district. So this evening, we're going to present what a possible bond committee might might look like should the board believe one is necessary after hearing some of the data that will be reviewed this evening, including again that growth in the Northwest quadrant as well as our bond history and where we've been and where we project being in the future along with again, what a bond committee might look like. I'm joined this evening by Mr. Ted feeling who is our assistant superintendent for operations and I'm going to ask Mr. Mr. Verling to join us at the podium right now.
All right, good evening, President Doyle, Board members, Superintendent Grigorski. My portion of the presentation tonight is to talk a little bit about the numbers. You've seen this slide before. This came to us from PASA last month, and so this gives us a growth scenario possibility through the year 2029. That green portion there, It's kind of like the, I hate to use the analogy, but the hurricane cone of uncertainty. It could be really big, it could be smaller, or it could just be right there in the middle. And that right there in the middle is the dotted line that runs right through it. So at the snapshot point this year in 20, or past year 20. 83,427. We're predicting if it's that middle growth, the 94,000 and then we'll hit a hundred they're predicting in 2027, 100,000 kids. So a wild number there. You know as well as I do over the past 15-20 years we've been talking about extreme growth in the southwest quadrant of the district. We still see that although we're running out of territory down there and now what's coming of course is is the growth in the Northwest quadrant. And that's where we're seeing the extreme growth here in the next few years. Just a number I know we've thrown a lot of numbers out today. Today, 83,892 students in KDISD. About 1,000 over projection. So our next slide takes us to the high school projections and scenario through 2029. You know as well as I do, we've been working on the ABM for for uh we started with katie high school and jordan high school we've done some work across the district to try to balance those numbers you can kind of see though as we move across and and and into the 2024 and 2029 those numbers grow again i've got the two asterisks by katie high school's number that that 2697 does not take into account the 400 plus or so kids that have have requested to stay based on the abm so that number is going to be a little bit higher but those kids then age out through the 2024 school year but you see the growth in that part of the world and pay toe with the big scary number out there in 2029 at 7,000 kids so just to give you a little history of that Seven Lakes at its highest point was a was one of our biggest high school the biggest high school ever in 2012 39 96 and Tompkins is creeping up right behind them here We're currently just shy of 10 kids there. So our junior high scenario, again, we do see a lot of kids still in that southwest quadrant. We've done some attendance boundary modifications there in the past two years to try to help that. This growth in particular here is going to be in the northwest quadrant again, Katie Junior High and Stockdick Junior High. You can follow the numbers across. We're okay through the 2024 school year and then it gets a little scary again. We don't have our junior high 17 numbers in there. Obviously we haven't done an attendance boundary modification. I didn't wanna throw imaginary numbers in there for you. But obviously junior high 17, which is in progress now, will help us with those numbers. But when we get to 2029, if you do the math on that, 6,000 kiddos in two different junior highs even a third is going to be is going to be tough in the junior high projection and of course you remember some of our biggest junior highs Wood Creek junior high had 2,100 kids there for a while a few years ago the next scenario is our is our elementary scenario again Bryant although Bryant is in the Southwest quadrant quadrant it's It's in our furthest southwest quadrant. It is still growing. And, of course, it gets kids from Kane Island and those areas as well. And then you see growth in our elementary schools. Bethke Elementary, we just did an ABM4 to create Leonard Elementary, which ultimately turns into 43. So you see that growth in the northwest quadrant as well. Wood Creek Elementary was at its biggest with 1,602 kids back in 2012. but again the capacity on these about a thousand kids so you can kind of see growth over time elementary 43 a pretty scary number out in 2029 four thousand three hundred and eighty nine kids so given all this information the board may want to consider the exploration of a 2020 bond and dr. grooms is here to give you a little more background on the history of bond elections in Katie I see
So as you know, the primary mechanism for funding capital projects such as schools and facilities has historically been bonds. And this slide provides you a visual of what our bond history has looked like in KDISD in recent history. This chart goes back to 1994. The district has established a practice based on its long-range facility planning of approving bonds and the community has approved those bonds every three to four years and you see that reflected in this chart our last two bonds November 2014 and November 2017 were developed by 150 member bond committee group that will be talking about next as I outline a proposal for forming a community bond advisory committee those last two bonds by the way were also passed with a zero tax rate increase. You may recall that in 2014, again, and in 2017, the board approved a process for a community bond advisory committee structure that included 150 members who are representative of the parents, the business owners, faith-based leaders, senior citizens, students, and other community members in Katy throughout Katy excuse me coming down for cold this evening so this 2020 structure is very similar to that of which we saw in 2017 also part of that process included nominees from the board at least three each from each trustee those that committee in 2017 and in 2014 were led led by a bond facilitator and a bond chair who was selected by the board. Here is a proposed schedule should the board decide that you would like to move forward with a bond committee for 2020. The latter half of those meetings would be reserved for the committee to actually build a bond based on a series of presentations that would begin in April at meeting number one. Again, all meetings are led by a facilitator with the goal of coming to consensus on the project, should that be the recommendation of the committee. These next two slides are a planning timeline beginning with tonight's presentation, the selection of a bond share, which again would be the charge of the board, with community members being selected to serve on the committee in February. and then those first committee meetings beginning in April, followed by a series of milestones, which would be monthly updates to the board with regards to the progress of the committee. And then August, it would be the last date in which the board could call for a bond election, should that be something you wish to do. And Mr. Verling and I will take any questions you may have at this point. All right. Board members, do you have any questions?
