Noting that a quorum is present, I hereby call this work study meeting of the Board of Trustees of Katy Independent School District to order.
Katy ISD · Work Study Meeting
Katy ISD Work Study Meeting, September 15, 2025
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- 0:04 to 0:29 1. Call to Order
- 0:29 to 1:18 2. Pledges of Allegiance
- 1:18 to 9:08 3. Public Comment
- 9:08 to 9:28 4. Closed Meeting
- 9:28 to 10:09 5. Reconvene from Closed Meeting – The Board will reconvene from Closed Meeting.
- 10:09 to 1:13:21 6. Reports
- 1:13:21 to 1:18:38 7.1 Discuss and consider Board adoption of the 2025-2026 Maintenance and Operations Tax Rate and the 2025-2026 Debt Service Tax Rate.
- 1:18:38 to 1:20:53 7.2 Discuss and consider Board approval of the July 2025 Financial Reports.
- 1:20:53 to 1:24:38 7.3 Discuss and consider Board approval of nominating candidates for positions on the Boards of Directors for the Waller County Appraisal District, Fort Bend Central Appraisal District, and Harris County Appraisal District.
- 1:24:38 to 1:30:05 7.4 Discuss and consider Board approval of the September 2025 budget amendments.
- 1:30:05 to 1:32:45 7.5 Discuss and consider approval of an order authorizing the replacement of the Bank of New York Mellon Trust Company.
- 1:32:45 to 1:44:51 7.6 Discuss and consider approval of the Voluntary Benefit Products for Plan Year 2026.
- 1:44:51 to 2:44:30 7.7 Discuss and Consider Health Plan for Plan Year 2026.
- 2:44:30 to 2:46:21 7.8 Discuss and consider Board approval of claims administration for unemployment compensation by TASB Risk Management Fund.
- 2:46:21 to 2:47:09 7.9 Discuss and consider Board approval of the District Performance Objectives.
- 2:47:09 to 2:48:49 7.10 Discuss and consider Board approval of the Campus Performance Objectives.
- 2:48:49 to 2:58:19 7.11 Discuss and consider Board approval for the superintendent to prepare, sign, and submit a waiver application to the State Commissioner of Education for elementary school campuses that exceed the allowable class size of 22:1, in addition to campuses that could potentially exceed the ratio due to increased enrollment during the 2025 - 2026 school year.
- 2:58:19 to 3:07:14 8. Information Items
- 3:07:14 to 3:07:28 9. Future Meetings
Full transcript
Automated transcript, not human verified. It is a way to find a passage, not a quotation.
1. Call to Order
Today is Monday, September 15, 2025, and the time is 5 p.m.
Dr. Grigorski, will you verify that we are in compliance with the provisions of Texas Open Meetings Act with regard to the notice for this meeting?
Mr. Redman, I do confirm we're in compliance with the provisions of the Texas Open Meeting Act for our meeting tonight.
2. Pledges of Allegiance
Thank you.
KDIC Police Officer Robert Lister will lead us in the Pledge of Allegiance tonight.
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.
one state under God one indivisible thank you do we have any scouts in the
audience this evening no we do not this time the Board of Trustees will give
members of the public an opportunity to speak in accordance with Katie I see
3. Public Comment
board policy BED local as defined by board policy speakers who signed up by
2 p.m. on Monday September 15th provided their first last name mailing address
list the number of specific agenda items they tend to address designate whether
they reside in Katy I seen if they have children in Katy I see schools will be
allowed to address the board speakers that fail to sign up in advance with
required mission information will not be called to speak neither is this we need
to update this right this update with how we're doing now we've made some
changes so tonight if you signed up by 2 p.m you're eligible to speak whether you showed up
and signed in or not speakers who signed up to speak on posted agenda items will be allowed three
minutes to speak if a speaker is not finished speaking at the end of their three minutes the
audio will turn off if speakers wish to share written material with the board please provide
10 copies to the secretary for board services before the meeting begins for board members the
superintendent the chief communications officer and permanent record if a speaker is not attempted to
resolve a matter administratively through proper channels as stated in board policy.
The residing officer's designee shall advise the speaker to seek resolution through the
appropriate policy.
Finally, pursuant to Texas Government Code Section 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 policy,
FNG local, DGBA local, CKE local, or GF local.
Our speakers will be called forward in the order they signed up to speak.
Tonight we have two speakers on agenda items.
The first is Sandy Cuevas, followed by Carrie Lowry.
Good evening, members of the board.
My name is Sandy Cuevas.
KDISD shaped me as a student and now as a parent and teacher.
I want to make sure it continues to give every child the same opportunities I had.
I love this community, and I'm deeply invested in the success of our schools,
not only for my own children, but for every student who walks into our classrooms each day.
I'm here to respectfully voice my opinion to the proposal that would allow the superintendent to submit a waiver to exceed
The 22 to 1 student to teacher ratio as a parent I can tell you firsthand that class size already impacts my children
They come home telling me how noisy it can be and how hard it is to focus
And how difficult it is to get the help they need when so many other students are demanding the teachers attention
Their experiences reflect what we know to be true smaller class sizes create better learning environments as a teacher
I see the other side of the struggle every day with every additional student the time I'm able to spend helping guiding and encouraging each
Child decreases it doesn't matter how dedicated or experienced a teacher is when you stretch too thin
The quality of education suffers and our students are better than just enough
They deserve the best that we can give them a proven this waiver will may seem like a quick fix to enrollment challenges
But the cost will be paid for by our children
children. Larger class sizes means less individualized support, more distractions, and more students
slipping through the cracks. This is not the kind of education that KDIAZ is known for
and not what our families want for their children. Instead of increasing class sizes, I urge
the district and the state to pursue real solutions. Hiring more teachers and paraprofessionals,
exploring creative use of space to create more classrooms, improving teacher retention
by offering competitive pay, manageable workloads, and strong support systems, and
advocating at the state level for increased funding. We don't need to lower
the standard by waiving class size limits. We need to raise the bar by
investing in real sustainable solutions that put kids first. I urge you tonight
to stand with parents, teachers, and most importantly students by rejecting this
waiver request. Let's keep class sizes at a level where true learning can happen,
where children feel seen and supported, and where teachers can continue to give
of the high quality education this district prides itself on.
If we want Katy ISD to remain a district of excellence,
we must keep class sizes small enough for excellence to happen.
Thank you.
Next will be Ms. Carrie Lowry.
Good evening, Trustees, President Redmond, Dr. Gagorski, Cabinet members,
members, fellow employees, and the Katy community. My name is Carrie Lowry and I'm a proud 25-year
employee of Katy ISD, a graduate of KISD, and a parent of two KISD graduates. Tonight, we will
hear about the rising cost of health care. I don't think anyone realistically expects to pay less.
However, when we're asked to pay more and the quality of what we're getting is less than what
we should expect to access, given our 8,000 members and being minutes from the finest medical center
in the world, we have a problem. We are losing teachers to surrounding districts who might pay
more for insurance but get better benefits.
Our plan is creating delays, denials, confusion and frustration for employees.
When you go to our benefits site and you look for an in-network provider, you can find a
list, but if you call, you're often provided with a different list.
I personally have then called KDISD and received a third list that was different from the first
two.
Employees sometimes find that when they go to the appointment, they're turned away with
information that they're not on that Memorial Hermann plan.
This is creating a delay in care.
In network doctors sometimes request tests to gain more information towards the course of care.
It would be assumed that those tests would be covered.
We're finding denial of those tests is occurring too often.
One employee passed out several times at work, was told to go to the ER, then told to go to a cardiologist.
He did and was told he needed a stress test.
Aetna has denied his test, so he's trying to find the cheapest place to get a stress test to pay out of pocket.
Another employee paid out of pocket for an ultrasound after her annual breast
exam warranted it and it was denied. My own husband is having an 8 to 12 hour
surgery on Wednesday and his cardiologist wanted him to receive a
stress test before his surgery to be sure his heart was functioning well
enough to withstand the surgery. It was denied. We don't have time to final file
an appeal, wait for a peer-to-peer review, be denied again, so he will undergo the
surgery on Wednesday without that assurance. My husband has stage 4 bladder
our cancer. We started going to the ER and doctors in February and it took
three months to get this diagnosis. I'm convinced that if the test ordered in
early March were conducted then we would be facing a less daunting future. Even a
PET scan was denied. Two appeals, peer-to-peer review, we paid the $2,000
out of pocket so that our oncologist could make the best plan for my husband.
I was told by Katie by ISD benefits administrator that we would get it
covered. It has not been covered. I hope what I hope that you hear from me most
is this is not just about the money. We're asking for a plan that values
access, timelines, and quality of care, not just lower premiums on paper. Please
consider bringing back the Benefits Advisory Committee to give employees a
voice in their health care. Explore options that expand access to providers,
balance cost control with quality so we don't lose good people over health care.
We don't mind paying more if it means we get better care, but right now we're
paying more and getting less. And I'll be honest with you, nothing hurts me more
than watching amazing teachers who love katie and our kids leave because they feel like their
health and their family's health are worth more somewhere else thank you thank you
this concludes the open forum portion of our meeting the board will now convene and close
meeting is authorized under section 551.001 of the texas government code for the following purposes
4. Closed Meeting
Texas government code 551.071, 551.076, and 551.129.
One too many Cheetos.
The board will now reconvene in an open meeting.
Today is Monday, September 15, 2025, and the time is 6.32 p.m.
5. Reconvene from Closed Meeting – The Board will reconvene from Closed Meeting.
On behalf of my colleagues, I welcome everyone to this evening's work-study meeting.
Each board member received the agenda and documentation for this meeting on Wednesday, September 10, 2025.
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, although we won't be taking action tonight.
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.
We'll move on to Section 6 or Item 6.1 KDIC-AI Administrative Roadmap for Innovation and Efficiency with our presenter, Dr. John Launay, Chief Information Officer.
6. Reports
Good evening, President Redman, Superintendent Grygorski, and board members.
Tonight, I want to share with you the KDISD AI administrative roadmap for innovation and efficiency.
Education has evolved with technology over the years. We started with the internet in the 90s
and then moved to mobile devices and bring your own device in the 10s and one-to-one Chromebooks
and cloud access in the 20s. Today we are entering a new era of AI automation and
it is not just the next tool, we think it is the next chapter in how schools
operate. AI is already quietly improving our district and making an impact with
productivity and document integration, operational support with book reviews or
processing invoices and with access to AI tools like Copilot, Gemini and chat GPT.
and in advanced platforms created by KTISD to drive AI model development.
Here are some examples.
The black screen on the upper left corner shows how the district-built AI agent
cut web filtering help desk tickets turnaround time as soon as it went live.
Also, on the opposite corner, librarians are using locally developed AI agents to review books in accordance with our policies and laws.
AI is already integrated into applications and available to staff on the MyKD Cloud.
Today, we're taking the first step of many into the era of AI automation with the KDISD AI
administrative for innovation and efficiency. This initiative emphasizes administrative functions.
functions. Our vision for AI administrative is simple. Leverage AI to make the district
more efficient so our people can spend more time focusing on students and families. Basically,
free staff to focus more on people not the processes
so administrative provides AI administrative provides the core
core features that serve as building blocks for AI driven customer service.
Many of these core features will be integrated into our legacy virtual high
school initiative that the district is about to launch next year.
And Ms. Hack, who is a big fan of AI, will be presenting this next week to you.
and we will be integrating a lot of those building blocks into it and one of
those building blocks is the it's is the legacy virtual high school I'm sorry
Sorry, we're missing some slides on this one.
So forgive me, some of my slides here don't match this.
But I'm going to be covering those missing slides anyway
because they're important.
So one of these building blocks is
going to be basically integrating all these features
into the legacy virtual high school.
And this is basically going to guide our students and parents
through the enrollment and registration processes,
offering 24-7 bilingual support via both chat and voice channels.
These agents, when integrated into this environment,
into this virtual high school will answer common enrollment and course
selection questions in real time or refer it to a specialist as needed. They
will provide parents with immediate help reducing frustration and waiting times,
ensure families have access to information at any hour regardless of
language barriers. It will be bilingual. We will start with English and
in Spanish. The result is a streamlined experience, faster resolutions, and reduced burden on
staff, freeing them to handle more complex cases.
Another building block is what we refer to as the AI Help Desk Assistant. The AI Help
disc assistant guides staff through common and routine fixes in technology
24-7 and also bilingual English and Spanish escalating when needed to human
support this model can be replicated to other areas like operations and
maintenance and it translates into faster 24-7 multilingual reliable
reliable support for staff, students, and parents.
The AI receptionist model, another building block, greets callers, answers questions,
routes, calls, freeing front office staff to handle complex tasks.
It can support multiple languages as well, available beyond regular hours, and relays
messages via email when staff are unavailable reducing workload extending
service and improving response speed
another AI building block is a chat bot model supports intelligent communication
via text in a chat on a district website at ESC and campuses. It's available 24-7,
answers parent questions, again in English and Spanish, and eventually will
extend those to other languages without waiting for business hours. It can answer
most common questions and escalates to appropriate staff when necessary, either
by sending an email or a text message for follow-ups. It's 24-axis, which means fewer calls and emails.
Another one of those AI building blocks is the AI building axis assistant model.
model. It is placed at a safe location at the main entrance of a school. It can interact
with visitors via voice to facilitate visitors' access. It can answer basic access questions,
validate appointments, and once confirmed, can guide the visitor through the badging
process using a nearby badging panel, all while staff remains safe inside at the front
front desk. It can also escalate to a live receptionist as needed. This enhances campus
security and safety. The enrollment assistant model will help parents fill out enrollment
forms correctly the first time, reducing delays and frustration while it reduces staff workload
and improved parents experience. It will be available 24-7 and will support
support multiple languages. It will make enrollment easier, faster, and less
stressful. The AI call-out assistant model automates targeted communications
to help with the annual enrollment updates. To ensure compliance with
programs eligibility and regulations. It cuts workload like while keeping
families informed and supported. By the end of this implementation we expect AI
to handle at least 30% of common inquiries across the district. That means
a reduced workload for staff, faster enrollment with higher completion rates,
and 24-7 bilingual support for parents. We will also strengthen campus safety
with smarter building access. We are taking a phased, careful approach, a
a measured step-by-step rollout to ensure success.
It includes pilots, expansion, and deployment.
Phase 1 focuses on pilots at ESC.
It will cover piloting these specialized building blocks,
these AI models for chatbots, voice assistants, building access,
and the integration into the legacy virtual high school this is a proving
ground for district-wide adoption phase two expands pilot to include three
schools for initial campus testing the campus limited pilot expansion for
for chat pots, receptionists, all these building blocks
will be a controlled test to measure and adjust
for real world impact at the campus level.
Phase three, under controlled expansion,
we will grow to 40 schools.
We will be scaling while keeping
close oversight and adjustment.
By the end of this project, which we estimate will take anywhere from 12 to 18 months, we will have full deployment of the AI administrative initiative across all campuses and ESC, including the Legacy Virtual High School.
This step-by-step rollout ensures we learn, adjust, and build trust at every stage.
Our goal is for AI to manage at least 30% of routine inquiries delivering bilingual
24-7 support across our campuses.
We believe with these capabilities, KDISD is setting the standard for AI-driven school
school operations, improving efficiency, expanding access, and lowering costs.
Implementing AI requires investment in people, platforms, and operations.
