Okay, good afternoon. This meeting is now convened. The time is 03:07PM. I would like to ask everyone to please silence all cell phones. A quorum of the Board members is present in the Board Auditorium. They are from my right on the platform, Cassandra Bandy, Michelle Cruz Arnold, Jeanette Garza Linder, myself Rick Campo, Aubrey Mo Men, IE. We also have Rolando Martinez, Paula Mendoza and Alan Revan. We have some public officials in the audience this afternoon. Savant Moore,
good to see you. I think that's it there. I can't really see that far. Today, we have speakers to the agenda. We will now hear from our registered speakers. So we'll begin with public officials followed by student speakers. We'll then hear from remaining in person speakers and Zoom speakers. Public comment during school board meetings will only be available to those persons who have signed up to speak prior to the meeting time per current protocol. Verbal and other disruptions by persons during the school board meetings are not acceptable as they inhibit the board's ability to conduct business and the public's ability to observe those
processes. Persons who participate in such behavior will be given one warning and if the behavior is repeated they will be asked to leave the meeting. We have 18 speakers, today who will be limited to two minutes each for board policy. We ask that you stay on topic and refrain from naming individuals, especially students as their identity is protected under the law, but you may name your own child. I ask that you please respect our procedures and that other speakers at the end of comments promptly when your time is expired and the timer rings. We'll start with public officials.
Will HISD Board of Education Trustee Savant Moore? Good to see you. One of my schools, Wheatley and Yates, will be playing in the, regional finals, if they're two more games away from a state championship. And so when I think about a budget workshop, it's very important that when you make the decision with your, with the finances, you think of those children. I know many of those young men because they play sports with my children, football, basketball, track. So I know them personally, and I know the railroad tracks that they have to cross. So please consider your busing.
I know, the young lady, she just text me. She was able to pay for her housing, going to Stephen f Austin. She's gonna graduate this May. The challenges that she faces in Kelly Village in my neighborhood, think of wrap around services. Think of the importance of why we should have a library. I do thank the superintendent and his team because I know in North West Houston, academically, we have, improved. And so I appreciate you in that regards of, making sure that you uplift their reading, you uplift their math because it's important. But let's make sure that what that constituent said when she was disappointed,
that's real. It's not fake news. It's real. And so, please, you have an opportunity to not disappoint the public when it comes to the finances. Let's do right this term. You have another opportunity to for a second opportunity, a second chance for the public to say, hey. He listens to us, and he changes. And so I hope that you do that. Thank you for everything that you do. I hope that you have a great day. I'm about to run because haircut and go to this game. I'm being so excited, but I'm proud of all of them and I'm proud of you.
God bless each of you and God bless HISD. Thank you. We'll now hear from speakers who have identified themselves as students when they checked in today. Speakers, please state your name and topic when you step to the microphone. Ms. Smith, please call our speakers. So my understanding is our student speakers did not attend today. Is that correct? Are there any student speakers? Okay. Okay. Thank you. So we can move on to speak regular speakers. Okay. I I will welcome Board Member, Angela Flowers.
Good to see you. Okay. Next, we'll call the in person speakers to the microphone. Will the first ten speakers come to the front row? Again, please state your name and topic when you begin speaking. Speaker number one. There's no numbers. Okay. Well, go ahead. Miss Smith, why don't you call the speakers? Where is she? No numbers. Go ahead. Hi. My name is Anna Lusurriaga, and I'm a parent, and I'm a part of this community. And I'm here to talk to you about the budget. We've asked for transparency over and over again. It's 3PM in the afternoon, and I had to take off of work to be in here.
And I'm I'm glad to do that, but I'm not gonna be making income this afternoon. Okay? That's part of a budget that will be a shortfall in my house. How do you guys actually listen to the community? Because I feel I was last year in budget workshops where I was spoken to. Mister Mike Miles over here, you have done a lot of stuff unilaterally with our public funding. It's our public education for our students and for our teachers, not for you to unilaterally go ahead and have a show or decide to do
marketing and advertising for a bond that failed due to the fact that we don't have transparency. I want to trust you. I have hope for you guys, but I also have a lot of shame. We're here for all the right reasons. Show us that. Show us that you actually are listening and engaging. We we don't just wanna come up here and talk forever. We don't. We we don't get the chance to. This is our one chance. Please engage with us. Let us know what you've spent the money on. What have you spent the money on? Brick Campus.
Wow. You just got got honored. Why? I really don't know. I'm sad, but I want to have some kind of faith in this board. Show us transparency. Thank you. We'll be calling speakers by alphabetical last name, Trista Bishop Watt, followed by Christy Brewster. Good afternoon. I'm Trista Bishop Watt with Houstonians for Great Public Schools. As the board begins the annual budget approval process, I urge you to consider the following principles to effectively prioritize resources and ensure every student has the support they need to succeed.
Student outcomes should be the heart of the budget process. Resource allocation must align with the board's goals, and workshops should clearly show how the budget will advance the district strategy for student growth. Equitable resourcing is essential. The district's district must continue to prioritize campuses and students with the greatest needs to close achievement gaps across the district. The district must also maintain the transparency. We appreciate the earlier start this year and encourage the board to ensure that the public has timely, accessible information for meaningful feedback.
Long term financial planning should be a priority. Enrollment has been declining in the district for over a decade now, and that underscores the need for careful future planning. We recommend five year financial forecasting to keep track toward a balanced, sustainable budget. Lastly, regular reviews of budgeting practices are crucial for accuracy and efficiency. Building on the past work of this administration, consider policies for periodic efficiency audits to help identify areas for improvement. Thank you for your time and your consideration. Thank you. Christy Brewster followed by Jessica Campos,
Judith Cruz followed by Catherine Danis. Buenas tardes. I appreciate the budget conversation starting in February, so thank you for scheduling this workshop. I hope to see alignment of the budget to the board goals since per Lone Star governance, the resource allocation to meet the board's goal should be the first priority. Goal three, there is incentive money from the state for these student outcomes that actually put students on a much clearer post secondary path that gives them options, and the return on investment is significant. We are talking about millions and millions of dollars, 50 million dollars, 50 million dollars, 50 million dollars, 50 million dollars, 50 million dollars, 50 million dollars, 50 is significant. We are talking about millions and millions of dollars. 50 million is what HISD left on the table just last year alone.
Also, are we on track to be fully approved for the teacher incentive allotment? This will also unlock millions of dollars, and designated teachers in the state of Texas are retained at eight percentage points higher than their peers. And how much are we spending per student? How do we ensure our students with high needs are receiving the weighted funding at any campus they attend to ensure their needs are also met? We have students with high needs across each of our campuses. The last thing I want to address is the ever growing deficit. Two years ago, you inherited a substantial deficit. You adopted a budget with a large deficit in June,
but now here we are two years later and the deficit still looms. Regardless of passports and superintendent superintendents, this budget and deficit is now yours. We don't have yet what will get past this legislative session, but even in the best scenario, the basic allotment increases very slightly and will not be enough to address our enrollment decline and deficit. Please help us understand how the district will address these complex challenges. Gracias. Thank you. Catherine Donis. It's very easy to spend other people's money, isn't it, Mike Miles?
The oops, I spent $870,000 without board approval is an honest mistake, isn't it? We all know private businesses go broke with incompetent management, don't they? Especially when there's no proper accounting or paper trail. Again, there's no accountability on your end. Miles, you wasted our children's money by taking care of your cronies. People who are willing to give and receive dishonest help, you cannot use flattery to gain favor from us, the public, because we know that you, Miles, are not doing what was intended with the money. Harming hundreds of thousands of underprivileged children,
you have yet to show us the public that you, my Miles, are complying with funding regulations. Did you illegally redirect redirect the dinero to increase your crony salaries? Because it sure looks that way. We, the public, will continue to speak out to make sure the money goes to the schools for the sake of the underprivileged children and not your cronies. We will make sure there's no oops again. How much did you pay, Shirley Miles, your sister, and Michelle Ray? And how did you, Mike Miles, get a healthy bonus after mixed evaluation? Why is your annual performance evaluation confidential? We got the facts from Houston Chronicle.
After all, you earned 66.7 of the 100 possible points of evaluation according to the Board of Manager evaluation. You received a bonus of $126,730 or 66.7 of the 190,000 maximum bonus. HISD released a confidential review, the Houston Chronicle, in response to an open record request. It's time for us to request an audit report. Miles, why is it that the auditor only reviewed the largest purchasing order in within each project and not the entire project? The audit did not list which specific purchases or projects
or projects the external auditor had sampled. Correct practices and financial access are closely related, isn't it, Miles? Oops, did I say that? Thank you. Ann Eagleton followed by Eileen Harrell. Hello. I'm Anne Eagleton. I have to say coming into this budget season, I'm already in a bad mood. I'm trying to understand why taxpayer money was spent on destination transformation. I'm unclear how inviting third future employees and board members, vendors, what did that have to do with helping our students?
We don't know how much it cost yet, but I'm guessing instead of putting money down a rat hole, you could have actually used that money to patch up real rat holes at Lanier Middle School. We don't have the money to waste on an education summit that is a vanity project of Mike Miles. It did nothing to enhance our students and the experience they are getting at HISD. And there better not be another one of these things in next year's buzz budget. I don't know if any of you attended it. I don't know if I paid for your cocktails and light bites at the Westin,
but I sure hope you all have the sense to stay away from it because it's not a pretty look going into budgeting with the deficit that we have. It's completely irresponsible for you to sit around and let this kind of stuff go on. And I see you have a smile on your face. You must have enjoyed the cocktails and light bites. For the budget, I really need all of you to take off the rose colored glasses, get your brains out of the overhead bin, and take a good hard look at the budget and what we're spending our money on. We are in financial trouble.
NES isn't sustainable. Just pull the financial statements for third future schools, and you are gonna see so much red ink, you're gonna think it's a crime scene on there. They're drowning in debt. This is the path we are on is drowning in debt. You need to get a handle on how much NES really costs. Not fanciful numbers, but how much is it really costing? Is this sustainable? You also need to weigh in there, family are ready for NES. Thank you. Eileen Harrell followed by Shawn Reeder.
Eileen Harrell, good afternoon. Thank you for beginning the budget discussion today. Whether we're looking at achievement data or aligning budget expenditures with student outcome and achievement goals, where we focus our oversight is vitally important. If we think of this question like a recipe for a cake, a list of ingredients is insufficient. Knowing to add flour, sugar, vanilla, baking soda and mixing and baking will not result in a very good cake. The details actually matter. We need student level data from every campus because that is where the students are
and where the learning happens. Disadvantaged students, gifted students, special needs students, and English language learners exist on every single campus, and this data exists. Delving into the specifics will allow you to see how funds are being spent to meet the priorities and goals you have set on behalf of this community. It demonstrates how many students on each campus have certain needs and whether there are actual funds at the campus level to meet the students' needs. To do right by our 174,000
students on our two seventy three campuses, we need to look deeper. We are in this intervention because aggregate numbers bury the hard truths that student, campus level and subpopulation data reveal. It will allow for true comparison and understanding of the per pupil spending on NES and PUA and SUS campuses. Comparing that per pupil rate with the actual enrollment trends on individual campuses is vital to making sure that we're building an equitable and sustainable model for the district as
a whole. Comparing our actual spending trends against budgeting projections and truing it up is crucial and so is right sizing this district. The task before us is huge, but students are counting on us to get it right. Let us build a detailed recipe. Thank you. Shawn Leader followed by Brooke Longoria, Tracy Riley followed by Fleur Vivar. Good afternoon. I'm Brooke Longoria, and, thank you for today's budget workshop. As you enter today's budget workshop, I want you to think about what you're funding.
Currently, you're funding an unsustainable NES model. You're funding Mike Miles, buying his preferred desks that that sit in hallways. You're buying SMART Boards to be on top of other newly purchased SMART Boards. You're purchasing SPIN bikes that nobody wants and that sit unused in cafeteria. You're funding the closure of libraries. You're funding novels not being read in schools. Today is I don't know. Where are we at? February 28? My fourth grader still hasn't read a novel. You are funding a mass exodus of teachers. You are funding a mass exodus of students.
All of this is is the result of superintendent Miles' poor policies and planning. This is your opportunity to reverse course. This is your opportunity to say no more in yes. We will not be funding it. This is your chance. This is your opportunity. I hope you take advantage of it. Additionally, what else are you funding? You're funding the increase in the administrative staff. What it it was, there were 28 in 02/2003, and now there's 60 people making over 200,000. You're funding a bloated bureaucracy is what you're funding.
What else are you funding? You're funding you're funding silent lunch. You're funding middle schoolers who are not allowed to speak in hallways, and they have to walk in silence, and they never get a moment to decompress and talk to their friends. You are funding a culture of fear and teachers who are afraid to talk to parents and tell them what's happening in the classroom. You are funding, however many people showed up to speak at a budget meeting, which is bizarre because it's usually two or three. I know because I've watched it by home in the past, and there aren't usually speakers, and there are today. So think about that,
and good luck. Thank you. Tracy Riley followed by Flor Vivard. It's all good. Thank you for the opportunity to be here today. And echoing the sentiments of other speakers, thank you for starting this process earlier. Affording us the opportunity for transparency or the perception thereof is huge. I think as you all commented on the bond that you were gonna make the approach to be more community driven, thank you for walking your talk. Some of the things that have said today, the baking of the cake, what are the inputs and how are we seeing them and demystifying the process. You have a big opportunity to heal wounds and be transparent just like every other
corporate opportunity would be. Some of the commentary, and I hope these are things that you've already considered, but just to say them out loud for the record, we're in a tough position with HP. If SB two passes, what's the preparation for that? We know what the goals and constraints. This is why we were your purview. You have to approve this budget. So what are you doing in that? Can you give us two budgets? Can we ask that of the team? What happens if SB two passes? What happens if it doesn't and vouchers come through? We know that the governor is actively saying that all of these things are made up. You guys know they're not.
Show that to the public. How are we prepared? Please outline your method and inputs in detail. Inform next year's enrollment. It was off this year by almost double, you guys, and everybody's waiting till March 7 to see when they're gonna go to private school. People are fleeing NES. We're asking for enrollment assumptions and inputs. Like, last year, if you were very savvy and could do the math, you could figure it out. This was wrong. You guys were off. Do better by us. Show us what those numbers are. Get ready for people to flee. We know the private school enrollment's full.
It's not gonna be good, you guys. So what is the plan? And tell us about that plan. Use the verbiage, prepare the argument, and share it with us. It doesn't have to be a secret. Thank you for your support of our students, and thank you for preparing us for the future and not setting us up for failure. Flor Vivard, followed by Ellen Walter. I'm Ellen Walter. Students are leaving HISD in droves. Since 2023, schools that have turned NES have lost 8.8% of their students. Non NES schools have only lost 1.6%.
The NES system is a drain on our budget, and the district parents are showing that it's not a system they want for their children. We want wrap around specialists who have one on one communication with kids and families. We want AED machines that work, AC machines that work overnight so they don't get frozen in the morning. We want libraries with books and a librarian who can help our kids find a love of reading. We want to scale back and defund NES. Thank you. Next,
we'll move to Zoom speakers. Maria Benzon, please turn your camera on. You may begin. Hello. My name is doctor Maria Benzon. I'm a parent and a former teacher, and I'm deeply concerned about our district's finances and policies. The NES model prioritizes test prep over actual learning. Instead of curiosity, creativity, and love of learning, NES focuses on drilling students to gain standardized tests. That's not real education. It's compliance training. High quality research based instruction should be about deep understanding, critical thinking, and engagement, not just artificially boosting scores to make a system look good on paper.
The failed $4,400,000,000 bond proposal was a clear sign that the community does not trust this administration. Adding to the outrage, community members have now accused superintendent Miles of using $2,000,000 in district funds to promote the bond, essentially campaigning on the district's dime. Over 30 residents have formally requested an investigation by the Harris County District Attorney. Meanwhile, nearly 7,400 students have left district attorney. Meanwhile, nearly 7,400 students have left the district, costing HISD approximately $45,000,000 in state funding. Parents are still pulling their children out because,
one, unqualified teachers delivering overreliance on technology or placing real instruction, and three, an obsession with standardized tests that does little to foster authentic learning. Furthermore, STAR and MAP assessments foster a pressure filled environment. The cost to these testing programs and associated test prep materials could be more effectively utilized to promote genuine learning and critical thinking skills. Parents have and will continue to opt their children out of STAR in protest of high stakes testing and teaching to the test. Our children are beautiful and talented human beings, and they are most definitely more than any test score.
We need real investment in students. We demand financial transparency, not a mismanagement of public funds. And above all, we need leadership that respects students, teachers, and parents. Thank you. Thank you. Doctor Anita Wadhwa, you may begin. Hi. I've asked this before at a board meeting, but I don't know who to contact to get answers for my questions. I'm a parent at Pershing. I have been trying to figure out why we are not teaching full novels to our children. I've emailed the principal multiple times. I've emailed people on the board. Angela Flowers,
you're an English teacher. You're the head of an English department. I don't know how to get a response from anyone. You don't want kids to read full books. They're going into a meeting. I'm a woman with four degrees who expects that when I send my daughter into a school rather than hearing about kids getting arrested yesterday because they're beating up other children or earlier in the year they beat up, a teacher or were using the police officers to discipline kids in the school that she's reading a book.
I just want my daughter to read a full novel. I trust her teachers. They need to be given freedom, and I just want my daughter to read a book. Who who's gonna respond to my emails? Angela never has. I used to email someone. He stopped writing back. Who on you? Y'all are trying to do board engagement. Who responds to emails? Miss, of the principal at Pershing does not respond. Who will respond to my concerns? I'm told by the PTO, do not air dirty laundry. Who will respond to my concerns? I want my daughter to read a book.
I would like my daughter to read books in school. I don't want them thrown away like this. We have no librarian. Get a librarian in the school. She has a law degree. She has never checked out a book at the school. What are you going to do to fix this? It's embarrassing. It's shameful. Thank you. That concludes our speakers. Okay. That concludes our speakers. We will continue with the agenda item. Next, we will consider an action item on the agenda. Board policy requires Board members to abstain from all discussion and votes pertaining to contracts that might involve conflicts of interest.
Board policy BBFA local defines a conflict of interest, as any circumstance that could be that could cast out on a board member's ability to act with total objectivity with regard to the district's interest. So we're going to talk the first item is to may have a motion to approve Item one, which is a consideration and approval of the minutes from the previous meeting. This is to approve minutes from the February 13 meeting. Okay, we have a motion and a second.
Any questions or comments? Okay, please vote. Okay, the motion passes. We'll now address our first workshop topic, which is the revisions to goal progress measures and the Lone Star governance board monitoring calendar. Superintendent Miles, you're going to go through that? Yes, sir. I'm gonna ask the Chief Economic Officer, Kristen Hull, and her team to come up and talk about these, goals and progress monitoring measures. Good afternoon, board members. Thank you for having me. I also just wanna introduce my team. This is Alicia Wildman and Allison Lavecki.
