DAC Meeting Minutes December 16, 2010 Mark Smith Welcome and DAC – HISD Budget Overview (see presentation) ‐ Budget shortfall estimated o HISD piece of budget shortfall is at minimum $57million ‐ TEA grants cuts – every agency has been asked to look for 5% reduction in their budgets o Several state level grants will diminish in size or be gone completely ‐ Fed restricts 30% of Title I dollars ‐ HISD must present budget by June 30th, 2011 even if state funding hasn’t been decided o Preparing for a “moderate worst case scenario” o Budget process has already begun ƒ Looking to cut somewhere between $50M ‐ $150M Where are the dollars budgeted currently? ‐ School allocations $987M ‐ Non resource District Wide Accounts ‐ Include things like utilities, transportations costs, etc. ‐ District wide benefits ‐ Others Department budgets $234M ‐ More than half spent in operations – maintenance, security, transportation, etc. ($133M) ‐ Academic services – curriculum, CSO, SIO’s management of schools structure ($50M) Send suggestions to [email protected] Powerpoint presentation to be sent out from Mark’s office Who are the other DAC members on the budget committee? ‐ Keith and Mark ¾ Carolyn to send out contact information with notes Karla Stevens – Promotions Standards Revisiting, revising and making changes to districts promotions standards Presenting to various stakeholders in the district for feedback Critical that districts promotions policy maintains the districts rigorous promotion standards ‐ Retention itself does not put students where they need to be and puts them at risk for dropping ‐ Develop meaningful intervention plans ‐ Place the responsibility of meeting grade requirements not just on the student but on the school for providing the correct intervention. Recommendations ‐ Remove Stanford and Apprenda criteria from promotion standards o Not an appropriate use of the assessment o Testing was moved to end of school year and results not available to mid June Desire to align with state policy. No district in the area uses this testing as a promotion standard Continue using the high frequency word, TAKS and course grades Want to use state and local assessments to identify students who would be eligible for promotion with appropriate interventions o If the child passes TAKS and course grades they will be promoted Make sure there are meaningful and interventions plans to make sure students are performing and progressing as required. Accountability at the school level for response based interventions o
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Comment: Applaud proposal to revise retention and promotional changes. At the high school level I see it every day. Kids come in behind a grade and want to get caught up and if we don’t have an intervention in place they will get lost and end up dropping out. Comment: It seems to me that we’re solving the wrong problem we’re reducing the standards when the problem is in the intervention plan. Comment: About grading – what’s the data correlation between the change in grading policy and the results on TAKS and testing results? ¾ Grading policy didn’t change. A recommendation was made but it was not adopted. What about retaking of tests? ¾ Only happens at the 5th and 8th grade levels With the revised grading plan, there was an option to retake test to improve course grades. Is that still available? ¾ Yes. You can retake tests to improve course grades. With summer school shortening students will have less time to do this now. This is even more reason we need rigorous intervention plans For the 25K that is retained – the goal is to initiate 25K interventions across the district? ¾ Yes, that’s the point Ann Best – Appraisal System Work Objectives for the meeting: • Step back and reflect on the DAC’s role in the design process • Review Cycle 3 recommendations from the SDMCs • Come to an agreement on the specific criteria for Instructional Practice and Professional Expectations • Receive an update from the Measures of Student Learning working group • Review examples of appraisal processes Reflection ‐ What have we done this fall ‐ And what is it going to take for us to meet these milestones in the spring? Comments: ‐
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Problems we see – SDMC brought forward categories and if it wasn’t popular it disappeared from the list. The thought is that unless something is popular it doesn’t have a place. o Is there a way to bring in all the contributions of the outliers to make decisions on the best thinking not necessarily he most popular? o If we are going to become the best school district in the nation, what’s popular now isn’t going to get us there. We need to move beyond what were comfortable with and that means bringing in those outliers and their ideas and seeing how we can move forward. When we were talking about what was done before – all we see is data‐ we have yet to make a decision on the data and at times the data comes too quickly without time to internalize it. We’re funnlizing (sic) this and are supposed to come up with bullets in a short period of time. We are not giving it the time it needs for discussion and debate. Get some best practices and ideas from across the country and bring that forward. Maybe sending out some optional reading and website links on what other districts are doing, etc. would help Summary of Cycle 3 meetings ‐ 473 representatives from 240 SDMC’s and 252 schools Dina discussed the process to get to the criteria this far and that the DAC will reviewing the criteria and coming up with recommended changes prior to the next meeting. Today we will discuss Cycle 2 criteria recommendations, that were provided to you at the last meeting on top of additional scorecard information ‐ 1. Split into two groups, one for Instructional Practice and one for Professional Expectations ‐ 2. Review the data and draft revised framework ‐ 3. Discuss revisions and what changes need to be made ‐ Make any changes to the draft framework ‐ 5. Present to the group DAC was split into two groups and discussed potential changes to each set of the criteria. Summary of discussion points: Instructional Practice • When reviewing the criteria, the primary discussion point was to what extent qualifiers should be removed from the list of criteria to be further defined in the rubric‐ this led to specific changes to criteria such as: communications with students and setting student learning goals • The group agreed to all of the “Proposed Removals” • There was debate around including the term rigor/rewording the first criteria under Instruction so that is does address skill development • Emphasis was placed on needing to make clear to those building the rubric that pacing lessons is vitally important, which came up during a discussion on “Maximizes Instructional Time” • Emphasis was placed on needing to make sure appraisers took into consideration the diversity of students and what it means to “perform at high levels” in those groups • Emphasis was placed on needing to make sure that under discipline management that the rubric not penalize individuals for a well‐behaved classroom (i.e. give points for responding to misbehavior in the right way) Professional Expectations •
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When reviewing the criteria, the primary discussion point was that the criteria selected be measurable The group agreed to all of the “Proposed Removals”, except for the criteria related to professional dress and debated the need a professional development criteria related to content There was discussion whether or not “treating colleagues with respect” would be measurable There was debate around if professional dress should be included and it was determined that it is an expectation worthy of specific attention, focused on what the school policy is, given the diversity of expectations which may exist While criteria related to setting examples for students and acting with integrity are vitally important, the group felt that by meeting these expectations in totality, teachers would be setting an example and that integrity may be covered within professionalism and ultimately very difficult to measure Debate arose over separating out regular, respectful and responsive communications for emphasis and clarity and responsive was targeted to be pulled out on its own Conclusion: After 35 minutes groups came back and Ann Best suggested that the DAC meeting on January 6th to confirm the Cycle 2 Recommendations on the IP and PE criteria. The group will confirm its Cycle 2 criteria recommendation after the holiday break, when members have more time to review and reflect on the criteria. DAC members were given homework on reviewing the SDMC Cycle 3 recommendations in more detail and the meeting concluded at that time.