Published: July 02, 2009 09:19 pm      

HISD trustees OK additional assistant superintendent

To help ease administrative burdens in the district, Huntsville Independent School District trustees gave their OK to the hiring of an assistant superintendent for learning and accountability during a called meeting Thursday.

“A few years ago we had a few more administrators, but did away with them and redirected those funds for use at our campuses,” HISD Superintendent Dr. Richard Montgomery said at the meeting. “Now we have a situation where our current administrators have taken on a lot of responsibilities, which can be overwhelming.”

Montgomery was very grateful to current staff members who had had gone the extra mile for the district, and was pleased to offer them some relief through the new position.

“This new position will give us someone to serve as an overseer of our curriculum and assessment areas, giving us back what we once had, but with a different flavor,” the superintendent said.

Based on Montgomery’s recommendation, the board hired Coppell ISD principal Dr. Juneria Berges to serve in the role.

“Dr. Berges is principal at Coppell Middle School North (located in the Dallas area),” Montgomery said. “She was assigned to the campus when it was opened in 1999 — charged with the task of fully staffing it with teachers.

“For the past 10 years, the CISD school has received an ‘exemplary’ state rating,” he added. “Prior to that, Berges was employed at Grapevine ISD, serving as principal at the first campus in that district to ever be designated as a Blue Ribbon School.”

Berges will begin her role in the district around Aug. 1, Montgomery said, and “has every intention” to move to the district and become part of the community.

“Even with a bare bones staff over the past several years, we have had a lot of success,” board president Dr. Karin Williams said. “But we are kind of limping along.

“We have brought in consultants to help us in this area, but those people are not in the district to know what our needs really are,” she added. “I am glad to see that the district is in a position where we can do more.”

Also during the meeting, trustees approved entering in to contracts with two school software companies — DecisionEd Group, Inc. and eduphoria! SchoolObjects.

“The district has received an allotment of $782,205 in federal stimulus funds to use for education purposes,” Montgomery explained to the board. “It was recommended that a good way to spend that money was in the area of technology.”

HISD Director of Elementary Instruction Cherie Meroney spoke to the board about the two software purchases.

DecisionEd is a record warehousing program, that will allow administrators fast access to multiple student records.

“Right now, if a student needs an intervention and we have to look up several reports, we have to access each reporting program separately,” Meroney explained. “We have all these different systems that don’t talk to each other, making it difficult to get reports in a timely manner.”

DecisionEd uses a ‘dashboard’ format that stores multiple student reports, including attendance records, grades, TAKS scores, discipline reports and more.

“The software will give us all the numbers we need in just a few clicks,” Meroney said. “It sits on top of the programs we already have and puts everything in a central location.”

Cost of DecisionEd totals $342,000 for the first two years, with an optional annual maintenance and support fee of $27,000.

Also using federal stimulus money, the $54,100 eduphoria! School Objects software contract was OK’d by trustees.

“We currently use eduphoria for our staff evaluation, or PDAS, reporting,” Meroney said. “But the company offers and entire suite of software covering lesson plans, work orders, testing and more.

“It is an easier, more comprehensive software, plus the renewal fees are cheaper.”

According to Meroney, eduphoria will replace the district’s current DMAC software and will run parallel with it until the record changeover is complete.