Exciting Meeting tomorrow!

Hello everyone, and welcome back from break. Hope your first week went well! After a grueling first day back last Monday (but I have to say it was nice to see all my friends again) I attended my longest board meeting yet. Started at 5:00 sharp. I left the building at 10:20! Wow! The meeting, as you can imagine, was packed with some really hot issues. The board (me included!) will be voting on many of these tomorrow. Stay tuned!

4K-- Unfortunately, we learned that the MMSD will most likely not be eligible for grants for 4K from the state. We could receive these grants in a few years, but the biggest costs for the district will occur in implementing 4k, which was planned for this coming fall. With this setback, board members are now faced with a question: should we go ahead with 4k and provide this much-needed program to our districts' children? we could use some pretty brilliant methods to finance it, but taxes would still go up for madison citizens. or should we postpone 4k, and hope that perhaps the state budget will give us a little extra money in the future (haha. yeah right).

Behavior in the MMSD-- we had a lengthy discussion of programs in the district to help children with serious behavior problems. These aren't just kids who don't do their homework, or who are snotty to their teachers once in a while. Some kids, because of mental disabilities or very difficult home situations, need a lot of extra help from the district. The board learned about various programs that schools use to help these students and the schools' behavior issues as a whole. Some board members posed a difficult question-- is the recent philosopy that students with severe mental disabilities should be included 100% in the classroom beneficial to those students, or can such students cause so much of a distraction to other students and themselves that they may be better off being educated outside of the school, in a more one-on-one enviornment?

Anti-Bullying-- Bullying, especially in middle school, has been around forever. However, even if some parents and teachers may claim it's "just a phase," bullying is an alarming problem that can cause very destructive consequences. As celebrities such as Demi Lovato begin to speak out against bullying, the MMSD is following suit and evaluating the measures our schools take to prevent and handle bullying. See the district website for the presentation!

New middle school-- The board received an early proposal from a huge, diverse group of community members to start a new "project-based" charter school with an enviornmental focus. Located in the Badger Road/Beltline neighborhood, the school would serve some of the district's neediest children, many of whom now are bussed to Sennett middle school. Through project-based learning, cultural awareness and education about the enviornment, the charter school hopes to bring the students of the school together with community members to increase achievement and activism in the neighborhood. Stay posted!

And that's all for tonight. I'll let you know how things turn out after tomorrow's meeting!