Coppell Chronicle Vol. 1, No. 24

COVID Protocols Under Review • Votes Scheduled on Tax Rates • Coppell Y Offers Youth Cricket • A Story from the Campaign Trail

Aug 08, 2021

COVID Protocols Under Review

The first article in last Sunday’s Chronicle was about Coppell ISD’s COVID-19 Protocols Update, which said the school district would discontinue contact tracing, quarantining, and its COVID-19 dashboard for the upcoming school year. That article included a link to the “COVID-19 Protocols Update” page on Coppell ISD’s website, but that page has since become inaccessible.

Meanwhile, here’s how Superintendent Brad Hunt began Thursday’s edition of the school district’s Informed newsletter:

“The entire Coppell ISD team is hard at work preparing to welcome our students to the first day of school on Tuesday, August 17. We are balancing this preparation with monitoring the latest COVID-19 developments and directives from the Texas Education Agency. Based on the recent update from the TEA on August 5, we are reviewing our COVID-19 protocols and will share an update with our community early next week.”

Last Monday, the Board of Trustees conducted a budget workshop that included an “open forum” session. Seven people, including three physicians, spoke during that session, and they all implored the district to reverse the course laid out in the since-deleted update.

“We do not want our schools to be closed. I want to be clear about that. We are not asking for school closures,” said Taria Greenberg, who works in the epidemiology department at Dallas County Health and Human Services. She wore a T-shirt that says “America needs public health,” and spoke after her husband and brother-in-law, who are both physicians. “We are not asking for full remote learning again. But we need preventive measures, just like last year.”

During the budget workshop, after Chief Financial Officer Diana Sircar discussed how much the district has spent on personal protective equipment, Trustee Leigh Walker asked about the costs of contact tracing and maintaining a dashboard.

“The budget implications there are more intangible, because what we’re doing is we’re taking staff time,” Sircar said. “So staff is being diverted to focus on those items.”

Walker asked to see a specific cost analysis of maintaining these practices. “I’m curious what that does to our bottom line,” she said.

Kristen Eichel, the district’s Assistant Superintendent for Administrative Services, said the dashboard was relatively inexpensive.

“We will still be required to let the Health Department know of any positive cases reported to us – students or staff,” Eichel said. “So something like that is pretty easily in place with the staff that we have.”

Contact tracing, however, is more complicated. Eichel said CISD had five COVID case managers last school year who spent at least 80 percent of their time on contact tracing. These were all people who had “director” or “executive director” in their job titles. Eichel said they were able to devote their time to contact tracing because the primary aspects of their jobs were not as demanding with fewer people on campuses.

“The environment we’re walking into will look different,” she said, in reference to the fact that the TEA will no longer fund virtual or remote learning. “They’ve got to go back to their regular job.”

Trustee Tracy Fisher suggested hiring five people at a lower salary than what a director or an executive director makes — say, $50,000 apiece, or $250,000 total — to handle contact tracing for the upcoming school year. Fisher said those $50,000 salaries could come from federal Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funds or CISD’s fund balance.

“I know we hate to dip into our fund balance,” said Fisher, who was the only masked individual among the trustees and administrators. “Last year, we really dipped into our fund balance. It just seems to me that that’s what fund balance is for.”

Speaking of fund balances, Frisco ISD recently announced that it will “tap into reserve funds,” if necessary, to offer virtual learning for kids in grades 6 and younger this fall. Frisco ISD — which is led by Hunt’s predecessor as Coppell ISD Superintendent, Mike Waldrip — is limiting virtual learning to those grades because children younger than 12 are not eligible to receive COVID vaccines.

Frisco ISD has posted a set of Frequently Asked Questions regarding the plan to offer virtual learning, and these statements are part of the answer to “How will Frisco ISD fund a virtual learning option without funding from the state?”:

“Depending on how many students enroll in online learning, this could easily amount to tens of millions of dollars in lost funding. … If these state supplemental ESSER funds are not sufficient to offset the lost funding as a result of offering a temporary online learning option, FISD will also utilize a small surplus from the approved 2021-22 budget and, if necessary, tap into reserve funds.”

Getting back to Coppell ISD, Fisher said the district needs to do more to make parents confident about safely sending their children to in-person classes.

“Right now, it’s sort of been ‘Governor said,’ so we can’t do anything,” she said. “And I really think we need to dig in and make sure that we’re doing the right thing for our kids and for all of our community.”

Fisher said she wants that conversation to happen before school starts on Aug. 17. But the Board of Trustees isn’t scheduled to meet again until Aug. 23.

