November Steering Committee Meeting

After talking with a few of the Trustees about November's Education Committee hearing, and looking at the documents released by the board for yesterday's Steering Committee meeting,  Annette and I brainstormed about what to bring up at the meeting and what to push off to Education Committee.

The upside is that the data coming out of the review really supports the program and the staff are going to have a difficult time justifying shutting us down. We decided to ask three questions (answers in bold):

1. There are a variety of perceptions about the role of the steering committee floating about, and while we who are on it know that it is solely an advisory body without any decision-making role, the public is getting conflicting information from some trustees and superintendents. How are we going to deal with rectifying this? (This got brought up by Rob Campbell in the context of concern about bias and we did discuss it. The board staff have an unusual definition of "steer". It was suggested that the board may want to clarify through notes to principals or a Q&A section on the review page of the web site. This is something that we can usefully bring to the Education presentation.)
2. What are the exact timelines for the draft report, final report, DEC, trustees, etc. We have seen different ones and are a bit confused. (Interim report: December 8th. Final report (no recommendations): January 19th. Recommendations from Director's Executive Council on January 19th. The final report and Recommendations will be made available around January 9th.) Annette also asked for when the letter consultation email address would end (rumours had been November 14th). (Jennifer Adams said that they would keep accepting letters until the report was delivered to trustees)
3. We are getting a lot indication that alt ed is indeed providing a template for best practices, and that it is perceived as greatly different from regular English programme - we have not at all had a mechanism to examine and collect data on the question of how the programme would look like in the future. The second goal of the review talks about determining "the extent to which a strengthened, or redefined, alternative program would be expected to differ from that expected to result from planned improvements to regular programs." How is the community going to be consulted about these expected differences? How will the information be collected on what the differences should be? Is this information going to be part of the body of the report or only collected and discussed inside the DEC? (This answer was a surprise. Jennifer Adams noted that they would be just recommending directions (close, modify, status-quo) in January and a follow-up review would look at implementation details (how to close or what a revitalized program would look like). This is not the mandate as approved by trustees last spring, but I am hardly one to complain.)

As well, it was suggested that the letters sent to the board be included in the report data. Staff took this under advisement, which generally means "no". We can usefully ask this again at the November Education Committee meeting. The OCASC rep., Madelaine, was very animated about the process being too short and how it was necessary that we expand the Alternative tenets.