Highland Park ISD Becomes ‘District of Innovation,' Gaining Flexibility in Start Dates, Class Sizes, Other Areas

HIGHLAND PARK — Highland Park ISD has joined dozens of local and statewide school districts by becoming a "District of Innovation," which grants some of the flexibility available to open-enrollment charter schools in Texas. The Texas Legislature in 2015 passed House Bill 1842, which created the District of Innovation concept. The classification grants school districts some ability to seek exemptions for five years to current rules in the Texas education code on curriculum, governance, accountability and finance.HPISD trustees voted in favor of the designation at Tuesday's board meeting. The move will give district more flexibility in picking start dates; setting class-size limits for kindergarten through fourth grades; establishing teacher-certification criteria; and giving students credits by examination without prior instruction, district Superintendent Tom Trigg said. “We view this as an increased local control,” he said. “I think our board felt very good about this opportunity to look at things from a more flexible perspective.”Trustees took their first step toward the designation in January when it appointed a 36-member District Leadership Council of teachers, parents and students to develop a local innovation plan. Cristy Hirsh, the district's director of student and administrative services, said the council met with principals, staff and parents to collect information before drafting the plan. Officials also studied the innovation plans of other districts. Once drafted, the plan was posted on the district's website for 30 days for everyone to read before trustees voted, Hirsh said. "We did a lot of work in a fairly short amount of time," she said. According to the Texas Education Agency, more than 150 school districts statewide have been declared a District of Innovation, including Coppell, Grand Prairie, Red Oak, Kaufman and Terrell ISDs. Others, such as Dallas and Irving have started the process.Trigg said the classification makes it easier to find and hire more qualified teachers for hard-to-fill positions such as technical education, science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics. “If we were to come up with a course of study in a specific engineering field and we opened the application process to find a teacher ... this would give us some greater flexibility to find the best person,” he said. “Whether we take advantage of that, we don’t know. But we at least have the flexibility.”The current innovation plan would allow the district to determine the passing grade for students who receive school credits for subjects by taking an exam rather than a class. Trigg said district officials noticed fewer students were prepared to move on to more advanced courses when the Legislature several years back lowered the minimum score to pass the exams to 80 percent from 90 percent. Now, he said, the district will flexibility to find a score that can assure them that students who pass these exams are prepared for more advance courses. “We like the idea that if a student already has mastered the material, they should get credit for that,” he said. “We want some flexibility to determine whether the student is ready or not.”Current law states that non-District of Innovation districts cannot start school earlier than the fourth Monday in August. The new designation will allow HPISD to start sooner and to have a more consistent and balanced calendar, Trigg said.District spokesman David Hicks noted that first semester tend to be shorter than the second when the school year starts after the fourth Monday in August. Though the innovation plan is already in place, Trigg said that the soonest academic calendar changes, if any, would occur is during the 2018-19 school year. "I don't see this as an immediate impact," he said. "I see this as a long-term flexibility that our district now has."  Continue reading...