Costs include development platforms, usage, fees, product maintenance, training, and other infrastructure elements, along with developing new skills and roles.
By building many of those tools in-house using enterprise resources provided by
leading vendors, we can reduce costs while tailoring solutions to our needs.
Ultimately, the return on investment will show higher productivity, better quality,
and lower operational costs.
Finally, all transitions are naturally accompanied
by a healthy dose of nerves and concerns.
I want to emphasize this is not about replacing people.
It is about empowering them.
By taking on repetitive, time-consuming tasks,
masks, this will allow our staff to focus on what matters most, our students and parents.
KDISD has the opportunity to set the national standard for how schools can responsibly and
effectively use AI to streamline operation while increasing productivity and lowering
costs.
With your support, we can lead with vision, innovation, and responsibility.
And thank you. I welcome any questions you have.
Questions, Board?
Mr. President, I happen to have a lot of little questions.
Thank you very much, Mr. Alaudone, for the presentation.
First, I want to make sure I understand, are you developing this in-house?
You said that towards the end, I believe.
Yes.
Primarily, would you say?
Yes.
I mean, this is an early conceptual presentation, but ...
We are developing this in-house, and we are using development tools provided by major
companies.
companies, a lot of big companies, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon actually have a lot
of those platforms that we are using to develop this environment.
Sure.
Okay.
I just, I read a quote, and I'm sure you can appreciate this, and I'm not being a naysayer
or anything, but part of AI is we get answers quickly.
We're a society that wants it now, right?
And efficiency is beautiful.
I agree.
but sometimes it's the wrong answer, right?
And in the area of security,
it makes me uncomfortable to hear about building access,
and I'm sure that would be triple, quadruple checked,
but what thoughts are there on mistakes
that an AI bot could make with building access security?
Right. So these platforms definitely have to have a lot of guardrails to manage what kind of information they provide and control also how they behave.
So we're focusing on really simple processes, simple inquiries that we provide these platforms
with very specific information about how to react and how to respond and how to behave.
That if it goes, if the interaction goes beyond what we specify, we instruct these models
to basically call a live person to deal with that situation.
So with building access, for example,
all they're going to do basically is get basic information
about who are you here to see,
and then that model is going to get your name,
and then the person you want to meet with.
They will place a call to that office
to confirm the appointment,
and then if confirmed then they will guide that person and if you saw that image where there's a
badging system next to it they will guide him through the badging system and then once that
that the person clears they will call the receptionist or somebody to basically allow
this person to enter the building so yeah with that process we make sure first of all this whole
All interaction is happening outside the receptionist area
where now they pretty much have to do it right there,
but this happens outside.
That's a good point.
Okay, thank you.
And then with the,
I just wanna add,
with ChatGPT,
or even the CEO, Sam Altman, has stated
right that he's surprised at how much we depend on chat GPT to give the answer
and that many times it's it's not correct so just I say that in light of
that this is a little different if you're building it in-house but just
we're only we're as good as the information we feed the bot right so
it's critical in certain areas that it's fed very well for example the light like
our policies and and what we the board have put in place I'm hoping the bot
would be built really well and in light of library book reviews my understanding
was you know obviously it would need to be fed with policy but that there was a
dependency on to review books it depended on PDFs of the book there's the
The bot needed the PDF of the book, but we don't have PDFs of all books, correct?
Right.
So these agents that we developed also in-house, and I showed a sample of this, they have two modes.
One is if you have the content in-house, you feed it the content, and it can go through.
massive number of pages in no time and analyze it and you can actually have, you can ask it for confirmations on paragraphs.
Can you read this page again? Can you tell me the context?
Or the other mode it has is if you don't have the content.
If you don't have the content, if you provide it with the title of the book and the publisher,
publisher, it will go and search the internet for any reviews out there, for any content
that may be available, any kind of information available about this book and it will bring
it to you.
It will tell you this is basically what everybody's talking about, about this book.
Now, this is not as good as having the content, but it does provide a lot of good information
about that publication.
And some of it is actually ranking
from other reviews that were done online.
Okay.
You know, and it's probably fair to ask library services
how it's been going,
because they've been using this roughly for six months,
would you say, roughly?
A year?
Probably a year.
I think to answer your question on, yes, it does, the PDF, if it had the content of the
whole book, that's difficult to get.
What this particular, we call it AIR, tool has helped us do is confirm upfront if the
book is in violation.
With everything that it scours, the information, is it in violation of EFB, FA, the four Texas
penal codes that it could violate?
If it's elementary, is it content per House Bill 1525 that requires parental opt-in?
We've dumped all that into it.
So what the book will do is if it can confirm, and lots of times it can, it's harmful material,
it's sexually explicit, or it requires parental permission, high school only, that type of
content right there that tells us how we need to move forward with it.
Does it need to be removed because it's one of the four Texas penal codes?
If it can't confirm any of that, at least we've eliminated some of them we don't have
to read in its entirety.
If we can't confirm any of that, then that book goes on, gets divvied out for someone
to read internally.
But it's like it's becoming more and more intuitive.
It can even, because of all the journal reviews of particular, of the books, it can find excerpts
and give us those excerpts that will take us to that particular part of the book to kind of scan and read.
So it's really helped us refine our internal review process.
It sounds really promising.
There's exceptions, and so I'm trying to figure out when I hear from a parent right now of a book
that seemingly I don't think should be there, what would be the reason for that if we have AI employed?
If the book is on the shelf right now?
Yep.
Yep. If you've become aware of a book, just like we become aware of books all the time for whatever reason, neighboring districts, we immediately put them under internal review.
I guess what I'm saying is AI is fast and it's supposedly thorough and the input could be all at once.
So have all our books been reviewed through the AI tool?
No, we have over 500,000.
So what are the iterations that you do with that?
we have book we put quantity Q huh quantity wise roughly like we have 1.1
million on the shelves or those aren't unique titles though so I'm just curious
how quickly it could be done 50 a week and we're internally reviewing books
across the district using the tool I'll use the last Friday the first library
librarians meeting that's the first thing went over trained the new
librarian so that they're deploying it and calling their books and using it for
their inventory so is has there been a increase in efficiency with reviews with
the AI over this last year in fact today we meet on Mondays and there were some
books that were found in violation I have been removed okay thank you board
Okay.
Yeah, I just would want the results.
I know productivity is great and efficiency, but I don't want results stunted.
I want them to be good.
And that has to have an alternative plan when the AI result isn't quite right.
And I like the way you spoke about building access.
That makes sense to me.
And all of our library services process, et cetera.
We're using it across the district. I believe we're very efficient and we're consistently and constantly reviewing books to make sure they're compliant.
Okay. Thank you. I have a question.
Ms. Gellman?
So mine's more towards data, the data itself.
So when you're taking in all this data, let's just say, or what the plan is to take in all of this data that you're getting from inquiries or from, we'll just say, like personal information that you'd be checking in at the desk or anything like that, who holds that data?
Yeah, good question.
So these agents will store, it actually will have a complete transcript.
If you have a conversation with it, voice or text, it will keep the transcript.
We actually will hold all that data.
We can manage it.
Either we can wipe it out or we can store it, retain it for a certain period of time.
That would be available for us.
We own the data with all these agents.
I would think it would be hard to just wipe it out at some point because you're hoping
that the system is, for lack of a better word,
learning based, that's the AI,
is it's learning based off of what's being input into it
constantly, so.
Yeah, it actually, those agents,
we don't really want them to learn so much.
I agree with you.
So what we do, we structure them.
This is different than the general agents.
So we tell them basically strict guidelines.
We give them strict guidelines and strict, very precise information to use.
And we instruct them not to be creative with their answers.
So that's slightly different.
What really helps with these agents is the natural interaction, the natural language it uses.
So it doesn't look like it's so timid and structured where it's like frequently asked questions type thing.
It just really makes it easy for somebody to interact with them and ask, but it is limited by the data that we give it.
It does not add to the data.
It does not learn.
We give it a policy.
It needs to follow the policy.
Right.
But it's free to interact with you, with your language, with your accent, you know, and then be able to relay the information back to you.
So that actually goes on to the next thing that I have on here. When we're talking about
interaction with the, we'll just call them the agents, I guess that's what you're calling them,
right? Agents. So we're calling them our AI agents and you have a front office staff that is now
kept away, right? So they're somewhere else and then you're having either a parent or someone else
interacting with this agent are we concerned about the loss of human
interaction developing relationship developing between the people with the
push for AI I mean I think that's a large question that we're asking
socially and I know that we're all driving like fast and furious towards AI
regardless of what anybody does but can we stop and ask the question of does
does this actually truly help us, all for the benefit of a little bit easier time?
Yeah, excellent question.
Actually, Ms. Hack, she tells me she uses the book reviewers.
We actually have four of them.
One is called Max, and we named him.
And she's telling me, you know what, I love Max.
I'm like, every time I want to do something, I'm always chatting with Max.
Well, that becomes intuitive.
Yeah.
In regards to your, I guess I would call it the in-person customer service that we offer in KDISD,
I think where we're looking at the AI support is we've become very aware how large our district is,
and I'll use the start of the school year as an example.
Three weeks ahead of the start of the school year, we could see that we still had a number of students,
what we call in the queue, trying to get their enrollment processed.
And what was happening was various reasons.
They didn't have the right paperwork, they're having trouble uploading it, they needed password
reset, that was a big one.
So we went in person and set up down in the Merrill Center and we kept track.
We probably saw well over, I think, 1,200 families in person because we went up quickly
with that customer service.
John's team was a big part of it down there.
It was our district enrollment team.
We had technology support down there.
We had homeless support down there because it was coming in the doors with all kinds of things.
But what we did when we tracked all of it, what we found was a lot of it was they just needed someone to assist
them through a process.
Something that probably an AI, intuitive enrollment assistant could do and then at some point it got to the point to finalize or
it was something a person needed to do, it would take you to that person.
I think we could have been a lot more efficient that way instead of having the families wait
till they get to an in-person.
And we had a big team down there, but we still had a big wait.
I think it could help us there.
That's an efficiency.
We have a call-out team going right now.
We have about 10,000 families that did not finish the annual student update.
We need them to do that.
We need them to update their information.
We need to know what they want to opt in, opt out of.
we want to make sure they have the opportunity to fill out that free and reduced meal application
before the benefits end 45 days after the school year all kinds of things we have a team calling
monday through thursday nights and on saturdays and sundays we've knocked out about 3 000.
but again it's very manpower intensive where a lot of it was with um an ai support could do it let
Let me help you.
And we could get through a lot of it without having the in-person,
but then take them to that.
I think we would get through it much faster.
So John's team's kind of pulling along with us on that,
hearing the script, what we're doing, what needs to be done.
And so that's something we're looking to pilot as well.
When it comes to the campuses, we're already with the parents.
Whoever's visiting, you have to show your ID outside before you can get in.
having that where you can scan your credentials like whether it's Raptor or
otherwise and then it would say why you're there it's that efficiency for
that reception is that once you enter is sitting right there they know you're
there for an R they know you're here for this those kinds of processes on the
front end and I can appreciate that for efficiency sake and I understand because
we can all we're demanding and it's like trustee Cruzella said we want it now we
We wanted it five minutes ago.
With good customer service.
Right, with good customer service.
But I guess my pushback a little bit, or my hesitation, I'm going to say my hesitation towards this,
is as we've become more automated socially, the customer service hasn't necessarily gone up.
Because when I go shopping, I don't want to talk to someone when I'm going to shop for my clothes.
I'm just going to shop for them online.
I don't want to talk to you in the store.
That may sound rude, but when I go into the store, the sales clerks often don't know how to have a personal interaction with the person, and they're not really as quick as what I can find online.
So it just continues to kind of chip away at that social engagement with another human being.
So my hesitation and my concern with this is that in the name of efficiency and in the name of making things smoother and faster, it actually makes it less socially.
Does that understand the point that I'm trying to make there?
It's a balance.
I do think I understand what you're saying.
It's a balance.
And I think if there's things that we could use AI efficiencies to do quickly, you know, some people, they want it, just tell me how to do it and I'll take care of it.
but never lose that peace where we step in in person and assist our families.
That's my concern.
And one of the things we're focusing on with this,
even these agents, they can feel the sentiment.
So if the user is talking and getting a little frustrated,
it will immediately transfer them to a live agent.
The other thing is we disclose transparency is very important.
This is a virtual agent.
At any point, if they say, I want to talk to a live person,
I don't want to talk to this agent, they will transfer them to a live agent.
The other thing we noticed with these agents, we've been testing these models, what we noticed
is people are waiting on hold, waiting to get through the lines.
We get hundreds of calls every day, for example, to the help desk.
This agent can now basically offer to assist, can I help you with something?
and yeah can you walk me through my password reset for example and then
while they're waiting they actually can engage them and help them with that and
at any point if the person says hey you know what can you try to transfer me to
a life agent this system will transfer them to a life agent so it is it is
really trying to kind of fill the void when you got a lot of calls coming in
this agent can basically help as much as possible but still connect you to a live
person at any point I have one last question towards this and then I'll be
done you said that it decreases or it takes on 30% of the inquiries did I read
that right it's a 30% so when we're talking about that we're looking at our
I'm assuming that the person who is now being whose workload is now being
being alleviated by 30% would be front office?
It's gonna be, I think, spread.
I mean, we have, you saw these different models.
Some of them are receptionist model, help desk model
that can be replicated easily
to do similar roles somewhere else.
But yes, these people will be basically relieved
by having the AI pick up that work.
But the point here is to really have them focus
on more maybe complex issues to help parents and we see these models actually
implemented in insurance companies or you know the virtual agent picks up
collects all the information basic stuff what's your policy number what is your
issue and they collected and then they transfer you and then you have to repeat
everything that you just said to the difference with the AI models it
It actually already populates the system with all that data.
So that live person doesn't have to spend all the time
collecting these boring, tedious stuff instead of focusing
on your issue and getting to the solution.
OK, I see you have an issue with this and that.
I see here that you couldn't get that through.
Let me help you.
That reduces the amount the live agent, who
is expert on that, not collecting information,
they're experts on solving your problem, really getting into the problem and solving it for you.
We hope the same thing will happen here.
I'm going to hope and trust and have some faith that your development is going to be better than my insurance company's development of their AI model,
because I'm not super loving it. But I feel like you're probably going to be better at that than they are.
So those were just some of my thoughts towards this. So thank you for entertaining them. I appreciate it.
Mr. President? Ms. Simi? Okay, I really like the 24-7 idea. That is something, you
know, that you can't, if you have to go in and enroll, maybe this is nice, you can
do it 24-7. And then I was wondering, had you all thought about AI for substitute
scheduling? Remember last fall, not this fall, but last fall, we encountered some,
our staff encountered a lot of trouble with switching over to this new system.
Is that something we could apply AI to?
So these, and, you know, I was missing a couple of slides.
I apologize.
You probably have it on your screen, but I didn't have it here.
We're building these core models, and each model is actually customizable.
customizable. So like a help desk for IT can be also helping for a program. It can help
with other departments for maintenance, for example. So yes, I mean eventually the idea,
we haven't really targeted that area yet, but after we prove these models, then it's
going to be really easy for us to replicate them for any area of need. All we need to
do is basically you get the baseline model has the ability to interact, has the ability
to transfer calls, ability to sense the sentiment of the caller, and then we add to it a customizable
layer or subs, for example. Learn the subsystem really good. Here's a document that shows
shows you how the subsystems work, scheduling works and all of that and then we basically
give it a number for people to call 24-7.
