North East ISD makes adjustments to popular programs with significant cost savings.
During the April 8th NEISD Board of Trustees meeting, the trustees approved a plan that could potentially save our District over a million dollars by making adjustments to our Dual Language and Hyper-Accelerated Math (HAM) programs.
The information below explains how those programs will be affected.
Dual Language:
After hosting community meetings at each Dual Language campus and listening to targeted focus groups of staff members and stakeholders, our District leaders decided not to condense the campuses where Dual Language is offered.
The savings will come from being more efficient within the existing program. Through surveying campuses, we learned that while a class may start with 22 or 23 students, some students may move to other campuses or leave the program within the course of the school year. This results in partially filled classes where we have traditionally added full-time teachers.
Our goal is to uphold a class size ratio of 22:1 across all elementary campuses. Recognizing the challenges of fluctuating enrollments, we are introducing a plan to ensure our commitment to this class size is unwavering and adaptive to the conditions.
The approved plan will create a pool of 20 highly-qualified, long-term substitute co-teachers who can be deployed to campuses within 48-72 hours after a classroom exceeds our 22:1 student-teacher ratio. This will allow class sizes to temporarily increase until things level out while keeping student-to-teacher ratios low.
This is a strategic move that will allow class sizes to temporarily increase, but offer immediate support. It will maintain the quality of education our students receive without disrupting the consistency they have with their current teacher.
This proactive measure helps our District serve the maximum number of students interested in the Dual Language program while also giving us the flexibility to respond promptly and effectively to our campuses and student needs.
Hyper-Accelerated Math (HAM):
Once again, after listening to our Stakeholders, the decision was made not to discontinue or consolidate this popular program but to increase its efficiency and potentially increase enrollment.
Currently, HAM teachers drive between campuses to support HAM at the elementary level.
The new plan is to create a pilot program at 2 to 4 elementary campuses where the full-time Gifted and Talented (GT) teacher will provide 5th grade HAM instruction. Our District will also develop a 3rd-grade Pre-HAM enrichment curriculum during this pilot.
During the plan's second year, the 3rd grade Pre-HAM enrichment program will begin.
In years three and four, we expect to see an increase in HAM enrollment, leading to full-time elementary campus-based HAM instruction. This will help our teachers avoid having to travel between campuses and help stretch our students to reach higher goals.
Focusing on efficiency in these programs aligns with our commitment to stewardship on our Balanced District Scorecard. You can read more about the Balanced District Scorecard here.
To learn more about these programs, visit Dual Language and HAM.
