Harvey Milk Civil Rights AcademySan Francisco public elementary school

HMCRA SSC Jan 10 2012

Tuesday, January 17th, 2012

Members from staff: Tracy Peoples, Brandon Lew, Tom Ryan, Jessica Rosenfeld
Members/Parents: Lisa Kelly, Vincent Leddy, Jeff Cowell, Liz Janes
Also present: Julia Whitt, Karen Thompson, Sarah Kern, Alison Adams

1) Members of the SSC and active members of the PFC are invited to attend the district-wide school summit, Saturday, February 11, 8:30 am to noon at Everett Middle School. The district provides useful training opportunities for SSC current and prospective members, on topics such as budget, fundraising, academic standards, etc. To register please go to http://www.sfusd.edu/en/councils-committees/school-site-council.html.

2) All families are encouraged to login to School Loop. You need your child’s student number (also called HO number) which is printed on some of the correspondence from the district or available from the school office. HMCRA’s school loop webpage is http://hmes-sfusd-ca.schoolloop.com/.

3) We had a presentation from James Fredericks of the Stanford EPGY program, an online self-paced learning tool for K-8 math and 2-6 language arts. It would cost approximately $5K/year for HMCRA to purchase a site license available to all students, at school or outside of school and during the summer, to be given accounts to this resource.

Mr. Fredericks provided us with two Cisco grant sources but both programs list schools as ineligible for those grants. Teachers would consider using the tool if the funds were raised elsewhere, however they have also been using free programs such as Math Blast and Khan Academy videos for similar purpose. If anyone is interested in applying for a grant to fund this program, please email peopletsfusdedu.

Next SSC meeting will be Tuesday, February 7, 5:30. Outstanding tasks include reviewing the SSC bylaws and naming members to posts; scanning and distributing the BSC; revisiting the status of FOHM as our afterschool provider.

Other important news: Terry Asten-Bennett is stepping down from Treasurer position of PFC. This critical volunteer role ensures that funds raised through PFC events go to vital school needs including extra staffing in the kindergarten classrooms and in literacy programs. If anyone with basic math and spreadsheet skills would like to volunteer, please reply to this post.

Other important dates:

1/24 and 1/31: Financial Literacy For Families
2/10: Valentines’ Drag Show

SSC Meeting Notes 12/13/11

Wednesday, December 21st, 2011

Attendees

Staff/Faculty: Tracy Peoples, Leanne Francis, Jessica Rosenfeld, Brandon Lew, Tom Ryan. Also: Julia Whitt, Susan Tramontana.
Parents: Lisa Kelly, Vincent Leddy, Jeff Cowell, Liz Janes. Also: Terry Asten-Bennett, Kelly Seringer. Absent: Martin Rawlings-Fein.

Introductions and new faculty members: Dara Peters, Alisa Chriss-Price and Kelly Clark are no longer members of the School Site Council (SSC.) Leanne Francis, Jessica Rosenfeld, and Tom Ryan will join Brandon Lew and Tracy Peoples representing faculty/staff. Parents Lisa Kelly, Vincent Leddy, Jeff Cowell, Martin Rawlings-Fein (absent), Liz Janes are representing parents and community. Julia Whitt and Karen Thompson have volunteered to be alternates (but we always welcome more). The SSC meets at 5:30 the second Tuesday of each month, before the PFC meeting.

1. Meeting Norms: we agreed to follow the community agreements established at the summit, which include transparency, mutual respect, productive ideas, collaboration, 5 Be’s, and having a diverse parent body reflected in decision making.
(Gentle reminder that all parents and faculty are members of the PFC, and also are welcome to attend/join SSC.)

2. Tutoring increases possible – various members said they would reach out to high school staff; Vincent has a contact with a group of adult volunteers. Anyone who goes through the District volunteer process who wants to make a regular commitment to tutoring is welcome. Help is needed during and after school. Goal is to recruit 12 volunteers, 2 per grade. We did not clarify who would be responsible for training volunteers, a faculty member may have to provide that training if we are successful in recruiting efforts.

3. Balanced Scorecard: the latest version was posted to the website, see ???? The link on www.harveymilk.com is still the old BSC, see http://www.beyondthetalk.org/bscs/es/milk.pdf. Tracy can you provide a new link? Many families have requested it. Tracy suggests that we do not revisit the BSC until we have the February revised District budget.