I can add to that.
I think that's a great idea.
That's a great example of where our subs are all hours of the day in the evening trying
to pick up positions and if they struggle there would be AI assistance after hours on
something like that.
So I think that is something, that's a good idea.
Yeah, and I'm not I'm only one person but I would prioritize that just seeing the
Struggles that our staff went through last year. Well, my husband is struggling to figure it out and I'm his AI
You know, I think that's a great idea. Okay great and then my does your husband know about max just
Do you one more question did you see I know you briefly touched on it, but
Do you anticipate any shrinking or short or termination of staffing?
Because that is a little bit concerning to me.
Or termination?
I know you touched on it, and I know that's not your goal, but I am a little nervous.
I think it's making us more efficient with the existing staff that we have.
A couple things that I referenced earlier where we were what I would call outnumbered.
I think having this type of support is much more cost effective and we still can provide that in-person support, but there's a lot of things that wouldn't require maybe every time an in-person and it would make us more efficient.
So I think John and I in discussions with Dr. Gorgorski, when we go up with Legacy Virtual, and you'll get more information about that next week, what that looks like planning and moving forward, that would be a great campus to pilot these efficiencies with.
and it's not with our existing kids in the seats and our families and we're working out if the
kinks are on it before if we do deploy it to the campuses with our principals so we'll be giving
you more information we'll have more information about legacy virtual next week but we are looking
at some of those ai features that john referenced on piloting them with that particular campus
thank you mr president dr elani thank you for the presentation i really like how you
You said you want to position KDSD as a national leader in K-12 AI-driven operations.
People continue to look to KDSD as a leader, and I think this is an excellent way to do that.
I had some of the same concerns you've already talked about.
Like all those new families at the beginning of school, there were calls and concerns about,
I put the I brought the utility bill but still not being cleared at the campus
and it's like yeah there's hundreds of children in line and and as many people
as possible to get that done and if that kind of automated thing would make it
easier and quicker and more efficient that would save angst and get our boys
and girls in the door you know first day and of course you know we as parents on
vacation wait till the last minute to get back and get all the paperwork in i i would be guilty of
that when you talk about three schools will this am i safe to assume it's an elementary a junior
high in a high school and okay um who i don't need to know which one but who will decide will it be
a feeder pattern or do you know who it's going to be yet or we're working very closely with miss
hack on all the work was partners on this project she's a big fan of AI so
that helps a lot we generally run pilots like we were running a sub or the ID
badges at three pilot schools we broach it with the principals we have to have
principal buy-in they support the initiative they want to run the pilot
and you know that we would not force it beyond discussions and generally we kind
of think about which whatever type of pilot it is for example we're running the student personal
device pilot at taylor high school um that is something that we knew initially that dr stone
would be interested in with her staff and so we're getting ready to launch that next monday so i would
again i'm going to guess that you'll use a bilingual campus so that you can test both of
of the language models there.
Let me just add to that, Ms. Fox.
So we are piloting the same models over here.
We call them foundational pilots right here at ESC.
So once we're happy and satisfied with them,
we still want to pilot them with these three campuses.
And part of that is really, you know, the social aspect of it.
How does the community interact with that and how do they deal with it?
And also for our own staff as well.
So at the campus level, we want to see how can we modify and adjust the model to better
serve a school environment.
Yes, that's excellent.
And the questions will be very different at a campus than it will at an administration
building.
I have a couple more. Is that all right? So I think help desk tickets, this sounds like a great idea because those are the same ones over and over, right? Like I use a MacBook at home and I use, here we use a different, and so I'm constantly like, how can I get my Apple computer to do what I need it to do from home and I'll call the help desk and they know all the answers.
But that would be something that AI would be able to do like that, right?
You already talked about you're using, you're writing some of them,
and you're using some of the models in places like Amazon and Google and those things that I have, right?
So would this be something that they could use?
Let's take an elementary school as an example.
like the end of year celebration when all of the parents and grandparents come
and they're trying to get badges to Raptor in you know and they're out to
the to the driveway and maybe you know I'm lined up I think we could be even
more efficient on the front end before the event it actually occurs I too have
have learned to appreciate AI and a chat GPT
and asking questions.
I find that it's like Google for,
you know, Dr. Ilani, you know how computer fancy I am,
but it's like Google only instead of giving me
all of the articles to go read,
it summarizes all of them for me
so I can get a sense of which direction.
And the thing I like most about it is
when you ask it your question or to give you input then it says would you like me
to and it gives you a suggestion put it in a PDF make a schedule for you do that
would you like more information about this or that and it's like you know
those are the kinds of things that will be so helpful when someone asks a
question they give the answer now would you like to know where to go with that
would you like to know what kind of utility bill you need would you like to
to know how to upload it.
Those things I think will be so helpful to our families
and save time for our valuable employees
to be able to service more of the on-campus needs.
Mr. Krause can have a lot more examples than I have.
Thank you for the presentation.
Mr. President, so thank you again for the presentation.
What I'm really interested in is what
what that's going to look like when it shows up at the campuses in the sense of like the folks who are going to be impacted by it most.
You know, again, the front office folks, those people who really serve the public right out of the gate.
So I guess my question is, is feedback, I understand on the AI side of it, you get, you know, it's doing that as things happen.
On the other side of that, the people side of it, is that going to be kind of a real time?
I mean, is that a check in with principals at these pilots to say, OK, what are your folks saying?
Like, you know, after so many weeks of this, you know, what do we has this become more efficient?
Are they able to do the I loved what you said, Dr.
Alani, about, you know, really doing the more complex things and for the folks that that really need that personal touch.
So I'm just curious, like, is there a thought on that piece of it on the campus feedback
from the actual human beings who are being impacted by it?
Absolutely.
I think any time we run a pilot, I'll use the Taylor High School one, when we've been
out there meeting once a week to get the campus ready for the kids that opted in and were
approved, they will go live with their student personal devices next Monday, October 20,
September 22nd, and then we are scheduled, working with communications, Dr. Groom's team,
every three weeks, beginning with the second six-weeks progress report, a survey will go
out to the staff, to the students, to the parents, how is it working, what do you think,
what are things we need to know, and when we go live with the next pilot that is out
at one of the complexes, we'll do the same type of feedback gathering.
And that feedback, just to add to this, is really crucial for AI development.
Because you refine the model based on how people react to it.
So whether it's the staff side or even the community side.
And then you tweak that model to make sure it fits.
You know, AI, like ChatGPT, is a general model.
So when you're interacting with it, there are very limited guardrails to it.
It's not really confined in behavior or they do have some guardrails, but our environment
is going to have even more guidance on how it interacts based on what we hear from our
own community and especially the schools, from the school itself, because we want it
to really be part of that school.
Mr. President, I have one question. Biometrics, is any of this planned AI or otherwise? Are you going to be planning any sort of biometric scanning?
Not part of this initiative, no. Not part of this.
I would not be in favor of that.
Usually, you know, we have like building access system that relies on proximity.
We don't even use biometrics for building access, which is probably a more suitable
technology.
but we don't use it for building access.
We use these.
Yes, I'm aware.
Just moving forward, is that a vision at all,
part of the vision or anything?
I have not really, to be honest with you,
thought about it to use biometrics.
OK, because like the airport, right?
They scan your face.
And it's pretty quick.
I wouldn't want us to be tempted that way.
Especially fingerprints.
I know at some point we considered it
for computer access.
but it requires training and that's part of it that we are not sure with kids how
that's gonna work but yeah thank you mr. president all right so I enjoyed your
presentation to you I do have some concerns and some of them have already
been mentioned but lots of them are really good like for example I used to
help every year at Taylor when I was there with the registrar before school
and I know that those counselors and the registration people were there
sometimes 12 hours a day doing that and that's silly and then they had also
volunteers too so that was a lot of work for that's just one school so I'm sure
it was it's like that every year campus you know district-wide so I think things
like that are gonna be good what I am concerned about is actually mrs. Calhoun
the interpersonal relationships that you have.
And, you know, there's always,
I can always tell when I go into schools,
you know, those front office people
always kind of set the tone for the school.
Like, you know, it's either like,
really nice to see you, Mrs. Champagne,
or it's like, you know, next.
I mean, you know, and that kind of thing.
So, but you've kind of reconfirmed,
you know, you've confirmed that
a lot of that's still going to stay there.
And I just hope so,
because that's that is a really good part of the personality of our district is those
people that are there to greet you and then the last thing I'm going to say is I get a
little bit afraid about the the telephone calls with the you know that you want to speak
to a person because you know we all have an insurance company like Mrs. Calhoun said or
whoever and you want to speak to someone but then you say I'd like to speak to representative
and they go, just some more information.
Please let me speak to your representative.
What is your cat's first name?
I don't know.
It's just on and on and on.
And it's just by the time you finally get to speak to someone,
the person, well, me, is so upset that, you know,
it took me 20 times to say, can I please speak to someone.
I'm hoping that ours isn't going to be like that
because that is such a negative way to talk to someone
especially maybe sometimes for the first time to speak to KDISD. So hopefully
when you roll this out and you get the feedback and all that, that that'll all
be part of the feedback that you'll receive and hopefully that'll be a
question on your survey, you know, how was your, did you have to ask a question over
the phone and how did how did that go? So good, good point, excellent point because
Because I'll tell you, when we started,
we've been talking about this for more than a year or two,
even.
And my own cabinet members, they had the same feedback.
It's like, John, what is this?
This is going to be like the frequently asked questions
where you're just going to go in circles with it all the time.
It's FedEx.
Yeah.
And Ted, in particular, he was.
So this model is much more advanced
and more intelligent. It actually, we have to put a disclosure at the beginning that it is virtual. It's not real. And it interacts with you using natural language that you will not be going in loops with it the way some of those systems are.
and I agree with you those systems are frustrating they're using older
technology and you know the technology we use is a lot more advanced and I wish
we can demo that someday but it is it is different we could just call the help
desk and say we lost our password right we can interact with it today I actually
have another question miss calhoun this is speaking to the one-to-one device um well the
taylor high school pilot program that is on that if so if a student says that yes they want to
bring their own device what kind of security measures do they then agree to under kdisd
what does that look like at the point that they opt in and to be for consideration um to be in
the pilot every the opt-in form requires them to acknowledge all the requirements of the pilot and
and the acceptable use and what will happen in the event that's violated,
that they must remain in the A-plus learning environment that John and his team developed,
which is basically putting them in the My Katie environment.
They must remain in that environment throughout the instructional day.
Backing out of that environment, basically that becomes a personal telecommunication device
and is now subject to, like, if you pulled your cell phone out.
And so all of that is spelled out.
The acknowledgments are the parents acknowledge it, sign it.
The student signs it and then the campus retains copies.
This week the students that have opted in will be coming in on Thursday.
There's no students on Friday.
It's the end of the first six weeks grading period.
They'll bring their devices in on Thursday.
Jeremy Frazier and several members of his team will be out on the campus and
make sure that their laptops meet the specs in order to have that A plus
learning environment.
Not downloaded.
Get it right for me.
Enrolled.
Enrolled.
Enrolled into the environment.
Yeah.
And so when they leave on Thursday, their laptop will be ready to go and they will turn
in their Chromebook or retain their Chromebook there at the campus because they'll have to
check it out for certain tests that they'll have to use a Chromebook.
When they come to school on Monday, they will be able to use their personal laptop.
Teachers at Taylor High School, they will all be notified which kids are in the pilot.
They are going to kind of, I don't know how they're going to do it, but so when they have their laptops open, they can tell the personal devices, which you probably could because of the size.
But Dr. Stone and her team had some ideas about that.
But the teachers will know the number of students that are approved in the pilot.
It will stay those students through the end of the fall semester, and that's who we will be garnering the feedback from, in addition to the staff and the families.
So my, again, I sound like a conspiracy theorist.
I can't help it.
I'm sorry.
call me what you want I don't really care at this point so when you bring in
your own device and you go into the KTISD operating system is that what
we're saying we're calling it for more better or less an operating system
platform platform so that's downloaded onto that child's device it's so a good
Good point. So it's really not downloaded. What happened with this process, we configure the device, which is a temporary configuration.
The device is configured to act in a certain way, basically to mimic a Chromebook, which, by the way, nobody's doing this anywhere.
and so it turns your laptop whether it's a Mac or Windows into basically a
browser and it it holds off all the pushes back all the other Windows or Mac
resources so you can't access them kind of acts like a guard dog yeah you cannot
protect it yes it basically gives you the browser it prevents it locks it to
to the browser.
So we don't really download anything on the machine,
we configure it to act that way.
And then how does the student remove that configuration?
Good question.
So what they do, they have to basically
sign out of their machine.
They basically have to reboot the machine, sign out of it.
When they do that, control-alt-delete,
or it gives them the ability to sign out
and then sign back in when they do that they're back to their normal environment
okay so when the student graduates from Katy let's say how do they remove that
entire programming from their computer so that it's no longer there yeah
absolutely so they can always they do enroll at the beginning and they do and
enroll or and install it at the end so there will be they will go to our my
By KD cloud event right now with the pilot, we're doing things slightly different, but eventually when we roll it out for the district, they will go to them. We don't they don't need us. Actually. They can go to the cloud enroll.
And they can go to the cloud and end and roll. And is it like, almost like a monitor like, you're monitoring them during the school day while they're on this KD.
the platform.
So we created this special, well, because we're trying to guard the security for this,
but let's just say only while they're in our schools that this model will work.
It will not work at home or outside our school.
So there's not any necessarily, like when they leave the building, or they leave, they're
at home, they're not, there's nothing that's then monitoring them at home in any way, shape,
form from like browser data or keystroke data or anything like that.
No, nothing. Now what happens also if you log in with our credentials, every
student has a KTISD user ID and if you log into your browser with our
credentials then we do have some applications like our filtering system,
system. There's a product called Beacon which monitors which behaviors on risky behaviors.
Now when you log in with that, we do monitor. We don't collect. We monitor if somebody going
into risky websites, it actually alerts us that this person is doing something. If you
log in with our KDISD credentials. Okay. All right. That's what I wanted to know. Thank you.
Any other questions for her? Mr. President. Ms. Fox. Thank you for the update on that. Do you,
is there very much interest in bringing their own devices? I know they talked a lot about they needed
a better, stronger, different computer to do some of the AP classes. Is there a big enrollment or is
Is it wait and see?
Yeah.
They seem to be very happy with utilization of the district Chromebook.
So it's a small pilot group.
We're looking to possibly expand to two other campuses that they are interested in joining
to kind of expand that group.
But that's still in the test phase.
But we do want to move forward, even if it is a small group.
We're learning so much.
And what the work that the team put into this, and it's really fascinating to see it.
And I think the kids that do opt in, they probably have a vested interest that they want to use their own device.
And we want to see how that works.
Because if it does work, then we can put them in a protected platform using their own device.
I appreciate them wanting to do that.
Because what you'll collect is, you know, it's worth it or it's not.
And our children will tell us.
Did we, very quickly, did we talk about this here?
or did I hear this at a conference where they,
a school district said that the child has
a one-to-one device and they take it with them
when they leave the district and it has all of their work
on it and they take it to college if they want.
