AssistantSuperintendent BoardReport

The adoption timeline was modified to allow more time for committee members and District leaders to solicit formal quotes and meet (virtually) with selected publishers during the month of April. The committee's recommendation, which will reflect full adoption pricing, will be presented to the Board for approval at the May 2024 meeting. Click HERE for the revised timeline.

District and Campus administrators met on April 10th to discuss plans for Summer School 2024. Bilingual Summer School for incoming Kindergarten and 1st-grade Bilingual students will be held Monday-Friday, June 3-21, 2024, at Finley-Oates. All other students will attend Summer School Monday-Thursday, June 3-20, 2024. L.H. Rather students will attend Summer School at I.W. Evans due to Junior High pre-construction events at LHR. Campus principals are now working on identifying students they will invite to Summer School based on an analysis of student academic performance, attendance, and academic growth.

Teachers across the district have been reviewing their content with students to ensure that they are well-prepared for various end-of-year assessments. These review activities vary from learning boot camps during or after school to embedded reviews in the class period. The activities focus on the TEKS Readiness Standards, which are crucial for success in the current grade and also prepare students for the next grade. The review activities also focus on helping students improve their writing skills in response to short and extended constructed response questions.

We appreciate all the time, effort and hard work our BISD teachers and staff have put in to ensure their students are prepared for Spring STAAR assessments. The Spring testing window begins this week:

• Tuesday, April 16 - STAAR Reading Language Arts 6-8; English I EOC
• Wednesday, April 17 - English II EOC
• Tuesday, April 23 - STAAR Science 6-8; Biology EOC
• Thursday, April 25 - STAAR Social Studies 8; US History EOC
• Tuesday, April 30 - STAAR Math 3-8; Algebra I EOC

On Wednesday, March 27th, the Curriculum & Instruction Department held a 2024-2025 District Assessment Calendar planning meeting in the BISD Boardroom. Campus and District Administrators worked with District Test Coordinators to review the district calendar, the TEA testing calendar, sports schedules, and other information in order to draft campus testing calendars for local and state assessments for the 2024-2025 school year.

Planning efforts are underway for the 2nd Annual BISD LEAD Conference which will be held during in-service on August 8-9, 2024. District staff who volunteered to present a conference session attended a LEAD Conference Kickoff event hosted by BISD Instructional Specialists, Chris Dickson and Jenny Haggard, on April 3rd or April 9th. During these meetings, Instructional Specialists shared the 2023 LEAD Conference survey results and discussed changes for the 2024 based on the staff input received through the survey. Goals for the 2024 event were also developed during these sessions. Session presenters were then allowed to collaborate and work on their session overviews which will be uploaded into the conference scheduler in May. The plan is to have the scheduler app ready for district staff to select their sessions before the last week of school. This will allow C&I leaders to identify topics that may need additional sessions well in advance of the August event. We are very excited to continue this popular staff development program that was the brainchild of Mr. Dickson and Mrs. Haggard and look forward to a successful LEAD 2024!

Budget amendment documents for Title I, Title II, Title III and Title IV were prepared for Region 10 (SSA) after TEA released final allocations, reallocations, and carry-over amounts. Once the amendments were approved by Region 10, general ledger adjusting entry information and the Region 10 budget sheets were given to the CFO for updating Ascender general ledger accounts. Any increases in allocations were applied to function 6100 payroll accounts (staff salaries and shortage stipends). Once the adjusting entries are entered in Ascender by the CFO, I will cross-reference them with my documents to ensure accuracy.

TEC requires districts to annually certify to the State Board of Education and the commissioner that students have access to instructional materials covering all TEKS for all required subjects (except PE). Districts are also required to annually certify that they protect against access to obscene or harmful online content. Completion of the Certification Process (Board approval) is a requirement to regain access to instructional materials allotment funds when the state instructional materials ordering system, EMAT, reopens in May. There is an action item on this month's agenda for this process.