Photo courtesy of Dallas Morning News
Greetings, District 2!
School’s out for summer for our Dallas ISD students, but your Board of Trustees is still working! Catch up on the latest happenings below.
Dallas ISD District 2 Monthly Updates:
Graduations: Congrats to our amazing District 2 Hillcrest High School and Woodrow Wilson High School Class of 2024 graduates who were awarded scholarships amounting to $21.7 and $25.9 million, respectively! A special shout out as well to three of our amazing District 2 executive directors who oversee the Hillcrest, Woodrow, and Thomas Jefferson High School feeder patterns on their graduations from The University of Texas at Austin this May with their doctoral degrees in education!
Smart Education Strategies: Looking to our future Dallas ISD graduates, we continue to support smart education strategies, focusing our board goals on improving student outcomes and experiences and investing in guidance counselors to support students in choosing and completing their pathways.
Extra Credit for Teacher Residencies: Residency programs increase the likelihood that teachers stay in the profession longer. Our Dallas ISD partnerships with the University of North Texas, University of North Texas at Dallas, Dallas College, and more support high-quality mentorship, hands-on experience, and classroom learning, as well as providing a pathway for recruitment and retention.
May Board Meeting Debrief:
This month, Dallas ISD had its regular board briefing and meeting. I’ve chosen to highlight three important items below:
- Budget Adoption for 2024-2025: In May, trustees approved Dallas ISD’s budget for 2024-2025 by a vote of 7-0 (one abstaining, and one not present). This budget will help us continue to drive growth in student achievement.
- Highlights include:
- Adopting a shortfall budget of $187 million. Note that in anticipation of the 2024 fiscal year being the last with federal COVID-19 learning loss funding, the board has fund balance reserves intended to help prevent a fiscal cliff. Next year’s budget adoption anticipates spending down these reserves to approach best practice levels and benefit our students who still need post-pandemic investment. Looking forward to the 2026 budget, we will need increased state funding and/or to continue decreasing expenditures to maintain a balanced budget with appropriate reserve levels.
- Funding initiatives that show a positive return on investment in improving student outcomes. Some of these initiatives include discipline reform, providing additional resources to high-priority campuses, adding mental health clinicians, and decreasing the student-to-counselor ratio.
- Increasing minimum wage to $16.50, which continues to lead the region.
- Providing approximately $34 million in compensation increases to our educators and staff across the district.
- New Trustees Sworn In: We are excited to welcome Lance Currie and Ed Turner to the Dallas ISD Board of Trustees. Lance Currie succeeds Edwin Flores in District 1, and Ed Turner succeeds Justin Henry in District 9. We extend our heartfelt thanks to trustees Flores and Henry for their dedicated service and look forward to the perspectives and leadership trustees Currie and Turner will bring.
- Dallas ISD Bond Construction Updates: Campus infrastructure upgrades funded by the proceeds from the 2020 Bond continue.
As always, please reach out to me if you have thoughts, ideas, questions, concerns, or simply want to say hello!
Best,
Sarah Weinberg
Photo courtesy of Sarah Weinberg.
