May 24, 2007 - Unapproved Minutes

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QEC Qualitative Sub-committee Meeting Notes

May 24, 2007
4:10-5:20 pm                           DRAFT-not approved by sub-com members
Hanover High School. Room 130

Present: Marjorie Rose, Jan Assmus,  Mully Blight,  Paul Tierney, Rob Edson, and Linda Addante( Facilitator and scribe)

Absent: Sarah Curtis, Mary Sachsse, Ann Waterfall

Resigned: Adina Desaulinier

Handouts:

• Interim Report of the qualitative Sub-committee of the Quality of Education Committee, May 16, 2007 Draft #4: prepared and submitted by Jan Assmus & Mully Blight at the request of the sub-committee
• Qualitative assessment: Parent Surveys-submitted by Marjorie Rose
• Qualitative Sub-Committee Interim Report, May 16, 2007-Submitted by Paul Tierney

Documents Referenced in the meeting:

• Hanover High School NEASC Expectations for Student Learning
• Qualitative Sub-Com. Report 4.26.07 Draft #1
• Quality of Education Committee Action Plans for Sub-Committees, Faculty, Board
• Quality of Education Committee Goals (endorsed by QEC on May 16, 2007)
• Menchik Comparable District Study- in the spring of 2004 the SAU engaged the services of Bettie Landauer-Menchik to provide a list of schools that were comparable to Dresden based on a number of socio-economic criteria. The study, finalized in July, 2004, used data compiled by the National Commission for Education Statistics (NCES), School District Demographics, the Common Core of Data, and the Census of Governments School Finance file. Ms. Menchik is the Director of the Data Services unit in the Office of K-12 Outreach at Michigan State University and is a consultant to the NCES.  ( To access this study go to SAU 70 web page at http://www.sau70.org and go to “Spotlight” page.

Committee To Do List:

• Mully and Jan will work on final Interim Report Draft
• A process for review of the next draft was not discussed. The final Qualitative Sub-com. Interim Report is due to the SAU office on May 29, 2007
• Linda will email Sub-com. members to facilitate a next meeting date and location.

________________________________________________________________________
Qualitative Sub-committee Meeting Notes-draft (not reviewed by sub-committee members as of May 28, 2007)

• Opening of meeting, Linda spoke to the following:
• A posted summary of the QEC Goals which she reviewed:
• Celebrate our achievements
• Make transparent the workings and complexities of our schools
• Continuously improve the quality of the school

• Review of the 3-A’s - the action plan for implementation of the QEC goals
• AssessmentàAnalysisàActionàAssessment

• Review of the recommended format/content for the sub-committees’ Interim Reports (name listed is party assumed to be responsible for that portion of the document):
• Introduction-Overview of contents (Wayne Gersen)
• QEC Mission & Purpose (Wayne)

• Recommended Action Steps for QEC Sub-committees- Titled:

   Quality of Education Committee Recommended Action Plans
               for Sub-Committees, Faculty, Board (see golden rod sheet
   from QEC meeting 5.16.07 listed on handouts for meeting)
   

• Essential questions to frame the meeting’s work-proposed by Linda:
• How do we, the Qualitative Sub-committee make decisions àall decisions or this one decision concerning what the Interim Report look like and contains.
• Within the context of the QEC goals, using the action steps of the 3’s, and following the suggested Interim Report format (from Wayne):
• What does our Interim Report look like, that is, contain, convey for information, recommendations, next steps

