KIPP Texas SHAC approves counselors, mentors and safety-curriculum partners across four regions

At its fourth and final School Health Advisory Council meeting of the year, the council reviewed and approved a set of community partner organizations to deliver services to KIPP TEXAS PUBLIC SCHOOLS students across Austin, Dallas, Houston and San Antonio.

Chair (meeting host, S1) presented each organization, described the services and called for a hand-raise vote. The organizations approved during the session included: Shoes for Foster Care Students (Jan Coleman) to provide new shoes for identified foster youth across Texas; Austin Bilingual Therapy to provide bilingual parent workshops and student support groups (parent consent required; services free to schools in the Austin region); Soul Loved (Houston), a shoe charity that partners with Title I schools (referrals limited to 10 children at a time; parent consent required; no photos); the Dallas Children's Advocacy Center to provide two short safety curricula (Child Safety Matters for grades K–5 and Teen Safety Matters for grades 6–12; sessions typically 30 minutes; parental consent required); two Big Brothers Big Sisters partnerships (Lone Star and South Texas) to mentor younger students with trained high-school mentors (selection and matching handled by campus counselors and the Big Brothers Big Sisters organization; adult supervision required); and Plan2 mentoring/tutoring camp and a UT student mentor program in Austin that employs KIPP alumni and UT volunteers to support students (parent consent required).

Council discussion included questions about regional scope, referral limits (Soul Loved: "no more than 10 kids at a time"), and selection and matching procedures for mentoring programs; staff and Big Brothers Big Sisters representatives were cited as managing applications, interviews and observation during matching.

All items presented in the meeting were approved by the council through hand-raise votes; the chair announced each item as approved but the transcript does not record named movers, seconds, or a numeric roll-call tally for votes. The council closed the meeting after approvals and asked members to look for follow-up communications from school-based mental health staff.