Diversity Committee Agenda

Diversity Committee Meeting Minutes

February 7, 2007

In attendance:

Irene Haddow Parent, Chair

Lance Adams Parent

Terri Stone Parent

Mary-Pat Soukop Parent

Kimberly Kinzer Parent, Vice Principal

Jane Enterline Parent, Scribe

Approval of minutes

The November 2006 minutes were approved.

Seattle School District’s Race and Equity Steering Committee

Kimberly’s position on the committee was a temporary position. She no longer serves on the committee.

Kimberly shared a document titled “Nine Characteristics of High Performing Seattle Schools.” This document provides guidelines/benchmarks, through a lens of equity, to help assess how a school measures up in each of the nine characteristics.

There was a question about how Salmon Bay uses and tracks culturally relevant assessments. Kimberly is talking with teachers on the relationships in the classrooms between teacher and students and student engagement in the classroom to measure if all students are performing.

Salmon Bay’s Race and Equity Committee

Kimberly reported that the Cohort groups are up and running. The groups are based on a model used at Eckstein Middle School. In addition to meeting as a cohort, students are also paired up with “model/successful” students. Kimberly’s group is feeling successful to her. See November’s minutes for more details on Cohort Groups.

Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, Questioning (GLBTQ) event with Middle School Gay Straight Alliance (GSA) and Lisa Love

Irene, Kelly and Jane visited the GSA meeting last Wednesday and opened the dialogue with students about organizing a school-wide event. The students want to plan an assembly. Lisa Love can find high school students to participate. The goal of the assembly, and the posters that the students want to make, will be to educate the community on what the GSA is and the importance of being an ally. Two topics were discussed that we would like to address at the assembly:

1) How can a student be an ally? What should you do if you hear a put-down or insult on a bus (or elsewhere)? What if you don’t know the person who is doing the bullying?

2) Why are there so few boys at GSA meetings? How do we break that stigma?

We have requested to Lisa that the high school students represent gay and straight, male and female allies.

We would like to plan the assembly before the Day of Silence, of which we still need to find the date. Kimberly will check with team leaders to see if we can schedule an assembly. Jane will email Kimberly to remind her.

Irene will look into making t-shirts for GSA members, and buttons for all students.

Mavin, “Chasing Daybreak,” and Generation Mix

Kelly was not able to attend. Irene and Jane gave a brief report on her behalf.

The Mavin Foundation is going through a reevaluation around funding shortages. They are not currently able to accept our membership, as they will not be expanding into the K-12 arena as they had hoped, at least not at this time. The film “Chasing Daybreak” is in the mail and we will invoice that bill when we receive it.

The Family Movie Night is on! It is scheduled for Tuesday, Feb 27^th. We will serve food at 6. Movie will start at 6:15. After the movie we will discuss the movie and hope to arrange future lunchtime meetings for students, parents and staff around multi-racial issues – multiracial and transracially adopted students, families and allies. There are three lunches at Salmon Bay: 3^rd-5^th graders eat first, then K-3^rd graders, and then the Middle School. Ideally, there will be a group during each lunch period that will meet some number of times before the end of the year.

Mavin is not able to provide a facilitator for the movie discussion or for the lunch meetings. We brainstormed the following people to contact, either to facilitate themselves or to recommend possible facilitators:

· Anna Flory, MS teacher

· Caprice Hollins, Seattle School District

· Nancy Calos-Nakano, parent and works at/with Mavin

· Michelle Ota, principal intern

Irene will look into a suggestion from Mavin to check out the web site of a Minneapolis Museum. It currently has an exhibit on multi-racial identity.

Jane will put announcements in the weekly bulletins and email the Summit email lists that she has from the past two Summits.

Kelly, Jane and Irene will arrange the logistics of the movie – posters, Kids Time, food.

Parent night with Anthony

This event has been tabled until next year.

Library acquisition update

Linda provided a list of books that she has purchased this year, highlighting the ones that were purchased off the Diversity Committee’s list at the UW Bookfair. Irene has the list and will check that the Asian books that we recommended are well represented on the list.

Jane asked Linda is she would like us to apply for more funds for additional library resources. Linda still has over $3000 in her budget this year, so it is not necessary to apply for more funds at this point.

The next round of Mini Grants – Ideas? Needs?

We agreed that we have enough funds to complete the projects we are working on for this year. We will not apply for grant money in this round.

Diversity Committee Organization
At the last FOSBE Meeting, Rosemary recommended that committee chairs rotate at least every two years. The Diversity Committee has discussed, each year, the role of the chair. Each year Irene offers to resign, but no one has volunteered to chair the committee. In these discussions we have talked about how our committee is project-based. We have a different leader for each project. The chair serves as a contact person and as a representative at FOSBE meetings. All other tasks are divvied up amongst other members.

Our proposal is to create a democratic committee with project leads to oversee our activities and operate without a chair. It was pointed out that this structure is more reflective of how our committee currently operates; everyone is welcome to participate; events and projects that we undertake are generated from ideas by any member; all members of the Salmon Bay community are welcome to submit agenda items for our meetings; once the agenda is set, we move through the items, making decisions by consensus.

We discussed the following concerns:

· FOSBE representation: We propose to have a rotating representative. The person who attends a given FOSBE meeting would be expected to attend the previous and following Diversity Committee Meetings. We discussed whether we would assign the representatives at the beginning of the year for all meetings or appoint someone one or two meetings out. That decision was not resolved.

· Contact person: We have an email mailing list to which anyone can send a question or information. We would post project leads and their contacts in the bulletins and on our web site. We would also post the schedule of FOSBE representatives with FOSBE and on our web site.

· Setting agendas: The Chair does not currently set the agendas. Jane sets agendas based on input from anyone who requests to have an item on the agenda.

Next year’s Diversity Committee Meetings

We will schedule the meetings to fall half-way between FOSBE meetings. This year we meet on the same week of the month as FOSBE - unfortunate scheduling.

Ideas/volunteer writers for school newsletters

Nothing at this point.

An article about our new organization, if and once it’s set up, would be nice.

Future Meeting Dates: Wednesdays at 7:00 in the Library: