Last night’s Coppell ISD School Board Candidate Debate allowed CISD Board of Trustees Place 7 candidates Sonal Tandale, Sam Wellington and incumbent Tracy Fisher to share perspectives on topics spanning the district and trustee responsibilities. 

Former PTSO president and moderator Lisa Johnson inquired about candidate views on charter schools, personal volunteering experiences, budgeting and the challenges that CISD faces. The recording can be found here. Place 6 candidate and incumbent Nicole Bentley was not present for the debate, as Place 6 is unopposed.

When prompted about the issue of cheating at Coppell High School, Tandale proposed a model of rank transparency to alleviate peer pressure and provide guidance to families. 

“The reason why kids are getting into cheating and doing things that are not correct is that CISD is not disclosing ranks, at least privately, to all the students and parents,” Tandale said. “To help this, I would say we need to have a transparent ranking system. I am not saying ranks should be disclosed in public, but the ranks need to be given privately to the family and they can then evaluate what choices the student should take to better their education. That will be a motivating factor and help them avoid cheating.”

Fisher expressed her concern for the expansion of charter schools, which are for-profit, and their negative impact on CISD from financial and taxpayer standpoints. According to Fisher, charter schools perform worse than public schools. She explained that taxpayer dollars sent to these institutions end up in other states and at the discretion of charter boards, which are not transparent because they are not elected board members by their public. 

“We have a $7 million deficit budget right now, we know it’s going to be much less than that,” Fisher said. “If, right now, we would get our kids back that are in charter schools, if we got them back in elementary schools, we would get about $7 million back in student revenue and that would take care of a lot of our problems. What’s really sad are the people that pay taxes and don’t have kids. They should be offended by this and I don’t know how any conservative person could support a charter school.”

Wellington cited adapting to stabilization and geographic growth in the southern portion of the district as the main challenges facing CISD. According to him, CISD saw a growth of approximately 4% per year until 2018, after which the growth rates have seen a decrease. He emphasized the concept of self-sustainability to handle the transformation of the district. 

“Anytime that you have a change in the number of students that you have in a particular entity, the cost of your overhead and the proportion of your overhead per student is shifting,” Wellington said. “Our challenges are in taking on this stabilization in a way that we do not impact any of these wonderful offerings that we managed to bring on while we were growing. At the same time, we have to make sure we don’t take on future deficits every time Austin changes the rules. We need to make sure everything we do after this point is looked at with a concept of self-sustainability. When you bring on a new program or idea or open a new school, is that self-sustained?”

Early voting is open through April 27 and Election Day is on May 1. For more information, visit CISD’s candidate webpage.

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