And so because they're so old by the time they leave,
if they've had it four or five years,
you can't, you know, they're outdated anyway
and they get to take that in all of their research
that they've done and all the work they've done
and maybe some of their portfolios that they've created
is on the Chromebook and they,
oh, it was the superintendent of the year interview
that said that, that they let them take it with them.
What a great idea.
So, a thought, just I'm not saying anything,
just a thought.
My last thing, Dr. Alani,
how long have you worked for KDISD?
13 years.
13 years.
In that time, I just think of all the innovation
that you have brought to KDISD
that has proven to be something other people look to
and here you are once again, and I appreciate you very much.
Thank you.
Thank you all very much.
We appreciate you all.
We'll now move on to our discussion items for the evening.
First up will be item 7.1,
7.1 Discuss and consider Board adoption of the 2025-2026 Maintenance and Operations Tax Rate and the 2025-2026 Debt Service Tax Rate.
discuss and consider board adoption of the 2025-2026 maintenance
and operations tax rate in the 2025-2026 debt service tax rate.
Our presenter tonight will be Chris Smith, our chief financial officer.
All right. Good evening, President Redman, Superintendent Gorski, and the board.
It'll come as no surprise to you as we've talked about this tax rate now for a couple of months,
what I'm going to be going over tonight. But as per tax code 26 and 26, the tax rate must be
adopted as two separate rates, one for maintenance and operations and one for interest in sinking.
thinking. An order levying a maintenance and operations tax rate and the debt service tax
rate for the Katy Independent School District for tax year 2025 is presented at the Board's
consideration. And I'm going to read that in a minute. The adoption of the maintenance
operations tax rate of .7271 per $100 valuation will provide funding to the service, the school
school districts maintenance and operations for the 25-26 fiscal year,
and the adoption of the interest and sinking tax rate of 39 cents, or .3900,
per $100 valuation will provide funding to serve the school district's debt service fund
or interest and sinking fund for the 25-26 school year.
That order reads, a levy maintaining an order,
levying a maintenance and operations tax rate and a debt tax rate for the Katy
Independent School District for the tax year 2025 be it ordained and resolved
that the Board of Trustees and Katy Independent School District that on this
22nd day of September 2025 we the Board of Trustees of the Katy Independent
School District do hereby levy and set the tax rate on $100 valuation for the
the school district for the tax year 2020-25 of $1.1171 or $1.1171 to be assessed and collected
by duly specified assessor and collector as follows.
Point 7271 for the purposes of maintenance and operations and point 3900 for the purpose
of payment of principal and interest on debts.
Such taxes are to be assessed and collected by the tax office officials designated by
the district.
And then, again, just a little rhetoric on that. It is the same tax rate as we've had last year for maintenance and operations. That's broken down to .6169 as our maximum compressed rate. And again, that is the same rate as last year, but TEA sets that on our behalf, on this board's behalf.
have and then it has eight golden pennies in it and three copper pennies
or three point zero two copper pennies so the six one six nine plus eight plus
three point oh two adds up to the seventy two seventy one maintenance and
operations tax rate it is recommended that the Board of Trustees approved the
tax rate of 1.1171 which is effectively a 1.54 percent increase in the tax rate and further
recommend the board of trustees approve the order adopting the maintenance and operations tax rate
of 0.7271 per 100 evaluation and the interest and sinking tax rate of 0.3900 per 100
of valuation for the tax year 2025 as reflected in the order i just read to you
And I'll be glad to answer any questions.
Any questions, Board?
Mr. President?
Ms. Cozzella?
Thank you, Mr. Smith.
How is this different than what we did last month, if you don't mind me asking?
How is it what?
This agenda item, is this just a formality, some document required?
This is required by tax code that an order or a resolution, it's the district's kind of choice,
which one to choose to formally adopt that rate.
Last month, we just discussed the rate that drove the numbers in the budget that we talked about last month, and that as a proposed rate, this is the month that we have to take action through the adoption of the order or the resolution, in our case, the order, to formally adopt those rates.
Okay.
In essence, it's been adopted because of our budget being adopted.
adopted.
If it was used to those the rates that I'm recommending tonight were used in the budget
adoption process.
But that's not been adopted.
Right thank you.
I'm asking for public who've asked like why are we looking at this again?
Didn't you set it last month?
But this is a formal proposal for that.
Thank you sir.
Any other questions, Board?
I will note, President Redman, that this is one item that really, by tax code, cannot come off and be on the consent agenda.
We'll have to talk about it again next week.
I'm sorry, but it will have to be in red, the order and everything will have to be red again.
Gotcha.
Thank you.
I will now move on to item 7.2 discuss and consider board approval of the July 2025 financial reports
7.2 Discuss and consider Board approval of the July 2025 Financial Reports.
Presenter will be Jamie Hines our assistant superintendent of finance
I can't see it without those
Good evening president Redmond members of the board of trustees and superintendent Gorgorski
We have tonight, for your approval, our financial reports through the month of July, including our financial statements, our construction report, our tax report, and a summary of our check registers for the month of July.
The good news is this is the very final financial statements and reports that we have to do for fiscal year 2025.
25 so just a little bit about this the financial statements as always provide
analysis of our expenditures and revenues by both function and object our
construction report has got a summary of all of our capital projects our tax
report has our current budget budgeted levy as well as our collections and our
certified Libby. Through the 11th month or July, which is about 91.6% of the fiscal year,
we've seen essentially the same thing that we've brought up month over month,
and that is underspending. And we're seeing about the same underspending that we've seen in the
past. So I'm not going to go further into detail, but we're seeing the same things.
and again this is the last set of financial reports that we'll see so I
won't I won't come up here again next month for the financial statements I'll
come back in January when you all will see and approve the act for the annual
comprehensive financial report so that'll be when we see the final piece
of this fiscal year that's all I have for the financial reports and I'd be
glad to take any questions. Questions for board? We'll move on to item 7.3. Mr.
Hines will be our presenter again and discuss and consider board approval of
7.3 Discuss and consider Board approval of nominating candidates for positions on the Boards of Directors for the Waller County Appraisal District, Fort Bend Central Appraisal District, and Harris County Appraisal District.
nominating candidates for positions on the board of directors for the Waller
County Appraisal District, Fort Bend Central Appraisal District and Harris
County Appraisal District. So item 7.2, unlike last month when we were filling a
vacated spot in one of our appraisal districts this is actually the formal
nomination process or month for formally nominating for all three of our appraisal
districts I'm just going to go into a little bit of detail but this this
essentially is your item to discuss but all three since we have two large
appraisal districts that now go by a state standard they actually have the
the ability to nominate two candidates each
for four year terms.
And that would be for Fort Bend Central Appraisal District
and Harris Central Appraisal District.
And then we've got Waller County
that abides by a little bit different rules.
So they're actually replacing all five of their,
or not replacing, but having an election
for all five of theirs.
And so they have five positions available
and those are at two year terms.
For all of these, as in the resolution, you're able to nominate up to the number of candidates allowed for those positions.
So essentially two in Fort Bend Central Appraisal District and Harris Central Appraisal District and up to five for Waller County Appraisal District.
I'd be glad to answer any questions about this.
Any questions, Board?
Feels like we just did this.
Yes, ma'am.
It's already time to do it again.
Mr. Paul Stamadas did request.
He lives in Katy, and we have nominated him before, and he did request a nomination.
So I'm sorry, I forgot to say that earlier.
So when we're talking about the HCAD ones, there are two that terms will expire this December,
and then it says 2027 and 2026.
Yes, ma'am, that's correct.
And so the new criteria or scenarios they have is they actually, every year, they'll elect additional nominees for the directors.
And so they're always overlapping.
So it looks a little different than it did in the past when everybody was elected on the same year and served the same number, same term.
Now they have four-year terms, and each year they have additional directors.
So that's why there's only two this year.
So we're only considering two, the ones that are expiring December 31st, 2025.
Yes, ma'am. That's correct.
So the others are just for our information but not for consideration
because it says these three people end in 27 and these three end in 26.
So we're not considering those people.
That's correct.
In Exhibit A that has all that on there.
That was just information that the CAD provided.
Okay.
Do we know if both of these people are seeking re-election?
For Harris County?
Yes.
For Harris County.
They're both listed.
Melissa Noriega and Martina Lamont-Dixon.
Yes, ma'am.
Thank you.
Any other questions?
All right.
Thank you.
Thank you. We'll now move on to item 7.4, discuss and consider board approval of the September 2025 budget amendments.
7.4 Discuss and consider Board approval of the September 2025 budget amendments.
The presenter will be Esperanza Rios, Director of Budget and Treasury.
Good evening, Board President Redman, Board of Trustees, and Dr. Krakorski.
Tonight we present a budget amendment for the capital projects fund in the amount of
$292,500 for design services for the proposed Opportunity Awareness Center facility approved
by the Board at the August Board meeting.
The design services will be covered with the bond interest proceeds and this approval of
the amendment will result in no impact to the capital projects fund balance.
Chair Greg Musil?
Any questions, Board?
Mr. President?
Ms. Costello.
Ms. Thank you, Ms. Rios.
So my question is, we just set the budget.
We just started our financial year.
It may not be really your question, 9-1, and we're already doing a budget amendment.
I realize it's a capital expenditure.
That's where we're getting the funds.
But why wasn't this part of the regular budget that we set, we just set?
And it's already been a plan.
Is it?
So this is kind of a bond fund?
I can answer that.
The board adopted budgets for, legally adopted budgets for the general,
the maintenance and operations fund, the interest and sinking fund,
and the special projects fund, which in our case is only food services.
So those three funds the board formally adopted a budget.
This is the capital projects fund.
The board does not formally adopt a budget yearly.
We present the financial statements to you and since last month we approved this expenditure to move forward the expenditure
We're just putting this in a formal budget amendment to kind of
Solidify if you will on the back end you've approved of the project now
We're just trying to get it cozy and it's those place. No I gotcha
We did we weren't presented a number though last month
I think I think we work is not a number we approved the plan there was no number and I
probably should have asked for the number there's a percentage based on the total project cost but
not not a detailed dollar-for-dollar if I remember correctly a percentage of what number we didn't
have a number last month I'm gonna go ahead and ask mr. beer Ling to step in and explain a little
bit with how that works you bet so we based it on a construction cost of about seven and a half
million dollars yeah and that wasn't presented last month i didn't see seven and a half million
and i didn't know 30 percent or so what you said 30 percent um so i just
it's the first time i'm seeing the the the figure uh this month and then um
So the question, though, was why wasn't this part of – I guess it has to be part of the –
the only way to expense this is through capital expenditure?
No, right?
We could have decided –
You could use undesignated bond funds.
You could use the general fund or project savings in bond funds.
You could use the general fund or this source.
Okay.
Okay, so that was part of the agenda last month that it was going to be CapEx, correct?
It was going to come out of the capital project.
You were financing it through that.
That was presented, but not a figure.
I didn't see a figure.
That's why I'm asking.
Appreciate it.
Sorry, I answered that you were, and I'm apparently wrong on that.
I apologize.
I just know that that number got to our offices.
What we need to put in there is the budget amendment.
Yes, and I understand the rule here of this agenda item.
So, okay.
Bear with me one second.
Let's see.
Okay.
Trustees, I did want to, while we're sitting here, I'm not super familiar with this item because it's not my shop,
but I did pull up the AIA documents that were attached to the last board meeting.
And under Section 1.13 of the owner's budget, you'll see that the $7,500,000 number, so that was presented to the board last month in that contract.
Mr. President, just so you're aware, General Counsel, usually I see that, we the board, see that in our board documents.
I know the document you're talking about is a lot of pages.
usually we see that summarized in the agenda item so that's where I'm coming
from all right I guess I'll stop there we've already had capex expenditure two
million from June I know we're in a different financial year and another two
million in July for the electric content management system so I'm just
trying to keep track of all the capex it's nice to know the figure thank you
any other questions work
We'll move on to item 7.5, discuss and consider approval of an order authorizing the replacement
7.5 Discuss and consider approval of an order authorizing the replacement of the Bank of New York Mellon Trust Company.
of the Bank of New York Mellon Trust Company.
Yes.
So we present for your consideration an order to replace Bank of New York Mellon
Trust Company, which is our current patent agent for the KDISD bonds for payments that
are made in February and August.
So we're asking the board to authorize the appointment of UMB Bank as the new paying
agent.
agent. Any questions, Board? I just wanted to make a clarification on that. Mr. Smith,
I know that you had spoken about your dissatisfaction with the original trust
company that we had had. Can you speak a little bit more to that, just for transparency's sake?
Sure. Our prior paying agent essentially sends us an invoice, and that invoice has all our
outstanding bonds and the payment amount that's due and then we send the money
from our cash account to theirs and they disperse it on our behalf to the bond
holders I think it really just boils down to customer service I'll be honest
with you there are invoices that are titled with my predecessor I've been in
this position for 13 years and my predecessors name is still on one of the
invoices we've been asking to have that changed for years probably not 13 but a
lot a lot of years but I think miss Rios can probably talk about more details if
I don't cover it in a depth enough but it's just we have to work with them to
make sure that we're sending the right amount of money we don't want to over
center and underspend those payments and it's it's difficult to get answers with
with our current one uh i think rude i've heard it several times uh kurt and uh as i understand
that there are other organizations similar to ours that are doing the same thing this bank does not
i'm not sure how they make their revenue but they don't make a lot of money off kdisd we pay about
500 an outstanding series to the bank to have it done so we're not talking about a large item at
all it's just that that's where the money flows from our account to them to
the bondholders understand it's a service issue thank you I appreciate
that any other questions for dr. Lama can we maybe record the interactions
we're having with that bank and put in as a negative model on our AI don't end
end up like that all right further questions I will now move on to item 7.6 discuss and consider
approval of the voluntary benefit products for plan year 2026 presenter Lance Nauman director
7.6 Discuss and consider approval of the Voluntary Benefit Products for Plan Year 2026.
of risk management and mr. Almond you'll be with us for 7.7 and 7.8 right correct and it offers
that from here if that's okay good evening president Redmond dr. Gorski and board of
trustees. Board policy CR legal states that a district may procure with any
insurance company authorized to do business in Texas to insure its
employees. Voluntary benefits made available to district employees through
payroll deductions are offered to provide access to services that promote
and enhance the health of employees and their dependents. These benefits
are presented to the Board of Trustees on an annual basis. The number of
offerings and plan structure for plan year 2026 remain unchanged premiums will be the same for
this period except for a slight increase in the dental program it is recommended that the board
of trustees approves the voluntary benefit products for plan year 2026. mr president
i'd like to ask a few little questions because i
So I know that the insurance issue is a huge issue, not just with KEIC, but around our country, around our state, and not just with ISDs, but with everybody.
