Buker School Council

Thursday, January 28, 2010

^3:30-4:30am

Agenda

Welcome and Announcements

Budget FY11

• Update

Homework

• Staff Assessment
• Parent Input
• Current Practice vs. Published Guidelines
• Next steps…

Transportation Policy Review

2009-2010 Goals

Additional questions, concerns, and/or topics for future meetings…

Questions to guide us…

· What do we (Buker School) believe about homework?

· What feelings does our parent community have towards homework?

· How can we bring the school’s and parents’ beliefs about homework into alignment? Does this matter?

· What are our thoughts on the existing homework guidelines?

· What recommendations, if any, which are consistent with our collective (school and parent) beliefs, do we have for the homework guidelines?

Buker School Council

Thursday, January 28, 2010

^3:30-4:30am

Meeting Minutes

Present: Amy Pasquarello, Kennon Anderson, Nancy McLean, Nichole Miller, Kathy O’Shea, Brian O’Donoghue

Budget FY11

• Dr. McGrath will present the preliminary budget to the school committee on 2/4/10.
• The budget is based on 2.2 million dollars of reductions, but we are hopeful that it will not require that level of cuts.
• We are presenting a worst case scenario.

Homework

• The staff reviewed our homework at each grade level in order to measure it against our district guidelines in the parent handbook.
• Observations noted by the staff included: more math at 3^rd grade, grade 1 may exceed time expectations, too much vs. too little it depends on the child, grade 1-2 experienced the greatest jump, math extensions are required in grade 3 but not in grades 4 or 5, more parent instruction is needed for their role, grade 2 had a discrepancy between classes
• The staff will review these observations during the 2/24 building meeting and determine the next steps.

Transportation Policy Review

• We are currently collecting data on bus changes and numbers of students riding the different buses.

2009-2010 Goals

• We reviewed our achievement goals in language arts and math, curriculum mapping, and communication and considered what additional support the school council could provide.

• Nancy asked about bullying at Buker School and we discussed the survey completed three years ago that indicated there were no indications that bullying was a significant problem. It may be time to do another survey to see where we are now. There is a new concern with email and internet bullying starting with younger students and it would be interesting to see how active our students are with the internet at home. The Essex County District Attorney’s Office is in the process of publishing a curriculum on internet safety and Brian will follow-up with any opportunities to use that with our students when it is available.

Questions to guide us…

· What do we (Buker School) believe about homework?

· What feelings does our parent community have towards homework?

· How can we bring the school’s and parents’ beliefs about homework into alignment? Does this matter?

· What are our thoughts on the existing homework guidelines?

· What recommendations, if any, which are consistent with our collective (school and parent) beliefs, do we have for the homework guidelines?