4. Budget: FOHM has successfully raised enough money to carry afterschool program to the end of the year. The PFC fundraising is ongoing, with upcoming events including the pre-drag dine out restaurant solicitation just out, in advance of the Drag Show 2/10/2012. FOHM is compiling a resource that will help parents manage private grant applications.

Faculty who have a classroom need have a few options for informing SSC/PFC/FOHM: (1) come to meeting and ask, (2) let Tracy know of need, or (3) add item to DonorsChoose.org. Several parents have subscribed to get alerts from that website when HMCRA projects come up, and most of them have been funded.

Parents who are willing to write grants and/or make sure that they are used according to the grant requirements can join the grant writing team by emailing Kellie Seringer at kseringersymcapcom.

Another note on budget: FOHM has sponsored a “Financial Literacy for Families” training that will be 1/24 and 1/31, for children and parents and faculty, 6:30-8:30 pm. Registration info will be coming in weekly folder in January.

5. SSC bylaws and assigning roles within SSC: these items were put off for the next meeting January 10.

6. New communication norms: All three school support organizations, SSC, PFC and FOHM have committed to attending each others’ meetings to keep the lines of communication open. Vincent and Liz agreed to go to FOHM and PFC. Kellie Seringer has agreed to come to SSC. Terry has been participating in SSC.

We hope to keep this communication line open, and make it as inclusive as possible. As Woody Allen is credited with saying, “Eighty percent of success is showing up.” Communication in person has proven more valuable over the last several months than emails, as there are multiple (and unreliable) means of electronic communication being used, including the Yahoo group, google group, school loop, etc. None of these are really open to everyone. Tracy would like to make School Loop her standard means of communicating with parents. If you haven’t signed up for it yet, you need to ask Alisa or Shawn for your child’s ID number and then go to http://www.sfusd.edu/en/schools/school-information/harvey-milk.html, click on the “school loop” link.

Any SSC member interested in seeing last years’ SSC minutes in blog form, go to http://harveymilk.com/ssc-meeting-notes/.

NEXT MEETING: 1/10/2012 5:30 pm. Among other agenda topics we will have a speaker from EPGY introduce their educational materials.

Happy, peaceful and safe holidays to everyone.

October 11, 2011 SSC Notes

Wednesday, November 2nd, 2011

10/11/2011 SSC meeting notes

Attendees:

Staff and Faculty: Tracy Peoples, Leanne Francis, Dara Peters, Brandon Lew, Alisa Chriss-Price
Parents: Lisa Kelley, Vincent Leddy, Jeff Cowell, Liz Janes
Observers: Terry Asten Bennett, Aaron Hall, Karen Thompson, Julia Whitt, Audrey Vernick
Absent: Martin Rawlings-Fein, Sarah Kern

1. Proposed Meeting norms: we agreed to revise the meeting norms at the next meeting. If anyone has any suggested rewrites/deletions of the following, please bring them to that meeting:

- Be thoughtfully engaged in discussions
- Always assume best intentions
- Challenge each other by speaking your truth and deepening conversations with questions
- Respect colleagues by sharing arirtime (three before me) and refraining from sidebar conversations, honoring commitments and starting and ending on time
- Respect diverse and different ideas
- Maintain confidentiality

I for one would propose that we agree to follow the 5 Bs – this will hopefully keep us in line and remind us of the kids’ commitment to them.

Followup action: everyone should be prepared to agree on meeting norms.

2. Data on Progress and Achievement Gap – Tracy shared graphs of the progress HMCRA has made on the CST English Language Arts and Math test scores over the last several years. The good news is that as a school we are improving. The not so good news is that we still have not made much progress in addressing the achievement gap to make sure all students reach minimally proficient levels. We acknowledged that there have been losses of student volunteers and District staff that contributed to our recent success. While the PFC has financially supported literacy in K-2 this year, there is not enough tutoring and language intervention staff for older students/afterschool.

Followup action: Tracy will be meeting each of the teachers in the next few weeks to talk about what has and hasn’t worked, and what we need in terms of funding/staff to improve.

3. Balanced Scorecard: Tracy handed out a revised BSC document and Alisa explained specific changes that had been made. This is still a work in progress.

