Notes from Parent Association Meeting, March 2, 2005

Announcements:

Volunteer help is needed in the library, to help with sorting and filing books for e.g. an hour a week. Contact Jill to check about the schedule for class library use first; otherwise any time is fine.

We weren't able to do a Smith's Earn & Learn sign-up at the community arts party, and quite a few parents will be committed for the spring soccer season for the next several Saturdays. Postpone organizing this until the April meeting.

Next week an architect will be coming to advise the Facilities Committee on the possibilities for the old hospital building. The meeting is Tuesday, March 8, at 5pm at the school. A couple of the regular Parent Association attendees will go to this. The committee is looking for ideas from teachers and from students (perhaps through the Student Council?) on what they would like to see in our new school; parents should have input too.

Tracey Hamilton asked Mary Nutt if we could give a short presentation to the teachers about the Parent Association, to explain what we'd like to do and ask for their ideas on how parents can help them. Mary said that any Monday teachers' meeting would be fine. We should probably wait until our initial goals and functions have been more clearly defined.

Parent Association Mission and Tasks:

Minda Stillings collected the comments received from parents on the small questionnaire forms handed out at the school performance in December. Although we weren't always sure exactly what each comment was referring to, parents at the meeting tried to go through these carefully, as well as adding other ideas we had thought of. Then we organized them into a few general categories, which cover both parent concerns and areas where a Parent Association could make itself useful.

1. Curriculum/Teaching
   • Core Knowledge: concerns about implementation and teacher training
   • loss of original vision for our school
   • declining academic performance expectations from faculty
   • impact of No Child Left Behind (e.g. limiting creativity)
   • music and art curricula
   • co-ordinating Spanish curriculum with other subjects
   • amount and consistency of assigned homework
   • class size
   • Personal Learning Plans
2. Special Education and IEP's (should this be a separate category?)
3. School Support and Community
   • teacher and administration appreciation/recognition/support
   • building/encouraging school spirit
   • community-building
   • helping to get Friends of the Charter School going once the organization has been established (non-profit 501(c)3)
   • fundraising
   • welcoming new families
   • family support
   • vision for the school
   • extra-curricular activities
   • organizing "grandma" help
4. School Safety and Health
   • discipline policy
   • girl bullying
   • physical roughness/violence
   • candy in classrooms
   • police communication with school administration and students, i.e. awareness of problems in the local community that affect students
   • police communication with parents (ditto)
   • confidentiality issues (e.g. students among peers)
5. Communication
   • advocacy between parents/Parent Association/Governing Council/administration
   • input on new facilities
   • parent/teacher communication, e.g. regular classroom newsletters
   • Parent Association/Student Council connection
   • student surveys, e.g. annual and for incoming students
   • "exit" survey for departing students and their parents
   • confidentiality boundaries in communication to/from parents

We did not discuss these at length for feasibility or how to proceed with them; they are just ideas. To go further in prioritizing this list and starting to work on things, we really need involvement from more parents, so this topic will be continued at the next meeting.

Comments on CVCS Annual Parent Questionnaire

Several changes were suggested, in particular:

• expand on the questions related to communication, e.g. evaluation of communication from the school should not be limited to "upcoming events", but should also cover things like staff changes; and from teachers it should include communicating classroom activities, schedule changes, etc.
• ask about extracurricular activities such as athletics, music groups, etc.
• ask about parent ideas for new facilities; this year's questionnaire, which will probably go out in April, is a unique opportunity for this!
• perhaps include a question about interest in a charter high school
• question(s) about students' interaction with other students, e.g. bullying; to address this kind of question, it might be useful to give students a survey of this nature, too (a much shorter one, of course)

There is a district-wide parent survey in addition to the CVCS-specific one, so ours should not directly duplicate questions from that. Tracey will present these comments to the Governing Council next week. The questionnaires are available in both Spanish and English.

Parent Association Meetings

The next meeting of the Parent Association was set for Wednesday, April 6 at 6:30pm, in the school multi-purpose room. Ruth Milner agreed to facilitate that meeting. Minda did a great job tonight and will be a hard act to follow! Minda will send a short summary of this meeting to Jill for next week's school newsletter.

To try to encourage more people to come to the next meeting (only seven parents were at this one), for the next reminder we will put together more detail about the Parent Association, to go out on a separate sheet attached to the newsletter. Hopefully this will help to draw more people so that we can make more progress on the Parent Association functions.