Minutes 1.25.17/Agenda 2.1.17

Post date: Jan 31, 2017 3:55:56 PM

Agenda 2.1.17

• 1. Approval of Minutes

  2. Reports

  3. Religious Holidays Ad Hoc Committee Approval

  4. Consecutive Review Day Motion

  5. Community Service Graduation Requirement Motion

  6. Notes and New Business

Council Minutes 1.25.17

“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.” -Robert Frost

• 1. Approval of Minutes

  2. Reports

     • Mod: Welcome back.

     • Treasurer: Council Fund: $5,816.04, Co-Curricular: $5,013 but the Council fund will be decreased slightly as a passed money allocation will go into effect

     • Secretary: Staff alternate can vote

     • DSB: Last night was the final budget approval for 2017-2018. Dr. Bass is interested in having the Chief Justice of the NH Supreme Court moderate a Council discussion and have a 45-60 minute question and answer session to discuss constitutional law if Council would be interested we will have to approve it.

     • SAC: Winter Carnival has been approved for two hours on the 17th of February

     • Exec: There have been committees meeting on different sections of the presentation for the conference in March including a meeting of people who have been involved with Council from the beginning

     • Admin: MLK day on February 3rd during Activity Period and a speaker has been chosen

     • Inclusivity: Because of the snow day the training will be tomorrow with the same schedule that was set for Tuesday and every Common Ground is covered

     • Religious Holidays Update: We are discussing legal and more inclusive options with Mr. Campbell and perhaps the school’s attorneys and we might be coming to form and Ad-Hoc committee for that

  3. Midterm Exam Debrief Discussion

     • Exams were fairly relaxed and with the snow days it almost felt like a vacation

     • There were a bunch of course evals that were not anonymous, especially in year long classes

     • The snow days and a low-key exam week has made it hard to transition back into the rhythm of school but the one on a day exam system means you can focus on each individual subject and might help even out the number of exams per day which might help with a rhythm

     • Having a math exam on Friday was difficult

     • Written evals in courses where there is a lot of writing means teachers can tell who wrote each eval in certain cases

     • Math is often one of the toughest exams for everyone and it was hard to have homework and be prepping for the exam and then go right from classes into exams

     • Because of the holiday we could either have the first exam on Friday or the last exam on a Monday and go into the new week on that Tuesday

     • Having the exam on Friday for math meant I was doing four hours of math a night during that week and the way to fix that would be to change when you have to stop teaching new material and start reviewing

     • This year we had an extra week before exams and some teachers started introducing new material that students were not going to be tested on in the exam

     • Off-campus was confusing for freshmen and it should be clarified in an email at the start of the week

     • Two days is enough review time if you have the weekend after but if there isn’t a weekend there should be more time

     • The Friday exam meant that you could go into the weekend with one exam done which was nice

     • Having math and science together is really difficult

     • It was hard to reschedule language exams if they fell at the same time

     • There were not-flexible social studies exams and when students take multiple classes that is difficult

     • Do people prefer having a subject per day or just having more random scheduling

  4. 2nd Semester Council Goals - Unmoderated Caucus

  5. 2nd Semester Council Goals - Discussion

     • It would be nice to have the Council agenda posted on the TV on the Atrium for Wednesday’s morning

     • We should mandate that everyone goes to a Council meeting every year

     • We should reinstitute the Council forum when we take a whiteboard down to get ideas because that started great discussion last year

     • Council has a lot of power and we should exercise it by passing motions when possible, not just suggestions

     • If we start to identify a message with the mascot and then say we don’t identify that, it almost makes it worse, we should either address it or move on

     • Discussion about exams before the break compared to after

     • Making a big deal about the mascot is not going to get us anywhere

     • Looking at how social media is used at the school

     • A digital citizenship unit was revamped for Civitas so it might be good to expand that to the upperclassmen who did not have that experience

     • We have not held an override session on a single veto this year and even if we know it is going to fail we should at least hold the vote so we are following through and get to have the good discussion

     • A lot of kids don’t like the Chromebooks

  6. Meeting Adjourned