Key Agenda Items
Budget Workshop Recap:
What should the Board be doing in March?
1. The HISD school board should finalize drafts of their student outcome goals, constraints, and theory of action to guide administration as they plan for next school year and finalize the proposed budget. According to their Governance Strategic Plan, a draft of the goals should have been finished and available for public comment by the end of January. The Board has a deadline for HB 3 required goals in June.
2. Last June, the HISD Board had to convene for a last-minute special meeting to pass a budget for the 2019 – 2020 school year. In order to prevent another last-minute budget vote next summer, the HISD Board needs to collaboratively and collectively set its budget priorities so the administration can create a budget proposal based on those priorities. The first budget workshop for next year was on March 5 and the Board still has not provided clear priorities or governance framework for the administration to use as a guide.
Outstanding Issues:
3. HISD should start identifying teachers and principals for the next school year to ensure there are no teacher or administrative vacancies. It should be utilizing the teacher pipelines, such as Teach Forward Houston, so every student will have a teacher for all of their classes before the start of the 2020 – 2021 school year.
4. The HISD Board should terminate their legal actions against the TEA. The Board is using taxpayers’ dollars from unassigned funds, running HISD into a deeper deficit, to pay for their lawyers. So far, the Board has accrued a $283,575.63 bill for their lawyers, which ONLY covers April 2019 through December 2019.
5. The Houston ISD Board of Education should be editing the language and changes of their in-district charter agreements. If the policies are set at the beginning of the year, the Board should be able to accept charter agreements by the end of the calendar year and approve them in January, avoiding the potential of closing a school in April or May.
6. The HISD Board should look into partnerships for HISD schools that may be Improvement Required (IR) in the following year. According to the TEA, this process should have started in November. The final deadline for submission is at the end of March.