Arts Academy Revitalization Action Team

Arts Academy Meeting Notes, Oct. 2, 2006

Summary:

No meeting on Thursday. No meeting next Monday because of the holiday. Next meeting is Thursday, October 12 @ 1:40 in the Music room.

Articles distributed:

• Many Flags
• Dennis Littky (MET school)
• Big Picture Company
• Argy Nestor (ME Dept of Ed.)

Most of the discussion centered around our long-term goal of becoming a comprehensive high school. Long-term, we need to think about:

• Getting other teachers (Math/English/Science/Soc. Studies/etc.) here or somehow working with our students. Getting a teacher here would probably mean transferring a teacher from another school in today’s budget times.
• Understanding the work that the graduation task force is doing at the state level to determine credit requirements. If students aren’t necessarily held to hourly requirements, but are held to standards, then we can figure out how we can prepare our students to meet those standards.
• Possibly becoming a school for Portland Schools only (and for students whose parents want to pay tuition).

In the short term, we need to think about:

• Making sure our curricula meet the new standards as set forth in the Maine Learning Results.

Present:

• Vicky Stubbs
• Jane Krasnow
• Phil Divinsky
• Diane Manzi
• Valerie Green
• Lisa Hicks
• Tom Lafavore
• Dave Nichols
• Elizabeth Watson

Full Notes (paraphrased):

There will be no meeting on Thursday, October 5. Next meeting is Thursday, October 12.

Elizabeth distributed an article from the Bangor Daily News about Many Flags. It is a possible model for us regarding collaboration between secondary and post-secondary institutions. Kennebec Valley & others put up money for this, to the tune of $7500 or so. This situation may be more college prep and a lot of community outreach, (for example, a lot of the community wanted access to technology resources that will be at the school). Whether or not Many Flags is a model for us, we should look at the "pull-out" programs for literacy skills that they currently have in place.

Elizabeth will talk to John Marcigliano and ask what contact he’s had with Many Flags. It would be nice to attend one of their organizational meetings, if possible.

Elizabeth distributed an article about Dennis Littky (the founder of the MET school). It’s very expensive to visit the MET school, but John has written a proposal to send to them detailing our reasons for wanting to visit and what we could afford, to see if we can visit more cheaply. Elizabeth also distributed an article about The Big Picture Company.

Elizabeth distributed an article about Argy Nestor, the new Visual & Performing Arts Consultant for the Maine Dept. of Education. She is starting from ground zero and is interested in visiting us. She will be here on October 17th during the day, and would like to meet with Music, Dance, & other members of the arts team. Elizabeth will be taking her around to the different team members’ classrooms, if that is OK. We will also provide her with the questions for the visioning night so we can discuss them with her.

Visioning discussion: we need to start with connections between curricula. Then we need to work on connection to literacy.

We had a disussion about our long-term goal of becoming a comprehensive high school. Where does that put us with PATHS? What happens to the culture of PATHS?

Tom asked: what are the pices that need to happen? We also need to take a close look at the work that the graduation task force is doing with graduation requirements: if we don’t get creative, PATHS will cease to exist because students won’t be able to get all of the credits required. We need to remember that students can get content in other content areas. However, we may need a Math teacher and an English teacher to help us teach and award credits. To make it past the school board, we’ll have to be in the situation where a teacher is being cut from another school and we can save the job by transferring that position to PATHS. Also, a Math teacher (for example) might not have to be in the building, but work on curriculum and grade assignments to award credit.

We need to know the details of the new graduation requirements. Does "4 years of Math/English" mean 4 years, or does it just mean "must meet the standards for Algebra II"? If it’s just about meeting standards, we could do it.

Long-term, we want to capture students for a whole day. Sending schools may make this difficult, even if parents from those schools want to send their kids here. The reality may be that it’s a Portland public school.

Incorporating Math/English/etc. will be messy. Do we start with the standards and change our curricula to match? Or do we take our curricula and expand it to fit in the Math/English? Probably will have to do both. The new Learning Results are now online. We should check them and look at the performance indicators to look at how our course content matches up. Students will be responsible for demonstrating knowledge on a state test. We need to prepare them for that.