Minutes of Faculty Council Meeting 10/19/1999

Announcements:

Jennifer DeCicco is the new coordinator of student activities.

Tom Clayton reminded faculty of the details for the mini-course planning day on Wednesday. Faculty should submit attendance cards to the Academic Programs Office.

Faculty may teach a mini-course and also sponsor a few mini-term individual projects. Faculty members are the only ones teaching mini-courses; other staff may sponsor individual projects.

Gail Hudson described the recommendation process. Juniors are told to approach their teachers during the junior year. Faculty should consider whether they are the best ones to write the recommendations and be honest with the students about these issues. Seniors are advised to approach the teachers again at the start of the senior year. Faculty members are encouraged to reasonably limit the number of letters they write, keeping in mind that a reasonable number for each faculty member to write would be in the neighborhood of 15. Faculty can submit the letters to the counseling office directly or to the students depending on the circumstances.

Monday, October 25 will be required hall discussions on the drug and alcohol policy.

Minutes were approved.

Third Decade Discussion:

The officers have tried to summarize the content of what the discussions have included up to this point. This meeting will finish discussion of what the school needs to look like in five years.

Points voiced by the faculty during the discussion:

Question:

What can our program do to meet the needs of our students in the future?

- worry less about how we will make it happen – instead think about the end result

- list included with the agenda already includes the most important points for the future

- should we accept 10^th graders?

- Advantages would be to correct problems in their background earlier

- Could make the senior year more productive

- The size of each class would be smaller but our selectivity would be greater

- Advantages to longer, more productive projects

- We could do more with them in the time that we have

- It would be a shame to limit our junior class to only people who were here in the 10^th grade

- Would the experience wind down earlier?

- Would students be mature enough?

- Would students burn out after three years?

- Could we do a better job if we had them for three years? Would an honor code work better? Would they actually have to work as hard?

- Our selection process would have to be different to accept only those who actually are mature enough to succeed

- Our program is intense and stressful but that is good and informative – tells students what they can do – it would be bad to reduce the intensity

- We would change the nature of the classes we are teaching

- Can we find resources to take advantage of the beds available in the spring semester after withdrawals –

- Would we gain something in recruiting/they would have less connection to their home school –

- Preliminary vote showed 13/31 would be in favor of a 10^th grade

- 10/31 would never support it

- Kathy Allen– idea of selecting a few sophomores after the 1 semester– 15/31 faculty would want to admit these select students during the second semester

- What if kids came in early – and learned for the joy of learning instead of for grades that will go on the transcript

- Would kids have more loyalty and commitment and more of a sense of belonging if they stayed for 3 years

Could we admit 8-10% from out of state with tuition?

Kids in the last 20 years are not as taken care of in the home.

Are our students more mature or more immature than they were before?

Is there more of a separation between adult and kid culture?

Can we provide for them with the things that they should have gotten in the home?

Affirmation about character/values/ how to address the “whole child”?

Would they become part of our community consciousness?

We want to train scholars.

Do we give them too much to do in their classes – and they don’t have time to learn for the joy of learning?

We should experiment more with independent study options.

Can we find more options for students to do independent work?

We need more opportunity for interdisciplinary topics.

We are too traditional.

We need to take advantage of doing more experiments.

We need time:

Flexibility

Creativity

Innovation

Choice

Weekends

Student choice

Faculty planning time

Do things differently

Take advantage of our environment

The following notes were also recorded by Donita Robinson on an overhead for discussion:

· 10^th graders:

· expand applicant pool

· have students an extra year

· be more selective in student body if we keep total number of students the same.

· Begin projects earlier (Westinghouse, for ex.)

· Less “unteaching”.

· Means limiting jr. class based on soph. class.

· Only take a few very special 10^th graders

· Would our “experience” wind down too soon?

· Would this increase “burnout” rates?

· Very different maturity level to consider: selecting these students in the admission process would be difficult

· Serves a smaller selection of students in NC.

· Intensity of our program is valuable and spreading the experience over 3 years would lessen this.

· Experiment by filling empty beds in the second semester with “special” sophomores.

· Helpful in recruitment

· Ask alums

· More time for greater commitment to NCSSM out-of-state students (at a cost).

· How do we address the “whole child”?

· Social growth

· Ethics

· Behavior

· Consider more ideas like XL (from previous years): more independent learning.

· Find a way very strong students can work on special projects.

· Should we change our curriculum so that all students do some research or special project before graduation?

· Explore interdisciplinary options, new and more traditional.

A focus group met and generated a list of 29 items to consider that might be important for the future development of the school.

Parents/alums will vote and pick 10.

The committee will look for themes that come from voting in different parts of the school.

We have as a faculty talked about where the academic programs are going to be.

Dot will mail out list of 29 to faculty.

Each faculty member should choose their top 10 and David will do the accounting from the faculty.

In addition, the faculty will be preparing this statement from our discussions.

Faculty will receive an e-mail and they may also add to the list.

Joann Lutz requested that computer science be added to the list.

Phil Nelson addressed the faculty on the following points:

The strategic plan should say where we want to go and how we want to get there.

Refer to article from the N&O; it will be forwarded to all faculty members.