Superintendent Adam Ivy presented the district’s back-to-school plan dealing with COVID-19 at the Thorndale ISD board of trustees meeting July 19 in the administration building.
He said that the leadership team had met to discuss the prior year’s plan and used new guidance from TEA and local health-care professionals to develop the plan.
The plan put forth a normal start to the school year Aug. 16 where COVID-19 would be treated the same as the flu or other communicable diseases.
The plan does have information about cleaning, hand washing and other precautions that have proven to be effective at limiting the spread of a variety of illnesses.
TEA removed all guidance except that cases of COVID-19 must be reported to the state and county health department but no contact tracing or quarantining of otherwise healthy individuals is prescribed.
Ivy said that at the time of the meeting he was looking forward to starting school with no major health restrictions in place but said the plan maintained the possibility of new guidance from federal, state and local officials that could force revision of the plan and reimplementation of some or all health precautions.
The board voted unanimously to not allow home schooled asynchronous students to join in extracurricular activities at the schools. Ivy presented the resolution to the board. He said he had talked with the superintendents from all local district schools and had heard reports from around the state and had not yet heard of any school allowing home school participation.
Thorndale High School Principal Jennifer Parnham and Middle School Principal Scott Frei told Thorndale ISD board members at the meeting that they had conducted a recent campus improvement meeting to discuss many different topics and that the student handbook was discussed briefly after the primary topics.
They said that the Texas Association of School Boards had only recently released the final model for the documents.
Ivy added that he always brings these documents to the board to review at the first budget meeting in August and that the board only approves the code of conduct, not the handbooks.
Ivy clarified that he had directed the principals to conduct the campus improvement committee meetings and invite any staff members to attend. He also explained that he had asked them to seek staff feedback on things that they felt were crucial to student learning and the learning environment.
Technology staff Deby Leschber and Lindsay Franklin discussed the status of the district’s roll-out of universal online registration.
Business Manager Rebecca Peel talked about her estimate of revenue numbers for the 2021-22 school year but stated that she would have to wait for more specific numbers until final taxable values are entered into the TEA calculation tool to see what the official tax rate would be.
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