Forced Charter Closure
The Kauffman Leadership Academy, located in Cleburne (near Fort Worth), suspended its operations as a charter on Friday, Feb. 21, after its status as a public school was revoked by the TEA due to “the financial situation at the charter school having deteriorated significantly, including federal tax liens and levies issued by the IRS that had frozen all accounts of the charter school."
The charter opened in August 2016 and had, at the time of its closing, 91 5th-to-8th graders and 14 teachers, the Cleburne Times Review reported.
School founders Greg and Theresa Kauffman told the newspaper that they plan to keep its homeschool program in operation and may create a private school in the near future. (See also these updates here and here.)
Conservator Appointed
Education Commissioner Mike Morath informed officials of the 14,000-student Harlandale ISD in San Antonio (Feb. 14) that he has appointed a conservator to the district, but no longer plans to replace the elected board with an appointed board of managers, as he had threatened to do last summer in the wake of the findings of a TEA special investigations report that found evidence of alleged governance problems, financial mismanagement and open meetings violations.
The district’s 2019-20 accreditation status will be lowered from Accredited to Accredited Warned, Morath said. The commissioner appointed former Region 20 (San Antonio) Education Service Center Director Judy Castleberry as conservator, who will be empowered to overrule school board decisions — and ordered the district to pay her $85 an hour, plus reasonable expenses.
College Prep Test Fee Reimbursements
The TEA has posted info detailing the processes and procedures for ISDs and charters to receive HB3-authorized reimbursements to help defray the fees for their 11th and 12th graders to take college preparation exams (the SAT, ACT and the Texas Student Success Initiative assessment).
The TEA has negotiated a special reduced per-student fee of $35 for students taking the ACT or SAT during the school day.
“Rider 53” Report
The TEA has released a legislatively required Rider 53: Texas Gateway and Online Resources Report (named for a corresponding rider in the state budget bill) that examines how the agency is spending the $7.5 million appropriated for each year of the current biennium to support online educator and student resources.
Programs funded include: 1) Texas Gateway, 2) Texas Lesson Study, 3) UT Austin OnRamps Dual-enrollment Courses and 4) UTeach/UT High School Blended Learning.
Among the report’s many highlighted datapoints was that as of May 2018, OnRamps programs involved 313 high schools in 151 school districts — and resulted in $17 million dollars of potential college-fee savings annually for Texans as high school students earned more than 11,700 semester hours of UT Austin or Texas Tech credit.
TEA Rule News
(click here for more info about the following):
Adopted TEA Rule:
- EOC test substitutions — Revising rules concerning end-of-course (EOC) assessments required for graduation to implement a federal mandate that all students must take the subject-related EOC test at least once. Starting in the current 2020 accountability cycle, only EOC test results can be used for state and federal accountability purposes.
Students can still take allowable EOC-substituted tests for graduation purposes.
The adopted rule also extends the availability of the Texas Student Success Initiative exam as an allowable EOC test substitution by four years, until Sept. 1, 2023.
Effective Feb. 23 (changes were made on final adoption). See also this TEA update.
Proposed TEA Rules — (comment by March 16):
- PEIMS — Requiring ISDs and charters to report via the Public Education Information Management System (PEIMS): 1) the number of full-time school counselors on each campus and 2) the availability of extended learning opportunities for each campus.
- Accountability — Specifying that starting with the current (2019-20) school year, the list of industry-based certifications to be used for public school accountability will be included in the annually adopted accountability manual.