1997-03-18 School Committee Minutes - joint School Council and PTO

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!ley z~~~~. Noted ® March 18 Combined Meeting coo ommittee, School Council, P.T.O. Ms. Fidele's class made a presentation including a shortened version of the video they prepared for the Rosewood School in Great Britain. They explained that the program began with penpals set up between RM.H.S. students and Rosewood students. Letters included information about RM.H.S. activities, the students, their families, and jobs they hold. After letters were exchanged, the class produced a 45 minute video tape for which they wrote the script and did the filming. So far the students have discovered the following similarities about themselves: they are the same ages, they will soon get their driver's licenses, and they enjoy the same sports. They have discovered the following differences: the students at Rosewood live in dormitories, Rosewood is an all boys school, students in Great Britain attend school until they are 16 and then choose to go on to a prep. school to prepare for college, or go into a job working during the day and attend school at night. The two groups also exchanged Christmas cards. Currently they are waiting for a response to their video tape from the Rosewood students. Ms. Fidele and the Rosewood representative are discussing the possibility of a student exchange in the future. This project allowed the students to use technology, presentation skill, and research schools. In addition to this project, Ms. Fidele's class also performed a community service by making cookies and buying toys with money they collected for an AIDS orphanage where children live who have lost their parents to AIDS. They delivered the cookies and toys to the children for Christmas. They would like to do something else for these children before the school year ends. Mr. Orlando passed out two items for discussion: bulleted items from his entry plan and also a categorized list of the bulleted items. The categories of the items were: programmatic, student-centered issues, teacher training, facility, restructuring, equity, and parent issues. Mr. Orlando summarized the categorized list before discussion began. The following feedback was garnered from the group. Mr. Spadafora brought up community service as being important. He also pointed out that health education should receive a priority. He mentioned the Yellow Dress play and how the roots of violence need to be explored and understood by students-He asked about computer equipment and the number of computers the labs have (how was the technology money spent in the high school). He felt that it was important to teach students parenting. Mr. Twomey had two issues: beef up the average level programs so that there is not such a disparity between these and the level 1 classes, and that the home environment has an enormous effect on the progress. He wanted to know whether there were things that we should be doing in the home environment to get results in the schools. When parents are involved with the students and the students know that performance is a value, they progress further.