So I understand that this may be a little bit off topic, but since we're on the topic of health insurance, I want to just see, do we ever do any kind of customer feedback type thing, you know, to see how things are going?
that would be one question and another one is can we because of it well I guess
it could all be one question if we did the customer feedback and found out some
things that may not be going well like some provider is supposed to be covered
and then then the customer finds out that they're not covered for example
then that could be part of the feedback that you've received and then maybe
maybe somebody could go along and check check out those things and make sure
that what is told to them in the plan is actually what they're getting that it
all matches up so that like our speaker said tonight that they're not having to
you know assume that something's covered and then find out when they get there
that that's not covered and I just think that we had some kind of feedback from
our from our employees and maybe we are doing that already but if we're getting
the feedback that maybe we'd hear some of these these problems and then somebody i don't know if
it's you or someone on your team to go and investigate these problems and iron them out
for people well let me let me just kind of speak to that on on an annual basis and sometimes a
semi-annual basis depending on the the type of coverage that it is we sit down with these
carriers and they're they've got customer satisfaction reports that they present to us
and we review those and we handle most of I'm going to say concerns on a
one-off basis and work with those employees to address whatever that may
be and it varies from coverage to coverage what the issue may be we see
too there's there's when there's a I'm gonna call it a customer service issue
We deal a lot with providers, improper billing, things of that nature that can cause these things up.
But we do try to address each one and every one and work with the employee to resolve those situations.
But is there a way, so if you saw that this was going on, you know, let's say some employee had some kind of issue,
but then this was a recurring issue.
This wasn't just this one time, this one person had this one problem, but this seemed to be
a continuous going on and on and on.
Is there something that can be done?
Because by the time a person needs this help, sometimes they're at their weakest moments.
You know, they're not, they don't have 100% energy level.
You know, they're in desperate need right now.
You know, they don't have all this time on their hands to go research all this.
And some people are alone.
You know, some people don't have an advocate for them.
Well, I think we take a lot of pride in being an advocate because our team constantly,
we have several meetings with different providers on right now.
I can think off the top of my head.
With our pharmacy team, we meet weekly and help identify issues as we roll out new platforms.
It could be with any of these voluntary carriers.
We have standing meetings, and if we notice a trend, we will address it.
So that answers your question.
Mr. President.
Ms. Fox.
Mr. Nauman, did you hear the speaker tonight?
Yes, I did.
Concerns which were not one, but many.
An example of a few, let's say few.
And we hear about those two of others, similar.
similar. What is your plan to fix the concerns expressed tonight?
Well, we need to look at the individual events and go back to the carriers and identify what
has transpired and look at those on an individual basis and go, do we have a trend here or is
it ‑‑ you understand what I'm saying?
Well, did your office provide different lists of providers to employees that weren't ‑‑
My office does not provide lists.
It's through the Aetna Navigator platform.
And something to understand about with those platforms is providers are very fluid in and out of those contracts.
So sometimes an individual may go online and say, well, is Dr. X on the plan?
Well, he or she may not be.
But then if the doctor's office is saying there isn't, they are, we will begin to communicate and say, where's the disconnect?
So those platforms allow people to research within their plan, whether it's the POS, the Memorial Hermann ACO, or the high deductible, to see those providers, are they in that plan?
Okay.
One other thought.
has your office considered putting together I don't even know if this is helpful but I was
just trying to be how do we communicate to our employees some of the confusion how do we how do
we settle it for them can we take people who have been through like you know someone who's navigated
the whole thing could there be a video of different employees in different situations saying this is
what happened to me and here's what i found to be helpful so that maybe what one person has been
through would be able to have a video on our on our website on your your connections that would
help them you know maybe we have our own ai of like here's here's how you do it you know when
it says this try you know a b and c don't give up here's the thing because mrs champagne's right
this is not the time when you're just trying to figure out how to get your deductible for a new
windshield it's you know it's gut-wrenching and when you're going into surgery but you're not
allowed to have you know a stress test to make sure you're strong enough to do it that's that's
risky and and time is of the essence so what can we do you and us and you need our help we're here
to help you serve our people who are out there serving children and taking every ounce they have
during the day to do that and then have to fight these battles you know hours on the phone in the
offices that's something we can take back and consider and kind of think through uh there's
mechanics we have to work through in terms of privacy issues uh identifying events that people
might have experienced but that's something we might consider i'm pretty sure our people would
be willing to help others of our people but i'm quite concerned about how do they find the answers
they need as quickly as possible and with as little red tape as possible like who who the
doctors are and then how do they advocate for themselves to get the coverages that would be
expected like a like a colonoscopy or like a stress test or those kinds of things should be
covered and if they're willing to pay more help us figure out what that is and
then we will get our people to explain this plan is worth the money when you
really need it we tend to offer three if I'll explain to you later on I guess
here in just a moment the three different plans that we offer and we try
to educate our people what what those plans are like what is it consumer
driven is it within the memorial Harmon Network or is it a broad network like
like our POS2.
And we go through open enrollment.
We send out communication flyers,
educating our people to make those decisions.
Mr. President?
Board, can we finish up the voluntary benefits,
and then we'll move on so you can do the presentation
and then question on health plan?
Any questions on the voluntary benefits, 107.6?
Yes, Mr. President.
That includes dental, right?
Yes.
Sorry, I'm toggling between a couple of agendas looking back.
So, Carrie, the premiums are roughly, they're up a little perhaps, but how do we see what the coverage actually is?
Because, you know, sometimes you pay a premium, it might be the same, but your coverage is different.
Now you've got to pay for x-rays or you've got to pay more for a crown, et cetera.
Do we have any indicator with what kind of coverage?
Particularly on the dental, you have a high plan and a low plan.
plan, if you think of it in terms of a richer benefit and not so rich benefit.
And that's outlined during open enrollment.
We present those, we give employees prior to open enrollment, we bring all of our partners
in, every partner in the voluntary and the health side, and give employees the opportunity
to come down and sit and talk with them individually.
Is this the best plan for me, for my family?
So we give them that opportunity.
And I will tell you this, as Mr. Harris would attest to,
is the way insurance is going these days,
particularly in the environment of vision, dental, and a few other lines,
it's gotten so that people are just trading dollars with a lot of these benefits.
And for some people it's a good thing.
for some others they use their hsa or their fsa to manage those those expenses that we face okay
i'm just hoping that it's clear when it's open enrollment time and they can clearly see what
they're trading in right and and we look at it this way we want our our partners they're the
subject matter expert we want our employees to talk face to face to make sure they understand
what they're what they're purchasing and I will conclude with this with this one
thought we're at the end of it this plan year 26 we're end of a three-year
guaranteed cost if you will program we will be going out to the market next
June May May or June to do to re-up and relook at things as we normally do as
the market changes
I'll save my other questions for the next one.
Any more questions on item 7.6, Board?
No? All right, 7.7.
Discuss and consider health plan
7.7 Discuss and Consider Health Plan for Plan Year 2026.
as medical insurance for year 2026.
When the district moved to a self-funded health care plan in 2004,
the main objective was to reduce the long-term impact of health care
inflation while improving quality options for employees. Since its inception, the year-over-year
inflation seen in the plan has ranged from 5 to 8 percent, while the national average saw
trending rates averaging from 9 to 12 percent. When compared to the same industry sector with
Aetna's book of business, the cost of care per member per month, PEPM, of the KDISD self-insured
plan was 30.2% lower in 2024.
In recent years, the collection of premiums for the plan did not keep pace with medical
trends and the unexpected collateral costs associated with COVID.
The district absorbed those direct losses without passing them directly to the plan
participants.
Specifically, in the POS2, program premiums will increase along with program deductibles
from $4,000 to $5,000 for individuals and from $7,000 to $8,000 for families.
Next, the Memorial Hermann ACO plan will see premiums increase along with the increase
increase in deductibles from $1,850 to $1,950 for individuals and family deductible moving
from $3,675 to $3,775.
Lastly, a premium increase will be noticed under the high deductible health plan with
accompanying increase in deductibles from $5,250 to $5,350 for individuals and from
$10,500 to $10,600 for families.
For those plan members requiring pharmacy services, the provider will change from Express
Scripps to HEB.
KDIC continues to provide chronic disease pharmacy management to staff to avoid unnecessary
expenses related to primary care visits.
Virtual care continues to be included at no charge to plan participants, providing convenience
and time savings when quality care is needed.
Risk management continues to verify those individuals seeking enrollment in the plan through dependent care verification process.
Once the verification process is completed, staff members will no longer be required to do so unless there is a qualifying life event.
In this program, this program provides fairness and equity to all members seeking health care benefits.
And with that, I would like to move into my, I guess, brief PowerPoint and kind of give some historical perspective as to what we've been doing in the plan and what we're looking at, if you don't mind.
Historical performance from 2019 to 2024.
You will see in 2019 we were in the red negative 1.7 continuing across in 20 to 2.6, 13.1, 16.5, and 13.7 and through plan year 13.1.
One thing to note is you will see that our participants have remained relatively flat across this time slot.
lot and it's important to note that every month the district contributes
three hundred and eighty five dollars per employee per month to the health to
their health insurance it is also doubly important to remember that during these
years when which we had a deficit the district did not pass that deficit on to
the plan members the district absorbed it so if you look across in this exhibit
you'll see in 2019 the actual contribution made, which would be the 385 plus the deficit of 19, was 404.
And that continues to grow across as we continue through time.
And it's quite clear you can see where the pandemic began and the continued cost of care continues to rise.
This example shows what our medical and pharmacy spend is and you will see that it is very important,
and I'll ask Mr. Harris to make the contribution to this commentary, is that medical trend is staying anywhere from 5 to 6 percent.
Correct.
But talk a little bit about what's driving the pharmacy.
Yeah, so really what's driving the pharmacy is specialty drugs, and that's why we've got a really tightly managed drug program.
Currently right now, nationally, and just depending on where you are regionally and the type of plan you have, we're seeing on average pharmacy trend at 11%.
So if you have medical trending on average at 6% and pharmacy at 11%, that gap is going to continue to grow.
For instance, in the early 90s, pharmacy was about 2% of the cost of health care.
Now nationally, it's 40% of the cost of health care.
And it's mainly due to specialty drugs.
And I would also add in this exhibit I'm presenting to you right now is you'll notice how we've
been a big advocate of our virtual care model.
Employees are utilizing that tremendously and we're very encouraged by that.
What it does, it keeps employees actively pursuing their healthcare, managing their
their chronic diseases and keeping them out of urgent cares and standalone ERs,
which has saved us money.
Where are we?
Fiscal year 24-25, we had a negative 17.9 in terms of contributions versus expenses.
And this is through the first 11 months for the fiscal year through July.
And then for plan year, we're trending through seven months at a negative 11.04.
Mr. Harris, could you give us some comments?
We're looking at our 2026 projection.
Kind of walk us through how we get to our loss pick.
I'm going to use that term, an insurance word.
What our total expected losses will be.
One second.
Mr. Allen, would you introduce Mr. Harris?
I'm so sorry.
My bad.
Tommy Harris with Baldwin Group, who's our benefit consultant.
I apologize.
I took that for granted.
So what our underwriting and actuary team do is we have to gather historical data and then project that forward into the future.
So we're trying to do a loss pick for 18 months out from now so that we can budget our plan design accordingly.
So we gather two years of historical data and then remove large claims.
We trend that forward using the medical inflation trends of 5 or 6% and pharmacy of around 10.
And the oldest years, we have to trend an extra year further ahead.
With the most prior year, we're trending ahead 18 months.
Because in a plan year, you have 12 months of claims, and then you have six months of incurred but not reported claims.
So we're having to take this data and trend it a year and a half into the future.
And so that's what we've done here with what our annual projection is or what our spend is going to be.
it's never going to be perfect. I mean, it's never going to be exactly what that trend is because
we're looking out so far into the future, but this is a very good estimate and we've been pretty
close to accurate so far. So when you see what the annual projection is, it is a one-if. It could be
worse, it could be better, depending on the utilization of the population. So one thing that
you'll see here, one, we know what we're going to spend in medical, we know what we're going to spend
in pharmacy, and then we have our stop-loss premiums for our individual stop-loss, and then
then we have our program oversight from Aetna as the administrator of our plan.
One thing you'll see here, which was a big win, is in the pharmacy rebates.
And this is what caused the switch from Express Scripts to HEB,
is we were able to negotiate a much more favorable contract for the plan and its members.
And you'll notice the increase in rebates went up from $5 million to $13 million.
So then what happens is you take your pharmacy spend,
those rebates come back to you from the pharmacy benefit manager through the manufacturers,
and we get that on a quarterly basis.
And then down at the bottom where we get the total, then it's going to show what our gains or losses is.
And you'll see that the deficit is finally starting to move in the correct direction,
and this is really a function of what we're doing with the high-performing network,
with the Memorial Hermann ACO model, the tightly managed pharmacy,
and then the ReadyMD direct primary care, which is very valuable for population health and closing gaps in care.
This next slide, I would like for you to take a look, and this shows you what the premiums will be for 2026 compared looking at 25,
and then with the increase, the dollar increase, and then the far right column what the premiums will be,
and I've also notated what those deductibles are switching to, as I alluded to earlier in the presentation.
And here's the question that is always asked is, well, where do we stand against TRS active care?
You will see that, for example, let's just look at employee-only, Tier 1.
For plan year 26, the premium will be $255 per month.
For TRS, that will be $628 per month.
For the ACO, it will be $127 compared to TRS active care, which is $268.
And then the high deductible at KD was $85,
with a comparable plan at TRS at $185 per month.
And the uncertainty of TRS active care continues to be a great concern.
With with funding from the legislature. It's to be to be to be determined
So that's what I have for you this evening
Or questions, mr. President the champagne. Okay. I just want to continue a little bit. Thank you very much
I know that this is very complicated. I actually used to do some of this work
before and I know how complicated it can be and
And it just never seems to get better.
But I did ask a question earlier, but I want to make sure you understand what my question is,
and then you tell me what the answer is.
Do we give not the providers a survey, but the actual employees a survey to our participants
to every once in a while to see how things are going, what their problems are?
that way if we did that then you could see if there was some kind of trend
going on rather than just arbitrarily hearing from one person or another every
once in a while that's my first question then the next question I have or not
really a question it's more a suggestion and I know that we're operating at a
deficit so I know that's hard but maybe a good idea would be for us to have some
kind of patient advocate that would be you know at the district to handle some
some of these questions, I know like Medicare has people like that, and I don't want to compare us to Medicare because they're very hard to get in touch with,
but there are people like that in Medicare that are just there to answer questions because I myself, I've been through a traumatic event in my life,
and when that happens, I don't want to watch a video.
I don't want to have to do research.
I'm laying in the hospital, and I need some help right now.
And sometimes if I go and look at my insurance or I call the phone and I have to answer 20 questions and all this to tell them who I am,
if there was just one, maybe just one person that I knew of that I could call and say, look, I have these issues.
I've already tried a couple things.
Can you help me or can you direct me to who's better to talk to?
You know, something like that.
The way we work that is if we have something, an issue brought up by an employee, they will call our office and then we will ask the question, where does that person need to go?
And we'll reach out to Aetna and act as that advocate to find out what's the issue.
Is it a bill?
Is it approval?
What it may be.
And we reach out to Aetna and work through the back door to make sure those things get handled.
That's how we approach that.
that we have a team, and that's what we kind of spread that service piece across.
And people know about this?
Well, people call risk management, and we ask, what is your issue, what is your concern?
And then do we do surveys to our clients?
We do not do a survey, no, ma'am.
Well, that would be a suggestion I would have.
So I know I'm just one person, and I'm not, you know, I'm just one board member,
and I'm not trying to tell you all what to do.
but it might be good because we do surveys for a lot of other things you
know even like the rollout of AI and the rollout of those you know I don't know
the personal computers that people are going to be using at Taylor and things
like that you know maybe if everyone saw we did some kind of survey and that way
if you saw like a continuous pattern with such-and-such whatever it is then
then you would know that that was a problem.