Allison was with us when we set board goals at the very beginning, of this administration. And Alicia is overseeing all the progress reports that we produce monthly for the board. So they're gonna be great resources and have been a critical part of the team, so have them here to support answering questions. But wanna start with just an overview of the goal progress measure revisions that we wanna propose. The objectives for today are to just, inform and clearly communicate the rationale for the proposed changes, talk through each of the changes, and obtain answer questions and or obtain feedback on those changes. And this is really a goal to talk through them today before bringing them to
a vote, for the board in in March. So this is just a chance to have that open discussion. In addition, we also have a proposed set of updates to the monitoring calendar, which outlines what we report out on, when, and why. So we'll also go through that proposed calendar today as well. We wanted to start with talking about why we got here. There are really two primary reasons for considering adjustments to the goal progress measure. The first was that there was a couple situations where at the end of the first year, we had actually already exceeded the target that we had set for 2028,
which is really great news, but we wanted to ensure that our progress monitor, metrics stayed challenging, and really continued to push us to grow further. So in many situations where we were already exceeding targets, we wanted to rethink what our future targets would be. Additionally, there was one metric around the conditional growth index index or c e CGI. That was a more complicated metric to unpack and articulate. And so we really wanted to find a metric that could be more transparent, both for the public and the community around how we can think about measuring growth. So in places where there was a CGI metric,
we really thought about how we can actually improve the transparency of the metric that we proposed. So what did we do to get here? A couple things. When we first set the goals and the metrics back at the beginning of the administration, we we didn't have any of the test data. We didn't have map data yet. We had administered it yet as a district. So we have the benefit now of having a year and a half's worth of data that we actually can use to think about what makes sense for targets that we set in the future, and we brought that past analysis into consideration and the recommendations.
We also looked really closely at the lone star governance model. What does that model model require of the board in setting good goal progress measures? And then we've actually had many conversations, probably more than y'all can count on on one hand with a smaller group of board members, board vice president Moe Manai and, member Rivan on really thinking through what the proposal is and what makes sense, in in many iterative conversations. TEA was also a part of that conversation, as the board coach was advising in this process. And so, really, the process we went through was, we thought about the,
metrics that could make sense to change or update based on those two reasons I just shared. Those proposals were reviewed with, myself and mister Miles. We brought those proposals to TEA for them to provide feedback and ensure alignment with the Lone Star governance framework. And then again, we brought that to that smaller working group of board members to really think through, do these metrics make sense? And really, do they align with what we're hoping a metric does, which is this criteria outlined below. So does the metric challenge HISD as an organization? Does it require adult behavior change for us to achieve that metric?
Is it a metric that is in the purview of the superintendent to be able to influence? And then is the goal progress measure predictive of the actual goal? And so we really thought through those sets of criteria for every one of the proposals that we're gonna share with you all today to ensure, it met that criteria, which is again a critical part of that Lone Star governance framework. And so that's when we got here today. I do think there was over a dozen meetings that took place to actually make sure we continued to refine and adapt what you're gonna see in front of you. So this just zooms out and gives you a big picture view of the goal
progress measures. So we have four goals as a district, and then, within each goal, we have, multiple goal progress measures. The ones that are in turquoise are the ones we're gonna talk about today, that have a proposed adjustment to them. The ones in black, we recommend no changes. And then, again, we'll also talk about that LSG calendar revision. And, so we'll go through these one at a time. And then through as we go through each, goal progress measure, we'll pause and just have some open time for the board to ask questions, and clarify as we go through the presentation. The other thing that you have in front of you is just a a summary
Excel table that just gives all of the goal measures in one place. Again, everything that's in this Excel that we're recommending will be covered in this presentation. But this is just something for you to be able to follow along if you wanna look at any particular goal or goal progress measure at a particular point in time. It has the the, both the current approved targets, the original baseline, and what the actual result was for the end of last year. So that's just a guidance document for you to follow if you would like. So we'll go ahead and get started. And this is a high level overview of goal one.
So goal one focuses on the percent of third grade students in HISD earning meets grade level on the STAR reading test, and that that will increase from forty one percent in June 2023 to fifty six percent in June 2028. So there's no change to the top line goal. What we really reflected on are the goal progress measures leading to that goal. And we have we we don't have recommended changes to one point one and one point two. Those goals really focus on the percent of our kids that are projected to meet grade level based on our MAP scores.
But in 1.3, that was that CGI metric that, we thought could, be improved. And so we're we're really gonna talk about both a recommended, adjustment to the metric itself as well as what the targets would be for that metric. Alright. So here is the CGI metric that was in place. I won't spend too much time on it. But just taking a step back, goal one and goal two from a structure perspective mirror each other very closely. Goal one is just on reading, and goal two is just on math.
So we'll have this same discussion about CGI for both one point three and two point three, because they're both CGI. It's just a difference in subject. But the proposal for the updated 1.3, really looks at a different way to think about growth. And and actually, I'm gonna go back one more time to point out something that we thought about a lot in our working groups. When we're thinking about the overall goal and how to get, being focused on meeting grade level expectations in STAR, and when we're thinking about how we progress monitor towards that goal, we really try to find a balance of goal progress measures that focused on both
achievement as well as growth. Because we know that if we're proving achievement, we're on our way to meeting that overall goal. But that even if our kids aren't at that achievement level yet, if they're growing towards it, it's also a really good indicator that they will reach achievement as they continue to grow. So when we're looking at the goal progress measures, goal 1.1 and, 1.2 are really achievement metrics. It's looking at our the percentage of our kids are already expected to achieve meets. So 1.3, we really wanted to find a growth measure, that could help inform, if our students were still growing on that path towards meeting grade level standards.
So this is the current proposal. We looked actually at the TEA accountability system, and this proposed metric, mirrors how TEA calculates growth in domain two point a. And so what we've proposed for this metric is looking at the percent of our students who demonstrate, an an improvement in their achievement level, whenever they're going from beginning of year to end of year. So for example, a student who starts at approaches and increases to meets, or a student who starts at does not meet and increases to approaches.
That increase in the proficiency level would be would allow us to see that that student is growing, and then we would be able to get growth points for that student. We also looked at and we'll talk about a little bit more of what that means, and how we specifically But we also looked at who would be in scope, for this particular metric. And and two things. One, the actual overall goal is for third grade. And so we actually thought about recommending is focusing this particular growth project, this growth measure on second grade, for two reasons. One, because it's an early indicator of what's gonna happen in third grade.
We can see sooner if students are more likely or growing towards that third grade metric, and it gives, HISD more time to intervene and to actually take action based on the goal progress measure. So it just gives us a little bit more of a runway. The other thing we thought a lot about was if we're looking at students if we want students to meet grade level, do we only look at the students who are not yet there or do we still look at all students? And we ultimately thought it was best to still look at all students because we also don't want students to drop below if they've already grown,
and we still think it's really important to pay attention to the collective body of as well. So that's also you'll see that represented in the goal. So this is how this metric, is, is would actually be calculated. The way you can read this graph is starting on the far left, what we would look at is where a student starts on their beginning of the year score. So let's say they are starting at does not meet, which is the first column on the far left in the first row. We would then look at where they end on their end of year score.
So and those are the columns across the right. So if they went from does not meet and at the end of the year they were still at does not meet, that they would land in that gray box and they would not get a point. But if they started at does not meet and they moved to approaches or meets or masters, then they would get a point because they've demonstrated an increase in that proficiency level. Similarly, we'll take the second row. They start at approaches. If at the end of the year, they dropped does not meet or they only maintain at approaches, they would not get that growth point.
But if they improved to meets or to masters, then they would get the point. Similar approach to meets. And then even masters, wanted to just call out that if a student starts at masters and ends at masters, they get the point. But if they start at masters and they drop to meets, they actually don't get the point because we want them to be able to maintain that proficiency level from wherever they were. So that's how we would read the table. Here's just a quick example. Student one scores does not meet at the beginning of the year and they grow to approaches. They land in the green,
so they would be counted as a point, versus student two who actually starts at masters but ends at meets. They'd end up dropping one so they would not get the point. And so we would look at the percentage of the students who are growing. One of the things, again, I think this is a reason why we chose second grade, instead of third grade is in our one point one and two point one, we were already looking at students who are meeting and mastering, and we wanted to remove duplication. So, again, it's why we thought it was important to focus on, second grade to avoid that overlap in our goal progress monitoring reports.
And then we also pulled the actual data. So this is what the table would have looked like had this been our metric at the end of this year. And so what you can see is the number of students who landed in each of the cells. So the students who started and does not meets but ended and does not meets was that 2,862 number. And then you can see on the far right, the total number of students that ended up growing and then what that looked like from a percentage point perspective. So where we landed is across all of our seventh graders,
over nine thousand seventh graders, 41% grew in their projected achievement level. And so that's really what we would have what we will consider the baseline for this particular metric. And so defining the metric as the percent of kids who kind of get that growth point, we also looked at how would we set the target. And what we did here was we looked at the overall goal. The overall goal is third grade star achievement. And, our target started off at 42% and ended at 56%. So what we actually did was said, okay, let's backward map from that 56% to make sure we can reach that end of
your star goal. And we use the 41% number, the number that we just showed you on this slide right here, the number of kids based on the end of year calculations, from last year's school year, and we use that as the baseline. So you'll see that show up, in the actual number in 2324. And then we increased, percentage points to make sure we get to that 56 end goal. That's actually reflective of the end goal in star. So, and then to to get the target difference in between, we mirrored what was already, again, in that third grade star goal.
So the star, goal had us increasing five percentage points, four percentage points, then three percentage points, and we just mirrored that same thinking when we were recommending the progress measure So that's really, one overview of 1.3, both how we thought about identifying the growth goal as well as how we set that target. And because there's so much content in this, our hope is to just do pause points, in between, different metrics to open to ask, give to folks time for clarifying questions, and then, determine if there's alignment around this goal progress measure.
When we were reflecting on this, we did think this particular measure challenged the organization because, again, we're starting at that baseline and have to go pretty significantly, in in alignment with STAR. It does require, again, adult behavior change because it's an outcome focused goal. We have to ensure students are actually growing, which requires again that high quality instruction, of which is influential by the superintendent. And then we did feel like it was predictive because it gives us that second grade view which leads right into third grade performance. But I'll pause and just see if folks have questions with 1.3.
Questions? Go ahead. Thank you. Can you hear me? So I know when we looked at the CGI, the original one point three and two point three, part of the discussion around the adoption of goal progress measure 1.3 was this expectation and need to get our kids, about a year and a half's worth of education a year. And so that's where that point six CGI number came from. I know y'all have done some analysis of what how that maps to what's, now this proposed metric change. Can you just speak to the rigor involved in those two and talk about how
they're functionally equivalent or better? CGI metric. And then yes, we can speak to the comparisons. Hi, everyone. So the CDI metric is a standardized z score of growth. So it's just measuring how much a student has grown when it is normed in standard deviations against other students who have other students' growth, which is why we feel like it's a little bit difficult to unpack. So this transition table here by using second graders, what they're actually doing is, map provides us the projected meets grade level for second grade,
but it assumes that there is a continued pattern of growth. So these are not second graders who have already met the third grade expectation. These are second graders who, at their end of second grade year, are positioned in a place where if they continue with normal growth, they will land at a third grade growth. So what we're doing is by pushing second graders to be at their as they grow, we're pushing them to still have another year. So as they catch up in second grade, then they only have one year's worth of growth to continue into third grade,
if that makes sense. So we're just pushing that target down to the to a lower grade level so that we still have an additional year to make sure that everybody gets up to the meets grade level. I think the other comparison too that's important is CGI did have that focus on looking at more than a year's worth of growth in a year's worth of time. But we thought that this represented similar view because you don't actually get a point if you maintain. So if you start at approaches and you stay at approaches, then you don't get the growth point.
But you actually have to be able to grow enough to to get to that next level which is reflective of, like, significant growth forward and growth that would demonstrate that you're on track to push towards that meet. We just have more we look the time at which we're looking at it has also expanded again because of the second grade, focus. So so rather than looking at a year and a half of growth or the CGI metric of 0.6, instead you're looking at what did the child move forward one band. And I guess my question is,
are those functionally equivalent? Or do we know? It's not a perfect, it's not an apples to apples comparison. So, it's hard to say we know perfectly. But I do and I do think it's different too because we're looking at two years as opposed to how much they grow in one year. Because they can grow an increased proficiency level in second grade and another one in third grade, that will allow them to get to that goal. So there it's not a perfect apples to apples comparison, but we also felt this was the same level of rigor that would allow us
to achieve what we were hoping to get to in STAAR third grade. Sorry. I have sorry. I know I'm stuck on it. You said two years. This measure, this metric though is for for second graders. Correct. Meaning that it focuses on the students in second grade, but they still have second grade and all of third grade. Yes. But the to get there. But the scores that were that they're being considered based on, the meets and masters, those are for second grade. The projection is actually for third grade star because there's not a second grade star.
So it's if they it's where they ended in second grade where they're predicted to land if they were kinda gonna maintain for third grade. But these are MAP scores. What I'm saying is the metric them themselves are the metric itself is looking at a MAP score. Right. It is a MAP score, but MAP predicts how they it's the yes. Okay. I understand there's a relationship. But what we would be adopting is this progress measure, which is about second grade math scores, right?
Correct. Correct. Thank you. Thank you. I have two quick questions. Do we lose consistency of data or sense making when we vacillate between third grade and second grade data? And, I appreciate the work of the committee, but I'm just gonna ask why we are removing a GPM instead of just adding one. Like, what is the benefit of doing that? Within Lone Star governance, it really typically is recommended that you stay at three. We do have one instance where we are actually recommending going above. But I do part of the reason this came up in the first place
was the complexity of CGI and how hard it is to understand what's actually happening. And so that in that instance we thought the removal is what made more sense because this still is a growth measure. Can I also this was not a committee, it was just me and Adam? It wasn't an established committee. Do You have another question? Okay. Did you have Adam with us? Go ahead Adam. Hey, I just wanted to say thank you to the team, because I think I counted three times you went back,
and I kind of poo pooed on the recommendation and you all came back with a solution that I do believe is simple, it's and it's elegant enough to get us to what we want. So, while I love CGI, as you all know, this is this is a measure, I think, that, from from my perspective, will help us move the needle. And it's it's a progress measure. It's not it's not a, you know, goal, But I do think it helps to move the needle. I just wanted to kind of air that out and say thank you to the
team, for all the work that you did in that regard. And I also just want to highlight that that I appreciate the it's a little bit, yes, simpler to understand for some folks, but also aligning it with the accountability measures makes it also somewhat attuned to where we're trying to go, which is to get out of, you know, intervention. And so, in that respect, while it's not what I love, it is, it is also, I think, helping us to get to where we want to be.
So I would have to say for 1.1, for go one and two that I support kind of how we've laid this out. Great. We'll go over here. Thank you for the information, Chief Ho. I have a few questions. I recall a conversation, that we had, I believe a few time we've had a few times, around the correlation and how well MAP projects star achievement. I recall last year having a conversation around something like the data points from the 2020 star and the correlation wasn't quite updated for
map. I I remember that conversation because as a parent who looks, I was like, does it correlate or doesn't it? Can you explain where MAP is with that? Have they kinda caught up to the NuSTAR or whatever that is? Yes. And we also ran the correlation after that meeting. And so we ran the correlation between MAP and STAR, and I think the two most significant findings were, one Based on the grade, it was between a point 70.8% correlate or, point seven to point 8% correlation, which is pretty high. And then we also looked at the actual numbers,
and what we found was that math only over projected 6% inflate our scores. So those were the two findings from that analysis, the the MAP to STAAR correlation analysis that we ran. Thank you for that. So it sounds like we did that analysis? Yes. We we ran that analysis, as well. And I do believe MAP also ran it. Yeah. MAP has a new 2024 linking study that they redid based on the NuSTAR. Okay. That that is what I needed to check. Thank you for that. And then, question about there's a footnote here on the number of the the second graders who
took the the test in Spanish. Can you explain that footnote? They were not included. Is that right? Or Yes. We're called go ahead. So the, NWEA map, well, the the standards that are tested, are not the same in span in when we're talking about reading. So when we look at the TEKS or the the essential knowledge and skills, we have a set of essential knowledge and skills for English speakers, English curriculum, and we have a set of knowledge and skills for Spanish speakers. So they are actually two different assessments. They are not assessing the same skills but in a different language.
In math, it is that way. In math, they're assessing math, and they just change the language of instruction. Right? So for this reading, data, they the map the NWEA map is not able to project the student achievement level to from the Spanish map to the Spanish star for second grade. They just don't have the right type of data because of the differences in the standards that are tested. They can do it when the student is in the tested grade level, but they can't do it when it's a a true projection a year in advance
of the STAR test. So we if we choose to select this metric, it would just be based on students who test in English. But we do have all of our students this school year testing in English regardless of their language of instruction. In the 2324 school year, that was not the practice. So they either had a score in English or in Spanish, which is why we weren't able to report them here. But if we were to pull this data this year, we would have every second grader represented. It just might not be it wouldn't necessarily be in their preferred language for some
of those students. Oh, okay. Preferred language, I think, is, whenever we think about, testing for students, particularly our original bilingual students, we always have them test in both, particularly in reading so that we have a view of their, English scores and a view of their Spanish scores. When we're thinking about the English scores, every single kid in HIC tests in English, so that'll be a % of kids in your denominator, with the exception of a student who might be excluded from an ARD. But, in your Spanish, you only have a subset of the district testing in Spanish, and that would be students who are part of our dual language program or in
one of our, emerging bilingual programs. So from the start, all students don't test in Spanish as well. So when we look at this, again, it will include, all the whole student population, and we do pay attention to the English scores regardless of if they're, a native Spanish speaker or an English speaker because English proficiency is a really important component of the work. Okay. So just trying to understand the gap. So so what is who are we missing? Who are we not be capturing if we and and how accurate is it for us to have,
students all students take the test in English? I I guess, I'm trying to understand that. It's not about we wouldn't be missing anyone, to get to your first question. A % of the students would be included. And it it's not it is still accurate. So the student who takes the score in English, it's projecting how they would do on the English star. So their particular projections for that student is accurate. Okay. Okay. Okay. One other comment and a question. I I really appreciate a leading indicator, which I think second I think k through second is a great leading indicator.
