Milford School Board 8/20/07

Superintendent's Report

Superintendent Suprenant reviewed some of the activities that occurred during the summer including:

* 339 students attending some sort of summer school program,
* Lots of training was held for various staff members,
* The schools were all cleaned and prepped for the new year,
* Some asbestos at the high school was abated in preparation for the upcoming renovations.

He announced that the Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) scores would be released by the State Dept of Education on Tuesday August 28th.

He issued some press releases to highlight various items. One item in particular that he is trying to promote are the new Evening Community Education programs that will be offered this fall. In summary, there are several courses that will be offered on a tuition basis this fall in the evening at the High School. The courses are:

* Conversational Spanish
* We the People...the Citizen and the Constitution
* Digital Scrap Booking with Photoshop
* Microsoft Word 2003
* Microsoft Excel

More information on these offerings can be found on the school web site.There is a link on that page to a description of the courses, and another link to the registration forms. Most of the courses start on Tuesday October 2nd.

Superintendent Suprenant invited the School Board members to attend the opening session for the staff on Tuesday the 28th. I was able to attend the session last year, and I thought that it was very helpful to hear the messages that were given to everyone. The session is used to try to get everyone on the same page for the year, working towards common goals.

PEG Access

David Kirsch is the new PEG Access Director. PEG is Public, Educational, and Government Cable TV Access. Milford has improved the channel 21 access over the past couple of years, and we are making more progress all the time. Dave has some good ideas on how to improve things, and he will be working to add to the program over time.

Some of the things that we discussed were:

* He is hoping to add sports coverage, but there are a bunch of details that need to be worked out. There is just one true home football game this year, and he is hoping to tape the game and broadcast it on channel 21. One issue is that while it is usually fairly easy to get someone to operate the camera, it is usually very difficult to get a commentator/announcer for the game. Dave is hoping to get someone from the Radio club to act as a commentator during the game.

* Dave talked about some of his previous experiences with other schools, such as in Concord. He said that one of the keys to gaining content is to provide a camera/computer/editing software setup to each school to enable them to create presentations on a regular basis.

* He thought that it might be good to create an overview film for each of the ATC programs. These videos could be shown on CATV, and they could also be shown to prospective students from other districts.

* We discussed how we can try to improve the audio quality of the School Board tapings. There are a few choices: do nothing, get a new microphone/mixer setup (about $5K), move to the Selectmen's Meeting Room where they have set up a decent system, or fix up a place in the school that has an improved setup. I am in favor of fixing up Room 4 in the High School as the designated meeting room, instead of just using the Selectman's Room. The main advantage is that Room 4 seats about 100 people, and the Selectmen's Room only seats about 20. Having seating for 20 people is fine for most meetings, but there are usually several meetings a year where 20 is just not enough.

* Dave mentioned that there are satellite feeds of educational programs that are popular in other Districts. He mentioned Annenberg and NASA as being two that were very good. He is going to look to see if we can add them to Milford.

* The Selectmen's meetings are going to be broadcast live in a month or two. We may be able to do the School Board meetings live also, but that would be for a later date and would require some sort of infrastructure to make it happen.

Policy Review

The Staff Protection policy was postponed pending further review of the implications of paying additional compensation on top of Workers' Compensation payments.

The Daily Physical Activity policy was approved. This policy was required by the state standards that were updated last fall. The basic premise of the policy is that the District will encourage all members of the District community to engage in some sort of daily exercise.

I brought up an issue that had come to light during our discussions last meeting on the Daily Physical Activity Policy. The State mandates minimum expectations for this policy, and we used the State guidelines for our policy. The New Hampshire School Boards Association has a sample policy that is more emphatic on a couple of points. For example, in one spot they use the phrase "Commit adequate resources..." and our policy uses the phrase "Support adequate resources..." for the same section. The policy review committee had mentioned this discrepancy at the last meeting when they were discussing the proposed policy.

I thought that it was a good practice for the policy review committee to bring to light any discrepancies like that, and I thank them for doing so on this policy. I asked that in the future, they continue to bring up any discrepancies that are identified between the proposed policy and the NHSBA sample policy. Also, I asked them to identify any NHSBA sample policies that were reviewed, but the committee decided to not implement. My concern on this is that there are some sample policies that have a political philosophy associated with them that might have varying support by the board as a whole. I would prefer that anything that is controversial be dealt with at the board level, and not be decided by a sub-committee without having an open discussion.

The policy committee is systematically going through our existing policies and updating them as required. I would encourage them to change their process to instead of starting with our policy book, that they use the sample policies from the NHSBA as the starting point to try to find the areas where we are deficient.

The policy review committee has been doing a good job, and they have updated quite a few policies. Sometimes just changing the wording in a very slight manner can have a big effect on on the outcome, so they have had to be very careful as they go through the policies.

Bales School

We decided to remove the "Bales Elementary School" sign from the front of the building. This will eliminate the word Elementary from a sign on a school that is no longer an elementary school. It will also allow us to see what is under the sign, since we don't know for sure what the exact wording is that is there. The best guess is that there is a sign under there that says "Centennial School", but there is a chance that it says "Centennial High School".

We did not rename the building at this time, but we may do that at a future meeting.

High School Renovations

Phase one of the bid items have come back in, and they will be presented to the building committee on Thursday 8/23. According to Mike Trojano, the bids on several of the items came in much higher than originally estimated. We are going to have to deal with this in some manner.

The School Board will have a quick meeting on Monday August 27th to review the Building Committee's recommendation about the bids. The objective is to award the grounds work as soon as possible so construction on the field can be started quickly. We'll have to see where the bids are before we do this, since we need to make sure that the overall renovation project stays on track.

World Language Curriculum

The new curriculum was approved.

Superintendent/District Goals

These were approved. Bob Willette asked (and we approved) that a goal to investigate lengthening the school day be added to the list.