Faculty Council Meeting of Tuesday, 11 December 2001
President: Joe Liles; Vice-president: John Woodmansee; Secretary: Floyd Bullard

Minute

This meeting of the Faculty Council occurred on an Alt Day during a time that had originally been scheduled for faculty and staff development.  When it was clear at the last meeting of the Faculty Council that a thorough discussion of the “Big Picture” document would require more time, Jerry Boarman volunteered this time slot for such a meeting.  Attendance was high.

Joe opened the meeting at 8:50, saying he hoped to “shepherd” us through reading the “Big Picture” document, and that hopefully we would vote separately on the preamble and the 12 recommendations before 9:45AM.

The discussion that ensued was done item by item in the order they occurred in the document.  In the end, ballots were distributed and faculty members voted by ballot and returned the ballots to Joe.  What follows in these minutes are short summaries of the comments that were made on some of the items and the changes that were to be taken as made when the items were voted on.

·         Item 1: Faculty Involvement in Administrative Decisions. Should the sentence “We recognize that it will not always be possible for the administration to accept our recommendations in light of the fact that their jobs are more encompassing than ours.” be included?  After some discussion, it was voted out, as weakening the recommendation.

·         Item 2: Seminars.  One faculty member commented that the more we limit things with these recommendations, the worse the document is.  It’s supposed to be “the Big Picture”.  It was decided to change recommendation two to something like “we would take a look at seminars, etc.”, with exact wording to be left, with trust, in Joe’s hands.

·         Item 3: Shortening Miniterm.  Several faculty were opposed to the implication that Miniterm was not of as much value as classroom time.  Others felt that the two were not being compared.  Someone pointed out that in AP-content courses, classroom time is already under a strain.  Finally, someone said that instead of shortening Miniterm, we should try to get as much Miniterm and classroom time as possible by auditing our resources; that we were not looking at the whole.  In the end, it was decided to leave the recommendation intact and “vote our consciences”.

·         Item 4: Alt Days.  Less discussion than this secretary expected.  “Priority should be given to scheduling activities that encourage teacher-student interactions” was changed to “Priority should be given to encouraging student-teacher interactions”.  Someone suggested that this suggestion [required activities on Alt Days] may not be perfect and would have problems, but it was worth a try.

·         Item 8: Evening Classes.  It was stated that there are many ramifications of this that are not apparent.  e.g., Besides teaching students, many teachers have responsibilities such as managing work service students, setting up labs, maintaining a stockroom, etc.  It would not be fair to put all those responsibilities on daytime faculty.  One alteration was made to the recommendation, changing the word “benefits” to “pros and cons”.

·         Item 12: An Academic Climate.  The phrase “in the dorms” was changed to “at our school” after a small amount of discussion concerning when and where an academic environment did or didn’t already exist.