Clear Creek ISD Blog

The Clear Creek Independent School District Board of Trustees has established a citizens committee to prioritize and recommend a list of capital projects to meet the district’s growth and replacement needs for the next three to five years. The special purpose committee of educators, parents, and community members will tour schools, interview staff, review facility assessments, and make a final recommendation to the school board on the timing, funding, and priority of capital projects by February 25, 2013. “As with any growing organization, public or private, capital needs exceed available funding.  This creates the framework for CCISD to engineer cost effective solutions to its infrastructure deficiencies and capacity shortages, stretching limited dollars as far as possible,” said Ken Baliker, School Board President. “In my view, the FAC Committee will provide an important barometer to the Board of Trustees to prioritize infrastructure projects proposed throughout CCISD and to gauge public willingness to fund them.”

The Clear Creek Independent School District is home to 44 schools and more than twenty-percent of the campuses are 40 years or older. “While we have done a great job in maintaining these aging facilities, the truth is many of our classrooms do not have the capacity, technology, or even meet current educational standards,” said Greg Smith, Superintendent of Schools. “In addition, we are still growing as a district and so we need to look down the road and around the corner to make sure we are prepared to handle such growth.”

The Board of Trustees outlined specific guidelines for the committee. They are as follows:

• address any identified safety deficiencies;

• provide learning environments conducive to improved student achievement;

• relieve physical and financial capacity constraints and/or maximize efficient use of facilities and;

• increase student and staff access to technology, consistent with the district’s long-term technology plan

• maintain the district’s fiscally responsible position;

• consider the district’s current and projected operating and debt service fund financial position;

• avoid the use of short-term general fund dollars to meet long-term capital needs; and

• avoid the use of disaster, emergency, and operating reserve funds to meet long-term capital needs where practicable

The Facility Advisory Committee will begin meeting on Tuesday, September 25, 2012 and will continue meeting bi-monthly until February. A website will be established to keep the community updated on the committee’s work.

Bilingual and English Second Language (ESL) programs in elementary school have long been established in the Clear Creek Independent School District (CCISD). The bilingual program was originally developed to support the linguistic and academic needs of Spanish-speakers, while the ESL program was developed to support speakers of other languages. As the number of Vietnamese, Urdu, and Mandarin-speaking students increased, CCISD developed additional bilingual and native language support programs for these languages. 

Traditionally, the focus of all these programs was on meeting the policy set by the Texas Education Agency in servicing English language learners; however, in 2004, a paradigm shift occurred at McWhirter Elementary. The Estrellas Two-Way Immersion program was launched.  In this program, English and Spanish-speakers share a classroom and receive instruction in both languages. Students are able to learn from each other, share cultures, engage in authentic language acquisition, and excel in an enrichment model of bilingual education. The students who began the program in 2004 are now in 7th grade and continue receiving instruction in both languages in the Estrellas Intermediate Program at Clear Creek Intermediate School.

As a district, we are entering into another exciting period of offering even more language learning opportunities at the elementary school level. Brookwood will become the district’s fifth Spanish-English bilingual campus in the 2012-2013 school year.  Bilingual classes will be offered in PK-5, and a Foreign Language Enrichment Program will be offered to entering Kindergarten students. This program will combine Spanish and English-speaking students for part of the school day, with students receiving science instruction in Spanish and math instruction in English.

Stewart Elementary, an established bilingual campus, will begin a dual language program in the 2012-2013 school year. Students entering Kindergarten are eligible to apply for this program, in which English and Spanish-speaking students will receive instruction in both languages based on a model which implements a language of the day for instruction.

This is an extremely exciting time for CCISD as we continue to grow linguistic opportunities for our students. Research from the Center for Applied Linguistics cites a variety of benefits to second language acquisition, such as a positive effect on intellectual growth, flexibility in thinking, and enriching and enhancing cognitive development. While these are important benefits, the philosophy of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages may best exemplify why these linguistic enrichment models are so powerful: Language and communication are at the heart of the human experience. The United States must educate students who are linguistically and culturally equipped to communicate successfully in a pluralistic American society and abroad.

We are excited to prepare students for the human experience that occurs beyond the school door.

Tacy King
Director of Instructional Services for ELLS

Read more on this subject at: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/opinion/sunday/the-benefits-of-bilingualism.htm?_r=1&scp=1&sq=bilingual&st=Search

The Clear Creek Independent School District is driven by the spirit of exploration. We work tirelessly to provide our students opportunities to demonstrate the Courage, Collaboration, Innovation and Self-Direction to succeed in the 21st century. For more than five decades, Science Fair has been one of those hallmark activities where we ask, and in many grade levels require, students to complete their own independent science project and compete against their peers. Many of our students have embraced Science Fair and successfully competed nationally and even globally with their projects. Tyler Raboin, Kusal Kadakia and Ashwin Varma are such examples. Their science fair projects earned them 2011 Broadcom Math, Applied Science, Technology and Engineering for Rising Stars (MASTERS) award. There are many more stories of successful science projects including a young homeless boy who told his teacher that his science project is what kept his mind off of his living environment. Science Fair has also become a family and community affair, where hundreds come into our schools to view some outstanding work.

