Southwest Partnership

Education Committee

January 4 2018

 

Minutes

 

Present

Jane Buccheri

Lou Packett

Gregg Herzog

Kristine Balsaz

Becky Newgren

Jane Mayrer

Dan Morrison

Quincy Goldsmith

Diana Geis

Venroy July

Patricia Nelson

Abigail Breseith

 

Committee Elections

Anyone who attended three meetings in the last 12 months is eligible to vote. The eligible voters present are Kristine, Jane B, Jane M, and Lou.

 

Officially a chair needs to be elected. There is an unofficial vice-chair position who could be immediately voted in as chair if there was a vacancy in the chair position. There are no official guidelines or policies on what the vice-chair would do. The Committee will elect a vice-chair.

 

Jane and Jane both nominated Lou to stay as Chair. Lou was elected to continue as chair by all the eligible voters.

 

Jane B nominated Quincy as vice-chair, he declined the nomination with appreciation.

 

The Committee decided to postpone the vote until the next meeting in February.

 

Project Updates and Assignments

 

Community School Planning Process Update

We have wrapped up the community member focus groups and are beginning to schedule the staff focus groups. The first one is set up for staff at Steuart Hill next Monday. The three that have risen to participation are Steuart Hill, Vivien T, and Southwest Baltimore Charter School.

 

Jane B will try to set up a meeting with George Washington.

Jane M and Lou will reinforce their efforts to get Franklin Square on board

Kristine will talk to Dr Woodhouse at Excel

There is the possibility for SWCOS interns to be placed at each of the three schools next school year that have been involved in the planning process if the principals agree–they have been very positive so far.

 

Need people to “adopt” schools–to participate in school family council meetings, be present and involved in the schools according to each schools volunteer needs and be an advocate for and a voice in the school. Jane M and Quincy will work on Franklin Square.

 

Also need to have folks willing to ‘activate’ or bring in other groups in the community. Dotie Page and Jen Kim are working on organizing the faith community in the area.

 

Gregg will think about the private sector and the larger business community and how they could potentially be involved.

 

The Committee will keep thinking of connections. Quincy suggested asking the neighborhood association meetings for the request. It is Lou’s plan to go to all of the neighborhood association meetings this month and ask people to volunteer and adopt a school–we can also add the request to build on connections.

 

Committee Recruitment

Have to increase the number of people involved. The Committee discussed the possibility of the annual meeting as a recruitment mechanism and ways to get people involved in the schools.

 

Becky will identify when each school is planning their school family council meetings and their PTO meetings.

 

Community Education

Lou has asked Venroy to lead the sub-committee that will work on conversations around race and the impact on education and systematic racism in general. George Hopkins from Gallery Church will help facilitate and the group will work on ways to facilitate those conversations. Goal is to have something together by early spring. Conversation will be global for the neighborhood and SWP Board. Venroy asked about the ultimate goal? Lou: race has a tremendous impact on education in general and the neighborhoods and the SWP and the community and the education committee needs to figure out a way to address those issues. Venroy has just received the Warnock Fellowship to work on a project related to the importance of having black professional role models for Baltimore students. If folks are interested in serving on the sub-committee they should connect with Venroy.

 

The SWP has a goal of providing leadership development in the seven neighborhoods have been trying to raise money to provide more systematic leadership development. The group that Sheila Camm is working with has connections to a national organization that works on community leadership development–we will be talking to them about potential resources that are out there. Lou asked Committee members for any thoughts on resources for this to share with the Committee as a whole.

 

Standards for World Class Education

Lou would like someone to chair a sub-committee on evaluating the nine issues and seeing how they could be involved in the committee’s work. Abigail suggested using it as an intellectual underpinning for the work that is being done moving forward. She will look through the document to see how it can be applicable to the work of the SWP. Jane M discussed how this work could engage with the political work around advocacy for supporting the schools.

 

2018 Goals

 

The Committee discussed goals, including promoting community education and continuous learning and connecting community and schools through shared learning–for example the One Maryland One Book model.

 

  1. Ensure that every school in the Southwest Partnership area is a community school
    1. Faith based group
    2. Identifying other groups for support of schools
    3. Community liaisons to school family councils/PTOs/Recruitment/having representatives from each of the schools at the committee meetings
    4. Move all schools along the path of the community school process
  2. Promoting community education throughout the seven neighborhoods
    1. Conversations about race
    2. Leadership development for the wider community
    3. Wider community education initiatives

 

Kristine will do some thinking on how the community education goal will work.

Abigail: should we set specific goals for each focus area? Yes, but at the next meeting

 

Announcements

Jane: BEC is being called to be accountable for race equity–BEC is committing to making decisions about advocacy and school issues through a race equity lens. They are putting together letters of advocacy around school closures around cold. The maintenance money that is supposed to come from the state has not yet. BEC also continues to push for Kirwan adoption and the funding formula.

 

Lou: meeting with different groups that could potentially be important collaborators. Will be calling on people to help with follow up.

 

Scroll to Top