So I I appreciate the thoughtfulness behind that. To that point, we have some goals that include, very like, two through five or six through eight or tenth, eleven, twelve. As far as leading indicators, why have we chosen just to focus on second and not maybe k through two or first and second to to kinda get us there? Because, again, identifying something earlier, we can pivot or intervene and, you know, meet the child where they are in the third grade. So just curious about that. It's a great question. In, k and one, we take different tests. Mhmm. So, we do have k and one in,
math, but we don't have it in RLA. But, also, the further you get from your third grade goal, the less math can be predictive of star. Uh-huh. So we also just wanted to be mindful of that. We do have a that stronger second grade. Math does actually tell us based on your math score if you're predicted to meet grade level in third grade at star. So the further you remove it, the more that can go on. I think that can influence whether that student is actually on track to meet that projected goal. I'm gonna add that.
Okay. MAP actually does not project for grade levels lower than second. So we would have to rely on other metrics regardless. And I think the goal here was to find something comparable to CGI. And so we were trying to think of something that was more comparable to that rather than extending out and looking at other assessments. But that's a great Thank you. Comment. And then one last question, please. Growth according to domain two a. In layman's terms, can you can you help, just make sure we're all on the same page around how, TEA measures growth as because it informs accountability.
Right? And growth as because it informs accountability, right, and accountability rating. So even just zooming out, 70% of a campus' score is based on the the best of domain one, which is proficiency, or domain two, which is growth. So if the campus is achieving growth, then that can count for 70% of their score. That last 30% is closing the gaps. So this mirrors how they would calculate that growth in domain two. And so the campus can achieve this,
then it will it will it will align with how TEA thinks about measuring growth in accordance with accountability. And when we're thinking about even the progress measure, this will we can carry this down even to support campuses in continuous improvement because it will relate so closely to something that they really pay attention to. Okay. They use the exact same transition table that you're seeing right here. We actually get data from TEA in a table like this. The only difference is that, the star is able to have more achievement levels.
It's more accurately scaled, so there's not just one does not meet. We have a high does not meet and a low does not meet. So there's more rows and more columns, but it's the same shading as far as if a student grows, it's it counts for a point. And if a student regresses, it doesn't. So we modeled it exactly the same. Excellent. Thank you so much. Follow-up question to Sarah. Go ahead. So a follow-up question. So in math, it's the same test, just different instruction, English and Spanish. Why are we not why are we not able to do the same for reading?
I mean, what what is the the challenge? I don't I don't know. I think that you your exact point in math, it is the same test. So in math, I, as a student, I am only taking one test. It is the same test whether you take it in English or Spanish, so you only get one score. In reading, it's two different tests, and and we have the data that does the projection for the English test, but math just doesn't have yet the data that allows us to do it for the Spanish one. Well, I think that answers my question. Mhmm. So it can be done. It just hasn't been done yet then.
Yeah. I mean, right. But right. Are we gonna get I mean, do it is there any indication that that will happen at any time soon? No? No. I spoke to the math team directly, and they just don't have the, you know, this type of projection for students in second grade when they're a full year away. They don't have, enough data points to accurately, confidently, within 6%, like we found, you know, predict where these students are gonna land at the end of third grade because there's just so many fewer students who participate in both Spanish MAP and Spanish STAR in
the state of Texas alone. Go ahead. Thank you for the details. So for non including Spanish speakers and how are we going to project how they're doing in third grade? We still do project we still do include Spanish speakers. So in the English scores, 100% of Spanish speakers are accounted for. Every single second grader in HIC still takes the English test, and it still does predict where that student will end up on that test. And many of our emergent bilingual students actually still test in English. So just because you're emergent bilingual doesn't mean you actually automatically take the Spanish star.
Actually, a large portion of them do end up taking the English star as well. So it still is an important prediction to pay attention to even for, emergent bilingual students. But how do we as a board how can we tell how that well, they're gonna do in third grade? I mean, maybe I'm not making sense. Just am I making sense? I'm not sure if I am. So if we're not including Spanish speakers We are though. We are, but you're saying they don't have a projected achievement level. No. Sorry. Well well, I'll try one more time. So in the English test, a hundred percent of students take the test Okay.
And a % of students, regardless of if you're English or Spanish, get a projected level in the English test. So we look at that. Separately, emergent bilingual students also take the Spanish test. Right. And so it's a separate test with a separate measure that's not a part of this, but it doesn't mean those students are not accounted for when we're looking at are they growing on the English map test. Maybe you can help. I think can I help? I think that I don't know if this clarifies. The the footnote says the 2,000
grade students who tested in Spanish, they were not included in what we're looking at. Right? But but for next year, they will be. Yes. Correct. Got it. Yes. That's what I think you're about to clarify. Yes. So for last year, they weren't tested in English, but this Right. But this year, they are tested in English. Yes. That's right. I said once they get to the third grade. That that's when No. When they're in second grade. Second grade. Yeah. Thank you. I was just here. Thank you for the clarification. My second question is this, is, our goal is students who third graders who meet, who meet grade level. Help me understand why we're deciding to track,
approaches, for end of year for second grade, considering that there's a likelihood that they're going to have some learning loss in the summer and really begin the fall with do not meets. I mean, hopefully, they don't, but there's learning loss that occurs over these three months. So help me understand why we would track achievement in second approaches in second grade but not necessarily not part of our overall goal? The main rationale is because if students are starting and does not meet and they grow to approaches in second grade, they're demonstrating that progress towards meet.
And the idea is that they would again, when they get to third grade, they grow from approaches to meets, and they continue that growth. So they they still have the ability to get to that meets by the end of third grade. And what we didn't want to happen was you have all these students who are in do not meets, and you actually can't measure their progress because do not meets jumping all the way to meets is a really far jump. So how can we make sure that we're giving credit to the students? Like, if you look at this slide, the 2,860 students, they would get that point if they move to that next category.
And we wanted to honor that growth in second grade, recognizing that they could still grow another grade level and jump another grade and we wanted to honor that growth in second grade recognizing that they could still grow another grade level and jump another grade level to that meets, threshold by the end of third grade. Do we know, and and how like the the, the extent of learning loss that happens over the summer for students in general? There's been many studies on it. We thought I mean, and and, I actually studied this a lot when I was at TEA, and one of the things that we really did find was the number of days in the summer matters. And I do think it was a really important,
one of the things that best supports, you know, decreasing learning loss is the number of days that you have in your academic calendar. So when when we increased to one eighty last year, that's actually the best thing I think that you can do to support learning loss, is ensure that you don't have as large of a summer. And it it really aligns with what all of the best performing nations around the world actually do and actually look at, learning loss across, different countries. But I do think the other thing is, you know, whenever we think about instruction,
we always are really looking at how are we making sure we're supporting students and really understanding that prerequisite skill to be able to access that grade level instruction to help bridge those gaps over time. And the design of really strong curriculum and really strong instruction, even if there is some learning loss, will help take that into account to bring those kids right back up to grade level. K. Thank you. And data wise, remember, these projections are for second graders and then how they land in third grade. And every second grader in their study experienced a summer learning loss at some point.
Right? So so statistically, there's they have accounted for that when they say second graders who score x RIT score at the end of the year are likely to be meets or masters. They've included the the learning loss of the students in the study. Thank you. Anybody else? Go ahead. Thank you. Something that this discussion has helped me, wonder is the targets that you're proposing here, in 1.3, do they do they assume or take into account the impact or how do I wanna ask this? What about the impacts of,
improving our evaluation system for teachers? And what assumptions do we have in these targets, with that evaluation system? Or really or was was the thinking done separately? Because we think about this over five years. Did we think about what impact an evaluation system improvement would have on our on our student outcomes? Yeah. This is a separate process, but I can tell you that, ensuring that the evaluation system has NWEA as part of it, that teachers will, do better on the NWEA, assessment or their students will do better on the NWEA because of the connection and
the tight alignment between evaluation and assessment. But these, progress monitoring targets was not part of that system. So it would help us sort of ensure, provided, like, assurance that we would be helping to make sure we're pushing towards these targets with it's a benefit, but it's not, a dependency here. We're looking for these targets anyway. That's right. These these progress monitor, targets are mostly are the board's and mine, that the teachers have, different ones. Mhmm. For example, they have met expected growth, and, the percentile versus this.
Just one last note. As you've clarified the 2,000 students, one thing that I would just caution you with is it's a different set of students, but if this year the baseline is 41 without the students, there might be some noise in the number. So there probably should be some consideration to how we're setting that baseline, to consider those students. And I know you've kind of looked at the current year star, and kind of walk your way back. But there could be possibly more noise in the number, considering the fact that,
you know, 20% of the students, wouldn't have been included in this data set. Yes. And I think that's the exact same feeling we experienced even, I think, when we set the initial targets is the more data we have over time, the more precise I think we can be about the best possible baseline. And so, to pontificate what the 2,000 students might have done, I think is really hard. But I do think we would wanna evaluate that data when it comes in with the full group. And if for for some reason we are way off with the 41 number, if we're low, we actually then have a really high target to set. But if we're high,
we always do wanna evaluate, hey. Did we set the right baseline? And is there a future point in the conversation with when if for some reason we didn't, we think about a process like this where we rethink it? Good question. Go ahead. I'm thinking about, so year over year, as and you were just talking about making adjustments. You know how there are big jumps, like, it'll it's a five point jump and then four and then three? How do you weigh making the adjustments along the way and and accounting for, you know,
the likelihood that we're not gonna have extraordinary gain on gain on gain every single I mean, I hope we do. But how do you decide where you move the needle or where you give some room? Yeah. It's a great here, we just chose to mirror how the target was set in the goal, because we thought that was most predictive of ensuring we could meet the goal year to year. So it's five points of four then three, and then similar, we did five to four, to three. But it it you know, it is, it how you get to the end goal,
I think, is there's a lot of different ways you could do it. Yeah. And I and I didn't mean I guess it's not as clear in this one, but I'm thinking in some of the others we're talking about when we when we consider whether how do you decide whether we set the base too low or whether two years or three years out it's going to level off? If we had more data, I think we could answer that question a little bit better. In my mind, for example, my experience is you you have your your growth is a little lower at the beginning of transformation. I would have preferred, you know, three, four, and five as the as the jumps because as your system of taking the assessment,
training the teachers, gets better, then your your growth might be better. And you have the systems in place and the kids are already used to, more rigor. So, that's a good question, and I think we need more data, really, to determine what's the best jumps over time. We we did ask TEA a version of this question, which is if we were off in the initial target, when does it make sense to reset the goal progress measure? And what they the guidance that we got from TEA from this perspective of look.
If you're off for just one year, but you're still not hitting your end goal at the end of five years, keep going. And you'll actually see in the next section of this presentation, there is one or two spots where we actually already hit the five year goal. And at that point, we've reset the full five years going forward. And so if we surpassed just one year, but yet having it 2028, we keep going. If we haven't, we if we have already hit that, we reset. Okay. I think we're, finished with this part of the question. Okay. And that was only the first one. I And and just to just to make sure you we we're not approving this
tonight. It'll become back another board meeting later. Yes. Right. Just so you'll have another crack at it. Two point goal two will hopefully go, a little it will probably go a little faster because it mirrors goal one so closely. And, actually, it's a your question, member flowers is a perfect example leading into goal two because in two point one and two point two, we're not recommending a change to the metric, but this was a situation where we did already exceed the twenty twenty eight target. And so we actually have recommended a new set of targets for two point one and two point two. And then 2.3
will mirror the exact same recommendation as we just saw in 1.3. It's just in math instead of reading. So we'll go through these, briefly. And reading. So we'll go through these, briefly. In 2.1, it's the percent of third graders who are projected to meet grade level, in math, and that, by 2028, they will end they will hit thirty nine percent. Well, when we looked at where we were end of year last year, we were already at 39. So we'd already met that 2028 goal. And so this recommendation has us putting that 20 that thirty nine percent as the baseline, but then increasing our 2028 goal from thirty nine percent where it was,
to fifty three percent where it was because that actually is what matches Oops. Sorry. Goal two. The goal two, which is the third grade star goal ending at 53%. So this allows us to take where we are in the baseline, reset that as, as this year, and then increase that goal to 53. We took a similar approach in 02/2002 where, we our our end goal in 2028 was 32%. But at the end of last year, we already surpassed that. We ended at 34%.
So we used 34% as our 2024 baseline and then reset the 2028 target out to 46%. This one is a little bit lower than the 53% in the goal, that's outlined in goal two, but that's because this particular metric only focuses on NES. And NES from an achievement perspective, which is what goal two focus on, has always been, historically lower than, PUA and then as the district as a whole. So you can kinda see that here. NES is the is the orange bar, and it's,
lower than PUA and lower than the district overall. So the end goal for just NES campuses is lower than the district goal and that just flows with, the historical, what's historically happening from an achievement perspective with NES. But NES in of itself still does have to show significant growth from 34% up to 46% over the course of the of the time. For, for, 2.3, so this again follows the same recommendation as 1.3 that we just talked about. It looks at second grade for all students who,
maintain their proficiency level at, and or at meets and or grow a proficiency level if they're not yet at meets. This is what the table looks like for math. So when you're looking at the actual results for end of year last year, this is the number of students that falls in each of the cells. Fifty one percent of our students ended up growing a proficiency level, last year. And that's how we again, set the baseline. So for the, 2.3 recommended metric, it focuses on that second grade number of students who grow one or more proficiency
levels, from BOI to EOI. And we set the baseline at 51% based on actual results from last year, and we end at 55%. So this one was a little bit interesting because our goal two, in math actually has us ending at 53%. But we wanted to still make sure we were growing every single year. So we went even beyond the 53% and recommended 55% to ensure we could increase at least a percentage point one year. So this actually exceed has us exceeding the top line goal, but allows us again to still be growing year to year.
So, Okay. So that I'm also gonna pause here because that's the conclusion of goal two. It has two point one and two point two, same metric with just a reset of targets. And then 2.3 with the same metric that we just talked through in 1.3. Good. Okay. One quick question. Sorry, just one quick question. So 2.3 and again, if Vargo is I'm sorry, sorry, go to is 532028%, we start off at 51% per second graders, but the goal is only to increase by four percentage points over five years or
through the end of twenty twenty eight, I won't say five years, is that rigorous enough? I mean, I look at the numbers and I ask myself, is it rigorous enough because we start off at 51, this four percentage points pushing it? We asked that question too. I think we've got two things. One, the goal of the progress measure is to be predictive of the goal. And so it does far exceed the predictability of the goal. It it increases above that. But even in these measures that we're setting, when we actually look at growth even across the state, for example, it takes many, many years for the state to even grow one point.
So from a rigor level, really everything that we see is rigorous compared to all urban school districts and the entire state across the board and and considerably more so, I would say, even than that. I need to jump on that because you're helping me formulate a better question, I hope, which is there's something about we are not the typical urban district right now. We're not at we're trying to set a new standard. Right? So if I flip these a different way and and and we accept that these targets
and in a year or as we run through the schedule, run through the calendar, and these numbers come, and we're not hitting the target. Let's say we don't hit it. I'm trying to imagine what would the superintendent explanation be about why we didn't hit it, and what are we thinking about now to say, well, if if that if that's why we didn't hit that goal, then what are we doing right now to make sure we are gonna hit that goal? I hope I'm being clear. Yeah. I imagine this in a different way. I think so. Because I've also been thinking about that too. Look, last year, for example, just to put your question in context,
this this goal setting, across the state usually is not as rigorous as what this board is is looking for and and rightly so because we are in intervention status. Last year, almost every single district in the state of Texas went down, and especially the large urbans in Texas went down. And you've you've seen the graphs. And so the goals that they set, I'm pretty sure they didn't meet. And yet, I I wonder how many of them have changed that,
or if they have, is it a perfunctory thing? This is not gonna be easy to do. We're also not getting any credit for the exceptional year that we had. Right? If you start so 51 is not an outlier, but it's a dog gone good year, when you start so low and then the kids hit 51. They had an exceptional year. We're gonna nullify the exception and and treat it like normal. And so that that is also further evidence that this is rigorous. I mean,
it's what Kristen said. Pete, the the percentage point changes across the state in Star is very slow over many years, and we're expecting this district to hit, you know, significantly higher than that. The average percentage point change, for example, in meets and exceeds in this district, third through eighth grade, last year was about seven points in reading and eight points in in math. Unheard of in the state of Texas. And so,
I think setting this bar the way the board has these targets, they're rigorous. And, if we don't hit them, I mean, we're we're we're not gonna make excuses for not hitting, but we will look at real reasons why that may or may not be. But keep in mind, they are indeed rig rigorous. And, you know, part of me says you you can't you can't be a Super Bowl champion three times in a row. I mean, you might be able to do it two times in a row, but, you know. I think for our kids, we can. We can. Yeah. So Yeah. You know, we we we For sure.
We were the Super Bowl champs last year in the state, and, you know, we're gonna I think we we should try to have a winning season, number one. And number two, we should always get to the playoffs. But I, myself, don't expect, you know, me to be the Super Bowl champion every year. There's something I'm struggling with here, which is a good struggle, but it's about we are setting a new standard. Right? So so to Rolando's point, I think, are these rigorous enough? Enough? I get that they need to be achievable, but as we set a new standard for this, are these numbers, you know, the right numbers for us?
Let's I I would say, just like we we we came to you to and we're bringing to you new, metrics because we already hit targets. And so I think that's a sign that we're not gonna rest just because, you know, we set a target and then it's too, you know, it's it's too easy and we we're fine with that. I think let's bring it let's wait a year. This my suggestion is wait a year, see see if we blow the 51 out of the water. And then if we do,
then it's kinda like what Adam was saying earlier. Let's see how much noise, and you mean statistical noise, in in the data, and then let's we'll bring it back if it is. Yeah. Because, again, this maybe I'm saying what you already said, which was we achieved amazing growth last year. It's really hard to achieve that growth again because all of those things that we changed, that's baked into There you go. That's it. That's we're already baking that into it. Right? So now we've gotta enhance, and build on this. And so that's why I'm, again, bringing up the teacher evaluation system, like things that we have to continue to enhance in order to not just protect
the growth, but enhance this growth and accelerate it. So okay. Thank you. Go ahead, Adam. One of the good news pieces of this, I believe and I I I saw it alluded to it earlier, which is this is a new set of students every year. So we could hit 60 next year, and I'm I'm gonna, you know, give you guys a party. Right? But then you gotta do it again. Mhmm. And so with a brand new set of students. And so I I while when you look at the cut scores for where,
a in excellence is for the state, you know, we we we should be thinking about that. But at the same time, I'm excited that you're pushing the envelope and I'm also excited that, you got to keep doing it. And this doesn't allow you to rest on, last year's performance. It it yes, sir. And it also means that if we don't do good work in k and one, we're we're not gonna grow further and further in second grade, which and then we're not gonna grow further and further in third grade. So, we're not gonna grow further and further in second grade, which and then we're not gonna grow further and further in third grade.
