School board meeting

In my previous career, I was a radio news journalist. Having worked in two small towns, this meant that I got to go to one of the few surefire news events each month: the school board meeting. When I worked in Illinois, I had the pleasure of going to at least four per month. We covered two towns, and each town had a high school and an elementary school district.

So, when I saw that I had to go to a school board meeting for student teaching, you can imagine how excited I was.

School board meetings, are ironically, the thing that pushed me out of radio. I don't like covering them. This is not to say that they aren't important. School boards do a lot of hard work and are often not recognized for their service to the community and the students.

Its just that the meetings are boring.

I attended Harrison's January meeting. Here's what I came away with:

~The science teacher gave a "staff report" in which she brought the board up to date with her classes and her professional development. Especially at a school the size of Harrison's, I thought this was a great way to keep the board (technically the public, they are invited) up to date with these things. I had seen teachers come in and share work and projects before, but this was unique to me. It was a planned part of the meeting and presumably takes place every month. I think there was also to be a student report, but the student that was to make it was sick that day.

~RESA 4 U was there. This is a professional development group for Montana schools. I don't know a lot about the issues facing rural teachers for professional development, but a professor candidate came to MSU and talked about that topic, so I'm a little familiar. From what I gathered, if Harrison joined the group, they would have access to some professional development opportunities. They might be also to get help with supply purchases and other things. RESA 4 U seemed to be a catch-all for education support.

~There are a lot of MHSA proposals. The meeting my mentor teacher went to last week where I got to watch over classes by myself was where this came from. I can't remember all of the proposals, they ranged from getting rid of the master schedule for basketball to whether or not students could wear jewelry during golf. There were some controversial proposals, such as allowing all 8th graders to play high school sports, regardless of school need. As of now, 8th graders can play at the HS level, if the HS team needs them in order to make up a team in a contact light sport (such as basketball, volleyball or track). This proposal would open it up to all sports.  The Harrison Board felt that this was a good system. They were worried about player safety (if a smaller 8th grader went out for HS football) and foresaw a lot of problems with this.

Outside of a few executive session items (which I did not stay for....no sense hanging out in an empty room just to get to the end of the meeting) that was it. A light meeting as far as business items went, but I've been to quite a few board meetings and know what to expect from them normally.