Val will give a lesson to whoever (Donna H. and Gail?)  on how to use the registration application

Hospitality students will be tour guides.  It would be great to have a couple of tours, and to get visitors into areas of Building B.  We will get the map to Hospitality students by Wednesday.

Next meeting: MONDAY!

Dave, Val and Di will meet at lunch tomorrow to do the map.

• Vicky Stubbs
• Dave Beane
• Phil Divinsky
• Dave Nichols
• Jane Krasnow
• Diane Manzi
• Val Green

More PATHSFEST planning! Click on the tab above for details.

• Vicky Stubbs
• Phil Divinsky
• Dave Nichols
• Dave Beane
• Diane Manzi
• Jane Krasnow
• Val Green

More PATHSFEST planning: check here.

More PATHSFEST planning! Click here for updates.

Present:

• Vicky Stubbs
• Phil Divinsky
• Val Green
• Dave Beane
• Dave Nichols
• Jane Krasnow

Please see the PATHSFEST Planning page for updates (or read the full notes). We made lots of decisions about which students to invite and talked about publicity letters, post cards, and posters.

We also heard a brief update about Vicky and Phil’s meeting with Michael Hale about possible collaboration opportunities between PATHS and Casco Bay High School.

Present:

• Vicky Stubbs
• Phil Divinsky
• Val Green
• Diane Manzi
• Jane Krasnow
• Dave Nichols
• Dave Beane

Jill has had 1000 post cards printed for PATHSFEST.

We need to decide what we should do with middle school students. Are they coming? What about the 8th grade exploratory students? If Portland and Deering aren’t sending 9th graders, maybe we should be inviting Portland and Deering’s 9th graders instead.

It’s easy to invite 8th graders, with teachers, to PATHSFEST, is easy for us to say “yes” to. What about parents? How can we get parents here? Encourage them to be chaperones? Could we e-mail parents of 8th graders (e-mails in PowerSchool?) And then give some paper invites to the middle schools for people they know without e-mail. We could also give out an invitation for parents, and give it to 8th graders to bring home.

separate discussion: letters to students/parents of students who have visited PATHS this year. The administration agreed that they could send this. Where is the money coming from?

For this project, it’s more likely that we could access money from our student activities accounts instead of our budgets, which are semi-frozen at this point.

Summary of PATHSFEST:

inviting 8th grade teachers and students from:
Lyman Moore
Lincoln
King

Inviting: 8th grade parents from those schools

Inviting: prior visitors

Need: coordinate the prior visitors. Who is in charge of a visitor who visited 3 programs? Letter to visitor could be a permission slip that could be signed by a parent and the principal of the sending school.

parent signature
student signature
administrator signature

Valerie will craft a letter to visitors and their parents, that includes a place for teachers to write a note and includes a permission slip.

Also: modify it slightly to be a post card for 8th graders’ parents.

We need to find a responsible student from each school to take a stack of post cards (100) to their sending school offices

Note: this idea has been nixed (see below)

Dave Beane: Windham, Bonny Eagle, Kennebunk, Casco Bay
Val: Deering, Gray, Greely
Dave N: Gorham, Yarmouth, Baxter
Diane: Scarborough, Falmouth, Portland
Jane: South Portland, Cape Elizabeth
Phil: South Portland, Westbrook

If we’re inviting students from sending schools, what if we get a ton of students and what about supervision and permission slips? Yikes!

Maybe instead we should just send letters to prior visitors and then send the post cards somewhere else. Where? Along with a letter, we should send a post card.

Also, we should invite our advisory committees.

Could John M. personally invite the guidance counselors and administrators?

Summary of things to do for PATHSFEST:
(copied to the “TO DO” tab at the top of the blog)
call middle schools and invite 8th grade teachers/students (John M.)
if possible, e-mail 8th grade parents with an invitation. (Phil will ask about this)
make a written invitation to PATHSFEST for 8th graders to bring home to parents. (Val)
send letter/permission slip to prior visitors, along with a PATHSFEST post card (Val will make a letter)
ask John to call sending schools to notify them that more students than usual may be on to buses 5/22.
ask John to personally invite guidance and administration from sending schools.
encourage to invite advisory committees to PATHSFEST.

attach post cards to poster, maybe? Make them pads and stick to the posters. (Val will work on this)

Update on collaboration with CBHS (meeting with Michael Hale)

lots of similarities with cross-curricular stuff between CBHS and PATHS
Bruce Tracy (sp?) will be working with 19 CBHS students next week in Lisa’s space . Some of Vicky’s students will be participating, and CBHS students will have the option of recording down in Vicky’s class. Vicky’s students who are participating in the intensive need to be excused for a whole week from their sending schools. Performance will be held in Room 250 on Friday.