Noted.
I have a question.
How many other providers...
Mr. President.
Sorry, Mr. President, I have a question.
Ms. Cullen.
How many other providers do we have to choose from at this point?
Like, for how much wiggle room do we have here?
If we're not liking what we're getting here with this plan,
do we have the option to take it out for bid?
Or I don't know how this works.
So we just recently took the health plan out for bid and I presented that to you
I believe remember that June and July and what we're seeing in mr. Harris can comment to this but I'll say this I
Guess when I started in the crew in my career, we had a vast array
But now it's it's shrinking down to basically what three or four different. Yeah, we've got four major carriers Blue Cross United
Cigna and Aetna and then there's dozens and dozens of third-party administrators
where you shop your stop loss and you shop your pharmacy benefit manager,
and we opened it up to the entire market to be able to bid through this process.
And this is the best we got?
Correct.
Aetna was the clear winner on this.
What are other districts?
Other districts, are they seeing increases in the same way that we are?
Absolutely.
What is this looking like?
Absolutely. Percentage wise, could you give a comparison? Well, so it's a little bit different
because every time, and I get that question a lot, I've got a population of this size and I've got a
population of this size. It has so much to do with the own utilization of that group because this
plan is considered 100% actuarially credible. You know, if you eat everything above a thousand
employees on a plan is 100% actuary credible. And so it's very difficult, even with the same carrier,
even with the same networks to compare populations,
because it's all based on population health.
It's all based on your own utilization.
So it's really hard for me to make the statement
except for the fact that, again,
back to medical inflation or trend,
which is an aggregate basis,
is going up 6% and 10 or 11%,
so you're gonna see a combined trend around 9%.
And that's just as a whole,
but it's really hard for me to compare populations.
I think you can see from the TRS numbers that, yes, it is going up.
And they had an increase this year, depending on the plan design, of up 10, up to 15 percent, based on what the plan design was.
That was on the TRS open enrollment information.
And there's most likely going to be another increase next year in that.
Well, that was my next question.
So what's the anticipation for us for next year?
if we're seeing increases like this right now with our employees looking at this and they're saying
what am i supposed to do how am i supposed to do this how are they supposed to what are they
supposed to anticipate for next year that's going to be a function of what our claims activity
begins over the next eight eight months or so and we will begin we'll start looking at trend again
in april or may when i come to you and present in may say here's where we are you'll begin to
will we get an idea of what's going on um so that's that's kind of it's hard to say well it's
going to be four percent or six percent but uh something to keep in mind is during those during
the coveted period the district decided made a formal decision that we weren't going to increase
premiums so as we go through this this this cycle if you will we're having to catch up to premiums
is kind of like your credit card bill, right?
You don't pay the full balance every month.
That compounding interest happens.
It's the same way with health care,
and you're seeing that across the market,
whether it's in the private sector or the public sector,
and health care is just in a bad situation right now.
And I will tell you this,
that on the administrative piece of the oversight of the plan,
we had a significant savings.
I mean we went from 36.02 down to 2475 in terms of savings and it was it was a tremendous
win for the district and all those little levers that we pull in terms of that with
the pharmacy and all that that helps keep that that trend going for upwards to eight
or nine percent so we try to manage most as we can on on the administrative piece and
be creative and be cost effective but I will also add too if you were to take out our large
squasses were trending very well but there are some things we just cannot
predict you know premature babies answers heart attacks things like that
that's just that's just an anomaly that very very hard to predict and I do want
to add something and I'm I can't remember my history like I used to but
but back in the 2000, before 2010, the state, when they adopted the TRS active care,
they also said at that time, and they funded it,
that school districts must commit a minimum of $225 a month towards health insurance premiums.
That somehow is now baked into the funding formula cake,
but the state of Texas through the funding has not increased that dollar amount in all of those years,
specifically for health insurance. It's been done at the local level for all those years.
Now, similar to what we've done, we've covered the losses. That dollar figure wasn't in that
one slide that showed the extra contribution we kick in to make it even, but the dollar amount
for the last five years is over $60 million. The state has also done the same thing to cover the
losses to TRS active care. In fact, this last year, in order to keep the premiums to the level
that that we talked about over there earlier was we need 490 I think it's 492 million dollars
insertion of state cash to keep these premiums at the levels or we're going to have to increase
even more so they took those big increases but the state covered that but that's for only the trs
active care so we were letting our representatives know that when you do that trs active care you're
We're only doing that for about half the state.
Those of us that have our self-funded plans aren't getting any of those additional dollars.
So to my knowledge and my recollection, yes, when you increase the basic allotment
or they added the ABC fund that can go toward health insurance,
specifically for health insurance, the state hasn't done anything
or given us the funds to do anything, to my recollection anyway, since the 2000 and before 10.
I don't know if that added anything, but again, that one slide, over $60 million, we funded to keep this thing afloat because we do think that this is a better option than having our employees in the TRS active care.
It's cheaper premiums on our people.
It's better coverage than TRS active care has, and so we've consciously made that effort to infuse an excess of $60 million.
And after the end of this fiscal year, when you see the audit in January, it's going to
be upwards of $70 million.
And if I would add this too, you know, two years ago we have to do an annual study of
our plan against TRS, right?
Well, now we have to do our plan against ERS, which is the state system.
The state system is extremely rich, but yet we're still compliant because of our program.
And you mimic, we always compare ourselves to the TRS richness, if you will.
I think TRS is what, 81%?
And we're like at a 88 point something.
We'll do that calculation here.
It's an actuarial value calculation on the plan designs offered.
We have to be within a certain range, and we're well within that range.
So I would just add that to the conversation, which is very important.
So I guess it's kind of the complications are obviously, I mean it's here.
So you have an employee who has to go have surgery and they need a certain test in order to make sure that they're fit for surgery, like was stated before.
but now that's not covered but then in order to prevent further losses so to
speak to the plan because of the cost of surgery going up if something doesn't
work out the way that it's supposed to that would have been found out how they
had the test covered does that make sense unlike where I'm going with that
that's a little it it seems a little convoluted here that were make that make
sense for me okay surgery surgical procedures um i'll just list a few uh mris cat scans things of
diagnostic nature or surgical nature go through a pre-authorization process and they will evaluate
the reasonable and customary customary necessity of those procedures sometimes when it could be
the wrong CPT code is put in on the provider side,
that it's not, well, wait a minute, that doesn't make sense.
Why are we doing this?
And they'll talk.
And sometimes you have peer-to-peer.
You'll have a doctor from A&M talk to the doctor at ABC group,
and they come to an agreement, well, that's not needed.
Let's try this other process.
So every procedure that goes,
there's a pre-authorization process that is implemented.
I hear what you're saying.
I hear that.
But when the patient's doctor says, you need this test before you go into this surgery,
why does that then have to go to appear to where that doctor's never met this patient?
The doctor doesn't know.
So does that make sense of what I'm saying?
I hear what you're saying, but the way plans are structured is that pre-authorization process takes place.
So I guess my question is how do we overcome that hurdle?
Because we see that there's a problem here.
We see that there's obviously a situation.
So how do we say, okay, we're going to move that out of the way?
Like, can we do that?
Do we have the capabilities of doing that?
Or are we just telling our employees, and I mean this very, very gently,
you're just up a creek without a paddle because this is the best we can do.
You know, I don't see the district getting...
I'm trying to be as respectful as I can.
Please understand.
I understand.
We can't get involved in the middle of the pre-authorization process because of HIPAA.
Right.
So our hands are kind of tied, but that's the reason we have our carrier to handle those things for us.
and I will say I very rarely hear of anything I say rarely I shouldn't say
that but I don't hear people calling in saying well that's not getting approved
that's not getting approved and sometimes if it isn't getting approved
we try to find out what the reason is for that and every carrier has
pre-authorization every single one of them they all go through that it's just
a matter of you know communicating with the member population to understand that they do have
advocates here at the district so that we can work through getting an appeal done because there is an
appeal process um and so that's just something that we have to be on top of with good communication
to the members regardless of the carrier that we switch to regardless of the third party
administrator we switch to because there's stop-loss insurance involved too so the carrier
does have some risk above the stop-loss level so every carrier and every third-party administrator
will also have some level of pre-authorization within their plan.
Mr. President?
We also have that same environment in the work that's being done.
Ms. Timmy?
Mr. President, thank you.
Mr. Ellman, thank you for this.
I know we talked about this in our finance committee meeting.
I think my heart breaks for the instances like we heard tonight.
and I just I just look at for the third year now I've looked at this the end
premium on the spousal coverage it's quite substantial and I don't I wish I
could you know make it all better and I I can't right now but I do know that I
I wanted to offer this as a resource maybe, and I'm not, this is just who my husband and I use.
There are some new products out there that we're self-employed, so we've, since 2010, we've been out on our own.
But I found this one agent, and he's phenomenal, and we pay, the two of us, pay less than what the employee and spouse pay for us.
and and we can go to any doctor we want so I was just gonna give this email if
that's okay to our community and ask them if they're you know especially on
the spouse I think that would be where I would focus is maybe you could contact
his name is Luke Elia he's in Dallas Texas he's phenomenal he answers his
phone calls his emails immediately and his name his email is Luke at Trinity
It's TrinityInsuranceGRP.com.
And I like it because there's very low deductible.
We can go to any doctor we want.
There's no pre-approval.
There's no waiting period.
And it's just been 15 years since we found anything decent.
So I know that doesn't help people that are facing surgery right now, and I hate that.
But maybe this could help some people, especially in the employee and spouse category.
and that that's all I'm trying I'm not getting any benefit from in fact I asked
him I said can I just give your email out to the public would you be okay and
he's like yes I will respond so I maybe that can help I think I think one thing
that that really kind of answer your question particularly about the tier two
and each one of the the loss in the plans rather is our spouses have
have historically been dropped.
I've been here, this is my 14th year here.
The spouses here, the tier two spouses,
have been driving the expenses of our claims elsewhere,
up through the roof, and that's a heavy burden.
So we have to try to recoup as much as we can in terms of premium
to help balance those claims out.
Right, and I understand that, and we talked about that,
and I appreciate that, but I'm just thinking
and there might be a better avenue for people to come you know like employees
like if I were working maybe it would be good to cover me on Katie I see his
plan but my spouse might be better on this and this because it's I can get we
can go anywhere anytime no pre approvals so you know which is phenomenal I've not
not seen that since Obamacare, right? So that's great. So I just, I know we're restricted
and I know Mr. Nauman, I know you and I know you're doing everything you can, but my heart
still breaks. Mr. President, thank you very much for your presentation. I understand it's
expensive and it's just getting worse same thing at my house you know my
husband works in oil and gas same thing it's all so I'm not going to talk about
cost I would like to talk about customer service in the kinds of things that I
don't know mr. Nelman where where you can help with this but here's here's
some questions that I've just been thinking about how do our employees know
what's covered I mean I see what that you know it's like oh this is a high
deductible and that kind of thing but how do they know what's covered do they have a thing like
okay if you need this surgery it's here this comes with mammograms this gets free is there a pamphlet
there's not a pamphlet we utilize the aetna website to navigate it's called that navigator to
what things are covered what's preventative uh who the providers are based on zip code things of that
nature that tool is available to them does it tell them what's covered what kinds of things are
covered yes okay uh and it would it would also be too something to think about too is is you know
generally speaking the pos2 is a very rich plan is a very broad network of coverage and providers
the memorial herman okay is specific to memorial herman aco providers the high deductible is a
is a broad plan, but you have a high deductible.
So it's up to the employee to make those decisions
and how they feel, what level of risk they want to take
in terms of their health care.
Personally, I went to a different insurance for myself.
I had to go to someone to help me understand
the difference between this and this and this
and based on me and my situation and our family situation what was best you know
fan age supplement what's all the things because they they just sound crazy you
know too hard to understand complicated not crazy okay I don't I don't know if
that's something you can do break it down I'm just constantly thinking what
could we do when I get confused and need a simple thing I go to YouTube try to
find something right is there something we can do to help our employees know that when they're
choosing and if you want if you think you might need this it's probably worth the cost now instead
of later okay uh if a doctor recommends it like like an ultrasound with the mammogram for for
reasons maybe risk or something who decides if it's denied the typically the way the process
works provider will submit a request to
through the pre-authorization process and that will be approved by and based
on the diagnosis the expected outcomes and things of that nature based on the
CPT codes that are being submitted I don't know if this is still accurate but
I a few years back had a someone who worked for insurance and they said we
deny everything the first time and make them come back that's just what they're
taught to do at insurance companies. I don't know. I don't know of an insurance company that does that.
I mean, I have not personally experienced that. I'm not saying that wouldn't happen in the market,
but when I first got started in the business way back in 86, I was taught as an adjuster,
find a way to pay a coin, and it's reasonable. I don't know that insurance companies intentionally
We would deny stress test before a major surgery.
I don't, you know, each case is unique and separate, but I don't think, if we were having
that as a trend, we would be, I would be aware of that.
So, when.
Intentional, intentional.
Okay, I'm just trying to get through some clicker things in my head, because I'm a marketing
communication person and I'm trying to think how do we communicate well to our employees
so they know what they need.
When something is denied, how do you tell the people,
and how long does it take?
Are they told about an appeals process?
Do they know what to do?
Well, the doctor's office will go through an appeal process,
and the doctor's office will have to communicate to the employee
this was denied for this reason, maybe a lack of information,
maybe it's not reasonable and customary.
There's a whole litany of things that a procedure could be denied for.
Okay.
So the doctor would probably call and say it got denied and we're going to redo it.
Did I leave something out?
Was I not clear enough in my diagnosis?
Things of that nature.
Wrong code.
Right.
Okay.
Could be anything.
Could be.
Okay.
Do you have any sort of a committee of teachers or something that could like, with a variety
of needs benefits committee or something that would give you advice from what they're thinking
because like mrs champagne said do you hear from them do they have a way to give you feedback
we communicate through the campuses through our benefit liaisons things that are pushed out what
we're changing but we did have i'll be perfectly honest with you several years ago we had a benefit
to the advisory committee.
And that literally became ineffective.
Complaint department because cost.
I'm trying to say it very delicately.
It became everything was a complaint.
And the primary focus that was going on was our premiums are so high.
Why are our premiums?
People weren't focused.
We couldn't get any results.
Actually, then, I think, if I recall, to the best of my ability and knowledge,
We did send out some surveys prior to that, but the people just focus on the premium the
majority of the time.
Right, and that wouldn't be the-
That's what they see.
Insurance is like a virus-
And we can explain it 100 times and it still costs so much, and then you go and your copay
is so much.
I get that, but maybe on things, well, maybe we can help them.
These are quick.
quick, do you have people to help navigate the roadblocks, right, any sort of struggles?
And you've said you do. You connect them to an advocate of some kind, some advocate like
Mrs. Champagne said. I'm all in favor of that. And can employees request a meeting with one
of your people to talk through stuff?
Oh, absolutely. They can come to our office. They can call us and figure out what the,
absolutely.
Absolutely.
Okay, great.
Thank you for hearing my questions.
I hope that I'm asking questions that people are at home screaming into their computers.
I don't know what they are, but just from having conversations with them and things
I would want to know if I were on that side, thank you for letting me ask and thank you
for taking care of our people the best you can.
Health care is difficult.
