Dear Colleagues:

This week I again must ask for your thoughts and prayers for the family and friends of one of our elementary homebound students who passed away. Her teacher, who was with her throughout a prolonged illness, brought this child to my attention and spoke of how special she was. 

Student Information System
We are in the process of preparing to migrate to Connects, our new Student Information System. Like the business conversion, this, too, will require lots of patience and willingness to make some essential changes.  Also like the business conversion, it will result in amazing new capabilities and immediate access to critical information about our students.

Unlike the business and finance conversion, we are able to build on some lessons learned and engage in greatly improved processes for the transition.  I want to commend Rhonda Fields, the project lead in the Division of Technology.  If you haven’t read the first of her newsletters, I urge you to do so.  You can find it on our Web site next week.

Budget Time
Next Tuesday at the regular meeting of the Board our new Chief Financial Officer Hank Johnson along with Executive Director of Budget Cheryl Kennon, will present the District’s revenue projections for 2010-2011.  If you have been following the news, you will know that the situation remains very grim where education funding is concerned.  The issues have not changed.  We are still frozen at the 2005-2006 level of funding.  Our electricity costs alone have increased 53% over the last 5 years.  You know what has happened to the price of gas in the last three years and the effect on your families.  So you can imagine what has happened to the District’s fuel bills.  We run the largest transportation system in the county, logging approximately 6,000,000 miles per year.  We have 460 buses that travel the combined distance of nine trips from Fort Worth to New York City each day.  In addition, the decline in interest rates has caused a decrease of $6.7 million in our interest income from 2008.  Our payroll alone averages $41 million per month.

The legislature has been unwilling to deal with the glaring inequities inherent in the school funding system.  Fort Worth ISD is classified as a Chapter 42 district, meaning we are considered a “property poor” school district.  As a comparison, Austin ISD, a mirror image of Fort Worth in terms of numbers of students and demographics, is a categorized a property wealthy, Chapter 41 district.  The net result is that Austin ISD, for the same tax effort, realizes approximately $99 million more per year than Fort Worth ISD.

The last legislative session, despite all of the initial promise and hype, resulted in a net increase for Fort Worth ISD of just $3 million.  We have no new source of revenue and no relief in sight for the next three years.  Therefore, I want to be up front about the harsh reality of our situation.  We will again look for all possible cost-cutting measures. 

In an abundance of caution and to protect the District, I will again ask the Board to declare fiscal exigency.  I remain committed, however, to the philosophy of holding the campuses as harmless as possible, not cutting any vital functions, programs or courses – including fine arts – or increasing class size.  That said, we cannot reduce spending without looking at people and functions across the system.  Our District business is about people, and salaries account for 87% of our budget.  That means when we must make cuts, we cannot avoid people.

We will begin the process by starting with internal vacancies and scrutinizing all services and programs that are contracted to people and organizations outside the District.  I will also again ask for your input about ways we can save, conserve and cut costs.  It truly does take all of us.

White Boards
Kudos to our Technology Division for finishing the last of the bond-scheduled Promethean Board installations prior to Christmas – 18 months ahead of schedule!  Our task now is to continue with learning through application and professional development in order to maximize the potential of the boards for teaching.  Recently, there has been some research on the efficacy of the interactive boards.  I have [linked] an article shared with me by our Director of Library Media Services, Carter Cook, for your review.  Of significance is the finding that without professional development and desire on the part of the teacher, the boards serve as nothing more than a glorified overhead projector. The magic happens through the teacher. Remember that technology is just a tool, but the teacher is the mind and heart of classroom instruction and learning. 

My best to all of you for a great weekend and fun Super Bowl Sunday.

Melody A. Johnson