River Valley Charter School
Minutes
Accountability Committee Meeting
Date and Time
Monday January 6, 2025 at 6:00 PM
Location
River Valley Charter School Middle School Great Room
River Valley Charter School welcomes your participation at Board meetings. The purpose of a public meeting of the Board of Trustees (“Board”) is to conduct the affairs of the organization in public. Your participation assures us of continuing community interest in our school and assists the Board in making the best decisions for our school. To assist you in the ease of speaking/participating in our meetings, guidelines are provided at the bottom of this agenda. All materials for all board and committee meetings, are available on our Board on track public portal found at rivervalleycharter.org.
Committee Members Present
A. Godino (remote), D. Herrera, E. Simone, J. Patterson, K. Kuse, N. Durkee, P. Ganley, T. Murdy
Committee Members Absent
C. Irose, M. Mitchell-Daniels, R. Waterson
I. Opening Items
A.
Record Attendance
B.
Call the Meeting to Order
C.
Approve Minutes
D.
Agenda
Climate survey:
Question on subject specific feedback query, e.g. asking about how caregivers feel their students are doing in math? Special Ed also came up.
--Jane, other school's surveys are more general/higher level/shorter like the new version.
--Nancy - how short are the open ended questions actually to answer? might take long still.
--Ach - open ended Q's, can we make them even more open ended? e.g. presenting sentence fragments to prompt a specific reply - "My favorite thing about RVCS..." or "I wish thaqt RVCS would..." I would recommend RBVCS to another parent...", "My child is happy to be at school..." - to make less open ended. Also takes burden off of the survey participant to come up with something in the open ended Q's.
Can we add a descriptor in ()'s to caregiver, i.e. not just "guardian"?
Survey monkey will be used to distribute survey.
Comment on reading scale - neutral option. Was discussed by Jane and Karen, decided it would make too
Maybe move free lunch Q to end, since NA to some.
Safety Q - could word smith from DESE wording, maybe specify emotionally vs physically. Seems like it is implied given context of rest of sentence/Q.
Can this be issued in multiple languages? Spanish, Portuguese? Might not be necessary now since all current parents converse/communicate with the administration in English. Sometimes difficult for expressing thoughts in a second, third language, etc?
Add phrase, if you would like to have a follow up discussion, please reach out to X and Y, etc. so they can do so anonymously, not being linked to their name within the survey.
Q10 - can we list out subcommittees?
Can we ask "do they think the BoT is providing sufficient governance of RVCS? Might need to just focus on the initial Q (Q10 as is) first. Concern is around BoT awareness amongst caregivers, to help with BoT succession planning, recruitment, etc.
If have multiple children, need avenue to get all different responses representing each child. Need to go back to each question to make sure there is a way to do this in Survey Monkey. Karen and Jane to follow up on what options we might have. Q's 4,5,6,7 would be subject to this caveat.
Jane to send out revisions through BoardOnTrack. Plan is administration of survey by mid-Jan. (week of Jan 21st).
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Staff Survey Plan
Is there a plan? It's been mentioned, but details not sussed out just yet. Details will be covered offline for follow up at next AC mtg. Might be a good tool to get some of the feedback that would be helpful for management.
MCAS follow up to be covered at next AC mtg.
Criterion 6 to be covered at next AC mtg.
Members to review and send email follow up to approve. Note minutes are being updated after completion of today's meeting.