Westminster Meeting Oct 7

Even the looming Pres. debate didn't shorten the meeting much. The good news: reading scores, on the DRA for 2nd graders, were way up! (95% of the kids last year met the standard (after dropping as low as 57% last year). Could be a one year blip, but more likely, we were assured, it was related to better attention to each and every student in reading (rather than being comfortable with good enough readers and focusing just on the struggling ones). A hopefully positive effort to really leave no child behind. Most of our time, as usual, was less education focused. A lot of time devoted to this silly federal regulation about 401(b) retirement accounts and how every district has to enact these complicated new policies that require hiring a third party administrator (TPA). No one really understands this except to say it is taking a lot of time from some adminstrators, it will cost money, and it has nothing to do with student learning. Second time user is the 13 page Comprehensive HIV POlicy (from the state) that is fine in intent, but includes provisions such as "the superintendent or his/her designee shall provide training to all staff and students" related to a bunch of stuff related to HIV. Again, a cost in money and LOTS of time that has little to do with student learning. Third item is the draft Wellness Committee Snack Guidelines. At least this articulates some recommendations and communicates to parents and is unobjectionable (I think) in that it doesn't really mandate or prohibit anything (except candy and soda). But it also, apparently, doesn't set any schoolwide practices and anything in it can be overridden by an individual teacher in their classroom, perhaps completely arbitrarily. So, this is a step forward in having written guidelines, but could still be confusing if individual teachers make some individual decisions in contradiction to this school recommendation. Fourth item: Purchasing a replacement bus. Despite a commitment to look into the relative merits of new vs used buses, we were told mostly about the new bus sales the district is familiar with and really have gotten little info on used buses. We pushed to continue to look at both new and used. In the end, new buses may be better for us, but it seems we should see what is the best use of this money. Last item (under open Director Comments). One board member (me), raised a concern about articulation and communication by teachers about their learning goals for students for the year and their overall plans to reach these. As a teacher, I have trouble understanding how you can teach without some overall goals and plans for the year. I am hopeful every teacher at Westminster has these plans in mind, but as a parent, I know I haven't seen this from some teachers. If we are to ever even begin to look at academic quality in the school, we at least need some sense of what teachers are aiming for to be able to tell how we are doing on getting there. This will be put on a future agenda and maybe we will actually talk about education and student learning for a change! A little thought: Ever notice how close the spelling of board and bored are?