So, yeah, it is a new set of students. And if this is only about growth, then I'd be worried because, you know, if you if you wanna grow on if you imagine a track and you wanted the kids to to run when everybody else is running one lap, they have to have the same time and run a, one one lap plus 20 yards. Well, to to be good in growth, it should be one lap in 20 yards each year, and that's that's good. But, you know, if if we say, well, next year, it's gotta be one lap in 30 yards, and then the next year,
one lap in 40 yards. At some point you get it's too much growth. It's too far a bar to reach. Okay. I'm going to keep going unless I hear objections. This takes us to goal three. So goal three is the percent of students graduating TSI ready with an industry based certification will increase from eleven percent to twenty six percent. We actually haven't made any recommended changes to 3.1%, three point two %, three point three %, but we are recommending adding a new 3.43.5%.
And our rationale was in goal one and goal two, we spend a lot of time thinking about third grade. And in goal three, we jump to TSI readiness, which is measured in eleventh grade. But in order to be TSI ready, you have to meet a very high math and reading threshold, and so much of that is dependent on the learning that happens for students in grade four through eight. So we wanted to call attention, to us being able to progress monitor the learning and and those critical grades in reading and math, because we do think it's predictive of ensuring that students can meet that TSI readiness
threshold. So this is a recommended addition of a new set of goal progress measures that look at, again, fourth through eighth grade students that are projected to meet grade level, in STAR. Yeah. This this raises the accountability and the rigor on the administration. And we're we suggested adding this because we we know that I mean, it is important second and third grade, but the other grades are equally important, especially when you consider, livable wage and the report that came out, the study that good reason Houston did, for example. If you're not doing well in eighth grade reading and algebra one,
that really affects and so it's important for us to to also pay attention and to call the the board's attention and the public attention to what we do as a district achievement wise in grades four through eight. We generally have three goal progress measures in a goal. So we have highlighted 3.3 as a board decision on if they would want to keep that. It's the it's the percent of eleventh graders who qualify for college credit. That metric can still be closely tied to TSI because the rigor of college credit
courses really can still support students being prepared for college. But we knew we were adding new goal progress measures, so wanted it to pose to the board as, thoughts and opinions on if they wanted to keep 3.3. But it's a it's a great measure. I'm really glad we've been tracking it to date. And then, the three point four and three point five, I think, are equally really important to pay attention to. For 3.4, one of the things we did here is, we looked at the base line, and and then we increased the target 2% each year.
One of the things we did to help think about how much we would increase the target, is actually look at the state data. Even if we look at last year, from '23 to 24, what reading language arts students did in three through eight English one and two, we saw one percentage point increase from 23 to 24. And what we're proposing is we actually have a two percentage point increase across all of those grades combined. So it does become more rigorous because, again, you have to do that across fourth through eighth. And then we we're setting almost double what we would see across the state every
year, which is, I think, pretty rigorous from that perspective. We did the same thing for, let's see if that was that was reading and language arts. We did the same thing for math. We looked at our baseline. From our baseline, we recommended a two percentage point increase each year. When we look at the state data, we actually saw math go down. So we're, recommending that our target is a two percentage point jump even when the state has seen math go down. And I think, again, people are still recovering from the lost learning through those COVID years, which makes math particularly hard if you've lost some of those foundational standards.
So and that's how we've approached the recommended targets for the new three point four and three point five. So we'll pause here too for discussion on goal three. Thank you. So, Brittan, I know the report you just referenced a good reason. You should also reference, an advanced course work, earlier on. What is considered at what grade level can someone start advanced course work? They well, they typically start in in ninth. We really start seeing, in ninth and tenth or in tenth, really. In tenth, we really start to see students integrate some of that advanced course work into their
schedules. Does does it start at ninth grade for everyone? It kinda start as early as eighth grade? It's, so what really drives your ability to take college coursework is your prerequisite courses. So you actually can't take certain courses until you've done other courses and so in some very unique situations if a student has taken a number of courses very early, but when we're looking at the traditional course sequence even if you're on the advanced track, you typically don't start till tenth grade. Would and and I have no questions for three point four and three point five.
I would I would suggest keeping 3.3, but even maybe modifying it a bit to include the number of students that take advanced coursework so we start tracking in eighth grade will increase by a certain percentage because if that's an indicator of post secondary success, the advanced coursework, why couldn't we track that if we're concerned about fourth through eighth graders? Could we look at eight, nine, 10 before they get to eleventh grade? So just a suggestion but whenever we look at 3.3, the percent of eleventh graders who qualify for college credit,
whenever we're looking at that beginning of your score, what we're actually reporting out on is the is the percentage of ninth and tenth graders who have credit. So it does take into account previous years of credit that students are be able are able to attain because at the they're only gonna have a beginning of the year number if they've gotten credit in previous years. And so we both pay attention when we're monitoring that. We're both even in the last school progress measure, we pulled both course enrollment so that we could make sure students who were supposed to be in those courses were actively getting in those courses and making sure that
it was growing. And then we were also looking at making sure students were doing it as early as possible for what made sense with the course sequences. So it actually will take into account a strong focus on ninth and tenth tenth in the in in, progress reporting, especially at that beginning of the year report. Member Martinez, just to clarify also hi. Over here. In LSG, we really wanna keep our goal metrics focused on outcomes, not inputs or outputs. Right? So the number of students that are enrolled in the course is an input because you obviously have to be enrolled in it if you're gonna earn credit.
But we're challenging the organization to actually improve our number of students who earn the credit, who achieve the outcome. I have kind of a, excuse me, follow-up question. I was thinking the same thing about, for instance, eighth grade algebra and biology, for instance. Right? How do we because when I look at the proposed three point four and three point five, when I think about eighth graders, I I think that we are if we're looking at where they are in eighth grade, then perhaps we've, maybe missed something, again, up to that algebra or potentially biology class,
which I guess I'm not clear on advanced coursework because I thought if you were eighth grader taking algebra, that was advanced coursework. So advanced coursework from the goal progress measure perspective, we define as AP, IB, dual credit, and dual enrollment. So, where you actually get credit so if you are taking algebra one in eighth grade, you are on an advanced track, but you're not actually getting college credit for that algebra one course. And so college credit if you're actually getting college credit with an institution, then we would count you as as getting college credit.
But what's really important that I think we to highlight here is whenever we're thinking about supporting students and obtaining college credit, we always start with where they are and make sure they stay on the most advanced track possible. So if they took algebra one in eighth grade, the the chance that they're taking college credit sooner is actually higher because, again, they've hit that prerequisite and they're moving to that next course. And if they, for some reason, didn't take algebra one in eighth grade, we actually have pathways for them to catch up if they still wanted to, for example, hit calculus by the time they're in twelfth grade.
So even, the way that we think about ensuring students enroll in college coursework based on the opt that new policy does account for wherever they are in eighth grade to make sure they stay on that most advanced track. And Chief Ogg could you just spend one minute on what we're doing to increase algebra one because we're doing a whole bunch in in with that. Yes. Two really important things. One is starting in fifth grade, all students who essentially meet fifth grade star are automatically enrolled in the advanced middle
school track. So they'll take an accelerated sixth grade course, an accelerated seventh grade course, and those in combination will allow them to take algebra one in eighth grade. So all students in HISD schools, who meet that fifth grade threshold get on that track. Additionally, with 10 schools, we have piloted a full school accelerated math pathway track. So every single student, regardless of where they were in fifth grade, starts on accelerated sixth, accelerated seventh in algebra one and eighth grade. We're monitoring it very closely. This year is the current year one implementation of year six across those schools,
many of which are NES. And the results of sixth grade are really strong even compared, to the results of students who are not in that accelerated path. So really doing a lot to actually increase the number of students who are able to access algebra one and truly ensure that no student who is ready for algebra one is able to fall through the cracks because our our advanced, scheduling systems and our opt out policy will prevent that. Thank you. I have a question. I I wanted to touch back on something you said around you you said we're talking about advanced coursework,
and you said we're talking about dual credit or dual enrollment. Is TSI ready does not necessarily mean I have dual credit. Right? TSI ready is defined as a threshold that you have to hit in reading and math based on one of the assessments Right. SAT, ACT. And so that actually indicates a TSI readiness standard. Right. Sometimes to access actual certain college coursework, you have to meet TSI readiness standards that you can enter, but sometimes you don't.
So in some of our dual, dual credit programs, you don't have to be TSI ready. So there are some prerequisite entry requirements for some, dual credit or for some college coursework, but not others. Okay. And I was just asking that because, again, a student taking, you know, algebra just may not and, you know, may go on through calculus, but may not choose to get dual credit or may not pass the test or or, you know, whatever it is. So I was just really trying to understand again, back to my initial question about how
how we're looking at these students in eighth grade and and filling that pipeline for advanced coursework. So I'm glad to hear about a lot of the opportunities there. I'll I'll just call out a concern. Five goal progress monitoring measures is a lot. And, you know, when we think about, you know, how many we have, like, how often would we see these? How often would they they come back around once speaker? Calendar for you. So Wait. But it's like one a board meeting or how we try to limit it to max of one goal reported out in a particular
board meeting. So, we've we've put all of this on a calendar for you all to be able to look at the end and that might help inform if that feels like too much or not too much, but we have a proposal for you. Just to remind everybody, this is going to come back to the Board. It's going to be you're going to be able to ask questions, written questions and have more debate about this before we approve them. This is just kind of a preview because we spent a fair amount of time of our budget workshop on this area. Well, yes, I mean, I think it's what we have to vote on it next month, right? So I not is it coming next month?
That's right. I think so. In March, right? Right. So trying to get my questions in now. I got it. I just want to make sure we have enough time for our budget too, so we don't get Go ahead one more. Great. And I think yeah. So what we Oh, yes. Yes. Sorry. When you mentioned about when you mentioned about the campuses, you you said there are 10 campuses students came and they're I'm just I don't understand. Can you just make us understand what what's happening there? Yes. When the full campus is accelerated, it we did regardless of where students were in fifth grade,
whether they were approaching or meets or masters, a % of those students are starting on that sixth sixth grade accelerated path. And, the the focus of this is with really strong sixth grade and seventh grade and eighth grade instruction in those first two years, getting more students to access algebra one, can we effectively do that, even if students have not yet met grade level on fifth? And so that pilot really allows us to focus on that, and monitor those students' progress. Are they still able to be successful in that accelerated sixth relative to students who
are not in accelerated sixth? And if they are, that's a really positive outcome because that means significantly more students show the capability of being able to take algebra one in eighth grade, and it pushes our thinking around who can be ready, who starts in fifth grade, if that makes sense. And these are NES campuses, and there are 10 of them, and they're in their pilot first year of sixth graders? Correct. It's nine NES and one PUA. But a lot of PUA campuses already they don't always do it at the full school, but a lot of PUA campuses already do this.
We actually have an a large number of students who were already doing this even before the pilot started. Got it. But not %? No. Not not that we Yes. Are aware of. I mean, I think this is major. I think it's %. That's a that's a huge difference. Okay. Thank you. Okay. Great. Alicia, I'm gonna call you up to talk about goal four. Thank you. Good afternoon. Okay. So just to recap, goal four is focusing on our special education students in grades four through eight. And the overarching goal focuses on domain two part a, which is our growth measure of accountability.
And it's to increase the number of fourth through eighth grade students from sixty three percent to seventy eight percent by August of twenty twenty eight who are achieving that growth. So we're there's no change proposed to the goal, but we are proposing changes to our growth metrics, which is four point one and four point two, which is our favorite CGI. No change proposed for goal progress measure 4.3, which is that achievement metric. So just to revisit, where we landed last year, our target for 2324 was 64%,
and we achieved sixty six percent of our fourth through eighth grade special education students achieving growth as measured by domain two, part a. So we still have 12% to go to reach our 78% goal, but we are on track. So if we're looking at the two CGI metrics that we're proposing revisions to, one is for reading, one is for math, the same as it was for our third grade students, in goals 1.3 or goal progress measures one point three and two point three. So we just wanted to give some context and some rationale on why we're making
the shift from CGI. And the metric that we're proposing is met expected growth on NWEA MAP. So the why is that goal four is more expansive as it's covering grades four through eight and not just focusing on a single grade level of grade three. Met expected growth provides a consistent, scalable measure regardless of what grade level students are in. It also takes into account starting RIT scores. So when we're talking about our special education students, we know that this is a very wide spectrum. The disabilities included in this student group can be very,
can can vary. So when we talk about starting writ score and taking that into account, this ensures equity when we're talking about these students. So meeting individual growth goals is also more aligned to the special education model. So each special education student has an IEP. They have their own personal goals. They have their own personal growth goals that they're supposed to meet. And met expected growth would mirror that same model. So that is why we're proposing shifting from CGI to met expected growth when it comes to our special education students.
So in looking at, the 23, 20 four data of our fourth through eighth special education students, we actually did take a look at met expected growth and how they achieved or how they felt. So out of 5,631 students with disabilities, forty eight percent of them met their expected growth. Met or exceeded, I should say. And we have the table breakdown here of what that looks like per grade level. But the overall for that grade range, four through 48% of them met their expected growth or exceeded it.
So that 48% is now our baseline for the proposed metric for 4.1. Now our district expects all students or 55% of all students to meet their expected growth targets. So we're proposing that our special education students be held to that same standard. So for when it comes to reading, we our goal, our long term target for 2728 is for 55% of our special education students to meet their expected growth. And while that 7% increase may seem smaller,
it is still meaningful. And it Lines with our district expectations of all students. But at the same in the same way, our overarching goal four is looking at growth in both math or reading. This specific metric is focusing on just reading. So there is some leeway there since we're narrowing it down to one subject. K? When we're looking at the math counterpart of the same metric, forty six percent of our students with disabilities met their expected growth targets. And you see the breakdown in the table there by grade level.
And this is, again, end of year 2324 data. So using that forty six percent as our baseline, we want our students with disabilities, fifty eight percent of them, to meet their expected growth by 2728. And the reason that we're pushing a little bit harder for math is because we know that showing growth in reading is a little bit more challenging. Right? There are language nuances. There are there are concepts that are might be a little bit more difficult for students to learn. But math, it builds on the previous year's, curriculum, constructs,
things of that nature. So we do feel like we can push them a little bit harder in the math area. And so this 12% increase that we're proposing actually mirrors the overarching 12% growth that we need to show in goal four. And, again, we still feel it's appropriate for the long term target to be lower than that 78% because this is just focusing on one subject when the overarching goal is the is both, math or reading. Everybody good? Can I can I say something? Sure. Go ahead. Yeah. This I just want the board to understand how difficult this goal will be.
This is, this is that track analogy I'm talking about. The kids have to grow, and then they have to advance that growth every year. And that's that's probably not the best way of doing it, if you just want to be even. But because we're trying to push, we have greater growth. The other thing is this. I was on the the technical advisory, program, committee to create the achievement metrics for the state of Colorado over a dozen years ago. And we ran data for the state to see how much growth is reasonable growth
and and which groups of kids grew the fastest. Because there was a myth or the assumption that if a kid is far far behind, they have more runway, and it should be easier for them to grow. Well, it turns out that in that at least in that study, and it's a study of thousands of because I I can't remember, a hundred thousand two or 300,000 students in Colorado. Turns out that in that dataset, proficient kids grew more than progressing kids who grew more than kids who were way
behind. And we the the study didn't show why, but it just showed the fact that proficient kids grew more. And the the suggestion, though, some some people on the committee doing their own research thought the reason is if you don't have some foundational skills, it's harder to grow. So kids with some foundational skills that that you grow on top of that so you can grow faster, And kids who don't have those foundational skills grow lower. And so we know that achievement wise and proficiency wise, our special ed population,
well, it's a wide range, of course, abilities and disabilities, achievement wise are far behind our other students. So to even ask them to grow like all the other kids is rigorous. That's all I wanted to say about that. Thank you. So I'm still challenged here. I think, what can close the gap for me, is if you can do the math for me and crosswalk like you did the other goals, and show how we can still get to 78 with the breakdown of students being able to achieve each four point one and four point
two. Does that make sense? So that way it then mathematically calculates for me to say, yes, when we get to fifty, fifty six or whatever the number was here and and this number here, our either or goal will show that mathematically, we should be right about at at the target for the goal. Does that make sense? Yes. We would love to do that, but we don't have enough data. So in order to truly do it, we would need to see how fourth through eighth graders performed on math in one year and then how many of them also grew because remember the overall goal for
this goal four is based on growth. Mhmm. So we have to have two years. We have to have a MAP score and then two years of STAR scores to see if they grew. So we could model it using different subsets of kids, but we haven't been taking MAP long enough to see how they did how they're growing on STAR compared to MAP. Got it. That's where I'm gapped in my mind still. Right? Is But to that point, I do think it's and it it's another example of with one more year of data,
if at that time, it makes sense to revisit the baseline that's been set, I do think that could be part of the discussion. Right? To to make sure that for some reason we didn't set a baseline that was too high, and then to be able to redo that analysis with the extra years' worth of data to answer that question. So I think it's something we could do in a year. Okay. Yes, I'm comfortable with that. Okay. Yes, I think we should do that. But I also want to make sure we manage expectations. NWA and STAAR are correlated,
but it's not they're not exactly predictive. A 0.7, zero point eight Pearson's R is huge, right? It's really strong correlation, but it's 0.7 or 0.8. So I just want to be careful to say that, we're going to be able to look at this even with the projected meets from NWEA themselves. It's it may be off a little bit. Sure. Sure. And and I understand that. And I I and I think for me, it's it's it's less about the, like, specific accuracy and more like this gets us,
it predicts, you know, and it helps us get there, and and as long as we're in the range, then I'm like, okay. This makes sense to me. I can see logically how the two tie together. Go ahead. Can I ask a question? So, when we're talking about student populations, both the four point two and four point one that you're proposing, their base the baseline is based on the testing of say 5,700 children. Those are that's our Special Ed population that was tested. What's the total Special Ed population just so we have an understanding because I know that there's varied disabilities in this
group and but there's some kids, I assume, that were excluded from testing. I think it's about 23,000 students, but, look, we're only talking about the kids in fourth grade through eighth grade. So okay. So same question for fourth graders. We can look that up that exact number for you. Okay. I think that would be helpful. I think the other reason, I'll just mean that this is hard, is oftentimes, once a student meets their projection, they actually get removed from the denominator. Right? Once you beat the the more likely you are to meet grade level, then you can exit the criteria.
So if we are really successful, our best performing students will get removed from the denominator over time, and we still then have to, again, maintain the met expected, growth with the percentage of students that we have. I'm not follow that. Can you say it again? Really tough. So over time, if a student no longer is classified as a student who, a student with disabilities, they would be removed from the denominator. Right? So, and and this if students, who You know? And that would be you're saying who someone is no longer disabled?
Yes. Yeah. Some some happen. It has to have a negative academic impact. Right. So the number of special education students in grades four through eight for this year that we're reporting, which is '23, '20 '4, was seven thousand three hundred thirty nine. Okay. So there's approximately 2,000 students that are, through their individual education plan have been it is inappropriate for them to participate in this type of an assessment, and they participate in alternate assessments. So these are students that are, generally going to be mainstreamed in the classroom and participating with peers.
