Arts Academy Revitalization Action Team

Arts Academy Meeting Notes, Jan. 18, 2007

January 18, 2007 at 2:40 pm | In Minutes |

Summary:

Next meeting: Monday, January 22 @ 1:40 p.m. in the Music room.

We did a recap of the Wednesday presentation.

We will ask Sue Steele to manage Art Academy monies so that those accounts will be separate from the PPS budget, and thus not affected by the budget freeze.

We had an update about the visit to the MET School in Providence.

Present:

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

Full Notes (paraphrased):

Elizabeth distributed copies of the timeline that she had typed up.

We did a recap/post-mortem of the Wednesday presentation to the faculty and shared our reactions.

We discussed the $650 the A.A. received from the plea letter. Right now it’s in a Student Activities account, and the way to pay Artists-in-Residence is to transfer it into another account and pay out of that (because Student Activities accounts can’t be used to pay Artists-in-Residence, but that’s what the money is earmarked for). The problem is that as soon as the budget gets frozen, the Student Activities money does remain intact, but we can’t transfer it to another account to pay artists.

The solution to this dilemma is to let Sue Steele handle our money for us. She does this for a number of school organizations. Because the Portland Partnership has 501c3 status, she can manage our money outside of the Portland Public Schools budget. Donations and fundraising monies can also be managed by Sue. Problem solved!

Vicky, Phil and Jill gave a quick update about their trip to the MET School in Providence. It sounded like much of what is going on at the MET could easily be implemented here. There is a lot of information online at their Web site, and Vicky, Phil and Jill have information packets. One big question we have is how they award credits in academic disciplines when all of their teachers are generalists (without certification in academic content areas). We need to investigate this to see whether we can do something about awarding academic credits from PATHS. There did seem to be a lot of teacher burnout happening at the MET. We should talk to CBHS teachers here about their experiences also. CBHS is similar in some ways to the MET (advisory groups, mentoring the same students for 4 years).