Scattergood Friends School Committee

Approved Minutes – March 13, 1999

The Scattergood Friends School Committee met on Saturday, March 13, 1999 at 9:00 am at Scattergood Friends School.

The meeting opened with a period of silence. Members present included Bruce Rohwer, Alice Hampton, Bob Rye, George Welch, Ron Knight, Burt Kisling, Joe Davison, Kathy Standing-Cordero, Dan Treadway, Barclay Kuhn, Lucy Hansen, and Richard Johnson. Staff members present included Ken Hinshaw, Kara Hartzler, and Nancy Ryan.

The minutes from the January 30 meeting were read, reviewed, and approved as corrected. Under the section “Suggestions to Improve Meetings,” the sentence “Some suggestions included incorporating hand signals to move discussion along and establishing a specific time during each meeting to without the Clerk and the Director” was deleted.

Suggestions to Improve Meetings: Three subcommittee reports on how to improve the general efficiency and effectiveness of the School Committee meetings were discussed. The School Committee agreed to make changes in the structure of meetings based on suggestions from the three reports cited, including establishing a cut-off time, breaking the day up into smaller time chunks, focusing the topic, and setting aside meeting time for staff reports and subcommittee meetings. Burt and Ken will attempt to implement these changes as they draw up future agendas.

SC Retreat: Alice gave a report on her experience of attending classes the previous day. She characterized it as a very worthwhile experience to reconnect with students and staff and suggested there be a scheduled student event in the future for SC members to attend.

Director’s Report: In a change of meeting structure, Ken gave the Director’s report while interspersing it with reports from other subcommittee:

Instruction Committee: Richard noted that guidelines have been drawn up for the independent study projects and that their first implementation gave good results. He added that the presentations of the projects could perhaps be videotaped in the future. A departmental meeting of the science teachers was held to discuss the topic of how to fit both Physics and Chemistry into the curriculum, as well as other issues affecting the science teachers.

Ken discussed the research that has been done on various capital projects. Plans have been drawn up for the new staff housing structure, and bids will now be accepted from contractors. Ken also reported that the most feasible plan for the sound wall involves a structure approximately 500-600 feet long and ten feet tall, made with steel I-beams and precast concrete. The price would be around $50,000, including a wooden sound wall along the east side of the hockey field. In addition, Ken recently contacted John Black, owner of the “Yankee corner” farm, to discuss the possibility of a land swap that would result in Scattergood gaining a strip of land north of the main campus in exchange for a strip of land on the east edge of the school farm. The SC members expressed support for the land swap, authorizing Ken, with the guidance of the Farm and Facilities Committees, to work with the Iowa Yearly Meeting trustees in completing the trade.

The school has also received word that it will receive the full original e-rate funding to complete the computer networking project. In order to receive this money, the school must put up several thousand additional dollars in matching funds beyond what has already been spent on this project. The School Committee approved the expenditure of $2,000 of matching funds in order to receive federal funding to complete work on the network.

Ken noted that the budget is on track for the year, but there may need to be an increase in the line of credit due to cash flow problems. The School Committee approved the increase of Scattergood’s line of credit from $75,000 to $125,000 for the 1998-99 year.

Development Report: Bruce handed out the report, along with a newspaper article addressing the issue of establishing a Long Range Plan for schools. Bruce noted the importance of getting to work on the Long Range Plan, and Nancy explained how the school must have three things: a mission, goals to achieve the mission, and objectives to achieve the goals. The new Scattergood brochure was also passed around, and SC members expressed approval for the way it turned out.

Human Resources: The Human Resources subcommittee met the prior week, and some of the issues addressed included staffing needs for the 1999-00 school year, instructions for conducting the Director’s evaluation, and how long a staff member should be able to take an unpaid leave of absence. The subcommittee acknowledged that the student handbook is outside its jurisdiction and is the responsibility of the Director and Dean to develop and present to the SFSC for approval, but noted that the staff handbook will be reviewed by the subcommittee in a meeting on April 3^rd. The student handbook will be on the next School Committee agenda to be approved, as will the revised copy of the staff handbook.

ISACS: Several members have given feedback on the ISACS Reaction Report that is due on March 16, and other SC members did not have any other significant changes to make to the report. Ken remarked that, out of the sixty recommendations, the school is only directly disagreeing with one, which deals with securing the library. The School Committee approved the submission of the Reaction Report to ISACS while acknowledging that there may still be small changes in format and grammar yet to be made.

Long Range Planning: There was an extended discussion on Long Range Planning, specifically addressing the issues of how to pull the chapters together, what audience it is being written for, how to establish goals, objectives, and a philosophy in each area, and what is the best way to proceed on the matter. It was decided that Nancy would suggest the initial goals within each chapter and put it in outline form to present to the School Committee at the next meeting. Burt then asked when the Five Year Financial Plan and Capital Expenditure budget would be done. Ken’s response was that he would have it done and mailed in two weeks so it could be reviewed prior to the May meeting.

The meeting adjourned at 3:10 pm with a period of silence.

Kara Hartzler, Recording Clerk