And we can be better and thank you for taking our suggestions.
questions. Mr. President, by this time most of the questions have been asked, but I just want to
reiterate, we realize, I think, that the costs are here and we do our due diligence, but I do hear
we need to do a better job somehow or make improvements or look at how we're communicating
with the employees through this benefit advisory council that we heard about tonight. I had never
heard of that might be something to revisit what I'm hearing is not I mean
sure premiums but what we're hearing is I got a list of providers and coverage
from my district of what's covered in my plan and I went to go use it and if
they're saying they have a different list so that's what I'm hearing and that
seems like something we could certainly fix and do better at that doesn't that's
not a dollar figure on that right is that realistic and and a fair ask well is it a fair
ask yes the challenge if you will is i think i said earlier is providers making an election
whether they want to be a part of a network and so that sometimes can be a very fluid thing in and
out so when you say fluid um like is there a maybe maybe we could look at it a little more often or
Or is there a timeline we could adjust?
What's fluid, like month to month?
It can happen in 30 days and it can happen in 45 days.
For whatever reason, the doctor's office or the practice decides we don't want to do this anymore.
Which may be out of your hands.
Right, and that's completely.
Usually in those situations, we kind of find out about it after the fact.
and it's like okay well I'm not familiar with dr. X and I was not aware that dr. X left the network
so sure sure so is there so currently today the status quo of updating those coverage lists and
provider lists is that a once a year thing yes it is well the provider lists are perpetually
updated through the Aetna Navigator online online and the coverages is we
don't change coverages typically in the middle of the year it's at the beginning
of the year there might be some augmentation that we may go we need to I
don't know whatever it might be that's not cost-effective or people aren't
utilizing and we try to communicate that say hey this is a benefit that's
available to you okay just trying to see if there's a process that we can do or a
quicker timeline on something to avoid some of these surprises sure not a I do
have one money question which is on page two slide two of your presentation and I
may have missed this I apologize but you talked about that it's that yeah the
history from 2019 to 2024 so this is five years or let's see technically six years um the deficit
the average participants and then you have monthly district contributions and that number is flat
across for six years at 385. that's the contribution we're contributing to an individual's
plan that is per employee per month per employee per month and it just struck me it's a flat line
for that many years when inflation rises a good 5%, 6% every year,
why is that flat?
Is there anything we can do to increase that number?
We could, and it would come out of some other funding source,
which has been stagnant since 2019.
So like salaries and their ability to give salary increases,
we'd love to increase that number permanently.
Now, the 385 is stagnant across the board,
but that's what employees can count on every month
for the district's contribution.
They can count on that when they sign up.
When it has a loss, we're funding that to the tune of $19, $29, added to it a month.
If we committed, let's just make that, let's say it was $400 and we moved from $385 to $400 and we had a great year and the fund didn't need it, we'd be at a loss, right?
So we're committing 385 up front, but we're doing the best we can to cover the deficit by it.
So when you look forward, it's 385.
Count on it.
Look back.
It was actually 530 last year or 521 last year that the district contributed every month.
Yes.
Yeah, thank you.
And I respect that.
So the deficit, like let's take the last year or plan year 2024.
$325,000 was contributed to the employee.
The district had to make up a deficit of $136,000 per employee,
but the employee doesn't see that.
That's a number you're catching.
The employee does see that.
The $136,000.
The premiums that Mr. Nauman would have presented tonight would have been much higher
had it not been for that participation.
All right, not in the contribution, I apologize.
They would be contributing much more out of their premium out of their pocket.
We're holding those costs down as best we can through that contribution.
additional contribution that is tough to communicate to the employee because they
don't see that right they don't see how the district paying down the deficit
keeps the premium even lower than it could have been and and and again that's
that's why I've said earlier I wanted to get that shot it's not shown here but
the shock and out factor is that as up to over 60 million dollars if you look
at it every per employee per month that's a 60 million dollars that the
district's general fund on stagnant revenue has covered to fund the losses of the plan the losses
because expenses health care expenses greater than the revenue of employee contributions plus that
385 every month i gotcha have we ever entertained and bear with me increasing it by by a little uh
the employee contribution as a you know a benefit that's tangible to the employee that they can see
I mean, was that part of, when do we see this number?
We don't see this number per se.
We see an aggregate number in the budget, I'm assuming, that we just approved, correct?
Mm-hmm.
Okay.
So, I mean, I just would like to see if there's something we can move and change so that something's
more tangible to the employee.
The contribution would be something they could see and understand, but as a benefit.
I respect what you're saying though.
Thank you.
Mr. President, may I ask a clarifying question?
Are you talking about the district contribution for the employee?
Yes.
Okay.
So that only benefits the employees who participate in this and not those who do outside?
True, but yet it's something so tangible and it's been the same for six years, seven years,
six years.
Thank you.
And again, with the focus on this, I'd be derelict in being able to say that 225 established before 2010 is what the state's contributing towards the health care premiums.
And so it has been stagnant since 2000 and before 10 at 225, and we're at 385.
Again, we could increase that to 400, 500.
If we ever bail the plan and go to TRS active care, we've got to live with that.
In other words, the district can't once you give it that you can't take it away
That's one of the things that factor into not increasing that number
We're covering that number from a marketing perspective. It may not work as
From a marketing perspective, but from a fiscal perspective
We're covering that deficit to the tune of 60 million dollars over the time frame you see here and then it'll be well over 70 million
dollars this
At when we close this fiscal year out
Mr. Cross, Mr. President.
thank you I would go back to the marketing issue because I think you're
right like for you know I don't know how many people watch this meeting and hear
anything about it maybe maybe a hundred maybe a thousand who knows but it seems
like we I mean because I understand what you're saying mr. Smith if we because
we're gonna cover it no matter what like that whatever that plan incurs we're not
going to dump that back on the employee like when we're in these deficits we're
taking care of the deficits as well I'm correct in that so in my mind if you
bumped it up to 400 and you still needed an extra 121 dollars to cover it employee
doesn't care about any of that right like they're they just look at what is
my what am I paying per month and I think I remember that about with TRS
active care and in the state only contributing the 200 and whatever
dollars and a long time but so I'm just wondering and this is something dr.
Gorg or ski I don't I don't know just how we how we try to make sure that
that information gets out somehow you know what I mean where our employees
understand that our districts not just leaving us hanging out to dry that that
our folks really are they're looking at plans they're they're trying to find the
best plans we we hire professional who does that for a living to also help us
with that and so I just I'm wondering if if some of this is just communication
Communication and that we can we can find a way to let folks know I mean it doesn't it doesn't fix all the stuff
It doesn't fix the individual things the situational things, but the second part of this and then I'll be done is
So we'll go back in May June
I think you said mr. Allen and look at you know plans again and and go through that process
I'm just also thinking that in and the
the survey is important, like what gets asked is important,
because if we don't ask the right questions, it will turn into stuff.
You know, maybe you don't want to say, like,
or you could say something like ignoring planned costs.
You know, what is something that, you know, you as an employee,
did you encounter, you know, something frustrating or didn't work?
or, you know, again, I'm not a, I know so little about health insurance,
but something that would give some valuable feedback to you so that when you are,
when you're going back and when the Aetna folks, if we get this tremendous amount of feedback
or get very little, you know, if you get eight people in a district who say something,
either the people didn't, you know, it wasn't a big enough deal, because you know how that goes.
like go to a restaurant and you don't usually take a review unless it's really
awesome or it's really bad and so but I'm just wondering if there is something
again that's something that has already been generated so certainly not ask you
to go reinvent the wheel and come up with your own survey and figure that but
if there's something that could go out to the employees it can't be just all
those years in education if it's going to take them 30 minutes to fill out a
survey then they won't do it you're wasting your time and you know it won't
do us any good but if there's something that could be relatively quick and and
still you know get the information that you need so that when you go back to
talk to those folks and they're you're you know we're ready to bed it out again
that that whoever it is that they get to hear like hey here's some of the things
our employees had some significant concerns about and if they you know and
and at that point at least don't know that, again, not knowing the insurance world,
I don't know if that's negotiating power or not.
It probably is not.
I will tell you this.
We're such, and Mr. Harris, you commented to this,
is we're at such size that we leverage that A-plus that's sitting behind you.
Oh, that's awesome.
And our size.
And we leverage that very, very hard.
I feel very strongly about that.
You know, I have this pin on, and it's very, I take it personally.
It hurts me when I see the way inflation is going in health care.
It's just, we pull every lever we can, and I use KDISD as best I can, each and every day, in every little thing that we do.
Sure.
Sure. I know, like the other trustees have said, it's a tough job and it's a tough world to navigate and so many factors beyond our control, right?
Like what's going on in the market and unexpected situations and all that.
but I'm just so I'm just wondering just maybe a couple things again something
that our folks know what we're doing that that word gets out so it's not just
if you happen to see the board meeting Monday night and and then the other
piece of just if there's something out there that yeah I mean you guys are the
expert so I'm not going to pretend to be but that you could look at that there's
something you go you know what this would be good information for us
somebody's already even if it's in the private sector you know they've developed
something we'd love for our employees to be able to you know send this in to us
and and we feel like we get some good data from it just so there's that
there's something because I understand I remember the days by the way of the the
committee's you know the benefits advisory and and I can remember sending
sending folks over and you're right.
You know, the plan's going up $20.
And they're like, but what else?
And I don't know, it's just going up.
And that's not a criticism of anybody,
but you're right, that's the first thing.
I mean, my daughter and son-in-law
work in this district
and that's the first thing they'll be like,
dad, insurance is going up, you know?
And so I get that, but then you have folks
like we heard tonight
that, you know, when a comment is made, I'm willing to pay more if we get something that works.
And, you know, I don't know how much of this is a one-off situation.
I pray that it is, and I pray that we can get that fixed and that folks can get what they need.
But I just feel like we've got to get some employee feedback,
back and then we need to let our folks know what we what we are doing as a
district to try to help them to the best of our ability you know I know we're
it's hard and we don't have the money and we're not being funded in a way that
allows us to do all the extra things like insurance insurance that that's a
biggie for everybody and so I'll wrap that up but just a couple of thoughts
before we leave this. Mr. President, may I add one thing? So on that survey that
you know that we have been talking about and I know I suggested that
early on but that could also be your like Mr. Cross was saying that could
also double as the informational part. I mean that information about what
we're already doing could be on that survey. So that could be a double
duty. But also, just as a side note,
insurance companies deny people for things all the time. We got denied today for an EpiPen for my daughter.
So I'm just saying, and I don't work for KDISD,
so I'm just saying that this is a problem. This is an insurance problem. This isn't necessarily
a KDISD problem or a Mr. Nauman problem or a Mr. Harris problem. This is just
So this is not something that's going to be solved or anything because we're not the insurance companies.
But just to have a little bit more an advocate type person or information or something like that
so that at least the people can know that we're thinking of them.
We're not going to solve those problems though probably.
I hate that, but that's just the way it is right now.
As I look at the numbers, I think the other way to look at this too, that monthly deficit contribution, if we're in private industry, would have been increases in monthly payments for every employee.
Because a private company is not going to go $16 million in the hole on insurance for people to offer.
Not saying we should have raised prices.
As I see that, there is some level of pride that we've been able to keep those premiums the same with hope that our income would increase to be able to cover it.
But I'm faced in my personal life for my company with these increases every year.
And to see that increase go on, and I don't get the opportunity to save it if we don't spend it.
I'm not self-insured.
I don't get that option.
But I do echo what the board said.
I think a lot of our employees understand those costs are increasing.
Medical insurance and our medical industry,
got some great friends doing that and some great doctors
and all those kinds of things, but it's getting expensive.
Yeah.
So I know what I'm hearing the entire board say is we want to provide
the best we can to our employees. We want to do that fiscally responsibly and we
want it to be clear to our employees what benefits they have and how to best
use those benefits. I know that's everybody's desire in this
room too. So thank you board. Any more questions or comments? I just have one
last comment. Ms. Calhoun? I just want to pick it up real quick. Thank you. Aetna doesn't report its annual
annual earnings but as of last year um it is assumed uh based off of CVS Health that Etna
did take in 60.6 billion dollars in 2024. so I don't want to um do a survey I don't want to have
our employees do a survey that gives them false hope that a 60.6 billion dollar health company
company, it cares that they're upset. I care that you're upset. I care that you're getting denied.
I think it's criminal. I don't think Aetna cares. I'm going to be totally honest. So what I would
rather you spend your time doing is finding ways to make this work for our employees
that are struggling. They just got raises this last year.
what are they supposed to do how are they supposed to do this how are they supposed to keep their
head above water and i know it's not your fault we said i said this to you privately this is not you
i know that but i appreciate this board wanting to hear your complaints i do but i don't want you
having the false hope that you're that these complaints are somehow going to make a hill of
beans worth of difference to a company that makes 60.6 billion dollars doesn't that's that's the
really awful hard truth to swallow so again i would rather you spend your time finding ways
that we can make this work for our employees instead of giving them something to scream at a
wall mr. president for a point of clarification this box no I know I just
want to make sure that you know that I was not asking for a survey to go to
Aetna I want a survey to how can you do you need more people to help them
navigate and if that's what you need and and that provides a service to them you
You know, that's, let us know what you need.
People are expensive.
I'm not making any commitments for Dr. Gorgorski.
He's rubbing his eyes, wishing I would stop talking.
But if what they're saying is, I don't understand what I'm getting.
I signed up for that one because that's what my next door teacher neighbor signed up for.
She has entirely different needs than I have.
Right?
She has, you know, young children.
I'm at this age where I'm going to need more medical.
I don't need to sign up for what she signed up for.
Who do you have who can help me understand it?
Those kinds of things.
Whatever that feedback is that would be,
that you could provide them information
or hand-holding to get them through what that looks like
and why is the deductible so much, those kinds of things.
It's information and helping them.
Because we're not going to be able to lower the cost.
And I appreciate what you said.
I agree, Aetna doesn't care.
They don't care how many times you're complaining,
but if you could provide something to get to the Aetna people for them
or how to do that, I think you really could provide some outreach
and a handout to them to help them figure out what these concerns are
that are not just cost.
Thank you so much for taking our suggestion.
Thank you, Mr. President.
Any more questions, Board?
I'm sorry, Dr. Arquette.
All right, we'll now move on to item 7.8.
Mr. Nauman, you're still presenting.
7.8 Discuss and consider Board approval of claims administration for unemployment compensation by TASB Risk Management Fund.
Discuss and consider board approval of claims administration for our unemployment compensation by TASB risk management fund.
The district shall comply with the provisions of the Texas Unemployment Act, Labor Code 201.26.
The district is permitted by law to enter into a joint group account with other political subdivisions to share the cost benefits that are attributable to the services provided in the employee of a group of account members, Labor Code 205.21.
KDISD has provided these services through an interlocal agreement with TASB Risk Management Fund.
The fixed contribution for plan year 2024 was $352,468.
with the renewal set at $296,073 for plan year 25-26.
It is recommended the Board of Trustees approves the claims administration
by TASB Risk Management Fund for plan year 25-26.
Any questions, Board?
Please hold, Mr. President.
I do like the fact, I mean, we can go back years when we talk about all the ways that
unemployment claims were just being approved by our government during COVID time and all
the fraud that was happening.
Crazy to go back and look at 833 claims back then and now just 183, like significant difference.
I will add this just parenthetically speaking.