• Today’s final product-the objective of today’s meeting: identified by Linda and endorsed by the individual present:
• A 3-5 page document that contains data we are currently collecting systematically with 3-5 action steps that facilitate continued improvement with the overarching QEC goals and the 3 ‘s reflected in the report.
• Comments form committee members:
• Two things that don’t come into play in the Interim Report are: celebrations of achievement and measures of achievement.  This is an interim report and we haven’t done the work yet to be able to identify the achievements we want to celebrate and what the measures of achievement are. 
• We haven’t collected data
• We haven’t analyzed surveys they may not be helpful-we can only recommend that they do surveys
• We have to identify how we are using the surveys: Are we asking parents, teachers, students, community members to identify what quality measures we should be using or are we giving them a set of quality measures and asking them how the district measures up with respect to the given quality measures?
• Example given on ways to use a quality measure: if we ask students if they feel safe in school and we set different degrees of proficiency for that measure, for example if a certain percentage says “yes” and they do feel safe than we can state how we are doing in that one measure based on what we have identified as “quality (noting that there may be degrees of quality identified). We may feel that 95 % of all students in all schools need to feel safe for us to be providing a quality
• learning environment for our students in the district.
• We need to identify the places we are doing well
• There has been a shift of the QEC’s original mission to where we find ourselves todayà I am sticking to the original mission in my work
• There has been a shift that has come from learning along the way: For example the new QEC goals, clarification of what the QEC is responsible for executing, ie recommendations, and what is the responsibility of the schools, administrators and teachers and finally more emphasis on actively recruiting teacher input and direct involvement in the teacher survey to be executed by the SAU
• Need to define “QUALITY”
• There has been a QEC mission drift: We started with how to access it and how to access the cost of achieving a quality education and than went to identification of standards
• We need to start with what values this community holds dear
• Can we start with what the QEC identifies as quality? Ans from fellow sub. com. member: We have to start somewhere. Maybe we have multiple definitions of quality. Maybe we narrow it down to see different sets of quality.
• There are hardly if any communities like us. I personally reviewed the Menchik (Comparable District) Study and there are districts that are similar to us in being a high income and highly educated community but the difference is that we are not an isolated bubble surrounded by unlike districts. The surrounding towns are more like us than different and that is unique-there are more shared values and a similar demographic across a much larger region than just our SAU District. This leads to homogenous values as a community.
• In our report it’s important to lay out what we did and what we didn’t do.

• Draft Interim Report #4 : Review begun. Objective to decide what will be include in the draft to be submitted to the SAU
• Paul Tierney proposed and handed out his version of draft Interim Report.
• All committee members were asked to read through report for 5 minutes and ask Paul clarifying questions: (note a clarifying question is asked to bring clarity not to direct or recommend what the writer should do to improve the document)

          CLARIFYING QUESTIONS ASKED BY SUB. COM MEMBERS:

• Have all of the recommendations proposed in this report been discussed in this committee? Ans. No
• What is the purpose of this alternative report?  Ans: To represent what I believe is most important… its what we originally were charged to do.

SUMMARY OF COMMENTS FROM SUB. COMMITTEE  MEMBERS

• “We” is used and we didn’t do all of this
• We can’t put stuff in we haven’t discussed or vetted through some process in this committee.
• I sent all of this information to all of you by email
• I do not believe that receiving information via email is the same thing as discussing it in a committee meeting. Admittedly we have not had the time to review all of the individual work that has been done by members of this sub-committee-that review process has yet to happen.
• We may just have to say this is an interim report and we are floundering
• We need to meet on what we haven’ done-will there be time after this to talk about that?
• The importance of defining Quality should be in our Interim Report and it ha been discussed by this committee and that is something the Board should address…and that is something that I think the Board recognizes too.
• Some of the issues in this (suggested alternate) report seem quantitative, shouldn’t this be in the quantitative sub-committee’s work, and if it is not being addressed they should see it
• We can’t tell other sub-committees what to do or what to look at-that’s not our charge
• The fact that there are no comparable communities to ours  based on a review of the Menchik Comparable Community Study is something that should be reported out to the SAU Board in this QEC Interim Report
• The “Advising” recommendation is important but I don’t know where this fits in. We haven’t discussed it, haven’t evaluated it—or looked into it to see what is being done already in the district
• I agree with many of the recommendations personally but feel that the work of this committee is to make recommendations based not on personal opinion or beliefs but to make recommendations based on data collection and analysis-which hasn’t been done for all of the recommendations listed in this report.
• There are some points made in this report that I think we should include-points we have talked about: Like the importance getting a definition of what we mean by ”quality” and the conclusion that there are no comparable communities to us based on a careful review of the Menchik Comparable Communities Study.

