ACTION REQUIRED

December 13, 2005

TO THE SUPERINTENDENT ADDRESSED:

The 2004-05 School Report Cards (SRC) for the campuses in your district will be available from the Texas Education Agency’s website by 11 a.m. on December 15, 2005. You will be notified via email on December 15 as well as with this letter. As with the prior two years, these reports are not being mailed to districts. To access and print the reports, type the following address on your web browser:

http://www.tea.state.tx.us/perfreport/src/2005/campus.srch.html

and follow the directions given at that site. Detailed instructions and answers to Frequently Asked Questions about printing reports are available from the link to the “help” page at the website.

• School Report Card — As required by statute, these report cards must be disseminated to the “parent, guardian, conservator, or other person having lawful control of each student at the campus.” Please note:

Distribution to Campuses. The principals of the campuses in your district will not get a separate notification by mail that their SRC is available. However, they will be notified by email. It is the districts’ responsibility to provide the SRCs to the campuses for distribution to the parents. On written request, the school district is required to provide a copy of a school report card to any other party.

Distribution to Parents. The SRC must be disseminated to parents within six calendar weeks after notification from TEA that it is available. The winter holiday does not count toward the six weeks. The campus administration may provide the SRC in the same manner it would normally transmit official communications to parents and guardians, such as: including the SRC in a weekly folder sent home with each student, mailing it to the student’s residence, providing it at a teacher-parent conference, or enclosing it with the student report card. While you are required, at a minimum, to provide SRCs to parents you are not limited to providing just this information. You may want to supplement the report by including information that highlights other areas of improvement and accomplishments of your schools.

Schools without a SRC. Some schools will not have a SRC. Generally, these are schools that meet two criteria: they serve special populations of students; and, they do not have TAKS results. Examples are the Juvenile Justice and Disciplinary Alternative Education Program campuses, and schools serving only the early education through kindergarten grades. Schools without a TEA-generated SRC are not required to distribute a report.
Schools with a SRC. Schools with sufficient TAKS data to receive an accountability rating, charter schools, and schools that have been paired for accountability purposes will have a SRC. Schools paired for accountability rating purposes will have a SRC even though they do not have TAKS results of their own. Paired schools must distribute their SRC.

• Sample Cover Letter — A cover letter for the SRC is not required, but many schools find it useful to provide one. A sample cover letter to parents is provided for your use (in English and Spanish) or you may wish to write your own cover letter.

• Definitions — Brief definitions of the items included in the SRC are also enclosed. Definitions are not required to be provided to parents, but many schools find it useful to include them with the reports. As with the cover letter, a Spanish translation of the Definitions will be posted to the website shown below as soon as it is available.

For your convenience this entire letter of notification will be available at the following address—links at the bottom of the notification letter will allow access to the attachments; namely the sample cover letter and the Definitions:

http://www.tea.state.tx.us/taa/perfreport121505.html

If parents have follow-up questions about the information provided, the Glossary produced for the 2004-05 Academic Excellence Indicator System (AEIS) reports contains detailed definitions and sources of data for all the information included in the SRC. The data in the SRC is a subset of that published in the AEIS reports. The Glossary can be viewed and/or downloaded from the following website address:

http://www.tea.state.tx.us/perfreport/aeis/2005/glossary.html

Should you wish to review the Commissioner of Education rules governing the School Report Card, see 19 TAC § 61.1021, located on the agency’s website at:

http://www.tea.state.tx.us/rules/tac/chapter061/ch61bb.html

I hope that you find this material informative and helpful. If, after careful reading of the enclosed materials you have questions about the SRC, please contact the Division of Performance Reporting at (512) 463-9704.

Sincerely,

Criss Cloudt, Associate Commissioner
for Accountability and Data Quality

Attachments:
School Report Card Definitions (English) - a PDF file
Definiciones para la Calificación Escolar 2004-05 (Spanish) - a PDF file
Sample letter for Parents (English) - a Word document
Sample letter for Parents (Spanish) - a Word document

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