CISD board approves audit

By Lindsey Vaculin

General Manager

The Cameron Independent School District Board of Trustees approved the 2015-16 financial audit and heard a report about YHS fall benchmarks during its meeting Dec. 12.

“I’m glad to report good news,” Steve Niemeier with Brockway, Gersbach, Franklin and Niemeier said. “We found nothing improper or in appropriate. The district is doing a good job.”

Niemeier said that CISD had some advantages this year due to an increase in enrollment and the subsequent ADA funding that came with that.

“When you compare to last year the advantages the district had were due to the increase in ADA this year,” he said. “The ADA increased pretty smoothly throughout the entire district there wasn’t a need to add new positions. As a result you had a lot better results. You had a positive in your general fund of $320,000 excess of revenue over your expenses.” 

“In the debt service fund you can see were you refinanced $3.7 million of bonds,” he said. “Even though the interest rate staying low people were willing to pay a premium for those bonds that made $178,000 above the stated value which gives you more moneys to help take care of the financing and that money was used to retire debt. The total debt retired was $1,050,000.”

He said CISD started the year with a total fund balance of $5,125,000 and had a debt increase of a half a million dollars. CISD ended the year with $5,660,000 in the fund balance. The general fund balance is $4,648,000. 

“That is a very strong fund balance for a district this size,” he said. “The district is doing a good job.”

Assistant Superintendent Susan Pommerening gave a presentation on the YHS Student Fall Benchmark Report.

“We are going to take a look at benchmark testing for the high school,” Pommerening said. “We broke it down into TEKS comparing the results for this fall to last fall. You can’t really compare TEKS because the TEKS change from year to year.”

She said that looking at TEKS provides meaningful data that allows the staff to pinpoint strengths and weaknesses that need to be worked on. It allows teachers to specifically plan for remediation and track growth.

Pommerening presented results from English I and II courses, Biology, U.S. History and Algebra I to the board.

“I think we need some work on our plan for what we are going to teach,” she said. “You can see that in some areas we have gone down and some areas we have gone up. In English I they are hitting writing heavy this year. That has been our weak spot – the kids writing short answers.”

She said the benchmark is really looking at how effective instruction is. Looking at how are the kids learning and are we mastering things.

“Conclusions from the data are that growth did not occur in all TEKS and all subjects,” she said. “You can see that tutoring needs to be required. If we are going to work with them, there is not enough time in the day in the classroom so we are going to have to do some tutoring before and after school. Then we are going to have to do some retesting on the TEKS that were not mastered and break it down to each individual student and make sure that they are doing well.”

She said there are plans to start student goal-setting and have students track their own progress as an internal motivation.

“The English teachers have really been trying to figure out why we do so poorly in writing and they put their heads together and working on their instruction,” she said. “They decided to bring the writing rubrics out to the kids and the kids are learning how to score. They are able to see what they want and their writing has improved.”

Pommerening said she plans to bring in an experienced English teacher to go into the classroom and do tutoring in small groups and one-on-one. The same is planned for math courses.

“We are going to be breaking apart the TEKS in team meetings and looking closely at those,” she said.

Board member Greg Hoelscher asked what can be done to get kids to go to mandatory tutoring?

CISD Superintendent Allan Sapp said that there is no way to force students to do anything, but getting the parents involved can help. 

“Maybe right at the end of the last period I can go get you and take you,” he said. “Your parent already knows you are going. We also do pullouts during the school day.”

“I don’t like these scores and we are going to deal with them,” Pommerening said. “All you have to do is pick out the problem areas and work with the kids that need it.”

“We have seen the same unimpressive scores for the last five years,” board member Jason Dohnalik said. “What is being done different this year to change that?”

Sapp said he feels like the teachers are really owning it and searching for answers and getting help from other teachers through the collaborative. 

“What happens when you have weekly meeting and it is about what the student is doing and you own what you did you see a difference,” he said. “You continuously work at it and you see results.”

The board will hear reports from other campuses early next year on benchmark testing.

During the superintendent’s facility report board members Francie Denio and Hoelscher asked that Sapp look into changing the lighting in the old high school gym to LED and research a portable sound system.