Week One Assignment

Week One Assignment – Part 1- Reflection

I really enjoyed learning about the history of school funding. It really helps put our current situation into perspective and it is evident that the problem of school finance has plagued our forefathers.  As I read the historical issues I was reminded of how wonderful it is to be an American and more specifically a Texan.  By learning the history of these reforms I am given a helpful perspective in viewing our current budget.  As a future superintendent it will be helpful to take this with me.

The assignment itself was not the issue, but the technology and how to achieve collaboration was seemingly unclear.  I have found that not just the members of my group were confused but that other members in the cohort were having difficulty as well.

Week One Assignment – Part 2 – Reflection

My group had basic understanding of funding formulas.  I felt that I needed more information than just the lecture and could not find any of the suggested readings.  So I did the next best things and googled it.  I found an excellent PDF  out by TEA last January that honestly goes into more depth than some of the documents in epic.  I posted this to our discussion board and while it is 50 pages long, it leaves no topic uncovered for Texas School Finance.  I learned A LOT from this assignment.  This was the area where I wanted to learn and understand more.  All of the allotments, the Tiers, and the formulas for WADA were very helpful!

Week One Assignment – Part 3 – Reflection

I realized how perspective becomes such a viable definition for every educator and lawmakers understanding of these concepts.  I have read the laws and read the new cases that are being currently discussed on Texas ISD and find this to hold true for each individual from corporations, to boards of trustees, to parents, to lawmakers, to teachers, and to school administrators.  Many people hate Robin Hood because it takes way funds from already wealthy districts and helps equitably provide adequate funding for the receiving district.  The wealthy district remains unharmed and is still able to provide (according to the state) an adequate education.  Special education and bilingual education is always a discussion with equity and even with equality.  Some sides feel that the amount of money that is spent of these students should be reduced to support more of majority of the students.  If you were to ask a parent of a Special Ed or Bilingual student I am sure you would get a much different opinion.

Week One Assignment – Part 4 – District Comparison

As I began to review my district improvement plan I found that it looked very similar to the year before and then even the year before that.  This week I attended a workshop on Comprehensive Needs Assessment and I am going to take over our District Improvement Plan.  This was the largest difference between my DIP and Austin ISD was that when there was goal set then funding and personnel was devoted to this goal. Each goal for Austin ISD was marked by how they were going to monitor the results of the plan in place.  Key funding sources for many of the initiatives comes from the Compensatory Allotment, Grants, and Title 1 federal funds.  My district does not have anyone that is dedicated to grant writing and I feel like this should be something that the administrative team should look in to. All of our compensatory and Title 1 funds are currently being for salaries after all of the budget cuts.  I am sure that Austin ISD’s current Dip would reflect this also. In our DIP we did state the implementation of campus-wide PBS systems, but there was no money or personnel devoted to this.  In Austin ISD they were hiring PBS coordinators and people to help track this data.  Their implementation process was very in depth and required specifics steps for everyone in the district to easily follow.  There are some areas in our district where I know that we need to focus improvement efforts on and Austin ISD left no stone unturned.  They addressed everything from graduation rates to attendance to discipline referrals.  In my district it is tough to see what we need to focus on looking from the outside because the dates on the DIP were just changed and we never did a formal comprehensive needs assessment.  Four years ago we hired an outside agency to come in and put together our CIPs and DIPs and now we just change the dates. I pulled up other districts DIPs on their web sites if they were posted and noticed that some look pretty cookies cutter while others are a livable document used for truly working towards improvement.  While I did find other DIPs that I liked better format wise than Austin ISD, I found that theirs really included a lot of meeting minutes and communication with stakeholders.  I worked in Austin ISD for 3 years and know that each site based decision-making team meets once a month, which is more than the bi-annual requirements that the state mandates.  This is reflected in the DIP and I think that this would benefit our district to engage in more meetings like these to get a true feel for what changes need to be made district-wide.