Present: Kathy Thielen, Shela Linton, Carole Rayl, Nancy Johnston, Chris Terry, Mary Goodemote, Stuart Strothman, David Schoales , Mikaela Simms, Karen Saunders, Curtiss Reed, Andy Davis.
Reviewed agenda, identified time frames for each item.
Youth Assets Leadership Retreat
Superintendent was unable to be here for this meeting. He sent along a document regarding the middle school leadership retreat.
Mary reviewed her experience at the very successful leadership event, which used training from Paul Hope to work on reducing cliques, and make schools more inclusive. Grades 6 – 8 met with Ken Williams at SIT, though he cannot be at next meeting.
Tracy Tsugawa in-service for paraeducators Sept. 30. Diversity committee should make sure para reps know about this from each building.
Looked at action plan. Superintendent numbered categories and put in a line about subcommittees, making this document slightly different from the one sent to the committee by email prior to this meeting.
Marge Bruchac spoke at convocation of SIT. Abenaki storyteller. Coming to high school, and we would like to see her at some of the elementary schools. She was at Putney last year. We will look into some of the logistics, around cost and timing. We think Oct/Sept. It might be a nice event during the grind of NECAP. Diversity committee members will talk to administration about the possibility. We wondered if a performance could be followed by a classroom visit or two for older kids.
Anti-bias inventory on Survey Monkey. We would like to make this happen, targeting educators, to see people’s responses and needs regarding the possibility of including anti-bias curriculum in their classrooms.
1% Planning on Textbook Review for Bias. Karen and Kathy met this summer to discuss the issue and look at tools for identifying bias in textbooks or children’s books. They looked at articles about this topic, and methods for analyzing books. They also discussed teacher’s difficulty with too much work and little time for reviewing materials. They found some approaches/checklists which seemed very quick and easy, with review of visual images or text, for stereotypes etc. They identified other texts such as websites and audio files, which also need review. The foremost method was entitled 10 Quick Ways To Analyze Instructional Material For Bias. We looked at this checklist, and Karen and Kathy plan to tweak it a bit, discuss it with the group, and make it available for teachers in the district. We identified people to include in the discussion, such as curriculum coordinators Lyle Holliday and Paul Eric Smith. We discussed briefly best ways to distribute, with no real resolution. Both FirstClass and the Guilford sites are likely locations.
We also identified the opportunity to request 1% funding for diversity projects from administrators by October 1. Carole did a 1% project to start a diversity library at Vernon this summer.
Curriculum subcommittee. Karen, David, and Carole are on it. Karen will send a notice for a meeting soon.
Curtiss has a new email address. creed@vermontpartnership.org
Visibility. Gallery walk May 7 is the next community-wide diversity day. We’ll start to work on that in December, in an organized way. We also talked about sponsoring programs for teachers—bringing in Bread and Puppet for instance, and then having them give a presentation to teachers. We discussed difficulty of scheduling things during inservice days, especially for identified schools. We discussed brochures and index cards, and the need to identify what we have to offer before we promote, especially as there is a lot of independent cultural diversity promotion locally that has nothing to do with us. Perhaps it is more important for us to focus on our mission, in working on issues within the schools.
DEC committee and Windham Northeast have a commitment for there to be a kiosk with harassment information at every open house. We are interested in helping to promote that at area schools. That would fit well under our action plan.