Welcome to another board meeting summary. This meeting was remarkable in that it was not overly long, it was informative, and all parties acted with proper decorum. I hate it when that happens :)

• Operations Committee Reports
  
• Patron comment
  
• Pyramid of Intervention Committee report
  
• Report from Dennis Griffith
  
• Scholarship and College Counselors update
  
• Individualized Learning Center report
  
• High School Intervention
  
• Board policy Updates

Operations Committee Reports

There were reports from several standing district committees. I'll outline some key highlights from each report:

Planning and Student Achievement

• Board certification for teachers is a good thing for the district and for the teachers. District gets better trained teachers, teachers get the training and an increase in pay. Some sense of worry over pay increase if sizeable percentage of teachers are certified.
  
• Investigating 21st century skills. Dr. Larson was charged with creating a plan to look at key 21st century skills that Rockwood students will need in a previous Board meeting.

Operations

• A survey is being created about the bond issue. Questions remain about the first draft, the length of the survey, and a comparison of the surveying companies.
  
• Many schools need improvements in their libraries to stay in compliance with state guidelines. It is going to take quite a bit of money to buy new books, retire old books, increase space, and bring libraries to where they should be. And once they are compliant, it will take additional, continuing money to keep them in compliance over time.

Community Relations

• Talked about bond issue in their meeting
  
• Is trying to create Speakers Bureau (in response to Board request as voiced in discussion over Superintendent's Blog?). They have generated a spreadsheet of all community organizations. Now is deciding what the bureau makeup should look like.
  
• Discussed how to handle requests from outside entities for student names and information. They are allowed to do this, as long as what they distribute meets some specific guidelines that preserve student privacy. Does the district have to honor such requests, can they charge for them?

Patron Comment

There was a single patron comment during the meeting. A District parent spoke about how Policy 6450, Grading and Reporting, was being implemented. According to the implementation directed by the Board, this policy is not supposed to be in effect until 2008, and then phased in over a number of years. According to her comment, this policy is already being implemented in some high schools and middle schools. Her main complaint centered around the fact that this fairly broad and important change was very poorly communicated to parents. It affects so many of our children, yet so few parents even know it is coming. Why?

Pyramid of Intervention Committee

The Pyramid of Intervention is a set of strategies and responses designed to allow teachers to react in a predictable way when rewarding or disciplining students (my own interpretation). In a welcome change, this meeting talked about the rewards system used to praise students who perform and behave well.

The belief of this committee is that younger students need more structure to their days than older ones. This allows rewards to be given to high school students resulting in more freedom in how they can structure their days, increasing from 9th to 12th grade. Assuming students qualify for this set of rewards, they can be granted privileges such as changes to go to the library during class hours, one-on-one teacher contact, and working as an office aide. The specific set of rewards has intentionally been left to individual high schools, to allow them to create incentives that match their existing culture and traditions.

The only troublesome part of this program to me is that they are looking at expanding the set of entrance criteria to this program. One possible criterion may be submitting to random drug testing, which I personally would be 100% against. I'm thinking back to my high school career at Parkway Central, and I would probably have been part of a program like this. I was an excellent student, always behaved well, had a good relationship with my teachers and administrators, and so on. I can't imagine being asked to submit to random drug screening at that point in my life, after working so hard to gain the respect of my peers, teachers, adminstrators, and parents. I think we're risking sending the wrong message here.

Report from Dennis Griffith on Transportation

In case you didn't know, there is a new high school schedule set to go into effect next year. It was caused by a new requirement from the state, increasing the number of credits needed to graduate from high school. To meet these new credit requirements, Rockwood decided to change the makeup and timing of the high school days. These changes necessitated changes in the bus routes, resulting in middle school children now being dropped off as early as 7:00 AM at their schools. This change will require $75000 to pay for additional supervision for these children.

First off, I don't know where this extra $75000 came from. Was this initially budgeted as part of the new high school schedule, or is this some extra expense that the Board has to approve? Was their any way that this extra cost could have been foreseen and potentially avoided by more careful consideration of the new high school schedule? Seems like an expensive thing to overlook...

Second, we're now asking our middle school children to have to wake up even earlier now, to make it to a bus 10 minutes earlier, to stay at the school building longer during what is already a long day for them. Again, this doesn't seem like a wise choice. These children are growing every day (my 8th grade daughter seems to grow about 3 inches a day :)), and they need their sleep. This truly does not seem like a good thing, but the best of a set of poor choices resulting from a lack of foresight.

Scholarship and College Counselors

This was a great report on the success that Rockwood enjoys in getting its students accepted into major, highly competitive universities around the country. The counselors do a great job in helping students learn about different universities, and then helping them prepare for the application process. The district has a college fair, where about 2000 students attend, including over 100 VICC students.

Additionally, the Athletic Directors at district high schools have done an excellent job in helping the recruitment process for our athletes. Rockwood students earned 72 athletic scholarships last year!

Individual Learning Center

This was a report given at the request of the Board. The ILC helps smart but troubled kids succeed in school. Their mission is to help students graduate who might otherwise have failed or dropped out. They were founded in 1996 and are up to 90 students now. Their goals are to increase student completion, attendance rate, and achievement. They have a low student/staff ratio and use a variety of teaching strategies to reach each student. At the end, they spoke of needing a small amount of room in their current building to be repurposed and set aside for them. This would give them additional instructional space for small classes and one-on-one counseling.

High School Intervention

There was a presentation about the High School Intervention policy, which is designed to identify and help those students who need extra help to succeed. Their presentation centered around the different strategies in place to identify those students in need, what kind of information they collect on them, how they communicate with parents, including Infinite Campus, and how they monitor these students' progress.

The presentation itself was very well done, and the program seems to be very well put together. Bill Adams had a wonderful comment at the end, where he praised the principals who take part in this program for treating each individual student as an individual and not a number. The adminstrators know each of the students by name, know things about them, talk with them, and so on. He thought this was excellent work, and I whole-heartedly agree with him. People are not numbers, even when taken in large groups. Individuals are their own person first and foremost, and only part of a group of people as a distant second. I echo Bill's praise for going the extra mile to get to know each student as a person. That's how trust and relationships are built.

Board Policy Updates

The biggest issue here was discussion the portion of the New Member Orientation policy that discusses the rules around absences from Board meetings. As current defined or interpreted, any member who misses three consecutive meetings is deemed to have abandoned their position, and the Board is allowed to replace them. There is an exception inthe case of excused absences, for things like a death in the immediate family, sickness, and so on.

The problem with this interpretation, as discussed at the meeting, is that there is no legal definition for what it means to have abandoned a Board position. Someone could miss a dozen meetings in a row, get replaced, come back, and potentially have a legal right to reclaim that seat. There is actually no legal recourse that the Board has against any of its members to remove them, short of them comitting a felony, moving out of the district, or a couple of other similar reasons.

The Board admitted there was an issue with this, but they couldn't come to closure on it. They'll discuss it again at a subsequent meeting.

Conclusion

And so ended a basically controversy-free Board meeting. I've recorded and represented the few contentious issues I noticed, and there weren't many. On the bright side, this upcoming meeting, October 4th, will be more exciting. The Electioneering Committee completed its work a couple of months ago, and their report is to be brought to the Board. This should be loads of fun for reasons I'll discuss after the meeting.

Thanks for sticking through this update. I know they're getting long, and I'm considering just referencing the BoardNotes document that Rockwood publishes and adding my comments as needed. That would make my job easier, but potentially make it more difficult for readers to follow while jumping between both documents. We'll see :)

-- bab