Meeting recap: August 25, 2009

Tonight the full Board met for the first time since June. Well, I guess technically the full board met on August 11, but since Commissioners Kim and Yee and I were all absent, it wasn’t really the full board.

The agenda felt like it was reasonably routine, but still the meeting lasted almost three hours. Dr. Khanna took us through a thorough presentation on our CST results and also the results of our family, staff and student surveys. Her department achieved impressive return rates on surveys compared to last year, and of course we all know that our CST results were encouraging. Still, we expect to be a PI 4 district next year (which means we will be in the 4th year of Program Improvement under NCLB, because of our subgroups’ failure to meet adequate yearly progress).

Here’s lots of data to download, if you’re a geek who wants to follow along:

• Dr. Khanna’s powerpoint from tonight’s meeting summarizing CST and survey results (and now that the incredibly efficient folks over at SFGTV have posted video of last night’s meeting, you can follow along with Dr. Khanna’s remarks!);
• Staff, family and student satisfaction surveys from 2009 and prior years; in the individual data files you will find responses summarized and broken out by school.

We also had a somewhat lengthy discussion on the consent calendar, focusing on one resolution which called for the district to contribute almost $100,000 to San Francisco School Volunteers (now merged with the San Francisco Education Fund) for a consultant to help assess parent engagement. Now, SFSV is a great organization and partner to the district but several of us were taken aback by the district paying an outside nonprofit for this service, since we have several departments already devoted to parent engagement. In the end we decided to postpone voting on this item so that we could get a fuller description of the services we are paying for and how they fit into (and complement) the district’s existing engagement efforts.

Speaking of surveys, the hardworking volunteers of the PEEF CAC have developed a survey that is meant to get a fuller sense of the community’s awareness of the PEEF (that’s Public Education Enrichment Fund) and to offer some priorities for the funds. The survey is available online until Sept. 15 (scroll down to”2009 PEEF Survey).

Last but not least, Happy 90th Birthday to our unflappable Parliamentarian, Ms. Evelyn Wilson.