Aubrey ISD school board received an update on the recent flooding at the high school during its meeting Feb. 12.
After the school had to be closed due to flooding after a large storm, Construction Consultant Dr. Scott Niven addressed the issue that he said has been remedied.
“Part of the issue is some of the drainage is not in yet where they’ve got the driveway torn up,” Niven said. “Then some of it has already been put in but is covered in silt, so it’s very slow draining. Those are the issues we’re facing though the actual construction is moving along. After the first issue, they got the site releveled so the water will go away from the building.”
Board member Terry Brockett asked whether Pogue Construction, the builder, had taken responsibility for the flooding.
“The responsibility has been very evident, and we have made that clear,” Niven said. “They have not backed out yet on paying. We had Cotton Remediation come in, and they took care of all of that. We had a little push back at the beginning, but we cleared that up. They’re taking responsibility.”
Brockett later led the council in a return to the topic of parking while Niven spoke about the indoor facility, which has come up repeatedly over the last several months.
“This has been my thing the whole time,” Brockett said. “I’m not worried about the kids having the ability to park there. What I’m worried about is the first time we have a sporting event and something in the auditorium at the same time. You are not going to be able to park everyone on this property unless we do something, and we know that right now.”
Superintendent Dr. Shannon Saylor reminded the board that after the renovation and indoor facility build are complete, the campus’ parking spaces will raise from a total of 821 to 1,169, though agreed that the number will not sustain the traffic load as the district continues to approach a 5A ranking.
Earlier in the meeting, Deputy Superintendent Terrie McNabb reported on the December EOC retest results and shared the district is experiencing some trouble on that front.
“The December retest is a tough one,” McNabb said. “The hard part is the students are in a new class the following semester. What happens is, if a student did not pass the STAAR for algebra 1, they’re now in geometry. If they did not pass English 1, they’re now in English 2. If they didn’t pass biology, they’re now in a different science class.”
The initial plan did not meet her expectations.
“We have to be really creative about how we’re going to catch those kids to remediate them before December,” McNabb said. “The initial plan we had is we would use our flex time for that, but what we found early in October is the kids were not clustered, so the students that were assigned remediation, the teacher didn’t know or wasn’t a vested teacher in that subject.”
They then moved to getting each student with proper teachers during that time.
“Unfortunately, by that time, you’ve got Thanksgiving and Christmas,” McNabb said. “We need to figure it out because it would be better if those kids pass in December, so they don’t have to retest at the end of the year.”
Moving forward, the district will enact separate plans for the English students and math students.
“The plan we have for next year is to cluster those kids [for English] so we can make it more focused on where those weaknesses are,” McNabb said. “The teachers will know who they are so while other students are working on essays, that teacher could pull over a small group of kids.”
Math students are trickier, she explained.
“For algebra, because they would be in a completely different math class, we will still have to work out clustering them during flex time,” McNabb said. “We’re still looking for that silver bullet to get those kids to pass because in December we would have 100% of those kids passing.”