All right. Let's proceed.
Madam President.
Mr. Lacey.
I move that the Board of Trustees approves the formation of a 2020 Community Bond Advisory Committee and approves the committee charter.
I have a motion by Mr. Lacey, a second by Ms. Vann, that the Board of Trustees approves the formation of a 2020 Community Bond Advisory Committee and approves the committee charter. We will now proceed to vote. All those in favor, please raise your right hand and say aye. all those opposed motion passes thank you both for your presentation next we have 10.5 discuss and consider board approval of the proposals for flooring replacements at five campuses mr. T good evening president Doyle board members
dr. Gagorski it's recommended that the Board of Trustees approves the proposals for flooring replacements at Exley Elementary, Franz Elementary, Rhodes Elementary, Beckendorf Junior High and Support Services Complex to Tarkett in the amount of $2,124,384.53, utilizing the Choice Partners Contract number 17-020CG-15. In a total not to exceed cost, project cost, of two million one hundred and forty four thousand three hundred and eighty four dollars and fifty three cents replacement will be coordinated with each campus and the work performed outside of normal school hours approval of this recommendation at this time will help ensure the August 2020 substantial
completion date thank you so much are there any questions hearing none will
proceed madam president mr. Redmond I move that the Board of Trustees approves the proposal for flooring replacement at five campuses as recommended by administration i have
a motion by mr redmond a second by mr keller that the board of trustees approves the proposal for flooring replacement at five campuses as recommended by administration we will now proceed to vote all those in favor please raise your right hand and say aye all those opposed motion passes thank you so much oh i'm sorry you're here for one more 10.6 consider board approval of the delivery method and funding source for the renovations to barns one through seven at the young agricultural facility go ahead yes ma'am it's recommended that the board of trustees
approves the competitive seal proposal delivery method utilization of 2017 bond savings as the funding source and an estimated project budget of two million seven hundred and seventy seven thousand dollars for the renovations of barns one through seven at the young agricultural facility Technology upgrades would include camera installations in barns and parking lot, building upgrades for piping, lighting, electrical, replacement of pin frames and gates, interior cleaning and painting. Site upgrades include allowance for drainage into the new storm drain system, installation of a concrete drive for loading and unloading, consolidation of shavings dump area and entry road replacement, and additional parking lot lighting on the south end. Also included is architectural and engineering fees and an additional funding for contingency of any unforeseen issues. Approval of this recommendation at this time will help ensure substantial completion by September 1, 2020. Thank you so much. Are
there any questions? Hearing none, we'll proceed. Madam President. Mr. Lacey. I
move that the Board of Trustees approves the competitive sealed proposal delivery delivery method and funding source for the renovations to Barnes 1 through 7 at the Young Agricultural Facility as recommended by administration. Second.
