Dallas ISD trustee Mike Morath explains his role in home-rule group
Dallas ISD trustee Mike Morath released a lengthy statement Monday explaining his involvement with Support Our Public Schools amid questions about his role in the group. Morath insisted he has no active role in the group pushing for Dallas ISD to become a home-rule charter district. However, he said he encouraged several board members of Support Our Public Schools to start the group after he aler
What Dallas ISD might look like with home-rule: Support Our Public Schools offering more thoughts
The initial revelation that a committee has been working to turn Dallas ISD into pretty much the legal equivalent of a multi-campus open-enrollment charter school blew up a couple of weeks ago without many details.
Since then, members of the Support Our Public Schools board have been explaining why they think the never-before-used “home-rule” provision in the Texas education code should be invoked. (Here’s a piece by the DMN’s Tawnell D. Hobbs and Matthew Haag that will get you up to speed, if you missed it.)
Today comes two new bits of data. One came directly to me. I’m working on a piece that will, I hope, look at how the largest school districts in the country do governance and whether there are lessons for us. I asked SOPS if it looked to any of those districts as models. In my reply, I also got back what I’m told represents “food for thought.” Not the recommendations of SOPS, mind you, but the sorts of ideas that should be included in the conversation.
The other bit of more information is in a letter sent to the D Magazine Frontburner blog by current DISD trustee Mike Morath that was his amend-and-extend to an interview that ran in the DMN on Sunday.
How teacher contracts might maybe be affected, how elections could be moved, how trustees might qualify for a new board and other items for consideration at the jump.
The note sent to me has the headline “Possible Changes Under Home Rule.” And here they are:
New Home Rule authority:
Ability to extend school year — Balanced school year and reduced summer learning loss
New flexibilities with labor — At-will employees puts the highest performing teachers