[Anonymous]

While I am eager to hear from the community at the town hall meetings, we have already received some helpful suggestions from the community on how we can improve the in-person experience for the rest of the school year.

I won’t go into too much of the details, but there are a couple of general directions/issues I am keen to address.

1. Put down the Chromebooks whenever possible and encourage socially-distanced face-to-face interaction, for both tutoring and group study.
2. Use paper handouts (e.g. math class), resume hands-on learning with manipulatives (with safety measures), and address the needs of kinesthetic learners.
3. Address academic dishonesty (among high schoolers in particular).
4. Inform students to self-advocate.
5. Facilitate idea sharing among teachers in similar disciplines across campuses. What works at one campus should be shared as President Weir said during the last meeting.

I understand that our campus staff and administration are doing their best while we are experiencing the worst of the pandemic now. We need to address the staffing issue- too many teachers are sick, quarantining, or leaving the job. I am optimistic that together, we will turn things around.

Finally, I would like to learn more about the summer plan, especially what we usually do and can do additionally (the financial and staffing implication of it).

[Danielle Weston]

I agree Dr Xiao. Since our 14 Jan 2021 board meeting, we have received some helpful, actionable and useful feedback from parents with suggestions about how to make the on-campus education experience better.

[Anonymous]

We were briefed back in December that our elementary schools were ‘over-staffed’. But I have grave concerns about staffing situations at our secondary schools. We cannot afford to slip further down if we are serious about recovery.

To understand the situation, I am asking for an up-to-date spreadsheet of class sizes, days of ‘guest teachers’, turn-over rates, and years of teaching experience for all CORE courses at middle schools and high schools. If because of short notice not all data can be gathered, I would like to have a case study of middle schools and high schools that have the highest number of in-person students and the lowest number of in-person students. Thank you.

[Anonymous]

I would like to elaborate on the staffing issues I have seen raised by the community.

Some secondary school students have experienced class sizes of 50-60+ kids for months at a time. We need to assess how widespread these class sizes are, why they are occurring and explore creative solutions.

Stopping the loss of teachers quitting upon denial of accommodations could have a huge positive impact on learning outcomes for in-person and virtual learners, both in terms of reducing the current, substantial disruption that occurs for students when a teacher quits and also in terms of retaining strong teachers who are better equipped to help us recover from learning loss that has already occurred.

With the vaccine available to high-risk individuals, accommodating a teacher to work-from-home is now a shorter term prospect than it was in the past. Securing vaccine access for this limited group of staff would minimize the duration of any work-from-home accommodations. I don’t know if it is possible to provide this option to teachers who had accommodations that were subsequently revoked and then quit as result. In this way, we could look at re-hiring these skilled teachers ASAP to resume the classes that they left, rather than losing them permanently.

[Cory Vessa]

I agree with Trustee Xiao that we need to focus on teacher retention as a board priority. And if allowing a teacher to work from home who is high risk, or who lives with a family member who is high-risk, enables that skilled teacher to continue delivering high quality instruction, albeit virtually, I believe that is what is long-term in the best interest of RRISD.

I also agree that enabling staff to be vaccinated ASAP is a high priority. I am grateful for administration’s continued efforts to make this a reality. Just today we received an email that staff 55+ with underlying health conditions could receive a vaccine today from 3-4 PM through Austin Public Health. All spots were snatched up in minutes. This and the Ascension Seton opportunity earlier this month to staff 65+ are indicative of the efforts being made to provide vaccinations to those staff that wish them and are eligible. As vaccine supply increases, I am confident RRISD administration will enable more opportunities for RRISD staff only vaccination clinics.

In terms of improving the in-person and virtual learning experiences, I have been grateful to see the input from the community. And I can say that many of the suggestions are the reality in many classrooms around the district. When I toured Double File Trail Elementary, Hernandez Middle School and Stony Point High School last Friday, I saw firsthand.

Things I saw in my tours:

At Hernandez, I saw that teachers were engaging with students in every classroom I visited. One teacher had a long pointer (probably 5 feet long) and used this device to point to text in a physical worksheet that a student was using. That enabled her to both stay physically distanced but also engage the student in a meaningful way. I also saw a teacher who had a robotic device that moved her tablet (which she was using to record herself) to follow her movements throughout the room. That way she didn’t have to just remain behind the computer screen.

At Double File, I saw the plastic dividers being used to enable group work. Students were able to sit closer to each other because they had the plastic divider. Every classroom I visited benefited from the interactive flat panels and no teachers were sitting behind desks. All were engaged with in-person students while interacting with the virtual ones as well. They displayed the virtual students on the flat panel and used the projectors to display the material for the in-person learners.

Based on my tours thus far, the focus really needs to be improvement at the high school level. I have toured Westwood and Stony Point now and both looked the same. Teachers taught at their desks to the computer and students (1-3 per classroom) sat far apart engaging virtually on their devices. Based on my discussions with the principals (even with a couple teachers), there are many obstacles, staffing and safety being among the biggest. But we need to make every effort to improve the in-person experience (while not compromising safety) and I look forward to seeing the ideas administration brings to the meeting tomorrow.

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