Counting CBHS kids towards our enrollment will make it more enticing for PATHS teachers to want to participate.

CBHS was interested to hear our ideas about us becoming a comprehensive high school.

When CBHS was figuring out standards for intensives, they had an English teacher right there to help. It made the whole process very smooth.

Next week we’ll hear about Phil and Vicky’s trip to the creativity conference at the Samoset.

Note: let’s revisit the idea of having teacher photos and prominent signage for CBHS and PATHS right inside the main doors.

• Vicky Stubbs
• Phil Divinsky
• Val Green

We had a short meeting today, due to the emergency staff meeting. Notes:

Revised post card looks great. 100 post cards to all 23 sending schools, so about 2300 (say 2500) cards, + 10 cards per staff person, so an extra 350. Plus additional cards for Building B? How many? We need 2850.

Student visitors get a letter (we need to write this).

Posters: the PATHSFEST logo and “A Celebration of Student Learning” need to be more prominent, and the description needs to be friendlier and more welcoming on the poster instead of a list of things.

About 125 posters for PATHSFEST. 3 per sending school, plus some for teachers to hang up around town and around school.

Vicky asked Shoshana to meet with Dave B. after the fashion show to talk about a PATHSFEST press release.

Maybe Tina can do a PATHSFEST release for the Press Herald, with photos from John (Valerie’s job is to get photos from John).

Present:

• Kate Harvey
• Phil Divinsky
• Vicky Stubbs
• Valerie Green

PATHSFEST timeline planning:

We have a balloon coming and a radio station coming, thanks to Jill. We like her post card also; we did some editing. Vicky will take the edited version to Jill.

2-day PATHSFEST idea: bring the visitors back on PATHSFEST day, each teacher is responsible for his/her visitors.

Who could be responsible for contacting the accepted visitors to tell them about PATHSFEST? Phil will ask about this.

Just a post card might get tossed by visitors. Maybe a visitor letter that could be sent to accepted visitors. Addressed to parents and kids, inviting parents to come dalso. Vicky will draft a letter to visitors and their parents.

We will need funds for this. May be able to get money because it’s recruitment related.

Middle schools: do we invite Portland middle schools? All middle schools? We need to be clear that middle school teachers need to monitor their students. Tina could also help with the inviting. Let’s invite King, Lincoln and Lyman Moore students. Phil will ask Tina if she can help with this.

Press release: ask Shoshana (Vicky will ask Dave to work on this with Shoshana)
Val will put some pictures on the Web site and give Shoshana a disk of photos.
Val will get a disk of photos from John M. and share it with Shoshana.

Val will update last year’s poster this week. We’ll see if we can print it on Dave N’s new color printer.

On April 7th, we have some time at the staff meeting to discuss whether PATHSFEST could take place in one spot (like in a tent or on the 1st floor or in building B) or whether it will be in classrooms. How much input should the staff get, and can we wait until April 7th to make that decision?

We’d like to stay with 5/22 because after that, Seniors are already leaving (some will already be gone by the 22nd). Graduation week is too full already. Vicky will send e-mail to the staff asking for feedback on the date of PATHSFEST.

For staff meeting and next week: get PATHSFEST participation survey.

Vicky will ask Dave N. if he would like to lead the student steering committee for PATHSFEST.

Agenda for next week:
planning for the PATHSFEST discussion at the staff meeting

• Vicky Stubbs
• Dave Nichols
• Diane Manzi
• Val Green
• Dave Beane

Vicky started by recounting her conversation with Lisa about the Dance program and the enrollment numbers.
- kids talking about what they like about the class (video?)
- important to talk about why this class is different than taking a class somewhere else.
- kids should get Phys Ed credit for the Dance class.
- need to go to the Phys Ed learning results and make sure everything is covered. Click here to see they Phys Ed MLRs.
- Bo could come into the Dance class and work with students on testimonials.

We took these ideas and others and here are the recommendations:
- check with John M. about Phys. Ed. credits
- check with Bo about leading students in writing testimonials
- check with Dave B. about a video montage for hallway, Channel 3 TV, and Web site
- check with Val about Web site update

We spent most of the time discussing our needs for semester courses and some of the issues involved. We will discuss Vicky and Lisa’s conversation around enrollment in Dance during the next meeting.

Next meeting: Wednesday, March 5th at 1:10 in Room 320

Agenda:

1. Discuss Dance program (20 minutes)
2. Possible subgroups for semester courses (30 minutes)
3. Possible subgroups for Dance enrollment conversation (30 minutes)
4. Check PATHSFEST timeline (10 minutes)

Present:

• Phil Divinsky
• Diane Manzi
• Valerie Green
• Vicky Stubbs
• Dave Beane

We’re going to talk about Vicky and Lisa’s discussion about enrollment and the Dance program next week, since we have a lot to discuss today.