Science Fair in CCISD is not going away. However, the 50-year tradition is in need of a few adjustments.  Over the last several years, parents have voiced concerns that Science Fair had become synonymous with CCISD’s science curriculum versus serving as an enrichment opportunity. Their concerns have not been about requiring students to conduct their own science experiment but rather how the district utilized competition guidelines as parameters for approving and conducting projects. CCISD’s Science Fair guidelines are in line with the Science Engineering Fair of Houston and the International Science Engineering Fair.  One of the top concerns among parents is that students’ project ideas were denied because those topics had been covered in previous Science Fair competitions, thus preventing students from pursuing topics of interest. These parental voices include NASA researchers and biotechnology engineers. I was in one meeting where an engineer feared we were unintentionally driving students away from pursuing higher levels of science.  Unfortunately, he may be correct. A district-level team has been reviewing this issue and discovered there are significantly fewer students participating in Pre-AP science classes than Pre-AP math classes. We also examined a CCISD survey that sampled secondary-level teachers’ attitudes toward requiring outside, independent science projects. The survey indicated most teachers felt that our curriculum should have a stronger emphasis on scientific inquiry during the school day. The surveys also showed that teachers do not feel that requiring outside science projects promotes student enthusiasm for science.

Here are the steps CCISD is taking to promote science, maintain the rigor of our standards in science and keep the long-held Science Fair tradition alive in CCISD:

Beginning 2012-2013 school year

• CCISD teachers will provide students increased opportunities to participate in experimental design during science classes and assign homework to reinforce those activities. Experimental design is the process in which you create an investigation to answer a question. To view what experimental design looks like at the elementary level, click here. To view what experimental design looks like at the high school level, click here.
• Experimental design in Pre-AP and AP science will mirror the College Board’s philosophy of ‘inspiring deep thinking’. Although Science Fair is not required, students still need to demonstrate, through teacher-led projects and assignments, mastery of experimental design from posing the question to developing the research/investigation to answer the question.   
• CCISD’s Science Fair will continue on a voluntary basis.
• After-school clubs or teams at the intermediate and high school will be encouraged to fuel science fair interest and collaboration.

While Science Fair will be a voluntary activity, creating an environment where students can excel in science, exploration and discovery is still very much required in CCISD!

Lacy Elliott
Clear Creek ISD
Child Nutrition Asst. Director

In 2012, preventing hunger among school-aged children continues to be a main goal of the National School Lunch and School Breakfast Programs and Clear Creek ISD. In order to address the health issues of a new generation, a new focus has been placed on reducing childhood obesity.  In December of 2010, Congress approved what has resulted in the most drastic change in school lunch guidelines in 30 years.  The guidelines will most likely be mandatory for the 2012-2013 school year.

By increasing the amount of fruits, vegetables, and whole-grains offered to students, school meals will be aligned with the 2005, “Dietary Guidelines for Americans.”  In addition, the proposed guidelines also set specific, age-based calorie requirements, allow only fat-free and low-fat milk to be offered, and aim to reduce the amount of sodium and saturated fat in meals.

In anticipation of the upcoming guidelines, CCISD implemented several changes at the start of the 2011-2012 school year. A few of these changes include offering all whole-grain items on our elementary menus, offering only fat-free or low-fat milk, and placing a variety of dark green and orange vegetables on our menus.

During the fall 2011 semester, six CCISD schools participated in a pilot program with Baylor College of Medicine to study the impact of the proposed guidelines.  Based on the success observed in these schools, we are implementing additional changes in each CCISD school in order to extend the benefits to all students.

When students line up in the cafeteria on January 4, 2012, they can choose more servings of fruits and vegetables at breakfast and lunch.  Under the old guidelines, at breakfast, students could only select one fruit at breakfast while under the new guidelines students can choose two fruits.  At lunch, students may now select two different fruits and two different vegetables instead of two servings of fruit and/or vegetables.  We are pleased to be able to offer these additional selections to students with no change in breakfast or lunch prices.

It is an exciting time in CCISD cafeterias!  We invite parents to join us for breakfast and lunch to experience all of these new changes with your child.

For more information about meal program changes in CCISD, visit the Child Nutrition Department’s webpage.
http://www2.ccisd.net/Departments/ChildNutritionDepartment.aspx

For more information about the proposed guideline changes to the National School Lunch and School Breakfast Programs visit USDA’s School Meals webpage. http://www.fns.usda.gov/cnd/