How’s That New School Board Doing?

This past Monday, May 6, was a monthly school board meeting here in Cy-Fair Independent School District, northwest of Houston. This is the board we worked so hard to flip from all seven moderate-to-liberal board members to six conservative and one liberal; it took two election cycles. At the same time, the previous (liberal) superintendent retired. We were very concerned about the timing—getting the new hire before the new board had a say. But the process allowed for input from the new board, who were all, along with the old board, in favor of our new superintendent.

Business with all the new people has been underway since January, so this is early, but it’s a good time to look at how things are going. There are two areas we’ll look at today: budget and curriculum.

Budget

The biggest issue right now is related to funding. You might call it a crisis—which obviously wasn’t created by this new board and superintendent, but it’s incumbent upon them to fix it. School districts are required by law to balance their budgets. The deadline for setting the next year’s budget is June 30, just a month away as far as school board meetings go, so that’s why this is a big, urgent issue.

from the budget presentation at the May 6 CFISD School Board Meeting,
screenshot from here

I’m trying to grasp the full narrative of the budget shortfall, which is significant. There was grant money because of the pandemic that has been available since 2020, and it runs out with this school year—and is not available for the 2024-2025 school year. That’s a sizable drop in funding. Add to that inflation since Biden took office that skews any budget based on historical expenditures. There has also been a drop in students attending since the pandemic shutdown, which affects school funding, which is based on students in seats. And there is some growth to the district as well, which is in population and could be on the verge of adding a new school; I find this confusing based on the previous sentence. But I’m still processing the details.

For the past couple of months there has been a committee looking for possible budget solutions, which included requesting much input from the community. We’ll get to more detail later, but the controversial solutions have been related to staffing decreases, which, at the suggestion of principals mainly, includes no longer having school librarians on some 50 or 92 campuses.

There will be no layoffs. Let me repeat, the staff decreases being suggested are using attrition and reassignments, not layoffs.

Nevertheless, there’s an army of the usual faces (the enemies of our new board) and their new recruits forming new organizations, on top of old ones, insisting we need librarians in schools. These people are not offering budget solutions, only blame and haranguing rhetoric.

This school board meeting lasted over five hours. (I did not go. I spaced out watching the livestream over the two following days.) Because this is near school year end, there were awards and recognitions that took up nearly the first two hours. Then came the brief board comments (3-5 minutes from each of the seven still takes a chunk of time). Then comes Citizen Participation. One innovation of our new board is to put Citizen Participation near the top of the agenda, rather than at the end, which we believed with the previous board was intended to get people to give up and leave before they could speak. So I’m not complaining about the placement of these public comments. Anyway, that is when people are allowed to speak (by signing up online ahead of time) on any subject without regard to what is on the agenda. Because of the high number, each speaker was limited to one minute.

The public can also comment (again, by signing up ahead of time) on topics related to agenda items. Since the big agenda item was the budget, many people (and some of the same people again) spoke during this segment. Most of these—including a fair number of students reading words fed to them or written for them—talked about the need for librarians and libraries. No solutions were offered.

It was 3 ½ hours into the meeting, after over an hour of public comment against firing librarians (none of which will be fired) that we got to a staff presentation on the budget, followed by a clear and coherent explanation of the situation and the proposals, from our new superintendent, Dr. Doug Killian. If only we’d heard from him first, most of the public complaints would have been moot.

An interesting detail he noted was that, by the time he was speaking, most of the audience had left; they spoke but didn’t want to hear anything else. I’ll get to his presentation in a moment.

CFISD School Board Meeting May 6, 2024. Left is toward the beginning of the meeting; 
right is during Dr. Killian's presentation on the budget. Both are screenshots from here.

One more difference I’ve noticed with this new board is that Citizen Participation is allowed to call out board members by name, and other speakers and community members. That was taboo with the last board, and the legal counsel shut them down immediately just for mentioning a name. I asked our board president about it in an email; he didn’t comment on it being different, but he noted that it’s a free speech issue and something we’re just going to have to tolerate. But it’s definitely uncomfortable. And at some point it may be grounds for a slander lawsuit against those speakers. (They’ve spent a couple of meetings claiming that one of the board members has a “boyfriend”/bodyguard who has roughed up these speakers at various other gatherings. Every word is a lie. Most of the other accusations are ad hominem attacks: we’re all Christian nationalists, racists, homophobes, “wack-a-doos.”)

OK, so now to Dr. Killian’s budget explanation, which starts at 3:30:25 on the video.  

