• On Monday, May 10, 2021, the NISD Board of Trustees will have its next meeting. During that meeting, it is my intention to recommend changes to current COVID-19 Protocols for our summer school programs and for the 2021-2022 school year. I recommend the following to begin on Monday, June 7, 2021: (1) Masks and face coverings are optional for all students, staff, and visitors; (2) Visitors are allowed on campuses; and (3) Facility rentals will be available again. We are still in the process of analyzing the guidelines for contact tracing and specific cleaning measures, and we will announce that later. I cannot put into words the pride we feel for our children, our staff members (with an emphasis on our classroom teachers), and our families for following the COVID protocols we initiated to fight the disease. Every day of this school year, everyone in our buildings took precautions to protect themselves and each other, and for that we will be ever grateful. Now we feel very comfortable about the process to do our best to return all NISD stakeholders to normalcy, and these first steps are logical for us. Please understand, if something happens this summer and another surge comes to light, we always reserve the right to implement whatever measures are needed to keep safe, but we feel very comfortable with these recommendations to our board members.

• Above and beyond the COVID challenge, one of the “normal” challenges for our area has been mobility, in terms of roads and transportation infrastructure. We have so many folks on our roads, we have too few roads to serve our area, and this challenge intensifies every year with the growth. Trains are another issue.  Stopped trains cause so much time lost for a lot of our stakeholders, including our parents taking students to school and our children on NISD’s buses. A group of area and state leaders have been discussing ways to alleviate some of these issues for our area, and that group had an exciting meeting a couple of weeks ago. This group, led by Representative Matt Krause (House District 93), Michael Morris (Director of Transportation, North Texas Council of Governments), and leaders with BNSF and other state and local officials, have come to the conclusion that work will begin to separate the BNSF rail from the road at one of the most congested intersections in the district – FM 156 and Avondale Haslet Road. This will be a multi-year process, but this group is committed to seeing the work done. They have also identified other intersections in the district as well, and we hope this work continues in the future.