Lawn Ave. School Improvement Team

Notes for March 11, 2004

Corrections were made to minutes of February meeting and reread:

Members read through corrected minutes, which were then accepted.

See: Community Week Schedule

Tours have been changed to Tuesday Morning and Thursday afternoon.

Mrs. Sipala wants to lead the tours of the building.

Julia Held, Paul McDermott and Martha Vigneault will assist the Tour if needed.

Teachers were told to expect the tours of visitors and, if possible, include student work to be viewed by visitors.

We’re having guests, be at your best!

Summary of District Wide Strategic Plan Meeting

Created action plans

Our School will invite the 34 participants to view the final document. These participants are being told to invite a few more to view it. Hopefully, those people who attend this meeting will become working members of teams to support the 5 action plans organized by the original group.

Champlain Foundation

Ms. Sipala is requesting short proposals to be sent to her concerning proposals of programs that would improve, support and/or begin areas throughout the school. Last year we didn’t earn the grant but this year is different and worth a try once again.

Application process is not too lengthy.

“Attention Getter” to earn the grant might be to align school and community under one proposal. (i.e. Baseball field renewal would be beneficial to both. Redoing Lawn Library would be a consideration however that would only affect school. Think more community/school rather than separate ideas.)

Lawn School Improvement Plan “Draft”

Members of Lawn Ave SIT broke up into working on 1 of the 3 goals.

Members were to make plans of action and record them on the sheets provided.

One person was to take initiative to be in charge of paper work being completed.

Directive to begin:

· Set up the action plan, meeting the goal and the strategy.

· Take goal and strategy and write steps to meet that action of meeting the goal and strategies.

Discussion of each goal:

Mentioned: Would like to have a national testing rather than “just state testing” to assist them in evaluating their child’s success. Hopefully, they would get a better idea of where the child is nationally.

It was brought to the table the idea that national standards are an appropriate test. As personally appreciated as a national standard evaluation might be, maybe identifying where their child falls nationally would not gleamed or possible from the tests. How could more testing effectively do that? More time spent testing would eliminate the teaching times available!

Where should more time be used? Teaching? Working to Learn? Testing? It was mentioned that the amount of time spent in the last few weeks at various grade levels, truly significantly prevented us moving through the curriculum.

More time donated to testing time during the school year, would be detrimental. Working to learn time, would be reduced due to the amount of time lost to testing.

Would say this school does more than what is “tested on these evaluations.” The results to these tests are used within our classroom. They are not used to evaluate a student’s high performance. That is the honor role in the grade levels. Would it be best to put more time into celebrating the success of student in school achievements? Due to peer pressure, kids infer that it isn’t always the best time for them when they earn high performance acknowledgement. Should we not have it because it isn’t cool? Consensus was, we as adults, can determine a forum identifying high performance in school whether they think its cool or not.

Mentioned that Portfolio is a much better means of evaluating the strength of the Jamestown School instruction and learning outcomes of the children.

Lawn Ave. School Improvement Plan

Strategies to Goal 1

a. Action to communicate the curriculum to parents.

Strategies to Goal 2

Possible Addition to Strategy section for :

a. After following sufficient evaluation to see if there is a gender gap in academics, MA or LA, and if gender gap is significant in number differences between girls and boys, then we should add to strategy section: The need to decrease the gender gap between boys and girls in Math and Lang. Arts academics.

b. Action to communicate the curriculum to parents

Strategies to Goal 3

a. Action to communicate the curriculum to parents

b. A blending of positive school and community conduct that supports the focus of positive involvement within the community.

Meeting ended at 5:50. Next meeting will be April 8, 2004