Bill thanked Bob, Danielle, Alex and Rob for volunteering to attend the DESE site visit and shared pictures from the school's winter field trips.

Robin and Meghan gave an overview of the January financials.

Bill gave an update about the school's business management consultant.  Lynne is no longer with Central Source.  Bill and Meghan met with Central Source, and a new consultant, Andres, will take Lynne place, helping with some of the school's control aspects, grants management and audit prep support.  Meghan had already been taking on more of the finance work so Lynne's departure is not a cause for concern.  The board asked about the terms of Central Source's contract; Bill explained that it could be terminated upon 30 days at any point should the school decide to make a change.
 

Bill reported that he is currently speaking to various fundraising consultants about working together on strategic development planning and program implementation.  He will report back at the board's next meeting with more updates.

Meghan reported that the FY18 budget will be ready to submit to the Finance Committee meeting and then the Board at each group's next meetings.

Danielle gave an overview of how the DESE site visit works.  The visit is part of the school's charter renewal process - at renewal DESE will review the annual site visit reports.  DESE will review board process and progress, looking to see how the board is involved and informed in the school's oversight. 

Alex reported out on the Governance Committee's discussion of the Head of School goals.  In short, they are the benchmark for evaluation and are intended to provide common understanding of how the board is evaluating Bill.  Some goals come from the Accountability Plan, while others are internal goals.  It was noted that the Board on Track evaluation is more generally about the Head of School's (HoS) performance (e.g., communication and work with the board) and less focused on specific metrics.  The HoS goals seek to fill this gap.  

Alex gave a presentation on the Open Meeting Laws and the board engaged in question and answer about this law.  To help ensure that the board releases executive session minutes when appropriate, it was decided that the governance committee will add to its monthly checklist a check to see if there are any executive session minutes that should be released.

Meghan presented on enrollment, demographic and attendance data:

• The lottery took place on Friday, March 3rd
• The school filled 50 seats in K, and there are 70 students on the wait list.  There are now a total of 239 students on the waitlist for next year in all grade levels combined
• Two students withdrew in February and the school enrolled two new students
• The school is just under its attendance goal but is seeing an upward trend

Bill presented on discipline and academic data:

• There was discussion about suspensions given the growing awareness of this as a problematic measure.  Our goal is to have 5% or fewer students suspended over the course of the year and we are at 6%. Bill explained that there are a few students with very significant challenges; the school has been using all the resources it has to support them and keep them in school.  However, when a student is physically assaultive, there are safety concerns and significant limitations on the school.  There was discussion about how to accurately show just how limited these suspensions are - one idea was to present suspension by showing the number of days over the number of students times the number of days.  This would show that it's a very low percentage of days that students are out for suspension.
• Round 3 ANet results were exceptional:  71% in ELA and 81% in Math.  Sherriff  noted that in his years analyzing ANet data, he has never seen over 80%, and never seen performance over the network this high. 
• STEP results are solid but have room for growth.  Given that the target STEP level will not change in the next window, we are confident that the majority of students will be on target at the next window.