Attendance log

The meeting began at 8.35am

Ina brought up the need to briefly discuss the process for future meetings, including writing of minutes, establishing a preliminary agenda at the end of the meetings for the next meeting and assign action items in between meetings

Ina asked for a basic orientation on the fundamentals of the school district (this is to include goals, philosophy, constraints placed by federal and state laws and collective bargaining agreements, laws and policies on whom makes the final decisions on specific issues)

Michele, Sibel, Donna and Ina all agreed to formalize the meetings and to rotate the taking of the minutes with Ina taking the first ones, we also agreed that we would address the basic orientation on the fundamentals of the school district during the next SAC meetings

Donna then started to review the progress of the SIP

Page 5 – Curriculum and Instruction

1. A math specialist is currently funded through a grant at 0.8, Mike will be asking to increase this to full-time in the next budget

2. Safety Net and intervention for low achieving students – working on this island wide
   A. reading specialist - is happening
   B. Refine RTI procedures and implementation - Molly Cabral will have a report out for one of our next
   meetings
   One of the school psychologists is now housed at the school which gives us an additional resource
   Her salary is covered by all schools, the initial feedback is good
   C. Increase differentiated teaching techniques by teachers - is being implemented step by step
   big part of professional development days are used for this

3. Improve student performance in writing – to be reviewed in Jan ‘12

Page 6 – Professional Development

1. Provide Funding to allow professional staff to improve teaching and learning skills
   this is happening – overseen by Mike & Donna
   Mike – it came up at a SC meeting that the WTS spends more than other island schools on this
   Mike feels strongly that this is very important – if you want growth for kids you need growth for teachers
   Jill – teachers often get together to discuss what they have learned and then bring it back to more people in the school
   Donna – Valerie is putting in school tech time together for teachers
   

2. Funding for prof. development to deal with at risk students – happening

3. Funding for substitute coverage of staff members that are attending prof. dev. Workshops – happening

4. Create schedules to allow teachers to improve student achievement through analyzing achievement data
   A data team is looking at this, this is a new initiative, they are developing a protocol to analyze the data

5. Teacher peer observation – ongoing
   Jill – Student learning expeditions are falling into this category – every 4-6 weeks students, teachers and administrators go around the school to check out other class rooms to look what is going on in exciting learning strategies, they look at and evaluate class room activity
   Mike – we will take notice of levels of academic rigor and see what is happening, this last time the theme that emerged was the amount of writing that is going on in the school as well as highlighted that students share their learning, Mike will e-mail the notes from the last SLE
   Donna recommended that Michele, Sibel and Ina each take part in one of the upcoming SLE on 2/9; 3/29 or 5/24
   Donna – Jim Weiss says that the WTS stands out in regards to students sharing what they learn and their love of learning
   Mike – our goal is to share with everyone what is happening, on every level, would like to share it with SAC and School Committee how the school works to help everyone to understand what they are supporting
   Sibel – we want to involve the community
   Ina – and the finance committee!
   

Page 7 – School Culture

1. Skipping awareness of bullying – will be reviewed in Jan & June

2. Skipping Development Design – will be reviewed in Jan & June

3. Student Council has had elections, 6-8 grade, 2 representatives will be coming to the SAC meetings
   Jill – they were very organized, surveyed other kids

4. Recess coordinators – fund, support, train – is happening
   Michelle asked for procedure in regards to bullying on buses
   Ina – is there a protocol?
   Mike – no, but they are addressing issues with the bus drivers, the school does not have oversight over the bus drivers, however, there is some level of basic training, the issue is identifying the problem and how does the school get notified?
   Donna – transportation is a priviledge, all bus drivers went through bullying training
   Sibel – is the bus = school grounds
   Donna – yes, we just don’t have the same level of resources
   Fran – could we teach the same level of responsive classroom for the bus?
   Donna – was done last year for lower level, should be done for upper level

5. Increase parent involvement – going very well
   Donna & Mike - Transition from Chilmark to WTS also going very well
   Ina – hope that next year’s parent orientation night will be attended by all teachers vs. 1 out of 4 core curriculum teachers this year
   

Page 8 – Community relations

Mike – approached Nancy Cole, Library Director to join SAC as community member. She could not commit,
Mike is asking everyone to network to suggest a community member, establish contact with Mike who as the principal is responsible for appointing the community member

Other issues:

Sibel asked for MCAS results
Mike will send out the link
Sibel would like to get the data on student improvement
Mike talked about the history of the results
Sibel – keeping in mind this is only one way of evaluation, can we get the data analyzed
Mike said he can easily get us improvement graphs on the kids – i.e. how did a particular grade do compared to last year?
Fran – we have spent a lot of time analyzing the data
Mike – would like to talk about student growth at the next meeting

Preliminary Agenda for next time:

1. Review School Committee Policy and how it ties into SIP– 10-15 minutes

2. Budget update by Mike –5 minutes

3. MCAS results – 10 minutes

4. Enrichment feedback – how is this evaluated and how and when do parents get feedback – 10 minutes

5. Community Member search – 5 minutes

6. Discuss Page 8 – Home – School connections – 10 minutes

7. Review Action Items and Preliminary Agenda for next meeting – 5 minutes

Recorded by:__________________________