Ruth Milner chairing.
Nine parents, the CVCS administrator, and one visitor were present. There was very good representation from new CVCS parents whose eldest child is just starting kindergarten.
Ruth gave a brief summary of last week's public meeting on planning our permanent facilities. About 35 parents plus a few members of the community attended, along with about ten children. The planners gave a good overview and then spent most of the meeting getting comments and discussion from attendees. During the pizza dinner break, they also talked to the kids about what students would like the new school to be like. Mary Nutt noted that the planners expect to have their summary of the suggestions organized and ready this week. It will be made available on the CVCS Web site.
Mary Nutt informed everyone that CVCS took first prize in the Socorro County Fair parade last weekend. Our classes won numerous ribbons in the fair's art show as well, including Best of Show. She received many nice comments from people while she was there.
We have also received some press coverage; in particular, the Mountain Mail recently had an article on our dress policy and the Walmart grant. Mary says she has seen fewer students referred to her office in the first few weeks than during the same period last year and attributes much of this decrease to the policy. Parents asked about outgrown school clothing. Mary commented that CVCS has a "school clothing bank" for which these items would be very welcome. The administration and the student council are working on fun (but reasonable) ideas for dress-policy exception days.
Tracey Hamilton announced that the CVCS Second Grade will hold a bake sale fundraiser after school on Friday to help relief efforts for Hurricane Katrina victims. Donations of baked goods are solicited.
The concept of AYP and the goals for proficiency are confusing, especially since Socorro schools did not all have the same goals. This is because the goals are set for groups of schools, based on the grades they are testing. CVCS tests grades 3-8 and therefore is grouped with similar NM schools. The goal is set at the 20th percentile of the scoring range for all students at schools in that group. Each year the goal will increase, slowly for the first few years, then rapidly ramping up, and tailing off gradually as we approach the ultimate target of 100% proficiency in 2014. (For perspective, that's the year today's kindergartners will be in grade 8.)
Testing for NMSBA is now required four times per year. Major tests are in March and take about 2 weeks' worth of mornings to complete. The tests done during the year are simpler. Mary plans to borrow the scheme that Las Cruces is using, which will incorporate these tests into the regular classroom schedule and therefore be less disruptive. Based on the CVCS results from last year, the school intends to make three adjustments to the curriculum:
Mary noted that CVCS has also been doing the Stanford-9 testing on our own. This has the advantage of being nationally normed, giving an idea of how we're doing compared to the rest of the country. However it does require about a week to complete, and the staff intend to review whether it is still worth doing now that the NMSBA will be done annually and thus provide us year-to-year progress data for each student. She made an attempt to see how the NMSBA results correlate with the Stanford-9 results, and could not find a relationship at all. It is not clear what this implies.
No additional topics were raised.
Wednesday, October 5, 6:30pm in the school multi-purpose room. Per a suggestion from a parent, the main topic will be Personal Learning Plans/ Individual Education Plans (PLP/IEPs). This is timely since this year's plans will be developed during the parent-teacher conferences following the ninth week, which is later in October.