Right? So these are students who there's a variety of disabilities that they're facing, but part of the reason that they are in special education is because they have a there's some a challenge to their ability to perform at grade level. So one of the exit criteria of being able to no longer need special education services is when you are performing at the level of your peers. So if a child meets expected not and that would not have anything to do with meet expected growth. That's the smart test that you're saying? No. And it's not the only it's not like where there's an automatic threshold and kids
move out. It's just something that's considered as they meet annually and discuss the student's progress. There's there's, less of an educational impact if if the student is able to consistently perform at grade level. Okay. Sorry. Can I jump in? Because I feel like we're we're talking apples and oranges. So special education is not about the achievement. It's about, being allowed access, equal access to achievement. So we started so that we went down the wrong path when people when we said you would no, you don't test out of SPED. So I think the conversation got confused. So I just think we're off track.
So if we can get back to Well, I'm just trying to understand when we were looking at the metric we were choosing for the last go round, we were talking about, well, what student population are we talking about? Here, it's important that we're we're looking at a different metric for looking at special ed kids than we were for the general population, which includes special ed kids, earlier in one and two. Right? We're doing a different analysis. And part of the reason for that is this is a group of kids that have disabilities. Right? And so that's that's the the thought process behind what you're talking about.
So my understanding is part of the reason we're looking at med expected growth and as, superintendent said, you know, you don't wanna set it set ourselves up for failure. But if we're looking at a subpopulation of the special ed's population, that's important because it changes the result that I would expect. So that's the reason I asked the question of, well, you know, is this 5,700 kids that we're looking at, or is that the entire, group of students with disabilities from fourth through eighth? Or is that twenty percent of them?
Because that's important. So you've answered my question. Great. So thank you. Okay. K. Okay. Do we have any other questions? Nope. I think we'll have you down. Okay. Great. Let's go into the calendar. Thank you so much. And so we do have just an updated calendar based on what this would look like. A couple things that we wanted to make sure we considered when we were coming up with this new proposal. One, we wanted to ensure that, all the data would be ready in time for us to appropriately prepare the report in advance, for the month that we're presenting. At times, we were really focusing on streamlining metrics together when it made more sense to talk
about them together. So it didn't feel like a repeat of, metrics from one point from one month to another month if there was no difference in actions related to progress monitoring. There are a couple months that we actually recommend we don't have a progress monitoring schedule, and that's because as soon as we have the results of a BOI, MOI, and EOI test, we wanna progress monitor as fast as we can. And so there's a couple low points where after we do, the report outs, it makes we we wait till the next test. And then finally, we are moving around a couple of things to better align with data avail availability,
which I already said. And then the last thing, constraints are required to be reported one time per year. And then we do try to and the Lone Star governance calendar also recommend that we keep a maximum of reporting on one two goals at a time per month. So we have some constraints to to consider whenever we're pulling the progress monitoring together. This is a lot to look at in one calendar, but I will try to orient you to how we designed it. On the far right, we wanted to name specifically if it was BOI, MOI, and EOI so you could see the information, chunked in certain ways.
In October, that's really where the progress monitoring calendar starts, and it has an EOI, EOI metric at the same time, and it's because 3.2 in particular has a delay in data. And so that's really the earliest we could, measure 3.2 for the EOI results for the end of the year, but we can also again measure it for the new cohort of students starting off at BOI. We then, right off the bat, would start reporting out on our goal one and goal two as a part of the math beginning of the year test. We'll focus on math reading, and math,
math in grade three. And then following in December, we'll report out on math that for students, with disabilities in December. There's no report in January because that's actually when the MOI test is happening for our students at that time. And then, it we actually have to have that report ready almost a month in advance. So we also then need a month for that preparation to report out on that. So January map is happening. In February, we're able to report out on 3.3, which is college credit. This is a good time, to report out on to report out on college credit because we have one semester, that first semester of data, so we can see,
a good BOI and EOI result, at that time. Then starting in March, we're able to, start reporting out on the middle of the year results. We do goal one and goal two together because they're both third grade reading and math. And then in April, we jump to, students with disabilities and then our new three point four and three point five, which is reading and math for grades four through eight. I personally would like to do math altogether, but because of the, constraints around the number of goals you can report out in one month, we we split that out into a a March report and an April report.
Then we have another lull in May. And then in June and again, that's again where we're taking that end of year MAP assessment. In June, we're reporting out on four point one and four point two for students with disabilities, as well as, our TSI readiness score. Again, we take SAT. The primary way we reach, TSI readiness is SAT that happens in April, and so we're able to report out on that in June. And then we have our first constraint in June as well. There's no meeting in July, and then August, we actually start to report out on full end of year results for the goal. So we have goal one and two again,
followed by goal three and four, with the remainder the constraints in September. And then that brings us back to October. We have one other option for you. It's very similar to option one. There's only two main differences. One is that, there's another lone star governance requirement that does require us to require the board to report out on four goals per year. This one's a little challenging because we only do three tests. So we have a a BOI, MOI, and EOI. We're only testing three times. So to report out four times,
sometimes it can feel repetitive because we're just taking a goal and we're slicing it into two months. But that, you know, we we're really reflecting on the data right at the time we take the test. So this is really a choice for you all. And the second option, all that we do is we take the March progress report, and we we split out one point one and one point two in March, and then we do one point three and two point three in April. So we will have to report out on math for third grade two months in a row, so that we can make sure we're hitting goal one and goal two four times
throughout the calendar year. So it's really just the number of times we hit the goal, but it's a it's a matter of a specific line in the LSG rubric for you all, and it allows you to meet that line. Yes. Go ahead. Have we requested a special dispensation from the LSG limitation for this? And if not, we should because if we're getting coaching from DEA, then I would suggest we ask for that that and get it in writing. Great. Oh, and I would prefer, I guess, number one. As would I.
Okay. We'll leave it on number one for a minute. Any issues any other issues, questions, folks have an issue with the calendar? We would recommend if this is adopted, we would recommend starting right away, in the, work March will follow the current March calendar, but once this would be adopted in March, we could immediately start implementing in April. Okay. Okay. That after that. Okay. So, we're going to get set up on on, let's say yeah. Go ahead. Yeah. I just wanted to thank, chief academic Officer Kristen Holl and her team.
Lots and lots of work, lots and lot of data that we sifted through. So thank you for all the work. Yes. Thank you very much. Great, great data. But I know you have to get set up for the budget part of it. So why don't we take a ten minute break? You let them get set up so we can come back and then be done. Mr. President, members of the Board, we're here for the first budget workshop of this year. I just want to give a quick overview of this budget workshop in relation to all the other workshops and Board meetings that we'll have on the budget.
This is not the budget. What we're doing today is we're over we have an overview of the district financial position, an overview of our best in class district budget development practices and HISD's twenty five-twenty six budget approach, so our assumptions methodology. You got a draft of that, a very early preliminary draft, I think, in January or early February. And so we have more information and so we're going to talk about that today. We also want to start to show the Board that our approach to budgeting is best in class.
They're very close to best in class. We want to show you that the budget will be tied to district goals and priorities and start to identify some of the areas of possible prioritization and increased investment and some areas where we'll have some spending reductions. So this is a broad overview. I think it always starts this way with an action plan and budget assumptions and methodology. So that's the point of today. In March, we will be developing the budget. But one of the things that the Board, I'm sure,
is aware of, right now, the legislature is going through the House Bill two, Senate Bill 26, several different funding bills, and that will impact our budget in significant ways. We won't know for sure what we'll get at the very end. I think they end on June 2. But we've been up both Jim Terry and I have been up in Austin a couple of times already, talking to the heads of the budget committees and other legislators. I'm part of the Texas Urban Council and we that group also lobbies the state
legislature and gets information. So as we go through this process, we're going to get a clearer and clearer picture of what the revenue side will be and the expenditure side. So in March, we're going to talk also about the district action plan. If you don't have a draft, you can get it. In fact, we'll just send it to you. My team and I have gone through the District Action Plan a couple of times now, so we're near final on that for the twenty twenty five-twenty six school year. And of course,
that plan is aligned to the Board goals. And we'll show that in fair detail on March 27. And then in April, we're going to talk about the impact on school budgeting. We'll look at we'll have a better idea then by April of the budget. And we'll talk about central office allocations and budget, the department budgets. By that time, the departments will have finished their draft budgets. All of it will be draft until the end of the legislative season. And then we'll also talk about facilities.
Finally, in May, on May 1, and so you'll get it before May 1, we're going to review the draft budget and the long term plan, so you'll actually get the draft budget in May. And that's before May 22, which you'll have another workshop on the budget and before June 13, which is the vote on the budget. And by law, it has to be done by June 30. So that's the series of workshops in context today.
Again, we're talking about the overview, best practices, our current financial state, where are we and what is our approach then to developing the budget and what are our principles and assumptions that we'll make. And we'll spend some a fair amount of time on that. So before we go any further, for this first part, I thought it would be very helpful to bring in Alvarez and Marsal. They're a financial and strategic budgeting consulting organization. They can give you more information about what they do,
but they do strategic budgeting and financial planning across the country for different districts. What's important for our purposes today, they were also here giving strategic advice and doing planning prior to this Board of Managers and prior to my administration with the last board, elected board and the administration that was here. They also did a a presentation to my team just prior to like a day or two before June 1.
Any case, I think it's often it's some it's often good to hear from somebody who has a third party perspective on what good budgeting processes should be across large urban districts, because most large urban districts don't do good budgeting. And this is a group that can give you some ideas. I'm sure you have a lot of questions for them on how budgeting processes should work. So So I'm going to turn it over to Jim Grady, Michael Potter and Vanessa
Myrafat to do this presentation. Thank you, superintendent Miles. President Campo, very nice to meet you. Board members, very nice to meet you. My name is Jim Grady. I'm a managing director with Alvarez and Marcel. Two things before I really get started. I'm here with my colleagues Mike Potter and Vanessa Merifat. We were part of the team that was, as superintendent Miles mentioned, we were part of the team that was here with the old administration and and the board of trustees. Starting in 2022 it was like '22 and '23, we were here and I'll talk about that in a moment. The second thing I just want to what we're going to cover with you briefly
tonight is, just some district budgeting guidance as we see it as we talk to school districts around the country, both large urban and suburban and all sorts of shapes and sizes in terms of K-twelve districts around the country. What are some of the budgeting guidance that we're seeing from them. That's the first thing. The second thing is my colleague, Mike, is going to cover a little bit of the current financial position. And what we're doing with that is we're hitting a refresh of some of the analyses that we did back in 2023 that we think would be relevant for you
all to see tonight. So before I do that, let me just start with just a little bit of background. Alvarez and Marcel is a management consulting firm. It's been around for about over forty years. We have about 11,000 professionals in eighty '80s and '90s. Timex was a big client of ours in the financial meltdown, in the 80s and 90s, Timex was a big client of ours. In the financial meltdown, we worked on Lehman Brothers, and most recently, we just did FTX.
In about 2,002 range, starting with the St. Louis Public Schools, we found that there was a need to help, public organizations and really k 12 organizations solve complex problems as well. And so the skill sets that we brought to the commercial market seem to align nicely in the k 12 space, especially on the finance and operation side when we talk about budgeting and finance. Me personally, I've been with the firm for over twenty years. I've had a background both on the commercial side working on commercial bankruptcies and restructurings as well as education clients. I have K-twelve education clients.
I've seen a lot of higher ed education clients recently, and I'm just pleased to be here with you tonight to talk through some of this. So just a little bit more of a drill down into what, Alvarez and Marcell and specifically in the K-twelve space, what it is we're really generally focused on. We spend a lot of time in the k in that upper left quadrant there, the k 12, transformation. We did a lot of that work here back in 2023. We also do a lot in the financial and operational improvements and federal funds management. That was another area of focus for us, back in '22 and '23 here. We also do some work on specialized population support.
We do we've got a lot of work recently in terms of accountability and compliance and forensic reviews and looking at processes and systems. And then finally, modernization enablement. That's a little bit about Alvarez and Marcel, a little bit about our k through 12 service offering. Let's talk a little bit about the history with Houston Independent School District. We originally started out back in the fall of twenty twenty one with a four week assessment, and our assessment really focused on three areas. One, looking at the deficit for that year in terms of a surplus or deficit,
what was it gonna look like? That was one area of focus we looked at. The second one was the actual budgeting process around here, and what went on, from that process and whether it was world class, did it have some challenges, just do an assessment of the budgeting process. And the third was related to ESSER funding, How were ESSER dollars being allocated? How were they being spent? How were they being tracked? Were their results being tracked against those? And so that was really where we started out. We then produced a report to then Superintendent House and then we left for a
few months. We then came back in around May of twenty twenty two. And really, the focus there was, their budgeting process at that time, I would say, was not necessarily world class. And so we were brought in to help them, specifically on the budgeting process. A couple of things, like one example of that, for example, in the PUA model, the principals ran a lot of those budgets at the school level, but a lot of them didn't understand how those budgets were built, how they were compiled and what the expectations were of them at that time. So we worked with the administration at that time to prepare and train essentially a
lot of those principles on what that looked like and how that worked. That was one example. Another example was central office. Central office was one that, you know, typically would take, last year's budget and, you know, either cap it at last year's budget or or last year's budget minus 10%. We came in here and and typically we're, and and I know, superintendent Miles has talked about it, but our best practice is zero going to a zero based budgeting process. Every year, every department comes and they they make the case. They start at zero and they make the case for the positions. They make case for the the the items that they need in terms of executing
their mission. They come with identifying what their mission is and who their service providers are and how they go about serving them. So that's we did a modified version of that, in which we had every department look at the services that they provide from starting with the closest to the student to the furthest away from the student and how to allocate their budgets, and where it fell on that continuum. At the end of the day, you'll know we went through a similar the similar sort of, meeting two years ago, and the and the administration at that time just made a recommendation to just do
a just to do a cut. But but the work was done to to lay that out. As we move forward into, '20 January of twenty twenty three, we started to look at, with the ESSER monies going away, what exactly was happening to the district, and and there's a lot of talk back in those days about the fiscal cliff. And and we worked with the administration to put together a three year projection on what that looked like for HISD back in 2023 and when we could expect the fiscal cliff to to to come at HISD if certain changes weren't made,
if things weren't weren't done to to try and mitigate that that that that that that item that thing. We had prepared a lot of those transformation type ideas. We we identified the three year plan. We looked at areas that levers that could be pulled by the administration, to to mitigate the fallout and start preparing HISD to weather that fiscal cliff. And then as as superintendent Miles mentioned, and we laid a lot of that out in our February budget meeting with the board and and and took them through a lot of those things.
And we did the same thing for superintendent Miles as he as he mentioned, I think, the day right before he started. And then as as we mentioned, we were just brought in a few days ago to take a look at refreshing some of the analysis that we did at a high level back in 2023 and what it looks like for HISD today. I'm going to take a moment now and just let's just talk about real quickly. There's a lot of words here. There's a lot of, really good, top you know, this is best practices, if you will, in terms of how school districts go about to budgeting.
So I would encourage you to read this at your leisure if you haven't already. I would just point out three things that we're seeing in in a lot of districts nowadays. The first one is is the maximizing the revenue streams, and that's making sure that you, ensure that temporary expenses are aligned with temporary store revenue sources. What we saw during ESSER and I know this you felt that here too is a lot of some of those ESSER dollars were used for reoccurring expenses, and you're not alone. There are districts all over the country that had that challenge, but it's being able to come off of that and realize what's reoccurring revenues and
what's match up with reoccurring, expenses. The second thing I want to just call it, second of the three things, is the maintenance backlog, making sure that you develop and implement, a multiyear deferred maintenance plan. Don't try and balance the budget on the backs of your buildings. That will just that will that's just not a really good policy and you wake up at one point and have some major issues within your facilities. And then finally, the third thing, is just adjusting for declining enrollments. We're seeing that not just Houston, but school districts across the country, ensuring that both school level and central office budgets are able to scale as enrollment
trends start to, start to decline, and again, with a focus on on students and academics and not so much buildings. And with that, I'll turn it over to my colleague, Mike. Thank thanks, Jim. So as, Jim mentioned, what we wanted to do here is just provide a quick update on our viewpoint on the financial outlook and investment strategy that you can see playing out in HISD's finances. So these are a refresh of analysis that we've prepared previously that we think help, provide an objective perspective on some of the key indicators of where the district is
investing its funds. And so I wanna start really quickly by looking at the central office budget per student. We analyze the trends in membership, which is how we look at, how we look at enrollment, against central office department expenditures in the way that HISD thinks about what it prioritizes in its budget for those departments. So this strips out everything that's at schools, everything that's not controllable, things like recapture are not within this, this, and focuses just on the things that are reporting to the department heads of each individual department that are not school facing. So this is the kind of the big administration,
the central office administration. And so what we saw over time when we first presented this, which was with 2022 data, was that, despite enrollment declines, which you can see that are quite significant there over time, HIC consistently invested more and more in department budgets, peaking in 2022 with a total of 466,000,000 in the general fund budget, almost a quarter of the total general fund budget being spent in department budgets. And then declining, we can see as we've refreshed the analysis, declining since then over time.
A couple things just to point out here. As as you look at this, this is is an indicator. You wanna see these things move together. Right? So as you think about the things that you do to support students, you wanna see as enrollment grows, the central office spend also grows with it to make sure you provide the supports that are necessary to run an effective school system, but you're prioritizing every resource you can towards being in the classroom or supporting the classroom. What we can see over time here is that at times, central central department budgets grew much faster than school budgets, which were controlled by the per unit allocation model,
which says x number of dollars gets to each student with some modifiers. And so over time, the central office grew and outpaced the the growth of the budget that was being set spent in schools. And even at times when they were cutting schools, we were continuing to add to the central office budget. At times when we were cutting schools, we were continuing to add to the central office budget. And so as that was happening, you saw membership continue to decline significantly. I'll note here that membership, you might not not be familiar with these numbers exactly. These reflect a small adjustment from the enrollment numbers you're used to seeing because they don't, they don't include numbers of students who don't participate to participate more than two hours a day or students who participate in Texas Connections Academy.
