On April 22, the Coppell ISD Board of Trustees voted unanimously 7-0 to introduce a panic button for teachers in the classroom.
Director of technology Dwight Goodwin introduced a solution following Governor Greg Abbott’s signing of “Alyssa’s Law,” which requires all public schools in Texas to have a silent panic button in place that transmits a message to first responders.
“As soon as they hit the panic button, we’ll have access to what’s going on right there, right now,” Goodwin said. “We don’t want to share everything that we have for our safety and security piece, but again, provide some comfort to our staff as well as our parents and students that this is a solution we’re working towards.”
The board also discussed how each department grew this year and helped students learn better, as well as what the directors will do this summer to further improve on their departments.
The English Language Arts department in particular did very well this year with tools in the classroom, such as NoRedInk, helping students engage more than ever. This is proven in the 2022-2023 data points on the percentage of ECR scoring of “0” by grade level. CISD’s percentage of test takers that scored a 0 on the ECR was significantly lower than the regional and state averages.
“You guys take lemons, you make lemonade and we don’t tarry about waiting if this is what we’re doing, it’s not going to be the minimum standard that we’re doing, we’re really going to get after it and make something amazing,” trustee Nichole Bentley said.
Furthermore, the athletics department also saw a significant growth in engagement this year. Director of athletics Kit Pehl shared the new UIL Athletic alignment for the 2024-2025 school year. Coppell will move to District 5-6A with Denton Braswell, Denton Guyer, Flower Mound, Flower Mound Marcus, Hebron, Lewisville and Little Elm.
Pehl is proud of the culture that Coppell has built around athletics and thinks the teaching and coaching in club sports is a major contribution to the program’s success.
”A motto of mine has always been ‘coach next year’s kids this year’,” Pehl said. “Our district should help develop all district-caliber players as opposed to just developing kids that are athletic, tough and strong.”
In the fine arts department, many accomplishments have been made over the past year across digital art, band, colorguard, choir, theater and the new guitar program that was introduced this year.
“The students who want to participate are going up and the quality,” director of fine arts Gerry Miller said. “More and more students are engaging in bringing their individual monologues, individual songs to be evaluated and we think that is so important on that individual success front.”
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