I have a motion by Mr. Lacey, a second by Mr. Redmond, that the Board of Trustees approve the competitive sealed proposal delivery method and funding source for the renovations to Barnes 1 through 7 at the Young Agricultural Facility as recommended by administration. We'll now proceed to vote. All those in favor, please raise your right hand and say aye. All those opposed. Motion passes. Thank you so much. Thank you. Next agenda item 10.7 discuss and consider board approval to utilize 2017 bond savings for identified needs at Maid Creek High School. Welcome Miss Cassman. Good evening President Doyle,
Trustees and Dr. Gorski, I have six items this evening for your consideration. The first item is in regards to Maid Creek High School. During the process of a project closeout there are some additional needs identified that should complete the recent comprehensive renovation project. These items include safety and security cameras recommended for the interior and exterior of the building to support student safety, additional wayfinding signage to improve traffic flow around the campus for students and visitors, and replacement of tennis courts lights that have structural and electrical deficiencies. We have some remaining funding from the project and the additional amount being requested should complete the needs identified. Board members do we have any
questions hearing none we'll proceed with the motion madam president mr.
Lacey I move that the Board of Trustees approves the use of the 2017 bond savings for the identity identified need at May Creek High School as recommended
by the administration I have a motion by mr. Lacey a second by miss van that the Board of Trustees approves the use of the 2017 bond savings for identified needs at May Creek High School as recommended by administration we will now proceed to vote all those in favor please raise your right hand and say I. Others opposed? Motion passes. Continue, Ms. Casman.
Ms. The second item is in regards to the fourth safety and security package. This package will cover 13 campuses. In addition, we are anticipating grant funding in the amount of $1,293,071 from the Texas Education Agency 2019-2020 School Safety and Security Grant. We are currently in the process of this application approval.
Board members, do you have any questions?
Mr. Redman. Mr. Gassman, the security grant, is it pretty solid that we would get it? I mean, as far as what we know, is there any question to that?
I'll answer that and say that we have applied. We are in negotiations, meaning we're just working out a couple of details with TEA, but once we were notified, pretty much it's just an application process and we have completed that. I will note that this those funds are available as a result of Senate Bill 500 again what was mentioned as part of Positive in our audit and so Senate Bill 500 again is very much appreciated. It's going a long way to the needs of the students of our district
Can I make one comment absolutely Mr. Smith this guy's been an entire financial team. Thank y'all for Putting the detail work that y'all put in there. I know I didn't mention it earlier, but a clean report on an audit is a huge thing. And for me as a board member to be able to know that a question off the cuff like that, that you know your stuff, gives me confidence as we move forward as a district. So thank you.
Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Redman.
Madam President.
Yes, Mr. Lacey.
I move that the Board of Trustees awards the contract to Acme Architectural Hardware for the construction of district-wide safety and security upgrades. upgrades package number four as presented by administration.
I have a motion by Mr. Lacey, a second by Mr. Keller that the Board of Trustees awards a contract to Acme Architectural Hardware for the construction of district-wide safety and security upgrades package number four as presented by administration. We will now proceed to vote. All those in favor, please raise your right hand and say aye. Aye. All those opposed, motion passes. 10.9. Go ahead, Ms. Cassman.
The third item is regards to the approval of a contract to Jamala Construction for the construction of Junior High 17. Junior High 17 will accommodate the growth in the northwest sector of the district and is located at the intersection of Katie Hockley Road and Clay Road. I have representatives from my department, PBK, and Jamala present this evening.
Are there any questions? Hearing none, let's proceed.
Ms. Vann. I move the Board of Trustees awards a contract to Jermala Construction Company, Inc. for the construction of Junior High No. 17 as recommended by the administration.
Second.
Was that you, Bill?
Yes, ma'am.
Thank you, Mr. Lacey. I have a motion by Ms. Vann, a second by Mr. Lacey, that the Board of Trustees awards a contract to Jermala Construction Company, Inc. for the construction of Junior High No. 17 as recommended by the administration. We will now proceed to vote all those in favor. Please raise your right hand and say aye.
Aye.
All those opposed? Motion passes. Go ahead.
MS.
The fourth item is also in regards to Junior High 17. As part of the permit process with the City of Katy, a plat is required as we move through the process to continue construction and to move forward with the permitting process. CHAIRPERSON WONG Are there any questions?
MR.
Madam President.
CHAIRPERSON WONG Mr. Redman. MR.
