Harvey Milk Civil Rights AcademySan Francisco public elementary school

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.

SSC Notes 2/8/2011

Friday, February 11th, 2011

1. SSC will start 15 minutes earlier (5:45) for the rest of the 2010/11 school year. We are meeting earlier to help support members who also are part of the PFC spring carnival planning.

We decided, as a site council, that any non member attending the meetings to hold their questions until the end of the meeting. We feel that it is challenging to try and orient and/or catch up community members that are not regularly attending meetings. In an effort to best communicate with our community meeting agenda and minutes will be posted on the bulletin board across from Shawn’s office and be sent via the PFC yahoo group. Our community is welcome to provide input to meetings via council members: Martin Fein (Kinder parent), Sarah Kern (1st grade parent), Liz Janes (2nd grade parent), Elizabeth Torres (4th grade parent), Michelle Holdt (1st grade parent) Ms. Alisa (secretary), Ms. Peters (2nd grade teacher), Aaron Hall (3rd grade teacher), (Ms. Clark-5th grade teacher) and Ms. Velasco (Principal) or in writing prior to the meeting. Anyone is welcome to attend. We meet in room 213.

2. The District’s schoolwide summit will be held this Saturday, 2/12 from 8:30 to 12:30 at Everett Middle School, 450 Church Street. Registration online is at SFUSD.edu. This is a good opportunity to learn about the District’s budget and attend learning/listening sessions on academic strategies, group decision making for PFCs/SSCs.

3. Our preliminary budget is due to the District 3/24/11. The District is asking for two budgets: one with a small cut of $19.00/ student-$4,693 or 1.67% and a larger one that could cost this school over $80,000. Protection from cuts requires the Legislature to place on the June special election ballot, an extension of temporary tax increases. The measure would require support from 2/3 of the Legislature and more than half of the voters.
To soften the impacts of the cuts, the District is allowing some flexibility to carry over unspent funds to future years and to use them with broader discretion. In our case, this would apply to only about $1200 in our school & library block improvement grant funds.

4. Staff requested that an analyst from the SFUSD budget office meet with them to help answer budget questions.

5. A proposal was made by the Arts Committee to consider the offer of assistance for application for a grant fro the California Arts Council for a teacher training/art support program, Visual Thinking Strategies or “VTS.” Staff requested a meeting with the proponent, as accepting such a grant would require $2-3K fee, 10 lessons from each teacher next year using the technique, and accepting a visitor into the classroom for 12 lessons for students to practice. The commitment is for 3 years, and includes a full day of PD for teachers offsite at a museum at the beginning of the first of the three years. For more information see www.vtshome.org/pages/elementary. Applications are due 3/11/2011.