To start with, he tells us, “We're $138 million shy of a balanced budget, and we don't have enough fund balance to be able to make it through next year by just simply not doing anything.” This is quite a crisis to face in your first month on the job. Fortunately, school finance is his specialty. Right away a committee was formed, the Budget Reduction Advisory Committee (BRAC), to come up with both cuts and additional revenue sources. And he went over several of these. Among these are staff reductions. So far the plan covers $58.6 million in deficit reduction.

Here are Dr. Killian’s main points concerning staff cuts, to contradict media and social media claims:

·        No staff are being laid off. The lower numbers of employees will come from attrition, and not filling currently open positions, but restructuring employees to fill those positions. Some positions are being eliminated, and the people in those positions will be given other positions with comparable pay. Preference will be given to keep employees at the same location; when that isn’t possible, they will be offered opportunities at other campuses.

·        The board and superintendent did neither come up with the suggestion of eliminating school librarians nor encourage that. The principals and their staffs determined what their campuses could most easily do without—even though we’d all rather not do without; those principals chose to eliminate librarians.

·        No school libraries will be closed. District librarians will handle book checkout and other librarian duties. (It appears to me that those whose positions were not let go by their principals will be handling multiple schools, rather than only one.)

Dr. Killian gave us some really useful information about the Limited Optional Homestead Exemption (LOHE). As I understand it, this is in addition to the state property tax homestead exemption, and relates to property taxation received by the school district. Not all (in fact, probably not most) school districts offer this tax break. This was passed, locally, back in 1983. There were a lot of expenses we didn’t have back then, such as campus police for safety and security—which, since shooting at Santa Fe and Uvaldi schools here in Texas, everyone agrees is essential. There are rules requiring certain staffing for special education, bilingual education, and more coming from the federal government, which they only partially fund. And inflation has affected that greatly. And there is greater need, as we try to make up for learning losses due to the pandemic shutdown.

from the budget presentation at the CFISD School Board Meeting, May 6, 2024,
screenshot from here

Here's part of that discussion:

This local optional homestead exemption is not a penalty in state aid. We have elected as a school district to reduce our local collections by $63 million, and that's coming to roost. And that is really a local issue. Not every district in the state actually funds a local optional homestead exemption, and that comes right off the top of our local taxes.

So, when you go to the commissioner and say, “Fund the local optional homestead exemption,” you're asking them to give us more money than what they give other people. So I'm doing that politely.

If I’m understanding correctly, Dr. Killian has been aware of an obscure law allowing us to ask for a temporary 50% funding of our LOHE. That is underway. And then, he’s working with legislators, along with other districts that offer the LOHE, to get full funding for the LOHE in the upcoming legislative session. But the temporary relief now looks like a strong possibility.

Near the end of the meeting, one of the board members asked whether this LOHE opportunity had been there in past years but not accessed, and the answer was yes. And that is one of many reasons we are pleased to have him as our new superintendent.

There were other deficit-reducing plans on the table as well. One was to limit bussing to danger zones and areas beyond 1 mile or 2 miles, depending on student grade levels, with an anticipated budget reduction of $4.7 million. While some people tried to fearmonger that they were considering eliminating practically all bussing, that was never the case. Here’s the chart they showed:

from the budget presentation at the CFISD School Board Meeting, May 6, 2024,
screenshot from here

Curriculum

Around 10:30 PM, in a meeting that had begun at 6:00 PM, there was an agenda item related to accepting state-approved curriculum. Board member Dr. Natalie Blasingame proposed an amendment that allowed accepting the curriculum with a list of chapters removed. (Most textbooks are electronic now, accessed on Chromebooks; making certain chapters unavailable is easily doable.) There wasn’t a lot of discussion here. No audience members spoke. But board member Julie Hinaman was in a panic to stop this from happening. She insisted that we hadn’t had time to look at the chapters—even though this item had been postponed from the last meeting for further study, and others clearly used that time to study. Hinaman said we ought to defer to our experts, who approved this curriculum, failing to note that local districts can and ought to make local decisions, and this was one of the very reasons the community enthusiastically flipped the school board. She insisted that we might be failing to meet TEKS—the materials tested on the statewide standardized annual tests. It was clarified that we were allowed to use or create other materials to meet any standards that are missed—and in fact we already do that, because no textbook covers all the TEKS.