I move that the Board of Trustees approves the plat for Junior High School number 17. CHAIRPERSON WONG Second.
MS.
I have a motion by Mr. Redman and a second by Ms. Vann that the Board of Trustees approves the plat for Junior High number 17. We will now proceed to vote. All those in favor, please raise your right hand and say aye. Aye. All those opposed? Motion passes. Final one, Ms. Cassidy.
No, two more.
Oh, I'm sorry, two more. Sorry. That's okay.
The fifth item pertains to the future development of a northwest facility. The 157 and 75 acre sites purchased in the last year required detention, wetland mitigation, and basins per Harris County Flood Control District. In addition, the Karis County flood control districts will require that this work be complete prior to the approval of any permits for any construction for up there in that area. So commencement of the work at this time will assist in meeting the future development datelines for this time. And I have representatives from Attico present this evening and they're helping us with those drawings and working with the county.
Thank you. Do we have any questions, Board Members?
Madam President.
Mr. Lacey.
I do have one question. I'm trying to remember and for some reason I have in my mind one is on one side of a road and one's
on the other correct 157 Katie Hockley Road 157 acres on the south side of Loganbaugh 75 acres on
the north side and are we going to have to go through any special design or anything like that for water flow to go underneath Loganbar are we going to have to be expending funds for that as
well or do we know that yet pretty much we're going to be doing work with Loganbaugh because because that's going to be serving both our sites. And that's what this project will also address. All right, perfect. Thank you.
Anyone else? Okay, let's proceed.
Madam President, I move that the Board of Trustees awards a contract to Attico LLC for design services necessary for the construction of a detention, mitigation, and overflow basin at a future Northwest facility development. Second.
I have a motion by Mr. Lacey, a second by Mr. Redmond, that the board of trustees awards a contract to attico llc for design services necessary for the construction of a detention mitigation and overflow basin at the future northwest facility development we will now proceed to vote all those in favor please raise your right hand and say aye
all those opposed promotion passes final one the final item pertains to a waterline easement to the north fork and water authority for work that will be required in front of alexander elementary
Are there any questions? Hearing none, we'll proceed.
Madam President.
Mr. Redmond.
I move that the Board of Trustees awards a water line easement to North Fort Bend Water Authority as depicted in the easement documented associated with Alexander Elementary School. Second.
I have a motion by Mr. Redmond, a second by Mr. Lacey that the Board of Trustees awards a water line easement to North Fort Bend Water Authority as depicted in the easement document associated with Alexander Elementary. We will now proceed to vote. All those in favor please raise your right hand and say aye. All those opposed motion passes. Agenda item, thank you so much Ms. Casper. Thank you. Agenda item 10.13 discuss and consider board approval of a resolution recognizing the partnership between Katy Independent School District and the American Heart Association. Dr. Grigorski.
Thank you Madam President. So we're bringing forward a resolution which is which is part of your packet in there with the American Heart Association, taking a look at our students in the vaping epidemic and e-cigarettes. In the fall semester, I had the opportunity to work with the AHA and about a dozen other superintendents all across the US here. And we all have the same problem in all of our communities. It's not a KD issue, it's a national issue here. Although we're seeing a trend line go down in the use of tobacco smoking, smoking. We're seeing a huge rise in e-cigarettes and vaping. And according to the AHA, you've got 5 million students all across the U.S. who are starting to get into this trend. And we're concerned about it. It's a concern in our community, and we've got to start doing something about that. So some of the things we're going to do is partner up with that AHA and see what we can do to educate. we've got a responsibility to educate our parents and our students about what's going on with vaping. Anybody can Google this. You know what I mean? You put it out there and you'll see that kids are getting addicted to nicotine and these big vape companies, they're targeting our youth. There's no doubt about that in my mind of what's going on. So it's about time that we do a little bit more in our community and we partner up with our parents and our community to put the message out there about what's going on with the vaping. Like I said, if you look out there and you see hundreds of kids getting ill on this, there's been deaths all across the country. It's very sad, and we've got to do something about that as a school district. So with that said, we're also seeing a rise in our community with our discipline and discipline-related offenses. It's getting to be more of an issue also not just with the vape-related nicotine pods that are going into these devices, but we're seeing a rise on the kids that are putting the THC oil and things like that in there and that's a huge issue you know I mean people don't understand the concentration of that THC in a vape pipe and what's going on with that on the on the other side of that I don't think people understand especially our students who do that that that is a state jail felony here in Texas with some pretty severe consequences of expulsion to a possible expulsion but at at least a mandatory removal off campus to our DAP. So I asked Mr. Graham, who works a lot with our discipline and his team, to put together some stats on that. Then I'm going to ask him to go ahead and share with our board and community that's here tonight about what's going on with vaping in our community. Hey, trustees, can you hear me?
