Faculty and Staff:

• Patti Farrell
• Ryan Harrington
• Patrick Jensen
• Michael Pliss
• Kim Snow

Parents:

• Madeline Estill
• Maria Harkins
• Lynn Miller
• Youngmi Schickel
• Julie Simmons-Lynch
• Denise Stover

Community Members:

• Bob DeLuca

Attended by: Lynn Miller, Roy Dexheimer, Patti Farrell, Patrick Jensen, Youngmi Schickel, Michael Pliss, Denise Stover, and Julie Simmons-Lynch

The CHES Site Council met on December 16, 2004 and discussed redistricting. Roy provided an update from the last public forum that was held on December 14th, 2004 and answered many questions regarding the board’s progress. In addition, he mentioned the tentative schedule that includes a public forum on January 4th, the board discussing potential scenarios at the January 25th meeting, and a decision being reached at the March 8th board meeting.
 

During the meeting, the group decided that the following key points should be stressed to the board at the next public forum (January 4th @ 7pm):
***Community members from Cayuga Heights should share their perspectives on redistricting and demonstrate their support for our West Hill families whose children attend school at CHES. We should look for ways to strengthen our cross-town community connections.
***Communicate to CHES parents that the board’s redistricting plan will examine middle school feeder patterns and that possible scenarios may include switching students who currently attend Boynton to DeWitt and vice versa.
***Can the district explore the potential for renovating existing spaces during the redistricting process and avoid having to move students from one school to another?
***We also decided that we should further explore why a pre-kindergarten program at CHES is important. During the meeting, we discussed the difficulty pre-k families have experienced transitioning to our school and the efforts that have been made to make the process less stressful.
***The group also discussed the potential scenario of reopening ACS as an elementary school in order to provide a neighborhood school for families on West Hill and to prevent the potential fragmentation of their neighborhood if students are assigned to a number of different schools.

The council also quickly reviewed changes to CHES School Development Plan. During the recent holiday break, all of the student performance data was reviewed and corrections were made.
The meeting ended promptly at 1:35 pm.