This month in Lone Star Governance
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Welcome to This Month in Lone Star Governance. These emails highlight current events in the LSG initiative, answer frequently asked questions, and celebrate LSG successes from around the state. If there is a topic you would like to see addressed in an edition of This Month in Lone Star Governance, please let us know by emailing lsg@tea.texas.gov.
If you missed a previous issue of This Month in Lone Star Governance, you can get it on the TEA website here.
The Texas Education Agency (TEA) is offering school boards $10,000 to engage in a rigorous, one-year program to institute board practices demonstrated to improve student outcomes.
The opportunity to submit your letter of interest for the Lone Star Governance (LSG) Exemplar Cohort for the 2022–23 school year has been extended to Friday, April 8, 2022, to allow governance teams sufficient time to evaluate the opportunities and responsibilities.
The data is clear: good governance relates to higher student performance. The LSG Exemplar Cohort is a one-year program designed to unleash the strategic impact of your board-superintendent team. By the end of your yearlong LSG experience, your governance team will have mastered how to connect the dots between vision, goals, and progress monitoring to improve student outcomes.
The letters of interest are due by 6:00 p.m. CDT on Friday, April 8, 2022. TEA expects to announce the cohort membership in late April.
The announcement and letter of interest are available now on the TEA website.
More information on the Lone Star Governance Exemplar Cohorts is available on the LSG Exemplar Cohort page.
At the time we started as an LSG board, I was a new board member and excited about how I was going to be able to help the students and staff of our district. As I soon learned from LSG training, the main focus of an LSG board is student outcomes. As we began the process, the words 'that’s not how we used to do it' came up quite often with veteran board members. However, as we began setting our goals and progress measures, it became evident that our behavior, as a board, needed to change in order to have our student outcomes change.
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In the beginning, we found that we were spending 70% of our time on things that had nothing to do with student outcomes. By working as a team, we were able to adopt board and superintendent constraints that would make it easier to stay focused. Either we followed them, along with the superintendent, or we wouldn’t be doing what was best for our students. Once we got them down on paper and realized that these were all things that we can use to monitor how the students were performing and were able to ask questions as to how the administration was working toward reaching the goals we had put in place, everything slowly started coming together.
By being an LSG board, our superintendent knows exactly what we expect him to do, as far as student outcomes. We were able to work together to put progress measures in place that will challenge us to focus on our vision. Within the past year, we have been working with a wonderful LSG coach from Region 3, Tony Williams. He is very knowledgeable about all areas of education and helps to keep us organized and on track. He attends every board meeting and is always just a phone call away. I owe our continuing success as an LSG board to our team of eight and Tony.
The implementation of LSG into the Runge ISD Board of Trustees has helped me as a trustee to narrow my focus on one of the most critically important aspects of our district. I am referring to student outcomes. LSG training enabled me personally to realize the importance that board cohesiveness and goal setting play in being an integral part of our students' success.
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I believe that the LSG training has helped our entire board shift our concentration toward being much more conscious of what our most critical roles really are. We now have concrete, board-formulated goals for student outcomes and a very good method to measure our progress toward meeting those goals. Our progress toward meeting the goals is reviewed periodically by our board, and we have the opportunity to modify how we plan to continue to work together as a team to achieve those board-driven goals.
LSG training has made me feel as though our board is more of a "family" working together with our superintendent. Yes, outside the boardroom, we are definitely individuals, But when we enter into our meetings, we focus with our superintendent on what we need to do to help make our district the best that we can for our students. The lines of communication remain wide open with our superintendent, and we feel that he is keenly focused on seeing that our district's goals are always at the forefront of his work.
Having a knowledgeable LSG coach is extremely important to our district to be able to concentrate on our goal setting, measuring our progress toward meeting them, and determining if and when the board needs to tweak our path to the students' outcomes we strive to meet. Any team's success is highly dependent upon having a good coach!
In August of last year, the Kenedy ISD Board of Trustees experienced a Lone Star Governance workshop for the first time. Check out our new video in which Dr. Diana Barrera Ugarte gives her impression of Lone Star Governance and the workshop.
LSG Field Testimonial: Kenedy ISD
Where can I find a list of training programs for the required cybersecurity training for trustees?
The Texas Department of Information Resources (DIR) identifies the eligible training programs for the required cybersecurity training. DIR has published a web page that describes the requirements for cybersecurity training and lists qualified providers of the training.
For more information about eligible training programs, please contact the Department of Information Resources.
See more frequently asked questions at the link below.
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Thank you for subscribing to the LSG news bulletin
and for your commitment to serving Texas students.
lsg@tea.texas.gov
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