Arts Academy Revitalization Action Team

Arts Academy Meeting Notes, Sept. 28, 2006

Summary:

Next meeting: Monday, October 2nd in the Music room.

The Visioning Night format has not been set. We’d like to make a very brief statement about the work we’re doing and ask interested people to talk to us.

We need to work on "selling" art as an important part of learning as part of our visioning. We need to:

• document our curriculum-sharing
• get kids’ views on having more inter-curricular classes/choices.
• start figuring out what courses we should offer and how kids will move through the curricula.

We’d like more info on these schools:

• Many Flags
• The MET School

Elizabeth is working on fundraising and on a contact database.

Present:

• Vicky Stubbs
• Phil Divinsky
• Valerie Green
• Elizabeth Watson
• Dave Nichols
• Lisa Hicks
• Jill Irving
• John Marcigliano

Full Notes (paraphrased):

We started with a recap of the Monday meeting with David Ruff. All felt overwhelmed with information, lots of which we have little control over.

Phil advised us to take Tom’s advice: "take small steps". What do we want to get done by the end of the year?

Other questions that came from this: Can we as teachers have that power to lead the school in a direction? What about a Board of Directors?

We’re not sure whether all of the "big picture" stuff is what interests us in the short term, but we want to keep David Ruff informed of what we’re doing.

Maybe our first-year goal is to have something to present to Mary Jo. We have to work on how to "sell" our academy: how do we show that arts are important for learning? We need to be able to talk that up and show it.

A short discussion about the October 17th Visioning Night: Should we talk about our visioning during the Visioning Night? Given that the format for the night hasn’t been decided and that we aren’t very far along (and don’t necessarily want to open up the doors for too many people to vision with us, because it would make the group unwieldy), we should probably just do a short summary of what our group is doing and ask for interested people to let us know who they are. The deadline for Visioning Night attendees is October 6.

Lisa was bothered by David Ruff’s comment that voc. ed. isn’t working, which led into a conversation about what a new vision of voc. ed. might look like.

Lisa: maybe we should just start figuring out what courses would look like, start planning how students would move through the curriculum, and then later go back to logistics.

On the same theme of a new look at voc. ed., John spoke briefly about Many Flags (which is combining with the university and with Mid-Coast and Rockland HS): they’re doing a completely different model. English, Math & Social Studies teachers are at the vocational school. They have 2 2-hour sessions with an hour break between them. Kids take 40-minute blocks when they can be pulled out for academics.

We’d like to know what they’re doing and whether Mid-Coast’s schedule or model would change as a result of the merging of the schools.

David Ruff talked about "autonomy" a lot, which could be a sticky issue–need to be careful not to make it sound like "us" and "them" (A.A. vs. rest of school).

Dave N. asked, "where does Graphic Arts fit in?" which started everyone talking about curriculum sharing. Already this year Web Programming students are going to Diane for some art background, and the Electricity students are showing the Music students how to test wires. This is exciting! We need to keep data on curriculum sharing. Also, we should interview students and find out how they feel about offering kids more (inter-curricular) choices. Again, interviews with kids would help us present our vision to the community, the school board, etc. PATHS is particularly interesting because we have the ability to create connections between courses that aren’t always obvious, such as Electricity with Music.

School visits: we’d like to visit the MET school in Providence. It’s very expensive ($175/day per person or $300/2 days). However, John is writing a proposal to them to say what we’re planning and what we could afford for a visit. Elizabeth will also visit the Boston Arts Academy at a later date.

Work plan for Elizabeth: she is collecting names for a contact database. Part of this year’s work plan is to raise $5K for artist-in-residence funding. The money can’t go into the student activities fund and be paid to artists, so it must go to Ellen.

Fundraising ideas: carts for Tuesday afternoon to sell food for people taking the Community of Learners classes. Also, we should see whether local artists could come in and spend some time with kids as part of a benifit concert or fundraiser.

Finally, we talked about how to free Vicky up for 1 session a week so that she has more time to do VISTA stuff. We all need to think about what we can do to get coverage for her.