Wildcats finish regular season as co-district champions
The Littlefield Independent School District’s Board of Trustees met in regular session on Thursday during lunch to discuss a 15-item agenda.
The meeting was called to order at 12 p.m. by Board President Pat Demel and the Invocation was given by Gary Birkelbach.
Megan Hollis was present to speak during public forum about Lamb County Educational Foundation.
The minutes from the previous meeting were approved as presented.
Supterintendent-elect Mitch McNeese and High School Principal Amber Hays presented the Annual Student Performance Report.
“Throughout the year we’ve covered our STAAR scores and other reports,” Supt.-elect McNeese said. “We did not get rated this year on the A-F scale, due to an ongoing lawsuit with 125 schools filing on TEA, saying there were some issues with changing some of the set points. The biggest one was on the CCMR rating. What happened is that they raised the point from 60 to 88% of kids who were graduating, who had to meet that standard that were college, career or military ready.”
He added, “The schools fighting this are saying that TEA didn’t give them enough time to make adjustments, so that they could get that percent of kids into that category. If you don’t meet that 88%, it will automatically knock you down to a B rating before you even get started. That lawsuit is still locked up, it was supposed to come out this month, but it has not, which is why we have not been rated yet.”
“CCMR used to cover across the whole district, but TEA decided it is just done at the High School,” Mrs. Hays said. “Historically, we’ve done a pretty good job in that area of CCMR, but now it only counts on the high school rating instead of the whole district. Another thing that has changed, is that this is the first year they’ve mandated that everybody be online. It is a challenge across the state.”
She added, “We used to have questions with answers A, B, C, D, now that is open ended, and that is a whole other training for kids and it is a whole different grading scale for teachers. For teachers to understand what those rubrics are, we didn’t have a lot of information on.”
The motion to approve the Annual Student Performance Report was made by Birkelbach and seconded by Hervey Valdez Jr. The motion carried.
Supt.-elect McNeese went over the 2024-2025 School Calendar.
“Rachel sent out a survey and we got a lot of feedback from them and based on that feedback, we created five different calendars,” Supt.-elect McNeese said. “A lot of it had to due with teacher work days throughout the summer. We had five drafts and it came down to two of them, drafts two and four. And then we had a re-vote and it came down to draft two. The difference between these is on draft four we start on the 14th of August, and on draft two, we start on the 21st of August. We’ll have two weeks of work days right before school starts and I elected to put those there, because we need to get these teachers trained. We’re going to have a lot of new teachers coming in and I want them sitting down with our veteran teachers to go over all of the programs that they use in whichever building they’re in.
He added, “With two weeks that’s going to get a lot of that training time built in, last year with one week, that was really a crash course and was hard getting teachers through those trainings. Also, with these two weeks, that takes a lot of those summer days at the end of the year, that they will not have to get. When we put this together, on draft four they would have three days of in-service, and draft two was five days of in-service. The only difference on the holidays is that we will be off three weeks during the Christmas break, and we built that in there strategically, because at that point we should be moving from the junior high to the new high school. That will give us time to get everything moved over there and also allows time for the stock shows going on around that time. We will get out of schoool on May 22nd with a teacher work day and graduation on May 23rd.”
No action was taken. Item seven on the agenda was to deliberate and take possible action to approve Resolution to employ or accept as volunteer(s) chaplains as required by Senate Bill 763.
“I recommend option two affirms the practice of the district campus permitting a chaplin to provide support services and programs for students in accordance with the district policy,” Supt.-elect McNeese said.
The motion to approve this was made by Valdez and seconded by Reese Rogers. The motion carried.
There were no trust property dispositions to discuss.
Bryan Gregory discussed the facilities maintenance priorities plan, stating, “.We had our meeting with Teinert and Parkhill this morning [Thursday]. Everything looks good, this last snow storm we had knocked them back about a week, but I don’t think there is any concern on their part about being so far behind that they can’t catch up. All of the steel is up and they continue to work on framing. Nearly all of the wall framing is up on the lower floor, they continue to work on duct work and some other things and they’re beginning to work on wall framing upstairs. They’re moving right along.”
He added, “Teinert was very optimistic about where we are and what is going on. Those guys do a great job of keeping us educated on issues that they’re having, anytime they have a question about something they come and ask us and anytime we have a question we’ll have an answer within a couple of hours every time.”
No action was taken. The next order of business was to deliberate and take possible action to approve the purchase of two new pickups and a Suburban.
“We’re going to be adding an Ag Teacher pretty quick, and part of that package we will offer that Ag teacher is a school vehicle so that they can pull trailers and do things they need to do when they’re moving kids around the state. The second pickup is to replace one of the pickups that we have in our fleet right now. If you’ve seen the pickup that we use to pull our mowing trailer, it is well used and we need to retire that. We will rotate the trucks in the fleet.”
He added, “On the Suburban, we have three old cars in our fleet that we use sparingly. One of those cars is a 2009 model Buick and I wouldn’t feel comfortable getting in it and going to Amherst. It is well used and needs to be retired. Rather than replacing it with another car, we would get more use out of the Suburban. We put RFP’s (Request for Proposal) in the Newspaper recently and got one sealed proposal from Premeier of Littlefield. For two 2024 Chevy 3,500 crew cab long wheel base 4-wheel drive, diesels with very minimal specs on them, with options to put a fifth wheel hitch on both and step-side assists on both. The Suburban is a 2024 LS two-wheel drive, gas, basic white Suburban, which is very similar to what we have always gotten.”
The motion was made by Sal Acevedo and seconded by Birkelbach to approve the purchase of two new pickups and a Suburban. The motion carried.
Destiny Chavarria went over a budget amendment, stating, “We need to amend our Cafeteria fund. We received a supply chain assistance grant, which we also received last year, so we had an increase in our revenue line, which is good. We had an increase to revenue line to $49,481.74, so we had to increase our revenue and then budgeted the expenses in the lines that are applicable. Bryan checked all of the regulations on the grant and we’re going to keep it the same as last year and use it towards the purchase of milk at our campuses. We increased our expense lines to match that revenue increase that we received from that grant.”
The motion to approve the budget amendment was made by Valdez and seconded by Acevedo. The motion carried.
Chavarria presented the financial and investment review and report.
The motion to approve the report was made by Birkelbach and seconded by Valdez. The motion carried.
The next item on the agenda was personnel matters and under Texas Government Code, Chapter 551.074, the Board went into executive session at 12:34 p.m. They returned to the open meeting at 1:05 p.m.
Supt.-elect recommended that they extend the contracts of Chief Operations Officer Bryan Gregory, Business Manager, Bev Boldes, PEIMS Specialist, Rachel Moreno, Federal Programs Director, Destiny Chavarria, Principals, Staci Sumners, Tom Whistler, Monica Acevedo and Amber Hays, Asisstant Principals, Mitzy Jennings and Brent Green, LCSSA Director, Brette Southard, Band Director, Bonnie Anderson, Athletic Director, Bo Bryant and IT Director Matt Mills.
The motion to approve the personnell matters was made by Birkelbach and seconded by Valdez. The motion carried.
Supt.-elect McNeese also recommended Amber Hays as the new Assistant Superintendent for Littlefield Independent School District and approve her contract beginning July 1, 2024.
The motion to approve Amber Hays as new Assistant Superintendent was made by Birkelbach and seconded by Valdez. The motion carried.
Supt.-elect. McNeese said he received resignations and retirements from Tom Whistler, Nancy Sewell, Bryan Allcorn and Leanne Allcorn.
Supt.-elect McNeese presented board training information to the Board and the meeting was adjourned by President Demel at 1:09 p.m.