Yes, sir.
So my office, one of the many things that we do is we support the discipline at the campus level for a variety of offenses. offenses. When we were looking at our level 2 and level 3 offenses related to tobacco use and or vaping and or THC, the numbers that we've seen over the past four years are pretty astonishing. If you look at the 16-17 school year compared to the 18-19 school year, which is the last year that we just had, the number of incidences on campus discipline discipline-related incidences has increased tenfold. Tenfold. And so I think that we need to consider that. And when I tell you incidences, documented incidences, right? Incidences where there's a discipline report done and we can attribute it back to a vape device. And so I think what do we talk about? Why do we have this increase? Is it something that we're doing locally? Are we paying more attention to it? But perhaps, because I think quite frankly, we as a country are paying more attention to it. I think given the deaths and the health issues that we're seeing nationwide, I think everybody's a little more sensitive to it. But we also see it as kind of like cigarettes were, kind of like the Joe Camel ads were targeted to children. Think about really when vaping started and And when it got very popular amongst that generation of students and that age group was the flavored pods, right? I mean, this is going to be the cool new thing to do. And for those of you who have ever used a Juul or seen a Juul, it looks like a USB. I mean, it's about this big and it looks kind of cool, right? And so I think with the targeted push that some of these vape manufacturers have had towards youth, also with the fact that we're more sensitive to it because we realize the health issues of it now we've seen an increase but I will tell you we're continuing to see it increase not that just we've seen a tenfold increase over the past like I said three years but even this year the number is still rising one of the things that's concerning about that I will tell you as parents as as a parent myself is that THC you know we understand that that's the act of drug and marijuana can be put in one of those pods and vaped at a very very high level and in fact our laws in the state of Texas haven't kept up with it to the extent that if we find a student that has THC in their vape it's a felony offense and it's an automatic expulsion we don't have the state of Texas has tied our hands so those students actually go to the JJAEP campus that's just one of those areas where the legislature they only meet every two years and we can't sometimes create laws to keep up with the technology but I will tell you from a campus perspective it is something that our principals and assistant principals counselors teachers deal with every day I don't know what the financial value is of it but I can't tell you it's something that we spend a lot of time and a lot of effort looking at resources and how we curb it, which is I think how the partnership with the AHA came up. And I think Dr. Gorski can tell you more about his invitation.
Yeah, like I said, this isn't anything surprising to anybody, what's going around the nation. So we've done our part. We've done a few things so far. We built some things into the curriculum with the catch-my-breath type curriculum that's aimed at secondary students. We've done a few PSAs, we're putting out some videos, we're doing some social media type things, made some posters, we've started posting those in the schools and giving those to the campuses. But there's more that can be done here in educating and this is our first step. We'll put together our resolution with AHA. They've agreed to partner and come out and as I'll quote what they said, come out and do some of the heavy lifting to educate our parents and our community about this and see if this is a problem we can tackle together in the upcoming year.
Thank you both. Board members, do you have any questions?