The materials in question are related to some controversial topics. KHOU did a story on it, listing for us the chapters to be removed (these were on the big screen in the room, but hard to get as a screenshot, so thanks to KHOU for the list): 

Biology course textbook (Texas, Miller & Levine Experience Biology by Savvas Learning Company)

·        Investigation 13: The challenge of diseases (includes discussion about vaccinations)

·        Investigation 16: human impact on the biosphere

Environmental Science: Sustaining Your World, Texas Edition

·        Chapters 5: Species Interactions, Ecological Succession, and Population Control

·        Chapter 7: Saving Species & Ecosystem Services

Earth Systems, Texas Edition

·        Chapters 2: Earth Systems & Cycles

·        Chapter 6: Mineral & Energy Resources

·        Chapter 21: Climate & Climate Change

Principles of Education & Training course – Teaching

·        Chapter 7: School & Society

·        Chapter 12: Teaching Diverse Learners

·        Chapter 15: Technology for Instruction

·        Chapter 18: The Challenges of Teaching

Health Science Theories textbook – DHO Health Science

·        Chapter 8: Human Growth & Development

·        Chapter 10: Cultural Diversity

There’s a hue and cry coming from the opposition that this is a “diverse” district, and the board is required to listen to them as parents, and not just those Christian extremists who give them campaign money. (Ha! If only I’d had money and not just time to donate to them!) But school board elections matter, and even more parents have spoken in a way that counts. If there are topics a “pro-diverse” parent feels their child is missing, they are free to supplement. What these actual extremists don’t get to do is indoctrinate all the kids, regardless of their parents’ will, and then say those parents can just un-indoctrinate their kids after the fact.

Board member Julie Hinaman, the only holdover from the previous board, was outmatched. She has, since the meeting, gone to social media to cry foul. She should have been informed ahead of time, she says. She fails to remember in social media, even though she mentioned it at the meeting, that the issue was postponed since the last meeting so the board could study the curriculum before accepting it, which others clearly did. Now she wants it two ways at once: there isn’t time to see which chapters and what content is being left out, so we should just accept the experts and approve their original recommendation.

She could have asked more specifics about the chapters to be deleted. Board member Justin Ray, in an effort to allay any fears or any sense that things were being hidden, asked Dr. Blasingame for some clarification on materials being left out. Dr. Blasingame mentioned a biology extension chapter related to vaccines was not necessary for TEKS. And then she covered some earth systems that included depopulation, and an agenda out of the UN, and a perspective that humans are bad. Ray agreed that those were controversial topics. Board member Todd LeCompte agreed that he wouldn’t want anything about depopulation to be taught.

In other words, there’s some indoctrination going on, which is exactly what we voted in this board to prevent. And we thank them for this first, important step.

Hinaman didn’t ask for those details. I think she didn’t, because the more open and detailed the board is about the indoctrination, the more parents agree with them—despite what the loud cohort screams. She claims that Dr. Blasingame stated the revisions were a result of a board subcommittee—but review of the video shows no such statement. She only said these materials were brought up as concerning across the state and within the district. Hinaman accused the board of vetting Dr. Blasingame’s proposed amendment, because it was available on the screen; in other words, Dr. Blasingame was prepared enough to hand out copies of her proposal to board members and had sent an electronic copy to the secretary handling the large screen, as would be expected for an amendment of this type in a typical public meeting. Somehow, to Hinaman, that is backroom dealing. Hinaman, in her online screed, says,

“Last year, it was library books. Last month, it was librarians. This week, it was Science. What next? Social studies? History? Ethics?”

screenshot from Julie Hinaman's social media,
I accessed it here, in a private group that may not be accessible

How terrible of us to not willingly submit to the indoctrination! Who do we think we are?

Note that Hinaman has an influential position on TASB (Texas Association of School Boards). People from around the state are calling for legislation to disallow association with TASB, because of the woke indoctrination problem. Association can be curtailed at the school district level; I hope Cy-Fair ISD makes that happen.

You can assume that the loud cohort will scream again, at the next board meeting, and the one after that…. Tolerating their tantrums is going to be one of the costs of standing up to them in order to stop allowing them to indoctrinate our kids.

So, they will go on saying anyone in favor of school choice is trying to defund public schools and destroy them. And they will go on saying anyone who wants porn removed from school libraries is a pearl-clutching book banner. And they will go on lying about school librarians being fired, and will claim removing indoctrination from textbooks is censorship—or whatever the next thing is that comes up.

It will be loud and uncomfortable, and often ugly. But I’m proud to say I helped get this board elected, and I’m very pleased to see how very capable our new superintendent is. As a report card at the end of their very first semester, I’d say they’re getting very good marks. (Except for that one; maybe we'll get her voted out in the next election.)