Jill facilitated three community meetings: Liberty 5/3, 27 attendees; Blossburg 5/4, 20 attendees;  and Mansfield 5/5, 20 attendees. She used a consensus-building style of facilitating to provide participants with an opportunity to discuss their concerns and questions within the context of a set of structured questions. Let's start the report by asking you to answer each of the questions:

1. What are the strengths of your community’s schools?

2. What are the weaknesses of your community’s schools?

3. As the school district faces this budget crisis, what do you want the  board and administration to know about what you value?

4. What improvements would help fill the gap between “what is” and “what ought to be”?

Take a few minutes to write down your thoughts on those questions. Write down everything (that's called "brainstorming") and then step back and look at what might be your top three ideas for each question.  If you're reading with a friend, compare your answers and see if you can come to a top three that you share. I'll wait ;-)

What did our community groups choose as their top ideas?

To summarize, we like our small, intimate community schools and we struggle with the downside that providing small community schools results in some expensive redundancies that prevent us from offering broader curricular choices. We value our art, music, life-skills and extracurricular activities that help develop well-rounded, involved kids. We also want more transparency and communication with the board and administration. 

The following questions and notes came up in the discussions. Jill put them in the "Parking Lot," an area to hold questions that were not answerable within the community discussion meeting. 

Parking lot 

-          We need to understand the NPHS building situation. 

-          How is the money divided by schools? Liberty is very concerned.

-          Long range planning!

-          Need breakdown of costs for each student activity.

-          Is seniority in the secretaries’ union contract?

-          Act 80 days could be a full day to cut transportation costs.

-          Wellsboro has some vo-tech.

-          Denise (MHS principal) has a dissertation about extracurriculars.

-          20% cuts across the district including admin

-          If we raise half & you give half… can we raise it?

-          Connect and grow the booster clubs.

-          How about lists of stuff parents & community can provide?

-          District wide band failed before.

As you've been thinking about the school district's budget crisis and reading these results are there other questions that have come up? 

Jill and I met with several district representatives Friday to discuss the community discussion meetings, which I will address in the next blog post. 

About Heidi I. Jones

Heidi's website is http://www.ridgerunnerconsulting.com. View all posts by Heidi →