AARAT Timeline work: we put up the old timeline to see whether we’ve missed any of the Spring work. What we noticed was that there is almost nothing on the timeline for 2008. Some of those goals are things like “Break ground for new building”. Time to update the timeline a bit.

One thing we wanted to get done was something to present to Central Office. We’re still working on our model. It’s good work…we’re not ready to present it yet, though. If we want to present our model by June, we need to figure out whether it’s more important than other things on our plate.

Do we put AARAT issues aside for the moment, to discuss more pressing issues such as Lisa’s enrollment, PATHSFEST, and semester classes? That’s the current feeling. Especially because semester classes are something we were talking about for AARAT anyway.

After PATHSFEST we will look at our timeline again and make a reasonable one for 2008-2009.

Semester Curriculum Work

Phil handed out a sheet that had our questions about semester courses from work we did last year.

What do we need to make semester courses happen for our programs? Not every program can be modified to be split into semesters. Many of our students can only come for 1 year anyway, so in that sense it could be better to have semester classes. Some classes could most easily offer a semester course in September only.

With a student entering mid-year, even if a student has a prerequisite, it’s not clean… we need to figure out what is linear and what can be chunked into a semester class. And really know what the prerequisites are.

Class culture can also be very different when a group of students enter a class in January. Right now the word is that if you can only offer a semester class in September.

Kids aren’t going to get as much with semester courses–they’ll get an introduction. They won’t be prepared for a certificate or a career with a semester course.

Also: how do teachers split themselves into a teacher of a 2-year course AND simultaneously a semester teacher? It’s hard to make sure you’re paying attention to everyone when you’re splitting yourself between different groups of students in the same class.

One of the AARAT models we had was a college model: Music Theory 101, then 201 with prerequisites.

What happens when a student can’t get the semester s/he wants? Maybe we can teach 2 semester courses at once? It’s harder to manage–sometimes easier when there’s another adult to supervise one group (Music class has an Ed. Tech. one day a week, and that makes 2 levels working simultaneously possible).

We need: sequence mapping, categorizing, reorganizing curriculum, an Ed. Tech. at least once a week.

Springtime is a time when we have lower numbers (kids dropping, etc.), but that’s not the time when some of us want to offer a semester course.

Some students have alternating days at their high schools–will they even be able to make it for a semester?

This discussion about semester issues might make us look at alternatives that we could consider a 4-year Arts Academy.

We discussed having a recruitment day back-to-back with PATHSFEST, and we would invite middle school students on that day. Vicky will talk to John M. more about this.

We did some work on “what does a graduating student look like?”

Agenda for 2/6/08:

1. Review John M.’s response to a second day of PATHSFEST for recruiting (5 minutes)
2. Revise/review PATHSFEST timeline (10 minutes)
3. Visioning (30 minutes)

Present:

• Vicky Stubbs
• Phil Divinsky
• Dave Beane
• Val Green
• Diane Manzi
• Dave Nichols

Agenda:

1. craft an invitation to middle schools for PATHSFEST (20 minutes)
2. Visioning (30 minutes)
3. Agenda/ parking lot (10 minutes)

PATHSFEST:
Many clusters are happy to have middle school students come to PATHSFEST.
Some want to have PATHSFEST be a “fun day” and not a recruitment day. Do they have to be separate things?
Our first priority is a celebration for us.

What about: inviting all of the students who have visited this year? Then we’re responsible…which means that we would have to figure that out. That would be a tough thing to do. Maybe there’s a day that we can focus on recruitment and have it be separate from PATHSFEST. Maybe we do 5/22 AND 5/23? It’s sounding like it will be either/or, or that we should separate PATHSFEST into 2 separate days.

Who do we choose to invite, if we’re inviting outside groups? The big issue is chaperones.

We definitely need a recruitment day! Like a trade fair, where programs get to show their stuff. If we’re already set up for PATHSFEST, we could have a recruitment day back to back with PATHSFEST. BUT we can’t take on 5/22 AND 5/23. Someone else in the school needs to take this on.

We can’t give a presentation about PATHSFEST at the Feb. staff meeting because we don’t know enough details. Moved to March.

Visioning:

we did some editing on the “what does a graduating student look like?” list.

“map their own course of study” is something we need to discuss in the future, but it doesn’t necessarily fit in our “what does a student look like” list. Having “majors” and electives, etc…these are things that we need to think about.

Agenda for 2/6/08:

1. Review John M.’s response to a second day of PATHSFEST for recruiting (5 minutes)
2. Revise/review PATHSFEST timeline (10 minutes)
3. Visioning (30 minutes)