I have a question please, Madam Chair. Ms. Champagne. Okay. So I really am so excited about this relationship because I think whatever we can do to help combat this would be great. I have a child that's in high school and I see it While I hear it from her that there's a there's a problem But I have also heard from some other People and then I've done some little bit of research about vapor detectors that some school districts are using in the restrooms and Some of these districts are having really great success with that and I'm just curious if we could look into the possibility of
something like that certainly machine saying champagne something we can look into with the vapor detectives it's it's kind of my feeling that's kind of a mix bag right now but it's worthy of an exploration in there of course there's a cost in there but I think a lot of people understand how that thing works so you put the detector in the restroom usually because that's where people like to go and hide in there and then you can get an alert when it when it beeps but but then who's going to get down there? So I'm a little concerned about them in that respect, that we tie up a lot of our resources. Who's going to go down there and do that? Okay, we can check some video cameras. We can see evidence coming in and out, which students are coming in and out of there, but a little hesitant on some issues with that, especially when it comes to privacy with the students. You were in there. People were vaping. Okay, 14 people on a passing period could be in the restroom. It goes off. Well, which of those 14 people were involved? We're not really sure which 14, so we round them all up and we expend all this time and energy. And maybe 13 of 14 were in there just using the restroom. So there's some legitimate concerns about those vapor kind of sensors that are in there. So we've looked at it. We haven't explored it in great detail, but we can certainly look into some of the districts. If they've had successes with those, I'd be anxious to know what success they've had and how they've kind of run some of the traps that I've just described and heard about that are the negative side of those things. But certainly worthy of discussion, and if we think it will curtail that. Most of the things we're focused on right now are going to be on the proactive side, and that's more of a reactive measure in there to kind of catch those folks. I want to put a lot of our resources into educating folks, hopefully, so they don't even take that step into that direction. direction.
CHAIRMAN BRYANT LORENZO.
HEARING NONE, LET'S PROCEED. MS. VANESSA. MS. I MOVE THAT THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES APPROVES THE RESOLUTION RECOGNIZING THE PARTNERSHIP BETWEEN CAYTIE INDEPENDENT SCHOOL DISTRICT AND THE AMERICAN HEART ASSOCIATION. CHAIRMAN BRYANT LORENZO.
I HAVE A MOTION BY MS. VANESSA, A SECOND BY MR. KELLER, THAT THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES APPROVES THE RESOLUTION RECOGNIZING THE PARTNERSHIP between Katy Independent School District and the American Heart Association. We will now proceed to vote. All those in favor, please raise your right hand and say aye.
Aye.
All those opposed, motion passes. Next on our agenda is discuss and consider board adoption of the order calling for a regular election of school board trustees to be held May 2, 2020 and authorization of the... administration to provide official notice of the election as required by Texas Election Code. Mr. Graham.
Uh, trustees, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to present from the die so that I can pull the document up on my computer. Um, what we have here is your standard, this is board election time, this is something that every one of you has seen and or approved. Uh, what I will remind our general public is that early voting starts starts on April 20th and we have the same five early voting sites that we've that we've had in the past the Leonard Merrill Center Seven Lakes High School Taylor Cinco Ranch and Wharton Ranch High School we will also have 13 day of voting sites those will be published they're going to be very consistent with how they have been in the past so this is nothing new I don't see any real changes that you need to be aware of happy to take any questions you may have board members
Members, do you have any questions? All right. Let's proceed.
Madam President.
Mr. Redmond.
I move that the Board of Trustees adopts the order calling for a regular election of school board trustees to be held May 2, 2020, and authorizes the administration to provide official notice of the election as required by the Texas Election Code.
I have a motion by Mr. Redmond, a second by Mr. Keller, that the Board of Trustees adopts the order calling for a regular election of school board trustees to be held May 2, 2020 and authorizes the administration to provide official notice of the election as required by the Texas Election Code. We will now proceed to vote. All those in favor, please raise your right hand and say aye. Aye. All those opposed, motion passes. Agenda item 10.15, discuss and consider board approval of the minutes of December 2019.
Board meeting. Madam President. Mr. Lacey. I move that the Board of Trustees approves the minutes of the board meeting held in December 2019.
2019 I have a motion by mr. Lacey a second by miss van that the Board of Trustees approves the minutes of the board meeting held in December of 2019 we will now proceed to vote all those in favor. Please raise your right hand and say aye all those opposed promotion passes Information items the quarterly investment report the board was provided with a copy of this quarterly investment report Donated items to Katie independent school district the board was provided with a copy of the donated items to Katie ISD our next regular board meeting will be held on Monday February 24th 2020 there being no further business before the board this meeting is adjourned the time is 9 15 p.m thank you all
Official documents
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Motions and votes
Recorded actions
MOTION 001 · AGENDA 4.1
PassedIt is recommended that the Board of Trustees names Sally Gupton as the principal of Creech Elementary School as recommended by the superintendent in Closed Meeting.