Some discussion/questions rose out of the following:
- school’s mission: who called us a Model Inclusion or Inclusive school? if it is not an official SFUSD label then perhaps we shouldn’t claim it, rather work inclusion into our definition of diversity
- School climate writeup (P4)
- EPSY license for math literacy – Tracy will be asking us to find funds for it?
- Addressing achievement gap with more professional development – SFUSD funds may not be available for this purpose, are there any concrete goals we could establish for this that are within our means?
- Can we re-establish more formal correspondence with USF for student volunteers trained in reading intervention? (Leanne was following up on this?)

Followup action: everyone should read the BSC. Tracy or Alissa, could you print/save it to .pdf and email it to all of us? If there are any listed activities in the BSC that never materialized (like Peace Patrol) let Tracy know. We will discuss it again at a future meeting.

4. Budget: The approximately $1.3M that we get from SFUSD covers core staff only. About 2% of the total covers instructional needs for English Language learners, equipment maintenance, field trips and daily operations. The bottom line is that without the PFC and FOHM support, our school day would be a lot shorter and less staffed.

Followup action: Liz will meet with Tracy on 10/21 to discuss the budget graph that shows government, FOHM, PFC and other funding sources, as a reference tool for the SSC and for parents.

5. SSC Membership: we welcomed Lisa Kelley, Jeff Cowell, Brandon Lew and Leanne Francis to SSC. Thanks to outgoing members Aaron Hall, Kelly Clark and Sarah Kern for many years of participation.

6. Next meeting NOVEMBER 8 agenda items:

- need to nominate/vote for chair, vice-chair and secretary
– need to sign by-laws
- need to prepare for schoolwide summit (moved to 11/15 because of election night conflict)
- review “we” budget of items funded for this year, and unfunded needs

PLEASE NOTE THAT THE PFC MEETING FOR NOVEMBER IS MOVED TO 11/15 – CAN WE STILL MEET ON 11/8 TO BE PREPARED FOR SUMMIT?

Questions posed to the PFC for the Summit 11/15 that relate to the SSC include:

Can families get a copy of the latest Balanced Scorecard?
What is the SSC’s role in applying for or monitoring received private grants?
How much money does SFUSD pass from government sources to HMCRA to keep the school open and staff paid? What must parents and private donors cover? What are some unfunded needs?
Does SSC want the current afterschool program to continue? How is SSC supporting that?
Is SSC talking with other afterschool providers to have a contingency plan in place in case FOHM can no longer fund it?
How many volunteer hours have gone into SSC in the last few years? What is expected of an SSC member in terms of time?
What does SSC do to acknowledge staff, community members for outstanding service to the school mission?
What do the principal and staff need most from parents to support the school?

SSC Meeting notes 3/8/2011

Monday, April 11th, 2011

HMCRA School Site Council, March 8, 2011

Attending staff: Christina, Kelly, Dara, Aaron, Alisa

Attending parents: Sarah, Michelle, Martin, Vincent, Liz T, Liz J

1.  Feedback from citywide summit:

- many workshops on topics as diverse as how to run SSC, middle school pathways, restorative justice, balanced scorecard changes

- parents encouraged to participate in future years – usually every end of February

2.  District changes in Excel funding for afterschool programs

- District will require us to submit renewal confirmation annually of after school service provider (otherwise known as CBO)

- the objective of annual confirmation is to ensure that vision and goals of school are aligned with afterschool program accountability measures and expenditures of those grant funds

- there was general consensus of SSC members that a parent advisory body should be formed to help decision-making process

- there were questions about whether Christina’s roles of being on board of FOHM and being the site administrator and being accountable for after school program implementation was a good synthesis or too much responsibility with inherent conflict.

3.  Balanced Scorecard – due at the end of April – all SSC members were given the new format and asked to read and write comments on it IN PREPARATION OF NEXT MEETING April 12.

4.  Vote on budget from District: Christina presented a proposed distribution of funds expected from SFUSD, including “floorplan” base funding for principal, secretary, and faculty; and additional funding that covers some or all of 4 additional key staff including one of our teachers, student advisor, parent liaison, and teacher aide/paraprofessional.  The proposed budget does not include any additional staff losses over the current year.

Most members endorsed the proposed budget with the assumption that the final numbers from the District will not be lower, and that additional funds from FOHM and PFC shared in 2010/2011 will also be available in 2011/2012.  There was at least one vote of “abstain” and a few absent members who did not vote.