54° and Clear
Very few people showed up to the ROISD School Board Meeting last Monday night as school was out for the summer. Two school board members were absent too, Brian Sebring and Dr. Joy Shaw. The meeting tonight covered some topics about budgets for the 2021-2022 school year for various programs, current costs for renovation and repairs, and some action items that were addressed at the end of the meeting.
Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER III), which is federal grant funding, helps out with academic, social, and emotional support allocated to the school districts to help with the learning gap due to Covid-19. Care Solace will get $195k over 3 years. An additional counselor at ROHS will get $240k over 3 years. The instructional support budget covers services like Services Bilingual Interventionist, Bilingual Instructional Coaches, Secondary Reading & Math Interventionists, and more are getting an estimated $2 million. Some instructional support services are Saxon Phonics and the AVID Program are getting an estimated $812k of that funding. Technology funding is around $498k and helps with Firewall updates, device updates and replacements, Zoom licensing, etc. All of this information was presented by Melissa Sulak whose contact information is melissa.sulak@redoakisd.org.
The Superintendent report was about updating the School Board on ROISD Projects. The fence at Support Services was completed. New A/C units and LED light fixtures were put in at Schupman Elementary. The Agricultural Project Center off of Bells Chapel is still being worked on and is almost completed. ROISD also received a Lonestar FFA degree at the silver chapter level with a golden horizon award. The twelve-year-old backstop netting at ROHS baseball and softball fields have been replaced. Also, PAC audio and visual systems have gotten upgrades as well. “A survey came out and the results have been posted to the ROISD website,” said Kevin Freels, Assistant Superintendent of District Operations.
The consideration approval for the 2021-2022 Budget was approved unanimously for $64 million, not including Student Nutrition at $2.6 million and Debt Service at $9.6 million to bring the total to $76.8 million for the fiscal year 2021-2022. The Accelerated Instruction Budget was $11.5 million. Some more good news was that there was a decrease in insurance cost through Texas Political Subdivision, which saved the Red Oak School District approximately $40k. They passed a motion to extend the Mentor Care Contract for next year. This program has been a huge success in that 96.3% of their at-risk students graduate. Lastly, Dr. Joy Shaw on the school board will officially resign from the school board next meeting after serving ROISD for over forty years. The agenda for the school board can be found at https://meetings.boardbook.org/Public/Agenda/2272?meeting=472280.
Tonight’s meeting went very smoothly and I encourage anyone and everyone to come out to the next School Board meeting occuring on July 26, 2021 at 7pm. I definitely learned a few things and hopefully jotted down some things that were informative to whoever is reading this. Go Hawks!
