The sky wasn't falling, best I could tell, immediately prior to the Oct. 20, 2023 ICISD school board meeting. But, the City of Mertzon was in process of paving parts of 5th Street at Fayette, just above the GMPL.
I just attended the ICISD emergency meeting, discussed by me earlier here. Frankly, my "the sky must be falling" standard for whether there was a true emergency failed. I couldn't tell whether the sky was falling!
The most important issue was approval to purchase (through a new company, Ener-Tel) security audio/video monitoring. While no one ever mentioned any explicit "emergency", Superintendent Moore appeared to talk around the issue of a particular area on campus that was insecure, as determined in the recent safety audit. So, perhaps, perhaps, the Board and Superintendent were being speedy with correcting the deficiencies from the safety audit, and the safety audit itself was the basis for the emergency. But, as criticized here in School Safety Goes Underground, it's impossible to know anything about the safety audit because it wasn't addressed publicly.
Was the sky falling? I can't say. But, the Board thought enough of it was falling to approve a $109,190 contract for 10 years with Ener-Tel. A budget amendment wasn't required because the District had available some school safety grant money.
Apparently the Ener-Tel services are quite robust, which raises all sorts of issues. The example given by Supt. Moore was that if they wanted to search for a "red shirt" the software would be able to locate the red shirted students. What about facial and vocal recognition? Add AI to this mix and there's real potential...for good...and evil. More on AI in the future. I think we are all blindly walking into the unknown with AI and public education.
The other issue on the emergency agenda was approving a DAEP campus. This is an easier call. There isn't a student currently, as in right now, immediately, requiring such a campus location. As such, the sky wasn't falling, and this wasn't an emergency. Was anyone harmed by this apparent failure to strictly follow the law? Probably not. But, it raises the issue of crying wolf that I mentioned before.
More on AI and school security in later posts. If you are interested in AI issues, I recommend the Hard Fork podcast.