Despite an hour’s early start, the Katy ISD board of trustees meeting on October 21 at the Education Support Complex at 6301 S. Stadium Lane ran long, with two separate closed meetings on the agenda, in which the board consulted with their attorney in private.
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Despite an hour’s early start, the Katy ISD board of trustees meeting on October 21 at the Education Support Complex at 6301 S. Stadium Lane ran long, with two separate closed meetings on the agenda, in which the board consulted with their attorney in private. According to the board agenda, the first closed meeting was to consider the deployment of plans for implementation of security personnel or devices. The purpose of the second closed meeting was not disclosed.
KISD Chief Operations Officer Ted Vierling and Kris Pool from presented the final proposed attendance boundary modifications for the district’s two newest schools – Elementary #47 which will serve the Elyson area and Elementary #48 which will serve the southern portion of the Sunterra subdivision. Both schools are in the rapidly growing northwest corner of the school district. The new boundaries will be effective in the 2025-2026 school year and are designed to provide population relief for the next two to three years, Vierling said.
The attendance zone for the Elyson school (#47) will be carved entirely out of the existing boundaries for Youngblood Elementary, Pool said and the boundaries for Elementary #48 in Sunterra will affect existing boundaries for Robertson and Faldyn Elementary campuses.
The proposed boundary modifications were first presented to the board in June 2024, and families in the affected area were given opportunities to provide feedback to the district, through an electronic survey, emails, written correspondence, and by telephone, Vierling said. The preliminary results of that survey were presented to the board at its September 23 meeting by Chief Communications Officer Andrea Grooms.
Pool said that growth projections indicate that the district could need six or seven more new elementary schools in the next ten years. Attendance zones will keep changing as growth continues, she said. She said that the district is considering an additional elementary to eventually be built in the northern section of Sunterra as well as one to be built in the Grange area.
Vierling said that there are no plans to have students living in the Lakehouse subdivision to walk to the Elementary #48 campus. “There are no walkways that go from inside the Lakehouse neighborhood through Sunterra.” He said that the district did not expect children to walk down Clay Road to get to the school.
The district does not want to move students multiple times, Vierling said. “We hope that this finalizes things in this part of the world,” he added.
Multiple items on the work study meeting agenda provided discussion points for safety and security upgrades at many of the district’s campuses, much of which will be funded by the 2023 bond:
· Security fencing at multiple campuses will be replaced with a six-foot non-scalable fence.
· Re-roofing and improvements to windows at Taylor High School and Beckendorff Junior High School were discussed.
· Life safety and special systems upgrades were discussed for Taylor High School, Seven Lakes high School, Katy High School, West Memorial Elementary, Rylander Elementary, Kilpatrick Elementary, Schmaltz Elementary, Griffin Elementary and the ESC.
The board also heard a presentation from Chief Communications Officer Andrea Grooms on community response received for consideration in setting the board’s legislative priorities. Grooms said that the district received feedback from the community through an electronic survey with 3898 participants and during six “listening circles” that drew a total of 225 attendees. Four of the listening circles were held for community members with and without children in the district, one was held for teachers, and one was held for student representatives on the district’s student leadership council, Grooms said.
The top three legislative priorities for the district were identified as:
· Increasing state funding to local districts through increasing the “per student allotment,” which has remained unchanged since 2019, with an increase accounting for inflation since 2019.
· Teacher recruitment and retention through increasing compensation, addressing rising healthcare costs, dealing with classroom behavior and streamlining classroom tasks.
· STAAR assessment accountability and reform, limiting STAAR testing and reducing its emphasis, and consideration for moving testing in grades 3 and 4 back to a “paper and pencil” model rather than online testing, and providing alternative assessments to STAAR testing for students who receive special services.
Next steps, Grooms said, involve using the legislative priorities to guide policy-making at KISD and to roll out an advocacy plan with more engagement at the state and local levels.
The board meeting schedule for the remainder of 2024 is:
· Regular board meeting, October 28
· Board work study meeting, November 18
· Regular board meeting, December 9