September 5, 2023
Dear AHISD Families-
It feels great to be back! We’re celebrating a really wonderful opening of the 2023-2024 school year. My favorite day of the week is Tuesday when I visit all of our campuses to see how I can support our campus leadership and to see all the great things taking place in our classrooms and in our facilities. I try my hardest to share snapshots of all that I celebrate about AHISD on social media through my X(Twitter)-
@Bashara-Dana and my Instagram
@danabasharasupt accounts. Follow me and then share with your groups the snapshots and stories that champion all that is extraordinary about our district. There is no better time than now for us to be sharing these stories and celebrating the noble profession of our educators!
Accountability- CBAS
Towards the end of the month, the Texas Education Agency will assign letter grades to every district and campus across the state. These letter grades are primarily based on how students in grades 3-11 perform on the STAAR test last spring. In AHISD, we have long cautioned against an overreliance on high stakes testing because it is a system focused on a single test administration on one day of a student’s performance in time, and it is not designed to measure a variety of important things valued by our community. The rich learning experiences that your children experience in Alamo Heights schools cannot be reduced to a single score on one day.
AHISD is a school system that places a priority on high standards of academic achievement for all students, and to that end, we embrace accountability because it is the catalyst for action for the outcomes we desire for each of our students. To that end, we have embraced a comprehensive local Community Based Accountability System (CBAS) to anchor our continuous improvement efforts.
In AHISD, accountability is more than one test score. Annually in our district we measure:
-Student academic achievement and growth
-Student college and career readiness
-Recruitment, retention and development of high-quality staff
-Supports for students to be well-rounded and engaged
-Community engagement in our schools
-Fiscal responsibility
Our local Community Based Accountability System (CBAS) relies on multiple data sources, authentic assessment opportunities, observations and feedback from stakeholders that identifies the accountability our community deserves and expects. The A-F system provides us with one piece of data to evaluate in that system.
Please visit our CBAS website to learn more. Later this month, we will release a new video and new CBAS report.
Safety and Security
Finally, this month is an excellent time for you to have thoughtful conversations with your child about safety in our schools. We have made great improvements with the security features on all our campuses including vestibules, bullet resistant film, individual crisis alert buttons for all our staff and the addition of School Resource Officers. However, the key to operating safe schools is through a community commitment to reporting concerns to responsible adults on our campuses or through the
Safety Concern website. I encourage you to have on-going conversations with your child about safety in an effort to provide us the information we need to proactively respond in a potential situation. Our campus administrators will provide notification each time one of our standard response protocols is practiced or implemented. As a reminder, you can access our standard response protocols in
English and
Spanish. We will make every effort to communicate factually about any situation we might face.