That's not part of HISD's, like, central office operations. So to create a good baseline, we compare those things. Our key takeaways here were that central office spending peaked on aggregate and on a per student basis in f y twenty two despite years of enrollment loss and has started to improve since then. The year over year, stabilization in budget reflects significant reductions when you look at the last three years because of significant increases in the compensation model that were approved. So you can see, 04/2012 in 2023, '3 hundred '90 '2,
and then 03/1990, and that feels flatlined, but that's against a pretty significant compensation increase. And so, yeah, as you'll see as we get to staffing analysis, reflects significant changes, you know, within this building. Last thing to point out here is that this these numbers that you see here do not represent every dollar that were spent in central office. This is the general fund budget. This is the general department budgeting process that you see play out in board meetings for years. There is also the ESSER budget, which peaked in 2023. So in addition to 2022,
you can see that kinda drop from 2022 to 2023 in spending. There's additional, federal funds supplanting a lot of what you can see there. To to clarify, to make sure, you're you're saying that that that line then does this department budget line does not include the ESSER funds. That's a different That's correct. Talking to money. Thank you. And and I can tell tell you a little bit more, but those peaked in the range of 300 to $400,000,000 a year in those years. So while we were obviously spending a lot of that money at campuses, there was a good bit of that that was spent that supplanted department operations.
So the budget does look like it, you know, expenditures planned expenditures decrease, but there's a lot of things happening in the ESSER budget that contribute to that, being possible that frankly aren't possible if you think about going from 2025 to 2026. So we just wanted to highlight that, as it's important. And as you look Sorry. Can I ask just a quick question? If we go back to the last slide, are you, are the years that are at the bottom, are those school year, like, '23, '20 '4? So the school year that ends the year of that is on the page. Got it. Twenty twenty five is last year.
Got it. Thank you. So the next thing we wanna cover quickly is just a a quick, test of staffing versus membership. So this is general fund and ESSER funded positions. So what we saw in comparing these things effectively when we ESSER funded positions. So what we saw in comparing these things, effectively, what we wanna do is look at central office positions, schools' positions, and ESSER funded positions over time to kinda develop an independent perspective as to where positions were and how they changed over time. And so what you can see here is as you look at, the same five years from 2021 to 2025, general fund general fund funded school positions decreased by around a thousand students.
General fund central office decreased by, around 700 students, and then ESSER obviously grew and then and dissipated. The important thing to note here is that all much almost all of the change in the central office positions was driven within the last year. So you see a thousand student a thousand central office positions fall off in the last year, while schools' positions actually increased slightly. But, you know, from a practical perspective, from those out in the field working at schools, you could experience a reduction in staffing because all of those temporarily funded positions that
we talked about that are ESSER funded were then reduced. Over time in terms of trends here, this is going in good direction in fixing what we talked about on the last slide. Like, we've turned a corner in terms of that investing so much so far away from students. But if you look at the trends over time, the change in these two in these two visuals, you can see that we still haven't actually made our our footprint of FTE match what it would as a ratio compared to students. And so that's important to note that there's work that's been done, improvement that's been made, but to be even as efficient as the district was five years ago,
there's more work to to be done. Any questions on this one? Again, to clarify, the school general fund, that population you're talking about, the number the staffing number is teachers? Who else? It's all school based staff. All school based staff. Okay. So it's a designation within the budgeting process if if somebody's school based. Mhmm. And and, again, this is, total positions that, were filled. So sometimes we talk about budget changes, and we say, oh, we're gonna cut 200 positions or 500 positions, but those positions were vacant. They don't achieve savings relative to the the status quo if the positions are always
vacant. So these are real positions that had people sitting in them. Yes. So just to be clear also, does this include nutrition and transportation folks or not? This does not. No. Okay. Yeah. Thank you. That's a great question. This is this is really general fund and asset funded, and so anything that's in that in that, service fund wouldn't be included. So the last thing we wanna just talk through really quick is the financial outlook of the district. So HISD is facing a lot of the same headwinds that major school districts in the country are facing. You know,
enrollment decline at, you know, major city school districts nationwide are facing enrollment decline. They're facing the end of ESSER. They're facing growing special education costs. And on top of that, the district's going through a transformation. So many districts are facing what what looks like the fiscal cliff playing out financially. So we just want to kind of provide a perspective on the liquidity of HISD relative to the planned budget. And so I'll try to walk through this, slowly. The we wanna just sort of talk about the available reserves and then the intended or planned spend and then compare what we have left to a standard or to
a set of standards that'll give some context as to how much that that balances if it's appropriate or how appropriate it is. So on the left, you can see sort of three blue bars. This is from your audited financial statements from the end of last year. So you have unassigned fund balance, which is kind of the big if you think of it as, you know, your big checking account, then you also have a reserve for instruction and a reserve for contingency operating. Collectively, these are your liquid reserves. And while they are the instructional reserve and the contingency operating reserve are designated as as assigned for those purposes, the board and and the administration team can choose to use those funds to fund
the district. Right? That creates your liquid reserves of $906,000,000. The projected deficit that you see forecasted here is simply the sort of paper plan deficit within the last amended bud amended budget. Right? So that $246,000,000 reflects if you spend everything to plan for the full year, revenues don't change from what we think they're gonna be now. You'll run a deficit of $246,000,000 this year. There's a a few details to talk about there because very rarely do districts actually spend every dollar that they plan to spend.
Things like vacancy and those things can reduce the impact to that. But because we don't have a crystal ball, there's a lot of things that happen differently each year. We don't try to say exactly how many dollars that is. But just be mindful that that $2.46 is the kind of the the outside marker. And then what happens is that that $2.46 reduces that ending balance of reserves, as you can see, to around, $650,000,000 or $660,000,000, I should say. And that $660,000,000 is your liquid cash. So that's if you had an emergency, you need to spend it. Some of it is in investments,
but there are things that are fungible. Right? You can get access to them to spend them. And then on top of that, you have a hundred and $42,000,000 of non spendable. So with the kind of planned budget this year, the end of the year, you'll have $801,000,000 of of, fund balance, of which a hundred and 42,000,000 aren't spendable, and that gives you 660,000,000 of spendable. And the way that we think about this in public finance and in school education is there are a couple standards. The first that we would apply is kind of the what we kinda consider the bare minimum of operationally safe to use is the government finance officers association standard,
which is equivalent of two months of operating reserves. So that gives you that that sort of first line that you can see there around the three seventy five mark, 350 mark. I'm sorry. And then the second is the board policy, the HAICD board policy of CE local, which is anchored in some more more important considerations related to cost of issuing debt and just to to managing the variability of funding of schools in Texas. So, effectively, the the financial integrity rating system of Texas, which is how TEA evaluates the fiscal health of schools,
indicates that a standard around that yellow line, which matches that board policy, provides sufficient operating reserves and also, gives you the right sort of backup to be in a financially healthy position when you're evaluated by a credit ratings agency. So those things together kind of dictate how comfortable, you we can get collectively at using funds in a public agency. So you wanna compare your reserves, your excess reserves to those standards when you think about what does the future look like. The the really important takeaway here is that, for some time, HISD built reserves,
in some cases, by not investing or not executing as quickly on their budget as they would have wanted to. At this time, the district is investing in a number of number of priorities that you have to invest in. So for example, you can you can leave behind things like, like capital maintenance. Right? If you wanna spend on things like capital maintenance, you have to do that in order to balance the budget in the long run. Because if you borrow from the capital budget, in the long run, the building falls apart. It costs you a lot more. So HIC is investing in some of those things that thinks about the budget, has spent more and is planning to spend more this year,
than they have in revenue, but they're operating against the reserve that permits that to happen. So that has happened. It can happen. It does happen. It can't keep happening, you know, in perpetuity. So while the district has some reserves to be able to make investments, the important thing is to start kind of turning towards, a lasting budget, you know, balanced budget to reach fiscal sustainability. So you have a little bit of time here to work on that depending on how the spend works out this year, but not a lot of time. And so this sort of encourages the mindset of let's bring the budget towards being balanced so that we're not using reserves in the long run.
So, with that, I think that's that's all of our slides. We'd be happy to answer any questions. I may have missed this, but can you explain non spendable again? I'm right here. Oh, yes. Sorry. So, yeah, there are a few things that on your fund balance, that are considered parts of your fund balance that you can't spend. So for example, if I made a contract with you and I said, you know, I'm gonna pay you this much in this many months, that would be a commitment that I couldn't spend that funding because I have an obligation already to you. There's also things like inventory. There are things like just certain amounts of working capital you need just to keep the kinda keep the things moving the pipes.
Most of Most of these are things that the district has made commitments on that they can't, spend that as cash, but they are on your balance sheet. So, like, if you're being evaluated, how many assets you have, you own all those all those resources. One threshold I don't see annotated here is related to like a AAA bond rating. Is that my understanding is that $800,000,000 8 hundred million dollars threshold is is that So there there there are lots of things that go into determining the eligibility of a bond rating. The definite floor for for any, you know,
healthy bond rating is at least three months of operating. And in many cases, it's helpful to have a a reserve in excess of that, especially depending on the size of the bond. Just just demonstrating the ability to handle cash flow issues and things like that beyond what the standard requires. Right now, that yellow line is as low as you can spend without you all approving, waiving that requirement. Right? So having nothing above that line doesn't give the district a lot of flexibility. And in some cases, credit ratings agencies or potential bond investors might be concerned about that. So there is a healthy reserve above that that can be prudent to keep in
order to maintain, both getting a good credit rating, but more importantly, keeping your cost of borrowing low. Got it. And is there also Just to remind the board on this question, we just got reevaluated by Moody's and S S and P, was it eight days ago, two weeks ago, Jim? Two weeks ago and we maintained our AAA with Moody's and our AA plus with S and P. Good. And that rating, that's awesome. Also, does it impact well, it will, but what type of impact when we talk about like notes and notes payable
we'll also have some leverage considerations there. Right? Yeah. I'd I'd be, speculating a little bit to get into, like, exactly the details of how that will affect it. But, you know, you just have to think of it like a credit rating personally. Anything you borrow cost you more the worse that rate that rating is, and especially today in a higher rate environment, you're more sensitive to that. So you don't wanna be at risk of being a lower rated bond than you than you're able to be. But there's other credit, you know, there's other credit mechanisms that also, you know, you have to think about with that.
Bond anticipation notes, other there's just many places where little pieces of interest could cost you more money that aren't in your official statement that are are certainly worthwhile thinking about. Thank you for the information. I I was curious as to if you all have a view on when we will get to a balanced budget based on everything you all know about us and our spending? So we're not in a position to, you know, kinda look forward in terms of what those items are because the budget hasn't been developed yet. It's hard to say that. There are, are,
you know, there are macro things that change over time that can tell you it's gonna be harder or gonna be easier, but the most important thing are what you all decide here, and that that, hasn't been set yet. What we would recommend is having a a deficit or or rather a forecast that integrates this view over multiple years that would let you analyze, understand those decisions within that context to say, we've got a five year viewpoint that says we know we're gonna maybe we will run a small deficit, maybe we can, and it's it's all above the yellow line.
Maybe that's okay. But you wanna kinda be able to look at the analysis in a multiyear perspective so that each of the big strategic initiatives you think about funding are affecting something like this that helps you say, how much space do we have before we worry about our credit rating being affected? How much space do we have before we are close to our board reserve requirements based on what your priorities are as for? Yes, no problem. Let me just make a comment on that too because part of the discussion in presenting the budget workshop cadence is to start big picture here and then and knowing
that we don't know what revenue is going to be based on legislature, we won't know until June, right, because they will not get this all done until the end, that's what happens. And then second, the action plans and the school plans have not been completed yet and those will be completed and then bubbled up. So as the cadence goes, we should get more detail as we go and then when we get closer to the May number or the May workshop, we will have a long term plan that will also show the future,
what the future looks like as well. So rather than just one budget and hope, we'll see a more longer term plan that will be able to show when we can get to a balanced budget and how we might do that, especially when you get closer to knowing what your revenue is. Rick, when you say long term plan, could you I missed something. What is the view that we're expecting to see? It's really hard to go much more than two or three probably because I mean, you can make lots of assumptions and go five. But I've always found that it's that three is probably the best you can do
to really have a better a good sense of it. And you've noticed in some of the materials here that we've talked about having a balanced budget in 2026, '20 '20 '7 school year. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Jim. Mike? Let me just make one last comment on that. You could have balanced budget this year if you want. You have to cut a couple of hundred million dollars out though. And the question is with these numbers here, you don't have to. Based on the amount of reserves that we have. So you can afford to have an operating deficit. Once you start getting to that yellow line on that graph,
that's when you start getting to be pressing the issue with what kind of reserves you have long term. And thank you for that. And I guess, again, we can because I'm hearing two things, I'm hearing 26, 20 seven and then it's too soon to note or too soon to call itself. The problem you have today is you don't know what revenue is. Two years ago when the legislature met, we thought we were going to get additional revenue and guess what, we get zero. So you won't know the revenue line until the end of the session. Now it looks positive. I mean, I've spent the day with superintendent in Austin.
We talked to all the major players there that are running the school finance and they all believe fundamentally that there will be more revenue. The revenue is likely not to be in just general assessment or in the general, the $6,100 It's going to be more targeted probably, probably targeted towards SPED, probably targeted towards teacher pay increases and then also security, the unfunded mandates of some of the legislatures last two years. So I don't I didn't hear anybody say that they believe you wouldn't have increased
funding for schools, but I did hear that how it comes and when it comes is going to be complicated and it always happens at the last minute at the end of the legislature, which is June. Having with that, we are here to make some reasonable assumptions about what the revenue side and expenditure side will be. We can't wait till June 2, of course. And so that's why we start with this workshop. And if we didn't have the workshop, just like last year, I presented assumptions and methodology document that outline what we can expect on the revenue
side and yes, it's always a guess until I mean, it's educated guess, but that will probably change a little bit, if not a lot, depending on several things, we're going to talk about that. And then what we can control on the expenditure side, tied to budget priorities and tied to board goals and the vision of the district. So that's the expenditure side and it's an iterative process. As we get closer to May and we see the writing on the wall, let's just say for example that we're not going to get a lot in
basic allotment. Even though right now we can say it's two twenty dollars per student, that's what's in the bill and there's going to be negotiating up and down, But let's say it goes to zero, then that means we have to look at the expenditure side and try to balance the budget. Jim and I believe that if we don't balance the budget this year, we will be able to balance the budget next year. We're not in full control of all the revenue expenditure side. And last year, we cut $250,000,000 out of this budget
from cutting 1,400 central office positions and another 800 teacher positions decline. Half of that or most of that was through cutting the recurrent expenses. So it didn't help as much as it should have, because we're cutting the expenditures that ESSER had allowed the district to do. In any case, we think we'll bring in a balanced budget either this year or next year. And if we don't get money from the state, that will mean some cuts at Central Office and other places in the district.
All right. So let's go through sure. Please clarify for me and I don't know. I I understand what algorithm are so I mean, I understand what they do and how they do it and all. I I didn't quite understand where where they're coming how long they'll be with us and and the purpose. Like, are they helping us? No. This is it. Okay. Okay. Yes. I'm one of well, this is it. We'll move on. So the development time line you see right there, and the reason why I put this up, you have this in different format I have given to you in the assumptions and
methodology report. And this is a little bit simpler. All this all I tried to portray here is that the action plan and the budgeting process go hand in hand. The action planning is in blue. The budgeting is yellow. So you can see it's, hand in hand because your money should follow your priorities. Your money should follow your key actions. And that's what this does for us. So you can see throughout that's how we operate. We have there's a lot to the process.
And one of the things we want to do on this, the twenty twenty five-twenty twenty six budget is to ensure that the resources we have can sustain transformation. That means we have to prioritize and ensure that our monies are going to the board goals and getting out of intervention status. That's a key goal of the budget. We're not here to raise the fund balance above what is good enough to keep our AAA rating and to be financially prudent. So I said last year,
what is the real measure because ESSER dollars were thrown into the budget and even supplanted to increase the fund balance artificially, what is a prudent fund balance to have? And we set that at $800,000,000 and you can see see we're well above that yellow line. And but $800,000,000 to me is good insurance policy to keep our rating. Now the second bullet is just as important that is you can't sustain long term if you keep using fund balance even if it's artificially inflated for a while,
it won't be forever. So we have to get to a balanced budget, whether it's this year, the twenty twenty five-twenty twenty six school year or the following year. But to be most prudent, we need to have that sort of sustainability and that sort of sustainability comes with a balanced budget. Now we have guiding prioritize right. And the first thing is keep cuts as far away from the classroom as possible. So when we prioritize, we spent more money on schools. And you could see that in the chart where
the per pupil for teachers or the number of teachers didn't decline that much. We cut the ESSER positions, but we didn't cut a lot of teacher positions. We did a little bit at the in the spring because we had more teachers than we needed because of the declining enrollment over many years and no teacher positions had been cut. But still, we did what we had to do to get the achievement results that we needed. So despite all those cuts last year, we put the money into the classroom, whether that teacher apprentices, learning coaches, teacher salaries,
curriculum, we increase expenditures in those areas and that's keeping the cuts as far away from the classroom as possible. Prioritized resources to meet the district goals, that's what we had to do. That came at a huge cost and we'll continue to do that. It won't be as costly this year, but we couldn't keep all the positions. And I know people there was a lot of real pain and real concern about the positions we cut. But when you prioritize resources, that means not everything can be funded the way it used to be funded.
And we'll do the same thing this year if we have to. We'll prioritize our resources, especially if we have to get close to a balanced budget. We're going to do that. And then again, make decisions now that support the long term financial sustainability. We are making decisions that if we had more money, we would do even more on transformation, but we know that we have to sustain things long term. And so you're going to see that reflected in both our action plan and in the budget. Now let's talk about some of the assumptions. I'm going to go through a sheet I think you've received
with a lot more detail and I want to go line by line. So let me just give you the big picture first and I'll show you the sheet. Again, one of the assumptions we're going to make is that we can maintain a fund balance of $800,000,000 or higher. Second, we do think there will be some revenue increases and we're going to show you what that is. Again, that's going to change probably, but again, not it wasn't just a meeting with Rick, we I think we had seven different meetings that day, But we've had other meetings and I've been in Austin a couple of other times
and Jim has just got back today from Austin. So we're talking to people all the time to see what the temperature is. The good news here on the revenue side is that, it's political and the Republicans are proposing increases in revenue for schools, yes, also vouchers, but for the traditional public education, they're proposing increases to entitlements and the basic allotment and we don't think the Democrats are going to oppose that this year. And so and that's a fairly good bet. How much is the question and we'll we'll make some assumptions about that.
Revenue decreases, we're estimating a decrease in enrollment. We hired a demographer to help us with that. And I think this is a conservative estimate, but we'll see. The demographer is a person who spends all day looking at enrollment trends, demographic trends and is telling us where we're going to see declines. And so we think with that better accurate information, we'll have a prediction and that's still a lot of kids. So that's still a lot of money,
67,000,000, and we'll show you that. So that's an assumption of a budget decrease on the revenue side. Central office reductions, we made huge cuts last year, we will not have to make as many cuts this year. The departments know already some minor cuts that we're going to be making and then their budgeting process, they'll be prioritizing their resources, both their personnel and their purchase services. So if we have to cut some more, we'll cut the low priority items from the departments that they'll be working on.
