Meeting slides:

BOT Meeting 9.18.26.pdf

• This is year 3 of strategic plan
• It's been a successful start to the school year and Back to School night was successful
• Enrollment is currently at 395, budget is for 396, there are 100 names on our waitlist

The Essential Question for the school year is “How can we grow by taking accountability?” We have focused on growth and accountability in Super Advisory and curriculum across the school. It has stimulated thoughtful and challenging discussions about our own behaviors and expectations – instead of focusing on the behaviors of others.

DEI - Leading for Equity Presentation, Caroline

This will be a learning series for the Trustees this year over three sessions

Three priorities chosen by Trustees to explore:

1. Identify systemic barriers
2. Recognizing implicit bias
3. Family and community engagement

• The Trustees broke out into small breakout groups to look at data and discuss "Seeing the System" using the What? So what? Now what? protocol. Focus was placed on describing what was seen in the data before interpreting it and using why questions to generate hypothesis rather than conclusions.
• Trustees looked at Student Body Racial Diversity, Staff & Student Diversity, and disaggregated data for Chronic Absenteeism, Student Withdrawals, and Student Wellbeing.
• Trustees shared the following reflections with the full group...
  • We are concerned about low-income students, fees for co-curriculars and the MART shuttle. Nicole suggested that we look at our fee structure in the next budget cycle.
  • Students with disabilities have historically had higher rates of absenteeism and withdrawals and lower self-reported wellbeing scores. We are welcoming our Special Education department and SEPAC to our November meeting to look more closely at student performance data.
  • Brian highlighted the increase in staff of color this year, the result of intentional work to attract and retrain BIPOC faculty and staff. We will hear from the Diverse Teacher Pipeline Taskforce in October.
• For next meeting: Bring one policy you oversee and ask privately: who is served well 
  by this, and who is not? Come ready to share one thing you noticed when you disaggregated a number you usually see whole.

The trustees worked in smaller breakout groups to discuss what we have done well the past two years and reaffirm what's priority in next steps.

The highlights included...

• We hired a new principal and changed the head of school position to an Executive Director. This reorg helped the school focus on its external goals and improve our instructional leadership.
• We have made considerable progress on closing the compensation gap for faculty and staff. We have about $130,000 remaining of the $950,000 gap between Parker and our seven closest sending districts.
• We generated $320,000 in donations in last year's Annual Fund and drafted a clear plan to professionalize development. We added a Development Associate and elevated the importance of fundraising for the Board of Trustees.
• We launched the Diverse Teacher Pipeline Taskforce to hire and retain staff of color.
• We increased the racial diversity of students of color from 12% to 20% BIPOC in two years. We have full and diverse enrollment with 100 students on the waitlist.
• We successfully completed our NEASC Accreditation, Special Education audit, Five-Year Charter Renewal, annual financial audits - all with glowing feedback and appropriate next steps.

• Katrina and Julie summarized FY26 fundraising activity and explored why stewardship is important
• Katrina will be sending out our 'thank you' call list in the next few days
• Julie addressed the difference between “Development” and “Fundraising” and the different ways board members can support Advancement Work. Some of the ways to help with this work include making thank you phone calls, inviting a like-minded friend to a Parker event, helping to identify prospective board members or donors, and hosting and/or attending development events. The focus is on relationship-building and she emphasized how every member of the board, depending on their comfort level, can find their own way to help further this work.
• Katrina then walked the board through the FY27 Development Plan and goals. She emphasized the work around professionalizing operations in development, evaluating our current CRM, and the multi-channeled efforts to get us to our $330K goal.
• Main takeaways from board conversation around the plan included:

1. Pleased to see thought going into having student ambassadors helping with the work.
2. Excitement over the small cultivation gatherings and how that will help with relationship building
3. Comments were made on how far development has come at Parker and how this plan clearly shows that
4. Appreciation over outlining how the board can help in the plan
5. The “purpose” and “why we fundraise” sections were talked about with many commenting how helpful it was to have this in writing

Trustee Evaluation Cycle, Pam

Stefanie, Rick, and Pam are this year's Executive Director Evaluation Committee

Discussed ED Goals vs. Strategic Plan Goals with the following feedback:

Goal 1: Establish Five High-Quality Partnerships

• Too broad
• Limit to a few this year (establish partnerships)
• CREATE A CLEAR STRATEGY FOR IDENTIFYING, VETTING, QUALIFYING, ENGAGING PARTNERS EACH ONE ALIGNED TO STRATEGIC PLAN
• Can we add initial progress steps as goals? What is a partnership?

Goal 2: Further professional development

• CUMMINGS + EARMARK ARE A LONGSHOT
• $100K FROM FOUNDATION BOARD SEEMS ATTAINABLE
• Donor retention has been ~60-66% last couple years – is that good?? Marie? Other informed folks?
• Plans have been dev. but question sustainability over time
• Is this at all applicable anymore?
• WITH ACTIVE MANAGEMENT AND SYSTEM/ STRUCTURE
• + ACCOUNTABILITY WHO DOES WHAT IN STAFF, BOARD…
• ✓ $100,000 in capital support generated

Goal 3: Launch the diverse teacher pipeline

• LOOK AT STIPENDS, COMPENSATION FOR NEW TEACHERS W/ MASTERS DEGREES, PARAPROFESSIONALS
• ✓ close the gap for good ✓ new mentoring, induction ✓ design a teacher pipeline strategy, hiring
• Is this the diverse Teacher Pipeline?
• Are we still focused on NTC at this time?
• Can you use ED report to make 2.2 more legible to the Board? (report out from taskforce)
• What is currently true about the campaign? Who does it serve? Does it need to change to serve BIPOC? If so, how?

Goal 4: Identify key student outcomes and systematize data collection

• Move to alumni success
• All while remembering - the perfect is the enemy of the good! Data informed decision making, not data-driven decision making. Leaving time for analysis and understanding
• These are all about collecting and presenting good data. That's good but what key outcomes have we identified/defined? Are we prioritizing Wellness? Grad rates? Employment? Portfolio completion rate? See also (My old goal vs. measure question)
• The data points should (may) be different for recruitment of students vs. recruitment of teachers vs. fundraising. A menu vs. a discrete set for everything
• Good job so far (2)
• define and make sure it matches these
• + cleaning? (data collection strategy)
• needs to be clearly defined (student success)
• = “the system is perfectly designed to yield these results”

Goal 5: Build and leverage marketing capability

• Dev - Good Job, Enrollment - Good Job, PR for Essential Schools vision - ?? if NTC/DTP is so small, how do we do this?
• Who is the target audience(s) now?
• Continue to define what data
• What venues have we identified as worth targeting? Educon? SXSW? Partner w/ e.g. CLEE? (3)
• Is this still applicable? (4)
• Next piece (former students)
• Seems this is happening in Dev comms? e.g. profiles of alumni in mailings (6)
• Also Dev Com?
• Yes, more than just enrollment but start there
• Why? (25%)
• WITH WHOM? FOR WHAT?
• How does this align with diversity initiatives? And/or low income goals? Is there a blind spot here? How are we differentiating the story for different audiences? Cultural racial religious and e. status

• Brian shared where the trustees can find board resources and sharing committee work and folders. Board on Track Documents will be used for storage of static resources while FWPBOT SharePoint will be used for Board and Committee folders. Links to SharePoint folders can be found in Board on Track Document folders.
• New and revised handbook policies have been vetted by our lawyers and include updates on restraint and seclusion, health information policies, interscholastic heat modifications, medication administration, PROTECT Act immigration enforcement.