Family & Community Involvement / Physical Space

7/15/10 evening meeting (5:00-7:00 pm) with Wilbur Cross High School Community Stakeholders: Family: Parents, Guardians, and Significant Adults

We are restructuring our school so there are more positive connections among adults and our students.

Participants offered the following feedback to the existing subcommittees as they do their work this summer. Please comment on the blog at http://wchsteachers.blogspot.com/, contact committee members, as well as attend meetings of the subcommittees.





Scheduling feedback
• Reflection needed on the success of block schedule: Where is it working; not working? Offer training for staff who struggle with block teaching


Policies and Procedures feedback
• With the new house structure, there is a need for a list/flow chart of the key individuals to contact for specific concerns.

Parents, Guardians, and Significant Adult Engagement feedback
• Need a calendar of events, updated constantly (electronically) and distributed on the first of month (email or paperless – option given on information sheet filled in during orientation; sign up for email distribution on web site (not yet established)).

• Need a weekly event schedule that is easily accessed
• Need to strengthen the Teacher : Parents, Guardians, and Significant Adult communication
• Make use of “Mayor’s Monday” information (include links to our school and events)
• School needs to consciously address needs that families may be unable to
• Use athletic events to engage Parents, Guardians, and Significant Adults

Advisory feedback

• What is the future of freshman seminar (what will the nature of the course be, Yale debate team participation, Achieve 3000, PSAT, SAT prep, college resume writing, career exploration, etc.)
• Will Advisory have a grade on the transcript?
• Advisory to do triage for Guidance – intervention before student issues
• Expand number of Proclamations (school newspaper) as well as generate a radio broadcast
• Have students record announcements (newscast-style) to be broadcast in school and on public access CTV (on a daily basis)

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Next steps:
• postings around ongoing Wilbur Cross High School improvement at http://wchsteachers.blogspot.com/
• ***please comment, using your first.last name so we may be able to follow up with clarifying questions***
• posting to http://schools.nhps.net/wcross/
• email updates
• Next evening meeting (not yet scheduled) will start at 6:00 and focus on specific issues

Respectfully submitted,

Chris Willems

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Physical Space / family involvement committee meeting notes

7/7/10 from 8:30-11:00 in E205

Present: Maria Fiore, Ann Nuzzo, Chris Willems, Ashley Yanyac

This meeting focused on family involvement.

We brainstormed ways to increase the family/parent/guardian/significant adult engagement at WCHS.

We had a focused discussion that we summarize as the following 5 recommendations:

1. All school staff needs to positively engage with the family/ parent/ guardian/ significant adult. We would like all houses to agree to sponsor at least one event each quarter (marking period) that engages members of the extended family unit in an event at the school.

2. Starting with the beginning of the year, we feel it is important to bring parents on as partners, and make them feel at home in the school. They are our allies, not adversaries.

To that end, we would like to suggest a restructuring of the “Meet the Teacher” night to an event that is house-based and more of an informal interaction. The rationale is the present model puts parents/guardians in the roles of children (sitting in front of the teacher) that frequently reawakens school anxiety in parents/guardians.

We envision an evening of food (brought by parents, students and teachers) and classrooms used as demonstrations of the studentlearning that has been going on (moving toward student-led conferences). We also envision learning activities for attendees, music played, and informal conversations among teachers, significant adults, and children. We would like more feedback from parents and the PTO on this idea.

This type of informal event could also mark the end of a particular unit of study during the course of the year.

We also suggest various family evening events during the year, such as movie night in auditorium, science night, pool party & open gym with many sports and games, cooking/pizza making at school in afternoon (by students) and house dinner that night…

(Unresolved issue: How elective courses fit into this program, with students across houses.)

3. We need to centralize and improve dissemination of school event information. The foyer should have a large event calendar (built in our shop? Updated/managed by a graphic design club) which is also replicated on our website, and sent home (hard copy) on the first every month.

We suggest a club/activity fair where all clubs can set up booths and let kids know about programs available. This could be an advisory activity in late September/Early October.

4. Ongoing parental contact, at the house level, is essential.Education is all about relationship building. It is critical that the advisor and/or the house teachers are in regular contact with the significant adults in our students’ lives.

Phone calls, text messages, and emails.

Use advisory as way to build connections with significant adults.

5. PTO engagement. Parents need to have a voice in the transformation of Wilbur Cross. Each house needs to send at least one teacher to every PTO meeting. Teachers need to do more for the PTO.

In turn, we can use more parent support with learning projects, trips, and the specialized knowledge and expertise of our parents.

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We discussed several other areas of concern that affect the entire school, such as:

-Learning needs to be engaging and meaningful… and not just test prep.

-We need to have high behavioral and academic expectations. Adults must not disrespect students and not tolerate (codify) disrespect from students. Students need to learn to clean up after themselves (in class, in the café, their lockers at the end of the year…) and we adults have to model the desired behavior.

-The disruptions of learning that occur as unnecessary announcements are made school wide. All of our lives are chaotic enough without these interruptions. They should only be used in the case of real (or simulated code red) emergency.

-Do we have an alumni/a coordinator or development director? There are a lot of WCHS grads out there that would like to give back to their school – if they were only asked… Some come back to speak to our students, but we’d like to see this network expanded.

Respectfully submitted,

Chris Willems

Thanks to Ashley Yanyac for taking and typing up meeting minutes. We meet as a full reform committee at 8:30 a.m. on Thursday, July 1, 2010 in the library media center of Wilbur Cross H.S..
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SLC Transformation Committee
Physical Space Sub-Committee
Minutes
June 25, 2010 in Library Media Center

Attendance: Chris Willems, Ashley Yanyac, Joseph Gonzalez, Patricia Schread, Lee Saltzman, David Marchesani, Louis DeLucia, Maria Orto, Maria Fiore, Ann Nuzzo, Michele Sherban-Kline, and
Nancy James.

Meeting was called to order at 8:20am by Chris Willems.

1. Roles for the meeting were designated:
a. David Marchesani was agreed upon to be the facilitator.
b. Lee Saltzman was the time keeper.
c. Ashley Yanyac was the note taker.

2. Primary goal for meeting was to, as a group; decide on how to best split up the physical space of Wilbur Cross High School into four separate (but equal) houses.

3. Resource Rooms are desired for every house, but this room should be used as a Read 180 room, Resource Room, and overall student focused room. One house will not need a Resource Room for all periods of the day.

4. The following split of the building was agreed upon by the Physical Space Sub-Committee:
a. House One: the Third Floor B Wing’s nine non-Science labs (B302, B304, B306, B308, B310, B312, B313, B311, and B309) along with the following Second Floor Rooms (B219, B220, B221, and B222).
i. B300 is suggested for an In-School Suspension room for this house.
ii. B303 could potentially be a Business Ed. Room.
b. House Two: V-Wing Classrooms (V101, V103, V106, V107, and V109) will be combined with the 2nd floor E-Wing Classes (E201, E203, and E205) the 1st Floor A-Wing classrooms (A108, A106, and A104) and the remaining B-Wing Classrooms (B223 & B224).
i. E207 should be an In-School Suspension room for this house.
c. House Three: 2nd Floor A Wing, 13 classrooms is perfect size for house (A203, A205, A207, A209, A211, A201, A202, A204, A206, A208, A210, A214, and A215).
d. House Four: 2nd Floor B Wing, 12 classrooms which includes B206 which is currently the teacher room (B206, B208, B210, B212, B214, B202, B205, B207, B209, B211, B213, and B215).

5. All Science Labs will be housed on the 3rd Floor.

6. CAPT Room (B218) will remain a secure room for CAPT materials only.

7. For House Two it is recommended that the V-Wing classes be for Upperclassmen and that the Freshmen remain in the second floor for the majority of their classes.

8. Goal should be for minimal student movement.

9. Guidance, Clerks, and Administrator’s Offices can be decided later once staff is divided into the Houses.

10. S. Kilburn asked that teachers not move the computers out of the rooms as the computers are assigned to classrooms not teachers.

11. S. Kilburn asked for consideration for the movement of Business Labs as they are specifically set up to handle bandwidth within individual servers in the building.

12. There will be four mobile PC Labs, one assigned to each House along with the other Computer Labs available throughout the building.

13. Library is not a structuring issue; the library is for the whole buildings use.

14. Alan Gibbons requested in writing that the ELL Department, and particularly the ACCELL classes, be housed in two classrooms that are directly next to each other in order to share resources within the department. These rooms will also be used for secure testing as well as team meetings. There are rooms that exist next to each other in at least two locations in the building that would fit this request.

Meeting concluded at 9:15am.

7/1/10 update:

This committee next meets on July 7 at 8:30 a.m. in the Wilbur Cross Library Media Center.

We will continue to brainstorm family involvement strategies such as dinner discussions (at school and in the community, offerings at school that families can use - such as personal finance, saving strategies, GED, computer training - please email me others. We would also like to engage families to teach TEACHERS languages (Spanish, French) and bring other talents to Wilbur Cross.

Items to be addressed with Michele Sherban-Kline

traffic flow planning

security deployment

common teacher resource room

lunch

Offices: house administration, clerks, ISS, guidance, social work, others?.

Other:

color-coded passes for each team (p&p concern?)