COMMITTEE CONSENSUS SUMMARY OF POINTS:

• We will include only those points in our Interim Report that have been discussed at the sub-committee level and only those recommendations that have been endorsed by the sub-committee based on the review/discussion at the committee level
• The Interim Report draft team, Mully Blight and Jan Assmus will work on Draft #5-the due date is May 29 th for all sub-com. reports to be into the SAU office
• The Interim Report Draft team have recorded the comments made by committee members relative to draft # 4 made during this meeting and will use those comments to write Interim Report draft #5
• It was noted that there is an extremely short timeline in which to finalize the draft given the controversy around content explored at this meeting.
• The comments made about draft #4 are not include in these minutes but will be reflected in the final Interim Report draft to be submitted. 
• Two points from Paul T’s report will be included in the Sub-com Interim Report. They are: The term “quality” needs to be defined and no comparable districts comparable to the SAU exist-according to a careful review of the Menchik report and other individual investigative work done by a member of this committee.

• Note: Paul stated he planned to submit his personal version of an Interim Report separately to the SAU Board. The committee members acknowledged his intent to submit a separate report from the Qualitative Sub-committee’s official Interim Report
• Recommendation made from committee member that Paul share his findings with the Quantitative Sub-committee
• A member acknowledged the hard work Paul has done and the value of his findings even though they could not support all of the stated recommendations he listed in his report because not all of the recommendations made had been discussed in the Qualitative Sub-committee 

• Qualitative assessments Parent Surveys-document submitted by Marjorie Rose
• Framing statement: Not all of this is meant to be included in the Interim Report some of it may be-the parts that have been discussed by the committee
• One point and perhaps the most important one is that neither the QEC or the Qualitative Sub-com should take responsibility for doing the parent survey
• Summary of comments made by Sub-com. members:
• Linda asked first for clarifying questions:

                        SUMMARY OF CLARIFYING QUESTIONS:

• Have we talked about everything in here as a committee and if not are we doing that now?  Marjorie Ans: A lot of this we have talked about and I am not suggesting that all of this needs to be included in the Interim Report. It is a summary relative to the work done and an effort to explain to the community why the Parent Survey isn’t being done again this spring.
• Are there really a lot of people asking about the Parent Survey because no one has asked me about it? Marjorie Ans. Yes there are, several people have asked. It is something people are wondering about
• How do we establish, quantify how many people are asking about the reportà that seems to be the question? Response from committee member: I was just wondering because it has not been my experience that a lot of people are wondering why we are not doing a Parent Survey again this spring.
• I don’t feel comfortable including everything that is in this document because I don’t recall talking about the details in some of these recommendations.
• Linda referred the committee to the first draft of the Sub-com Interim Report. She pointed out that in composing that the first draft the sub-committee’s Interim Report she took the parts and assembled them but did not try to do overview recommendations unless the committee had reached a consensus on the recommendation.
• She pointed out the consensus statements about surveys that are listed in the Qualitative Sub-com meeting notes of 4.5.07 and first draft of Interim Report 4.26.07
• Copy of first draft Interim Report given to Jan and Mully so that they can reference it as they do Interim Report draft #5.
• Don’t we want to include our rational for why we are doing the survey and what the purpose for doing it that we discussed at a previous meeting? As I recall we identified the purpose of doing surveys as gathering data/information but they can also be educational tools and we specifically discussed that we viewed doing a survey as a way to bridge the widening gap between school and community that was noted at one of our first QEC meetings—this last point is one of the reasons we suggested surveying parents, students, staff, and community (taxpayers).
• We don’t need to go into that level of detail in this report we should include that in our final report
• The important point I wanted to make with this document is that the QEC is not responsible for doing the Parent Survey and that having an outside consultant to help with survey design and analysis is our sub-committee’s recommendation.

• Return to discussion on Interim Report Draft #4:
• Summary of Comments were recorded by Mully and Jan for use in drafting final Interim Report

Meeting adjourned at 5:20 pm
Respectfully submitted by Linda Addante on May 28 at 11:20 am.