Arts Academy Revitalization Action Team

Arts Academy Meeting Notes, Oct. 16, 2006

October 16, 2006 at 1:40 pm | In Minutes |

Summary:

Next meeting: Thursday, October 19th, at 1:40 p.m. in the Music room.

Handouts distributed:

• short-term and long-term AARAT goals
• Education Weekly article about Connecticut tech. school reform

Argy Nestor is here tomorrow. Class visits in the A.M. Bring your lunch to the Music room at 10:30.

Elizabeth will be working with Sue Steele on how to connect with the community, and with John Marcigliano on grant-writing. This frees up the AARAT to work on visioning. Elizabeth will send a weekly e-mail update to free up meeting time for visioning.

The Visioning Night is tomorrow. We need a representative to attend the Academic Rigor session.

The Graduation Requirements Task Force’s current proposal looks scary for vocational schools. We need to be proactive and start to detail how our programs will prepare students to meet the standards for English and Math. The literacy specialist can help us with this. Also, Vicky will contact Derek Pierce about getting together with CBHS Math teachers to get more math into our curricula.

At our next meeting, we will develop a timeline, with action items for each timeline item.

Present:

• Vicky Stubbs
• Phil Divinsky
• Valerie Green
• Jill Irving
• Tom Lafavore
• Dave Nichols
• John Marcigliano
• Lisa Hicks
• Jane Krasnow

Full Notes (paraphrased):

The meeting opened with some updates about how Elizabeth will be using her time, and in what capacity the AARAT will be interacting with Elizabeth. Sue Steele has offered to help Elizabeth learn about the "community-connectedness piece" of her work at PATHS. Elizabeth has already started to learn about the Portland Partnership’s volunteer procedures, and will meet with Kara VanDorsten (the Partnership’s VISTA) on Mondays to continue learning about how the Partnership has learned to do things. Elizabeth will write a weekly report on e-mail and send it to the AARAT members to free up more meeting time for visioning. Elizabeth will work with John Marcigliano (the PATHS Program Developer) on grant-writing. The members of the AARAT are then free to do visioning!

Argy Nestor will visit tomorrow, 10/17. Elizabeth will put together a packet for her with course brochures and the document detailing our team’s short-term and long-term goals.

Vicky: how much do we vision and when do we just jump in and start doing?

Tomorrow is the Visioning Night. Most AARAT members will go to the Arts Academy session. Val will go to the New Programs session. We need someone to go to the Academic Rigor session.

Tom spoke a bit about the Graduation Task Force, which met this morning. The proposed state requirements are "scary". Portland’s Graduation Task Force won’t make any new recommendations until the legislation actually is in effect. The current proposal is:

• 4 years of English
• 4 years of Math
• 3 years of Social Studies
• 3 years of Science
• a Visual/Performing Art piece (to be implemented by 2012)
• a health/PE piece

Tom has the state’s PowerPoint presentation if anyone would like to see it. He noted that the presentation is somewhat contradictory, since it first states the yearly requirements, and then goes on to say that students will be tested on the Learning Results, begging the question, "what if a middle-schooler takes the math test and passes it? Does he still have to take 4 years of high school math?" Also, state requirements don’t take into account the type of students Portland has: for example, the 17-year-old immigrant from a refugee camp who speaks no English.

At the next meeting, we should create a timeline for what we want to do, with actions for each timeline item.

Tom suggested that our mission statement should involve literacy. Lisa: We all need to be creative thinkers!

Tom: students have to recognize patterns even more than algorithms (to meet Learning results for Algebra II). How do we teach to that? Tom distributed an article from Education Weekly about technical school reform in Connecticut. Quote: "Ms. Hughes credits some of the students’ academic gains to better cooperation between academic and career teachers. Bringing the two groups of teachers together helps them to craft strategies for reinforcing the academic material, such as geometry and physics, in the trade programs, and vice versa, she said."

"Rigorous academics" means that we need to have more than elementary math to gain credibility with high schools. How can we put more math into our programs? It’s exciting that we’ll have a literacy specialist this year to help us with our curricula–what about a math specialist to do the same thing with math?

Can we ask the CBHS math teachers to work with us on this? Vicky will contact Derek Pierce about this.