Continuing the countdown towards the new school year, meetings
are beginning to appear on my calendar again.
Continuing the countdown towards the new school year, meetings are beginning to appear on my calendar again. Parent group meetings, back to school night, school technology meetings, and many other evening meetings will soon start again. And then there is the bi-weekly meeting of the Board of Education. The Board met last Thursday for the first time in five weeks. In addition to their regular 7:30 meeting, the Board had a late afternoon study session where they discussed the ‘Comprehensive Accountability System’. More about that later.
This week I want to point out some of the changes made to the Board agenda.
The agenda is published in hard copy at the district office and on the Web site at www.gusd.k12.ca.us. If you haven’t looked at it lately, check the Web site, click on the button that says ‘Board of Education’ and then on the ‘next meeting agenda’. The agenda is almost always available the Friday night before the Board meeting.
When I first started attending Board meetings, the meetings could go on forever. More rule than exception, meetings ended about 11:30 p.m. or sometimes even past midnight.
A few months ago, the structure of the agenda was changed. Agenda topics were clustered by strategy and the time allotted to these topics was added to each agenda item. In addition the Board adopted a rule that no meeting would go past 10 p.m. unless the majority voted to continue. This rule really helps instill a sense of urgency on the meeting. And even though the majority of the board members mostly vote to extend the meeting for a few minutes if urgent items are still not discussed close to 10 p.m., we can all count on John Gurich to remind us that meeting longer doesn’t necessarily improve student learning.
Another change made to the agenda occurred more recently. The top of the agenda now has a new slogan. “Excellence: It Takes Everyone!” And it really does. It’s not just the teacher who is accountable for our student’s learning. I’ve had several comments from teachers over the past few weeks suggesting that I put an unreasonable burden on their shoulders and don’t understand teaching. I agree with them that there is a lot of pressure, but I never said it just comes down to the teacher. Denise Apuzzo commented in my blog a few days ago: “The way up is a group effort, and parents must be leading this effort if teachers and students are to succeed.” Board member David McRae followed up suggesting that in order to get parents really involved, a teacher and the parents could get together once a month. Sounds like something we should be able to accomplish.
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The third change on the Board agenda is the printing of the District’s mission statement. The mission statement was one of the outcomes from the Strategic Plan process and it is printed at the bottom of each Board of Education meeting agenda.
It reads: Gilroy Unified School District will provide opportunities for all students to reach their highest academic potential. Our purpose is to foster powerful student learning for all students by developing the academic and intellectual competencies and personal attributes to be life-long learners, responsible citizens, and productive members of society. This will be accomplished by having a clear focus on student needs; staff, parents and community members demonstrating high expectations for themselves and for every child served; and by continuously improving the quality of teaching and learning.
I’d like to draw attention to one word in the first sentence. The word ‘all’. And there should be no question as to what the word ‘all’ means. ALL means ALL. All students will continuously improve their academic achievement and all students will be proficient in Reading, Writing and Math. As part of the No Child Left Behind act, all students in the District will have to be proficient or advanced by the end of the 2013-2014 school year. Ten years seems like a long time. But we need to realize that our data shows that not all our Kindergarten students last year were proficient. And the High School Class of 2014 is the present 3rd graders this coming year. Too many of them are still far below proficient. The time to focus on this is now.
Rob van Herk, his wife Karin and their three children have been living in Gilroy for three years. He is the technology manager for Gilroy Unified. You can reach him at ro*@va*****.com. His column will be published each Monday.