6 Yes · 0 No
| Trustee | Vote |
|---|---|
| ashley-vann | Yes |
| bill-lacy | Yes |
| courtney-doyle | Yes |
| dawn-champagne | Yes |
| duke-keller | Yes |
| lance-redmon | Yes |
MOTION 002 · AGENDA 4.2
PassedIt is recommended that the Board of Trustees names Paul Landis as Executive Director for Transportation as recommended by the superintendent in Closed Meeting.
6 Yes · 0 No
| Trustee | Vote |
|---|---|
| ashley-vann | Yes |
| bill-lacy | Yes |
| courtney-doyle | Yes |
| dawn-champagne | Yes |
| duke-keller | Yes |
| lance-redmon | Yes |
MOTION 003 · AGENDA 4.3
PassedIt is recommended that the Board of Trustees approves the superintendent's annual evaluation and approves an amendment to the superintendent's contract as discussed in Closed Meeting.
6 Yes · 0 No
| Trustee | Vote |
|---|---|
| ashley-vann | Yes |
| bill-lacy | Yes |
| courtney-doyle | Yes |
| dawn-champagne | Yes |
| duke-keller | Yes |
| lance-redmon | Yes |
MOTION 004 · AGENDA 10.1
PassedIt is recommended that the Board of Trustees approves the 2018-2019 annual financial audit report.
6 Yes · 0 No
| Trustee | Vote |
|---|---|
| ashley-vann | Yes |
| bill-lacy | Yes |
| courtney-doyle | Yes |
| dawn-champagne | Yes |
| duke-keller | Yes |
| lance-redmon | Yes |
MOTION 005 · AGENDA 10.2
PassedIt is recommended that the Board of Trustees approves the District's November 2019 financial reports.
6 Yes · 0 No
| Trustee | Vote |
|---|---|
| ashley-vann | Yes |
| bill-lacy | Yes |
| courtney-doyle | Yes |
| dawn-champagne | Yes |
| duke-keller | Yes |
| lance-redmon | Yes |
MOTION 006 · AGENDA 10.3
PassedIt is recommended that the Board of Trustees approves the District's January 2020 budget amendments.
6 Yes · 0 No
| Trustee | Vote |
|---|---|
| ashley-vann | Yes |
| bill-lacy | Yes |
| courtney-doyle | Yes |
| dawn-champagne | Yes |
| duke-keller | Yes |
| lance-redmon | Yes |
MOTION 007 · AGENDA 10.4
PassedIt is recommended that the Board of Trustees approves the formation of a 2020 Community Bond Advisory Committee and approves the Committee Charter.
6 Yes · 0 No
| Trustee | Vote |
|---|---|
| ashley-vann | Yes |
| bill-lacy | Yes |
| courtney-doyle | Yes |
| dawn-champagne | Yes |
| duke-keller | Yes |
| lance-redmon | Yes |
MOTION 008 · AGENDA 10.5
PassedIt is recommended that the Board of Trustees approves the proposals for flooring replacements at Exley Elementary, Franz Elementary, Rhoads Elementary, Beckendorff Junior High and the Support Services Complex to Tarkett in the amount of $2,124,384.53 utilizing the Choice Partners Contract #17/020CG-15 and a total project cost not to exceed $2,144,384.53.
6 Yes · 0 No
| Trustee | Vote |
|---|---|
| ashley-vann | Yes |
| bill-lacy | Yes |
| courtney-doyle | Yes |
| dawn-champagne | Yes |
| duke-keller | Yes |
| lance-redmon | Yes |
MOTION 009 · AGENDA 10.6
PassedIt is recommended that the Board of Trustees approves the Competitive Sealed Proposal (CSP) delivery method, utilization of 2017 Bond Savings as the funding source, and estimated project budget of $2,777,000 for the renovations of barns 1-7 at the Young Agricultural Facility.
6 Yes · 0 No
| Trustee | Vote |
|---|---|
| ashley-vann | Yes |
| bill-lacy | Yes |
| courtney-doyle | Yes |
| dawn-champagne | Yes |
| duke-keller | Yes |
| lance-redmon | Yes |
MOTION 010 · AGENDA 10.7
PassedIt is recommended that the Board of Trustees approves the use of 2017 Bond Savings for interior and exterior security cameras, wayfinding signage, and replacing tennis court lights at Mayde Creek High School in the amount not to exceed $625,556.