“There’s some misinformation, maybe miscommunication, not from us, but just in general, and misunderstanding,” Hunt said during Monday’s budget workshop. “So our communications team is working on things that we want to make sure that we are very clear with our community on, so that they understand what we do have in place, what we are looking at, other considerations. We don’t want our families to think we’re not listening to their concerns.”

Votes Scheduled on Tax Rates

The Coppell ISD Board of Trustees has scheduled a public hearing for 5:30 p.m. on Aug. 23 regarding its proposed 2021-2022 budget and tax rate. The proposed tax rate is $1.292 per $100 of valuation, which is 1.8 cents lower than the current rate.

The Coppell City Council will conduct a public hearing regarding its proposed 2021-2022 budget and tax rate during its meeting that is scheduled to begin at 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday. The proposed tax rate is $0.58 per $100 of valuation, which is the same as the current rate.

Coppell Y Offers Youth Cricket

The Coppell Family YMCA’s inaugural youth cricket season wraps up this week. As far as I can tell, Coppell’s Y is the first YMCA in the area to offer the sport, and that’s certainly appropriate. Cricket is extremely popular in South Asia, and Coppell ISD’s student population is majority Asian (51.6 percent Asian to 27.6 percent Caucasian).

Rodney Black, the Regional Sport Director for the Coppell Y, told me 34 players registered for this first cricket season, which featured four teams. To put that in perspective, he said about 350 children typically participate in a Coppell Y basketball season.

Black said the YMCAs in Frisco and McKinney were planning to follow in Coppell’s footsteps by adding cricket this fall, but his counterpart in Collin County, Jake Lamb, told me those plans have been put on hold until the spring.

Meanwhile, I received an email from the Coppell Y the other day that said Aug. 31 is the registration deadline for the fall football, basketball, volleyball, and soccer seasons. Cricket wasn’t mentioned in that email.

Black told me the Coppell Y does indeed plan to offer cricket in the fall, but the schedule hasn’t been finalized yet. Stay tuned for more details.

On a related note, during the aforementioned Coppell ISD budget workshop, Trustee Neena Biswas urged administrators to add Hindi to the list of foreign languages taught in the district if they want to ensure that Indian-American families keep their kids in public school.

“Unless we make the curriculum attractive, we will not hit the enrollment numbers,” she said.

A Story from the Campaign Trail

I didn’t have as much time to work on the Coppell Chronicle this week as normal, due to a trip out of town for a funeral. But I’ve established a pattern of publishing four articles, so here’s a fourth one that required no reporting other than accessing my own memory files.

Before I ran for the Coppell ISD Board of Trustees in 2018, I took a candidate training course featuring a number of guest speakers. One of these speakers was a member of the Dallas City Council, and a piece of advice he offered regarding Post-it Notes stuck with me.

This council member would knock on doors to introduce himself to voters. When nobody was home, he would write a “sorry I missed you” note on a Post-it and attach it to his campaign literature. In the notes, he would mention something displayed in their yard or on their porch to demonstrate that he had stopped by in person (as opposed to just hiring someone to write notes on his behalf).

I adopted this practice when knocking on doors to promote my candidacy. While walking between the houses on my list of voters, I would write the majority of the next “sorry I missed you” note in advance. But I would save myself a little space for a postscript mentioning something unique about the voter’s home.

One day, I knocked on the door of a voter who owned one of those fancy Ring doorbells. A few seconds after I rang that bell, I heard him say “Can I help you?” via the device.

“Hi, my name is Dan Koller,” I said, “and I’m running for the Coppell school board. I wonder if you have just a few minutes to hear my pitch about why I deserve your vote.”

His response: “Well, to be honest with you, I’m taking a shit right now.”

Once I stopped laughing, I held up one of my campaign postcards, knowing that he was looking at me via the Ring. “Well, do you mind if I leave this on your porch?” I asked.

He said that was fine and shut down the device. I stood there for a second and mulled an appropriate postscript for that interaction. Here’s what I wrote at the bottom of the Post-It:

“Hope everything came out OK.”

Chronicle Crumbs

▪ In last week’s edition, I said this edition would include an article about DART acquiring properties in Coppell for its Silver Line rail project. My trip out of town made it impossible to do that article justice by today, but I hope to bring it to you next Sunday.

▪ The U.S. women’s volleyball team, featuring Coppell High School graduate Chiaka Ogbogu, won Olympic gold today by defeating Brazil. This was the first gold medal for the American women, who lost to Brazil in the Olympic finals in 2008 and 2012.

▪ I’m sorry to report that July 18 was the final day of business for Golden Boy Coffee in Coppell. Since launching the Chronicle, I’d met up with two elected officials at Golden Boy for getting-to-know-you conversations. In this correspondent’s opinion, the coffee there was really good, as were the breakfast tacos.