CHRONICLE ARTICLE ON THE BEAM INITIATIVE:

Read this Chronicle article first: http://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Katy-outreach-effort-seeks-to-link-schools-5997719.php

BEAM Initiative Aims to Sustain Culture of Excellence in Katy ISD

A Critique by Mary McGarr

"After a long fight, the $748 million bond issue had passed, and Katy Independent School District Officials took stock of the victory at a "State of the District" event in November. District officials and staff gathered for breakfast, a theatrical performance by several high school students and a keynote from author Jamie Vollmer all of which preceded Superintendent Alton Frailey's State of the District address."

"You are indeed part of something big," Frailey told the audience, trumpeting the district's fast growth and academic achievement, and Chronicle writer leah Binkovitz proceeds to pump the superintendent's bodacious claims about our school district.

Of course no mention is made of the duplicity inherent in Frailey's remarks, i.e., that the growth isn't anywhere nearly as fast as what he "trumpets," and the academic achievement claims are bogus. Frailey always fails to mention that the passing standard for the state test on which he bases his claim of "excellence" (the STAAR TEST) was set so low by the State Commissioner of Education that it is a joke. As for the growth, the superintendent likes to proclaim, as he did during the bond election, that the District grows by 3,000 or more every year-- that's bogus also. The truth is that the enrollment hadn't grown that much since 2008, (and then it dipped 600 students the very next year). After six years, we once again, just this school year, have an enrollment growth of over 3,000 students. Also, the fact that if it continues to grow by 3,000 students a year when it's at 70,000 students, it isn't quite the same as when it used to grow by 3,000 students a year when there were 48,000 students. Think about it.  And then there's that declining price for oil....

Mr. Frailey likes to crow about being in charge of a larger number of students than are enrolled at the University of Texas (the True North "State of the District Address" a few years ago) or that the District is now the 60th largest district in the nation, and never mind that in a recent listing of the 1,000 largest school districts in America, Katy ISD ranks 26th from the bottom in percentage of expenditures spent on pupils! (I can cite statistics too!)

This scenario is the "backdrop for a newly organized initiative" he claims.

I would like to start my OWN initiative, and it will be called "Because Everyone's Opinion Matters" [BEOM for short]. It is NOT a loosely defined platform. Since it's my creation, I will tell you that the platform is very concrete--it's based on allowing everyone who lives in this school district to have an opinion on school district matters, based upon facts that each individual may interpret as he sees fit. Hopefully, all those who wish to participate in this initiative will be smart enough to see statistics truthfully and not manipulate them for nefarious purposes! Arguing is healthy; shutting one's opposition down is not. Whining about the poor attitudes of one's critics is also self-serving.

Ms. Binkovitz continues in her article stating "Questions about the district's values were at the heart of two contentious, back-to-back bond campaigns..." and then Ms. Binkovitz transitions her article unexplainably into a statement which suggests that spending $58 million (on a stadium that was never proven to be needed) was a good thing and that those who disagreed were wrong! The idea that seven schools cannot get by with one stadium was disproved last fall--our football season worked just fine with one stadium. Recall that the State 6A Division I Football Championship was won by Allen High School which played ALL their District football games last fall in someone else's stadium! (See PBK and Allen ISD elsewhere on this web site).

One has to wonder how Ms. Binkovitz can come down on the side of values that elevate elaborate football stadia over academics, but that's what she suggests.

Somehow the Chronicle story moves on to "bullying" as a pertinent and related topic with regard to bond elections! Somehow, and with pretty bad advice from somebody, Mr. Frailey tries to suggest that "bullying" is somehow the result of the attitudes of adult citizens who have every right to question his inability to lead the school district, or who do not agree with his ideas or methods, and those opinions are what he wants to stop with his BEAM initiative!

Since I am the one who started writing about bullying WAY before the rest of the world did because as a school board member I saw bullying up close and personal while serving in that capacity twenty years ago, I believe I understand the issue, and I don't appreciate Mr. Frailey minimizing it by using it to falsely label his critics.

I can't tell you how many parents called me to tell me their stories about how their children were treated by other students and sometimes their teachers in our Katy schools. While I couldn't do anything about it myself, I certainly questioned the superintendent about the behavior of his administrators and talked to the other Board members about it. I also wrote about it, and one can see what I had to say by going to Education/Bullying on this web site.

I have also asked sitting KISD Board members when they review the Discipline Management Plan every spring to address what appears to me to be an illogical component of Katy ISD's Bullying Policy, i.e., that the student who is bullied may go to another school to get away from the bully if his parents will provide his transportation --leaving all HIS friends behind and disrupting his entire family, but the BULLY gets to stay at the school and continue bullying without any disciplinary action whatsoever! It's an insane policy, and those who allow it to continue are, in my opinion, not very smart.

The Katy area does indeed "have a sense of identity," but since 2007 when Alton Frailey arrived on the scene, that identity, in my opinion, has deteriorated immensely, and no one is to blame but Mr. Frailey himself. I question his motives when he continues to issue diatribes against citizens who have every right to question his actions and behaviors. I sat on the committee that was convened to advise the Board about what was needed in a new superintendent before Mr. Frailey was hired. One of my recommendations was that they find someone who could take criticism from the public. I had suggested the same thing when Hugh Hayes left and we got Leonard Merrell. No one listened to me then, either!

Individual OPINIONS from Katy citizens far outweigh ATTITUDES when it comes to steering our school district in the right direction. I believe Mr. Frailey is out of line suggesting that we all just shut up and let him do as he pleases.

Besides spending $9,000 to put up a "special BEAM web page on the KISD web site," I also must point out that Katy ISD, at the beginning of the school year in 2013 contracted with K12 Insight for a "Systems Based Stakeholder Engagement Solution." In ordinary parlance that means they agreed to spend our tax dollars ($749,148 of them) to buy advice from a Herndon, Virginia based company on how to improve their relations with the public so they can pass bond referenda without so much trouble and expense. You may have noticed the emphasis on "communication" in the last school board election and the bond election. That's all part of this deal.

The District paid K12 Insight $249,713.00 of the contract up front on September 11, 2013.

They've now spent over half a million dollars, and the BEAM initiative is one of the results of all that misspent money.

I'm guessing that the BEAM initiative emanates from this K12 Insight company just like the Community Conversations did.

If you have children in the Katy schools, you might want to read over the K12 Insight contract. Ask for the it through an Open Records Request of the District. (I asked for it this way: "Please provide me with a copy of the contract between Katy ISD and K12 Insight (Dr. Steve Knobloch, Leila Nuland, and Tony Mastrorio and any others who may not be listed on the report) showing the terms of the contract and the total amount paid to this company/group for this service this year and any other years." Ask for an unredacted copy of the contract as this is public information.