And then finally, maintenance needs, you heard it, we are behind in maintenance of our billings and facilities, you know that. And so with the loss of the bond, we still have to do something. So in above and beyond what we normally spend on maintenance, we're looking at maintenance tax notes to put in $100,000,000 over the next two years to our neediest buildings with regard to safety and health. And then other assumptions we can make right now, because they affect the expenditure side, we're at 130 NES schools,
and that seems to have done a really good job to move the needle tremendously from 121 DNF campuses to 41. This year, we increased number of NES schools by 45, making it 130 and we have special focus schools, we call them, they're PUA schools, where we're devoting more time and attention and some resources to. And so we feel pretty good about the trajectory, both D and F campuses going down and A and B campuses going up.
So we're going to maintain where we are on NES campuses, 130. The only difference will be if there's a PUA school that drops to an F status, we will be making that F school an NES school. I think the odds of that are low, but we're if if at most, we'll do five. Even if six or seven of them fall to F and again, I think that the odds of that happening are low. So that will help in the budgeting process because NES is more expensive. So we won't be growing those expenses much at all,
if any. And then on the PUA schools, another assumption we're going to make or we're going to kind of a guiding operating principle for this coming year for the PUA schools, 143 campuses, is to give them everything they're eligible for. So PUA times the enrollment times the ADA, that's 100% of what they're eligible for. Whether enrollment goes up or down, that's 100%. Plus, if their budget from last year goes down,
we'll give them 10% of the difference. So we'll add to the 100%. And we can't do that forever, guys. If we want a balanced budget, the schools have to get enrollment times PUA times ADA, which is how we get funded at the district level. So we measured we decreased it a little bit last year because everybody got used to ESSER dollars in their purchase services, their programs and the number of teachers and other positions. So as you remember,
we kept the cap we capped it at at 12% of the difference. And so we're going to only add 10% of what their loss is. Those are last one is school closures. We have not closed schools in quite a while in the district. We've lost 30,000 kids in six or seven years and that's an untenable financial situation. Any school that has fewer fewer than 300 students is we are subsidizing. We're subsidizing it, we're not maintaining, we can't run that school
at a breakeven. We're losing money. And it's not a financial equation altogether, but at some point, it does it is a financial equation when you have a lot of small schools. We tried to kind of mitigate that with school consolidations for a bond. So instead of closing, we would close these two schools, but we have built one that was really close by, that was new and that way we closed two, we had one, so net is one closure. But if we did 14 of them, which 14 schools, that's seven consolidations, 14 schools,
that would have helped. But we don't have that and so at some point, we will be bringing to the board, so not for next year, so you won't see it in this budget, the closures of school. For the following year, the budgetary impact of a small school is somewhere what we gain in our finances for closing small school is $1,500,000 to $2,000,000 So even with 15 schools, we would that's potentially $30,000,000 It's actually a little bit more than that because the recurring expenses of the people that don't have to be there,
like teachers, custodians, maintenance workers, groundskeepers, etcetera, starts to redown or compound rather down the road. So that's another assumption. So we're going to face those costs this next year. We already know a little bit about next year. The state comp ed, that's actually I don't think that's right. But if you count the other what that should say is the other entitlements. State comp ed and other entitlements will increase to about 200 per student. Teachers salary increases have been mandated.
We've been what does that mean? Real quick, in Senate Bill 26, the draft budget legislation is to increase teacher salaries in an allotment. That means you put money over here that you then can pay out, but only for salaries. This money for our district, just a quick estimate, is $38,000,000 but it has to be paid out in salaries. So depending on how we pay out, we can pay out any way we want, but as long as it's salaries. So,
we anticipate if it stays, our PUA schools will get get most of the increase, probably $3,000 to $3,500 increase per student per teacher on average with this bucket of money. But isn't the challenge, it's a one time deal, not a $3,000 raise forever? That's what you have to remember. That's not a one time deal. So that has been a point of big discussion in the legislature already. And the notion is that this is an allotment that would keep going, an allotment instead of a payout.
So the allotment will stay just like state comp ed allotment. So that's a good thing. What I what we've been arguing, you heard me, Rick. And since then, Matthew Giles took a trip up to the Austin, I don't know, earlier this week and handed a letter to, Buckley and the Creighton team and said, look, we appreciate the increase in teacher salaries. That's great. We we love that. However, this district increased teacher salaries $8,000 since before I guided to now,
dollars 8,000 on average. That's a fact. And that's why we have the highest teacher salaries in the area. By the way, March is our first teacher job fair. We have over 1,300 people registered. That means we're going to have 2,000 people there. And one of the reasons is that we have the highest compensation in the area. Also 95% of our teachers on the intent to return survey want to return to HISD, both the PUA side and the NES side. 27% of the PUA side want to teach in NES.
Part of that is because of high salary, not only, but that's part of it. So what the letter that Matthew gave them is that, if we already have a certain high salary that's above everybody else on average, could we then use some of that money for other classroom things like teacher apprentices, like learning coaches, like better curriculum or Zurn or Amira, these things that all help teachers, but when then increase our 8,000, that 4,000 more per teacher or something like that. So we think that will not be well received,
but we put it out there anyway. I was going to ask a question about that, right? Are NES teachers that just received the salaries that they're at now. I know it's a discussion for another day, but on the other that we thought was just a one time thing, is it something we might look at that we treat it as a one time thing? So maybe it's a end of the year bonus or something like that. So it's not expected for the next year in case we don't get it. Is that something that strategically we might think about? So yes, that's good thinking. And the answer is yes.
We you'll see in our state comp manual, which gets published in April, and when we bring you a budget, we're not going to increase salaries because we're anticipating this increase. And so we don't want to this increase, and so we don't want to add to another increase. So because we're in a tight budget situation, we want to make sure we're not overly expanding salaries that quickly. So $8,000 in one point five years, I think, is incredible. And now we're going to raise it even more. So that's good for teachers, though. Go ahead. If I I think I may have read this,
regard to the additional money for teachers. Wasn't, different amounts based on years of experience? And so how would we take care of that here in the district if it's based on years of experience? And then how does that impact our expenses? I think we ought to refrain from speculating as to what's going to happen because you can go down a big dark deep rabbit hole with that because who knows at the end of the day because when I was in Austin they were pretty adamant it was going to be a one time shot. Now it's based on allotment. That's right. That's a valid point, Rick. Yes. The bill was passed with an allotment.
Let me just answer the question quickly so that we you can see how it might how the allotment works. $5,500 for each teacher that has five years or more. We have 6,000 teachers in the district five years or more years of experience. We get $5,500 for each of those teachers in this bucket, not to the teacher, to the allotment. Dollars 2,500 for every teacher who has three three to five years of experience and we have around 1,500 or 1,700 teachers in that bucket.
2,500 times that goes into this bucket. That total is $38,000,000 for us. And then we spread it the way we want to spread it. If we want to increase new teacher salaries by by $5,000 we could, but probably not going to do that. Moving on. All right, so let me stop the slides and then show you the the spreadsheet and then we'll be done. Well, I will be done, but Alright. I don't want to go over this line by line because it's not a budget, but I just want to show you that we're trying to be thorough in our
assumptions to get a pretty good idea of what the revenue side will be and even a better idea of what the expenditure side could be. And this is not the budget. This is the assumptions. And the one thing both Jim and I will say and Jim more than anybody, and pretty soon, he will say something. Right now, it's just eye candy, but, for you all. Okay, well, at least you guys got it, okay. But on the one thing we both will say is that these numbers will change, okay? So
let's be careful about buying property based on this information. So decrease in enrollment, you see there, I'll start with the left hand side, I won't go through every line. But the biggest thing there is the decrease in enrollment, so that's a negative. That's why it's in red in parentheses. The next two lines is the increase in the basic allotment. That's based on $250 per kid. We already know it's $220 So we might be a little off there, but again, let's wait till the end. And then on the state entitlements, we put $250,000,000 We think it's going to be more than that, but just to be conservative.
And state entitlements are things like state comp ed, those are the materials and equipment and curriculum. It's dyslexia, it's safety and security, as Rick was saying, and it's other things like that, teacher apprentice money, things like that. So all these entitlements, these are monies in certain buckets that the state will give. And then as we move down, you see some other revenue is in black and the decrease in revenue is in red. A couple of other things to note,
this school calendar, we're budgeting conservatively, but there is legislation right now that decreases the number of days over which you need to be in order to get extended school year money for every day you're over. And the legislation is to decrease the cap from 180 to 175, which means that we would be six days over instead of one day over, so which means we get more money. But let's see if that pans out.
I don't I can't see that going away, but we'll see. And then the other thing is the teacher incentive allotment. I point this out only to say, the NES schools have a teacher incentive allotment, but all schools will have it, not this next year, but the following year. We are leaving close to $30,000,000 on table or $15,000,000 if you take the $14,000,000 out, every year that we don't have a pay for performance system, every year. And this year, the legislature is going to increase the amount in the teacher incentive allotment,
so it will be even more than $30,000,000 And so it's a good thing. Hopefully, the board will pass the TES in next month and then we tie the compensation to it and that will more than cover the increases due to TES. But this year, it will only be $14,000,000 for us. So altogether on the revenue side, we expect a revenue increase, money coming from the state and other places of $75,000,000
On the expenditure side Hey, Mike, before you jump into that, may I ask, I don't know the answer to this one, it bugs me. CCMR bonus, is that another state bucket of money that we have in here somewhere or or is there a reach for that that we're making? Yes, there's no yes is answered, but it's not reflected here because it's not a difference from last year. This is assumptions and methodology that points out increases or decreases to the budget. So we have that built into our revenue assumptions now,
like we already had it, it's still in there, okay. We already had it. And then on the expenditure side, you see there, that this teacher salary increases, these two numbers, is reflected here in this number because it's a wash. If we get it from the state, we have to give it out to the teacher, so it's budget neutral, really. It doesn't add to the general fund. I mean, it adds to the general fund, but it also is an expenditure to the general fund. Whoops. What happened here? The only other thing I would point out is we have,
if we have maintenance tax notes, we're estimating high on the interest rate, and then we're estimating health insurance increase and increases in insurance utilities. These are normal increases that we pay every year. So we are increasing expenditures, not totally, this is the increase and then we have a huge decrease in expenditures. So you can go through this, I'll just point out a couple of things. While we lose CAD67 million based on enrollment, we also will be we won't have the teachers and the custodians and others,
office managers, because we have 8,000 fewer kids. And as a result of that and as a result of other savings, we actually decreased expenditures by $47,000,000 We can go into recapture if you want. It's a complicated process. We're not done with the legislation. We think we will not have to do recapture this year, which means a difference in the two budgets last year to this year is a savings of $57,000,000 And then we always have this amount or something close to this amount because of
vacancies during the year and then onetime expenditures that we won't have to do this year and thus is a difference in expenditures. So all total, we decreased expenditures by CAD137 million. That is huge. And if you notice, one other thing I'll point out is the cuts to Central Office Department is only $30,000,000 You heard from Alvarez and Marcel, there's actually more to cut if we enforce some fiscal more fiscal discipline. But right now during this transformation,
in the second year, if we can stay stable with just $30,000,000 worth of cut to Central Office, that would be a good thing, just to stabilize a little bit more. That would bring our deficit or our expenditures over revenue at only $33,000,000 I said only because it's a $2,100,000,000 budget and $33,000,000 is very close and this is a conservative estimate. If we come over in our fund balance more than $830,000,000
that every dollar takes this dollar this amount down. That's why we're pretty confident that we will either balance the budget this year or next year. That's a huge feat that has happened, but it started with spring of last year when we cut all those positions. And the little known story is the second biggest thing most important thing we did last year that went mostly unheralded was turning a budget to this board that protected an $800,000,000 fund balance, right sized the ship and got rid of all the ESSER recurring expenses
with a lot of pain, but we did it. And now we're in a better position to serve our district and serve and keep the monies in the classroom. Any questions on this? Because I'm almost done with the presentation. Mike, I didn't understand your point around recapture. Could you please explain that again on that assumption? Recapture is a balance act. So what happens is the TEA calculates what we will get, what we're entitled to, the dollar amount. And then they look at our cash flows.
And if our cash flows are greater than our entitlement, that's recaptured. If our cash flows are below what we're entitled to, we get a little bit more from the state. If it's even, then there's still we don't get recaptured. But what's going to happen, we think it's going to happen, we're confident about it, and they, in the senate bill, four, they they are going to do a constitutional amendment that will be voted on that will allow homestead exemptions exemptions another 40,000
increase just like they did in the last biennium. And, so when they do that, that means our collections are going to be less, because of that homestead exemption, and therefore, we think that we will have no recapture. So we think we will avoid recapture based on that senate bill Yes. Assumption. Yes. Okay. Okay. Thank you. Yeah. And and But the revenues keep keep low earning. Right? No. So let me explain it the way I explained it to my daughter, because she is not a math person. So she is not, my daughter is not.
So we our revenues come from everybody's property tax bill, correct? There's an HISD. If you live in HISD's district, you pay a property tax, right? And that property tax is your revenue. The state gives us an allotment. If you're above if you divide the number of students and average daily attendance into our taxes and we're more than the state allotment, that's recapture. If it's less than the state allotment, they send us money, right? So ultimately, when you get to this position where you're at breakeven, you're basically getting the same amount that every other school district is getting.
If we're and this used to be called Robinhood, right, because the idea is rich school districts that have more than poorer school districts. You would equalize that out by virtue of making the they want the school districts that were that had more money than the state was giving everybody else. You give that to the state and then the state allocates it out to the other schools, right? So and what he's talking about here in this additional homestead exemption, so if you think about what's going to happen, they're going to raise the homestead exemption by $40,000
that means that you used to pay HISD school tax on that $40,000 of value. So our revenue is going to go down, okay? And so what happens then is even if it goes let's just say it goes down by $57,000,000 total, that means we break even, we don't have to pay recapture. And they call it compression, which is lowering the they're basically giving a tax break to all homeowners that equal to $40,000 assuming the home is worth more than $40,000 right?
And that way, you end up in a situation where we get less revenue. So we're not a rich school district anymore because we got our revenue compressed to this level, and that means you don't have to send money back to the state. That's why recapture could be zero. But again, you have to wait until the legislature, and it also depends on what the value of the underlying real estate is. And Jim, remind me, it's like $240,000,000,000 plus or minus of total taxable value, something like that? Taxable value, yes, dollars $230,000,000,000.
2 30 billion. And then you put the tax rate on that. And so if our tax if our property values go up and the compression comes down, you still might have to have recapture of property taxes go up dramatically. But on a relative basis, when you're we had to pay $57,000,000 of recapture this year, you're talking about not having to pay it next year because of what's going on in the legislature today. And for clarity I'm sorry, Audrey, were you about to say that? No, that's fine. The $57,000,000 documented here is a change. So you're not saying we're not paying this year,
you're saying we're not paying next year? Right. Correct. Okay. Are are you finished with your presentation? Do we wanna go around for Yes, sir. Or or you you wanna talk about tax notes to start with so we can get it get it all, and then we'll just do a little bit of questions. I I have a question, please, before we are we leaving this? No, I just wanted to make sure that we got to what your where you were your stopping point so that we can then open it up for questions on anything. Yes, I'm good. Go ahead, sir. Okay. So let's go. Who's first? I'll kick it off since Sir, you Oh,
I'm sorry. You want to kick it off for the next question? Yes, go ahead. Thank you. Sir, you mentioned that, there would be a reduction in personnel, department budgets because of personnel and purchases based on our declining enrollment. I don't know if I missed this, but I was wondering, is there a rule about the number of teachers that will also that we won't need with our declining enrollment? I'm not sure if I saw that anywhere. I hope you're making an assumption around that. That's so what what we're gonna do is, every school will will get
their enrollment projection, and we'll give that to them after spring break. And based on that, we'll do budget. We'll also do NES schools, and we what we call it a crosswalk. Number of kids, number of teachers needed, number of language arts teachers, etcetera. And if you have 8,000 fewer kids, that means when we do that crosswalk and when the PUA schools do their budgeting, if they, for the sake of argument, they lose a hundred kids, they won't have as many teachers. Mhmm. And so they'll have to budget and they'll have to decrease staff because no or
purchase services. But most of the money is is in staff at the school level. So, that's where we're gonna see the decrease in the overall number of teachers. And where is that in here? So it's in line let's see. On on the screen, it is 17. 17. Row 17 all the way to the right, decrease in budget due to loss. Decrease in budget due to loss. And most of that's in salary. And and what was that number last year with our loss in enrollment? How much do we decrease? I don't know the number. I can I can do quick math, though? Eight eight hundred teacher positions.
Multiply that by somewhere around 80 thousand accounting benefits. So you're talking about 64,000,000. Okay. Thank you. And then, I'm not sure about this. I know I received an intent for my children to return. Is just do all parents across the district receive that so we can get a projection? So I don't know. I'm looking for somebody from schools. It may have been just your school. I got one too. I always get one. Raise your hand if you got one. Rolando, did you get one? I'll I'll find out for you if it's just your schools or it's Well,
I'm curious because just like the teachers, I mean, we can we can get a view of we can start with something. Right? So okay. Thank you. So is it the worst thing that I ever So that yeah. If we're traveling got one, every school will get one. Thank you. If it's via e mail, I'm probably not going to see it. Are you done? Adam, you want to go? Sure. Go ahead. Good afternoon and thank you for the presentation and also for bringing the external folks. That was very helpful. So, I wanted to kind of start at the high level and then I don't need
to answer answer all my questions at first, so I can kind of circle back to make sure we've got enough coverage. But in fiscal year 2025, the fund balance the one that we've that you're showing here is $8.30. The one we approved in December was $8.00 $2,000,000 roughly and so there's a $28,000,000 difference in the initial fund balance for twenty twenty five million dollars The in context, it's a pretty sizable amount and then the against the maintenance notes it could significantly
impact some things acknowledging that 2026 ending balance, so you're showing the fund balance for '25, but not '26. So based on this one, it would essentially put us at $7.70 is where we're starting roughly, assuming that we make an adjustment to the ending fund balance of $800,000,000 We've had the ending fund balance for $26,000,000 is $796,000,000 so almost $800,000,000 Remember, these are estimates.
