Academic / Accountability Academies 2001 will be hosted by the Resource Center in Austin, San Antonio, Dallas, and Houston for all Texas charters. All charter school teachers are encouraged to attend the Reading, Math, and Classroom Management Workshops. All directors and assistant directors are encouraged to attend the Director's Workshop and the Classroom Management Workshop. See attached for times, dates, and registration form. Please RSVP to the Resource Center at 210-348-7890 or fax the attached registration form to 210-348-7899 as soon as possible. For all June workshops RSVP by Tuesday, June 5th and for all July workshops RSVP by Tuesday, July 10th. A continental breakfast and lunch will be provided each day. The workshops and meals are free of charge.

• AMENDMENT DEADLINE Friday, June 8th is the amendment deadline for the State Board of Education meeting on July 12-13, 2001.

• ANNUAL EVALUATION OF CHARTER SCHOOLS The legislation authorizing charter schools requires the State Board of Education to designate an impartial organization to annually evaluate charter schools. The Board has designated researchers from three entities, including the Center for Public Policy at the University of Houston, to conduct this evaluation. Recently TEA received a report that a University of Houston professor working on the evaluation was having trouble assembling the necessary data because many of the charter schools were concerned about releasing student rosters for the study. While TEA encourages schools with doubts about their legal obligations to seek advice from their own counsel, it would also like to remind the schools that the Family Educational and Rights of Privacy (FERPA) does not forbid release of all student information in all circumstances. For "directory information", which includes such things as a student's name, address, telephone number, and dates of attendance, FERPA contains a procedure for making such information public after giving notice of the information that will be treated as public and allowing parents an opportunity to request that any or all of it be withheld. For educational records beyond directory information, FERPA contains a list of circumstances in which its prohibition of releasing student records does not apply, including release of information to "organizations conducting studies for, or on behalf of, educational agencies or institutions for the purpose of developing, validating, or administering predictive tests, administering student aid programs and improving instruction, if such studies are conducted in such a manner as will not permit the personal identification of students and their parents by persons other than the representatives of such organizations and such information will be destroyed when no longer needed for the purpose for which it is conducted." Please participate in the study. If you have already supplied the research team with student rosters, thank you. The research compiled during this process will be presented to the State Board of Education when the study is complete.

• UPDATING INFORMATION IN ASKTED All school districts and charter schools have recently received a letter from TEA about updating information in AskTED, the on-line directory for school information. As you know, charter school information is updated from the Charter School Division, and you should have already sent data verification pages for the new division database. Please review AskTED. If the changes needed are changes that you have noted on the data verification pages and returned already, you can know that the correct information will be updated in AskTED. If your data needs changes that have not been submitted on the data verification pages, fax the new information to Mary Alvarez at 512-463-9732. If you have any questions, call Mary Alvarez or Mary Perry at 512-463-9575.