Tx Bd of Ed, LIVE: Science, and everything else...

Now that social studies is all over, they can move on to everything else.

Graduation requirements grandfather clause passes.

Proclamation 2012 Science: Postponed indefinitely. Vote confirmed.

SBOE needs to establish timeline for supplemental science materials
Request May 31, 2010
March 2011 Samples due
April 2011 Review Panels
May 2011 Board Adoption
Vote confirmed.

Supplemental high school materials: biology, IPC, chemistry and physics, amended to include grades 6, 7, and 8. Now Mavis wants to add grade 5. Bradley wants to know how some pricing options can be done (instead of the usual "maximum cost" approach).

Staff is proposing online with an option for printing out. Ancillaries are not allowed. (This is to try to keep costs low.)

As for costs, the Agency is showing options: typical maximum cost approach, or establish a total budget, or publishers price materials to deal with that and make it a statewide license. Final option--do not establish maximum costs, let publishers price it per-student, per-teacher, or state-license. The state can see what comes in, and allow negotiations for final costs. (Bradley leans towards this final option, and it is the one that prevails.)

Projected units: 1,584,235 for high school; 1,372,454 for middle school.

Statewide license--only one item so far that has that is a high school product for teachers only--it would have been $85 per teacher otherwise, but as a state-license, it winds up at $27 per teacher.

Board votes to allow Commissioner and TEA staff flexibility to determine which adoption rules would apply for this brand new process.

A bunch of other housekeeping items all pass without much comment. (Request for substitutions of newer versions of a program, two $100M real estate investments from UBS and Invesco for permanent school fund, etc.)