Jim can tell you about the adjusted budget that you all approved and what the fund balances go ahead. They didn't include everything into, from an accountant's point of view in the balance sheets, what he referred to as, you know, what we consider the the total fund balance. Our fund balance that we ended with in 2020 We can't hear you, Jim, Chief. It's on. Hello? Yes. Just a few. Okay. Well, it's probably good you didn't hear me. Yes. That was a joke. And, anyway, our fund balance that we ended up with last year was 1,000,000,000,
and, 47,000,000. That's what we ended up. They did not show that. What they showed is essentially expendable fund balance, cash that is available. And so that's what they showed you. Understood. No, I'm just referring to the budget adjustment we made last, in December. So that was showing it at $8.00 1 dot something and this one is showing at $8.30. So what we did is we started with $131,000,000
use of the fund balance, and then we brought you a, an amendment of a hundred I think it was a hundred and $24,000,000 which increased the use of the fund balance to $246,000,000 and that took it down to the $8.00 1. 8 0 1, right. Okay. And so, all I'm saying is, now we're expressing on this spreadsheet is $8.30. Yes. So that's a $28,000,000 difference. Yes. So When I take that out, that puts us below. Right. So our estimate is that in fact,
we will end this year better than what our current budget is. Okay. So we think we're actually gonna end at $8.30 and not at $8.00 1. Yes. Got it. And then we don't need to go into why, but maybe at their next budget adjustment amendment, we can talk about that. Okay. So, the so just on the assumptions, I'll hit these real quick and then we'll and hopefully we can move to the next person. Slide 10 and it may not be the same on yours, so I apologize the one that you shared with us initially.
It outlines the core assumptions on the guiding budget. And after reviewing the line items adjustment, my concern is around whether the assumptions hold up fully under scrutiny to what is presented here. So, for example, you've got $67,000,000 based on the decrease in enrollment, you know, so when we attribute to decline that equates to about $830 8 thousand 3 hundred and 70 5 dollars per student, which is less than the total,
allotment for students, which is roughly like $10,900 what we get on average for students. So, I'm trying to understand where the gap exists and why we set it at such. Additionally, I appreciate the explanation on the recapture. So we so I cannot highlight that. And then, yes, so if you can just kind of help me understand why when we look at $8,000 in decrease, we're using an assumption of $87 or $8,300
instead of the total allotment and then that will be very helpful. And thank you for also looking into the disaster relief piece and bringing that into the assumption. So, what happens is that the basic allotment is $6,160 So, that's the majority of that decrease. But there's also other entitlements that are tied to that, that also increase that. And so we may have been a little bit conservative, but that's essentially what we did.
There is a model out there that's used across the whole district. It's called Omar's Omar's model. Mhmm. It was built by a fellow by the name of Omar Garcia. He's been in the business as long as I have, so he's got gray hair. And that model, which consists of and let me all introduce you all to Daniel, Flores, who is our new, executive director for budgets. And, how many spreadsheet pages is that 40, Daniel? Is that correct? Yes. 16. I mean,
all tied together. And so, you know, to go into the nuances would take several days. You know, and I get that in general. And I'm just saying at a big picture level, there's a $22,000 difference between total allotment and what we're using in our assumption. Right. But the but the but the reason is among those 8,000, just to give you one example, you have to estimate how many special ed students there are. So there's a percentage. And for that group of kids, it's a different amount. And then you have to estimate how many emerging bilingual kids and etcetera etcetera.
So that's that's why it's not a straight multiplication. But your model, the the way you do it and the way we do it, it's gonna be close, anyway. And at this point, it's just an assumption. So I think if we're up by $1,000,000 or $2,000,000 it's still going to be okay. Okay. I think though just to highlight, I think it's more than a million and 2. We're talking about $2,000 per student So and times 8,000. That's that's 16,000 that we're saying we're not gonna lose, so that's less conservative. Yeah. I You see what I'm saying?
I, I don't know how you get that, but, I I trust the finance department who've done this a lot to to do it right. I I get that, and I'm not I'm not I'm not trying to throw off the assumption. What I'm trying to do is just understand. And I get that Omar's model and I've got the spreadsheets and I've seen how they're built up. I guess where I'm going though is if we've got a $2,000 difference per student, we do the math that comes out to about $16,000,000 that we're underestimating the reduction or the loss overall.
You see what I'm going? So if if that's not the case, it's fine, because maybe we all said it another way. I'm just wanting to make sure we're not missing $16,000,000 that we're going to lose for these 8,000 students. So we ran Omar's model. And what we did is we put in 250, one of the inputs, and then we put in the loss of 8,000 students, but we broke the loss into the kinds of students in terms of the they all have different weights as as, the superintendent has pointed out.
We spit out that model was that number. Okay. Those three numbers and that's what we do. Guarantee you those numbers will change Sure. Sure. Depending on what happens with the with the legislature. There we know we know there's gonna be a change in the model, but right now, I I talked to Omar today, and they're they are afraid to, make changes right now because they are they are arguing over what's called hold harmless Mhmm. And with the hold harmless, begins. And,
they don't know if they wanna go back because of what, senate, senate bill, senate bill four has written in there or actually senate bill two. And whether it goes back to 2039 or 2023. And so that model has not been changed. But right now, that was the best numbers we have got running through that model. Okay. And keep in mind, guys, the point of this exercise, this is not a budget. This is getting us close to what we might get on the revenue side and what we might expand on the expenditure side.
It's just an estimate. You got to start somewhere when you try to make the best assumptions we can. But even the projected enrollment number might change, right? And then the Homestead Exemption might change. So there's a lot of ways these numbers won't be exactly the same and they'll change. But as we go along, we'll tighten it as we get more information from the legislature. Anybody else? You look like you have one. Thank you, superintendent. Thank you, Chief Terry. Slide number 11, when it talks about assumptions, specifically for PUA campuses, so just to be very transparent and very clear,
last year my concern was that we weren't allocating enough funds to the PUA schools. And so for this year, you've referenced, we'll receive 100% of the money that they're entitled to. So for example, and this is just an example, if they have 1,000 students, can we expect that there's and they didn't zero, right, they didn't lose any students, can we we expect that they're still gonna receive the same amount of money total or just what entitlement are you referring to? Okay. And by the way, we have a whole session on school budgets. Yeah. Yeah. So I don't wanna get too far into it tonight. That's a whole whole workshop.
But what what I meant by what they're entitled to and prior to COVID, they received Yeah. The per pupil allocation from the state, which means the the basic allotment plus the entitlements, etcetera, times the enrollment times ADA. They're gonna get that. That's a % of what they're entitled to. Lastly, we gave them more than they were entitled to. Right? In other words, when there was a deep when they should have decreased, we didn't decrease them all the way. We only we capped it at a 12% loss.
That's huge. And as you notice, every school was able to do what they, you know, that what the what they needed to do to keep their programs, to keep their teachers and everything else. But now we're saying, we're you're gonna get a % plus, and we'll talk more about the percentage, the the increase, an increase of 10% of the loss. So it's Not the same as if this is where they are, this is a %, they're gonna get more than a %. But they will not get up here most likely. Okay. Are you following me?
I I think I think what your question was, and correct me if I'm wrong, is if they have a thousand students last year and they got a thousand students this year, okay, and what we would do is we say, you're getting a thousand this year. And if their their average daily attendance percentage is the same, you're right. They will get the same amount of money. No, Jim. They will not get the same amount of money. Meaning this, last year, they got a % plus an amount that's over that %. So a thousand kids You're right.
Times PUA times 88. Right. And then they got a a 15%, fifteen % more or something like that. We'll have to calculate each school as a little bit different because it's capped at 12% loss. In any case, it was more money than this %. And I'm saying they're gonna get if they keep the same amount of kids in the same ADA, they're gonna get that hundred. That's Entirely get that. Yeah. Plus they're gonna get more. But that more, that 10% more may be less than Last year.
Last year's budget. Okay. So I'll have more questions when we talk about campus. Yes. Let me just clarify too some of the discussions that we've had about what we're going to see when we start getting more detailed into the budgets through the budget workshops is we're going to see an analysis of NES, what it costs for NES, what the PUA schools cost on a per student, allotment basis. So we'll be able to drill down into where what's the PUA schools are getting versus the NES schools. And when we get to the school budget,
you'll have every school and then that. All right. And you'll have last year's Yes. And my concern isn't so much about per pupil. It's making sure that we have the appropriate funds for the appropriate initiatives that we have at that particular perm, the needs of the schools. So whether that's the same as Asher, again, it could be the same, but I'm more concerned as are we addressing the needs of every campus NES or PUA? Yes. We'll have that discussion. Yes. And then one of the questions just to follow-up with Janet's question about, CCMR bonus. Have we pivoted anything? Are we planning to pivot anything? Well, I guess not because we're keeping answer my own question.
Thanks. Okay. I have several questions. But just to go back and I must be missing something. So when you're talking about the 10% or the I just wanna make sure we aren't talking the same language because I was with Jim when he said they're getting the same amount of money. Are you saying that last year, there was, more money than the allocated amount even for the non subs I'm gonna call them non subsidized campuses. So you have 3,500 kids. Yes. That that's what it was. So So the So so, frustrating last year is we were giving more than the %.
We were giving more than a % last year. We're gonna give more than a % this year. The more may not be as much as what they got last year. And how is that calculated? I guess you said each campus was I I would I mean, we I we can let's wait to if you don't mind. Well, I think it's really important because if you're saying that on the whole, PUA campuses are gonna lose x percentage So that's important. Okay. So the first of all, I don't word it that way because I want people to understand they're getting a %. But just to give you an example,
Audrey, if you wanna wanna know. Let's use big numbers and exaggerate for effect a little bit. Sure. Sure. This this school was getting 5,000,000 this year. Mhmm. And that was because they got a % of what they're entitled to plus, you know, $500,000 more k. Because of because of the this formula that we The The 12%. The 12% cap cap. But the the 12% cap was, declined from the old prior year. Right? Declined from the prior year Right. But built up over many years of where they should have been. Right.
Okay? So So if they had declined enrollment for five years, that that that difference but let me finish. Okay? So here's 5,000,000. Mhmm. That's what they're getting this year. This year, PUA times ADA times enrollment is 4,000,000. Let's just, for the sake of argument, say it's 4,000,000 because they lost 200 kids. Can we use the same number? So 450,000. You just said the or four four point five million. Saying that PUA times enrollment is, is 4,000,000 or $404,500,000
because they'll just say they're the same exact situation. $4,500,000 fine, okay? Now we're going to give them 10% of the difference. So $5,000,000 from $4,500,000 is $500,000 10 percent of $500,000 is $50,000 So they're going to get $4,600,000 or $4,500,000 Can you let me say it another way perhaps and tell me if this is correct. All right. We're We're trying not to get into this. No, I know, but we're already in this
discussion. So if a school got the actual enrollment times ADA, right, And they were in excess of that number by some amount, right? Today, what you're going to do is or in this new budget, you're going to do the same math. Enrollment times ADA times the basic allotment. And if there is a still a if the amount of the gap, you're going to give those schools 10% of that gap, right? So if the gap was let's just use the $4,500,000
number and that gap was a 12% number before the or the cap that we had last year was 12%. Now some schools didn't get the 12% because they didn't need it, right? They didn't have a big And the same thing will be happen here. Right. So it's not gonna be applied evenly to every school. It'll be depending on what happened to their enrollment. But but the math is what your allotment is plus 10% of what the gap was that you got last year. Yes. So I I would suggest would give you real numbers Right. So that nobody panics. And remember,
the panic last year did not pan out. The sky did not fall. And the other thing is you wanna balance budget? You gotta do At some point, you have to balance the budget. And the balanced budget for the school is that you get what the state gives us, you know, for that school. Yeah. I I look. I think And and they still get the subsidies, like magnet subsidy, fine arts subsidies, EB subsidies. So there's still those subsidy. That's that hasn't changed. That's part of the PUA. So, with those subsidies, you should be able to run your school with a %,
not a 10%. But we're gonna do a 10%. I think I I think that the the the confusion was is because last year, the the max that you could lose was the 12%. You you wouldn't lose more than 12%. Capped. Yeah. It was capped. This is a different animal completely. Okay. Well, that's different than what we talked about before. Not not completely, but, yes, it's gonna happen. Okay. With respect to the PUA schools, I know a big issue that came up last year. I just wanna make sure it's understood by me. Materials, the same things are gonna be paid out of central office as as currently are.
Is that true? Yes. We are well, we haven't finished our budgeting process, so I wanna reserve judgment on that. But the answer is generally true. Like high quality instructional materials would be covered by central office? Yes. Yes. Generally true. Let's wait till we have our let's wait till the budget before I am definitive on that. Okay. Because we that's another way where we we spent more than our, you know, a balanced budget would dictate. Okay. Can I ask a question about the spreadsheet,
please? The, the decrease in budget due to lost enrollment, that 47,000,000 estimated number, that is just so I'm clear, that's to be absorbed through teacher salaries and other things. Right? Correct. Which that'll be determined both in school budgets and then adjustments to NES school budgets, I guess, or NES programming? Be minimal in this. It's mostly, salaries of teachers. So if a school's losing teachers, yes. But Okay. Got it. Hold on. You wanna go to somebody else and come back? Or you want me to flip there?
Anybody else? Robert, go ahead. To clarify, we've talked a lot tonight. I've I've heard this formula a lot, so I'd like to maybe get this clarified for those few people who might be listening to this recording. PUA times enrollment times ADA. Could we just get some definitions for those, please? And when we get those definitions and I think we've we've said them throughout. But there's something here about a sense of the things that the state controls, the things that you, the administration, the district controls,
and there's a sense of maybe some levers that I have a little bit of influence in as a parent in the school, a parent of a child in HISD. I influence attendance. So, by getting my kid to school. Right? So if you could just maybe clarify a little bit about those definitions and maybe something that we all maybe need a reminder of about what that ADA means and how we influence that number. Yes. I I can get that to you. I mean, I I can tell you right now. Just tell me the definitions. The definitions, understanding what they mean.
Like, PUA, my understanding is that's a state number. Right? We talked a lot about those levers. It's a state thing. Yes and yes and no. So the state the PUA number that we calculate for schools is based on the basic allotment plus entitlements for the for the students who have special conditions, plus our own subsidies and entitlements. So we have a magnet school subsidy. We have a small school subsidy. We have other subsidies, and every school is a little bit different.
And I don't know if you remember, last year we added all that up, and then we said that's your PUA. And that number is different for every school. It'll be close, but it's different for every school because the number of SPED students, the number of EB students is different for every school. Manage subsidy, etcetera. So that's what we call PUA. So that that that numb that PUA number won't change a lot. It probably will go up if the basic allotment goes up, but it won't change a lot. Then it's multiplied by the number of kids who are enrolled. We will use the PEINS number,
times ADA, which is, average daily attendance. So, yes, the attendance of students matter. We'll use a a general ADA before October to to determine the budget. I think we use March 4, ADA number an average of ADA for the year. And that and then if it goes up, we get you get more money. If enrollment goes up, you get more money, etcetera. So, that's what we mean by PUA times enrollment times ADA. What I'm looking for you to say is people need to show up to school. That's a lever that we can control.
Right? Like, we can we can do something about that. We can't control the state legislature, but we can make sure our kids get to school every day. I love that. Yes. Get this get your kids to school every day. That's You can have lots of swings with this. Any other anybody else on this line? Can you find your question? Let me ask just one last question. On the on the maintenance expenditures, I know we have a hundred million over the next two years. I know there's a lot more work that needs to be done. Can you just briefly explain how that's gonna be determined who how we're gonna to be set up?
We're we're gonna try to get maintenance tax. This is an effort to try to, do our most severe needs, and to try to improve, some of the things that are that will help our kids down the road. So, part of it is health and safety. That's the 40,000,000 I was talking about, and probably 60,000,000 the following year. So a hundred million over two years. And then, our kids desperately need upgrades to career tech ed. And so even though the bond didn't pass, it doesn't mean we should just throw up our hands. So we're gonna try to upgrade Barbara Jordan a little bit,
because that's we already have facility there. And then also CCMR and CTE improvements include programs of study that are more geared to a year 02/1935. Those are redown to our kids down the road. And then we have a huge systems problem with IT. We have a deadline on the program that we're using. So we need to upgrade that urgently. So that's the other thing on the maintenance tax notes. I see. Thank you. Thanks. Adam? Just one last thing on the assumptions or $1,500,000
So on the total estimated revenue for $26,000,000 we got $2,000,000 2 30 million dollars I'm sorry, dollars 2,000,000 and some change. The that number or is that the total revenue? Are we looking at all revenues? Or are we looking at tax revenues in that? Yeah. We're talking about the general fund. Okay. So, what is the number of students that we've got represented in that? We have 176,000 minus eight. Okay. So if you do the backwards math,
then we should be able to come up with a number. The one I come up with is one sixty eight, and if we do one sixty eight, that puts us at 12,000 per student. Is that the right number for next year that we're looking at? That's yes, it's 12,000. Okay. But you got to remember that, that includes not only the state amount, but it includes other amounts. Okay. State and federal, okay. And then the last question I've got is just around the leaseback. I don't think I've heard any specific information on that,
and maybe that's a closed session thing. But just at a high level, I was not aware of what that is. Well, the the the basic thing I would say here, the leaseback is, we're we're looking at, corporations, paying the the capital, for some HVAC systems, and then we would lease it back so that, we would do a payment, through the years and, that that it belongs to us. That's just one of other things that we're looking for. We're also looking for discretionary, discretionary grants. And, we also include a little bit of that into the disposal of our assets that,
like, used electronic equipment and trying to sell that stuff, which is minor. But, so we're looking at other financing sources that we can bring it, not clearly defined, but I do believe that we'll be able to do. Another one that we're looking at is we're looking at Charles. SHARS is a federal program that is entitlement that goes through the state and from the state it comes to us. There is some issues going on and we think that we're going to be able
to bring more money through that program. Got it. So this will be a one time funding mechanism, but then the debt payment and the maintenance tax rolls, that kind of covers all of both the maintenance notes and any leaseback obligations? Yes. Okay. Thank you. We will now, I think that is the end of this budget presentation and clearly we have a number of other workshops that are coming. And so this as you mentioned, superintendent, this is not set in stone.
This is a guidepost for us to be able to have a sense of where we're going with the assumptions. And we will do a lot of detailed analysis and and discussion about this in the months to come. So, good start and let's go to, we do have a short executive session. So the Board will now recess to closed session of chapter five fifty one of Texas government code, open means act, sub session 551.004 through 551.089. Should board final action vote or decision on any matter considered in the closed session
be acquired, such a final action, vote, or decision shall be taken in an open meeting covered by this notice upon the reconvening of this public meeting or at a subsequent public meeting of the board upon notice thereof. Board has recessed to closed session at 07:22PM on 02/27/2025. Are now ready to consider items discussed in closed session. Are now ready to consider items discussed in closed session. Go ahead and, is there a motion from closed session? We need to get your mic computer. Yes. Thank you. I move that the board approve the settlement and release agreement between Luz Martinez and
HISD effective 02/27/2025 on the term discussed in closed session. Okay. Go ahead and please vote. Okay. Motion passes. Okay. I think that is about it. Any, comments or discussions anyone wants to have before we close? Just one. Sister Act at HSPVA was amazing. Alright. Anybody else? Great. We'll we'll stand we'll stand adjourned then. Thank you.