Gowana Partnership Team Minutes
Present: Jill Bush, Ann Schwanda, Sarita Caserta, Jennifer Barnes, Ann Cocca, Terri O’Brien, Gail Ziggler, Meg Campbell, Dena Marie de la Rocha,
Note Taker: Dena Marie de la Rocha
Facilitators: Jill Bush and Terri O’Brien
1. Review of Minutes:
The group discussed different job titles and positions, the schedule and calendar of meetings, the phone chain, representatives, note taking rotation, time of meetings, etc.
2. Committee Reports:
a. Principal’s Report:
There are 702 students in Gowana this year, and two ESL students who are new to the district as of last week.
Open house is two separate evenings this year: Wednesday, September 24th for the 6th grade families, and Thursday, September 25th for the 7th and 8th grade parents. Sixth grade teams will be doing presentations for parents and really break down parts of the middle school day for them. This is being done as a trial and is an attempt to create a more informational and relaxed atmosphere in the building for parents new to the middle school. The 7th and 8th grade open house will be more of a traditional evening. There will also be a review of feedback from staff and parents to hear the possible successes and possible improvements to this type of layout.
b. Middle
School Vision:
The booklet was passed out and discussed briefly, and we were made aware that this compact has been a work in progress over the past 5 years, and is currently being reviewed and improved.
The booklet discussed teaming ideas, teacher goals, action plans, etc., and there are a few specific priorities for the Vision team to further focus on and examine this year.
The success of the TIES program that was piloted last year was reviewed, and even though it is not going to be officially implemented into the school day this year, we are searching for ways to categorize things that are already happening within the classroom that fall under the “curriculum” of the program.
c. Environment:
The team is working on Fun Thursday and Fridays for the community, and a way to tie in the character education words into each celebration. The special days will be celebrated in the cafeteria, and different teams will sign up to “sponsor” and decorate for the event.
The character education words of the month were also discussed and distributed to teachers on posters at the last faculty meeting. Even though it is new to the school community, we are developing an action team that will further explore resources for teachers to use and reinforce these terms each month in their own classrooms.
Environment also discussed the possible use of team bulletin boards which could be posted around the building and would be used as a calendar of events. The prospect of having individual teams come up with names for the school year would coincide with the bulletin board idea.
d. PTA:
Art in education is up and running for the school year, and each grade level has a representative as the “go to” person for ideas and decision making. The PTA has a budget of $8,000 for the year, they are currently sponsoring the magazine fundraiser in Gowana, and they funded ˝ of the student agenda books for this school year.
e. Board
of Education:
Currently we are waiting to hear about who the representatives. The proposal for a new elementary school, additional classrooms in the middle schools, and a pool at the high school is being discussed.
All of the construction going on around campus is a concern and the level of noise it is creating within classrooms.
3. Old Business:
Partnership pamphlets are going to be distributed at open house. There are going to be partnership representatives available at open house, and parents will be given information pamphlets if desired.
4. New Business:
2003 and 2004 goals for the partnership team were discussed, and there are current things already in process which will be further developed.
The strengths of action teams were discussed, and the team feels that they are a smaller group getting together to accomplish tasks easier. This leaves us with the ability to focus on more than one task at a time, and each will get quality attention while getting solved. The possibility of different creating specific action teams was discussed, and currently there may be one for character education, captain, and summer reading books.
A character education action team is being developed and will work towards promoting the use of “word of the month” around school and even within the community, finding supplies to assist teachers in getting involved, and finding specific ways to get the community involved is another goal of the team. They will meet sometime next week to get things started.
Another idea was trying to improve academic performance within the district, and possibly have department administrators in to talk about the significance of testing within each content area. Diane Poley is scheduled to attend our next meeting to discuss English.
Summer reading books will be reviewed again and the process for distributing to children around different buildings will be focused on this year. It is hopeful that old books could be sent into school and redistributed to students with some sort of sign out procedure. The English department along with Mary Jo Osinski, will also be into discuss their own ideas and review previous ideas for distributing books, and even selling the books “in house” (because it was really successful last year). It is also hopeful that some of the required summer reading books could be purchased to use at Outreach in the Park.
Captain Outreach
is up and running on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday afternoons from
Finding out the purpose of standardized testing is another goal for the team, and trying to figure out how to use the results, when they are actually made available to teachers, how to read the scoring, etc. is information that needs to become available to teachers and parents. The functions of the results along with the conditions under which we test students were of some concern, but their methods for preparation was also something to further explore.
The career expo., will be held on Tuesday, November 25th during periods 7-9 and speakers will be presenting to the students within class time.
5. Next Agenda: