Wednesday March 17, 2010

I'm back from my brief "hiatus" during which I skipped attending 2nd Cup and writing my blog in order to write a $1 million grant to support MLC arts program. Keep your fingers crossed!

Today we talked about the following:

Enrollment for 2010 - 2011: A question was asked regarding the fact that we decided to enroll 3 kindergarten classes in 2010 from our lottery on March 5 and how that would impact the facility and current enrollment. The decision to enroll 60 versus 40 new Kinders in the fall was based on our current enrollment numbers and projects for several years out and keeping us under 400 students which is our capacity. We will need to re-design the use of Room 2 in order to enroll the extra kindergarten class and we will likely have a 4/5 split in the upper graders rather than 4 small classes of two 4th's and two 5th's which we have now. Incidentally, we had 92 people participate in the Kinder lottery including 26 staff children/sibling perfences!

Data Collection: At the Town Hall Meeting last week, Toby mentioned the use of a tool called ZOOM for data collection and analysis and a parents asked to know more about it. ZOOM is a tool that allows us to upload all of the data we have on students including thier test scores, reading assessments, periodic assessments given by teachers, etc. to enable us to analyze needs for students, teachers, etc. In addition, we are using Measuring Up - which is are sample tests aligned with standards and similiar to the state tests that we are giving to students in grades 4-8 currently to assess specific skill-based needs that need to be addressed schoolwide, by grade, by class and by student. ZOOM produces reports based on these assessments that can help us see where the gaps are and which questions students or groups of students are missing.

Letters to Support Senate Bill: I (Gayle) passed around letters of support for interested parents to sign in support of a senate bill to include standards-based primary language achievement tests for English Learners in the state accountability system AND to allow English Only students in dual language programs to take the Spanish Standards Test as well! Right now, our EO's take Aprenda - a different test than the English Learners and it doesn't allow us to collect comprehensive data - and none of it is factored into our API or other data viewed and communicated publicly by the state. It's an effort led by a group called Californians Together. This would be HUGE for schools like MLC, as you can imagine where our test scores in English only do not tell a complete picture as to the academic progress of our students.

Gala Debrief: We debriefed many aspects of the gala including fundraising goals, venue, connections made, general outreach and publicity, and improvements/goals for next year. The Committee will be meeting in the future for a full debrief/2011 planning session