Some highlights from the HCDE meeting agenda for this Thursday at 1 PM, as emailed to me:
1. Changing board meeting dates.
2. Michael Wolfe wants to name our Post Oak facility for his deceased mother.
3. Create a Home School Division.
4. Create a School Choice Division.
5. Create a board services division that reports directly to the board. Transparency anyone?
6. Create a new travel policy for superintendent and board – no reimbursement for out of town travel or training. Most board training conferences are out of town.
7. Change superintendent’s spending authority without board approval from $50,000 to $5,000. If something were to happen at one of our schools and they needed emergency repairs, etc., the superintendents hands would be tied.
8. Fire current attorney and hire a new one.
9. New construction for special ed school and recovery high school are still on hold.
The meeting is tomorrow, Thursday, at 1:00pm at the main HCDE Administration building, 6300 Irvington. We had a couple of blissful years of sanity with the HCDE after 2008, but the craziness came back in 2014 when Michael Wolfe and Don Sumners were elected to at large positions. If you have the time and capacity to attend and keep an eye on them and their shenanigans, that would be a good thing to do.
Whoever put that email together is being somewhat disingenuous.
On item 6, the proposed change is to require prior board approval for out of town travel, not ban it altogether
I don’t see item 7 affecting the ability to perform emergency repairs, it will reduce the ability of the Superintendent to willy nilly move money around in the budget.
Items 3 and 4 are for forums: O. Consider holding a forum within in 90 days for the creation of a Home School Division held in conjunction and coordinated with the Texas Home School Division.
P. Consider holding a forum within 90 days for the creation of a School Choice Division
held in conjunction and coordinated with the appropriate entitie(s).
As for changing the meeting times, there’s this from our friends at Big Jolly:
As for changing the date/time of the board meetings, apparently newly elected Trustee George Moore has a work conflict on Tuesday afternoons and was hoping to change it to a better time for him. It seemed to me that the majority of the board was of the too bad/so sad mindset but did agree to have the HCDE secretary poll the board and try to determine if there was a day/time that everyone was happy with. They will discuss that at the next meeting.
For more policy wonk fun, read the entire 518 page document…
Who is Wolfe’s mom?
@Evan, she was apparently an educator and member of a school board. It’s in the pdf agenda document in the link. Page 471 or 474, somewhere in there