Charter School Day is in Santa Fe on Monday, February 14. Shawn Price is organizing the trip. Parents are encouraged to come, either on the bus (space permitting) or in their own cars. Grades 6-8 will be going, plus a few other students who will be serving as pages to legislators.
There have been a few staff changes in the past month. Mr. Straley has left. Rebecca Madrid will take over as our Special Ed Director, with Mary Link coming on board to take Rebecca's place teaching fourth grade half-time, and assisting the other half with Special Ed. Ms Link will also be working with Candy Lindquist in the after-school tutoring.
Mary Nutt discussed with teachers the idea of a regular report to parents covering upcoming classroom subjects/activities, schedule changes, etc. As at the last meeting, the parents present were all in agreement that this kind of communication is very important to us, and reassured Mary that we are not looking for a lengthy write-up, just a summary. We need a better understanding of what our children are working on so we can be more involved with their work at home, which should benefit everyone. Mary Dwyer offered to pass along a very good format that was used in the Pennsylvania school her children attended last semester, which worked well and took only 10-15 minutes for teachers to do each month.
Parents also encouraged Mary Nutt to continue working with teachers on the development of year-long lesson plans in every grade; these incorporate alignment of our Core Knowledge curriculum with the New Mexico state standards. This brought us to our main topic.
Mary Nutt described the brand-new tests that will be used in this year's state-wide testing: the New Mexico Standards and Benchmarks Assessment, or NMSBA. These tests will be administered to grades 3-9 and 11 only. Details of the benchmarks to be covered in this year's test were just released last week. There are some differences in the format compared to the TerraNova tests used previously; in particular, they will be looking for more written details of the reasoning students used to obtain answers. Our teachers have been working to get students accustomed to this. Some "beta-test" questions being tried out for future use will be included in various versions of the standard test; these will not be scored. The scored questions are the same for all students in each grade, but the beta ones may differ.
There will be four grading levels: Advanced, Proficient, Nearing Proficiency, and Beginning Step. The threshold for each level will be determined after all of the tests have been scored. No comparisons with national standings will be made, and results will not be available until October. While these tests may help the (newly-renamed) Public Education Department (PED) to evaluate how New Mexico schools are doing, they are not very useful to CVCS. We will continue to do the Stanford-9 tests in May in all grades. Stanford-9 is also given to newly-enrolled students as a baseline, permitting some assessment of individual progress to be done over time. The Stanford-9 results are available within a month afterward.
More information on state tests is available at the PED Web site (http://www.ped.state.nm.us/). This site will also be linked from the CVCS Web home page at http://www.sdc.org/~cvcs/ .[N.B. Effective August 1, 2006, the home page is now at http://www.cottonwoodvalley.org/.]
One of the main sources of outside revenue for CVCS has been the Smith's Earn and Learn program - about $3000-$4000 per year. This costs nothing for people to join, but requires annual re-enrollment in October. The last donation from Smith's, covering Sept-Nov, was considerably smaller than usual. To help improve this, the Parent Association will organize a sign-up drive. We will first see if we can set up a table at the Family Arts Party on February 12, with forms available (along with school information) and where we can help people fill it in. If not, we'll work with Smith's to set one up some Saturday (TBD) at the store. We will need volunteers to spend a short time - say, 1/2 to 1 hour - at the table.
Box-tops, soup labels, and toner-cartridge recycling are much lower key, and Jill is already doing a great job with reminders in the newsletter.
Jeanne Gacanich, Governing Council president, signed the purchase agreement with Socorro County last week. Next Tuesday, she and Mary Nutt will be going to Santa Fe to obtain state approval of the property transfer directly to CVCS. All the groundwork for this visit has been done and Mary doesn't anticipate any problems. Legal ownership of the property will also increase our liability for injury/damage on the premises, but as the lessor we previously carried much of that already. Mary has been in touch with the insurance company. She is waiting to find out if the bond issue passed; if it did, CVCS will receive funds to finally start doing something about permanent facilities. Without ownership, that has been in limbo for years.
The next meeting of the Parent Association was set for Wednesday, March 2 at 6:30pm, in the school multi-purpose room. (Basketball season should be finished by then.)
Tracey Hamilton suggested that meeting chair responsibilities rotate among attending parents. Ruth Milner chaired this meeting. Minda Stillings offered to do the next one. The chair will arrange an "anchor topic" for the meeting and create an agenda. He/she will ask Jill to put a meeting reminder in the school newsletter beforehand, and also send her a very short summary of the meeting afterwards to put in the next issue. Ruth offered to continue doing the more detailed notes.
One thing we need to work on is setting clear goals for what the Parent Association should accomplish. For example, we know that we would like to provide more support to the teachers, such as helping to make class projects and events happen, appreciation in the form of teachers' lunch, promoting school special events, etc. We need to clarify our ideas, and it would be useful to get suggestions from more CVCS parents.