Minutes of the May 11^th, 2016 meeting of

The 19^th Ward Community Association Schools Committee

Attendees: John Boutet, John Laing, Dan Ross, Jay Ross

Approval of April minutes

Accepted after a change

Spelling Bee Wrap-Up/Spend

Daniel Aliber from the fraternity has put together a post mortem of the event and it is attached. In December we provided a budget for the Spelling Bee, which had $2,540 in spend. The actual spend for our initiatives was $2,244.20. In addition there was $1775 spent on gift cards, of which $450 has not been distributed. We reviewed the spend items to provide an initial sense of the spend in 2017 with the following comments:

Scripps word list ($136), the school 44 coordinator is making up word lists from the past several years and common core words so this expense would not be repeated but their may be some expense for the teacher;

pencils ($137.55) these were the students’ favorites but there are many left over (we ordered 500 with the expectation they would last two years) and could be used in the summer reading program

pencil sharpener ($29.99), will last ;

erasers and hi-liters ($515.24), not as successful as pencils, maybe try something else next year, could also be used for the summer program;

t-shirts ($975.42), successful, plan on continuing next year ;

In-school celebrations ($450), would continue based on the impact in the schools ;

Summer Program

Sheila Driscoll is directing the summer program to be run by the urban fellow. Details are yet to be worked out, but we have supplied Sheila with prospective volunteers from Americore volunteers and the fraternity.

School 16 status

No news from Mike Schmidt but priority of school 16 has been confirmed with school board meetings.

Concern with “farming out” students when subs aren’t available was discussed. Will be raised at coffee and conversation with the superintendent.

School 44 status

CET meetings are in progress

Discussion of Charter School proposal

T. Felton is developing a proposal for a STEAM charter school to start in 2018 and is looking for a location in the Southwest quadrant of the city. We agreed that the schools committee should review the proposal and decide on the response for the association, as we did several years ago with the charter on Chili Ave. In that case we chose to stay neutral, and not give them a letter of support. We will invite him to our October meeting.

Old/New Business

Our next meeting will be joint with the executive committee. In the meantime we need to update our information for Square Fair where we will have a table.

Next Meeting

Wednesday, June 8^th at 7 pm in the 19^th ward association office.