SAC Meeting Minutes

November 12th, 2014

6:30pm

Attendence:

Liz TenCate, Jen Woolf, Heather Dinkel, Anne Draper, Meg Torres, Molly Pearson, Amy Beltzer, Aimee Bernard, Sophia Briegleb, Kristy Ballog, Brandon Auster

Minutes:

Upcoming School Community Events

All School Celebration on Friday Nov 21st at 3:00pm in the classrooms. Watch a 12-min video, do a raffle, each kid gets an otter pop and sticker, each staff will get a gift.

Swigert Story Hour on Thursday Dec 18th from 6:30-7:30pm in library. Two staff will read stories to children. Looking for a third. If well attended, may organize additional story hours.

Explorations

Want to keep Explorations but the coordinator role is becoming too big for a parent volunteer. Trying to see if we can fund the program next year (a salaried coordinator as well as funds to hire some vendors to teach classes).

Principals would like it to be aschool paid position. That person would also help organize social action activities. The two positions could be combined--perhaps into a PT para for about 20 hrs/week.

Need to find creative ways to fund it, and present it to the parents. This position doesn’t seem like a good candidate for a volunteer position since it’s during school hours with students and staff.

Liz will get vendor list from Polaris. Kristy will write a job description with approximate budget. Brandon will start working on a survey to see if parents want to continue Explorations, and would they be willing to fund it.

McAuliffe dropped their explorations program as the school grew. Polaris has a similar program and pays coordinator as well as vendors (Polaris is about half the size of Swigert though).

Increasing Parent Volunteering

Brandon sent out survey to staff this week asking:

  • What ideas do you have for increasing parent volunteers and making parents more comfortable volunteering?
  • Would a master schedule with hours that parents could pop in to help good or bad?
  • Could parents help specials teachers?

Popular ideas so far have been to have IB coordinator offer an introductory course on volunteering in IB school. Also, designated parent volunteer time--perhaps 2 hours after drop-off on Friday. Teachers could bundle up work to be done at that time. Waiting to get more answers from staff and then pick a few things we could start implementing in January.

Changes in classes and staff for next year

Swigert will not offer ECE3 next year, as the school needs more classroom space and ECE is not mandated. Specials are an issue—it’s hard to share those specials spaces between two schools. District is looking into building an art and music classroom on 3rd floor for Denver Discovery School (DDS), so additional classrooms need to be found and one will be the former ECE3 room. Closing off the multi-use spaces on all three floors will create additional classrooms.

District has stepped in to help plan how to share the space between Swigert and DDS for next year as well as the following year. Once DDS finalizes their schedule, the conversation can continue.

2nd grade is averaging 22 kids/class in 6 classes this year. Next year, 3rd grade will have 5 classes of 28 students. This year’s 2nd and 3rd grade are capped and no additional students can be added to those grades (if new kids move into the neighborhood, they’ll be assigned to another Stapleton school).

Next year, we’ll be down 4 teachers and up 3. Specifically down one ECE3 teacher, down one 1stgrade, down two 2nd grade, up two 4th grade, and up one 5th grade.

Staff change plan

The hiring proposal for 2015-2016 school year was shared. It outlined the rational, plan, timeline, frame for reflective dialogue, personnel committee, and Swigert teacher profile.

Every teacher has two goals for this school year--a personal goal and the school wide goal of differentiation: “Provides differentiation that addresses students’ instructional needs and supports mastery of content-language objectives.” In addition, Swigert has developed a teacher profile. It looks at the mindset and planning/instruction/implementation we want in our teachers. We want teachers who are a really good fit for IB, are open to the coaching model we have under our TIF grant, and other pieces that are unique to our school. These need to be something the teachers embrace. This profile specifies what we want for the teachers at our school, but it goes two ways. Maybe teachers say this is the environment they really want to teach in or maybe it’s not. The reflective dialogue will be a time for teachers to evaluate whether or not Swigert/IB are a good fit for them as well.

Budget will be set in mid to late Feb, so staffing decisions can’t be made until that’s finalized. Swigert will be one of the first schools to do this, giving teachers time to find jobs elsewhere if need be.

Personal committee will be comprised of one staff (who is not affected by staffing changes voted on by remaining staff), principal, AP, and a parent. Will have a 30-min reflective dialogue with each teacher.

Teachers have seen the hiring proposal at a meeting this week and will see it again at next week’s professional development.

Science Fair

Science fair volunteers (parents and CU Denver students) will do classroom visits on Friday morning, spending 10-15 min talking about science fair, showing the kids a poster, and explaining the scientific method. Wednesday Nov 19th is a parent informational science fair meeting at 6:30pm. Science fair is Tuesday, January 13th. 125 participants last year, and expecting 200 this year. Website for information and registration is swigertsciencefair.org.