We've had seen a spike here recently in the last few weeks in fraudulent claims being filed, and we fight those vigorously.
Seeing there's no questions, thank you.
We'll now move on to item 7.9, discuss and consider board approval for the district performance objectives.
7.9 Discuss and consider Board approval of the District Performance Objectives.
Our presenter is Natalie Martinez, Executive Director of School Improvement.
Good evening, President Redman, Dr. Gregorski, and the school board.
Each year the Board is asked to review and approve the district performance objectives that guide the district improvement planning process.
The performance objectives are all aligned to the nine strategic goals that are created through three different processes.
Five of them are legally required, 17 are from our strategic design, and nine of them are created from a needs assessment process.
You received a copy of the proposed district performance objectives, and at this time I will answer any questions you may have.
Any questions, Board?
No questions.
And we'll move on to Item 7.10, Discuss and Consider Board Approval of the Campus Performance
7.10 Discuss and consider Board approval of the Campus Performance Objectives.
Objectives.
Similar to the district improvement planning, each year the Board is required to review
and approve the performance objectives that guide each individual campus improvement plan.
The performance objectives are aligned to the district's strategic goals and drive their
work throughout the year.
At this time, I want to answer any questions you may have.
Chair Greg Musil.
Any questions aboard?
I just have a question, Mr. President.
Ms. Champaign.
This is a real simple question.
I think I probably ask it almost every year, so I'd just like to do it for clarification.
So all the campuses have their performance objectives, and just for clarity purposes,
purposes, who monitors that? Who is watching and making sure that each campus is trying
to obtain the goals that they've set for themselves?
Sure. So within our plan for learning system, there are quarterly reports and our assistant
superintendents along with my team as well, we go in and monitor which ones have been
reviewed. So the principal and their teams are reviewing them. And then my team and the
assistant superintendents go to see that they are reviewed and then we turn in a
report at least on the district side for all of those performance objectives
there's multiple things in place too I'm sure and then if they're somehow not
meeting their their goals we do rely on the principal's to go through that
process but they also have their assistant supers to help them absolutely
Absolutely. Okay. That's it. Okay.
No further questions. Thank you.
I will now move on to item 7.11, discuss and consider board approval for the superintendent to prepare, sign, and submit a waiver application to the State Commissioner of Education for elementary school campuses that exceed the allowable class size of 22 to 1,
7.11 Discuss and consider Board approval for the superintendent to prepare, sign, and submit a waiver application to the State Commissioner of Education for elementary school campuses that exceed the allowable class size of 22:1, in addition to campuses that could potentially exceed the ratio due to increased enrollment during the 2025 - 2026 school year.
in addition to campuses that could potentially exceed the ratio due to increased enrollment during the 25-26 school year.
Presenter Brian Schuss, Chief Human Resource Officer.
Good evening, President Redmond, members of the board, Dr. Gagorski.
This is an item that we present to the board each year in September,
and it is our class size waivers for the 25-26 school year.
In your board agenda, there is a document that has 49,
currently 49 class sections in pre-K through 4 that are over the 22 to 1 ratio.
Now, that is, so to give a little context, that's 49 out of 1,620 sections.
So when you look at it big picture like that, that's a pretty small number.
37 of the 49 are over by just one student.
So I think that's important information as well.
And as the board knows,
we've talked about this in the past,
this is after our enrollment balancing process
where we look at grade level class sections
and class sizes and if campuses have low enough numbers
where they can afford to maybe have a reduction in staff,
then we're able to use those staff members
at other campuses that are struggling with class size.
So we've completed that process, but then each year, even after that process, we still
have some waivers.
And an example, so the enrollment balancing process, a very collaborative process, our
assistant superintendents, elementary principals very involved in the process, and our decision
makers in that process.
And so it happens each and every year that we may go to a principal and say, you're slated
to receive an additional teacher or growth, and that principal might say, no, I appreciate it,
but I'm good. You know, even though I know I've got a couple of sections that may be over or a
few sections that are over by one student, I've got a great dynamic in that grade, right? And we
hear them say that, you know, to open up another class section and have a new teacher, that
sometimes that can be disruptive and, you know, and I'm going to rock with the team that I've got,
you know they're they're happy where they are so and actually that scenario
is the bulk of these of these 49 waivers so so it's and one thing I would like to
say is you know that this waiver is not it's not an in general statement that
the district now is okay with larger class sizes or that we're even pushing
larger classes that's not what this is we're just required to report each
individual section pre-k through four that is over that is over the 22 to one
I mean, I think, you know, when we do campus staffing, we staff at 22 to 1.
So I think that shows that, you know, where we want to be.
And that's why when we have staffing approved, we bring additional growth units for that reason,
that we can act when we see early on with enrollment if class sizes are going to be high.
So anyways, that's what we have for you tonight.
And I'll take any questions.
Any questions, Board?
Mr. President.
Ms. Fox.
So Mr. Shush, if we were to not have waivers or not be able to get the waivers, we would need 49 more teachers.
We would need 49 more classrooms with desks, and that would add a significant amount to our roster, right, which teachers cost money and all the things that happen.
and that would mean that instead of having 23 children now you're
rebalancing the whole grade level right until everybody all the children it's a
fruit basket turnover and then everybody's going to be redistributed
after you've made friends you know your teacher you've had the back-to-school
night and you have your PTA room moms all the things and now everybody's mad
right so I've been in elementary schools where we have to do it because you know
three classes went over and you switch them all around and all the parents are
mad because they want their children with that teacher or they want the
children with the friends they already had so when it's over by one which is
did you say 37 of the 49 37 49 of the 49 are over by one student maybe it's more
beneficial all around to keep our students together and give extra help to
to a teacher who might be over or something.
So it's financially better, it's emotionally
and academically better to keep everybody together
once you've already gotten started.
Yes ma'am, and we hear that too,
that relationships have been built
and I just don't wanna disrupt that dynamic.
So we hear that, yes.
And it's very true, if we had an all-out mandate
that every single class must be 22 to one or lower,
it one it would take the decision-making away from from the principal and
sometimes they purposefully do things but yes we would require us to add a
significant number of teachers mr. Redmond missy okay just a procedural
question for you so I understand the waivers at the beginning of the year
what about if like you know after Christmas a class is goes over 22 or
that class that's 23 goes up to 24 do we have to file another way between to file
I should have asked this a while ago.
No, no, no.
It's a great question.
So, yes, so with this approval, so we're here with 49 currently, okay?
But with this approval, this does give Dr. Gorsi the approval to file additional waivers throughout the year if that happens.
But last year, if I remember correctly, I should have written this down, I think a very similar number of waivers.
I think maybe 47.
But after that approval, there were no additional waivers for the remainder of the year.
Okay.
Mr. President?
Ms. Gazelle.
Thank you, Mr. Shush.
Do you know what's going on at Campbell Elementary?
So that's a good question.
That one does have, I think they had 13 waivers.
13, yeah.
And that was actually one of the principals
and campuses that said that they were fine,
that they were slated to get an additional teacher,
but the principal said, I'm good where I am.
I'm comfortable where I am and I wanna sit tight.
So, and here's the thing.
we're here to support the principals right and they're making the the best
decisions for their campus so uh and sometimes we'll get asked well if i
say no now can i not get one in the future well of course not
you know if uh let's say they continue to grow and at christmas
you know they said well you know i've i've i've thought about that more and
i'd like to go ahead and add we'll do that at that time
okay okay and and then um it's important what you said that 37 of the 49 classes
that we're talking about that are over the 22 to 1 are just by
by one.
Twenty-three.
Excuse me?
Or twenty-three, yes, ma'am.
Okay.
And so then that leaves 12 other classes.
What are they over by?
Yeah, so.
Roughly.
Yeah, nine are over by two and three are over by three.
Okay.
So that gives perspective on this.
Okay.
I think that's all I got.
Thank you.
Mr. President.
Mr. President, first of all, I want to say it's awesome that there's no pre-K that's over,
and there's only one kindergarten class.
There's only two first-grade classes.
So this is kind of helpful to me.
But I also want to say that I appreciate what Mrs. Fox said earlier,
because I did have a kid that was in a class that actually she had three teachers by November in first grade,
and that was a terrible year.
and thankfully she's of my three kids my strongest student so she she survived but
mom was having a meltdown but anyway that's that was a long time ago i'm trying to get over it but
i um but also the thing is too is sometimes when you have to redo all these these teachers
you have to disrupt another school because there may be another school that i won't pick on but
may have 15 kids per class and then you could combine them and oh well here's an
extra teacher over here at this other school that we could take combine all
those kids and take this teacher over to this school to make another teacher and
then now all those kids at that school are unhappy and that teachers not happy
you know so it's very very very very like a domino effect thing and I just
suggested if it's just one kid or even two kids and the teachers go with it
it's a lot better just to try to stay that way because I just know what we
went through personally and it and it has by the way been 21 years and I'm
still get an eye twitch when I think about it so it's I appreciate what you
do I know it's very probably like a juggling act and I don't know it's
probably very complicated process for the for the principals because I've seen
that process too where they're placing all the kids in all the classes and
that's and I see SEO elementary a previous elementary principal sitting in
the audience and I know she knows I'm talking about it's very complicated so I
really appreciate all the work that's been done in this and I feel very good
with it personally any other questions for thank you we'll move on to number
8 information items 8.1 donated items are donated items list has been received
8. Information Items
eight point to recap for board member requests for information madam secretary
we captured any requests from the board did you have anything did y'all have
anything oh I just had a question about donated items miss Cazale for the Ten
commandments that are donated I thought dr. Gorski you were makes or say
something or mr. Redmond was going to but it's SB 10 people are wanting to
donate them and I don't see that as something we should be on a monthly
basis as part of this donation report so just I wanted to wanted to suggest that
but when they're donated, they need to come here to the administration building,
as you had said, Dr. Gagorski.
So they do have to be a certain size, and they can't have whatever,
websites and such on it, paraphernalia.
It has to be the certain one that the state has approved
and that they should be hung if the district's happy with that.
They're the right 16 by 20 size, et cetera.
So is that permissible here?
I mean, does anyone have any different feelings on that?
I think, number one, we are going to hang them when they're donated.
I don't think the conversation is will they be hung or not hung, right, as soon as we get them.
No, that was a question.
And so that's what I wanted to clarify, that we're not waiting on this monthly board meeting to approve the donation before they can.
be hung. We do have a board policy about donated items. I can't think of what it
is off the top of my head that I'm trying to think of a reverse situation
of something that would be donated that we want to make sure we're receiving.
Obviously there's no discussion about not hanging them. We, I mean state law
says when we receive them we hang them. Mr. Redmond, let me step in here. This board has
policy CDC local it's a local board policy and it talks about the board
having final authority to accept unsolicited gifts which is why we
present the items to the board on a monthly basis I will tell you we're not
in actively soliciting the Ten Commandments posters were also not not
soliciting the Ten Commandments posters we're simply following the law so we've
given instructions to folks that are donating those items that they come to
the campus to come to the esc here we will accept them and then ultimately put them as they come in
put them on the board agenda for this board to see the donated items list this is i will board
members i will tell you this is the same process that we followed for the end guide we trust signs
so we get them put them on the board agenda once the board sees them then we will
put them up at the campuses so that that's that's the plan that's the process we're following your
board policy and it's worked in the past so we're going to continue to do that unless
this board would like to revise their policy to do something different
so there's not room in the policy for something that's state law to hang when you receive it
i mean because there could be a whole
month or so before they can be hung isn't there a problem with that or could could we handle
treat these differently. Something that's
in the law.
So,
how about this?
This donated list ended on
8-26. Would we be able
to get an updated list for Monday?
It would have up to
the date on that one specific item?
It's a question for Mr.
Smith. His team handles
all donated items. There's a process. Everything
comes through electronically.
So, Mr. Smith,
How feasible is that to update the donated items list between now and Monday?
Feasible that that can happen.
Now, we're relying on the campuses and the district to inform us of those donations
because they don't run through our office.
So there's a form that they fill out that gets that on that list.
And if that form is filled out and sent to us, sure, we can update the list.
It's going to fall out of practice with all the other donated items for the district
But that whatever the board wishes we can we can make that happen as long as we're aware of it now again
somebody could be making a donation of that right now and
Nobody knows about that in this room
And we won't know about it in my office until that
Gets there on that form
Yeah, that form can be updated sure
Mr. Graham, would it be possible for us to say on Monday in the board meeting to take action to say we pre-receive those?
I just say we can find out.
We can find out this week what we've got donated.
We can work on that and get you a list for Monday so that you can look at it on Monday.
But again, I will tell you, you're talking about state law.
We've done this once.
We did this with the N-Guide. We trust signs. And so we have a process in place
and we want to want to make sure that everything's hung, everything's hung
appropriately. It's not just slapped up on the wall. I mean that's, you know, Ted's
team does a good job with that, but we have, you know, the process that we gotta
follow. Mr. President? Ms. Simi? Is this what you're saying is just vote next week
that anytime we get a donation of those we're gonna go ahead and approve it to
be hung as long as it's within the measurements and all that you're saying just pre-approve it
all at once that's what my question is yeah i like that idea yeah yeah what mr are you saying
every month we have to do no just just for every campus like preemptively accept them as long as
they meet the criteria of the state yeah i think that's wise oh okay yes and that's what i'm trying
to suggest okay that's what you're saying that's what you're saying i'm trying to okay yeah i
apologize our donations here are way different than the standard ten commandment posters that
are going to maybe hopefully be coming in i get what you guys are saying we'll have some on the
agenda next week okay my worry would be that at some point we're setting up a different protocol
for other items that are not um one-off just yeah there's something that another item that's being
donated that now we're going to cheat these differently so okay thank you well would it
i mean this is mandated by law right so with the other items i guess this is a little bit different
because this isn't just something that's not just something that's donated just out of the kindness
of someone's heart i mean i guess it is but this those don't come with mandates by state law to be
be hung and then accepted.
So I think there's a little bit of an asterisk there
with what you're saying.
We're not talking about the same thing.
There's a difference.
So I think it is appropriate to make some kind of new,
whatever we need to do to make it happen
because it's the law.
Well, and Mr. President, I think it's prudent
that if somebody wants to donate something
to an athletic team, right?
You want to have the board make sure it fits the criteria of our policies, right?
But this is different because this is state law.
So that's why I feel like there's no – it feels to me like red tape,
and it feels like we're not being good faith in applying the law to me if we delay and delay and delay.
So that's why a preemptive vote on this, I think, would be very, this calls for that, in my opinion.
Mr. President, I think what they're saying makes complete sense.
You know, we're on this list today.
There's an ice cream party for back to school.
Well, that's already been consumed, and we're approving it after the fact.
It's like, you know, someone donated, and it's kind of a thank you, and we're kind of being like, thank you.
So yeah, I think it's perfectly fine to say that we're okay with those going in as they come in
Dr. Gorski your staff just
Execute it as you can
So again a point to madam secretary, is there any requests from the board I did not hear anything
All right, well then future board meetings we'll have our regular board meeting on Monday, September 22nd 2025
9. Future Meetings
25
This being there being no further business before the board this meeting is adjourned. The time is 9 30 p.m
Official documents
Motions and votes
Recorded actions
The motions and votes for this meeting have not been recorded here yet. Whether any were taken is not stated either way. The agenda and the recording above are the primary sources.