Duveneck
School Site Council
Meeting
Minutes
December
1st, 2008
Members
in Attendance
Kathleen
Meagher, Mark Robins, Jaynie Schemel, Kathy Thibault, Ching-wen
Miron, Sarah Sands, Esther Yoon, Maya Misner (absent), Soma Mitra,
Susie Hwang, Jodi Winchester and Al Yuen. Other Guests-
Approval
of Minutes
Novermber
3rd minutes were approved unanimously.
Correspondence/Open
Forum
None
Discussion:
How to build a healthy school culture
Kathleen
passed around a Mercury News article entitled “Kids’
happiness overrated; let’s try to make them good.”
Discussing how our society is focused on a child’s happiness
vs. nurturing them to be good, compassionate, with high values…
We
talked about how all kids getting trophies for any participation of
any event. Grade inflation in schools also may be an issue, when
finally a child is confronted for the first time with high
expectations and gets his/her first poor grade.
We
discussed how this influences what parents expect from teachers and
whether there is any unreasonable requests made of teachers.
The
topic of immediate gratification also came up, which is prevalent
among advertisers and society as a whole. The concept of waiting
for your turn, and allow others or the teacher to finish up the
thought is important.
It
was suggested that we have some more parent education nights
regarding learning behaviors of each child and how children learn
and progress.
Two
suggested readings for further study: “The Price of Privilege”
and “Too Much of a Good Thing.”
Discussion:
Leftover Block Money, idea generation
Teachers
have been spending their budgets as part of the original allowance by
grade-level. There is a substantial amount left over, which the Site
Council said we should wait for the next PTA meeting has taken place
to discuss further.
SPSA
– Review Language Arts
We
went over the Language Arts portion of the Single Plan for Student
Achievement.
There
was an October 10th workshop for teachers around the
district regarding the language arts.
Kathleen’s
staff meetings also have addressed the differences in learning style
for individual students.
There
was a comment that the last parent survey indicated that parents did
not understand how “writing” is taught in elementary
school. The teachers mentioned that they do not necessarily send as
much writing home, so that they can better assess the child’s
progress.
It
was suggested that Kathleen could write an article regarding the
“writing” topic to better inform parents.
PTA
Report
Talked
about how well the Harvest Carnival went and the number of volunteers
that do so much in preparation for the event. The bulk of the
meeting was discussing how to use the additional $40k+ funds. The
full list of ideas was presented and the teachers and staff were
given an opportunity to review. There will be an additional upcoming
PTA meeting on Monday, December 8th, to discuss the
allocation of funds further.
Principal’s
Report
The
book fair went well this year. There was good participation by
families during the family night. This month was spend on teacher’s
conferencing, which all went well. There seems to be an outbreak of
head lice, which Duveneck is continuing to manage.
New
Business
Susie
had a question regarding enrichment teachers (i.e. PE or Art),
specifically how to contact them regarding any concerns and
evaluation of the teachers (email addresses are available on the
PAUSD site, and for the SpectraArt a box is available in the office
for correspondence. What is the reason for SpectraArt to wait until
the end of the year before going home to parents? The main reason is
to provide the teacher an opportunity to assess the progress over the
year and to provide an opportunity to select for the year-end art
show. Kathleen will discuss this at her staff meeting with the
teachers to get feedback from the teacher. It was thought that
parents are missing an opportunity to discuss a creative development
with their child as the project is fresh in their minds.
Meeting
was adjourned.