6 Yes · 0 No
| Trustee | Vote |
|---|---|
| ashley-vann | Yes |
| bill-lacy | Yes |
| courtney-doyle | Yes |
| dawn-champagne | Yes |
| duke-keller | Yes |
| lance-redmon | Yes |
MOTION 011 · AGENDA 10.8
PassedIt is recommended that the Board of Trustees awards a contract to Acme Architectural Hardware for the construction of district wide safety and security upgrades package #4 in the amount of $3,688,750 and approves the total project cost not to exceed $4,242,000.
6 Yes · 0 No
| Trustee | Vote |
|---|---|
| ashley-vann | Yes |
| bill-lacy | Yes |
| courtney-doyle | Yes |
| dawn-champagne | Yes |
| duke-keller | Yes |
| lance-redmon | Yes |
MOTION 012 · AGENDA 10.9
PassedIt is recommended that the Board of Trustees awards a contract to Drymalla Construction Company, Inc. for the construction of Junior High #17 in the amount of $43,573,000 and approves the total project cost not to exceed $52,357,595.
6 Yes · 0 No
| Trustee | Vote |
|---|---|
| ashley-vann | Yes |
| bill-lacy | Yes |
| courtney-doyle | Yes |
| dawn-champagne | Yes |
| duke-keller | Yes |
| lance-redmon | Yes |
MOTION 013 · AGENDA 10.10
PassedIt is recommended that the Board of Trustees approves the plat for Junior High School #17.
6 Yes · 0 No
| Trustee | Vote |
|---|---|
| ashley-vann | Yes |
| bill-lacy | Yes |
| courtney-doyle | Yes |
| dawn-champagne | Yes |
| duke-keller | Yes |
| lance-redmon | Yes |
MOTION 014 · AGENDA 10.11
PassedIt is recommended that the Board of Trustees awards a contract to Adico, LLC for design services necessary for the construction of a detention, mitigation, and overflow basin at a future northwest facility development.
6 Yes · 0 No
| Trustee | Vote |
|---|---|
| ashley-vann | Yes |
| bill-lacy | Yes |
| courtney-doyle | Yes |
| dawn-champagne | Yes |
| duke-keller | Yes |
| lance-redmon | Yes |
MOTION 015 · AGENDA 10.12
PassedIt is recommended that the Board of Trustees awards a water line easement to North Fort Bend Water Authority as depicted in the attached easement document associated with Alexander Elementary.
6 Yes · 0 No
| Trustee | Vote |
|---|---|
| ashley-vann | Yes |
| bill-lacy | Yes |
| courtney-doyle | Yes |
| dawn-champagne | Yes |
| duke-keller | Yes |
| lance-redmon | Yes |
MOTION 016 · AGENDA 10.13
PassedIt is recommended that the Board of Trustees approve the Resolution recognizing the partnership between Katy Independent School District and the American Heart Association.
6 Yes · 0 No
| Trustee | Vote |
|---|---|
| ashley-vann | Yes |
| bill-lacy | Yes |
| courtney-doyle | Yes |
| dawn-champagne | Yes |
| duke-keller | Yes |
| lance-redmon | Yes |
MOTION 017 · AGENDA 10.14
PassedIt is recommended that the Board adopts the Order calling for a regular election of School Board Trustees to be held May 2, 2020 and authorizes the Administration to provide official notice of the election as required by the Texas Election Code.
6 Yes · 0 No
| Trustee | Vote |
|---|---|
| ashley-vann | Yes |
| bill-lacy | Yes |
| courtney-doyle | Yes |
| dawn-champagne | Yes |
| duke-keller | Yes |
| lance-redmon | Yes |
MOTION 018 · AGENDA 10.15
PassedIt is recommended that the Board of Trustees approves the minutes of the Board meeting held in December 2019.
6 Yes · 0 No
| Trustee | Vote |
|---|---|
| ashley-vann | Yes |
| bill-lacy | Yes |
| courtney-doyle | Yes |
| dawn-champagne | Yes |
| duke-keller | Yes |
| lance-redmon | Yes |