WVC Conference

The Youth and Adults Transforming Schools Together (YATST) 2 day retreat!

The retreat was a great success the Winooski Voice Committee (WVC) had a productive and wonderful time. Both adults and students were able to refocus their efforts and begin to build a new and productive frame for continuing to work on student voice in Winooski.

Here are some of our accomplishments so far and where we are headed!

• A student Voice box has been purchased and prepped for hanging, and the unveiling ceremony is being planned post haste!
• With the support of Ms. Poquette the student counsel has been revamped
• The WVC is reviewing the focus group data from last year from a student perspective
• Research into “student” views and “faculty” views is continuing with the finalizing and distributing of a survey created at the YATST retreat.
• Interim and long term improvement projects are being created and discussed,
• Students have begun to set WVC agenda’s and conduct meetings.

The WVC is still evolving, and we appreciate the Design Committee’s continued to commitment to student voice, and collaboration!

The WVC are Rachel Aureli, Krystal Alexander, Steven Lawrence, Abdullahi Matan, Michael Mutty, Neyna Minert, Miranda Rouille, Michael Dumont II, Noah Everitt, Jackie Lynch, Marc McQuinn, and Courtney Poqutte.

Parent/ Community involvement

In response to the first parent and community involvement post,

I think that we need to be aware of our biases as to what this relationship looks like...

That being said, I believe that it this relationship looks like the school being a safe place for all community members to come and celebrate the achievements of the school, and community, academically as well as socially.  Additionally the school presents a a place for parents and community members to come for support in dealing with youth, and young adults, a place with expertise, and not judgment, in dealing with youth, and their particular needs.

I believe that school is responsible for building, and promoting this image/ capacity

Conversely I do not think that this relationship looks like...  

Parents and community members only being invited to events/ meetings, of crisis or when something is wrong.  

Community members viewing the school as not relating to them if they don't have children.

These are the beginnings of my thoughts, but I am weary to say that we need to try and set our goals at systematically changing the behavior/ culture of our community, I would rather take the approach that by changing what we do, the way we teach, the way we discipline, they way we lead, the community will be positively impacted...

Just some Ideas, please feel free to find and point out the many faults or inconsistencies.  I hope that we can begin a dialog on this subject so that we come out with a concept well defined, and attainable!

-Noah

ps.  Sorry about the duke of Winooski title, it is for another blog and I don't know how to turn it off.

Student Voice Post

Sorry this has taken so long but I have made it,  here is a summary of what has happened so far:

1) we reviewed the action plan

2) Came up with these new priorities:

-adjust the meeting schedule for more meetings

-research to increase participation

-Student credit for participation

-reporting at community meetings

-PD for teachers around encouraging student voice

- making the comity sustainable

- Continue team building

-Student voice as relating to School news paper

-After school programs

-Student leadership transition

Several of these are being worked on for our next scheduled meeting.

Additionally the WVC or the comity who went to the retreat over the summer has been meeting, and have developed some goals.  This group will be publishing another blog and news letter which I will link to this one when it comes on line.

Thats all for now!

-Noah

Community/Parent Voice Committee

The community/parent voice committee met for the first time on Monday, October 13th, 2008. This group had not been able to meet previously. Our first step was to review the action plan created in June. While the action plan had a lot of good ideas, it was decided that we needed to further study the issue of parent/community involvement. We came up with the following essential question: How can we increase parent and community involvement? After setting our mission with the previously listed essential question, we started to discuss what community/ parent involvement looks like. This discussion lead to our question for the group.

What should community/ parent involvement look like?

Design Team Summary

First of all, everyone should have received an invitation to be an author on this blog. Now, each committee leader (or anyone, for that matter) can post a summary. The majority of our last design team meeting was about getting updates from committees and how to keep motivated. We decided to keep in touch using this blog by writing a summary and asking a question for feedback. My blog question is how can we continue to to keep the design team moving forward when the team itself is split apart into committees?

Roll Call

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