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The agenda for the first Brownsville ISD board of trustees meeting of the 2024-2025 academic year on Tuesday included discussion of two key initiatives, one dealing with customer service, the other with student attendance.
The overreaching goal of both is to improve student academic performance, which is BISD’s main goal, Superintendent Jesus H. Chavez said.
BISD’s human resources department, headed by Chief Human Resources Officer Linda Gallegos, developed the customer service initiative. Chief Operations Officer Nellie Cantu headed up development of the attendance initative, dubbed Every Day Matters.
The attendance initiative aims to get the district’s attendance rate back to its pre-pandemic level of 96% or better, Chavez said.
The customer service effort is guided by Chavez’s personal philosophy for public education, one of the main points of which is to treat everyone with dignity and respect.
“We all want to be treated well. And so one of the things that I want to be sure that we improve upon is the customer service that we provide everybody,” Chavez said.
“We expect a little over 36,000 students to show up here next week, but in addition to that we have over 6,000 employees, so make sure we’re working really well with each other, treating everybody with fairness, dignity and respect, and then of course we work with parents, so we have the proportionate number of parents based on the 36,000 students that we have, and in addition to that, we work with our citizenry here in the district as well as with businesses, so I want to make sure that we the district provide great customer service,” he said.
This is the last week of summer vacation for BISD students. Teachers already are getting their classrooms ready. Meet the teacher nights are scheduled this week across the city ahead of the first day of classes on Monday.
The district conducted a two-day leadership academy last week in preparation for the school year. One of the sessions was around customer service, Chavez said.
“Our first point of contact usually is the office, school offices, the central office, department offices and so we began by training those office folks, our executive assistants our secretaries and of course from there … our central office leadership, our campus leadership, principals and assistant principals,” he said.
The training stressed treating customers with respect and dignity, being courteous and respectful, in addition to phone and email etiquette.
Concerning attendance, Chavez said when schools opened back up after the COVID-19 pandemic, attendance was very, very low.
“We’ve been open three years since COVID. It improved from the 70s to the 80s to this past year it was around 92%. We’re getting there but obviously we want to get to that 96% that we had. The first reason is the main reason. We want students in attendance so they can learn,” Chavez said.
He said in some cases of chronic absences, some students at some schools have been absent 20, 30 and as many as 60 days in a semester.
“Just imagine six weeks out of the year you’re out. Well, you can’t be learning unless you’re in class, and so that’s the main emphasis we have for our students and for our parents,” Chavez said.
“Now, it’s got an economic, business aspect. And here, if we improve by 1%, the district will receive $2 million dollars from the state in additional aid. We’re talking dollars there,” he said.
Chavez added that the district wants to incentivize good attendance, “and really not only for perfect attendance, but we want also for students to improve, right. If they were out 16 days last year, can you reduce that by half and only be out eight days this year, that kind of thing.” he said.
“We want to see improvement from all of our students in their attendance. … I’m hoping we surpass the 1% because it has great benefits. We’re going to emphasize it with students. Principals have already received training around promoting good attendance. We’re going to be working with our parental involvement program to promote it as well. Every time I speak to a group, I emphasize attendance as important, ‘so please emphasize that to your employees.’ It’s going to be a citywide effort to continue to improve student attendance,” Chavez said.
