Update:

The Conroe ISD board of trustees unanimously voted to become a District of Innovation during Tuesday night's board meeting. Becoming a District of Innovation—a new program approved during the 2015 state legislative session—grants school districts more flexibility and local control on certain state statutes.

Print story:

Conroe and Montgomery ISDs are advancing their initiatives to become Districts of Innovation in time for the 2017-18 school year.

According to the Texas Education Agency, a school district that receives DOI status can be granted access to some of the exemptions to state statutes that are already available to Texas charter schools, such as exemptions from mandatory school year start dates, class size ratios, teacher certification requirements and school attendance policies.

Montgomery ISD Superintendent Beau Rees said becoming a DOI allows districts to make decisions locally that cater student education to the needs of the community.

“By being able to make decisions locally as opposed to relying on some uniform law or mandate from the state allows you to tailor-make education for what your community values,” Rees said. “It just makes more sense that we would have that ability.”

Innovation plans

Since the DOI program was approved in 2015 by the state Legislature and implemented in 2016, more than 45 school districts across the state have attained DOI designation and more than 40 additional districts have shown interest in the program, according to the Texas Association of School Boards.

Each DOI plan is tailor-made by the school districts’ boards of trustees, TEA spokesperson Lauren Callahan said.

“Every DOI plan is started at the local level, and it has to be passed by the local school board before it comes to the commissioner for notification,” Callahan said. “Every district’s needs are different. What they choose to exempt themselves from is different on a case-by-case basis.”

To receive the designation, districts must complete several steps at the local level before they can notify the state of the change. The steps include hosting a public hearing, appointing a committee to develop the DOI plan and posting the proposed plan on the district website.

After the plan has been posted for 30 days, the board of trustees can approve the final plan. The plan is effective for five years, after which it can be renewed. Regardless, Callahan said the DOI designation could be revoked if the district does not perform up to education and financial assessment standards.

Conroe ISD plan

CISD has posted its DOI plan on the district website, and it was scheduled to be considered for final approval at the Dec. 13 board of trustees meeting. The only exemption the district is pursuing relates to the school start date mandate. The state currently mandates the school calendar cannot start before the fourth Monday in August.

The district is preparing several calendar options for the 2017-18 school year, including two versions that show the effects of an earlier start date. Even if the DOI plan is approved, however, the district may opt to maintain its regular start date when the board of trustees considers the calendar during its Jan. 17 meeting, CISD Deputy Superintendent Curtis Null said.

“By starting earlier, we do have an opportunity to provide more days off during the school year,” he said. “There are parents that would like for us to end school before June or as early in June as possible, so by starting the school year earlier, you get the ability to achieve that.”

Still, some community members have voiced concerns about implementing the plan. During the Oct. 18 board meeting, former CISD Position 7 trustee Jessica Powell said if the plan is adopted it could cause unforeseen problems. Powell has since been replaced by Scott Moore after she decided not to run for re-election in the Nov. 8 election.

“I think it sounds good, [but] I think it’s a real slippery slope,” Powell said during the meeting. “It opens up to possible future issues when different boards, different opinions, different agendas start to come into play. I think there is a lot of reason for this to still be considered a dangerous plan to adopt.”

It is unknown if the district’s DOI plan was approved as of press time.

Montgomery ISD plan

MISD is in pursuit of a more robust DOI plan that includes exemptions from the school start date, 90 percent attendance rule, teacher contract and certification mandates, and the state principal evaluation system, Rees said.

The district was finalizing its DOI plan and planned to bring it to the board of trustees for approval as early as Dec. 13, but it is unknown if the board voted on or approved the plan as of press time.

Rees said exemptions from teacher certification requirements would allow the district to improve its workforce training programs.

“In high-need and difficult areas like career and technology education, sometimes it is really difficult to find a teacher that is also certified in say nursing, [for example],” he said. “They just don’t exist because you can go and become a registered nurse and earn a lot more money.”

An exemption from the 90 percent attendance rule would also allow the district to offer an online course to prepare students for college as well, he said. Meanwhile, the district is interested in the teacher contract exemption to reduce the number of days teachers have to work, Rees said.

Teachers are required to work 187 days. The district could implement the change by reducing the number of staff development days it hosts per school year.

Rees said the proposed adjustment would fall in line with changes made by the state to the school year length for students in 2015—when the state changed its mandate from 180 days of instruction to 75,600 minutes, or about 173 days in MISD. To comply with teacher contract mandates, the district had to double the number of staff development days from seven to 14 in 2015, he said.

“We are looking at the potential of reducing the number of teacher contract days but plan to continue to pay our teachers the same salary,” Rees said. “So in effect we have given them a raise plus we have reduced the number of additional staff development days back to where they would normally be.”

Rees said the district would also like to maintain its principal evaluation system, which he claims is more robust than the one outlined by the state. He said the district does not need to be a DOI to maintain the system, but the district seeks to include it in the plan regardless.

“We know that we put a lot of demand on those campus administrators, so our evaluation system for them is different from the state’s,” Rees said. “So we would like to be able to continue to use our own system as opposed to adopting the state’s evaluation system.”

Additional reporting by Beth Marshall